Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) pump out nearly five times more planet-heating pollution than official figures show, a report has found. The Guardian: The cars, which can run on electric batteries as well as combustion engines, have been promoted by European carmakers as a way to cover long distances in a single drive -- unlike fully electric cars -- while still reducing emissions. Data shows PHEVs emit just 19% less CO2 than petrol and diesel cars, an analysis by the non-profit advocacy group Transport and Environment found on Thursday. Under laboratory tests, they were assumed to be 75% less polluting. The researchers analyzed data from the onboard fuel consumption meters of 800,000 cars registered in Europe between 2021 and 2023. They found real-world carbon dioxide emissions from PHEVs in 2023 were 4.9 times greater than those from standardized laboratory tests, having risen from being 3.5 times greater in 2021.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Cloud-computing firm Salesforce was hit with a proposed class action lawsuit by two authors who alleged the company used thousands of books without permission to train its AI software. Novelists Molly Tanzer and Jennifer Gilmore said in the complaint that Salesforce infringed copyrights by using their work to train its xGen AI models to process language.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Atari has announced yet another retro console revival, but this time it's launching hardware from an old competitor. Atari and Plaion, a company that develops, publishes, and distributes games, have collaborated on the new Intellivision Sprint that blends '80s console aesthetics with modern gaming conveniences. It's a new take on Mattel's Intellivision, which initially went head-to-head with the Atari 2600 when it was released in 1979. The $150 Sprint looks a lot like the original Intellivision with a gold and black case and a wood-grain panel on the front, but there are a lot fewer cables. It connects to a TV using a single HDMI cable, and while it still includes two controllers featuring dials and number pads instead of joysticks, they're both wireless and charge when docked to the console.

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Foreign institutional investors have pulled nearly $30 billion from Indian equity markets over the past twelve months. A substantial portion of that capital moved to Korea and Taiwan. Foreign portfolio investor ownership in stocks listed on India's National Stock Exchange fell from 22.2% in September 2024 to 17.3% in May 2025. Taiwan absorbed $15 billion of net foreign inflows in the third quarter of 2025 alone. HSBC analysts say global investors increasingly view India through the lens of AI economics and are positioning the world's most populous nation as a global anti-AI play. India employs roughly 20 million people directly and indirectly in IT services. Services account for 55% of Indian gross domestic product. HSBC estimates digital AI agents cost approximately one-third as much as human agents for customer support and certain mid-office functions. Global tech giants will spend two trillion dollars on AI infrastructure between 2025 and 2030. India's AI Mission committed $1.25 billion over five years beginning March 2024.

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Jason Allen has responded to critics who say he is not an artist by filing a new brief and announcing plans to sell oil-print reproductions of his AI-generated image. Allen won the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition in 2022 after submitting Theatre D'opera Spatial, which Midjourney created. He said in a press release that being called an artist does not concern him but his work and expression do. Allen says he asked himself what could make the piece undeniably art and decided to create physical reproductions using technology. The reproductions employ a three-dimensional printing technique from a company called Arius that uses oil paints to simulate brushstrokes. Allen said the physical artifact is singular and real. His legal filing argues that he produced the artwork by providing hundreds of iterative text prompts to Midjourney and experimenting with over six hundred prompts before cropping and upscaling the final image. The U.S. Copyright Office has rejected his copyright applications for three years. The office maintains that Midjourney does not treat text prompts as direct instructions.

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Backblaze has been tracking hard disk drive failures in its datacenter since 2013. The backup and cloud storage company's latest analysis of approximately 317,230 drives shows that peak failure rates have dropped dramatically and shifted much later in a drive's lifespan. Where the company once saw failure rates of 13.73% at around three years in 2013 and 14.24% at seven years and nine months in 2021, the current data shows a peak of just 4.25% at 10 years and three months. This represents the first time the company has observed the highest failure rate occurring at the far end of the drive curve rather than earlier in its operational life, it said. The drives maintained relatively consistent failure rates through most of their use before spiking sharply near the end. The improvement amounts to roughly one-third of the previous peak failure rates.

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The U.S. is awash with scam text messages. Officials say it has become a billion-dollar, highly sophisticated business benefiting criminals in China. From a report: Your highway toll payment is now past due, one text warns. You have U.S. Postal Service fees to pay, another threatens. You owe the New York City Department of Finance for unpaid traffic violations. The texts are ploys to get unsuspecting victims to fork over their credit-card details. The gangs behind the scams take advantage of this information to buy iPhones, gift cards, clothing and cosmetics. Criminal organizations operating out of China, which investigators blame for the toll and postage messages, have used them to make more than $1 billion over the last three years, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Behind the con, investigators say, is a black market connecting foreign criminal networks to server farms that blast scam texts to victims. The scammers use phishing websites to collect credit-card information. They then find gig workers in the U.S. who will max out the stolen cards for a small fee. Making the fraud possible: an ingenious trick allowing criminals to install stolen card numbers in Google and Apple Wallets in Asia, then share the cards with the people in the U.S. making purchases half a world away.

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Speaking of the new MacBook Pro, which Apple launched on Wednesday, Bloomberg News reports that the company is preparing to launch a touch-screen version of its Mac computer, reversing course on a stance that dates back to co-founder Steve Jobs. From the report: The company is readying a revamped MacBook Pro with a touch display for late 2026 or early 2027 [non-paywalled link], according to people with knowledge of the matter. The new machines, code-named K114 and K116, will also have thinner and lighter frames and run the M6 line of chips. In making the move, Apple is following the rest of the computing industry, which embraced touch-screen laptops more than a decade ago. The company has taken years to formulate its approach to the market, aiming to improve on current designs. Bloomberg News first reported in January 2023 that Apple was working on a touch-screen MacBook Pro. The new laptops will feature displays with OLED technology, the same standard used in iPhones and iPad Pros, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the products haven't been announced. It will mark the first time that this higher-end, thinner system is used in a Mac.

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The TED conference is changing hands, and education pioneer Sal Khan will be the new "vision steward" for the institution long headed by Chris Anderson. From a report: The move aims to ensure the future of the organization, while keeping it a not-for-profit entity. Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, will be the public face of TED, with Logan McClure Davda taking over as CEO. Davda, who previously served as the organization's head of impact and was the co-founder of its fellows program, will run day-to-day operations. Khan remains CEO of Khan Academy while joining TED's board. Jay Herratti, who has served as CEO since 2021, will remain on TED's board. TED announced in February it was seeking new leadership and structure and put out an open call for proposals. The company held dozens of discussions, including some that would have transformed the organization into a for-profit venture. The organization's flagship conference is also headed for a big change, with 2026 being its last year in Vancouver, with plans to hold future events somewhere in California.

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Oil, gas and coal will continue to dominate the world's energy mix well beyond 2050, as soaring electricity demand outpaces the shift to renewables, according to a new McKinsey report. From a report: McKinsey expects fossil fuels to account for about 41-55% of global energy consumption in 2050, down from today's 64% but higher than previous projections. U.S. data-center-related power demand is expected to grow nearly 25% a year until 2030, while demand from data centers globally would average 17% growth per year between 2022 and 2030, especially in OECD countries. Alternative fuels are not likely to achieve broad adoption before 2040 unless mandated, but renewables do have the potential to provide 61-67% of the 2050 global power mix, McKinsey said.

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Hanneke Faber, CEO of global tech manufacturing company Logitech, says she'd be open to the idea of having an AI-powered board member. From a report: "We already use [AI agents] in almost every meeting," Faber said at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington, D.C., on Monday. While she said AI agents today (like Microsoft Copilot and internal bots) mostly take care of summarization and idea generation, that's likely to change owing to the pace at which the technology is developing. "As they evolve -- and some of the best agents or assistants that we've built actually do things themselves -- that comes with a whole bunch of governance things," Faber said. "You have to keep in mind and make sure you really want that bot to take action. But if you don't have an AI agent in every meeting, you're missing out on some of the productivity." "That bot, in real time, has access to everything," she continued.

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The IMF has issued a stark warning over soaring global government debt, saying it is on track to exceed 100% of GDP by 2029. Semafor: Such a ratio would be the highest since 1948, when large economies were rebuilding post-war. Today, "there is little political appetite for belt-tightening," The Economist wrote: Rich nations are reluctant to raise taxes on their beleaguered electorates -- but they're facing pressure to spend more on defense, and on social services for aging populations. Higher long-term bond yields, meanwhile, suggest investor wariness over governments' balance sheets. In the short term, the debt concerns manifest in political disruption: France's budget fight recently toppled another government, while the US federal shutdown highlights the tension between new spending demands and deficit reduction.

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Salesforce says it's saving about $100 million a year by using AI tools in the software company's customer service operations. From a report: The company is working to sell AI features that can handle work such as customer service or early-stage sales. To illustrate the value of the Agentforce product to business clients, Salesforce has been vocal about its own use of the technology. Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff announced the statistic on Salesforce's savings during a speech Tuesday at the annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The company said more than 12,000 customers are using Agentforce. For example, Reddit was able to cut customer support resolution time by 84%, Salesforce said.

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DirecTV wants to use AI to put you, your family, and your pets inside a custom TV screensaver. From a report: If that's not uncanny enough, you'll find items you can shop for within that AI environment, whether it's a piece of clothing similar to the one your AI likeness is wearing or a piece of furniture that pops up alongside it. The satellite TV giant is partnering with the AI company Glance to roll out this experience to DirecTV Gemini devices starting next year. "We are making television a lean-in experience versus lean back," Rajat Wanchoo, the group vice president of commercial partnerships at Glance, tells The Verge. "We want to give users a chance to use the advancements that have happened in generative AI to create a ChatGPT moment for themselves, but on TV." Glance is owned by InMobi, the same company that injected ecommerce bloatware into Motorola's budget phones.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: An attorney in a New York Supreme Court commercial case got caught using AI in his filings, and then got caught using AI again in the brief where he had to explain why he used AI, according to court documents filed earlier this month. New York Supreme Court Judge Joel Cohen wrote in a decision granting the plaintiff's attorneys' request for sanctions that the defendant's counsel, Michael Fourte's law offices, not only submitted AI-hallucinated citations and quotations in the summary judgment brief that led to the filing of the plaintiff's motion for sanctions, but also included "multiple new AI-hallucinated citations and quotations" in the process of opposing the motion. "In other words," the judge wrote, "counsel relied upon unvetted AI -- in his telling, via inadequately supervised colleagues -- to defend his use of unvetted AI." The case itself centers on a dispute between family members and a defaulted loan. The details of the case involve a fairly run-of-the-mill domestic money beef, but Fourte's office allegedly using AI that generated fake citations, and then inserting nonexistent citations into the opposition brief, has become the bigger story.

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Indonesia's film industry has started using generative AI tools to produce films at a fraction of Hollywood budgets. The country's filmmakers are deploying ChatGPT for scriptwriting, Midjourney for image generation, and Runway for video storyboarding. VFX artist Amilio Garcia Leonard told Rest of World that AI has reduced his draft editing time by 70%. The Indonesian Film Producer Association supports the technology. Indonesian films typically cost 10 billion rupiah ($602,500), less than 1% of major Hollywood productions. The sector employed about 40,000 people in 2020 and generated over $400 million in box office sales in 2023. Jobs for storyboarders, VFX artists, and voice actors are disappearing.

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The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization projects record production of global cereal crops in the 2025-26 farming season. The forecast covers wheat, corn and rice, and comes as the global stocks-to-use ratio stands around 30.6% -- the world is producing nearly a third more of these foundational crops than it currently uses. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in August that American farmers would harvest a record corn crop at record yield per acre. The FAO Food Price Index has risen slightly this year but remains nearly 20% below its peak during the early months of the war in Ukraine. Average calories available per person worldwide have climbed from roughly 2,100 to 2,200 kilocalories daily in the early nineteen-sixties to just under 3,000 kilocalories daily by 2022. Cereal yields have roughly tripled since 1961. Yet the World Bank estimates around 2.6 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, and current famines in Gaza and Sudan stem from political failures rather than crop failures.

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Generative AI models trained on internet data lack exposure to vast domains of human knowledge that remain undigitized or underrepresented online. English dominates Common Crawl with 44% of content. Hindi accounts for 0.2% of the data despite being spoken by 7.5% of the global population. Tamil represents 0.04% despite 86 million speakers worldwide. Approximately 97% of the world's languages are classified as "low-resource" in computing. A 2020 study found 88% of languages face such severe neglect in AI technologies that bringing them up to speed would require herculean efforts. Research on medicinal plants in North America, northwest Amazonia and New Guinea found more than 75% of 12,495 distinct uses of plant species were unique to just one local language. Large language models amplify dominant patterns through what researchers call "mode amplification." The phenomenon narrows the scope of accessible knowledge as AI-generated content increasingly fills the internet and becomes training data for subsequent models.

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California has enacted new legislation that aims to limit companies from charging consumers "exorbitant" fees to cancel fixed-term contracts. From a report: Assembly Bill 483 was signed into law by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday, placing transparency requirements and fee limits on early terminations for installment contracts -- plans that allow consumers to make recurring payments for goods and services over a specified duration. This includes services that lure consumers into signing annual contracts by allowing them to pay in installments that appear similar to rolling monthly subscriptions, but with hefty cancellation fees for not locking in for the full year. The bill bans companies from hiding early termination fee disclosures within fine print or obscured hyperlinks, and limits the total fee amount to a maximum of 30 percent of the total contract cost. The goal is to make it easier for Californians to take these fees into account when comparing between services, and lessen the financial burden if they need to end their contract early.

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smooth wombat writes: At one point in technology history, floppy disks reigned supreme. Files, pictures, games, everything was put on a floppy disk. But technology doesn't stand still and as time went on disks were replaced by CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, and now cloud storage. Despite these changes, floppy disks are still found in long forgotten corners of businesses or stuffed in boxs in the attic. What is on these disks is anyone's guess, but Cambridge University Library is racing against time to preserve the data. However, lack of hardware and software to read the disks, if they're readable at all, poses unique challenges. Some of the world's most treasured documents can be found deep in the archives of Cambridge University Library. There are letters from Sir Isaac Newton, notebooks belonging to Charles Darwin, rare Islamic texts and the Nash Papyrus -- fragments of a sheet from 200BC containing the Ten Commandments written in Hebrew. These rare, and often unique, manuscripts are safely stored in climate-controlled environments while staff tenderly care for them to prevent the delicate pages from crumbling and ink from flaking away. But when the library received 113 boxes of papers and mementoes from the office of physicist Stephen Hawking, it found itself with an unusual challenge. Tucked alongside the letters, photographs and thousands of pages relating to Hawking's work on theoretical physics, were items now not commonly seen in modern offices -- floppy disks. They were the result of Hawking's early adoption of the personal computer, which he was able to use despite having a form of motor neurone disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, thanks to modifications and software. Locked inside these disks could be all kinds of forgotten information or previously unknown insights into the scientists' life. The archivists' minds boggled. These disks are now part of a project at Cambridge University Library to rescue hidden knowledge trapped on floppy disks. The Future Nostalgia project reflects a larger trend in the information flooding into archives and libraries around the world.

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