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Welcome to the first GNOME Foundation update of 2026! I hope that the new year finds you well. The following is a brief summary of what’s been happening in the Foundation this week.

Trademark registration renewals

This week we received news that GNOME’s trademark registration renewals have been completed. This is an example of the routine legal functions that the GNOME Foundation handles for the GNOME Project, and is part of what I think of as our core operations. The registration lasts for 10 years, so the next renewal is due in 2036. Many thanks to our trademark lawyers for handling this for us!

Microsoft developer account

Another slow registration process that completed this week was getting verified status on our Microsoft Developer Account. This was primarily being handled by Andy Holmes, with a bit of assistance on the Foundation side, so many thanks to him. The verification is required to allow those with Microsoft 365 organizational accounts to use GNOME Online Accounts.

Travel Committee

The Travel Committee had its first meeting of 2026 this week, where it discussed travel sponsorships for last month’s GNOME.Asia conference. Sadly, a number of people who were planning to travel to the conference had their visas denied. The committee spent some time assessing what happened with these visa applications, and discussed how to support visa applicants better in future. Thanks in particular to Maria for leading that conversation.

GNOME.Asia Report

Also related to GNOME.Asia: Kristi has posted a very nice report on the event, including some very nice pictures. It looks like it was a great event! Do make sure that you check out the post.

Audit preparation

As I mentioned in previous posts, audit preparation is going to be a major focus for the GNOME Foundation over the next three months. We are also finishing off the final details of our 2024-25 accounts. These two factors resulted in a lot of activity around the books this week. In addition to a lot of back and forth with our bookkeeper and finance advisor, we also had a regular monthly bookkeeping call yesterday, and will be having an extra meeting to make more process in the next few weeks.

New payments platform rollout

With it being the first week of the month, we had a batch of invoices to process and pay this week. For this we made the switch to a new payments processing system, which is going to be used for reimbursement and invoice tracking going forward. So far the system is working really well, and provides us with a more robust, compliant, and integrated process than what we had previously.

Infrastructure

Over the holiday, Bart cleared up the GNOME infrastructure issues backlog. This led him to write a service which will allow us to respond to GitLab abuse reports in a better fashion. On the Flathub side, he completed some work on build reproducibility, and finished adding the ability to re-publish apps that were previously marked as end of life.

FOSDEM

FOSDEM 2026 preparations continued this week. We will be having an Advisory Board meeting, for which attendance is looking good, so good that we are currently in the process of booking a bigger room. We are also in the process of securing a venue for a GNOME social event on the Saturday night.

GNOME Foundation donation receipts

Bart added a new feature to donate.gnome.org this week, to allow donors to generate a report on their donations over the last calendar year. This is intended to provide US tax payers with the documentation necessary to allow them to offset their donations against their tax payments. If you are a donor, you can generate a receipt for 2025 at donate.gnome.org/help .

That’s it for this week’s update! Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.

Abstract of a paper on NBER: We construct an international panel data set comprising three distinct yet plausible measures of government indebtedness: the debt-to-GDP, the interest-to-GDP, and the debt-to-equity ratios. Our analysis reveals that these measures yield differing conclusions about recent trends in government indebtedness. While the debt-to-GDP ratio has reached historically high levels, the other two indicators show either no clear trend or a declining pattern over recent decades. We argue for the development of stronger theoretical foundations for the measures employed in the literature, suggesting that, without such grounding, assertions about debt (un)sustainability may be premature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world's oceans absorbed yet another record-breaking amount of heat in 2025, continuing an almost unbroken streak of annual records since the start of the millennium and fueling increasingly extreme weather events around the globe. More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity's carbon emissions ends up in the oceans, making ocean heat content one of the clearest indicators of the climate crisis's trajectory. The analysis, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, drew on temperature data collected across the oceans and collated by three independent research teams. The measurements cover the top 2,000 meters of ocean depth, where most heat absorption occurs. The amount of heat absorbed is equivalent to more than 200 times the total electricity used by humans worldwide. This extra thermal energy intensifies hurricanes and typhoons, produces heavier rainfall and greater flooding, and results in longer marine heatwaves that decimate ocean life. The oceans are likely at their hottest in at least 1,000 years and heating faster than at any point in the past 2,000 years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you ask people why they are using AI (or want other people to use it) you get a ton of different answers. Typically none of them contain the real reason, which is that using AI is dirt cheap. Between paying a fair amount to get something done and paying very little to give off an impression that the work has been done, the latter tends to win.

The reason AI is so cheap is that it is being paid by investors. And the one thing we know for certain about those kinds of people is that they expect to get their money back. Multiple times over. This might get done by selling the system to a bigger fool before it collapses, but eventually someone will have to earn that money back from actual customers (or from government bailouts, i.e. tax payers).

I'm not an economist and took a grand total of one economics class in the university, most of which I have forgotten. Still, using just that knowledge we can get a rough estimate of the money flows involved. For simplicity let's bundle all AI companies to a single entity and assume a business model based on flat monthly fees.

The total investment

A number that has been floated around is that AI companies have invested approximately one trillion (one thousand billion or 1e12) dollars. Let's use that as the base investment we want to recover.

Number of customers

Sticking with round figures, let's assume that AI usage becomes ubiquitous and that there are one billion monthly subscribers. For comparison the estimated number of current Netflix subscribers is 300 million.

Income and expenses

This one is really hard to estimate. What seems to be the case is that current monthly fees are not enough to even pay back the electricity costs of providing the service. But let's again be generous and assume that some sort of a efficiency breakthrough happens in the future and that the monthly fee is $20 with expenses being $10. This means a $10 profit per user per month.

We ignore one-off costs such as buying several data centers' worth of GPUs every few years to replace the old ones.

The simple computation

With these figures you get $10 billion per month or $120 billion per year. Thus paying off the investment would take a bit more than 8 years. I don't personally know any venture capitalists, but based on random guessing this might fall in the "takes too long, but just about tolerable" level of delay.

So all good then?

Not so fast!

One thing to keep in mind when doing investment payback calculations is the time value of money. Money you get in "the future" is not as valuable as money you have right now. Thus we need to discount them to current value.

Interest rate

I have no idea what a reasonable discount rate for this would be. So let's pick a round number of 5.

The "real-er" numbers

At this point the computations become complex enough that you need to break out the big guns. Yes, spreadsheets.

Here we see that it actually takes 12 years to earn back the investment. Doubling the investment to two trillion would take 36 years. That is a fair bit of time for someone else to create a different system that performs maybe 70% as well but which costs a fraction of the old systems to get running and operate. By which time they can drive the price so low that established players can't even earn their operating expenses let alone pay back the original investment. 

Exercises for the reader

• This computation assumes the system to have one billion subscribers from day one. How much longer does it take to recuperate the investment if it takes 5 years to reach that many subscribers? What about 10 years?
• How long is the payback period if you have a mere 500 million paid subscribers?
• Your boss is concerned about the long payback period and wants to shorten it by increasing the monthly fee. Estimate how many people would stop using the service and its effect on the payback time if the fee is raised from $20 to $50. How about $100? Or $1000?
• What happens when the ad revenue you can obtain by dumping tons of AI slop on the Internet falls below the cost of producing said slop?

GNOME ASIA 2025 took place in Tokyo, Japan, from 13–14 December 2025, bringing together the GNOME community for the featured annual GNOME conference in Asia.
The event was held in a hybrid format, welcoming both in-person and online speakers and attendees from across the world.

GNOME ASIA 2025 was co-hosted with the LibreOffice Asia Conference community event, creating a shared space for collaboration and discussion between open-source communities.

Photo by Tetsuji Koyama, licensed under CC BY 4.0 About GNOME.Asia Summit

The GNOME.Asia Summit focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop while also covering applications and platform development tools. It brings together users, developers, foundation leaders, governments, and businesses in Asia to discuss current technologies and future developments within the GNOME ecosystem.

The event featured 25 speakers in total, delivering 17 full talks and 8 lightning talks across the two days. Speakers joined both on-site and remotely.

Photo by Tetsuji Koyama, licensed under CC BY 4.0

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Around 100 participants attended in person in Tokyo, contributing to engaging discussions and community interaction. Session recordings were published on the GNOME Asia YouTube channel, where they have received 1,154 total views, extending the reach of the event beyond the conference dates.

With strong in-person attendance, active online participation, and collaboration with the LibreOffice Asia community, GNOME ASIA 2025 once again demonstrated the importance of regional gatherings in strengthening the GNOME ecosystem and open-source collaboration in Asia.

Photo by Tetsuji Koyama, licensed under CC BY 4.0

 

 

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: At the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), physicists successfully exceeded what is known as the Greenwald limit, a practical density boundary beyond which plasmas tend to violently destabilize, often damaging reactor components. For a long time, the Greenwald limit was accepted as a given and incorporated into fusion reactor engineering. The new work shows that precise control over how the plasma is created and interacts with the reactor walls can push it beyond this limit into what physicists call a 'density-free' regime. [...] A team led by physicists Ping Zhu of Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Ning Yan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences designed an experiment to take this theory further, based on a simple premise: that the density limit is strongly influenced by the initial plasma-wall interactions as the reactor starts up. In their experiment, the researchers wanted to see if they could deliberately steer the outcome of this interaction. They carefully controlled the pressure of the fuel gas during tokamak startup and added a burst of heating called electron cyclotron resonance heating. These changes altered how the plasma interacts with the tokamak walls through a cooler plasma boundary, which dramatically reduced the degree to which wall impurities entered the plasma. Under this regime, the researchers were able to reach densities up to about 65 percent higher than the tokamak's Greenwald limit. This doesn't mean that magnetically confined plasmas can now operate with no density limits whatsoever. However, it does show that the Greenwald limit is not a fundamental barrier and that tweaking operational processes could lead to more effective fusion reactors. The findings have been published in Science Advances.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at Stanford University have created a programmable synthetic "skin" that can independently change color and texture, "a feat previously only available within the animal kingdom," reports the Register. From the report: The technique employs electron beams to write patterns and add optical layers that create color effects. When exposed to water, the film swells to reveal texture and colors independently, depending on which side of the material is exposed, according to a paper published in the scientific journal Nature this week. In an accompanying article, University of Stuttgart's Benjamin Renz and Na Liu said the researchers' "most striking achievement was a photonic skin in which color and texture could be independently controlled, mirroring the separate regulation... in octopuses." The research team used the polymer PEDOT:PSS, which can swell in water, as the basis for their material. Its reaction to water can be controlled by irradiating it with electrons, creating textures and patterns in the film. By adding thin layers of gold, the researchers turned surface texture into tunable optical effects. A single layer could be used to scatter light, giving the shiny metal a matte, textured appearance. To control color, a polymer film was sandwiched between two layers of gold, forming an optical cavity, which selectively reflects light.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version:next-20260109 (linux-next) Released:2026-01-09

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: [I]t turns out that some genius dogs can learn a brand new word, like the name of an unfamiliar toy, by just overhearing brief interactions between two people. What's more, these "gifted" dogs can learn the name of a new toy even if they first hear this word when the toy is out of sight -- as long as their favorite human is looking at the spot where the toy is hidden. That's according to a new study in the journal Science. "What we found in this study is that the dogs are using social communication. They're using these social cues to understand what the owners are talking about," says cognitive scientist Shany Dror of Eotvos Lorand University and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. "This tells us that the ability to use social information is actually something that humans probably had before they had language," she says, "and language was kind of hitchhiking on these social abilities." [...] "There's only a very small group of dogs that are able to learn this differentiation and then can learn that certain labels refer to specific objects," she says. "It's quite hard to train this and some dogs seem to just be able to do it." [...] To explore the various ways that these dogs are capable of learning new words, Dror and some colleagues conducted a study that involved two people interacting while their dog sat nearby and watched. One person would show the other a brand new toy and talk about it, with the toy's name embedded into sentences, such as "This is your armadillo. It has armadillo ears, little armadillo feet. It has a tail, like an armadillo tail." Even though none of this language was directed at the dogs, it turns out the super-learners registered the new toy's name and were later able to pick it out of a pile, at the owner's request. To do this, the dogs had to go into a separate room where the pile was located, so the humans couldn't give them any hints. Dror says that as she watched the dogs on camera from the other room, she was "honestly surprised" because they seemed to have so much confidence. "Sometimes they just immediately went to the new toy, knowing what they're supposed to do," she says. "Their performance was really, really high." She and her colleagues wondered if what mattered was the dog being able to see the toy while its name was said aloud, even if the words weren't explicitly directed at the dog. So they did another experiment that created a delay between the dog seeing a new toy and hearing its name. The dogs got to see the unfamiliar toy and then the owner dropped the toy in a bucket, so it was out of sight. Then the owner would talk to the dog, and mention the toy's name, while glancing down at the bucket. While this was more difficult for dogs, overall they still could use this information to learn the name of the toy and later retrieve it when asked. "This shows us how flexible they are able to learn," says Dror. "They can use different mechanisms and learn under different conditions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube is updating search filters so users can explicitly choose between Shorts and long-form videos. The change also replaces view-count sorting with a new "Popularity" filter and removes underperforming options like "Sort by Rating." The Verge reports: Right now, a filter-less search shows a mix of longform and short form videos, which can be annoying if you just want to see videos in one format or the other. But in the new search filters, among other options, you can pick to see "Videos," which in my testing has only showed a list of longform videos, or "Shorts," which just shows Shorts. YouTube is also removing the "Upload Date - Last Hour" and "Sort by Rating" filters because they "were not working as expected and had contributed to user complaints." The company will still offer other "Upload Date" filters, like "Today," "This week," "This Month," and "This Year," and you can also find popular videos with the new "Popularity" filter, which is replacing the "View count" sort option. (With the new "Popularity" filter, YouTube says that "our systems assess a video's view count and other relevance signals, such as watch time, to determine its popularity for that specific query.")

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk persuaded a judge on Wednesday to allow a jury trial on his allegations that ChatGPT maker OpenAI violated its founding mission in its high-profile restructuring to a for-profit entity. Musk was a cofounder of OpenAI in 2015 but left in 2018 and now runs an AI company that competes with it. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, said at a hearing that there was "plenty of evidence" suggesting OpenAI's leaders made assurances that its original nonprofit structure was going to be maintained. The judge said there were enough disputed facts to let a jury consider the claims at a trial scheduled for March, rather than decide the issues herself. She said she would issue a written order after the hearing that addresses OpenAI's bid to throw out the case. [...] Musk contends he contributed about $38 million, roughly 60% of OpenAI's early funding, along with strategic guidance and credibility, based on assurances that the organization would remain a nonprofit dedicated to the public benefit. The lawsuit accuses OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of plotting a for-profit switch to enrich themselves, culminating in multibillion-dollar deals with Microsoft and a recent restructuring. OpenAI, Altman and Brockman have denied the claims, and they called Musk "a frustrated commercial competitor seeking to slow down a mission-driven market leader." Microsoft is also a defendant and has urged the judge to toss Musk's lawsuit. A lawyer for Microsoft said there was no evidence that the company "aided and abetted" OpenAI. OpenAI in a statement after the hearing said: "Mr Musk's lawsuit continues to be baseless and a part of his ongoing pattern of harassment, and we look forward to demonstrating this at trial."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Illinois Department of Human Services disclosed that a misconfigured internal mapping website exposed sensitive personal data for more than 700,000 Illinois residents for over four years, from April 2021 to September 2025. Officials say they can't confirm whether the publicly accessible data was ever viewed. TechCrunch reports: Officials said the exposed data included personal information on 672,616 individuals who are Medicaid and Medicare Savings Program recipients. The data included their addresses, case numbers, and demographic data -- but not individuals' names. The exposed data also included names, addresses, case statuses, and other information relating to 32,401 individuals in receipt of services from the department's Division of Rehabilitation Services.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Google is putting even more generative AI tools into Gmail as part of its goal to further personalize user inboxes and streamline searches. On Thursday, the company announced a new "AI Inbox" tab, currently in a beta testing phase, that reads every message in a user's Gmail and suggests a list of to-dos and key topics, based on what it summarizes. In Google's example of what this AI Inbox could look like in Gmail, the new tab takes context from a user's messages and suggests they reschedule their dentist appointment, reply to a request from their child's sports coach, and pay an upcoming fee before the deadline. Also under the AI Inbox tab is a list of important topics worth browsing, nestled beneath the action items at the top. Each suggested to-do and topic links back to the original email for more context and for verification. [...] For users who are concerned about their privacy, the information Google gleans by skimming through inboxes will not be used to improve the company's foundational AI models. "We didn't just bolt AI onto Gmail," says Blake Barnes, who leads the project for Google. "We built a secure privacy architecture, specifically for this moment." He emphasizes that users can turn off Gmail's new AI tools if they don't want them. At the same time Google announced its AI Inbox, the company made free for all Gmail users multiple Gemini features that were previously available only to paying subscribers. This includes the Help Me Write tool, which generates emails from a user prompt, as well as AI Overviews for email threads, which essentially posts a TL;DR summary at the top of long message threads. Subscribers to Google's Ultra and Pro plans, which start at $20 a month, get two additional new features in their Gmail inbox. First, an AI proofreading tool that suggests more polished grammar and sentence structures. And second, an AI Overviews tool that can search your whole inbox and create relevant summaries on a topic, rather than just summarizing a single email thread.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 02 to January 09.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad announces

Thanks to work done by Jamie Gravendeel Maps has now been ported to use Blueprint to define the UI templates. Also Hari Rana ported the share locations (“Send to”) dialog to AdwDialog.

Third Party Projects

Giant Pink Robots! says

Version v2026.1.5 of the Varia download manager was released with automatic archive extraction, improvements to accessibility and tons of bug fixes and small improvements. The biggest part of this new release however is macOS support, albeit in an experimental state for now. With this, Varia now supports all three big desktop OS platforms: Linux, Windows and Mac. https://giantpinkrobots.github.io/varia/

francescocaracciolo announces

Newelle, AI Assistant for Gnome, received a new major update!

• Added MCP server support, enabling integration with thousands of apps
• Added Tools, extensions can now add new tools very easily
• Added the possibility to set some models as favoutites
• You can now trigger recording and TTS stop with keyboard shortcuts

Download it on Flathub

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

Phosh 0.52 is out:

We’ve added a QR code to the Wi-Fi quick setting so clients can connect easily by scanning it and there’s a new gesture to control brightness on the lock screen.

There’s more — see the full details here.

Flare ↗

Chat with your friends on Signal.

schmiddi announces

Version 0.18.0-beta.1 of Flare was now released on flathub-beta. This release includes fixes for using Flare as a primary device, which I have done successfully for a while now. Feel free to test it out and provide feedback. Note that if you want to try it out, I would heavily encourage linking Signal-Desktop to Flare in order to set your profile information and to start new chats. Feel free to give feedback if you have any issues with this beta in the Matrix room or issue tracker.

Emergency Alerts ↗

Receive emergency alerts

Leonhard reports

Emergency Alerts 2.0.0 has been released! It finally brings the long-awaited weather alerts for the U.S. and air raid alerts for Ukraine. Location selection is now also more powerful, allowing you to choose any point on Earth, and the new map view lets you see active alerts and affected areas at a glance. Please note that to make all this possible, the way locations are stored had to be updated. When you first launch the app after updating, it tries to migrate your existing locations automatically. In rare cases, this may not work and you might need to re-add them manually. If that happens a notification will be sent.

Highlights:

• Weather alerts now available across the U.S.
• Air raid alerts now available for Ukraine
• Pick any point on Earth as a location
• New map view showing active alerts and impacted areas

GNOME Websites

Sophie (she/her) says

The www.gnome.org pages are now available in English, Bulgarian, Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Chinese. You can contribute additional translations on l10n.gnome.org.

Miscellaneous

Guillaume Bernard reports

Damned Lies has been refreshed during the last weeks of 2025.

To refresh the statistics of branches, many of you complained that the task was synchronous and ended in timeouts. I have reworked this part in anticipation of ticket #409 (asynchronous git pushes) and the refresh now delegates refresh statistics to a Celery worker. For git pushes, we’ll use Celery tasks the same way!

In short, this means every time you click the refresh statistics button, it will start a job in the background, and a progress bar will show you the refresh status of the job in real time. There will be a maximum of three concurrent refreshes at a time, that should be enough :-).

In addition to these major changes, I reworked the presentation of languages and POT files in modules:

1. The date & time of the POT file generation is now shown with the number of messages.

2. Your languages are shown on top of the list; it will no longer be necessary to scroll down to find your language in the language list.

Arjan reports

PyGObject 3.55.1 has been released. It’s the second development release (it’s not available on PyPI) in the current GNOME release cycle.

Notable changes include:

• A fix do do_dispose() is always called on your object.
• You can define a do_constructed() method that will be called after the object is initialised.
• A regression in 3.55.0 has been fixed: instance data is now saved and outlives the garbage collector.

All changes can be found in the Changelog

This release can be downloaded from Gitlab and the GNOME download server.If you use PyGObject in your project, please give it a swing and see if everything works as expected.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

Paris Judicial Court ordered Google to block additional pirate sports-streaming domains at the DNS level, rejecting Google's argument that enforcement should target upstream providers like Cloudflare first. "The blockade was requested by Canal+ and aims to stop pirate streams of Champions League games," notes TorrentFreak. From the report: Most recently, Google was compelled to take action following a complaint from French broadcaster Canal+ and its subsidiaries regarding Champions League piracy.. Like previous blocking cases, the request is grounded in Article L. 333-10 of the French Sports Code, which enables rightsholders to seek court orders against any entity that can help to stop 'serious and repeated' sports piracy. After reviewing the evidence and hearing arguments from both sides, the Paris Court granted the blocking request, ordering Google to block nineteen domain names, including antenashop.site, daddylive3.com, livetv860.me, streamysport.org and vavoo.to. The latest blocking order covers the entire 2025/2026 Champions League series, which ends on May 30, 2026. It's a dynamic order too, which means that if these sites switch to new domains, as verified by ARCOM, these have to be blocked as well. Google objected to the blocking request. Among other things, it argued that several domains were linked to Cloudflare's CDN. Therefore, suspending the sites on the CDN level would be more effective, as that would render them inaccessible. Based on the subsidiarity principle, Google argued that blocking measures should only be ordered if attempts to block the pirate sites through more direct means have failed. The court dismissed these arguments, noting that intermediaries cannot dictate the enforcement strategy or blocking order. Intermediaries cannot require "prior steps" against other technical intermediaries, especially given the "irremediable" character of live sports piracy. The judge found the block proportional because Google remains free to choose the technical method, even if the result is mandated. Internet providers, search engines, CDNs, and DNS resolvers can all be required to block, irrespective of what other measures were taken previously. Google further argued that the blocking measures were disproportionate because they were complex, costly, easily bypassed, and had effects beyond the borders of France. The Paris court rejected these claims. It argued that Google failed to demonstrate that implementing these blocking measures would result in "important costs" or technical impossibilities. Additionally, the court recognized that there would still be options for people to bypass these blocking measures. However, the blocks are a necessary step to "completely cease" the infringing activities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is embedding full e-commerce checkout directly into Copilot chats, letting users buy products without ever visiting a retailer's website. "If checkout happens inside AI conversations, retailers risk losing direct customer relationships -- while platforms like Microsoft gain leverage," reports Axios. From the report: Microsoft unveiled new agentic AI tools for retailers at the NRF 2026 retail conference, including Copilot Checkout, which lets shoppers complete purchases inside Copilot without being redirected to a retailer's website. The checkout feature is live in the U.S. with Shopify, PayPal, Stripe and Etsy integrations. Copilot apps have more than 100 million monthly active users, spanning consumer and commercial audiences, according to the company. More than 800 million monthly active users interact with AI features across Microsoft products more broadly. Shopping journeys involving Copilot are 33% shorter than traditional search paths and see a 53% increase in purchases within 30 minutes of interaction, Microsoft says. When shopping intent is present, journeys involving Copilot are 194% more likely to result in a purchase than those without it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission plans to authorize a new category of wireless devices in the 6 GHz Wi-Fi band that will be permitted to operate at higher power levels than currently allowed. The FCC will also consider authorizing higher power levels for certain wireless devices that are only allowed to operate indoors. The FCC said it scheduled a vote for its January 29 meeting on an order "to create a new category of unlicensed devices... that can operate outdoors and at higher power than previously authorized devices." These so-called Geofenced variable power (GVP) devices operating on the 6 GHz band will "support high data rates suitable for AR/VR, short-range hotspots, automation, and indoor navigation," and "overcome limitations of previous device classes by allowing higher power and outdoor mobility," the FCC said. They will be required to work with geofencing systems to avoid interference with fixed microwave links and radio astronomy observatories. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr attributed the FCC's planned action to President Trump in a press release titled, "President Trump Unleashes American Innovation With 6 GHz Win." That's consistent with Carr's relatively new stance that the FCC takes orders from the president, despite his insisting during the Biden era that the FCC must operate independently from the White House. While many of Carr's regulatory decisions have been criticized by consumer advocates, the 6 GHz action is an exception. Michael Calabrese, of New America's Open Technology Institute, told Ars that "increasing the power levels for Wi-Fi connections to peripheral devices such as AR/VR is a big win for consumers" and a change that has been "long advocated by the Wi-Fi community." Carr said that the FCC "will vote on an order that expands unlicensed operations in the 6 GHz band so that consumers can benefit from better, faster Wi-Fi and an entirely new generation of wireless devices -- from AR/VR and IoT to a range of innovative smart devices. [It] will do so through a set of forward-looking regulations that allow devices to operate at higher power while protecting incumbent users, including through geofencing systems." [...] A draft of the order said the planned "additional power will enable composite standard-power/LPI access points to increase indoor coverage and provide more versatility to American consumers." The FCC will also seek comment on a proposal to authorize LPI access points on cruise ships.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The long-standing hierarchy in the TV market -- Sony, Samsung and LG at the top, TCL and Hisense fighting it out in the midrange -- is eroding as the budget brands close the performance gap and increasingly lead on technology innovation, The Verge writes. Hisense debuted the first RGB LED TV last year, and TCL's X11L announced at CES 2026 is the first TV to use reformulated quantum dots and a new color filter. TCL's QM9K release last year was "a pretty clear statement that they're ready to fight with the big boys." The premium brands retain certain advantages: Sony's processing remains unmatched and LG's OLEDs deliver contrast that mini LED cannot match. "Even as the gap in performance across technologies continues to shrink, and TVs from all the manufacturers get closer to parity, the challenge for TCL and Hisense shifts from creating incredible, competitive products to altering perception," The Verge notes. Samsung once owned the art TV segment entirely; CES 2026 saw announcements from Amazon's Ember Artline and LG's Gallery TV, all using similar edge-lit technology and magnetic frames. The experience across brands is "remarkably similar." If the pricing gap persists and performance remains comparable, "the big three will have to respond by bringing their pricing down or risk losing sales," the publication concluded.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Internet access available through mobile devices in Iran appears to be limited, according to several social media accounts that routinely track such developments. Cloudflare Radar, which monitors internet traffic on behalf of the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, said on Thursday that IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), a standard widely used for mobile infrastructure, was affected. "IPv6 address space in Iran dropped by 98.5 per cent, concurrent with IPv6 traffic share dropping from 12 per cent to 1.8 per cent, as the government selectively blocks internet access amid protests," read Cloudflare Radar's social post. NetBlocks, which tracks internet access and digital rights around the world, also confirmed it was seeing problems with connectivity through various internet providers in Iran. "Live network data show Tehran and other parts of Iran are now entering a digital blackout," NetBlocks posted on X.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The promise of AI-powered workplace tools that sort emails, take meeting notes, and file expense reports is finally delivering meaningful productivity gains -- one software startup reported a 20% boost around mid-2025 -- but companies are discovering an unexpected tradeoff: employees are burning out from the relentless pace of high-level cognitive work. Roger Kirkness, CEO of 14-person software startup Convictional, noticed that after AI took the scut work off his team's plates, their days became consumed by intensive thinking, and they were mentally exhausted and unproductive by Friday. The company transitioned to a four-day workweek; the same amount of work gets done, Kirkness says. The underlying problem, according to Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, is that businesses tend to simply reallocate the time AI saves. Workers who once mentally downshifted for tasks like data entry are now expected to maintain intense focus through longer stretches of data analysis. "If you just make people work at a high-intensity pace with no breaks, you risk crowding out creativity," Schor says.

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