Mark Zuckerberg is testifying in a landmark Los Angeles trial examining whether Meta and other social media firms can be held liable for designing platforms that allegedly addict and harm children. NBC News reports: It's the first of a consolidated group of cases -- from more than 1,600 plaintiffs, including over 350 families and over 250 school districts -- scheduled to be argued before a jury in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Plaintiffs accuse the owners of Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Snap of knowingly designing addictive products harmful to young users' mental health. Historically, social media platforms have been largely shielded by Section 230, a provision added to the Communications Act of 1934, that says internet companies are not liable for content users post. TikTok and Snap reached settlements with the first plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman identified in court as K.G.M., ahead of the trial. The companies remain defendants in a series of similar lawsuits expected to go to trial this year.

[...] Matt Bergman, founding attorney of Social Media Victims Law Center -- which is representing about 750 plaintiffs in the California proceeding and about 500 in the federal proceeding -- called Wednesday's testimony "more than a legal milestone -- it is a moment that families across this country have been waiting for." "For the first time, a Meta CEO will have to sit before a jury, under oath, and explain why the company released a product its own safety teams warned were addictive and harmful to children," Bergman said in a statement Tuesday, adding that the moment "carries profound weight" for parents "who have spent years fighting to be heard." "They deserve the truth about what company executives knew," he said. "And they deserve accountability from the people who chose growth and engagement over the safety of their children."

Google is bringing its Lyria 3 AI music model into the Gemini app, allowing users to generate 30-second songs from text, images, or video prompts directly within the chatbot. The Verge reports: Lyria 3's text-to-music capabilities allow Gemini app users to make songs by describing specific genres, moods, or memories, such as asking for an "Afrobeat track for my mother about the great times we had growing up." The music generator can make instrumental audio and songs with lyrics composed automatically based on user prompts. Users can also upload photographs and video references, which Gemini then uses to generate a track with lyrics that fit the vibe.

"The goal of these tracks isn't to create a musical masterpiece, but rather to give you a fun, unique way to express yourself," Google said in its announcement blog. Gemini will add custom cover art generated by Nano Banana to songs created on the app, which aims to make them easier to share and download. Google is also bringing Lyria 3 to YouTube's Dream Track tool, which allows creators to make custom AI soundtracks for Shorts.

Dream Track and Lyria were initially demonstrated with the ability to mimic the style and voice of famous performers. Google says it's been "very mindful" of copyright in the development of Lyria 3 and that the tool "is designed for original expression, not for mimicking existing artists." When prompted for a specific artist, Gemini will make a track that "shares a similar style or mood" and uses filters to check outputs against existing content.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For a while now, Mac owners have been able to use tools like CrossOver and Game Porting Toolkit to get many Windows games running on their operating system of choice. Now, GameSir plans to add its own potential solution to the mix, announcing that a version of its existing Windows emulation tool for Android will be coming to macOS. Hong Kong-based GameSir has primarily made a name for itself as a manufacturer of gaming peripherals -- the company's social media profile includes a self-description as "the Anti-Stick Drift Experts." Early last year, though, GameSir rolled out the Android GameHub app, which includes a GameFusion emulator that the company claims "provides complete support for Windows games to run on Android through high-precision compatibility design."

In practice, GameHub and GameFusion for Android haven't quite lived up to that promise. Testers on Reddit and sites like EmuReady report hit-or-miss compatibility for popular Steam titles on various Android-based handhelds. At least one Reddit user suggests that "any Unity, Godot, or Game Maker game tends to just work" through the app, while another reports "terrible compatibility" across a wide range of games. With Sunday's announcement, GameSir promises a similar opportunity to "unlock your entire Steam library" and "run Win games/Steam natively" on Mac will be "coming soon." GameSir is also promising "proprietary AI frame interpolation" for the Mac, following the recent rollout of a "native rendering mode" that improved frame rates on the Android version. There are some "reasons to worry" though, based on the company's uneven track record. The Android version faced controversy for including invasive tracking components, which were later removed after criticism. There were also questions about the use of open-source code, as GameSir acknowledged referencing and using UI components from Winlator, even while maintaining that its core compatibility layer was developed in-house.

TP-Link is facing legal action from the state of Texas for allegedly misleading consumers with "Made in Vietnam" claims despite China-dominated manufacturing and supply chains, and for marketing its devices as secure despite reported firmware vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored actors. The Register: The Lone Star State's Attorney General, Ken Paxton, is filing the lawsuit against California-based TP-Link Systems Inc., which was originally founded in China, accusing it of deceptively marketing its networking devices and alleging that its security practices and China-based affiliations allowed Chinese state-sponsored actors to access devices in the homes of American consumers.

It is understood that this is just the first of several lawsuits that the Office of the Attorney General intends to file this week against "China-aligned companies," as part of a coordinated effort to hold China accountable under Texas law. The lawsuit claims that TP-Link is the dominant player in the US networking and smart home market, controlling 65 percent of the American market for network devices.

It also alleges that TP-Link represents to American consumers that the devices it markets and sells within the US are manufactured in Vietnam, and that consistent with this, the devices it sells in the American market carry a "Made in Vietnam" sticker.

A study of more than 12,000 European firms found that AI adoption causally increases labour productivity by 4% on average across the EU, and that it does so without reducing employment in the short run.

Researchers from the Bank for International Settlements and the European Investment Bank used an instrumental variable strategy that matched EU firms to comparable US firms by sector, size, investment intensity and other characteristics, then used the AI adoption rates of those US counterparts as a proxy for exogenous AI exposure among European firms.

The productivity gains, however, skewed heavily toward medium and large companies. Among large firms, 45% had deployed AI, compared to just 24% of small firms. The study also found that complementary investments mattered enormously: an extra percentage point of spending on workforce training amplified AI's productivity effect by 5.9%, and an extra point on software and data infrastructure added 2.4%.

Cleveland.com, the digital arm of Ohio's Plain Dealer newspaper, has removed writing from the workloads of certain reporters and handed that job to what editor Chris Quinn calls an "AI rewrite specialist" who turns reporter-gathered material into article drafts.

The reporters on these beats -- covering Lorain, Lake, Geauga, and most recently Medina County -- are assigned entirely to reporting, spending their time on in-person interviews and meeting sources for coffee. Editors review the AI-produced drafts and reporters get the final say before publication.

Quinn says the arrangement has effectively freed up an extra workday per week for each reporter. The newsroom adopted this model last year to expand local coverage into counties it could no longer staff with full teams, and Quinn described the setup in a February 14 letter after a college journalism student withdrew from a reporting role over the newsroom's use of AI. Quinn blamed journalism schools for the student's reaction, saying professors have repeatedly told students that AI is bad.

Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and longtime Universal Basic Income advocate, published a blog post this week warning that AI is about to displace millions of white-collar workers in the U.S. over the next 12 to 18 months, a wave he has taken to calling "the Fuckening."

Yang cited a conversation with the CEO of a publicly traded tech company who said the firm is cutting 15% of its workforce now and plans another 20% cut in two years, followed by yet another 20% two years after that. The U.S. currently has about 70 million white-collar workers, and Yang expects that number to fall by 20 to 50% over the next several years.

Underemployment among recent college graduates has already hit 52%, and only 30% of graduating seniors have landed a job in their field. Yang's proposed remedy remains the same one he ran on in 2020: Universal Basic Income.

Linus Torvalds has told The Register how Linux went from a solo hobby project on a single 386 PC in Helsinki to a genuinely collaborative effort, and the path involved crowdsourced checks, an FTP mirror at MIT, and a licensing decision that opened the floodgates.

Torvalds released the first public snapshot, Linux 0.02, on October 5, 1991, on a Finnish FTP server -- about 10,000 lines of code that he had cross-compiled under Minix. He originally wanted to call it "Freax," but his friend Ari Lemmke, who set up the server, named the directory "Linux" instead. Early contributor Theodore Ts'o set up the first North American mirror on his VAXstation at MIT, since the sole 64 kbps link between Finland and the US made downloads painful. That mirror gave developers on this side of the Atlantic their first practical access to the kernel.

Another early developer, Dirk Hohndel, recalled that Torvalds initially threw away incoming patches and reimplemented them from scratch -- a habit he eventually dropped because it did not scale. When Torvalds could not afford to upgrade his underpowered 386, developer H. Peter Anvin collected checks from contributors through his university mailbox and wired the funds to Finland, covering the international banking fees himself. Torvalds got a 486DX/2. In 1992, he moved the kernel to the GPL, and the first full distributions appeared in 1992-1993, turning Linux from a kernel into installable systems.

An anonymous reader writes:

Electric buses are proving unreliable this winter for Vermont's Green Mountain Transit, as it needs to be over 41 degrees for the buses to charge, but due to a battery recall the buses are a fire hazard and can't be charged in a garage.

Spokesman for energy workers advocacy group Power the Future Larry Behrens told the Center Square: "Taxpayers were sold an $8 million 'solution' that can't operate in cold weather when the home for these buses is in New England."

"We're beyond the point where this looks like incompetence and starts to smell like fraud," Behrens said.

"When government rushes money out the door to satisfy green mandates, basic questions about performance, safety, and value for taxpayers are always pushed aside," Behrens said. "Americans deserve to know who approved this purchase and why the red flags were ignored."

General manager at Green Mountain Transit (GMT) Clayton Clark told The Center Square that "the federal government provides public transit agencies with new buses through a competitive grant application process, and success is not a given."

Microsoft says a Microsoft 365 Copilot bug has been causing the AI assistant to summarize confidential emails since late January, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies that organizations rely on to protect sensitive information. From a report: According to a service alert seen by BleepingComputer, this bug (tracked under CW1226324 and first detected on January 21) affects the Copilot "work tab" chat feature, which incorrectly reads and summarizes emails stored in users' Sent Items and Drafts folders, including messages that carry confidentiality labels explicitly designed to restrict access by automated tools.

Copilot Chat (short for Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat) is the company's AI-powered, content-aware chat that lets users interact with AI agents. Microsoft began rolling out Copilot Chat to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote for paying Microsoft 365 business customers in September 2025.

Ring's AI-powered "Search Party" feature, which links neighborhood cameras into a networked surveillance system to find lost dogs, was never intended to stop at pets, according to an internal email from founder Jamie Siminoff obtained by 404 Media.

Siminoff told employees in early October, shortly after the feature launched, that Search Party was introduced "first for finding dogs" and that the technology would eventually help "zero out crime in neighborhoods." The on-by-default feature faced intense backlash after Ring promoted it during a Super Bowl ad. Ring has since also rolled out "Familiar Faces," a facial recognition tool that identifies friends and family on a user's camera, and "Fire Watch," an AI-based fire alert system.

A Ring spokesperson told the publication Search Party does not process human biometrics or track people.

WordPress has started rolling out an AI assistant built into its site editor and media library that can edit and translate text, generate and edit images through Google's Nano Banana model, and make structural changes to sites like creating new pages or swapping fonts.

Users can also invoke the assistant by tagging "@ai" in block notes, a commenting feature added to the site editor in December's WordPress 6.9 update. The tool is opt-in -- users need to toggle on "AI tools" in their site settings -- though sites originally created using WordPress's AI website builder, launched last year, will have it enabled by default.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2013, scientists unveiled the first lab-grown burger at a cost of $330,000. By 2023, the FDA approved cultivated chicken for sale. The price had dropped to around $10-$30 per pound, and over $3 billion in investor money had poured into more than 175 companies developing meat grown from animal cells instead of slaughtered animals.

The promise is straightforward: real meat, no slaughter required. You could eat beef without killing cattle, chicken without industrial farming, steak without ethical compromise. The technology works. Federal regulators approved it as safe. And nearly a third of US states have banned it or are trying to. Not because it's dangerous -- because it threatens something deeper than food safety.

Start with a small sample of animal cells -- a biopsy, not a slaughter. Place them in a bioreactor with nutrients. The cells multiply, forming muscle tissue identical to conventional meat at the cellular level. Nutritionally comparable, same protein content, but grown without raising and killing an animal.

The process uses 64-90% less land than conventional meat production and drastically reduces greenhouse gas emissions. No factory farms, no slaughterhouses, no ethical compromise for people who love meat but hate industrial animal agriculture. For vegetarians who gave up meat for ethical reasons, it offers something impossible before: guilt-free steak.

[...] Here's where the dream hits reality. Consumer surveys show people perceive conventional meat as tastier and healthier than lab-grown alternatives. Fewer consumers are willing to try cultivated options than expected. The words "lab-grown" and "cultivated" don't exactly make mouths water.

Something about meat grown in a bioreactor triggers deep discomfort for many people, even those who claim to care about animal welfare and environmental impact. It's the same psychological barrier that made "Frankenfood" stick as a label for GMOs. Meat is supposed to come from animals, raised on farms, connected to land and tradition. Growing it in a facility feels wrong to people in ways they struggle to articulate.

The Food and Drug Administration has reversed its decision on Moderna's flu vaccine and has agreed to review it for possible approval, Moderna announced on Wednesday. From a report: Last week, the agency rejected Moderna's application for review of a new flu vaccine, saying the company's research design was flawed. But in subsequent discussions the company said that the agency had relented and agreed to begin a review.

Moderna said it split its application for the flu vaccine based on age, seeking a traditional approval for people 50 to 64 years old, and accelerated approval for those 65 and older. The company also said it agreed to conduct an additional study among those 65 and older once the vaccine reached the market. Moderna said on Wednesday that the F.D.A. set a deadline of August to decide whether to approve the vaccine. If it is authorized, it would be available for those older adults in the flu season that begins later this year.

The vaccine uses messenger RNA technology, which Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly criticized as unsafe and ineffective. The mRNA approach, which instructs the body to produce a fragment of a virus that sets off an immune response, was widely successful in Covid vaccines and is considered generally safe by public health experts and scientists.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An Indian university has been asked to vacate its stall at the country's flagship AI summit after a staff member was caught presenting a commercially available robotic dog made in China as its own creation, two government sources said.

"You need to meet Orion. This has been developed by the Centre of Excellence at Galgotias University," Neha Singh, a professor of communications, told state-run broadcaster DD News this week in remarks that have since gone viral.

But social media users quickly identified the robot as the Unitree Go2, sold by China's Unitree Robotics for about $2,800 and widely used in research and education globally. The episode has drawn sharp criticism and has cast an uncomfortable spotlight on India's artificial intelligence ambitions.