Meta plans to cut roughly 10% of staff in its Reality Labs division, with layoffs hitting metaverse-focused teams hardest. Reuters reports: The cuts to Reality Labs, which has roughly 15,000 employees, could be announced as soon as Tuesday and are set to disproportionately affect those in the metaverse unit who work on virtual reality headsets and virtual social networks, the report said. […]...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Supreme Court will hear a case that could invalidate the Federal Communications Commission’s authority to issue fines against companies regulated by the FCC. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile challenged the FCC’s ability to punish them after the commission fined the carriers for selling customer location data without their users’ consent....

22 years ago, developer and columnist John Gruber released Markdown, a simple plain-text formatting system designed to spare writers the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags. As technologist Anil Dash writes in a long piece, Markdown has since embedded itself into nearly every corner of modern computing. Aaron Swartz, then seventeen years old, served as the beta tester before its quiet March...

Microsoft has abruptly retired the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, a free platform that IT administrators have relied on to deploy Windows operating systems and applications for more than two decades. The retirement, reports the Register, came with “immediate” notice, meaning no more fixes, support, security patches, or updates, and the download packages may be removed from official distribution...

The layoffs are set to be announced this week and would affect Meta’s work on the metaverse, as the company spends heavily on building artificial intelligence.

Norway has released its December and full year 2025 automotive sales numbers and the world’s leading EV haven has broken records once again. The country had previously targeted an end to fossil car sales in 2025, and it basically got there. From a report: In 2017, Norway set a formal non-binding target to end fossil car sales in the country by 2025 — a target earlier than any other country in...

Apple was facing increasing questions about its plans for artificial intelligence as other big tech companies invested tens of billions in the technology.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Deserts are hard to reclaim because plants cannot survive on shifting sand, but scientists in northwest China are changing that — by dropping vast amounts of blue-green algae onto the dry terrain. These specially selected strains of cyanobacteria can survive extreme heat and drought for long periods, according to China Science Daily on Thursday. When rain...

60 years ago today, ABC aired the first episode of its live-action Batman television series, introducing Adam West as the deadpan Caped Crusader in what became a pop culture phenomenon blending high-camp humor and cliffhanger thrills. The mid-season replacement ran for 120 episodes over three seasons before ending in March 1968.

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Doctors say they have achieved the previously impossible — restoring sight and preventing blindness in people with a rare but dangerous eye conditon called hypotony. From a report: Moorfields hospital in London is the world’s first dedicated clinic for the disorder and seven out of eight patients given the pioneering treatment have responded to the therapy, a pilot study shows. One of them —...

The dramatically larger corner radius Apple introduced in macOS 26 Tahoe has pushed the invisible resize hit target for windows mostly outside the window itself — roughly 75% of the 19Ö19 pixel clickable area now lies beyond the visible boundary. In previous macOS versions, about 62% of that resize target would fall inside the window corner. Apple removed the visible resize grippy-strip from...

The trade deal would cut tariffs and include a commitment from Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, the island’s chip giant, to build more manufacturing plants in the United States.