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The date for the introduction of the EU’s new entry-exit system has been pushed back again until November, allaying fears of long queues at the border during the October half-term holidays.

The launch of the new biometric checks for foreign travellers, including Britons, entering the EU, has been delayed from 6 October until at least 10 November, with many smaller airports yet to have facilities in place.

The move will again raise questions over the readiness of a system that has been long delayed from the planned 2021 start, with the French insisting the additional border controls should not be introduced before the Paris Olympics.

Under the entry-exit system (EES), non-EU citizens will have to register their biometric information – including fingerprints and facial scans – at the border, under the supervision of an EU officer, on their first visit.

There have been warnings of long queues at British points of entry – including the Port of Dover, and Eurostar’s St Pancras terminal – where the French and EU border is physically located in England, before passengers board ferries or trains.

The cross-Channel train operator said the process would add only a few seconds to border queues and not cause chaos, although passengers would have to ensure they arrived in time for the additional layer of biometric checks.

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As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we weren’t able to uncover fully.

The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”

If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.

In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”

The small number of staff across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its immense business as basically the de facto PC gaming platform.

While we haven’t seen any leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data, the figures give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff — which, given the massive popularity of Steam, is probably still just a fraction of the money the company is pulling in.

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Hours after a battle in eastern Ukraine in August, a wounded and unarmed Russian soldier crawled through a nearly destroyed trench, seeking help from his captors, a unit of international volunteers led by an American.

The shooting of the unarmed, wounded Russian soldier is one of several killings that have unsettled the Chosen Company, one of the best-known units of international troops fighting on behalf of Ukraine.

In a second episode, a Chosen member lobbed a grenade at and killed a surrendering Russian soldier who had his hands raised, video footage reviewed by The Times shows.

In a third episode, Chosen members boasted in a group chat about killing Russian prisoners of war during a mission in October, text messages show.

A Greek soldier known as Zeus was at the center of all three episodes — tossing the grenade and, Mr. Grosse says, firing at the wounded Russian in the trench and bragging about another kill.

But in the United States military, a video showing the killing of a surrendering soldier, regardless of the circumstances, would prompt an immediate investigation, said Rachel E. VanLandingham, a professor at Southwestern Law School and a former U.S. Air Force lawyer.

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The iPhone’s next major software update will roll out later this year, featuring plenty of AI infusion—Apple Intelligence—plus other quality-of-life improvements across the platform.

At WWDC 2024, Apple announced that iOS 18 would finally let you place app icons wherever you want on the Home screen, freeing them from the stringent rail it was on before.

The iOS 18 developer beta shows that the color accents pick up based on your wallpaper and system theme.

Still, even though Apple quietly announced RCS support this week during its developer conference, Google doesn’t get its victory lap.

On the plus side, messages between iPhones and their green bubbles will be able to share features like high-resolution photos and Tapback animations later this year.

In Android 7, the Quick Settings in the notification shade added editable tiles, which were eventually opened up to third-party app developers.

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Jeremy Soller who is an engineer at System76 and manages a side hustle of leading development on the open-source, Rust-written Redox OS has shared the latest look at this open-source operating system with the System76 COSMIC desktop applications.

Redox OS down to its micro-kernel is leveraging Rust and thus the COSMIC apps – also leveraging Rust – are a great fit for this open-source OS.

Here’s a look at Redox OS from a few years ago when I last gave it a shot, rather basic:

Now here’s the latest look at Redox OS that Solley posted to X with the caption "This is Redox OS, a Rust and micro-kernel based operating system that I created, running three COSMIC DE apps (with only Rust dependencies) that I authored.

Jeremy in follow-up comments also added that they still need to port DRM kernel graphics drivers to make gaming more viable and self-hosting is “very close”.

Nice job to those that continue to be involved in this from-scratch Rust-written open-source OS.

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Napster, a free, online music-sharing platform was created 25 years ago.

It didn’t last long, but we look at how it made lasting changes to the way we consume music.

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President Volodymyr Zelensky last month also signed a law to allow some prison inmates to join the military in exchange for a chance of parole — copying a Russian tactic that provided thousands more fighters but is also releasing violent criminals back into society.

“We had guys that didn’t even know how to disassemble and assemble a gun,” said a 28-year-old deputy battalion commander from the 93d Mechanized Brigade, whom The Washington Post agreed to identify by his call sign, Schmidt, according to Ukrainian military protocol.

Russia has made gains this year in large part because Ukraine’s military doesn’t have enough troops to defend against relentless assaults, soldiers say, while the government has been slow to ramp up its mobilization efforts.

To get more troops to the battlefield immediately, Zelensky’s recently appointed military chief, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, has redeployed people who were previously serving in jobs such as guarding bridges and other infrastructure far from the combat zone to brigades engaged in some of the fiercest fighting.

Syrsky’s predecessor, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, had proposed drafting close to 500,000 people — a figure Zelensky publicly rejected by saying he had not been shown evidence that it was necessary and that Ukraine would struggle financially to pay so many new soldiers’ salaries.

For a reconnaissance unit in the 42nd Mechanized Brigade, which was recently redirected to the northeast Kharkiv region to defend against a renewed Russian offensive, many of the scouts had just been reassigned from rear roles and were given just two weeks preparation before being sent into combat, to carry out tasks that at times require sneaking behind enemy lines.

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Bringing the right webpage to your computer is no passive task as thousands of editorial decisions are made on your behalf by a secretive group of Googlers.

Several SEO experts tell Gizmodo the leak lists 14,000 ranking features which, at the very least, lay a blueprint for how Google organizes everything on the web.

Google has previously denied that it uses some of these ranking features in Search, but the company confirmed these documents are real, albeit, in its telling, imperfect.

“We would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about Search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to Gizmodo.

King and Fishkin also noticed the ‘isCovidLocalAuthority” and “isElectionAuthority” in their writeups of the leak, both pointing out the importance of search engines in elevating quality information.

“It’s a non-statement that doesn’t address the leak, provides no value, and might well have been written by an AI trained on the past decade’s most soulless corporate messaging.”

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Actress Scarlett Johansson’s voice bears a striking resemblance to OpenAI’s now-pulled “Sky” personal assistant, according to an artificial intelligence lab analysis conducted by researchers at Arizona State University.

The researchers measured Sky, based on audio from demos OpenAI delivered last week, against the voices of around 600 professional actresses.

The lab study shows that the voices of Sky and Johansson have undeniable commonalities – something many listeners believed, and that now can be supported by statistical evidence, according to Arizona State University computer scientist Visar Berisha, who led the voice analysis in the school’s College of Health Solutions and the College of Engineering.

Berisha said while the study analyzed a vast array of subtle vocal features, it also zoomed in on several particular dimensions of each voice and teased out some differences.

Altman himself amped up the speculation on the day of the release by posting on X one word, “her,” the name of the 2013 romantic sci-fi film in which a lonely man falls in love with a superintelligent computer operating system voiced by Johansson.

The company says he deferred to OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, who told NPR she didn’t even know what Johannson sounded like until people were comparing Sky to the actress.

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JOHANNESBURG (AP) — South Africa’s ruling African National Congress was on the brink of losing its parliamentary majority for the first time Saturday after an election that brought a stunning drop in support for the party that led its country out of apartheid under Nelson Mandela.

It is a huge slide considering the ANC has dominated South African politics for 30 years since the end of white minority rule in 1994 and at its height commanded 70% of the vote in Africa’s most advanced economy.

The main opposition Democratic Alliance has around 21% of the vote with counts still coming in; the MK Party of former President Jacob Zuma has 14% and the Economic Freedom Fighters has 9%.

Despite the uncertainty, South African opposition parties were hailing the new political picture as a much-needed change for the country of 62 million, which is Africa’s most developed but also one of the most unequal in the world.

The official unemployment rate is 32%, one of the highest in the world, and the poverty disproportionately affects Black people, who make up 80% of the population and have been the core of the ANC’s support for years.

The ANC has also been blamed — and apparently punished by voters — for a failure in basic government services that impacts millions and leaves many without water, electricity or proper housing.

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"Users will be directed to the Chrome Web Store, where they will be recommended Manifest V3 alternatives for their disabled extension.

The most salient of these is the blocking version of the webRequest API, which is used to intercept and alter network traffic prior to display.

Under Manifest V2, it’s what extension developers use to stop adverts, trackers, and other content appearing on pages, and prevent certain scripts from running.

The new MV3 architecture reflects Google’s avowed desire to make browser extensions more performant, private, and secure.

Li acknowledged the issue by noting the ways in which Google has been responsive, by adding support for user scripts, for offscreen documents that have access to the DOM API, and by increasing the number of rulesets in the declarativeNetRequest API (the replacement for webRequest) to 330,000 static rules and 30,000 dynamics ones.

And by the beginning of 2025, when the API changes have been available for some time in the Chrome Stable channel, Manifest V2 extensions will stop working.

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Actress Scarlett Johansson’s voice bears a striking resemblance to OpenAI’s now-pulled “Sky” personal assistant, according to an artificial intelligence lab analysis conducted by researchers at Arizona State University.

The researchers measured Sky, based on audio from demos OpenAI delivered last week, against the voices of around 600 professional actresses.

The lab study shows that the voices of Sky and Johansson have undeniable commonalities – something many listeners believed, and that now can be supported by statistical evidence, according to Arizona State University computer scientist Visar Berisha, who led the voice analysis in the school’s College of Health Solutions and the College of Engineering.

Berisha said while the study analyzed a vast array of subtle vocal features, it also zoomed in on several particular dimensions of each voice and teased out some differences.

Altman himself amped up the speculation on the day of the release by posting on X one word, “her,” the name of the 2013 romantic sci-fi film in which a lonely man falls in love with a superintelligent computer operating system voiced by Johansson.

The company says he deferred to OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, who told NPR she didn’t even know what Johannson sounded like until people were comparing Sky to the actress.

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Sources “with direct knowledge” of the project—granted anonymity because they’re not authorized to discuss it publicly—told Reuters that the TikTok effort began late last year.

They said that the project will likely take a year to complete, requiring hundreds of engineers to separate millions of lines of code.

“The Reuters story published today is misleading and factually inaccurate,” the TikTok Policy account posted on X (formerly Twitter).

"As we said in our court filing, the ‘qualified divestiture’ demanded by the Act to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally.

However, in the meantime, sources told Reuters that TikTok is seemingly exploring all its options to avoid running afoul of the US law, including separating its code base and even once considering open-sourcing parts of its algorithm to increase transparency.

“Compliance and legal issues involved with determining what parts of the code can be carried over to TikTok are complicating the work,” one source told Reuters.

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On Wednesday, Axios broke the news that OpenAI had signed deals with The Atlantic and Vox Media that will allow the ChatGPT maker to license their editorial content to further train its language models.

While the company maintains the practice is fair use, it has simultaneously licensed training content from publishing groups like Axel Springer and social media sites like Reddit and Stack Overflow, sparking protests from users of those platforms.

On X, Vox reporter Kelsey Piper, who recently penned an exposé about OpenAI’s restrictive non-disclosure agreements that prompted a change in policy from the company, wrote, "I’m very frustrated they announced this without consulting their writers, but I have very strong assurances in writing from our editor in chief that they want more coverage like the last two weeks and will never interfere in it.

The San Francisco-based company is currently in the middle of a lawsuit with The New York Times in which OpenAI claims that scraping data from publications for AI training purposes is fair use.

NYT’s counsel Ian Crosby previously told Ars that OpenAI’s decision “to enter into deals with news publishers only confirms that they know their unauthorized use of copyrighted work is far from ‘fair.’”

The people who continue to maintain and serve The Atlantic deserve to know what precisely management has licensed to an outside firm and how, specifically, they plan to use the archive of our creative output and our work product."

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AOL sold the service to Digital Sky Technologies back in 2010, and the Reg FOSS desk – once known to his friends as 73187508 – verified that old accounts still worked.

More ambitious is a project called NINA which is hoping to open a whole range of them: AOL, MSN, Yahoo!

Its MSN Messenger server, Escargot, opened up in 2021 – although by way of full disclosure, this vulture has so far failed to get any client to connect to it.

As we’ve said earlier, Pidgin is very much alive and can talk to Discord, Matrix, Mattermost, Rocket.chat, Slack, Telegram, and most other chat services.

In our cynical view, a communications service isn’t really cross-platform unless it has a documented protocol and a choice of true, native clients.

A Javascript web app running in Electron doesn’t count – which disqualifies Slack for a start.

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Expressed last week was a “major issue” from the GNOME Foundation side with regard to the Sovereign Tech Fund partnership for funding a number of useful improvements to the GNOME software stack just as Germany’s STF has been doing to a number of other prominent open-source projects.

While there still aren’t many clear public details on this “major issue”, a Friday night update from the GNOME side seems to indicate all is well and they are also embarking on additional development funding initiatives.

Tonight’s post on the GNOME website is entitled “Exciting Updates on the GNOME Development Initiative and Sovereign Tech Fund” with the key takeaways being: - The contracted work continues to progress, and the Sovereign Tech Fund is very encouraged by what has been accomplished to date.

• The areas of work currently being funded by STF are planned to continue and to be strengthened and expanded as part of our new, permanent GNOME Development Initiative, as described in our draft strategic plan: foundation.gnome.org/strategicplan - The Foundation is reorganizing the project and hiring an additional program manager to work with current managers on the new Initiative.

We are finalizing a contract for transitional work with the new manager and will make a formal announcement next week.

So at least from today’s update at face value, all seems well with the important Sovereign Tech Fund partnership…

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