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Microsoft has released Patch Tuesday updates for Windows 11 24H2, 23H2, and 22H2. The 24H2 update is provided via KB5060842, while the 23H2 and 22H2 updates are delivered via KB5060999. You will be on builds 26100.4343 (24H2), 22631.5472 (23H2), and 22621.5472 (22H2), after applying the updates. The full changelog for KB5060842 and KB5060999 is given below. They are identical: Highlights This update addresses security issues for your Windows operating system. Improvements This security update includes improvements that were a part of update KB5058499 (released May 28, 2025). The following summary outlines key issues addressed by the KB update after you install it. Also, included are available new features. The bold text within the brackets indicates the item or area of the change. [System Restore] After installing the June 2025 Windows security update, Windows 11, version 24H2 will retain system restore points for up to 60 days. To apply a restore point, select Open System Restore. Restore points older than 60 days are not available. This 60-day limit will also apply to future versions of Windows 11, version 24H2. [Windows Hello] Fixed: This update addresses an issue that prevents users from signing in with self-signed certificates when using Windows Hello for Business with the Key Trust model. Known issues Noto fonts issue Symptom Workaround There are reports of blurry or unclear CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) text when displayed at 96 DPI (100% scaling) in Chromium-based browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. The March 2025 Preview Update introduced Noto fonts in collaboration with Google, for CJK languages as fallbacks to improve text rendering when websites or apps don’t specify appropriate fonts. The issue is due to limited pixel density at 96 DPI, which can reduce the clarity and alignment of CJK characters. Increasing the display scaling improves clarity by enhancing text rendering. As a temporary workaround, increase your display scaling to 125% or 150% to improve text clarity. To manually download the updates, you can head over to the Microsoft Catalog website here: KB5060842, KB5060999. 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

It's the second Tuesday of the month, which means it's Patch Tuesday time again. As such, today, Microsoft is rolling out the monthly security update (also called "B release") for June 2025 on Windows Server 20H2 and Windows 10 for the latest supported versions, 20H2, 21H2, and 22H2. The new updates are being distributed under KB5060533, bumping up the builds to 19044.5965 and 19045.5965. You can find standalone links to download the new update on the Microsoft Update Catalog at this link. The major highlight of the release is security patches. Microsoft writes: [Internal Windows OS] This update contains miscellaneous security improvements to internal Windows OS functionality. No specific issues are documented for this release. This release has known issues with Noto fonts. Some of the older Windows 10 versions have also received updates today, which have been listed below with their respective release notes (KB) linked as well as links to download them at Microsoft's Update Catalog: Version KB Build Download Support 1809 KB5060531 17763.7434 Update Catalog Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) 1607 KB5061010 14393.8148 Update Catalog 1507 KB5058387 10240.21034 Update Catalog It is noteworthy that Windows 10 20H2 and Windows 10 1909 reached the end of servicing. Non-LTSC editions of 21H2 have also reached the end of servicing. 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 new Start menu is responsive and more customizable than ever. The Start menu on Windows 11 is about to get a major upgrade, and you can try it right now. Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel can now test the new Start menu in Windows 11. The refreshed Start menu brings the "All" section forward, making it easier to access. There are two views for that section: category and grid view. Category view is the default. It automatically groups apps, much like the experience you'd have on some smartphones. Grid view sorts apps alphabetically and takes advantage of the Start menu’s expanded size. The Start menu now adapts to your screen size, expanding to up to eight columns of pinned apps, six recommendations, and four columns of categories. The Pinned and Recommended sections of the Start menu are responsive as well, meaning they'll shrink or expand depending on how much you have pinned to Start. You can now hide the Recommended section within the Start menu. (Image credit: Microsoft) Phone Link now integrates with the Start menu on Windows 11. (Image credit: Microsoft) Category view (left) and grid view (right) are available in the refreshed Start menu. (Image credit: Microsoft) The Start menu on Windows 11 has received a fair bit of criticism over the years. Windows Phone and Live Tile enthusiasts disliked the shift to static icons. Even those who liked the general interface were faced with a recommended section that could not be disabled. That feature gap is closed with the refreshed Start menu. You can now turn off recommendations entirely. Previously, the recommended section remained even if you disabled its contents. Our Senior Editor Zac Bowden went hands-on with the new Start menu before the experience was officially announced. The Start menu also gained a powerful new tool for cross-device integration. People with connected Android or iOS devices can have content synced from their smartphone to an add-on of the Start menu. That functionality, which works through Phone Link, is already generally available in most areas, though it will ship to the European Economic Area at a future date. The same build of Windows 11 that brings the new Start menu to the Dev Channel also gives you the option to choose which Lock screen widgets appear. Microsoft outlines all the changes to the build in an Insider blog post. 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

This week, Microsoft started testing a big redesign for Windows 11's Start menu. It is now rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Dev and Beta Channels, addressing quite a few pain points in the original Start menu, which was shipped in late 2021. Nearly four years later, we finally have the long-anticipated redesign (announced earlier this year). The updated menu now features a single-page view, with all your pins and apps on one scrollable page. You can change the list of all apps between three variants: list, grid, and category. More importantly, you can now hide the recommended section in the Start menu settings (one of the most requested Start menu-related changes). The new Start menu is available in this week's Dev and Beta update. However, like always, Microsoft is rolling out changes gradually, which means you might not have the lucky ticket even on the latest build. If you do not want to wait, you can force-enable the new Start menu and its Phone Link button using a few commands in the ViVeTool app. Here is how to do that: Download ViveTool from GitHub and unpack the files in a convenient and easy-to-find folder. Run Command Prompt as Administrator and navigate to the folder containing the ViveTool files with the CD command. For example, if you have placed ViveTool in C:\Vive, type CD C:\Vive. Type vivetool /enable /id:47205210,49221331,49381526,49402389,49820095,55495322,48433719 and press Enter. Restart your computer. As usual, keep in mind that stuff in preview builds is less stable, so be aware of the risks of running preview builds. While Microsoft is not saying when the new Start menu will be available to all users, it will probably not take too long before it shows up in Release Preview and non-security updates. By the way, if you are curious, check out some of the prototypes that Microsoft considered when designing the new Start menu. Credit for the IDs goes to @phantomofearth on X. 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

Back in 2019, Microsoft announced a big change to its list of blocked file types for attachments. At the time, Microsoft stated that it was doing so to improve security by adding "file extensions to the BlockedFileTypes property of existing OwaMailboxPolicy objects." The tech giant deems such file types as no longer secure for attachments and is a good way to protect customers from potentially malicious attacks from threat actors. Over time the company has expanded the block list for Outlook for the Web and also the New Outlook for Windows app. In a new message via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center portal, the company has announced that two more such file types will be added. However, the tech giant feels this should not affect most users, as these "newly blocked file types are rarely used." It writes: "As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance security in Outlook Web and the New Outlook for Windows, we’re updating the default list of blocked file types in OwaMailboxPolicy. Starting in early July 2025, the following file types will be added to the BlockedFileTypes list: .library-ms .search-ms" For admins, Microsoft says that no action is required if their respective organisations do not rely on the aforementioned file attachments. However, if they are still in use, then admins can "add them to the AllowedFileTypes property of your users’ OwaMailboxPolicy objects before the rollout." Speaking of which, this is set as a "major change" with the rollout expected to start in early July 2025. You can find information on how to do that in the official documentation on Microsoft's website here. For those wondering, the following file types are allowed by default: ".avi, .bmp, .doc, .docm, .docx, .gif, .jpg, .mp3, .one, .pdf, .png, .ppsm, .ppsx, .ppt, .pptm, .pptx, .pub, .rpmsg, .rtf, .tif, .tiff, .txt, .vsd, .wav, .wma, .wmv, .xls, .xlsb, .xlsm, .xlsx, .zip" You can find the list of blocked file types here on this Microsoft support article on the company's official website. If you are a system admin, you can view the message on the Microsoft 365 Admin Center under ID MC1090702. 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

Mozilla is rolling out a new update for Firefox 139. Version 139.0.4 arrived today with four fixes and security patches. With today's release, Mozilla fixes freezes that occur when switching between apps or opening certain parts of the browser, issues with drop-down menus and triple-clicking text, and a bug with incorrect file names when setting a picture as the desktop background on Windows (the image would save as a BMP file with a blank name instead of Desktop Background.bmp) Here is the changelog: Security updates in Firefox 139.0.4 include two patches for vulnerabilities of high impact: CVE-2025-49709: Memory Corruption in canvas surfaces. Certain canvas operations could have led to memory corruption. CVE-2025-49710: Integer overflow in OrderedHashTable. An integer overflow was present in OrderedHashTable used by the JavaScript engine. As usual, you can update Firefox by heading to Menu > Help > About Firefox. Alternatively, grab the browser from the official website, Microsoft Store (if you are on Windows 10 and 11), or Neowin's Software page. For reference, release notes for version 139 and its subsequent bug-fixing update, 139.0.1, are available here and here. In other Firefox news, Mozilla recently announced the end of Pocket, Fakespot, and some other services. The company says its goal is to consolidate efforts and focus on Firefox development, its primary product. 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 few weeks ago, Mozilla announced that its Pocket and Fakespot services were getting the axe as the company focuses more on Firefox. It is a complete shutdown. Pocket, the read-it-later service Mozilla bought in 2017, will stop working on July 8, 2025. You have until October 8 to get your saved articles out before they are deleted forever. Fakespot, which helped you spot garbage product reviews, is also being sunsetted. But the house cleaning does not stop with those two. Neowin has spotted a shutdown notice dated June 26, 2025 for Deep Fake Detector, the Firefox extension that was supposed to tell you if a piece of text was written by a human or an AI chatbot. That tool used a combination of Mozilla's own proprietary ApolloDFT engine and open-source models like ZipPy to give you a verdict on what you were reading. The notice says: This brings us to the AI tools. Following the pattern, the Orbit website was updated with a banner that announced the service would shut down by June 26. Orbit was Mozilla's big privacy-first experiment in AI. It was a Firefox add-on that could summarize articles and answer questions about a webpage's content without sending your data to a third party. Orbit's private, self-contained setup can be replaced with the new sidebar built directly into Firefox, letting you connect to third-party chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini. But, for Orbit users, this is still a huge loss, as a key feature of the service was privacy. Your prompts were handled by Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) within Mozilla's GCP instance and were not shared with other companies for model training. Mozilla keeps saying these cuts are necessary. As the only major browser not owned by a tech giant, its resources are limited; hence, the need to focus its cash and engineering talent on the core Firefox browser to compete. 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 blog post from Arm states that 100 of the most popular Windows apps are now Arm-native, and users are spending upwards of 90% of their time in non-emulated apps, marking a significant milestone. Arm says that users are now spending over 90% of their time on Windows on Arm PCs using natively compiled Arm-based apps on Windows 11, a huge improvement over prior years. With the launch of Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs last year, it appears Windows on Arm is finally getting its moment in the spotlight. Developers are now taking the platform seriously, with over 100 popular and mainstream Windows apps now natively compiled for Arm. "The application experience on Windows on Arm is no longer about checking for compatibility. It’s about unlocking better performance, longer battery life, and more intelligent features across the board," says Arm in a blog posted on May 16. Some of the best native Windows on Arm apps include Google Chrome, WhatsApp, Davinci Resolve, Adobe Photoshop, Spotify, Microsoft Office, Slack, and many more. Pretty much all mainstream browsers now support Windows on Arm, as do most messaging apps. Even in cases where an app isn't natively compiled for Arm, recent improvements to the x86 emulation layer mean even non-native apps run well on the latest Copilot+ PCs from Snapdragon. We are in a new era for Windows on Arm PCs, one where app compatibility issues are at an all-time low. Even apps like XSplit work great on Arm. (Image credit: Windows Central) With that said, compatibility issues aren't entirely gone. There are still some apps that don't run well or at all on Windows on Arm, including most of the Adobe suite, as well as many games and some accessories, such as older printers and peripherals. However, this list is shrinking every day. For people using Windows PCs for productivity-based tasks, I'd wager that there's unlikely to be any app you need that doesn't work on Windows on Arm, whether emulated or otherwise. I've been daily driving a Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 since June 2024, and I believe it to be the best Windows laptop you can buy, even a year later. It's the MacBook Pro of the Windows world, with all-day battery life and good performance. You really can't go wrong, and my experience with it has only gotten better as more apps become natively available on Arm. So, if you've been worried about buying a Windows on Arm PC, like the new Surface Pro 12-inch, due to potential app compatibility issues, I say you're unlikely to encounter any problems at this point. The app compatibility gap is smaller than ever. 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

Intel is rolling out a new graphics driver under version 32.0.101.6881. This WHQL release does not contain much. In fact, there is only a single fix for a popular multiplayer hero shooter. The new driver fixes crashes when launching Overwatch 2 (DirectX 12) on High or Ultra graphics settings on Intel Arc A-Series graphics cards. From the changelog: Overwatch 2 (DX12) may experience an application crash while launching the game with High or Ultra graphics quality settings. Known bugs in the drive include the following: Intel Arc B-Series Graphics Products: Fortnite may experience an application crash when “Performance - Lower Graphical Fidelity” is selected as Rendering Mode. Recommendation is to use default Rendering Mode – DX12. Visual corruptions may appear in certain scenarios with multiple application interactions. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (DX12) may exhibit flickering corruption in certain scenes during gameplay. Returnal (DX12) may experience an application crash during gameplay with Ray-Tracing settings turned on. Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 (DX12) may exhibit corruptions on water areas in certain scenarios. SPECapc for Maya 2024 may experience intermittent application freeze during benchmark. PugetBench for Davinci Resolve Studio V19 may experience an application crash while running the benchmark. HWiNFO may incorrectly report number of Xe Cores for certain Intel Arc B-Series Graphics Products. Intel Arc A-Series Graphics Products: Returnal (DX12) may experience an application crash during gameplay with Ray-Tracing settings turned on. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (DX12) may experience an application crash with Ray-Tracing and XeSS enabled. PugetBench for Davinci Resolve Studio V19 may experience an application crash while running the benchmark. Intel Core Ultra Series 1 with built-in Intel Arc GPUs: Adobe Premiere Pro may fail to import video. Mitigation is to use Intel NPU Driver version 32.0.100.3717 or lower. PugetBench for Davinci Resolve Studio V19 may experience errors intermittently with benchmark preset set to Extended. Intel Core Ultra Series 2 with built-in Intel Arc GPUs: Valorant (DX11) may fail to enumerate supported resolutions in game settings. Adobe Premiere Pro may experience an intermittent application crash. Adobe Premiere Pro may fail to import video. Mitigation is to use Intel® NPU Driver version 32.0.100.3717 or lower. PugetBench for Davinci Resolve Studio V19 may experience errors intermittently with benchmark preset set to Extended. You can install Intel 32.0.101.6881 WHQL driver on PCs with 64-bit Windows 10 and Windows 11 with the following graphics products from Intel: Discrete GPUs Integrated GPUs Intel Arc A-Series (Alchemist) Intel Arc B-Series (Battlemage) Intel Iris Xe Discrete Graphics (DG1) Intel Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake) Intel Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) Intel Core 14th Gen (Raptor Lake Refresh) Intel Core 13th Gen (Raptor Lake) Intel Core 12th Gen (Alder Lake) Intel Core 11th Gen (Tiger Lake) You can download the driver from the official website here. Full release notes are 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

Apple's latest software design can be thought of as the tech version of 'new year, new me.' macOS 26 is one among them, featuring the "Liquid Glass" as a translucent new material that reflects and refracts its surroundings. The updated macOS design is all over the place, including the Dock, sidebars, and toolbars, which have been refined to focus more on the user's content. Apple continued its annual tradition and introduced new wallpapers custom-made for macOS 26 Tahoe to go along with the new design language. These macOS Tahoe 26 wallpapers are available in light and dark theme options, complementing the transparent menu bar, which makes the display feel bigger. To download the wallpapers to your device, click on the image to open it, then right-click on the wallpaper and select "Save Image As." Apple said during the announcement that "the new design also unlocks more personalization on the Mac. App icons come to life in light or dark appearances, colorful new light and dark tints, as well as an elegant new clear look." Apple's Liquid Design-inspired default wallpapers are also available for iOS 26 in light and dark options. The company has utilised Liquid Design extensively when upgrading the wallpaper experience on iPhones. Lock Screen wallpapers on iPhone create a 3D effect when the device is moved around, giving the illusion that the objects in the image are popping out of the screen. The time displayed on the lock screen fluidly adapts to the available space in an image for a more dynamic feel. Not just the design, Apple has further bridged the gap between iPhone and Mac by adding new Continuity features to macOS 26 on these supported Mac models. This includes the new Phone app that lets you relay phone calls from your iPhone nearby. Just like widgets, macOS 26 can populate Live Activities from a nearby iPhone, enabling you to track your Uber ride, live sports scores, or incoming dinner orders. Source: Apple via 9to5Mac [1,2] 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 Web Era arrives, the browser wars flare, and a bubble bursts. Welcome to the second article in our three-part series on the history of the Internet. If you haven’t already, read part one here. As a refresher, here’s the story so far: The ARPANET was a project started by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Project Agency in 1969 to network different mainframe computers together across the country. Later, it evolved into the Internet, connecting multiple global networks together using a common TCP/IP protocol. By the late 1980s, investments from the National Science Foundation (NSF) had established an “Internet backbone” supporting hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. These users were mostly professors, researchers, and graduate students. In the meantime, commercial online services like CompuServe were growing rapidly. These systems connected personal computer users, using dial-up modems, to a mainframe running proprietary software. Once online, people could read news articles and message other users. In 1989, CompuServe added the ability to send email to anyone on the Internet. In 1965, Ted Nelson submitted a paper to the Association for Computing Machinery. He wrote: “Let me introduce the word ‘hypertext’ to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.” The paper was part of a grand vision he called Xanadu, after the poem by Samuel Coleridge. A decade later, in his book “Dream Machines/Computer Lib,” he described Xanadu thusly: “To give you a screen in your home from which you can see into the world’s hypertext libraries.” He admitted that the world didn’t have any hypertext libraries yet, but that wasn’t the point. One day, maybe soon, it would. And he was going to dedicate his life to making it happen. As the Internet grew, it became more and more difficult to find things on it. There were lots of cool documents like the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Internet, but to read them, you first had to know where they were. The community of helpful programmers on the Internet leapt to the challenge. Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal wrote a tool called Archie. It searched a list of public file transfer protocol (FTP) servers. You still had to know the file name you were looking for, but Archie would let you download it no matter what server it was on. An improved search engine was Gopher, written by a team headed by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota. It used a text-based menu system so that users didn’t have to remember file names or locations. Gopher servers could display a customized collection of links inside nested menus, and they integrated with other services like Archie and Veronica to help users search for more resources. Gopher is a text-based Internet search and retrieval system. It’s still running in 2025! Jeremy Reimer Here is the multi-page result of searching for “Hitchhiker” on Gopher. Jeremy Reimer By hitting the Enter key, you can view the document you were looking for. Jeremy Reimer A Gopher server could provide many of the things we take for granted today: search engines, personal pages that could contain links, and downloadable files. But this wasn’t enough for a British computer scientist who was working at CERN, an intergovernmental institute that operated the world’s largest particle physics lab. The World Wide Web Hypertext had come a long way since Ted Nelson had coined the word in 1965. Bill Atkinson, a member of the original Macintosh development team, released HyperCard in 1987. It used the Mac’s graphical interface to let anyone develop “stacks,” collections of text, graphics, and sounds that could be connected together with clickable links. There was no networking, but stacks could be shared with other users by sending the files on a floppy disk. The home screen of HyperCard 1.0 for Macintosh. Jeremy Reimer Hypercard came with a tutorial, written in Hypercard, explaining how it worked. Jeremy Reimer There were also sample applications, like this address book. Jeremy Reimer Hypertext was so big that conferences were held just to discuss it in 1987 and 1988. Even Ted Nelson had finally found a sponsor for his personal dream: Autodesk founder John Walker had agreed to spin up a subsidiary to create a commercial version of Xanadu. It was in this environment that CERN fellow Tim Berners-Lee drew up his own proposal in March 1989 for a new hypertext environment. His goal was to make it easier for researchers at CERN to collaborate and share information about new projects. The proposal (which he called “Mesh”) had several objectives. It would provide a system for connecting information about people, projects, documents, and hardware being developed at CERN. It would be decentralized and distributed over many computers. Not all the computers at CERN were the same—there were Digital Equipment minis running VMS, some Macintoshes, and an increasing number of Unix workstations. Each of them should be able to view the information in the same way. As Berners-Lee described it, “There are few products which take Ted Nelson's idea of a wide ‘docuverse’ literally by allowing links between nodes in different databases. In order to do this, some standardization would be necessary.” The original proposal document for the web, written in Microsoft Word for Macintosh 4.0, downloaded from Tim Berners-Lee’s website. Credit: Jeremy Reimer The document ended by describing the project as “practical” and estimating that it might take two people six to 12 months to complete. Berners-Lee’s manager called it “vague, but exciting.” Robert Cailliau, who had independently proposed a hypertext system for CERN, joined Berners-Lee to start designing the project. The computer Berners-Lee used was a NeXT cube, from the company Steve Jobs started after he was kicked out of Apple. NeXT workstations were expensive, but they came with a software development environment that was years ahead of its time. If you could afford one, it was like a coding accelerator. John Carmack would later write DOOM on a NeXT. The NeXT workstation that Tim Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web. Please do not power down the World Wide Web. Credit: Coolcaesar (CC BY-SA 3.0) Berners-Lee called his application “WorldWideWeb.” The software consisted of a server, which delivered pages of text over a new protocol called “Hypertext Transport Protocol,” or HTTP, and a browser that rendered the text. The browser translated markup code like “h1” to indicate a larger header font or “a” to indicate a link. There was also a graphical webpage editor, but it didn’t work very well and was abandoned. The very first website was published, running on the development NeXT cube, on December 20, 1990. Anyone who had a NeXT machine and access to the Internet could view the site in all its glory. The original WorldWideWeb browser running on NeXTstep 3, browsing the world’s first webpage. Jeremy Reimer Clicking links in WorldWideWeb would open up new windows. Nevertheless, there were options to navigate “forward,” “backward,” and “up.” Jeremy Reimer There were no inline images. However, you could link to images that would pop up in a new window as long as they were TIFF files. Jeremy Reimer Because NeXT only sold 50,000 computers in total, that intersection did not represent a lot of people. Eight months later, Berners-Lee posted a reply to a question about interesting projects on the alt.hypertext Usenet newsgroup. He described the World Wide Web project and included links to all the software and documentation. That one post changed the world forever. Mosaic On December 9, 1991, President George H.W. Bush signed into law the High Performance Computing Act, also known as the Gore Bill. The bill paid for an upgrade of the NSFNET backbone, as well as a separate funding initiative for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). NCSA, based out of the University of Illinois, became a dream location for computing research. “NCSA was heaven,” recalled Alex Totic, who was a student there. “They had all the toys, from Thinking Machines to Crays to Macs to beautiful networks. It was awesome.” As is often the case in academia, the professors came up with research ideas but assigned most of the actual work to their grad students. One of those students was Marc Andreessen, who joined NCSA as a part-time programmer for $6.85 an hour. Andreessen was fascinated by the World Wide Web, especially browsers. A new browser for Unix computers, ViolaWWW, was making the rounds at NCSA. No longer confined to the NeXT workstation, the web had caught the attention of the Unix community. But that community was still too small for Andreessen. “To use the Net, you had to understand Unix,” he said in an interview with Forbes. “And the current users had no interest in making it easier. In fact, there was a definite element of not wanting to make it easier, of actually wanting to keep the riffraff out.” Andreessen enlisted the help of his colleague, programmer Eric Bina, and started developing a new web browser in December 1992. In a little over a month, they released version 0.5 of “NCSA X Mosaic”—so called because it was designed to work with Unix’s X Window System. Ports for the Macintosh and Windows followed shortly thereafter. It wasn’t easy to get Mosaic working on a Windows computer in 1993. You had to purchase and configure a third-party TCP/IP application, like Trumpet Winsock, before Mosaic would even start. Jeremy Reimer But once you got it going, the web was a lot easier and more exciting to use. Mosaic added the tag that allowed images to be displayed inside webpages as long as they were GIFs. The GIF format was invented by CompuServe. Jeremy Reimer Being available on the most popular graphical computers changed the trajectory of the web. In just 18 months, millions of copies of Mosaic were downloaded, and the rate was accelerating. The riffraff was here to stay. Netscape The instant popularity of Mosaic caused the management at NCSA to take a deeper interest in the project. Jon Mittelhauser, who co-wrote the Windows version, recalled that the small team “suddenly found ourselves in meetings with forty people planning our next features, as opposed to the five of us making plans at 2 am over pizzas and Cokes.” Andreessen was told to step aside and let more experienced managers take over. Instead, he left NCSA and moved to California, looking for his next opportunity. “I thought I had missed the whole thing,” Andreessen said. “The overwhelming mood in the Valley when I arrived was that the PC was done, and by the way, the Valley was probably done because there was nothing else to do.” But his reputation had preceded him. Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, was also looking to start something new. A friend had shown him a demo of Mosaic, and Clark reached out to meet with Andreessen. At a meeting, Andreessen pitched the idea of building a “Mosaic killer.” He showed Clark a graph that showed web users doubling every five months. Excited by the possibilities, the two men founded Mosaic Communications Corporation on April 4, 1994. Andreessen quickly recruited programmers from his former team, and they got to work. They codenamed their new browser “Mozilla” since it was going to be a monster that would devour Mosaic. Beta versions were titled “Mosaic Netscape,” but the University of Illinois threatened to sue the new company. To avoid litigation, the name of the company and browser were changed to Netscape, and the programmers audited their code to ensure none of it had been copied from NCSA. Netscape became the model for all Internet startups to follow. Programmers were given unlimited free sodas and encouraged to basically never leave the office. “Netscape Time” accelerated software development schedules, and because updates could be delivered over the Internet, old principles of quality assurance went out the window. And the business model? It was simply to “get big fast,” and profits could be figured out later. Work proceeded quickly, and the 1.0 version of Netscape Navigator and the Netsite web server were released on December 15, 1994, for Windows, Macintosh, and Unix systems running X Windows. The browser was priced at $39 for commercial users, but there was no charge for “academic and non-profit use, as well as for free evaluation purposes.” Version 0.9 was called “Mosaic Netscape,” and the logo and company were still Mosaic. Jeremy Reimer Version 1.0 was just called Netscape, although the old logo snuck into the installation screen. Jeremy Reimer The new logo was a giant N. Images were downloaded progressively, making browsing much faster. Jeremy Reimer Netscape quickly became the standard. Within six months, it captured over 70 percent of the market share for web browsers. On August 9, 1995, only 16 months after the founding of the company, Netscape filed for an Initial Public Offering. A last-minute decision doubled the offering price to $28 per share, and on the first day of trading, the stock soared to $75 and closed at $58.25. The Web Era had officially arrived. The web battles proprietary solutions The excitement over a new way to transmit text and images to the public over phone lines wasn’t confined to the World Wide Web. Commercial online systems like CompuServe were also evolving to meet the graphical age. These companies released attractive new front-ends for their services that ran on DOS, Windows, and Macintosh computers. There were also new services that were graphics-only, like Prodigy, a cooperation between IBM and Sears, and an upstart that had sprung from the ashes of a Commodore 64 service called Quantum Link. This was America Online, or AOL. Even Microsoft was getting into the act. Bill Gates believed that the “Information Superhighway” was the future of computing, and he wanted to make sure that all roads went through his company’s toll booth. The highly anticipated Windows 95 was scheduled to ship with a bundled dial-up online service called the Microsoft Network, or MSN. The CompuServe Information Manager added a graphical front-end to the service. It helped cut down on hourly connection fees. Jeremy Reimer CompuServe Information Manager also came with a customized version of the Mosaic web browser, which let users surf the web while connected to CompuServe. Jeremy Reimer America Online was a new graphical online service that, among other things, let you send email to anyone on the Internet. It was wildly popular in the US but less so in the rest of the world. Jeremy Reimer Microsoft’s answer to services like CompuServe and AOL was the Microsoft Network, which came bundled with Windows 95. Jeremy Reimer At first, it wasn’t clear which of these online services would emerge as the winner. But people assumed that at least one of them would beat the complicated, nerdy Internet. CompuServe was the oldest, but AOL was nimbler and found success by sending out millions of free “starter” disks (and later, CDs) to potential customers. Microsoft was sure that bundling MSN with the upcoming Windows 95 would ensure victory. Most of these services decided to hedge their bets by adding a sort of “side access” to the World Wide Web. After all, if they didn’t, their competitors would. At the same time, smaller companies (many of them former bulletin board services) started becoming Internet service providers. These smaller “ISPs” could charge less money than the big services because they didn’t have to create any content themselves. Thousands of new websites were appearing on the Internet every day, much faster than new sections could be added to AOL or CompuServe. The instruction manual that came with my first full Internet connection. It was a startup that had purchased my favorite local BBS, Mind Link! Jeremy Reimer The manual did its best to introduce new users to the World Wide Web. Windows 95 came with TCP/IP built in, so it was a lot easier to get online. Jeremy Reimer The tipping point happened very quickly. Before Windows 95 had even shipped, Bill Gates wrote his famous “Internet Tidal Wave” memo, where he assigned the Internet the “highest level of importance.” MSN was quickly changed to become more of a standard ISP and moved all of its content to the web. Microsoft rushed to release its own web browser, Internet Explorer, and bundled it with the Windows 95 Plus Pack. The hype and momentum were entirely with the web now. It was the most exciting, most transformative technology of its time. The decade-long battle to control the Internet by forcing a shift to a new OSI standards model was forgotten. The web was all anyone cared about, and the web ran on TCP/IP. The browser wars Netscape had never expected to make a lot of money from its browser, as it was assumed that most people would continue to download new “evaluation” versions for free. Executives were pleasantly surprised when businesses started sending Netscape huge checks. The company went from $17 million in revenue in 1995 to $346 million the following year, and the press started calling Marc Andreessen “the new Bill Gates.” The old Bill Gates wasn’t having any of that. Following his 1995 memo, Microsoft worked hard to improve Internet Explorer and made it available for free, including to business users. Netscape tried to fight back. It added groundbreaking new features like JavaScript, which was inspired by LISP but with a syntax similar to Java, the hot new programming language from Sun Microsystems. But it was hard to compete with free, and Netscape’s market share started to fall. By 1996, both browsers had reached version 3.0 and were roughly equal in terms of features. The battle continued, but when the Apache Software Foundation released its free web server, Netscape’s other source of revenue dried up as well. The writing was on the wall. There was no better way to declare your allegiance to a web browser in 1996 than adding “Best Viewed In” above one of these icons. Credit: Jeremy Reimer The dot-com boom In 1989, the NSF lifted the restrictions on providing commercial access to the Internet, and by 1991, it had removed all barriers to commercial trade on the network. With the sudden ascent of the web, thanks to Mosaic, Netscape, and Internet Explorer, new companies jumped into this high-tech gold rush. But at first, it wasn’t clear what the best business strategy was. Users expected everything on the web to be free, so how could you make money? Many early web companies started as hobby projects. In 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were electrical engineering PhD students at Stanford University. After Mosaic started popping off, they began collecting and trading links to new websites. Thus, “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was born, running on Yang’s Sun workstation. Renamed Yahoo! (Yet Another Hierarchical, Officious Oracle), the site exploded in popularity. Netscape put multiple links to Yahoo on its main navigation bar, which further accelerated growth. “We weren’t really sure if you could make a business out of it, though,” Yang told Fortune. Nevertheless, venture capital companies came calling. Sequoia, which had made millions investing in Apple, put in $1 million for 25 percent of Yahoo. Yahoo.com as it would have appeared in 1995. Credit: Jeremy Reimer Another hobby site, AuctionWeb, was started in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar. Running on his own home server using the regular $30 per month service from his ISP, the site let people buy and sell items of almost any kind. When traffic started growing, his ISP told him it was increasing his Internet fees to $250 per month, as befitting a commercial enterprise. Omidyar decided he would try to make it a real business, even though he didn’t have a merchant account for credit cards or even a way to enforce the new 5 percent or 2.5 percent royalty charges. That didn’t matter, as the checks started rolling in. He found a business partner, changed the name to eBay, and the rest was history. AuctionWeb (later eBay) as it would have appeared in 1995. Credit: Jeremy Reimer In 1993, Jeff Bezos, a senior vice president at a hedge fund company, was tasked with investigating business opportunities on the Internet. He decided to create a proof of concept for what he described as an “everything store.” He chose books as an ideal commodity to sell online, since a book in one store was identical to one in another, and a website could offer access to obscure titles that might not get stocked in physical bookstores. He left the hedge fund company, gathered investors and software development talent, and moved to Seattle. There, he started Amazon. At first, the site wasn’t much more than an online version of an existing bookseller catalog called Books In Print. But over time, Bezos added inventory data from the two major book distributors, Ingram and Baker & Taylor. The promise of access to every book in the world was exciting for people, and the company grew quickly. Amazon.com as it would have appeared in 1995. Credit: Jeremy Reimer The explosive growth of these startups fueled a self-perpetuating cycle. As publications like Wired experimented with online versions of their magazines, they invented and sold banner ads to fund their websites. The best customers for these ads were other web startups. These companies wanted more traffic, and they knew ads on sites like Yahoo were the best way to get it. Yahoo salespeople could then turn around and point to their exponential ad sales curves, which caused Yahoo stock to rise. This encouraged people to fund more web startups, which would all need to advertise on Yahoo. These new startups also needed to buy servers from companies like Sun Microsystems, causing those stocks to rise as well. The crash In the latter half of the 1990s, it looked like everything was going great. The economy was booming, thanks in part to the rise of the World Wide Web and the huge boost it gave to computer hardware and software companies. The NASDAQ index of tech-focused stocks painted a clear picture of the boom. The NASDAQ composite index in the 1990s. Credit: Jeremy Reimer Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan called this phenomenon “irrational exuberance” but didn’t seem to be in a hurry to stop it. The fact that most new web startups didn’t have a realistic business model didn’t seem to bother investors. Sure, WebVan might have been paying more to deliver groceries than they earned from customers, but look at that growth curve! The exuberance couldn’t last forever. The NASDAQ peaked at 8,843.87 in February 2000 and started to go down. In one month, it lost 34 percent of its value, and by August 2001, it was down to 3,253.38. Web companies laid off employees or went out of business completely. The party was over. Andreessen said that the tech crash scarred him. “The overwhelming message to our generation in the early nineties was ‘You’re dirty, you’re all about grunge—you guys are fucking losers!’ Then the tech boom hit, and it was ‘We are going to do amazing things!’ And then the roof caved in, and the wisdom was that the Internet was a mirage. I 100 percent believed that because the rejection was so personal—both what everybody thought of me and what I thought of myself.” But while some companies quietly celebrated the end of the whole Internet thing, others would rise from the ashes of the dot-com collapse. That’s the subject of our third and final article. 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

Intel Core Ultra 400 processors for desktops and laptops should arrive with their Nova Lake codename, following Panther Lake. Nova Lake is a codename for future generations of Intel processors for desktop PCs and laptops, following the usual "Lake" pattern as its predecessors. Meteor Lake represented a shift to a new naming system for Intel chips, which began with Core Ultra Series 1 mobile processors, including the Core Ultra 7 155H found in HP's highly rated Spectre x360 14 (2024) laptop. Now, Arrow Lake covers the current generation of Core Ultra Series 2 desktop processors, such as the efficiency-focused Core Ultra 9 285K, while Lunar Lake is the codename for its mobile counterparts, like the Core Ultra 7 258V in the phenomenal HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 (2024) laptop. So far, everything I know about Nova Lake is based on speculation, leaks, and rumors, aside from a confirmation from Intel regarding its codename. Still, this future generation will likely follow upcoming Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" mobile processors, with Intel positioning Nova Lake as Core Ultra Series 4. Intel's Arc graphics in Nova Lake-S (desktop) processors are rumored (according to reliable leaker @jaykihn0 on X) to use a combination of next-generation Xe3 (codenamed Celestial) and its future successor Xe4 (Druid) tiles on the system-on-chip (SoC), the former handling real-time graphics rendering and the latter dedicated to display and media. The remaining mobile processors are rumored (by InstLatX64 on X) to be Nova Lake-U for low-power devices, Nova Lake-H for high performance , and Nova Lake-HX for maximum performance enthusiast devices, usually gaming laptops. Otherwise, Nova Lake-S and Nova Lake-SK represent desktop PCs, which could shift to a new socket, despite Core Ultra Series 2 recently adopting LGA1851, but there isn't any concrete evidence in one way or the other. As more information develops, this page will update to reflect confirmations or disprovals of previous rumors, and coverage of any new information. When is Nova Lake launching? Intel Nova Lake processors are rumored to launch in 2026. 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

Fresh data for 2024 reveals that while overall pirate site traffic dipped to 216 billion visits, the landscape is shifting dramatically. Publishing piracy is booming, largely driven by an insatiable global demand for manga. In stark contrast, both music and film piracy have tanked. Despite these changes, the United States remains the top traffic source for pirate sites. Despite the widespread availability of legal options, online piracy remains rampant. Every day, pirate sites are visited hundreds of millions of times. Website visits are only part of the full piracy picture, as IPTV streaming is popular too. Nonetheless, traffic trends can provide valuable insight, especially when there are clear divergences across content categories. 216 Billion & America First Fresh data released by piracy tracking outfit MUSO shows that pirate sites remain popular. In a report released today, MUSO reveals that there were 216 billion pirate site visits globally in 2024, a slight decrease compared to the 229 billion visits recorded a year earlier. TV piracy remains by far the most popular category, representing over 44.6% of all website visits. This is followed by the publishing category with 30.7%, with film, software and music all at a respectable distance. Piracy by Category Pirate site visitors originate from all over the world, but one country stands tall above all the rest: America. The United States remains the top driver of pirate site traffic accounting for more than 12% of all traffic globally, good for 26.7 billion visits in 2024. India has been steadily climbing the ranks for years and currently sits in second place with 17.6 billion annual visits, with Russia, Indonesia, and Vietnam completing the top five. Visits per country As a country with one of the largest populations worldwide, it’s not a complete surprise that the U.S. tops the list. If we counted visits per internet user, Canada and Ukraine would top the list. Manga Piracy Booms While pirate site visits dipped by more than 5% in 2024, one category saw substantial growth. Visits to publishing-related pirate sites increased 4.3% from 63.6 to 66.4 billion. The increase is largely driven by the popularity of manga, which accounts for more than 70% of all publishing piracy. Traditional book piracy, meanwhile, is stuck at 5%. The publishing piracy boom is relatively new. Over the past five years, the category grew by more than 100% while the overall number of global pirate site visits remained relatively flat. Publishing piracy growth Looking at the global demand, we see that the U.S. also leads the charge here, followed by Indonesia and Russia. Notably, Japan, the home of manga, ranks fifth in the publishing category. This stands out because Japan is not listed in the global top 15 in terms of total pirate site visits. Music & Film Piracy Tank In the other content categories, MUSO’s data shows a dip in pirate site visits. The changes are relatively modest for TV (-6.8%) and software (-2.1%) but the same isn’t true for the music and film categories. In 2024, there were 18% fewer visits for pirated movies compared to a year earlier. MUSO notes that this is due to a “lighter blockbuster calendar” which reduced piracy peaks. “The drop in demand is as much about what wasn’t released as it is about access,” the report explains. The music category saw a 19% decline in piracy visits year over year, with a more uplifting explanation for rightsholders. According to MUSO, the drop can be partly attributed to “secure app ecosystems” and the “wide adoption of licensed platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.” Piracy Leads The Way MUSO’s business model is to market these piracy data to rightsholders so they can use piracy as a market signal. Piracy is not necessarily triggered by unavailability; legal channels, pricing, and fragmentation are also key drivers. “Piracy continues to reveal unmet demand: where audiences want content, but legal channels are too slow, too fragmented, or too expensive,” the company explains in a blog post. There’s also a more practical application for the piracy data. Since MUSO tracks which pirate sites are most popular, rightsholders can use the data for their site blocking efforts. “With monthly updated insights at the country and category level, alongside access to site-level intelligence, our data empowers rightsholders, regulators, and ISPs to prioritize action where it has the most impact,” MUSO writes. Whether blocking access will stop people from trying to find piracy alternatives is up for debate. Perhaps pirate site blocking plans in the U.S. will provide more insight, if they come to fruition. —- A copy of MUSO’s 2024 Piracy Trends and Insights report can be requested through the official website. 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

Android 16 is now available for select phones today. Here are the features we're most excited about. Another year, another version of Google’s mobile operating system. Android 16 brings a whole new look (Apple also just announced a redesign in iOS 26), more customization options, some chunky security enhancements, and a few welcome accessibility improvements. Android 16 is rolling out to select devices today—these are the new features that caught our eye. Google officially ditched the delicious dessert names for Android years ago with Android 10, but it still uses them internally. Android 15 was Vanilla Ice Cream, and Android 16 is codenamed Baklava. When Is Android 16 Arriving for Your Phone? The official release date for Android 16 is June 10. This release is earlier than usual (last year’s release was September), and Google has already scheduled another “minor” release, maybe Android 16.1, for the last quarter of 2025. The developer preview of Android 16 was first released in November 2024, and Google dropped beta releases in January, February, March, and April 2025. Google's Pixel phones always get the new Android version first, but Android 16 is also coming to select devices from Honor, iQOO, Lenovo, Motorola, Nothing, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Samsung, Sony, Sharp, Vivo, and Xiaomi in the coming months. Check your phone manufacturer's website, forums, or social media to learn when (if ever) to expect Android 16. How to Download and Install Android 16 Folks with a Google Pixel phone (Pixel 6 and newer) can download Android 16 by going to Settings > System > Software updates > System update and tapping Check for update. If you can't wait, you may be able to install the Android 16 Beta. These pre-release versions enable developers to test the forthcoming version of Google’s mobile operating system, learn about the new features, and prepare their apps or games to work properly. They also give early adopters the chance to get a sneak peek. Beta releases are more stable than developer previews, but some bugs are likely, and there are a few hoops to jump through to install them, so it’s not recommended for everyone. If you want to try it, you need a supported partner device (including select phones from Honor, Oppo, OnePlus, and Xiaomi), and you must sign up for the Android Beta Program. Most folks who sign up will get the beta updates OTA (over-the-air) without wiping their phones, but you can’t opt out of the beta program without factory resetting your phone. Make sure you back up your Android phone first. Updates usually pop up automatically, but you can always check whether you have the latest version in Settings > System > System update by tapping Check for update. Want to get off the beta and go back to Android 15? Go to Google's Android Beta page, scroll down to find your device, and hit Opt out. This will wipe all locally saved data, so you'll lose anything you haven’t backed up. You should get a prompt to return to the older version. Top Android 16 Features These are the features and improvements coming in Android 16 we're most excited about. You can learn more at Google’s developer site, and make sure to read our interview with Google’s Android chief about his hopes for the platform. Live Updates Google is introducing real-time tracking into your Android notifications for services, like food delivery and navigation. Instead of having to open up the relevant app, you’ll see live updates in the notification showing when your Uber will arrive or what turn to take next if you’re traveling somewhere using directions. These Live Updates will be the top notification and also appear on the Always-on Display, so you can see at a glance when your food will arrive via an app like DoorDash. Pull down to expand the notification, and you’ll see a progress bar and quick links to actions, such as the option to call or message the driver. Similar to Live Activities in Apple’s iOS, Live Updates may be implemented slightly differently by each manufacturer. Samsung apparently plans to roll Live Updates into its Now Bar that sits at the bottom of the lock screen, while OnePlus will integrate them into its existing Live Alerts system. Advanced Protection Mode This new extra-secure mode in Android 16 is for at-risk folks, like public figures, journalists, and activists, who need extra protection for their digital lives. Google’s Advanced Protection already exists for Google accounts, but now extends to Android 16, imposing tough security settings on apps and services to keep your data safe. It includes checks on memory to block exploits, USB protection, and guards against unsafe websites and spam calls and messages. A later release will add intrusion detection by keeping a permanent end-to-end encrypted log from your device in the cloud, which can be shared and analyzed by a security expert if you suspect there’s a problem. AI-Powered Scam Detection Sadly, fraud is big business. Most folks have seen a scam on their phone at some point, whether disguised as tech support, a prize, or a crypto investment opportunity. Google is using on-device AI to spot scam texts with the Scam Detection feature in Google Messages. It runs locally on-device, so no message content is shared, and shows a pop-up warning to folks when it discovers a suspected scam, warning them of the risk and offering the opportunity to report and block the scammer. Some permissions will also be blocked during phone calls, so scammers can no longer walk people through the process to sideload a malicious app. Medical Records Health Connect enables different health, fitness, and wellbeing apps to share data covering your health in certain categories (Activity, Body Measurement, Cycle Tracking, Nutrition, Sleep, and Vitals). Google is now adding support for Electronic Health Records (EHRs) using the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard widely used by healthcare providers. It’s unclear exactly how this will work or what data it will include, but it may make sharing health records easier. Auracast Broadcast Support As one of the newest Bluetooth features, Auracast enables audio streaming to hearing aids and other supported devices in public spaces. Several people can use it to connect to the same audio stream simultaneously and get audio from TVs in public spaces like the gym, for example, or stream audio directly to hearing aids at a public concert. Android 16 supports broadcasting, so you can go to Settings > Connected devices > Audio sharing and choose to share audio from your device with nearby devices that support Bluetooth LE Audio, which includes Auracast. Better Support for Bigger Screens While some apps restrict resizing and screen orientation, Google is removing this default capability in Android 16. Every app should now adapt to different screen sizes and aspect ratios, including tablets and folding phones. Google also wants developers to ensure that app content is displayed edge to edge. Hide Sensitive Notifications Google is redacting content in sensitive notifications, such as One-Time Passwords (OTPs), when it detects the potential risk of someone else seeing the notification. This might be if you are not connected to your home Wi-Fi and haven’t unlocked your phone in a while. More Legible Text For folks with low vision and reduced contrast sensitivity, Google is detecting text that might be an issue and drawing a high-contrast color box underneath it to ensure the text is as legible as possible. LE Audio Hearing Aids Features There are a couple of notable new features for folks using Bluetooth LE Audio hearing aids with Android 16. First is the option to switch between the built-in microphones on the hearing aids and the microphone on your phone for voice calls. Second is the ability to adjust the ambient sound volume picked up by your hearing aid's microphones. Both could prove helpful in noisy environments with a lot of background noise. Enhanced Camera for Pro Photographers Google is pushing a host of small camera improvements in Android 16 for keen photographers. There’s hybrid auto exposure, allowing a balance of automatic and manual ISO and exposure control, precise color temperature and tint adjustments, better night mode support for apps, and support for Ultra HDR images in the HEIC file format. Google is also adding the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec for higher-quality video recording and post-processing. Windowing Apps Have you ever wished Android was more like Windows? Support for desktop windowing, enabling you to run multiple apps simultaneously, is in the works. Multitaskers will be able to resize windows, and the new feature will work seamlessly with split screen (just like the new iPadOS 26!). Google is also adding connected display support, so you can attach an external display to your Android device and discover the joys of a dual screen setup. Currently part of the developer preview, this won't come to your Android tablet until later this year. Fresh Design The latest evolution of Google’s Android design language is Material 3 Expressive. While it’s not a complete overhaul, it is giving Android a facelift with fresh new animations, better haptic feedback, more dynamic color themes, impactful fonts, and more chances to personalize your Android device. Google has done its homework, drawing on 46 studies with more than 18,000 participants to make changes that people of all ages approved. Before you get too excited, Material 3 Expressive won’t be part of the June release, instead rolling out on Pixel phones first, later this year, and then on other Android devices. Impatient folks may get a sneak peek by signing up for the Android Beta Program. 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

Company is moving past focus on qubits, shifting to functional compute units. On Tuesday, IBM released its plans for building a system that should push quantum computing into entirely new territory: a system that can both perform useful calculations while catching and fixing errors and be utterly impossible to model using classical computing methods. The hardware, which will be called Starling, is expected to be able to perform 100 million operations without error on a collection of 200 logical qubits. And the company expects to have it available for use in 2029. Perhaps just as significant, IBM is also committing to a detailed description of the intermediate steps to Starling. These include a number of processors that will be configured to host a collection of error-corrected qubits, essentially forming a functional compute unit. This marks a major transition for the company, as it involves moving away from talking about collections of individual hardware qubits and focusing instead on units of functional computational hardware. If all goes well, it should be possible to build Starling by chaining a sufficient number of these compute units together. "We're updating [our roadmap] now with a series of deliverables that are very precise," IBM VP Jay Gambetta told Ars, "because we feel that we've now answered basically all the science questions associated with error correction and it's becoming more of a path towards an engineering problem." New architectures Error correction on quantum hardware involves entangling a group of qubits in a way that distributes one or more quantum bit values among them and includes additional qubits that can be used to check the state of the system. It can be helpful to think of these as data and measurement qubits. Performing weak quantum measurements on the measurement qubits produces what's called "syndrome data," which can be interpreted to determine whether anything about the data qubits has changed (indicating an error) and how to correct it. There are lots of potential ways to arrange different combinations of data and measurement qubits for this to work, each referred to as a code. But, as a general rule, the more hardware qubits committed to the code, the more robust it will be to errors, and the more logical qubits that can be distributed among its hardware qubits. Some quantum hardware, like that based on trapped ions or neutral atoms, is relatively flexible when it comes to hosting error-correction codes. The hardware qubits can be moved around so that any two can be entangled, so it's possible to adopt a huge range of configurations, albeit at the cost of the time spent moving atoms around. IBM's technology is quite different. It relies on qubits made of superconducting electronics laid out on a chip, with entanglement mediated by wiring that runs between qubits. The layout of this wiring is set during the chip's manufacture, and so the chip's design commits it to a limited number of potential error-correction codes. Unfortunately, this wiring can also enable crosstalk between neighboring qubits, causing them to lose their state. To avoid this, existing IBM processors have their qubits wired in what they term a "heavy hex" configuration, named for its hexagonal arrangements of connections among its qubits. This has worked well to keep the error rate of its hardware down, but it also poses a challenge, since IBM has decided to go with an error-correction code that's incompatible with the heavy hex geometry. A couple of years back, an IBM team described a compact error correction code called a low-density parity check (LDPC). This requires a square grid of nearest-neighbor connections among its qubits, as well as wiring to connect qubits that are relatively distant on the chip. To get its chips and error-correction scheme in sync, IBM has made two key advances. The first is in its chip packaging, which now uses several layers of wiring sitting above the hardware qubits to enable all of the connections needed for the LDPC code. We'll see that first in a processor called Loon that's on the company's developmental roadmap. "We've already demonstrated these three things: high connectivity, long-range couplers, and couplers that break the plane [of the chip] and connect to other qubits," Gambetta said. "We have to combine them all as a single demonstration showing that all these parts of packaging can be done, and that's what I want to achieve with Loon." Loon will be made public later this year. On the left, the simple layout of the connections in a current-generation Heron processor. At right, the complicated web of connections that will be present in Loon. Credit: IBM The second advance IBM has made is to eliminate the crosstalk that the heavy hex geometry was used to minimize, so heavy hex will be going away. "We are releasing this year a bird for near-term experiments that is a square array that has almost zero crosstalk," Gambetta said, "and that is Nighthawk." The more densely connected qubits cut the overhead needed to perform calculations by a factor of 15, Gambetta told Ars. Nighthawk is a 2025 release on a parallel roadmap that you can think of as user-facing. Iterations on its basic design will be released annually through 2028, each enabling more operations without error (going from 5,000 gate operations this year to 15,000 in 2028). Each individual Nighthawk processor will host 120 hardware qubits, but 2026 will see three of them chained together and operating as a unit, providing 360 hardware qubits. That will be followed in 2027 by a machine with nine linked Nighthawk processors, boosting the hardware qubit number over 1,000. Riding the bicycle The real future of IBM's hardware, however, will be happening over on the developmental line of processors, where talk about hardware qubit counts will become increasingly irrelevant. In a technical document released today, IBM is describing the specific LDPC code it will be using, termed a bivariate bicycle code due to some cylindrical symmetries in its details that vaguely resemble bicycle wheels. The details of the connections matter less than the overall picture of what it takes to use this error code in practice. IBM describes two implementations of this form of LDPC code. In the first, 144 hardware qubits are arranged so that they play host to 12 logical qubits and all of the measurement qubits needed to perform error checks. The standard measure of a code's ability to catch and correct errors is called its distance, and in this case, the distance is 12. As an alternative, they also describe a code that uses 288 hardware qubits to host the same 12 logical qubits but boost the distance to 18, meaning it's more resistant to errors. IBM will make one of these collections of logical qubits available as a Kookaburra processor in 2026, which will use them to enable stable quantum memory. The follow-on will bundle these with a handful of additional qubits that can produce quantum states that are needed for some operations. Those, plus hardware needed for the quantum memory, form a single, functional computation unit, built on a single chip, that is capable of performing all the operations needed to implement any quantum algorithm. That will appear with the Cockatoo chip, which will also enable multiple processing units to be linked on a single bus, allowing the logical qubit count to grow beyond 12. (The company says that one of the dozen logical qubits in each unit will be used to mediate entanglement with other units and so won't be available for computation.) That will be followed by the first test versions of Starling, which will allow universal computations on a limited number of logical qubits spread across multiple chips. Separately, IBM is releasing a document that describes a key component of the system that will run on classical computing hardware. Full error correction requires evaluating the syndrome data derived from the state of all the measurement qubits in order to determine the state of the logical qubits and whether any corrections need to be made. As the complexity of the logical qubits grows, the computational burden of evaluating grows with it. If this evaluation can't be executed in real time, then it becomes impossible to perform error-corrected calculations. To address this, IBM has developed a message-passing decoder that can perform parallel evaluations of the syndrome data. The system explores more of the solution space by a combination of randomizing the weight given to the memory of past solutions and by handing any seemingly non-optimal solutions on to new instances for additional evaluation. The key thing is that IBM estimates that this can be run in real time using FPGAs, ensuring that the system works. A quantum architecture There are a lot more details beyond those, as well. Gambetta described the linkage between each computational unit—IBM is calling it a Universal Bridge—which requires one microwave cable for each code distance of the logical qubits being linked. (In other words, a distance 12 code would need 12 microwave-carrying cables to connect each chip.) He also said that IBM is developing control hardware that can operate inside the refrigeration hardware, based on what they're calling "cold CMOS," which is capable of functioning at 4 Kelvin. The company is also releasing renderings of what it expects Starling to look like: a series of dilution refrigerators, all connected by a single pipe that contains the Universal Bridge. "It's an architecture now," Gambetta said. "I have never put details in the roadmap that I didn't feel we could hit, and now we're putting a lot more details." The striking thing to me about this is that it marks a shift away from a focus on individual qubits, their connectivity, and their error rates. The error hardware rates are now good enough (4 x 10-4) for this to work, although Gambetta felt that a few more improvements should be expected. And connectivity will now be directed exclusively toward creating a functional computational unit. That said, there's still a lot of space beyond Starling on IBM's roadmap. The 200 logical qubits it promises will be enough to handle some problems, but not enough to perform the complex algorithms needed to do things like break encryption. That will need to wait for something closer to Blue Jay, a 2033 system that IBM expects will have 2,000 logical qubits. And, as of right now, it's the only thing listed beyond Starling. 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

NB.1.8.1 has mutations that could increase the virus’s transmissibility and decrease the efficacy of certain neutralizing antibodies against it. A new Covid variant is being kept under surveillance by the World Health Organization (WHO) as its emergence has led to an increase in infections in several regions of the world. First identified at the end of January, the variant—called NB.1.8.1 but known informally as “Nimbus”—is a descendant of the Omicron family of Covid sublineages, and has become increasingly prevalent throughout the spring in Europe, the Americas, and the Western Pacific. The virus has mutations that may increase its infectiousness and allow it to escape certain antibodies. Nevertheless, “considering the available evidence, the additional public health risk posed by NB.1.8.1 is evaluated as low at the global level,” the WHO wrote in its most recent risk evaluation for the variant. Like other variants before it, Nimbus has specific mutations to its spike protein. These proteins coat the virus’s surface and are what it uses to gain entry into cells, where it reproduces. Nimbus’ spike protein modifications could increase its transmission capacity and partially reduce the neutralizing efficacy of certain antibodies generated by previous infections, both of which would contribute to its spread. However, the WHO says that there is no evidence that this variant causes more severe disease compared to other strains currently circulating. Nor have increases in hospitalizations or deaths related to its emergence been observed. Symptoms associated with NB.1.8.1 are similar to those caused by other SARS-CoV-2 variants: sore throat, cough, fatigue, fever, muscle aches, loss of taste or smell, respiratory distress, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. The WHO experts explain that, although this variant may partially evade some antibody responses, such “immune escape” is comparable to that observed in other Omicron sublineages. This suggests that the mutations present in NB.1.8.1 do not give the virus increased resistance to antivirals such as nirmatrelvir, and that current vaccines continue to be effective in preventing severe disease when infected with this version of the virus. However, to those most vulnerable to Covid—such as the elderly, immunocompromised, or those with preexisting chronic conditions—Nimbus represents a new health threat, and these groups should stay up to date with booster vaccinations to ensure they are protected against Covid’s worst effects. This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish. 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 British government announced today that it will allow limited self-driving pilots on UK roads as early as next year. Uber and British AV firm Wayve are gearing up. Slow and steady. When it comes to autonomous vehicles on city roads, that’s been the approach in most of the world’s countries. But on Tuesday, the UK announced it would put a cautious foot on the pedal, when the Department of Transport said it would accelerate plans to allow companies to operate self-driving cars on public roads in limited pilot programs starting spring of next year. The British government had initially planned to open up its roads for self-driving vehicles more than a year later, in the second half of 2027. “We can see what a massive economic opportunity this technology presents,” Transport secretary Heidi Alexander tells WIRED in an interview. The department estimates the autonomous vehicle industry will create 38,000 jobs and generate 42 billion pounds ($57 million US) for the country by 2035. The secretary also cites better and more efficient travel options and road safety as motivators behind the country’s new timeline. “We know how hard companies are working on issues related to safety, and we don't want to sit around waiting for this technology to develop further,” she says. The pilot phase of the country’s autonomous vehicle deployments will include a limited number of vehicles, says Transport Department spokesperson Marco Barbato, and the government will spend about a year studying the data those vehicles produce. The government aims to allow companies to fully launch autonomous taxi services in the second half of 2027. Still, UK government officials say they will prioritize safety. “We won’t allow this technology to be deployed on our roads unless we are confident that really rigorous safety tests have been met,” Alexander says. Major transportation players appeared poised to take advantage of the government’s announcement. The British autonomous vehicle developer Wayve and US ride-hail giant Uber said Tuesday that they would partner to take advantage of the government's new plan by launching autonomous vehicle trials on London roads. London will be a tricky place to operate self-driving cars, Wayve CEO and cofounder Alex Kendall says. “This is not Phoenix, Arizona—it’s not a grid-like city in the desert where the sun always shines,” he says. (Waymo began its self-driving taxi service in Phoenix.) London, by contrast, “is a medieval, structured environment. It has seven times more jaywalkers than San Francisco.” Launching service in London will help Wayve prove how "scalable and trusted” its autonomous tech can be, he says. Kendall declined to say when Uber and Wayve might launch their service. Wayve's various autonomous vehicles. Courtesy of Wayve Wayve will become Uber’s latest partner in its all-of-the-above approach to autonomous vehicle tech. Customers can use the Uber app to order an autonomous vehicle from the Google subsidiary Waymo in Austin, Texas, and soon, Atlanta, Georgia. Volkswagen subsidiary Moia said it aims to have thousands of self-driving vehicles operating on the Uber network in the next decade. Uber is working with Hyundai-linked robotaxi company Motional to test autonomous technology in Las Vegas, and has inked a deal with WeRide to bring autonomous vehicles to the UAE. And Uber has a nearly 25 percent stake in the autonomous trucking tech firm Aurora, after selling its own self-driving unit to the company in 2020. “Our vision is to make autonomy a safe and reliable option for riders everywhere, and this trial in London brings that future closer to reality,” Uber president and COO Andrew Macdonald said in a written statement. Several other companies are developing and planning to test autonomous vehicles in the UK, even before the government announced its accelerated timeline. Autonomous vehicle software developer Oxa has trialed its tech in Oxford and London, though plans to apply its tech to transit and industrial contexts, including mining and ports. (“We’re everything but taxis and personal transport,” Oxa founder Paul Newman said recently.) The Israeli company Mobileye has tested collision avoidance technology on London buses. Another British firm, Birmingham-based Cognital, announced its liquidation due to “funding issues” earlier this year. A handful of companies are experimenting with autonomous vehicle technologies in Europe, though none yet have the commercialized robotaxi services found in the US and China. But despite the UK’s push, Uber and Wayve may not be alone in Europe for long. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the Chinese company Baidu is in talks to launch a robotaxi service in Switzerland. 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