AI-powered apps have flooded Apple's App Store, with AI-branded tools dominating top rankings across multiple categories, particularly in graphics and design. An investigation by The Verge reveals significant quality concerns among these applications.

Turkey-based developer HUBX controls three of the top 10 graphics apps, including DaVinci AI, which offers limited free features while charging up to $30 annually for full access. The app produces low-quality images and forces watermarks on paid users' downloads, The Verge writes. According to Sensor Tower data, four of the top 10 most downloaded iOS graphics apps in the U.S. this year include "AI" in their titles.

While established photo editing apps like Photoshop Express saw downloads drop 21%, AI-focused app Photoroom's downloads surged 160% year-over-year. Professional creative apps continue to dominate iPad and paid iPhone categories, suggesting the AI app trend primarily targets casual users seeking free alternatives to paid creative services.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The news came by Slack message. Cruise CEO Marc Whitten, who took the top post in June, posted a message Tuesday afternoon in the company's announcements channel along with a link to a press release entitled "GM to refocus autonomous driving development on personal vehicles."

GM, which acquired the self-driving car startup in 2016, would no longer fund the company, ending a mission that hundreds of Cruise engineers had worked on for years. Minutes later, during an all-hands meeting, Cruise employees learned a few more details. The self-driving car company would be absorbed into parent company GM and combined with the automaker's own efforts to develop driver assistance features -- and eventually fully autonomous personal vehicles. Whether their jobs would be safe or cut was, and still is, unclear.

That meeting was short and unsatisfactory, according to one source, who noted that the senior leadership team was also surprised by this turn of events. Whitten, president and chief technology officer Mo Elshenawy, and chief administrative officer Craig Glidden, led the all-hands. Several Cruise employees who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity said they were "surprised" and "blindsided" by the decision. One source told TechCrunch that employees learned about GM's plans the same time the media did.

WP Engine just won a preliminary injunction against WordPress.com parent company Automattic. On Tuesday, a California District Court judge ordered Automattic to stop blocking WP Engine's access to WordPress.org resources and interfering with its plugins. From a report: The preliminary injunction comes after WP Engine, a third-party WordPress hosting service, filed a lawsuit that accused Automattic and its CEO, Matt Mullenweg, of "multiple forms of immediate irreparable harm." It later asked the court to stop Mullenweg from restricting WP Engine's access to WordPress.org.

Mullenweg waged a public campaign against WP Engine in September, accusing the service of misusing the WordPress trademark and not contributing enough to the WordPress community. After blocking WP Engine from WordPress.org's servers, Automattic took control of WP Engine's ACF Plugin.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google recently asked the U.S. government to break up Microsoft's exclusive agreement to host OpenAI's technology on its cloud servers, according to a person who has been directly involved in the effort. The conversation took place after the Federal Trade Commission, one of the primary federal antitrust enforcement agencies, asked Google about Microsoft's business practices as part of a broader investigation, this person said.

Firms that compete with Microsoft in renting out cloud servers, including Google and Amazon, want to host OpenAI's artificial intelligence themselves so their cloud customers don't need to also tap Microsoft servers to get access to the startup's technology, this person said.

Amazon expanded Tuesday into online car sales with the launch of Amazon Autos, an e-commerce business that lets customers find, order, and buy new cars, trucks, and SUVs from dealerships. From a report: Amazon is kicking off the new endeavor with Hyundai in 48 U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The launch comes a little more than a year since the e-commerce giant announced plans to start selling vehicles on its website in the second half of 2024. Amazon said it will add more cities and additional auto manufacturers in 2025.

Amazon Autos will function, in many ways, like the rest of the broader Amazon e-commerce ecosystem. Shoppers will be able to search for available vehicles from participating dealers by model, trim, color, and features. Notably, customers will also be able to secure financing and e-sign paperwork via the Amazon Autos site. Once the payment is finalized, customers can schedule when to pick up their vehicle from that dealership. When vehicles go on sale at Amazon, the local dealer (for now just Hyundai dealers) will be the seller of record. Amazon Autos will even handle trade ins.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Nearly 100 live samples of the deadly Hendra virus have been lost in a biosecurity bungle at a state-run Queensland laboratory. An investigation has been launched after it was revealed 323 virus samples went missing from Virology Laboratory in 2021 in a "major breach" of biosecurity protocol, Health Minister Tim Nicholls announced on Monday.

The material, which included samples of Hendra virus, lyssavirus and hantavirus, appears to have gone missing after a freezer storing the samples broke down. Mr Nicholls said the breach was uncovered in August 2023. The lab has been unable to say whether the materials were removed or destroyed. "It's this part of the transfer of those materials that is causing concern," Mr Nicholls said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Software vulnerability submissions generated by AI models have ushered in a "new era of slop security reports for open source" -- and the devs maintaining these projects wish bug hunters would rely less on results produced by machine learning assistants. Seth Larson, security developer-in-residence at the Python Software Foundation, raised the issue in a blog post last week, urging those reporting bugs not to use AI systems for bug hunting.

"Recently I've noticed an uptick in extremely low-quality, spammy, and LLM-hallucinated security reports to open source projects," he wrote, pointing to similar findings from the Curl project in January. "These reports appear at first glance to be potentially legitimate and thus require time to refute." Larson argued that low-quality reports should be treated as if they're malicious.

As if to underscore the persistence of these concerns, a Curl project bug report posted on December 8 shows that nearly a year after maintainer Daniel Stenberg raised the issue, he's still confronted by "AI slop" -- and wasting his time arguing with a bug submitter who may be partially or entirely automated.

Global antibiotic use in livestock varies dramatically across regions, with some Asian countries using up to 80 times more antibiotics per kilogram of meat than European nations, according to new research published by Our World in Data. Thailand leads global antibiotic consumption in livestock, while Norway reports the lowest usage rates.

The study found that around 70% of global antibiotics are administered to farm animals rather than humans, raising concerns about antimicrobial resistance. Several European countries have successfully reduced veterinary antibiotic sales by more than half between 2011 and 2022 through stricter regulations, including requiring prescriptions and imposing taxes on sales.

The Netherlands saw a 54% decrease in pig farm antibiotic use between 2004 and 2016 without negative impacts on animal welfare or farm economics. Researchers suggest global livestock antibiotic use could fall by two-thirds if consumption were reduced to 50 milligrams per kilogram of meat produced.

After spending more than $10 billion on its robotaxi unit, General Motors is abandoning its Cruise driverless ride-hailing service. From a report: The Detroit automaker on Tuesday said it will no longer fund its Cruise division's robotaxi development and will instead fold the unit into its broader tech team. "Cruise was well on its way to a robotaxi business -- but when you look at the fact you're deploying a fleet, there's a whole operations piece of doing that," GM CEO Mary Barra said on a call Tuesday.

Barra said GM would instead focus on the development of autonomous systems for use in personal vehicles. GM cited the increasingly competitive robotaxi market, capital allocation priorities and the considerable time and resources necessary to grow the business as reasons for its decision.

BrianFagioli writes: Linux Mint has reclaimed its position as the top-ranked Linux distribution on DistroWatch, dethroning MX Linux. The latest page hit rankings, which reflect the popularity of distributions among DistroWatch users, place Linux Mint in first place with 2,412 hits per day. MX Linux, previously the reigning champ, now sits in second with 2,280 hits.

Cable industry lobbyists have urged the Federal Communications Commission to avoid regulating data caps and overage charges, comparing broadband plans to restaurant menus in a filing last week.

NCTA - The Internet & Television Association argued that usage-based pricing benefits low-income consumers by providing cheaper options, pushing back against advocacy groups who say data caps disproportionately harm price-sensitive users. The group likened different pricing models to restaurants offering tasting menus, buffets, or unlimited soup and salad.

Consumer advocates, including Public Knowledge and Free Press, countered that low-income households often have no choice but to accept data caps since lower-priced plans typically include usage limits. They cited examples of users like Gloria Simmons, a Georgia retiree who pays $60 monthly for internet service plus $10 for every 50 gigabytes over her data allowance.

Microsoft, trying to mitigate the climate impact of its data center building boom, is starting to roll out a new design that uses zero water to cool the facilities' chips and servers. From a report: Launched in August, the new design will eliminate the more than 125 million liters of water each data center typically uses per year, the company said in a statement. The new system use a "closed loop" to recycle water; liquid is added during construction and continually circulated -- obviating the need for fresh supplies. Data centers will still require fresh water for worker facilities like bathrooms and kitchens.

Microsoft spent more than $50 billion on capital expenditures in the fiscal year ended June 30, the vast majority related to data center construction fueled by demand for artificial intelligence services. It plans to top that figure in the current year, requiring rapidly rising amounts of energy to run the networks and water to cool equipment. Many of latest facilities are going up in hot, dry areas like Arizona and Texas, making it even more critical to find ways to conserve water. Microsoft's existing data centers will continue to use a mix of older technologies, but new projects in Phoenix and Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, will begin using the zero-water designs in 2026.

China should focus on developing original technologies and scientific knowledge and leverage the expertise of scientists returning from the United States, according to a top Chinese-American mathematician. From a report: Yau Shing-Tung retired from Harvard University in 2022 to teach at Tsinghua University and help China become a maths powerhouse. He said many ethnic Chinese students had been driven away from the US by discrimination from the government, including accusations of misusing American research funds for China's benefit.

"Chinese scientists have no choice but to leave the US because they work best under a supportive research environment," he said. "This exodus is unfortunate for the US as it could diminish its research capabilities. For China, the return of these scientists means it is gaining top talent, but it also results in weakened ties with the US and a loss of first-hand knowledge of advanced technologies."

An increasing number of leading scientists are leaving the West for Chinese institutions. Yau's maths centre at Tsinghua in Beijing is one example where top foreign mathematicians have been recruited. In a survey of 1,300 US-based scientists of Chinese descent conducted between late 2021 and early 2022, 72 per cent of respondents said they did not feel safe as academic researchers. And 61 per cent said they had thought about leaving the United States for either Asian or non-Asian countries.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon on Tuesday said it is piloting a quick commerce service in India that will see the U.S. tech giant delivering grocery and other items in 15 minutes or less.

[...] The quick-commerce model -- delivering items to customers within 10 to 15 minutes -- hasn't worked in most parts of the world, but it's increasingly finding success in India, where a range of retailers and internet firms, from food delivery giant Swiggy to online cosmetics platform Nykaa, are gearing up their supply chain ecosystems to accommodate for faster deliveries.

As tech giants struggle to profit from AI, a growing industry of specialized AI training firms is emerging by hiring doctors, radiologists and other experts to develop commercially viable applications. The $20 billion data services sector, projected to grow 20% annually, is attracting major investment by focusing on high-value, specialized AI applications.

Companies like iMerit and Centaur Labs are recruiting specialists worldwide, from radiologists in Kazakhstan to agricultural experts in Bhutan, paying premium rates for domain expertise rather than basic data processing. While Microsoft and Alphabet post losses on AI development, this specialized sector is finding profitability by bridging the gap between raw AI capabilities and practical business applications.

China's high-speed rail network, which has tripled to nearly 30,000 miles under President Xi Jinping's leadership, faces mounting financial challenges amid aggressive expansion plans. China State Railway Group, the national operator, has accumulated nearly $1 trillion in debt and liabilities, requiring $25 billion annually for debt service.

Despite this, plans call for adding 15,000 more miles by 2035. While flagship routes between major cities like Beijing and Shanghai remain profitable, newer lines into rural regions are struggling with low ridership. In Sichuan province's Fushun County, which received high-speed rail service in 2021, stations built for thousands sit largely empty despite having 12 high-speed rail stops within a 40-mile radius.

The expansion has become a symbol of China's technological advancement but raises concerns about economic viability. Ticket prices are maintained at about one-quarter of global averages to ensure public access, limiting profit potential. The railway operator turned a modest $460 million profit in 2023, aided by government subsidies, after three years of losses during the pandemic.

An area of land nearly a third larger than India has turned from humid conditions to dryland -- arid areas where agriculture is difficult -- in the past three decades, research has found. From a report: Drylands now make up 40% of all land on Earth, excluding Antarctica. Three-quarters of the world's land suffered drier conditions in the past 30 years, which is likely to be permanent, according to the study by the UN Science Policy Interface, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations.

Africa lost about 12% of its GDP owing to the increasing aridity between 1990 and 2015, the report found. Even worse losses are forecast: Africa will lose about 16% of its GDP, and Asia close to 7%, in the next half decade. Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the UN convention to combat desertification (UNCCD), said: "Unlike droughts -- temporary periods of low rainfall -- aridity represents a permanent, unrelenting transformation. Droughts end. When an area's climate becomes drier, however, the ability to return to previous conditions is lost. The drier climates now affecting vast lands across the globe will not return to how they were, and this change is redefining life on Earth."

Some crops will be particularly at risk: maize yields are projected to halve in Kenya by 2050, if current trends continue. Drylands are areas where 90% of the rainfall is lost to evaporation, leaving only 10% for vegetation. Two-thirds of land globally will store less water by mid-century, according to the report published on Monday.

Malaysian lawmakers voted in favor of broadening the government's control over the internet, unmoved by criticism that the law risks suppressing dissent and free speech. From a report: Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil told parliament Monday that the government needed to amend existing laws to tackle online harm including scams, cyber-bullying, and more. "Freedom of speech does exist, but we are also given power through parliament to impose any necessary restrictions for the safety of the public," said Fahmi.

The bill imposes stricter penalties on content violations and grants sweeping powers to law enforcement, such as the right of any authorized officer to search and seize without a warrant. Service providers may also be held liable under the law, and compelled to disclose user data to authorities during investigations of alleged violations. More than 20 consultation sessions were held with stakeholders in the drafting of the bill, Fahmi said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Scientific advisers to the European Commission are calling for a moratorium across the EU on efforts to artificially cool Earth through solar geoengineering. That includes controversial technologies used to reflect sunlight back into space, primarily by sending reflective particles into the atmosphere or by brightening clouds.

Proponents argue that this can help in the fight against climate change, especially as planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb. But small-scale experiments have triggered backlash over concerns that these technologies could do more harm than good. The European Commission asked its Group of Chief Scientific Advisors (GCSA) and European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) to write up their opinions on solar geoengineering, which were published today alongside a report synthesizing what little we know about how these technologies might work.

There's "insufficient scientific evidence" to show that solar geoengineering can actually prevent climate change, says the opinion written by the GCSA. "Given the currently very high levels of scientific and technical uncertainty ... as well as the potential harmful uses, we advocate for a moratorium on all large-scale [solar geoengineering] experimentation and deployment," writes the EGE in the second highly anticipated opinion.

Over 300 musicians have signed an open letter defending the Internet Archive against a $621 million copyright infringement lawsuit over its preservation of 78 rpm records. The letter, organized by Fight for the Future, opposes the lawsuit filed by major record labels including Universal Music Group and Sony Music.

The labels claim the Archive's Great 78 Project, which digitizes shellac discs from the 1890s-1950s, amounts to widespread copyright infringement. Musicians argue the lawsuit prioritizes corporate profits over artists' interests.