computers

14 Jul 2026

Slashdot

Google Images Gets a Pinterest-Like Redesign Focused On Discovery

Google Images is getting a Pinterest-like redesign that turns image search into a personalized discovery feed, with "For You" galleries, real-time updates, and collections for saving visual ideas. "Google is also adding a way for users to create AI images right in Search, as it celebrates 25 years since the debut of Google Images," reports TechCrunch. From the report: After navigating to the redesigned Google Images, users will see a "For You" gallery of images tailored to their interests and browsing history. Like Pinterest, the gallery is designed for continuous browsing, with Google saying it updates in real time with new images. As users browse, they can save ideas to their "collections," which will appear as tabs above the main gallery of photos. For example, users can create collections for things like vacation outfit ideas, travel inspiration, and ways to design a reading nook, which they can come back to later. [...] As for generating images directly in Search, Google says the feature is meant for moments when you have a highly specific idea for an image that doesn't already exist online. Google is bringing image generation directly into AI Overviews on Search and will use its latest Nano Banana model to transform a text prompt into a custom visual. The feature can also help users reimagine spaces and visualize ideas, such as seeing what a room might look like painted red or what a dorm room with a coastal theme could look like.

Lawsuit Claims Meta's Layoff Decisions Were Made By AI, Not Humans

A lawsuit from 26 Meta employees alleges the company used AI-driven scoring and monitoring systems to select workers for layoffs, disproportionately targeting employees with disabilities or those who had taken protected medical, family, pregnancy, or parental leave. "Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work. Instead, Meta used a constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems -- including a system referred to internally as 'Metamate,' employee-trained 'second-brain' agents, keystroke- and activity-monitoring data, AI-token-usage dashboards, and algorithmically assisted performance ranking and calibration -- to score, rank, and select employees for inclusion on the list," the lawsuit (PDF) said. Ars Technica reports: Employees were allegedly graded, among other things, on how much they used Meta's AI tools. "Meta's internal dashboards classified employees by their stage of adoption of its artificial-intelligence tools, using categories such as 'AI Native,' 'AI First,' and 'AI Enabled,'" the lawsuit said. The lawsuit is apparently "the first against a major U.S. company to challenge the alleged use of AI in conducting layoffs," according to Reuters. The complaint alleges that Meta's tools for monitoring employees did not account for differences caused by disabilities and protected leaves. "Those tools draw on inputs -- performance ratings, calibration scores, productivity and output metrics, 'AI-native' ratings, and AI-token consumption -- that, by design, cannot be accumulated by an employee who is on protected medical or family leave, or whose output is reduced by a disability," the lawsuit said. The lawsuit alleged that Meta management did not take steps to adjust scores for employees who took leave or who requested reasonable accommodations for disabilities. "Meta did not neutralize those inputs for protected leave; did not exclude protected-leave-takers or accommodation-seekers from the selection cohort; and did not pause the system for the individualized, leave- and accommodation-neutral review that the law requires," the complaint alleged. "The result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff, based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected leaves, but in effect penalized the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves." The 26 plaintiffs requested leaves or disability accommodations in the 24 months before being selected for layoffs, the lawsuit said. The layoffs are not yet finalized, but employees are scheduled to start losing their jobs on July 22, the lawsuit said. "These claims lack merit and are not based on facts," said Meta in a statement. "Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI."

Ars Technica

Lawsuit claims Meta's layoff decisions were made by AI, not humans

Meta denies using AI to terminate workers with disabilities and medical problems.

14 Jul 2026 8:05pm GMT

Slashdot

Google DeepMind Calls For US To Spearhead AI Standards Body

Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis is calling for a U.S.-led AI standards body to review frontier models for national security risks such as cybersecurity and biological threats. His proposal would create a federally overseen public-private organization, initially voluntary and eventually mandatory for U.S. deployment. CNBC reports: Google DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate, said in an article posted on X on Tuesday that "urgent action" was needed to address risks associated with artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- the point at which AI matches or surpasses human intelligence. "We've already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance," he said. [...] Hassabis said the U.S. was well positioned to lead in developing an AI framework "given its economic and technical standing." "It could establish a new Standards Body modelled on a federally overseen public-private partnership or self-regulatory organisation, much like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), with a board that includes independent leading technical experts and open-source representatives," he added. FINRA regulates brokerage firms and exchange markets in the U.S. The proposed body would need "substantial" funding "in order to attract world-class technical talent and provide the necessary compute resources for large-scale testing," Hassabis said. Funding would "likely" come from industry, he added. Frontier labs would initially voluntarily share models with the body for review up to 30 days before release, before becoming mandatory for deployment in the U.S. market after being shown to be "effective." "Specific agentic AI tests could look for attempts to bypass safety guardrails or signs of deception, and ensure best practices, such as digitally watermarking AI-generated images and generating human-readable output tokens to understand model reasoning," Hassabis said. Further reading: Over 200 Economists Say 'We Must Act Now' On AI's Economic Impact

Ars Technica

Probe into explosive diarrheal cases points to Taco Bell and bad lettuce

Federal officials have not confirmed a source yet-and there may be multiple sources.

14 Jul 2026 7:00pm GMT

US military sent explosive drone boats into combat for the first time

US military's drone boats struck an Iranian naval port as war heats up again.

14 Jul 2026 6:00pm GMT

13 Jul 2026

OSnews

How early SunOS did diskless workstations before NFS

I have a love-hate relationship with Sun's NFS. Since it was so prevalent, it's a go-to for getting stuff on and off the classic UNIX workstations I love to explore, but at the same time, it also never seems to work right away. However, the technology NFS was designed to replace was apparently quite a bit worse. Sun sold diskless workstations before NFS, which used something called nd (network disk). The problems with nd stem from a limitation of SunOS at the time. Since SunOS only provided support for a maximum of eight partitions per physical disk, nd offered the ability to create subpartitions, of which you had to manually create and remember the start and end sectors. That's a recipe for problems. But wait, there's more! For extra bonus problems, you might run out of available partitions to use on your server disk because you needed all of the available ones for regular filesystems and your swap area. If you were in this situation you could take the dangerous but necessary step of specifying your network disks using the special 'c' partition (cf dkinfo(8)), which was conventionally used to provide access to the entire disk. This was extra dangerous because you had to make sure that the nd disks you specified weren't overlapping into any regular partitions that you were using, since as nd(8) says, nd itself did no sanity checking. If you said sectors X to Y were network disk X, that's what they were, and goodness help you if some of them were also something else. ↫ Chris Siedenmann And this isn't even everything. Every part of this sounds horrid, and I can totally understand seeing NFS as a godsend compared to nd. It's depressing that we're in 2026 now, and the basic task of sending a file from one computer to another over your own network often still a total clusterfuck.

13 Jul 2026 9:22pm GMT

Nokia’s 14 years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

OSNews covered the downfall of Nokia extensively back when it was happening, but I must admit that seeing this whole story in "retrospectives" now makes me feel so incredibly old. This story played out roughly between 2007 and 2016 - in the grand scheme of things, the end of Nokia's phone business wasn't that long ago! Zeit, bitte bleib stehen. Anyway, here's another retrospective, but this one I definitely like a bit more than the countless others we've seen, because it ends on the part of the story often left out: Nokia not only survived, it's actually thriving. The company itself ultimately survived, even if the transition wasn't painless. Nokia's revenues, which peaked in 2007, fell sharply through the mid-2010s before the company refocused on a decades-old business line-telecom infrastructure-that many had forgotten Nokia was even in. Nokia now ranks among the world's top three suppliers of 5G network equipment, serving carriers across more than 125 countries, alongside Ericsson and Huawei. Although the company could never quite crack the smartphone, it now plays a key role in providing the network backbone those smartphones run on. ↫ Chris Chinchilla at IEEE Spectrum From a business perspective, I honestly doubt Nokia's phone business could've survived to this day, even if they had responded to the arrival of the iPhone sooner, and even if they didn't do the stupid thing of focusing on Windows Phone first and had just embraced Android right away. Obviously, a Nokia with its own touch-era smartphone operating system would never have survived - none of them did - and even if they went with Android from the onset, I think the eventual onslaught of Samsung, which has killed many a popular smartphone brand, would've trampled Nokia too. In a better version of our world, Nokia would've survived with its own smartphone operating system, based on Symbian or not, and it would've been Europe's strong, consistent answer to the Americans' iOS and Android. While Nokia would've still been a business and would've undoubtedly tried the same anti-user shenanigans as Apple and Google, they'd at least be easier to reign in regulatory-wise. You'd hope. The EU should've never allowed Nokia's smartphone business to be sold to Microsoft.

13 Jul 2026 9:05pm GMT

10 Jul 2026

OSnews

Apple sues OpenAI for theft of “trade secrets”

Apple sued OpenAI on Friday, alleging the AI company has stolen the iPhone maker's trade secrets to develop its own yet-to-be-unveiled AI gadgets. In the suit, filed in the District Court of Northern California, Apple accuses OpenAI of trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract. ↫ Lisa Eadicicco and Hadas Gold at CNN I find this about as interesting and watching artificial grass grow, but with the common wisdom being that Apple is behind on "AI", it was honestly only a matter of time before the lawsuits came. After all, that's usually what companies who can't win in the market do. At the very least this will give corporate tech news websites a whole slew of new material. I just hope they both implode. We'd all be better off for it.

10 Jul 2026 10:16pm GMT