TUESDAY, 24 FEBRUARY 2026, 13:05
Minecraft: Java Edition is switching its rendering backend from OpenGL to Vulkan as part of the upcoming Vibrant Visuals update, aiming for both better performance and modern graphics features across platforms like Linux and macOS (via translation layers). GamingOnLinux reports: For modders, they’re suggesting they start making preparations to move away from OpenGL: “Switching from OpenGL to...
A staffer of the Incognito dark web market was secretly controlled by the FBI—and still allegedly approved the sale of fentanyl-tainted pills, including those from a dealer linked to a confirmed death.
Clips of Deadpool and other film characters have sparked alarm within Hollywood over copyright infringement.
The IRS’s IT division has reportedly lost 40% of its staff and nearly 80% of its tech leadership amid a federal “efficiency” overhaul, the agency’s CIO revealed yesterday. The Register reports: Kaschit Pandya detailed the extent of the tech reorganization during a panel at the Association of Government Accountants yesterday, describing it as the biggest in two decades. … The IRS lost a quarter...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg faced a barrage of questions about his social-media company’s efforts to secure ever more of its users’ time and attention at a landmark trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday. In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta’s growth targets reflect an aim to give users something useful, not addict them,...
A bare-bones Chinese app called “Are You Dead?” — whose entire premise is that solo-living users tap daily to confirm they’re still alive, triggering an alert to an emergency contact after two missed check-ins — has rocketed to the top of China’s app store charts and gone viral globally without spending a dime on advertising. The app wasn’t built for the elderly, as many assumed; its creators...
Rimini Street, Inc., (Nasdaq: RMNI), a global provider of end-to-end enterprise software support, managed services and Agentic AI ERP innovation solutions, and the leading third-party support provider for Oracle, SAP and VMware software, today announced results for the 2025 fourth quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2025.
Microsoft Research has published a paper in Nature detailing Project Silica, a working demonstration that uses femtosecond lasers to etch data into small slabs of glass at a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter and a maximum capacity of 4.84 terabytes per slab. The slabs themselves are 12 cm by 12 cm and just 2 mm thick, and Microsoft’s accelerated aging experiments suggest the data...
The Executive Branch has a reported membership list that includes Trumpworld elites like David Sacks. A WIRED review of corporate filings reveals an under-the-radar player: a notorious former DC police officer.
A new essay in Works in Progress Magazine argues that Europe’s failure to produce a Tesla or a Waymo stems not from insufficient research spending or high taxes — problems California shares in abundance — but from labor laws that make it devastatingly expensive for companies to unwind failed bets. According to estimates, corporate restructuring costs the equivalent of 31 months of salary per...
Fallout, Neighbors, and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters are just a few of the TV shows we’re swooning over for February.
On TikTok, Chinese manufacturers are advertising signal-blocking weapons with the breezy cadence of consumer lifestyle advertising.
Workers describe a deteriorating culture at Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, where layoffs continue and employees are expected to use AI tools daily.
These compact Edifier speakers may not be the fanciest, but they’ll blow your monitor’s built-in speakers out of the water.
The Boston startup uses AI to translate and verify legacy software for defense contractors, arguing modernization can’t come at the cost of new bugs.
Bafta has brought in “human achievement” as a guiding principle for its annual awards as the film and television industry grapples with the rapid adoption of AI tools in many parts of production. From a report: In an interview with the FT, Bafta chair Sara Putt, who is nearing the end of her three-year tenure, said artificial intelligence would change how people worked “but at the base of...
The AI search startup once predicted advertising would be a massive business. Now it’s betting on a smaller, more valuable audience.
Research adds weight to theory Arrokoth’s two lobes produced by gravitational collapse – and reveals process
It is the most distant and primitive object ever visited by a spacecraft from Earth: now researchers say they have fresh insights into how the ultra-red, 4bn-year-old body known as Arrokoth came to have its distinctive snowman-like shape.
Arrokoth sits in the Kuiper belt, a vast, thick...
AI security firm Irregular has found that passwords generated by major large language models — Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini — appear complex but follow predictable patterns that make them crackable in hours, even on decades-old hardware. When researchers prompted Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 fifty times in separate conversations, only 30 of the returned passwords were unique, and 18 of the...
The company says it has addressed the issue and it “did not provide anyone access to information they weren’t already authorised to see”.
Despite the popular notion that the modern economy runs around the clock, a new NBER working paper analyzing fifty years of U.S. labor data from 1973 to 2023 finds that Americans have been steadily and consistently moving away from evening and night work toward traditional daytime hours [PDF]. The share of the workforce on the job at 11PM, for instance, fell by over 25% from its 1970s level....