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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Google has agreed to pay $100 million in cash to settle a long-running lawsuit claiming it overcharged advertisers by failing to provide promised discounts and charged for clicks on ads outside the geographic areas the advertisers targeted. A preliminary settlement of the 14-year-old class action, which began in March 2011, was filed late Thursday in the San Jose, California, federal court, and requires a judge's approval. Advertisers who participated in Google's AdWords program, now known as Google Ads, accused the search engine operator of breaching its contract by manipulating its Smart Pricing formula to artificially reduce discounts. The advertisers also said Google, a unit of Mountain View, California-based Alphabet, misled them by failing to limit ad distribution to locations they designated, violating California's unfair competition law. Thursday's settlement covers advertisers who used AdWords between January 1, 2004, and December 13, 2012. Google denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle. "This case was about ad product features we changed over a decade ago and we're pleased it's resolved," spokesman Jose Castaneda said in an emailed statement. Lawyers for the plaintiffs may seek fees of up to 33% of the settlement fund, plus $4.2 million for expenses. According to court papers, the case took a long time as the parties produced extensive evidence, including more than 910,000 pages of documents and multiple terabytes of click data from Google, and participated in six mediation sessions before four different mediators.

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The Chrome extension Honey has lost over 4 million users after a viral video exposed it for hijacking affiliate codes and misleading users about finding the best coupon deals. 9to5Google reports: As we reported in early January, Honey had lost around 3 million users immediately after the video went viral, but ended up gaining back around 1 million later on. Now, as of March 2025, Honey is down to 16 million users on Chrome, down from its peak of 20 million. This drop comes after new Chrome policy has taken effect which prevents Honey, and extensions like it, from practices including taking over affiliate codes without disclosure or without benefit to the extension's users. Honey has since updated its extension listing with disclosure, and we found that the behavior shown in the December video no longer occurs.

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OpenAI is having another viral moment after releasing Images for ChatGPT last week, with millions of people creating Studio Ghibli-inspired AI art. In a post on X today, CEO Sam Altman said the company has "added one million users in the last hour" alone. A few days prior he begged users to stop generating images because he said "our GPUs are melting."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The creator of an open source genetic database is shutting it down and deleting all of its data because he has come to believe that its existence is dangerous with "a rise in far-right and other authoritarian governments" in the United States and elsewhere. "The largest use case for DTC genetic data was not biomedical research or research in big pharma," Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, the founder of OpenSNP, wrote in a blog post. "Instead, the transformative impact of the data came to fruition among law enforcement agencies, who have put the genealogical properties of genetic data to use." OpenSNP has collected roughly 7,500 genomes over the last 14 years, primarily by allowing people to voluntarily submit their own genetic information they have downloaded from 23andMe. With the bankruptcy of 23andMe, increased interest in genetic data by law enforcement, and the return of Donald Trump and rise of authoritarian governments worldwide, Greshake Tzovaras told 404 Media he no longer believes it is ethical to run the database. "I've been thinking about it since 23andMe was on the verge of bankruptcy and been really considering it since the U.S. election. It definitely is really bad over there [in the United States]," Greshake Tzovaras told 404 Media. "I am quite relieved to have made the decision and come to a conclusion. It's been weighing on my mind for a long time." Greshake Tzovaras said that he is proud of the OpenSNP project, but that, in a world where scientific data is being censored and deleted and where the Trump administration has focused on criminalizing immigrants and trans people, he now believes that the most responsible thing to do is to delete the data and shut down the project. "Most people in OpenSNP may not be at particular risk right now, but there are people from vulnerable populations in here as well," Greshake Tzovaras said. "Thinking about gender representation, minorities, sexual orientation -- 23andMe has been working on the whole 'gay gene' thing, it's conceivable that this would at some point in the future become an issue." "Across the globe there is a rise in far-right and other authoritarian governments. While they are cracking down on free and open societies, they are also dedicated to replacing scientific thought and reasoning with pseudoscience across disciplines," Greshake Tzovaras wrote. "The risk/benefit calculus of providing free & open access to individual genetic data in 2025 is very different compared to 14 years ago. And so, sunsetting openSNP -- along with deleting the data stored within it -- feels like it is the most responsible act of stewardship for these data today." "The interesting thing to me is there are data preservation efforts in the U.S. because the government is deleting scientific data that they don't like. This is approaching that same problem from a different direction," he added. "We need to protect the people in this database. I am supportive of preserving scientific data and knowledge, but the data comes second -- the people come first. We prefer deleting the data."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The post-Covid rebound of live events is all the more evidence that movie theaters are never coming back, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told Semafor in an interview at the Paley Center for Media Friday. "Nearly every live thing has come back screaming," Sarandos said. "Broadway's breaking records right now, sporting events, concerts, all those things that we couldn't do during COVID are all back and bigger than ever. The theatrical box office is down 40 to 50% from pre-COVID, and this year is down 8% already, so the trend is not reversing. You've gotta look at that and say, 'What is the consumer trying to tell you?'"

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Micron will raise prices for DRAM and NAND flash memory chips through 2026 as AI and data center demand strains supply chains, the U.S. chipmaker confirmed Monday. The move follows a market rebound from previous oversupply, with memory prices steadily climbing as producers cut output while AI and high-performance computing workloads grow. Rivals Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are expected to implement similar increases. Micron cited "un-forecasted demand across various business segments" in communications to channel partners. The price hikes will impact sectors ranging from consumer electronics to enterprise data centers.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has closed its IoT & AI Insider Lab in Shanghai's Zhangjiang hi-tech zone, marking the latest sign of the US tech giant's retreat from China amid rising geopolitical tensions. The Shanghai lab, meant to help with domestic development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, closed earlier this year, according to people who work in the Zhangjiang AI Island area. Opened in May 2019, Microsoft's IoT & AI Insider Lab was touted as a flagship collaboration between the global tech giant and Zhangjiang, the innovation hub of Shanghai's Pudong district, where numerous domestic and international semiconductor and AI companies have set up shop. The lab covered roughly 2,800 square meters (30,000 square feet).

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Learning to code has become sort of become pointless as AI increasingly dominates programming tasks, said Replit founder and chief executive Amjad Masad. "I no longer think you should learn to code," Masad wrote on X. The statement comes as major tech executives report significant AI inroads into software development. Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently revealed that 25% of new code at the tech giant is AI-generated, though still reviewed by engineers. Furthermore, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted AI could generate up to 90% of all code within six months. Masad called this shift a "bittersweet realization" after spending years popularizing coding through open-source work, Codecademy, and Replit -- a platform that now uses AI to help users build apps and websites. Instead of syntax-focused programming skills, Masad recommends learning "how to think, how to break down problems... how to communicate clearly, with humans and with machines."

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Version:next-20250331 (linux-next) Released:2025-03-31

"The big set of open-source graphics driver updates for Linux 6.15 have been merged," writes Phoronix, "but Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn't particularly happy with the pull request." The new "hdrtest" code is for the Intel Xe kernel driver and is around trying to help ensure the Direct Rendering Manager header files are self-contained and pass kernel-doc tests — basic maintenance checks on the included DRM header files to ensure they are all in good shape. But Torvalds accused the code of not only slowing down the full-kernel builds, but also leaving behind "random" files for dependencies "that then make the source tree nasty," reports Tom's Hardware: While Torvalds was disturbed by the code that was impacting the latest Linux kernel, beginning his post with a "Grr," he remained precise in his objections to it. "I did the pull, resolved the (trivial) conflicts, but I notice that this ended up containing the disgusting 'hdrtest' crap that (a) slows down the build because it's done for a regular allmodconfig build rather than be some simple thing that you guys can run as needed (b) also leaves random 'hdrtest' turds around in the include directories," he wrote. Torvalds went on to state that he had previously complained about this issue, and inquired why the hdr testing is being done as a regular part of the build. Moreover, he highlighted that the resulting 'turds' were breaking filename completion. Torvalds underlined this point — and his disgust — by stating, "this thing needs to *die*." In a shot of advice to fellow Linux developers, Torvalds said, "If you want to do that hdrtest thing, do it as part of your *own* checks. Don't make everybody else see that disgusting thing...." He then noted that he had decided to mark hdrtest as broken for now, to prevent its inclusion in regular builds. As of Saturday, all of the DRM-Next code had made it into Linux 6.15 Git, notes Phoronix. "But Linus Torvalds is expecting all this 'hdrtest' mess to be cleaned up."

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"Microsoft built things. It broke things." That's how the Seattle Times kicks off a series of articles celebrating Microsoft's 50th anniversary — adding that Microsoft also gave some people "a lucrative retirement early in their lives, and their own stories to tell." What did they remember from Microsoft's earliest days? Scott Oki joined Microsoft as employee no. 121. The company was small; Gates was hands-on, and hard to please. "One of his favorite phrases was 'that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,'" Oki says. "He didn't use that on me, so I feel pretty good about that." Another, kinder phrase that pops to Oki's mind when discussing the international division he founded at Microsoft is "bringing home the bacon." An obsession with rapid revenue growth permeated Microsoft in those early days. Oki was about three weeks into the job as marketing manager when he presented a global expansion plan to Gates. "Had I done business internationally before? No," Oki said. "Do I speak a language other than English? No." But Gates gave Oki a $1 million budget to found the international division and sell Microsoft products overseas. He established subsidiaries in the most important markets at the time: Japan, United Kingdom, Germany and France. And, because he had a few bucks left over, Australia. "Of the initial subsidiaries we started, every single one of them was profitable in its first year," he says... Oki left Microsoft on March 1, 1992, 10 years to the day after he was hired. Other memories shared by early Microsoft employees: One recent graudate remembered her parents in Spokane saying "I think that's Mary and Bill Gates' son's company. If that kid is anything like those two, that is going to be a great company,'" She got her first job at Microsoft in 1992 — and 33 years later, she's a senior director at Microsoft Philanthropies. The Times also interviewed one of Microsoft's first lawyers, who remembers that "The day the U.S. government sued Microsoft ... that was a tough day for me. It kind of turned my world upside down for about the next eight years." Microsoft senior VP Brad Chase remembers negotiating with the Rolling Stones for the rights to their song "Start Me Up" for the Windows 95 ad campaign. ("Chase is quick to dispel any rumor that Mick Jagger called up Bill Gates and got $12 million. But he won't say how much the company paid.") But Chase does tell the Times that Bill Gates "used to say all of the time, 'We're going to bet the company on Windows.' That was a huge bet because Windows, frankly, was a lousy product in its early days."

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What happens when you ask Copilot to "write a program that can be run on an iPhone 16 to select 15 random photos from the phone, tint them to random colors, and display the photos on the phone"? That's what TouchDevelop did for the long-discontinued Windows Phone in a 2013 Microsoft Research 'SmartSynth' natural language code generation demo. ("Write scripts by tapping on the screen.") Long-time Slashdot reader theodp reports on what happens when, 14 years later, you pose the same question to Copilot: "You'll get lots of code and caveats from Copilot, but nothing that you can execute as is. (Compare that to the functioning 10 lines of code TouchDevelop program). It's a good reminder that just because GenAI can generate code, it doesn't necessarily mean it will generate the least amount of code, the most understandable or appropriate code for the requestor, or code that runs unchanged and produces the desired results. theodp also reminds us that TouchDevelop "was (like BASIC) abandoned by Microsoft..." Interestingly, a Microsoft Research video from CS Education Week 2011 shows enthusiastic Washington high school students participating in an hour-long TouchDevelop coding lesson and demonstrating the apps they created that tapped into music, photos, the Internet, and yes, even their phone's functionality. This shows how lacking iPhone and Android still are today as far as easy programmability-for-the-masses goes. (When asked, Copilot replied that Apple's Shortcuts app wasn't up to the task).

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The U.S. and China "are racing to build a truly useful humanoid worker," the Wall Street Journal wrote Saturday, adding that "Whoever wins could gain a huge edge in countless industries." "The time has come for robots," Nvidia's chief executive said at a conference in March, adding "This could very well be the largest industry of all." China's government has said it wants the country to be a world leader in humanoid robots by 2027. "Embodied" AI is listed as a priority of a new $138 billion state venture investment fund, encouraging private-sector investors and companies to pile into the business. It looks like the beginning of a familiar tale. Chinese companies make most of the world's EVs, ships and solar panels — in each case, propelled by government subsidies and friendly regulations. "They have more companies developing humanoids and more government support than anyone else. So, right now, they may have an edge," said Jeff Burnstein [president of the Association for Advancing Automation, a trade group in Ann Arbor, Michigan].... Humanoid robots need three-dimensional data to understand physics, and much of it has to be created from scratch. That is where China has a distinct edge: The country is home to an immense number of factories where humanoid robots can absorb data about the world while performing tasks. "The reason why China is making rapid progress today is because we are combining it with actual applications and iterating and improving rapidly in real scenarios," said Cheng Yuhang, a sales director with Deep Robotics, one of China's robot startups. "This is something the U.S. can't match." UBTech, the startup that is training humanoid robots to sort and carry auto parts, has partnerships with top Chinese automakers including Geely... "A problem can be solved in a month in the lab, but it may only take days in a real environment," said a manager at UBTech... With China's manufacturing prowess, a locally built robot could eventually cost less than half as much as one built elsewhere, said Ming Hsun Lee, a Bank of America analyst. He said he based his estimates on China's electric-vehicle industry, which has grown rapidly to account for roughly 70% of global EV production. "I think humanoid robots will be another EV industry for China," he said. The UBTech robot system, called Walker S, currently costs hundreds of thousands of dollars including software, according to people close to the company. UBTech plans to deliver 500 to 1,000 of its Walker S robots to clients this year, including the Apple supplier Foxconn. It hopes to increase deliveries to more than 10,000 in 2027. Few companies outside China have started selling AI-powered humanoid robots. Industry insiders expect the competition to play out over decades, as the robots tackle more-complicated environments, such as private homes. The article notes "several" U.S. humanoid robot producers, including the startup Figure. And robots from Amazon's Agility Robotics have been tested in Amazon warehouses since 2023. "The U.S. still has advantages in semiconductors, software and some precision components," the article points out. But "Some lawmakers have urged the White House to ban Chinese humanoids from the U.S. and further restrict Chinese robot makers' access to American technology, citing national-security concerns..."

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Slashdot reader jrnvk writes: The Verge is reporting that Microsoft will soon make it harder to run the well-publicized bypassnro command in Windows 11 setup. This command allows skipping the Microsoft account and online connection requirements on install. While the command will be removed, it can still be enabled by a regedit change — for now. "However, there's no guarantee Microsoft will allow this additional workaround for long," writes the Verge. (Though they add "There are other workarounds as well" involving the unattended.xml automation.) In its latest Windows 11 Insider Preview, the company says it will take out a well-known bypass script... Microsoft cites security as one reason it's making this change. ["This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account."] Since the bypassnro command is disabled in the latest beta build, it will likely be pushed to production versions within weeks.

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The giant financial news site Bloomberg "has been experimenting with using AI to help produce its journalism," reports the New York Times. But "It hasn't always gone smoothly." While Bloomberg announced on January 15 that it would add three AI-generated bullet points at the top of articles as a summary, "The news outlet has had to correct at least three dozen A.I.-generated summaries of articles published this year." (This Wednesday they published a "hallucinated" date for the start of U.S. auto tariffs, and earlier in March claimed president Trump had imposed tariffs on Canada in 2024, while other errors have included incorrect figures and incorrect attribution.) Bloomberg is not alone in trying A.I. — many news outlets are figuring out how best to embrace the new technology and use it in their reporting and editing. The newspaper chain Gannett uses similar A.I.-generated summaries on its articles, and The Washington Post has a tool called "Ask the Post" that generates answers to questions from published Post articles. And problems have popped up elsewhere. Earlier this month, The Los Angeles Times removed its A.I. tool from an opinion article after the technology described the Ku Klux Klan as something other than a racist organization. Bloomberg News said in a statement that it publishes thousands of articles each day, and "currently 99 percent of A.I. summaries meet our editorial standards...." The A.I. summaries are "meant to complement our journalism, not replace it," the statement added.... John Micklethwait, Bloomberg's editor in chief, laid out the thinking about the A.I. summaries in a January 10 essay, which was an excerpt from a lecture he had given at City St. George's, University of London. "Customers like it — they can quickly see what any story is about. Journalists are more suspicious," he wrote. "Reporters worry that people will just read the summary rather than their story." But, he acknowledged, "an A.I. summary is only as good as the story it is based on. And getting the stories is where the humans still matter." A Bloomberg spokeswoman told the Times that the feedback they'd received to the summaries had generally been positive — "and we continue to refine the experience."

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As Rust approaches its 10th anniversary, "there is an important piece of documentation missing that many other languages provide," notes the Rust Foundation. While there's documentation and tutorials — there's no official language specification: In December 2022, an RFC was submitted to encourage the Rust Project to begin working on a specification. After much discussion, the RFC was approved in July 2023, and work began. Initially, the Rust Project specification team (t-spec) were interested in creating the document from scratch using the Rust Reference as a guiding marker. However, the team knew there was already an external Rust specification that was being used successfully for compiler qualification purposes — the FLS. Thank Berlin-based Ferrous Systems, a Rust-based consultancy who assembled that description "some years ago," according to a post on the Rust blog: They've since been faithfully maintaining and updating this document for new versions of Rust, and they've successfully used it to qualify toolchains based on Rust for use in safety-critical industries. [The Rust Foundation notes it part of the consultancy's "Ferrocene" Rust compiler/toolchain.] Seeing this success, others have also begun to rely on the FLS for their own qualification efforts when building with Rust. The Rust Foundation explains: The FLS provides a structured and detailed reference for Rust's syntax, semantics, and behavior, serving as a foundation for verification, compliance, and standardization efforts. Since Rust did not have an official language specification back then, nor a plan to write one, the FLS represented a major step toward describing Rust in a way that aligns with industry requirements, particularly in high-assurance domains. And the Rust Project is "passionate about shipping high quality tools that enable people to build reliable software at scale," adds the Rust blog. So... It's in that light that we're pleased to announce that we'll be adopting the FLS into the Rust Project as part of our ongoing specification efforts. This adoption is being made possible by the gracious donation of the FLS by Ferrous Systems. We're grateful to them for the work they've done in assembling the FLS, in making it fit for qualification purposes, in promoting its use and the use of Rust generally in safety-critical industries, and now, for working with us to take the next step and to bring the FLS into the Project. With this adoption, we look forward to better integrating the FLS with the processes of the Project and to providing ongoing and increased assurances to all those who use Rust in safety-critical industries and, in particular, to those who use the FLS as part of their qualification efforts. More from the Rust Foundation: The t-spec team wanted to avoid potential confusion from having two highly visible Rust specifications in the industry and so decided it would be worthwhile to try to integrate the FLS with the Rust Reference to create the official Rust Project specification. They approached Ferrous Systems, which agreed to contribute its FLS to the Rust Project and allow the Rust Project to take over its development and management... This generous donation will provide a clearer path to delivering an official Rust specification. It will also empower the Rust Project to oversee its ongoing evolution, providing confidence to companies and individuals already relying on the FLS, and marking a major milestone for the Rust ecosystem. "I really appreciate Ferrous taking this step to provide their specification to the Rust Project," said Joel Marcey, Director of Technology at the Rust Foundation and member of the t-spec team. "They have already done a massive amount of legwork...." This effort will provide others who require a Rust specification with an official, authoritative reference for their work with the Rust programming language... This is an exciting outcome. A heartfelt thank you to the Ferrous Systems team for their invaluable contribution! Marcey said the move allows the team "to supercharge our progress in the delivery of an official Rust specification." And the co-founder of Ferrous Systems, Felix Gilcher, also sounded excited. "We originally created the Ferrocene Language Specification to provide a structured and reliable description of Rust for the certification of the Ferrocene compiler. As an open source-first company, contributing the FLS to the Rust Project is a logical step toward fostering the development of a unified, community-driven specification that benefits all Rust users."

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A former Facebook director of global policy recently published "the book Meta doesn't want you to read," a scathing takedown of top Meta executives titled Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. But Wednesday RestofWorld.org published additional thoughts from Meta's former head of public policy for Bangladesh (who is now an executive director at the nonprofit policy lab Tech Global Institute). Though their time at Facebook didn't overlap, they first applaud how the book "puts a face to the horrific events and dangerous decisions." But having said that, "What struck me is that what isn't included in Careless People is more telling than what is." By 2012 — one year after joining Facebook — Wynn-Williams had ample evidence of the platform's role in enabling violence and harm upon its users, and state-sanctioned digital repression, yet her memoir neither mentions these events nor the repeated warnings to her team from civil society groups in Asia before the situation escalated... In recounting events, the author glosses over her own indifference to repeated warnings from policymakers, civil society, and internal teams outside the U.S. that ultimately led to serious harm to communities. She briefly mentions how Facebook's local staff was held at gunpoint to give access to data or remove content in various countries — something that had been happening since as early as 2012. Yet, she failed to grasp the gravity of these risks until the possibility of her facing jail time arises in South Korea — or even more starkly in March 2016, when Facebook's vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, was arrested in Brazil. Her delayed reckoning underscores how Facebook's leadership remains largely detached from real-world consequences of their decisions until they become impossible to ignore. Perhaps because everyone wants to be a hero of their own story, Wynn-Williams frames her opposition to leadership decisions as isolated; in reality, powerful resistance had long existed within what Wynn-Williams describes as Facebook's "lower-level employees." Yet "Despite telling an incomplete story, Careless People is a book that took enormous courage to write," the article concludes, calling it an important story to tell. "It goes to show that we need many stories — especially from those who still can't be heard — if we are to meaningfully piece together the complex puzzle of one of the world's most powerful technology companies."

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The New York Times notes that white-collar workers have faced higher unemployment than other groups in the U.S. over the past few years — along with slower wager growth. Some economists wonder if this trend might be irreversible... and partly attributable to AI: After sitting below 4% for more than two years, the overall unemployment rate has topped that threshold since May... "We're seeing a meaningful transition in the way work is done in the white-collar world," said Carl Tannenbaum, the chief economist of Northern Trust. "I tell people a wave is coming...." Thousands of video game workers lost jobs last year and the year before... Unemployment in finance and related industries, while still low, increased by about a quarter from 2022 to 2024, as rising interest rates slowed demand for mortgages and companies sought to become leaner.... Overall, the latest data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show that the unemployment rate for college grads has risen 30% since bottoming out in September 2022 (to 2.6% from 2%), versus about 18% for all workers (to 4% from 3.4%). An analysis by Julia Pollak, chief economist of ZipRecruiter, shows that unemployment has been most elevated among those with bachelor's degrees or some college but no degree, while unemployment has been steady or falling at the very top and bottom of the education ladder — for those with advanced degrees or without a high school diploma. Hiring rates have slowed more for jobs requiring a college degree than for other jobs, according to ADP Research, which studies the labor market.... And artificial intelligence could reduce that need further by increasing the automation of white-collar jobs. A recent academic paper found that software developers who used an AI coding assistant improved a key measure of productivity by more than 25% and that the productivity gains appeared to be largest among the least experienced developers. The result suggested that adopting AI could reduce the wage premium enjoyed by more experienced coders, since it would erode their productivity advantages over novices... [A]t least in the near term, many tech executives and their investors appear to see AI as a way to trim their staffing. A software engineer at a large tech company who declined to be named for fear of harming his job prospects said that his team was about half the size it was last year and that he and his co-workers were expected to do roughly the same amount of work by relying on an AI assistant. Overall, the unemployment rate in tech and related industries jumped by more than half from 2022 to 2024, to 4.4% from 2.9%. "Some economists say these trends may be short term in nature and little cause for concern on their own," the article points out (with one economist noting the unemployment rate is still low compared to historical averages). Harvard labor economist Lawrence Katz even suggested the slower wage growth could reflect the discount that these workers accepted in return for being able to work from home. Thanks to Slashdot reader databasecowgirl for sharing the article.

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"After a long run, Google is sunsetting two of its signature Nest products," reports PC World: Google has just announced that it's discontinuing the 10-year-old Nest Protect and the 7-year-old Nest x Yale lock. Both of those products will continue to work, and — for now — they remain on sale at the Google Store, complete with discounts until supplies run out. But while Google itself is exiting the smoke alarm and smart lock business, it isn't leaving Google Home users in the lurch. Instead, it's teeing up third-party replacements for the Nest Protect and Nest X Yale lock, with both new products coming from familiar brands... Capable of being unlocked via app, entry code, or a traditional key, the Yale Smart Lock with Matter is set to arrive this summer, according to Yale. While both the existing Nest Protect and Nest x Yale lock will continue to operate and receive security patches, those who purchased the second-generation Nest Protect near its 2015 launch date should probably replace the product anyway. That's because the CO sensors in carbon monoxide detectors like the Nest Protect have a roughly 10-year life expectancy. Nest Protect and the Nest X Yale lock were two of the oldest products in Google's smart home lineup, and both were showing their age.

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Cloud providers like the security of running things in virtual machines "at scale" — even though VMs "are not known for having fast cold starts or a small footprint..." noted Microsoft's Open Source blog last November. So Microsoft's Azure Core Upstream team built an open source Rust library called Hyperlight "to execute functions as fast as possible while isolating those functions within a VM." But that was just the beginning... Then, we showed how to run Rust functions really, really fast, followed by using C to [securely] run Javascript. In February 2025, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) voted to onboard Hyperlight into their Sandbox program [for early-stage projects]. [This week] we're announcing the release of Hyperlight Wasm: a Hyperlight virtual machine "micro-guest" that can run wasm component workloads written in many programming languages... Traditional virtual machines do a lot of work to be able to run programs. Not only do they have to load an entire operating system, they also boot up the virtual devices that the operating system depends on. Hyperlight is fast because it doesn't do that work; all it exposes to its VM guests is a linear slice of memory and a CPU. No virtual devices. No operating system. But this speed comes at the cost of compatibility. Chances are that your current production application expects a Linux operating system running on the x86-64 architecture (hardware), not a bare linear slice of memory... [B]uilding Hyperlight with a WebAssembly runtime — wasmtime — enables any programming language to execute in a protected Hyperlight micro-VM without any prior knowledge of Hyperlight at all. As far as program authors are concerned, they're just compiling for the wasm32-wasip2 target... Executing workloads in the Hyperlight Wasm guest isn't just possible for compiled languages like C, Go, and Rust, but also for interpreted languages like Python, JavaScript, and C#. The trick here, much like with containers, is to also include a language runtime as part of the image... Programming languages, runtimes, application platforms, and cloud providers are all starting to offer rich experiences for WebAssembly out of the box. If we do things right, you will never need to think about whether your application is running inside of a Hyperlight Micro-VM in Azure. You may never know your workload is executing in a Hyperlight Micro VM. And that's a good thing. While a traditional virtual-device-based VM takes about 125 milliseconds to load, "When the Hyperlight VMM creates a new VM, all it needs do to is create a new slice of memory and load the VM guest, which in turn loads the wasm workload. This takes about 1-2 milliseconds today, and work is happening to bring that number to be less than 1 millisecond in the future." And there's also double security due to Wasmtime's software-defined runtime sandbox within Hyperlight's larger VM...

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