Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the fighting-back department: Apple has filed an appeal with the European Union's General Court in Luxembourg challenging the bloc's order requiring greater iOS interoperability with rival companies' products under the Digital Markets Act. The EU executive in March directed Apple to make its mobile operating system more compatible with competitors' apps, headphones, and virtual reality headsets by granting developers and device makers access to system components typically reserved for Apple's own products.

Apple contends the requirements threaten its seamless user experience while creating security risks, noting that companies have already requested access to sensitive user data including notification content and complete WiFi network histories. The company faces potential fines of up to 10% of its worldwide annual revenue if found in violation of the DMA's interoperability rules designed to curb Big Tech market power.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the oops department: An anonymous reader shares a report: Business Insider announced this week that it wants staff to better incorporate AI into its journalism. But less than a year ago, the company had to quietly apologize to some staff for accidentally recommending that they read books that did not appear to exist but instead may have been generated by AI.

In an email to staff last May, a senior editor at Business Insider sent around a list of what she called "Beacon Books," a list of memoirs and other acclaimed business nonfiction books, with the idea of ensuring staff understood some of the fundamental figures and writing powering good business journalism.

Many of the recommendations were well-known recent business, media, and tech nonfiction titles such as Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, DisneyWar by James Stewart, and Super Pumped by Mike Isaac. But a few were unfamiliar to staff. Simply Target: A CEO's Lessons in a Turbulent Time and Transforming an Iconic Brand by former Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel was nowhere to be found. Neither was Jensen Huang: the Founder of Nvidia, which was supposedly published by the company Charles River Editors in 2019.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the self-inflicted-wounds department: A new analysis argues that Stack Overflow's decline began years before AI tools delivered the "final blow" to the once-dominant programming forum. The site's monthly questions dropped from a peak of 200,000 to a steep collapse that began in earnest after ChatGPT's 2023 launch, but usage had been declining since 2014, according to data cited in the InfoWorld analysis.

The platform's remarkable reputation system initially elevated it above competitors by allowing users to earn points and badges for helpful contributions, but that same system eventually became its downfall, the piece argues. As Stack Overflow evolved into a self-governing platform where high-reputation users gained moderation powers, the community transformed from a welcoming space for developer interaction into what the author compares to a "Stanford Prison Experiment" where moderators systematically culled interactions they deemed irrelevant.
Posted by Black Convoy from TFW2005


THe official Yolopark Instagram and Facebook have shared our first images of a new update of their upcoming AMK PRO Bumblebee Movie Soundwave giving us our first look at his partner Ravage. While the AMK PRO Bumblebee Movie Soudnwave was revealed in previous events, now at the Hainan International Digital Entertainment Expo 2025, they had Ravage prototype on display, confirming that he will be included with Soundwave. It’s just a hard resin prototype, so we have no concrete information if this Ravage could fit inside Soundwave’s chest. Stay tuned with this space for more updates! See the mirrored images » Continue Reading.

The post Yolopark AMK PRO Bumblebee Movie Soundwave Prototype Update: Ravage Prototype Image appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the stranger-things department: A new business model has emerged across China's major cities, El Pais reports, where companies charge unemployed individuals to rent desk space and pretend to work, responding to social pressure around joblessness amid rising youth unemployment rates. These services charge between 30 and 50 yuan ($4-7) daily for desks, Wi-Fi, coffee, and lunch in spaces designed to mimic traditional work environments.

Some operations assign fictitious tasks and organize supervisory rounds to enhance the illusion, while premium services allow clients to roleplay as managers or stage workplace conflicts for additional fees. The trend has gained significant traction on Xiaohongshu, China's equivalent to Instagram, where advertisements for "pretend-to-work companies" accumulate millions of views. Youth unemployment reached 16.5% among 16-to-24-year-olds in March 2025, according to National Bureau of Statistics data, while overall urban unemployment stood at 5.3% in the first quarter.
Posted by Joe Moore from The Toyark


The second wave of Biker Mice From Mars action figures are now available to pre-order directly from Nacelle Toys. These 6″ scale action figures are based on the classic Biker Mice From Mars toys of the 90’s. The second wave ...

The post Biker Mice From Mars Wave 2 by Nacelle appeared first on The Toyark - News.
Posted by Black Convoy from TFW2005


Japanese Publisher Hero-X have finally revealed the cover of their new Transformers Generations Book 2025. Hero X have tweeted our first look at the amazing cover art of this book including a clean version.The art, by artist Akira Amemiya, features a mix of G1 and G1 Japan characters with Devastator, Liokaiser, Star Convoy, and Predaking with MPG-17 Optimus Prime Style Generation and the new Wild King Energy Master Optimus Prime in the center. The Transformers Generations book 2025 will have 96 pages, but there’s still no exact information about the content this time, but judging for the cover the new MPG-17 Optimus Prime Style Generation and Wild King » Continue Reading.

The post Transformers Generations Book 2025 Cover Art Revealed appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.
Posted by Joe Moore from The Toyark


Four upcoming Target Exclusive Superman figures from McFarlane Toys have been listed online at Target.com. These DC Multiverse Gold Label Series and Collector Edition Action Figures are currently not available to purchase. However, you can set up notifications for when ...

The post DC Multiverse Listings for Target Exclusive Superman Figures appeared first on The Toyark - News.
NECA Previews Wednesday Figures 2025-06-02 05:25:03
Posted by Joe Moore from The Toyark


This Wednesday, NECA will open pre-orders for their new line of figures based on the Netflix Wednesday Series. Inspired by the classic Addams Family comic strips, the series follows Wednesday Addams as a student at Nevermore Academy. The new 8″ ...

The post NECA Previews Wednesday Figures appeared first on The Toyark - News.
Posted by Joe Moore from The Toyark


Later this week, the next Street Fighter figure from Jada Toys will be available to pre-order. Up next is a Vega 6″ Scale Figure from Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers. The figure includes masked and unmasked portraits, a ...

The post Ultra Street Fighter II – Jada Toys Vega Figure appeared first on The Toyark - News.
Posted by Joe Moore from The Toyark


Pre-orders are live for the new No Time To Die – James Bond 1/6 Scale Figure from Hot Toys. Based on Daniel Craig’s final James Bond movie, the new figure stands at approximately 12″ tall, with about 30 points of ...

The post No Time To Die – Hot Toys James Bond Figure appeared first on The Toyark - News.
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the rise-of-the-machines department: "If the adoption of AI feels different from any tech revolution you may have experienced before — mobile, social, cloud computing — it actually is," writes TechCrunch. They cite a new 340-page report from venture capitalist Mary Meeker that details how AI adoption has outpaced any other tech in human history — and uses the word "unprecedented" on 51 pages:

ChatGPT reaching 800 million users in 17 months: unprecedented. The number of companies and the rate at which so many others are hitting high annual recurring revenue rates: also unprecedented. The speed at which costs of usage are dropping: unprecedented. While the costs of training a model (also unprecedented) is up to $1 billion, inference costs — for example, those paying to use the tech — has already dropped 99% over two years, when calculating cost per 1 million tokens, she writes, citing research from Stanford. The pace at which competitors are matching each other's features, at a fraction of the cost, including open source options, particularly Chinese models: unprecedented...

Meanwhile, chips from Google, like its TPU (tensor processing unit), and Amazon's Trainium, are being developed at scale for their clouds — that's moving quickly, too. "These aren't side projects — they're foundational bets," she writes.
"The one area where AI hasn't outpaced every other tech revolution is in financial returns..." the article points out.

"[T]he jury is still out over which of the current crop of companies will become long-term, profitable, next-generation tech giants."
Posted by Black Convoy from TFW2005


Car insurance company The General Insurance has surprised us with a new commercial featuring ROTB Bumblebee and Shaquille O’Neal. The video, shared via The General YouTube account, shows American former professional basketball player “Shaq” O’Neal interacting in a fun scene with Rise Of The Beasts Bumblebee. We won’t spoil the fun, so watch the video after the break and then share your impressions on the 2005 Boards!

The post ‘The General Insurance’ Commercial Featuring ROTB Bumblebee & Shaquille O’Neal appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.
Posted by from MMO Champion
The War Within Extended Maintenance - June 3, 2025

Blizzard has announced an extended maintenance for the Dastardly Duos World Event launch day in North America, lasting approximately 3 hours from 7:00 AM PT until 10:00 AM PT. European realms will have the usual 1-hour maintenance on Wednesday, from 3:00 AM CET until 4:00 AM CET.

Weekly Maintenance Schedule
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the very-dark-energy department: Adam Riess won a Nobel Prize in Physics for helping discover that the universe's acceleration is expanding, remembers The Atlantic. But then theorists "proposed the existence of dark energy: a faint, repulsive force that pervades all of empty space... the final piece to what has since come to be called the 'standard model of cosmology.'"
Riess thinks instead we should just replace the standard model:

When I visited Riess, back in January, he mentioned he was looking forward to a data release from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, a new observatory on Kitt Peak, in Arizona's portion of the Sonoran Desert. DESI has 5,000 robotically controlled optic fibers. Every 20 minutes, each of them locks onto a different galaxy in the deep sky. This process is scheduled to continue for a total of five years, until millions of galaxies have been observed, enough to map cosmic expansion across time... DESI's first release, last year, gave some preliminary hints that dark energy was stronger in the early universe, and that its power then began to fade ever so slightly. On March 19, the team followed up with the larger set of data that Riess was awaiting. It was based on three years of observations, and the signal that it gave was stronger: Dark energy appeared to lose its kick several billion years ago.

< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the getting-to-the-core department: An anonymous reader shared this report from The Hacker News:

Two information disclosure flaws have been identified in apport and systemd-coredump, the core dump handlers in Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora, according to the Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU).

Tracked as CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598, both vulnerabilities are race condition bugs that could enable a local attacker to obtain access to access sensitive information. Tools like Apport and systemd-coredump are designed to handle crash reporting and core dumps in Linux systems. "These race conditions allow a local attacker to exploit a SUID program and gain read access to the resulting core dump," Saeed Abbasi, manager of product at Qualys TRU, said...
Red Hat said CVE-2025-4598 has been rated Moderate in severity owing to the high complexity in pulling an exploit for the vulnerability, noting that the attacker has to first win the race condition and be in possession of an unprivileged local account... Qualys has also developed proof-of-concept code for both vulnerabilities, demonstrating how a local attacker can exploit the coredump of a crashed unix_chkpwd process, which is used to verify the validity of a user's password, to obtain password hashes from the /etc/shadow file.
Advisories were also issued by Gentoo, Amazon Linux, and Debian, the article points out. (Though "It's worth noting that Debian systems aren't susceptible to CVE-2025-4598 by default, since they don't include any core dump handler unless the systemd-coredump package is manually installed.")

< This article continues on their website >
Posted by Black Convoy from TFW2005


Via Takara Tomy T-Spark YouTube channel we can share for your a new promotional video of the new Takara Tomy Zoids x Diaclone x Transformers: Shield D Prime. This is a triple crossover figure. A Shield Liger Zoid which can be piloted by Diaclone corps, and it can transform into an Optimus Prime-like robot. We have images of  two samples, one in robot mode, another one in Zoid mode and a close up of the Diaclone corps figures. Following the reveal of the first color prototype at the Shizuoka Hobby Show 2025 event, now we have a CGI promotional » Continue Reading.

The post Takara Tomy Zoids x Diaclone x Transformers: Shield D Prime Promotional Video appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the Who's-on-first department: "The Doctor is dead. Long live the Doctor!" writes Space.com. (Spoilers ahead...)

"The era of Ncuti Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor came to a surprise end on Saturday night, as the Time Lord regenerated at the end of "Doctor Who" season 2 finale... [T]he Doctor gradually realises that not everything is back to normal. Poppy, his daughter with Belinda Chandra in the "Wish World" fantasy, has been erased from history, so the Time Lord decides to sacrifice himself by firing a ton of regeneration energy into the time Vortex to "jolt it one degree" — and hopefully bring her back. It goes without saying that his madcap scheme saves Poppy, as we learn that, in this rewritten timeline, the little girl was always the reason Belinda had been desperate to get back home. But arguably the biggest talking point of the episode — and, indeed, the season — is saved until last, as the Doctor regenerates into a very familiar face...

Hint: They played the Doctor's companion, Rose Tyler, "alongside Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor and David Tennant's Tenth Doctor during the phenomenally successful first two seasons of the show's 2005 reboot."
Showrunner Russell T Davies called it "an honour and a hoot" to welcome back Billie Piper to the TARDIS, "but quite how and why and who is a story yet to be told. After 62 years, the Doctor's adventures are only just beginning!"
Although the show's post-regeneration credits have traditionally featured the line "And introducing [insert name] as the Doctor", here it simply says "And introducing Billie Piper". The omission of "as the Doctor" is unlikely to be accidental, suggesting that Davies is playing a very elaborate game with "Who" fandom...

Another mystery! The BBC and Disney+ are yet to confirm if and when "Doctor Who" will return for a third season of its current iteration.

< This article continues on their website >
Posted by Black Convoy from TFW2005


Via Instagram user @delicious_peter, 2005 Boards member Dinobot Snarl, and we have our first in-hand images of the new Transformers Age Of The Primes Wreck N’ Doom Collection Carnivac & Fisitron 2-pack. This Amazon exclusive pack consists of a nice retool and redeco of the Legacy Evolution Detritus/Hound mold as Fisitron, and a redeco of Titans Return Wolfwire with new weapons as Carnivac. We have images of both figures in robot and alt/beast mode for your viewing pleasure. See the images after the break and then sound off on the 2005 Boards!

The post Transformers Age Of The Primes Wreck N’ Doom Collection Carnivac & Fisitron 2-pack In-Hand Images appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the spacing-out department: An anonymous reader shared this report from Space.com:

Three world travelers, two Space Camp alums and an aerospace executive whose last name aptly matched their shared adventure traveled into space and back Saturday, becoming the latest six people to fly with Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos.

Mark Rocket joined Jaime Alemán, Jesse Williams, Paul Jeris, Gretchen Green and Amy Medina Jorge on board the RSS First Step — Blue Origin's first of two human-rated New Shepard capsules — for a trip above the Kármán Line, the 62-mile-high (100-kilometer) internationally recognized boundary between Earth and space...

Mark Rocket became the first New Zealander to reach space on the mission. His connection to aerospace goes beyond his apt name and today's flight; he's currently the CEO of Kea Aerospace and previously helped lead Rocket Lab, a competing space launch company to Blue Origin that sends most of its rockets up from New Zealand. Alemán, Williams and Jeris each traveled the world extensively before briefly leaving the planet today. An attorney from Panama, Alemán is now the first person to have visited all 193 countries recognized by the United Nations, traveled to the North and South Poles, and now, have been into space. For Williams, an entrepreneur from Canada, Saturday's flight continued his record of achieving high altitudes; he has summitted Mt. Everest and five of the other six other highest mountains across the globe.
"For about three minutes, the six NS-32 crewmates experienced weightlessness," the article points out, "and had an astronaut's-eye view of the planet..."
On social media Blue Origin notes it's their 12th human spaceflight, "and the 32nd flight of the New Shepard program."
© Z-R0E