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From the pulling-the-China-card department: Google has argued in court that the U.S. Department of Justice's proposal to break up its Chrome and Android businesses would weaken national security and harm the country's position in the global AI race, particularly against China. CNBC reports: The remedies trial in Washington, D.C., follows a judge's ruling in August that Google has held a monopoly in its core market of internet search, the most-significant antitrust ruling in the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago. The Justice Department has called for Google to divest its Chrome browser unit and open its search data to rivals.
Google said in a blog post on Monday that such a move is not in the best interest of the country as the global battle for supremacy in artificial intelligence rapidly intensifies. In the first paragraph of the post, Google named China's DeepSeek as an emerging AI competitor. The DOJ's proposal would "hamstring how we develop AI, and have a government-appointed committee regulate the design and development of our products," Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, wrote in the post. "That would hold back American innovation at a critical juncture. We're in a fiercely competitive global race with China for the next generation of technology leadership, and Google is at the forefront of American companies making scientific and technological breakthroughs."
Posted by from MMO Champion
Season of Discovery - Scarlet Enclave Raid Hotfix Notes
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Hi All,
We’ve seen a bit of confusion about the Scarlet Enclave adjustments posted in today’s hotfix notes
here and wanted to post an additional note ahead of tomorrow’s North American resets to clarify that these are not the only adjustments we have planned this week. The adjustments detailed in the post earlier this evening are already live as of today, but the remainder of the adjustments we have planned needed a bit more time for testing but are ready and waiting for deploy with regional downtimes starting tomorrow.
Here’s an overview of the adjustments coming with regional maintenance tomorrow:
Solistrasza, Beastmaster, and Mason and their adds have had their HP reduced by ~15%
Reborn Council, Lillian Voss, and Caldoran and their adds have had their HP reduced by ~10%
Reborn Council enrage increased from 5 minutes 30 seconds to 7 minutes
Lillian Voss enrage timer increased from 3 minutes to 4 minutes
Beatrix Trash HP lowered by 20%
We apologize for the confusion on this. We had intended to combine our communications around these two rounds of hotfixes tomorrow for clarity, but there was a miscommunication that prevented that on our end. We will continue to monitor performance in this next week’s reset and make additional adjustments as needed.
Thank you!
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From the happy-birthday department: NASA's oldest active astronaut, Don Pettit, celebrated his 70th birthday by returning to Earth after a seven-month mission aboard the ISS. The Guardian reports: A Soyuz capsule carrying the American and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan on Sunday, Pettit's birthday. "Today at 0420 Moscow time (0120 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan," Russia's space agency Roscosmos said.
Spending 220 days in space, Pettit, Ovchinin and Vagner orbited the Earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3m miles over the course of their mission. It was the fourth spaceflight for Pettit, who has logged more than 18 months in orbit during his 29-year career. Nasa said in a statement that Pettit was "doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth." A recording of the touchdown can be viewed here.
Earlier this year, Pettit managed to take one of the best photos ever captured from space. "When I first saw it, I was dazzled by its beauty," wrote Ars Technica's Eric Berger. "But when I looked further into the image, there were just so many amazing details to be found."
"In this image, one can see the core of the Milky Way galaxy, zodiacal light (sunlight diffused by interplanetary dust), streaks of SpaceX Starlink satellites, individual stars, an edge-on view of the atmosphere that appears in burnt umber due to hydroxide emissions, a near-sunrise just over the horizon, and nighttime cities appearing as streaks."
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From the reef-to-relief department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Arete Glacier Initiative has raised $5 million to improve forecasts of sea-level rise and explore the possibility of refreezing glaciers in place.
Off one atoll, just south of the Maldives' capital, Male, researchers are testing one way to capture sand in strategic locations -- to grow islands, rebuild beaches, and protect coastal communities from sea-level rise. Swim 10 minutes out into the En'boodhoofinolhu Lagoon and you'll find the Ramp Ring, an unusual structure made up of six tough-skinned geotextile bladders. These submerged bags, part of a recent effort called the Growing Islands project, form a pair of parentheses separated by 90meters (around 300 feet). The bags, each about two meters tall, were deployed in December 2024, and by February, underwater images showed that sand had climbed about a meter and a half up the surface of each one, demonstrating how passive structures can quickly replenish beaches and, in time, build a solid foundation for new land. "There's just a ton of sand in there. It's really looking good," says Skylar Tibbits, an architect and founder of the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, which is developing the project in partnership with the Male-based climate tech company Invena.
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From the stop-the-slop department: Researchers have uncovered a new supply chain attack called Slopsquatting, where threat actors exploit hallucinated, non-existent package names generated by AI coding tools like GPT-4 and CodeLlama. These believable yet fake packages, representing almost 20% of the samples tested, can be registered by attackers to distribute malicious code. CSO Online reports: Slopsquatting, as researchers are calling it, is a term first coined by Seth Larson, a security developer-in-residence at Python Software Foundation (PSF), for its resemblance to the typosquatting technique. Instead of relying on a user's mistake, as in typosquats, threat actors rely on an AI model's mistake. A significant number of packages, amounting to 19.7% (205,000 packages), recommended in test samples were found to be fakes. Open-source models -- like DeepSeek and WizardCoder -- hallucinated more frequently, at 21.7% on average, compared to the commercial ones (5.2%) like GPT 4. Researchers found CodeLlama ( hallucinating over a third of the outputs) to be the worst offender, and GPT-4 Turbo ( just 3.59% hallucinations) to be the best performer.
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Posted by from MMO Champion
WoW Hotfixes - April 21, 2025
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Achievements
The title granted by Hall of Fame: Chrome King Gallywix has been corrected to Famed Slayer of The Chrome King for all characters.
The achievement Hall of Fame: Chrome King Gallywix now requires One-Armed Bandit, Mug'Zee, and Chrome King Gallywix to be defeated on Mythic difficulty.
Dungeons
Darkflame Cleft
Candle King’s Throw Darkflame’s health absorb reduced by 20%.
Cinderbrew Meadery
Hobgoblins no longer spawn Brewdrop on death.
Yes Man health reduced by 10%.
Operation: Mechagon - Workshop
Rim visual added to Plasma Orb in King Mechagon’s encounter.
Line visual added to Mega-Zap from Aerial Unit R-21/X in King Mechagon’s encounter.
U.-J.0. health reduced by 10%.
Addressed an issue where K.U.-J.0. can be hit during Venting Flame in certain angle.
Priory of the Sacred Flame
Ardent Paladin health reduced by 6%.
Feverant Sharpshoote’s Pot Shot cooldown increased by 100%.
War Lynx’s health reduced by 20 and Pounce’s impact damage reduced by 20%.
Prioress Murrpray’s health reduced by 12.5%.
Season of Discovery
[With realm restarts] The Portable Cannon item will now deal its damage to targets even if they are Immune to the stun portion of the effect.
The Vanquished Tentacle of C'thun and the Eye of Mar'li have been added to the list of items that cannot be used while in a neutral area like Cenarion Hold or Light's Hope Chapel.
The Scarlet Base Camp is now considered a neutral area where certain effects and spells, like Homunculi, cannot be used.
Classes
Hunter
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Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the game-changer department: CATL has unveiled a second-generation Shenxing battery capable of delivering a 520km range in just five minutes of charging, surpassing BYD's recent breakthrough and positioning both Chinese firms ahead of Western rivals in EV battery tech. The battery manufacturer also introduced a sodium-ion battery called Naxtra, offering up to 500km range for EVs and potential to diversify global energy resources. The Financial Times reports: The claims by the Chinese battery groups would put them ahead of major western rivals. At present, Tesla vehicles can be charged up to 200 miles (321km) in added range in 15 minutes, while Germany's Mercedes-Benz recently launched its all-electric CLA compact sedan, which can be charged for up to 325km within 10 minutes using a fast-charging station. [...] The second generation of the Shenxing battery, which boasts a range of 800km on one charge, can achieve a peak charging speed of 2.5km per second, the company said at a media event ahead of this week's Shanghai auto show.
"We look forward to collaborating with more industry leaders to push the limits of supercharging through true innovation," said CATL's chief technology officer Gao Huan, adding that he wanted the new batteries to become "the standard for electric vehicles." Analysts at Bernstein said the latest progress meant that charging speeds had more than doubled in the past year and "increased tenfold over the past 3-4 years." Huan said the new Shenxing battery would be installed in more than 67 EV models this year. He later told reporters that energy density would not be sacrificed as a trade-off for fast charging.
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From the tit-for-tat department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: While most people enjoy PCs that are powered by SSDs, mechanical hard drives are still king in the datacenter. When these drives reach the end of their useful lives, they are usually shredded, and the key materials they're made of -- including several rare earth elements (REE) -- end up as e-waste. At the same time, countries are mining these same materials and emitting a lot of greenhouse gases in the process. And China, a major source of REE, recently announced export restrictions on seven of them, potentially limiting the U.S. tech industry's access to materials such as dysprosium, which is necessary for magnetic storage, motors, and generators.
[On Thursday], Western Digital announced that it has created a large-scale hard disk drive recycling program in concert with Microsoft and recycling-industry partners CMR (Critical Materials Recycling) and PedalPoint Recycling. The new process reclaims Rare Earth Oxides (REO) containing dysprosium, neodymium, and praseodymium from hard drives, along with aluminum, steel, gold, palladium, and copper. The REO reclamation takes place completely within the U.S. and those materials go back into the U.S. market.
Dubbed the Advanced Recycling and Rare Earth Material Capture Program, WD's initiative has already saved 47,000 pounds worth of hard drives, SSDs, and caddies from landfills or less-effective recycling programs. WD was able to achieve a more than 90% reclaim rate for REE and an 80% rate for all of the shredded material. The drives came from Microsoft's U.S. data centers where they were first shredded and then sent to PedalPoint for sorting and processing. Magnets and steel were then sent to CMR, which uses its acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) technology to extract the rare earth elements.
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From the that's-embarrassing department: Cursor AI users recently encountered an ironic AI failure when the platform's support bot falsely claimed a non-existent login restriction policy. Co-founder Michael Truell apologized for the issue, clarified that no such policy exists, and attributed the mishap to AI hallucination and a session management bug. The Register reports: Users of the Cursor editor, designed to generate and fix source code in response to user prompts, have sometimes been booted from the software when trying to use the app in multiple sessions on different machines. Some folks who inquired about the inability to maintain multiple logins for the subscription service across different machines received a reply from the company's support email indicating this was expected behavior. But the person on the other end of that email wasn't a person at all, but an AI support bot. And it evidently made that policy up.
In an effort to placate annoyed users this week, Michael Truell co-founder of Cursor creator Anysphere, published a note to Reddit to apologize for the snafu. "Hey! We have no such policy," he wrote. "You're of course free to use Cursor on multiple machines. Unfortunately, this is an incorrect response from a front-line AI support bot. We did roll out a change to improve the security of sessions, and we're investigating to see if it caused any problems with session invalidation." Truell added that Cursor provides an interface for viewing active sessions in its settings and apologized for the confusion.
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Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the mature-moves department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Whisky, a gaming-focused front-end for Wine's Windows compatibility tools on macOS, is no longer receiving updates. As one of the most useful and well-regarded tools in a Mac gamer's toolkit, it could be seen as a great loss, but its developer hopes you'll move on with what he considers a better option: supporting CodeWeavers' CrossOver product.
Also, Whisky's creator is an 18-year-old college student, and he could use a break. "I am 18, yes, and attending Northeastern University, so it's always a balancing act between my school work and dev work," Isaac Marovitz wrote to Ars. The Whisky project has "been more or less in this state for a few months, I posted the notice mostly to clarify and formally announce it," Marovitz said, having received "a lot of questions" about the project status. [...] "Whisky, in my opinion, has not been a positive on the Wine community as a whole," Marovitz wrote on the Whisky site.
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A new report has exposed a “true crime” community of Roblox players who reenact real-life murders. A part of this group is reportedly dedicated to digitally recreating and playing through famous school shootings within the extremely popular free-to-play game.
We all saw it coming. Once John Cena shocked the wrestling world by announcing his retirement after 2025 at Money in the Bank last July, him winning his record-breaking 17th World Championship was preordained. Wrestling fans around the world were on board with the WWE engineering a championship run for a man who…
All hell broke loose in the Pokémon community last October when leaked internal documents, game builds, and more from developer Game Freak appeared online. Fans got a front row seat to everything from upcoming project codenames to a rapidly meme-ified Typhlosion backstory. It may have been the biggest leak in Pokémon…
If you’ve been wanting to build your physical movie collection or just want to watch some new movies for cheap, then I have some good news. Amazon’s fantastic 3 for $33 4K UHD Blu-ray sale is back. It’s the perfect time to add some sharp looking classics and new hits to your movie collection.
