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Longtime Slashdot reader sandbagger shares the passing of John C. Dvorak, an early and influential technology journalist for PC Magazine. He was 80. Talking Biz News reports: Aric Mackey writes, "Widely recognized for his profound impact on the technology industry, John's career spanned decades of rapid digital evolution. He was perhaps best known for his influential, long-running column in PC Magazine and his groundbreaking work on the No Agenda podcast. Through his prolific writing, broadcasting, and distinct public voice, he helped shape critical conversations around both technology and political analysis, guiding generations of readers and listeners with his unique perspective. "To those who knew him personally, John was far more than his public work. He was a beloved husband, devoted father, proud grandfather, and a loyal friend. Those closest to him will remember a man defined by his strong convictions, his exceptionally sharp wit, and an enduring curiosity about the world around him." Dvorak was also part of the startup team at CNET Networks, and appeared on MarketWatch TV.

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24 Jul 2026 5:00pm GMT

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24 Jul 2026 4:52pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PYMNTS.com: Stripe is in talks to buy OpenRouter, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that could sell for roughly $10 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. The move would mark a significant step outside payments for a company that processes transactions for much of the internet. It also lands while Stripe pursues a far larger target: a bid for PayPal that would value the payments giant at about $53 billion. The Journal reported Thursday (July 23) that a transaction could be announced soon, though the talks could still collapse or another buyer could step in. The exact price under discussion could not be learned. Several other large technology companies had also been weighing deals for OpenRouter. The startup was valued at $1.3 billion in May, according to PitchBook, meaning a sale near $10 billion would represent a steep markup in a matter of months. Its backers include Menlo Ventures and CapitalG, the growth fund of Google parent Alphabet. OpenRouter sells software that lets customers reach AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic, along with open weight alternatives anyone can download and run. The Journal described the company's position this way: "OpenRouter is part of an emerging crop of startups that have found a lucrative niche between AI developers and the companies that want to use them." The platform lists hundreds of large language models and lets developers compare and switch between them.

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24 Jul 2026 4:00pm GMT

Astronomers studying the star system CD-35 2722 may have found the first known moon-like object outside our solar system. The classification is unusually tricky, however, because it orbits a brown dwarf rather than a planet, making it clearly an "exosatellite" but forcing scientists to rethink where the line between planet, moon, and failed star should be drawn. Space.com reports: The star CD-35 2722 is located around 73 light-years away and has around half the mass of the sun. It is orbited by a "failed star" or brown dwarf. These stellar bodies get their unfortunate nickname because they form like other stars but fail to gather enough mass to trigger the fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores. In terms of mass, brown dwarfs are more massive than the largest gas giant planets, but smaller than the smallest stars, usually with around 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, or around 0.013 to 0.08 times the mass of the sun. The newly discovered object in CD-35 2722 is certainly moon-like, but rather than orbiting a planet as the moons in the solar system do, it orbits the system's brown dwarf. "This system is somewhat hard to define using solar-system-based words like 'planet' and 'moon.' The exosatellite is clearly massive enough to be a planet, but it does not orbit a star, though it orbits an object that orbits a star," team leader Kevin Hoy of the Universidad Diego Portales and the Millennium Nucleus of Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS) in Chile, said in a statement. "Being the third wheel in this system makes us want to call it a moon, even if it is nothing like the small, rocky moons we have in our system." The team currently isn't able to definitively claim this object in CD-35 2722 is an exomoon, because that would require really nailing down a new definition of what a moon is. "The satellite we report is a giant gaseous body orbiting a highly massive companion, itself several times the mass of Jupiter. We have a clear delineation between the planets and the sun in the solar system, so defining things like moons is simple," team member Alice Zurlo of the Universidad Diego Portales said. "In the CD-35 2722 system, where we are blurring the lines between stars, planets, and moons, the whole thing becomes more complicated to describe." Zurlo and colleagues can, however, confidently claim this is an exosatellite, meaning it is a first-of-its-kind detection no matter what the future holds for its classification. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

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24 Jul 2026 3:00pm GMT

App is installed through Windows Update when certain LG monitors connect to a PC.

23 Jul 2026 8:47pm GMT

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has introduced Buzz, an open-source team chat platform aiming to reduce reliance on Slack and GitHub.

23 Jul 2026 8:23pm GMT

The FDA hasn't said where the cases are or how they're linked.

23 Jul 2026 7:22pm GMT

Google's selfie videos can be used for account access, AI Avatars, and age verification.

23 Jul 2026 7:14pm GMT

Tails 7.10 adopts GNOME's standard shutdown process, replaces GNOME Videos with Celluloid, and updates Tor Browser.

23 Jul 2026 9:32am GMT

The nonprofit Git hosting platform Codeberg now bans repositories that consist mainly of code written by generative AI.

23 Jul 2026 8:20am GMT