More large donations from wealthy Silicon Valley figures are expected as they try to marshal opposition to a proposed ballot measure that would impose a new tax on billionaires.

Alphabet-owned Wing “is expanding its drone delivery service to an additional 150 Walmart stores across the U.S.,” reports Axios:[T]he future is already here if you live in Dallas — where some Walmart customers order delivery by Wing three times a week. By the end of 2026, some 40 million Americans, or about 12 percent of the U.S. population, will be able to take advantage of the convenience,...

Gentoo Linux posted its 2025 project retrospective this week. Some interesting details:Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories, Gentoo currently considers and plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contributions to Codeberg. Codeberg is a site based on Forgejo, maintained by a non-profit organization, and located in Berlin,...

An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget:If you received a bunch of password reset requests from Instagram recently, you’re not alone. As reported by Malwarebytes, an antivirus software company, there was a data breach revealing the “sensitive information” of 17.5 million Instagram users. Malwarebytes added that the leak included Instagram usernames, physical addresses, phone...

“China recently placed a supercritical carbon dioxide power generator into commercial operation,” writes CleanTechnica, “and the announcement was widely framed as a technological breakthrough.”The system, referred to as Chaotan One, is installed at a steel plant in Guizhou province in mountainous southwest China and is designed to recover industrial waste heat and convert it into electricity....

Remember that re-discovered computer tape with one of the earliest versions of Unix from the early 1970s? This week several local news outlets in Utah reported on the find, with KSL creating a video report with shots of the tape arriving at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum, the closet where it was found, and even its handwritten label. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that the closet where...

Scifi author/tech activist Cory Doctorow has decried the “enshittification” of our technologies to extract more profit. But Saturday he also described what could be “the beginning of the end for enshittification” in a new article for the Guardian — “our chance to make tech good again”.There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that...

For a quarter century, the TIOBE Index has attempted to rank the popularity of programming languages by the number of search engine results they bring up — and this week they had an announcement. Over the last year the language showing the largest increase in its share of TIOBE’s results was C#. TIOBE founder/CEO Paul Jansen looks back at how C++ evolved:From a language-design perspective, C#...