A US law firm has accused Lenovo of violating Justice Department strictures about the bulk transfer of data to foreign adversaries, namely China. From a report: The case filed by Almeida Law Group on behalf of San Francisco-based “Spencer Christy, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated” centers on the Data Security Program regulations implemented by the DOJ last year....

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman expects “human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks” from AI, and believes most work involving “sitting down at a computer” — accounting, legal, marketing, project management — will be fully automated within the next year or 18 months. He pointed to exponential growth in computational power and predicted that creating a new AI model will...

Britain has lost more than 14,000 pubs since 2009, a decline from roughly 54,000 registered public houses and bars to under 40,000 by 2022, according to a new analysis of UK business register data by data analyst Lauren Leek. The North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands lost 25 to 30% of their stock; London saw the smallest decline. Leek trained a random forest model on 49,840 pubs...

Mark Fischbach, the YouTube creator known as Markiplier who has spent nearly 15 years building an audience of more than 38 million subscribers by playing indie-horror video games on camera, has pulled off something that most independent filmmakers never manage — a self-financed, self-distributed debut feature that has grossed more than $30 million domestically against a $3 million budget. Iron...

An anonymous reader shares a report: A moderator on diyAudio set up an experiment to determine whether listeners could differentiate between audio run through pro audio copper wire, a banana, and wet mud. Spoiler alert: the results indicated that users were unable to accurately distinguish between these different ‘interfaces.’ Pano, the moderator who built the experiment, invited other members...

Micron has begun mass production of the 9650 series, the industry’s first PCIe 6.0 SSD, capable of sequential read speeds up to 28 GB/s and random read performance of 5.5 million IOPS — roughly double the throughput of the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives available today. The drive targets AI and data center workloads and ships in E1.S and E3.S form factors across two variants: the Pro, available in...

Up to a third of people worldwide have shoulder pain; it’s one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints. But medical imaging might not reveal the problem — in fact, it could even cloud it. From a report: In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99 percent of adults over 40 were found to have at least one abnormality in a rotator cuff on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)....

China’s courts are now handling more than 550,000 intellectual-property cases a year — making it the world’s most litigious country for IP disputes — as the nation’s own companies, once notorious for copying foreign designs and technology, find themselves on the defensive against a domestic counterfeiting epidemic fueled by excess factory capacity. The problem runs from knockoff “Lafufu” plush...

Mazda, the automaker that for years defended its scroll-wheel infotainment system as a safer alternative to touchscreens, is abandoning the approach entirely in the 2026 CX-5 in favor of a 15.6-inch touchscreen and zero physical buttons. The current lineup — the CX-50 Hybrid, CX-70 and CX-90 — still relies on a console-mounted scroll wheel and dedicated action buttons to navigate a tablet-like...