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Google has brought ChromeOS M137 to the stable channel, and it includes a few focused updates for users and IT admins. A key change is a new policy for managing big groups of Chromebooks. The face control accessibility tool, which Google also updated back in ChromeOS M135, now gets a vital control for managers. A new policy called FaceGazeEnabled lets them switch the feature on or off across a whole school or company. The update also brings a new audio feature called crosstalk cancellation. It aims to create a better sound experience using just the Chromebook's built-in speakers. The software processes audio to make it seem like it is surrounding your head, not just coming from two small points. This tries to copy the feel of a surround sound system or good headphones. Any audio gets a boost, but you will notice it most when watching movies or playing games with directional sound. More accessibility tools have arrived, too. ChromeVox now has a direct keyboard shortcut, Search + O + C, that displays spoken text as braille captions on a connected display. For the poor souls in IT, troubleshooting got a little less painful as well. A new event-based log collection system, when enabled by an admin, will automatically upload relevant logs when something specific fails, like an OS crash or a botched update. Instead of digging through mountains of data, administrators get targeted reports sent straight to them. Here's how to enable it: Turn on the Device system log upload setting. Turn on OS update status reporting—For the Report device OS information setting, select OS update status. Turn on device telemetry reporting on crash information—For the Report device telemetry setting, select Crash information. Google also keeps things sane by limiting these targeted uploads to just twice a day per device. As usual, the update is rolling out slowly. If you do not see ChromeOS M137 for your machine yet, just be patient. This phased release lets Google find and address any issues before the update gets to everyone. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Editing a transcript in Clipchamp will soon automatically trim your video to match. Microsoft's video editor Clipchamp is about to get a powerful feature for trimming videos. Soon, the app will support trimming a video by editing a transcript. Clipchamp is the built-in video editor on Windows 11. There are also versions of Clipchamp available on the web and for iOS. At this time, you cannot use Clipchamp on Android devices. Microsoft purchased Clipchamp in 2021 and has steadily expanded the feature set of the app. It's designed to be a basic video editor, not a competitor to Adobe Premiere Pro or more powerful tools. The work version of Clipchamp comes with select Microsoft 365 business and education licenses. It supports branded video templates, has a range of AI features, and can record your screen and webcam for creating presentations. Clipchamp already supports generating AI transcripts for dialogue within videos. But a new feature set to ship this month will allow you to edit the text within the transcript and then have the corresponding portion of the video removed. The capability makes it possible to trim segments of a video without having to deal with the timeline, lowering the learning curve for video editing and streamlining the process of creating videos centered around dialogue. Microsoft's Anastasia Passaris announced the feature in a Tech Community post and outlined how to use the feature: Open a new or existing video project in Clipchamp that contains spoken dialogue. Select the Transcript tab from the panel on the right-hand side of the editor. Select Generate transcript to start the transcription process. Highlight any text in the transcript that you’d like to remove, then select Delete. This will remove that portion of the video from the timeline. The Captions tab is being replaced by the Transcript tab in Clipchamp. Caption-related features are still in the app but they now live in a different section. AI-generated transcripts include timestamps to make it easy to jump to different parts of a video. With the new feature, you can delete off-topic dialogue and have your video trimmed accordingly. Transcript-based editing will roll out in June 2025 to Clipchamp for work users. Quick and easy video editing Clipchamp is an easy-to-use video editor with a growing list of capabilities. It's especially useful for making presentations and content centered around dialogue. (Image credit: Future) Transcripts and captions are important because they make content more accessible. They also can help with retention since people can listen to a presenter speak while also reading the same information. In the days of social media, it's also useful to have captions because people can watch your content while it's muted. I used to work in television and often repurposed content for the web. Transcribing videos used to take ages. As important as it was, transcribing by hand took a considerable amount of time. Clipchamp's AI-generated transcriptions save quite a bit of time and the ability to trim videos using those transcriptions is a natural extension of the feature. I've reviewed and re-reviewed Clipchamp since it was purchased by Microsoft. It's a solid video editor that has a lot of capabilities centered around productivity. If your business or organization already has a license that includes Clipchamp for work, I'd suggest giving the app a try for content such as walkthroughs, onboarding videos, and presentations. Clipchamp also has a version for personal use, which I use to create highlight reels for my American football team. That version has a slightly different feature set but it's also easy to use. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Internet providers are increasingly tasked in the role of anti-piracy enforcers and instructed to block pirate websites and services. In Europe, court-ordered blockades are now commonplace, but ISPs are cautious when it comes to further expansion. In a recent submission to the EU Commission, EuroISPA, which represents over 3,300 ISPs, complains about "disproportionate" blocking measures, as recently seen in Italy, Spain and elsewhere. Earlier this month, dozens of rightsholders and copyright groups urged the European Commission to pave the way for more robust measures to tackle live-streaming piracy. Two main themes in many of these submissions were broad pirate site blocking powers and effective Know-Your-Business-Customer (KYBC) requirements for online service providers. Ideally, this would enable rightsholders to swiftly block pirate sites while allowing them to track down the identities of those responsible. According to the MPA, IFPI, beIN, Eurocinema, FEVIP, Premier League and others, blocking and/or KYBC are essential to combat piracy. ISPs are Deeply Concerned These calls for broader enforcement are neither new nor unexpected. At the same time, they are not without opposition either. Among the many rightsholder requests, EuroISPA, the world’s largest association of Internet Service Providers, urges caution. “We are deeply concerned by the approach taken by some European rightsholders and certain Member States, who have implemented disproportionate network blocking measures,” the association writes. EuroISPA represents over 3,300 ISPs, including several of the largest European providers. The group is particularly concerned about regimes where over-blocking and collateral damage have damaged many innocent parties. Despite previous overblocking incidents, the rollout of increasingly broader blocking regimes continues. Where the initial orders were targeted at local ISPs, more recent blocking requests have included DNS resolvers, which operate globally. This introduces fallout well beyond EU borders. “Despite numerous over-blocking incidents, certain Member States continue to escalate their efforts and have therefore taken increasingly aggressive measures to expand blocking orders beyond local ISPs,” EuroISPA writes. Problematic Blocking Efforts The ISP association lists several concrete examples of collateral damage caused by overblocking. This includes an intervention in Italy, where a Cloudflare IP-address was blocked, rendering tens of thousands of websites inaccessible for Italian users. Italy’s blocking regime, known as “Piracy Shield“, also added the drive.usercontent.google.com domain, which made Google Drive unavailable in the country for more than half a day. This error was the result of reports from “trusted flaggers”, EuroISPA notes. Case study: Italy In Spain, there were similar overblocking issues related to third party service providers, including Cloudflare. One blocking order targeting CDN infrastructure, requested by the football league LaLiga, was approved in court while the owners of the servers were not informed, leading to collateral damage. This led to many outages for legitimate websites without any advance warning for those affected, EuroISPA says. “LaLiga secured the blocking order without notifying cloud providers, while knowingly concealing from the court the predictable harm to the general public. This blunt approach not only demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet works, it also violates the principle of net neutrality.” The ISPs worry that ‘expeditious’ blocking requirements, including an often mentioned 30-minute timeframe to take action, will lead to more errors. There are concerns that smaller service providers are simply not equipped to properly analyze the accuracy of blocking requests in such a short timeframe. When done properly, EuroISPA believes that blocking remains an option. In this light, EuroISPA mentions an order in Belgium under the Copyright Directive framework, that offered “clear guidance” and “legal certainty” for ISPs, enabling them to take prompt and appropriate action. Guidelines and Cooperation EuroISPA isn’t ruling out all blocking efforts, it’s concerned that the current blocking push is disproportionate and a threat to the open Internet. Instead, of expanding the European Digital Services Act, which has yet to be implemented in many member states, the EU should foster cooperation. “EuroISPA believes that collaborative approaches between rightsholders and intermediaries are more effective than relying on court orders and invites rightsholders to engage directly with ISPs rather than pursue legal action against them. “The ultimate goal should be to bring together stakeholders – despite their potentially conflicting business interests – to collaborate on finding practical and sustainable solutions to piracy online.” The call for voluntary cooperation is not new and, in some countries, this is a reality today. However, this also requires both sides to reach common ground, which can be easier said than done. KYBC, DNS and VPN Expansions While EuroISPA opens the door to future agreements, it’s also clear that the European Commission should not burden internet service providers with further anti-piracy obligations. The association notes that expanding the current KYBC provision will introduce extra risks for the ISPs, which could potentially undermine the Internet as a whole. The same is true for the suggested addition of DNS and VPN providers as site blocking partners. While EuroISPA doesn’t rule that out, it notes that the legal and technical aspects of these measures should be carefully analyzed before any action is taken. All in all, the ISPs urge the European Commission to tread with caution and keep the interests of all stakeholders in mind when deciding what steps to take next. — A copy of EuroISPA’s submission in response to the European Commission’s assessment of the May 2023 Commission Recommendation to combating online piracy of sports and other live events is available here (pdf). Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

A light-sensitive wire mesh implanted in the retina helps restore nerve impulses. Human vision relies on photoreceptor cells in the retina that react to visible light and trigger neurons in the optic nerve to send signals to the brain. Degradation of these photoreceptors is the leading cause of vision impairments, including blindness. However, a team of scientists at China’s Fudan University has recently built prototype retinal implants that can replace the failing photoreceptors and potentially provide infrared vision as a bonus. Sadly, they’ve only been tested in animals, so we’re still rather far away from making them work like Cyberpunk 2077-style eye augments. Vision on chip Earlier work on retinal implants that restored at least some degree of vision to the blind involved using electrode arrays that electrically stimulated neurons in the back of the retina, taking the place of the damaged photoreceptor cells. A patient had to wear a camera mounted on a pair of glasses that sent signals to the implant to activate this signaling. These implants required a power source to work, were unreliable, difficult to use, and had limited resolution, and the surgical procedure necessary to put them in the eye was extremely complicated. For all these reasons and more, they were withdrawn from the market. What the Fudan team achieved was an implant that worked without the external camera and without a power source. The development process started with extensive simulations aimed at pinpointing the right material. The ideal candidate was a photovoltaic material—it had to generate photocurrent without any external voltage in response to a broad spectrum of light. The primary material that emerged from these simulations was tellurium, a rare silver-white element that shares properties of both metals and nonmetals. The Fudan team fabricated prototype retinal implants using a mesh of tellurium nanowires. Once the implants were ready, the scientists conducted a test campaign—first in mice, then with non-human primates. Making blind mice see For the experiments, the team selected genetically blind mice that lost their sight shortly after birth due to deteriorating photoreceptor cells. Tellurium mesh devices were implanted into a narrow space between the photoreceptor layer and the retinal pigment epithelium, a site where the implants could interface with the neurons. After ensuring the implants were biocompatible, weren’t rejected, and didn’t cause any excessive inflammation, the team started checking how well the mice performed visual tasks. The first test was pretty simple and relied on shining the light into the mice’s eyes to see if this would trigger their pupils to contract. The results seemed promising—the pupils in blind mice constricted as they should in healthy animals. The second, somewhat more complex task was designed to check if the implant enabled the mice to consciously perceive light—in other words, whether the visual stimuli were properly converted into signals in the right areas of their brains. The animals were put in a well-lit cage and were rewarded with water if they licked a surface within three seconds after the lights went out. Here, implanted mice had a success rate of over 85 percent compared to 98 percent scored by a control group of non-implanted mice with healthy vision (untreated blind mice scored between 25 and 26 percent, which is no better than random). The implanted mice could also localize an LED light source and even discern different shapes (triangles, squares, circles) almost as well as the mice. And on top of that, they gained a superpower. Tellurium meshes respond to a wider range of the light spectrum than the normal human visual range. They’ll generate current when exposed to near-infrared wavelengths that a healthy human or rodent eye can’t see. Healthy mice excelled at the tasks the team threw at them when the lighting was kept in the standard visual range, but when lights were switched to infrared, they scored no better than chance. The implanted mice, on the other hand, scored very well—a bit worse than in the visual range, but not by much. Finally, the tellurium meshes, especially the infrared vision capability they offered, were tested on healthy macaques, an animal model that’s much closer to humans than mice. It turned out implanted macaques could perceive infrared light, and their normal vision remained unchanged. However, there are still a few roadblocks before we go all Cyberpunk with eye implants. Sensitivity issues Tellurium meshes, as the Fudan team admits in their paper, are far less sensitive to light than natural photoreceptors, and it’s hard to say if they really are a good candidate for retinal prostheses. The problem with using animal models in vision science is that it’s hard to ask a mouse or a macaque what they actually see with the implants and figure out how the electrical signals from their tellurium meshes are converted into perception in the brain. Based on the Fudan experiments, we know the implanted animals reacted to light, albeit a bit less effectively than those with healthy vision. We also know they needed an adaptation period; the implanted mice didn’t score their impressive results on their first try. They needed to learn what the sudden signals coming from their eyes meant, just like humans who had used electrode arrays in the past. Finally, shapes in the shape recognition tests were projected with lasers, which makes it difficult to tell how the implant would perform in normal daylight. There are also risks that come with the implantation procedure itself. The surgery involves making a local retina detachment, followed by a small retinal incision to insert the implant. According to Eduardo Fernández, a Spanish bioengineer who published a commentary to Fudan’s work in Science, doing this in fragile, diseased retinas poses a risk of fibrosis and scarring. Still, Fernández found the Chinese implants “promising.” The Fudan team is currently working on long-term safety assessments of their implants in non-human primates and on improving the coupling between the retina and the implant. The Fudan team's work on tellurium retinal implants is published in Science. Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.ady4439 Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Federighi talks to Ars about why the iPad's Mac-style multitasking took so long. CUPERTINO, Calif.—When Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi introduced the new multitasking UI in iPadOS 26 at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference this week, he did it the same way he introduced the Calculator app for the iPad last year, or timers in the iPad's Clock app the year before—with a hint of sarcasm. "Wow," Federighi enthuses in a lightly exaggerated tone about an hour and 19 minutes into a 90-minute presentation. "More windows, a pointier pointer, and a menu bar? Who would've thought? We've truly pulled off a mind-blowing release!" This elicits a sensible chuckle from the gathered audience of developers, media, and Apple employees watching the keynote on the Apple Park campus, where I have grabbed myself a good-not-great seat to watch the largely pre-recorded keynote on a gigantic outdoor screen. Federighi is acknowledging—and lightly poking fun at—the audience of developers, pro users, and media personalities who have been asking for years that Apple's iPad behave more like a traditional computer. And after many incremental steps, including a big swing and partial miss with the buggy, limited Stage Manager interface a couple of years ago, Apple has finally responded to requests for Mac-like multitasking with a distinctly Mac-like interface, an improved file manager, and better support for running tasks in the background. But if this move was so forehead-slappingly obvious, why did it take so long to get here? This is one of the questions we dug into when we sat down with Federighi and Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Greg Joswiak for a post-keynote chat earlier this week. It used to be about hardware restrictions People have been trying to use iPads (and make a philosophical case for them) as quote-unquote real computers practically from the moment they were introduced 15 years ago. But those early iPads lacked so much of what we expect from modern PCs and Macs, most notably robust multi-window multitasking and the ability for third-party apps to exchange data. The first iPads were almost literally just iPhone internals connected to big screens, with just a fraction of the RAM and storage available in the Macs of the day; that necessitated the use of a blown-up version of the iPhone's operating system and the iPhone's one-full-screen-app-at-a-time interface. "If you want to rewind all the way to the time we introduced Split View and Slide Over [in iOS 9], you have to start with the grounding that the iPad is a direct manipulation touch-first device," Federighi told Ars. "It is a foundational requirement that if you touch the screen and start to move something that it responds. Otherwise, the entire interaction model is broken—it's a psychic break with your contract with the device." Mac users, Federighi said, were more tolerant of small latency on their devices because they were already manipulating apps on the screen indirectly, but the iPads of a decade or so ago "didn't have the capacity to run an unlimited number of windowed apps with perfect responsiveness." It’s also worth noting the technical limitations of iPhone and iPad apps at the time, which up until then had mostly been designed and coded to match the specific screen sizes and resolutions of the (then-manageable) number of iDevices that existed. It simply wasn’t possible for the apps of the day to be dynamically resized as desktop windows are, because no one was coding their apps that way. Apple's iPad Pros—and, later, the iPad Airs—have gradually adopted hardware and software features that make them more Mac-like. Credit: Andrew Cunningham Of course, those hardware limitations no longer exist. Apple’s iPad Pros started boosting the tablets’ processing power, RAM, and storage in earnest in the late 2010s, and Apple introduced a Microsoft Surface-like keyboard and stylus accessories that moved the iPad away from its role as a content consumption device. For years now, Apple’s faster tablets have been based on the same hardware as its slower Macs—we know the hardware can do more because Apple is already doing more with it elsewhere. "Over time the iPad's gotten more powerful, the screens have gotten larger, the user base has shifted into a mode where there is a little bit more trackpad and keyboard use in how many people use the device," Federighi told Ars. "And so the stars kind of aligned to where many of the things that you traditionally do with a Mac were possible to do on an iPad for the first time and still meet iPad's basic contract." On correcting some of Stage Manager’s problems More multitasking in iPadOS 26. Credit: Apple Apple has already tried a windowed multitasking system on modern iPads once this decade, of course, with iPadOS 16's Stage Manager interface. Any first crack at windowed multitasking on the iPad was going to have a steep climb. This was the first time Apple or its developers had needed to content with truly dynamically resizable app windows in iOS or iPadOS, the first time Apple had implemented a virtual memory system on the iPad, and the first time Apple had tried true multi-monitor support. Stage Manager was in such rough shape that Apple delayed that year's iPadOS release to keep working on it. But the biggest problem with Stage Manager was actually that it just didn't work on a whole bunch of iPads. You could only use it on new expensive models—if you had a new cheap model or even an older expensive model, your iPad was stuck with the older Slide Over and Split View modes that had been designed around the hardware limitations of mid-2010s iPads. "We wanted to offer a new baseline of a totally consistent experience of what it meant to have Stage Manager," Federighi told Ars. "And for us, that meant four simultaneous apps on the internal display and an external display with four simultaneous apps. So, eight apps running at once. And we said that's the baseline, and that's what it means to be Stage Manager; we didn't want to say 'you get Stage Manager, but you get Stage Manager-lite here or something like that. And so immediately that established a floor for how low we could go." Fixing that was one of the primary goals of the new windowing system. "We decided this time: make everything we can make available," said Federighi, "even if it has some nuances on older hardware, because we saw so much demand [for Stage Manager]." That slight change in approach, combined with other behind-the-scenes optimizations, makes the new multitasking model more widely compatible than Stage Manager is. There are still limits on those devices—not to the number of windows you can open, but to how many of those windows can be active and up-to-date at once. And true multi-monitor support would remain the purview of the faster, more-expensive models. "We have discovered many, many optimizations," Federighi said. "We re-architected our windowing system and we re-architected the way that we manage background tasks, background processing, that enabled us to squeeze more out of other devices than we were able to do at the time we introduced Stage Manager." Stage Manager still exists in iPadOS 26, but as an optional extra multitasking mode that you have to choose to enable instead of the new windowed multitasking system. You can also choose to turn both multitasking systems off entirely, preserving the iPad's traditional big-iPhone-for-watching-Netflix interface for the people who prefer it. “iPad's gonna be iPad” The $349 base-model iPad is one that stands to gain the most from iPadOS 26. Credit: Andrew Cunningham However, while the new iPadOS 26 UI takes big steps toward the Mac's interface, the company still tries to treat them as different products with different priorities. To date, that has meant no touch screens on the Mac (despite years of rumors), and it will continue to mean that there are some Mac things that the iPad will remain unable to do. "But we've looked and said, as [the iPad and Mac] come together, where on the iPad the Mac idiom for doing something, like where we put the window close controls and maximize controls, what color are they—we've said why not, where it makes sense, use a converged design for those things so it's familiar and comfortable," Federighi told Ars. "But where it doesn't make sense, iPad's gonna be iPad." There will still be limitations and frustrations when trying to fit an iPad into a Mac-shaped hole in your computing setup. While tasks can run in the background, for example, Apple only allows apps to run workloads with a definitive endpoint, things like a video export or a file transfer. System agents or other apps that perform some routine on-and-off tasks continuously in the background aren’t supported. All the demos we’ve seen so far are also on new, high-end iPad hardware, and it remains to be seen how well the new features behave on low-end tablets like the 11th-generation A16 iPad, or old 2019-era hardware like the iPad Air 3. But it does feel like Apple has finally settled on a design that might stick, and that adds capability to the iPad without wrecking its simplicity for the people who still just want a big screen for reading and streaming. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

There will be a mandatory update for a ‘subset’ of Pixel 6A phones. Earlier this year, Google shipped a Pixel 4A update to some owners that lowered battery life to mitigate overheating risk, and soon, it’s going to do the same for the Pixel 6A. “A subset of Pixel 6A phones will require a mandatory software update to reduce the risk of potential battery overheating,” Google’s Alex Moriconi says in a statement to The Verge. “The update will enable battery management features that will reduce capacity and charging performance after the battery reaches 400 charge cycles. We’ll contact impacted customers next month, with all the information they need to address the issue.” As reported by Android Authority, at least two users have reported instances of their Pixel 6A phones catching fire, with one person on Reddit saying their Pixel 6A “spontaneously combusted in the middle of the night.” Android Authority also spotted code strings in the Android 16 QPR1 Beta 2 release alerting Pixel 6A users to “a potential battery overheating issue” and pointing toward a support page at g.co/pixel/6abattery that currently isn’t live. In April, Google also announced an extended repair program for battery swelling issues with the Pixel 7A. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

The test grew out of a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference. Generative AI is permeating the Internet, with chatbots and AI summaries popping up faster than we can keep track. Even Wikipedia, the vast repository of knowledge famously maintained by an army of volunteer human editors, is looking to add robots to the mix. The site began testing AI summaries in some articles over the past week, but the project has been frozen after editors voiced their opinions. And that opinion is: "yuck." The seeds of this project were planted at Wikimedia's 2024 conference, where foundation representatives and editors discussed how AI could advance Wikipedia's mission. The wiki on the so-called "Simple Article Summaries" notes that the editors who participated in the discussion believed the summaries could improve learning on Wikipedia. According to 404 Media, Wikipedia announced the opt-in AI pilot on June 2, which was set to run for two weeks on the mobile version of the site. The summaries appeared at the top of select articles in a collapsed form. Users had to tap to expand and read the full summary. The AI text also included a highlighted "Unverified" badge. Feedback from the larger community of editors was immediate and harsh. Some of the first comments were simply "yuck," with others calling the addition of AI a "ghastly idea" and "PR hype stunt." Others expounded on the issues with adding AI to Wikipedia, citing a potential loss of trust in the site. Editors work together to ensure articles are accurate, featuring verifiable information and a neutral point of view. However, nothing is certain when you put generative AI in the driver's seat. "I feel like people seriously underestimate the brand risk this sort of thing has," said one editor. "Wikipedia's brand is reliability, traceability of changes, and 'anyone can fix it.' AI is the opposite of these things." An example of Wikipedia's Simple Article Summaries. Credit: Wikipedia Multiple comments question the underlying usefulness of Simple Article Summaries on Wikipedia. The amazing breadth of Wikipedia means that there are countless articles covering advanced technical topics, but the editors strive to make it accessible. The site's guidelines state that the lead section of articles should summarize the content of articles, giving the "basics in a nutshell." Many editors pointed out that the addition of AI summaries is simply redundant. "Leads are already a shortened version of a page," said one of the editors. "The best leads have been carefully crafted by dozens of editors and represent some of the best content in the world." Wikipedia has confirmed it is pulling the summary test while it evaluates the deluge of feedback it has received from the editors who make the site work. "Reading through the comments, it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea and opening up the conversation here on VPT back in March," a Wikimedia Foundation manager told 404 Media. VPT refers to village pump technical, a forum where the foundation and community members discuss technical issues on the site. This probably won't be the last spirited discussion about Wikipedia's use of AI. Foundation representatives have confirmed they are still interested in finding ways to integrate generative AI into the Wikipedia experience, but they need buy-in from editors. If the initial reaction is any clue, that's going to be tough. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Last year's data plus plenty of simulation are meant to create a level playing field. This coming weekend will see the annual 24 Hours of Le Mans take place in . In total, 62 cars will compete, split into three different classes. At the front of the field are the very fastest hypercars—wickedly fast prototypes that are also all hybrids, with the exception of the V12 Aston Martin Valkyries. In the middle are the pro-am LMP2s, followed by 24 GT3 cars—modified versions of performance cars that include everything from Ford Mustangs to McLaren 720s. It is racing nirvana. But with so many different makes and models of cars in the Hypercar class, some two-wheel drive, others with all-wheel drive, how do they ensure it's a fair race? Get ready for some acronyms Sports car racing can be (needlessly) complicated at times. Take the Hypercar class at Le Mans. The 21 cars that will contest it are actually built to two separate rulebooks. One, called LMH (for Le Mans Hypercar), was written by the organizers of Le Mans and the World Endurance Championship. These prototypes can be hybrids, with the electric motor on the front axle: Ferrari, Peugeot, and Toyota have all taken this route. But they don't have to be; the Aston Martin Valkyrie already had to lose a lot of power to meet the rules, so it just relies on its big V12 to do all the work. Most of the cars are purpose-built for the race, but Aston Martin went the other route and converted a road car for racing. The other is called LMDh (Le Mans Daytona hybrid) and hails from the US, in the rulebook written for the International Motor Sports Association's GTP category. As the name suggests, these cars must be hybrids, and all must use the same specified motor, battery, and gearbox. LMDh cars also all need to start off using one of four approved carbon-fiber chassis (or spines), onto which automakers can style their own bodies and add their own engines. Alpine, BMW, Cadillac, and Porsche all have LMDh cars entered in this year's Le Mans. Ferrari's 499P is built to the LMH rules. JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER/AFP via Getty Images By contrast, the BMW V8 M Hybrid is built to the LMDh rules. James Moy Photography/Getty Images Convergence In a parallel universe, the result would be two competing series, neither with many cars on the grid. But the people at IMSA get on pretty well with the organizers of Le Mans (the Automobile Club de l'Ouest or ACO) and the World Endurance Championship (the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, or FIA), and they decided to create a way to allow everyone to play together in the same sandbox. "2021 [was] the first year with LMH, and at that time, the only big manufacturer involved was Toyota; Glickenhaus was there at the time, but there were not many manufacturers, let's say, interested in that kind of category," said Thierry Bouvet, competition director at the ACO. "So together with IMSA, while the world was [isolating] during the pandemic, we basically wrote a set of technical regulations, LMDh which was, on paper, a little bit of a different car [with] more focus on avoiding cost escalation. After a couple of years of writing those regulations, we had an interesting process of convergence, we call it, to be able to have the LMH and LMDh racing together," he said. It's not the first time that different cars have competed against each other at Le Mans. Before Hypercar, the top category was called LMP1h (Le Mans Prototype 1 hybrids), which burned brightly for a few short years but collapsed under the weight of F1-level budgets that proved too much for both Audi and Porsche, leaving just Toyota and some privateers. LMP1h used a complicated "Equivalence of Technology," but now the approach, first perfected with the slower GT3 cars, is called Balance of Performance, or BoP. The race starts at 10 am ET on Saturday, June 14. Credit: Ker Robertson/Getty Images Obviously, none of the automakers behind the LMDh teams would have entered the race if they thought only LMH cars had a chance of winning overall. "So it went through a couple of long and very interesting—in terms of technique, technically speaking—simulation working groups, where we involved all the manufacturers from both categories, and we believe we achieved... a nice working point in the middle, which allows both cars to be competitive, through the different restrictions, through BoP and so on. Now we feel that we've got a really fair and equitable working point," Bouvet said. As evidence, he pointed to the fact that last year Toyota took the World Endurance Championship for constructors, but Porsche's drivers cemented the WEC driver's title, with Ferrari winning Le Mans. Imma hit you with the BoP gun The rules limit both the amount of downforce and the amount of drag that the cars can generate from their bodywork, which have to be in the ratio of 4:1; this prevents any one manufacturer from having a massive advantage in terms of cornering grip or fuel efficiency. From there, the BoP gets more granular, setting maximum weight and power outputs (above and below 250 km/h), the maximum amount of energy allowed to be sent to the wheels between pit stops, as well as any extra time added to pit stops. Weighing cars is easy, and timing them in pit stops is old hat, too. But the advance here is the torque sensors at each axle that feed back data to the race officials, letting them know exactly how much power each car is deploying to its wheels. "We had to think of something which will work independently, whether it's hybrid power or internal combustion engine power. Should we think about fuel only? That will only be concerning, obviously, the internal combustion engine and not do the job for the hybrid system. So, power at the wheel is a nice and elegant solution," he said. The Aston Martin Valkyrie is the only road-going hypercar to be entered into the Hypercar category at Le Mans. Credit: ames Moy Photography/Getty Images For the World Endurance Championship, BoP is calculated on a rolling average of the last three races, with some OEMs getting a little more weight or a little less power if necessary. While the 24 Hours of Le Mans counts as a round of the WEC, it's open to other entrants as well, and BoP works a bit differently. Instead, Bouvet and his team based this year's BoP on data from last year's 24-hour race, plus the simulations he mentioned. This is done to prevent teams from sandbagging in the races that lead up to their most important race of the year As the newest and least competitive car, the Valkyrie gets the biggest break, with a minimum weight of just 2,271 lbs (1,030 kg) and a maximum power of 697 hp (520 kW). The Toyota GR010—which won the race in 2021 and 2022—can also deploy 697 hp but at a minimum weight of 2,321 lbs (1,052 kg), more than any other car in the class. No process is perfect, and there is little that racing fans like to complain about more than BoP, which some feel makes racing too artificial, or even fixed. You're unlikely to hear complaints about it from competitors at Le Mans, though—criticizing BoP is not allowed in WEC, although both Porsche and Toyota have recently expressed their feelings about BoP within those strictures. The first qualifying session for this weekend's race took place earlier today, sorting out the 15 fastest Hypercars that will compete later this week to see who leads the pack to the start line on Saturday. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend