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"Google, which recently laid off thousands of employees globally, is now laying off the robots that cleaned cafeterias at its headquarters. A report by Wired recently said that Alphabet's "Everyday Robots" project - a unit under Google's experimental X laboratories - has been shut down by Google's chief executive officer (CEO) Sundar Pichai."

"Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you've been. Google's support page on the subject states: "You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored." That isn't true. Even with "location history" paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking."

""When you have a fully digital system you have no weapon to defend yourself if someone turns it off," he says. "If Putin invades Gotland [Sweden's largest island] it will be enough for him to turn off the payments system. No other country would even think about taking these sorts of risks, they would demand some sort of analogue system.""

"What if this isn't just a one-off case of a popular professor dying. With so many classes online, why wouldn't universities just lay off any professor with a body of recorded lectures? We already know that tenure is harder to achieve every year, and schools are relying more and more on adjunct professors who teach a couple of classes on yearly contracts with no benefits. This scheme could save schools even more money! Of course, tuition will remain the same. One prof in the Twitter thread saw this possibility already."

"New research by scientists at Michigan State University suggests that laptops do not enhance classroom learning, and in fact students would be better off leaving their laptops in the dorm during class. Although computer use during class may create the illusion of enhanced engagement with course content, it more often reflects engagement with social media, YouTube videos, instant messaging, and other nonacademic content. This self-inflicted distraction comes at a cost, as students are spending up to one-third of valuable (and costly) class time zoned out, and the longer they are online the more their grades tend to suffer."

"The role of AI writing systems as drafting buddies is a big departure from how writers typically get help, yet so far it is their biggest selling point and use case. Most writing tools available today will do some drafting for you, either by continuing where you left off or responding to a more specific instruction. SudoWrite, a popular AI writing tool for novelists, does all of these, with options to "write" where you left off, "describe" a highlighted noun, or "brainstorm" ideas based on a situation you describe. Systems like Jasper.ai or Lex will complete your paragraph or draft copy based on instructions, and Laika is similar but more focused on fiction and drama. "

"In this future, teachers assisted in marking and lesson planning by LLMs would be left with more much-needed time to focus on other elements of their work. However, in a bid to cut costs, the "teaching" of lessons could also be delegated to machines, robbing teachers and students of human interaction. "Of course, that will be for the less well-off students," Luckin says. "The more well-off students will still have lots of lovely one-to-one human interactions, alongside some very smartly integrated AI." Luckin instead advocates a future in which technology eases teachers' workloads but does not disrupt their pastoral care - or disproportionately affect students in poorer areas. "That human interaction is something to be cherished, not thrown out," she says."

"Stress is the common factor in many behaviours widely understood to be bad for our health - drinking too much booze, smoking cigarettes, even eating unhealthy food. (There is some evidence to suggest that cortisol - the hormone released when we feel stress - makes us crave high fat and sugary foods.) And, these days, many of life's stressors are communicated via the mobile phone. I cannot stop these stressors, but by turning off notifications, I can at least stop them ambushing me. It's an action that helps me regain some sense of control. For example, when I open up a news app, I am ready to find out what is happening in the world. It is different from being in the supermarket cheese aisle and getting an alert, where - as part of a whole barrage of communications - I may feel blindsided."

"When Vancouver tech retailer NCIX went bankrupt, it stopped paying its bills, including the bills for the storage where its servers were being kept; that led to the servers being auctioned off without being wiped first, containing sensitive data -- addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, passwords, etc -- for thousands of customers. Also on the servers: tax and payroll information for the company's employees."

"Engineer who created Facebook 'like' button swears off social media apps"

"Emmanuel Macron is facing a backlash after threatening to cut off social media networks as a means of stopping the spread of violence during periods of unrest. Élysée officials and government ministers responded on Wednesday by insisting the president was not threatening a "general blackout" but instead the "occasional and temporary" suspension of platforms. The president's comments came as ministers blamed young people using social media such as Snapchat and TikTok for organising and encouraging rioting and violence after the shooting dead of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb last week."

"Sounds lovely. But a few (mostly worried) thoughts come instantly to mind. First, our fingerprints are unique whether or not they're attached to our hand. That sounds like a dangerous incentive to chop off a few fingers, no?"

"The blackouts coincided with exams for secondary and high-school students and were implemented as the ultimate step in the country's battle to stop students cheating using smuggled mobile phones and internet-connected devices in exam halls. While attempting to ban mobile phones from exams or setting up local jamming equipment might be a less draconian measure, shutting off the internet is undoubtedly efficient. However, the outage impacted every person and business in the parts of the country controlled by the Iraqi government, causing human rights campaigners, including Access Now, to condemn the move."

"AIs do not need more intelligence than humans to transform the job market. They need only enough to do the task well. And that is not far off, Harari says. "Children alive today will face the consequences. Most of what people learn in school or in college will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50. If they want to continue to have a job, and to understand the world, and be relevant to what is happening, people will have to reinvent themselves again and again, and faster and faster.""

"That is when the alarm bells went off for Mr Ang. "I saw that there was a text file inside the encrypted folder that showed that it was ransomware, asking for payment to decrypt the files." The company decided not to pay the ransom of US$1,000 (S$1,447). Instead, it spent a week rebuilding about 3,000 infected files with data of the accounts and stocks from hard copy files."

"There aren't many exit nodes out there. Many people fear that running an exit node will put them in police crosshairs if it gets used in the commission of a crime. For the record, Boing Boing runs a very high-capacity exit node, and though we've received multiple contacts from US law enforcement, we've just explained that this is a Tor node that runs with logging switched off, and thus we have no information that'll be relevant to any investigations, and the officers involved have thanked us and gone away without further trouble. "

"Therefore, under EU law in force since May 2011, people must give their consent before an anti-ad-blocker script can run and hide content on a page. Of course, while waiting for that consent from a visitor, the site could refuse to show anything, but then the publisher will scare off all readers, even the ones who turn out to be not running anti-ad plugins. If the page is viewable while waiting for the consent, then blocking ad-blockers is pointless."

"demonstrate a fiendishly clever procedure for getting data off of airgapped computers that have had their speakers removed to prevent acoustic data-transmission: instead of playing sound through the target computer's speakers, they attack its fans, varying their speeds to produce subtle sounds that humans can barely notice, but which nearby devices can pick up through their microphones."