Nvidia AI chips worth $1B smuggled to China after Trump export controls

Black market for US semiconductors operates despite efforts to curb Beijing’s high-tech ambitions.

At least $1 billion worth of Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence processors were shipped to China in the three months after Donald Trump tightened chip export controls, exposing the limits of Washington’s efforts to restrain Beijing’s high-tech ambitions.

A Financial Times analysis of dozens of sales contracts, company filings, and multiple people with direct knowledge of the deals reveals that Nvidia’s B200 has become the most sought-after—and widely available—chip in a rampant Chinese black market for American semiconductors.

The processor is widely used by US powerhouses such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta to train their latest AI systems, but banned for sale to China.

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Study sheds light on why some people keep self-sabotaging

“Some people just don’t learn from experience; they fail to realize their own behavior is causing the problem.”

Most people, after suffering consequences for a bad decision, will alter their future behavior to avoid a similar negative outcome. That's just common sense. But many social circles have that one friend who never seems to learn from those consequences, repeatedly self-sabotaging themselves with the same bad decisions. When it comes to especially destructive behaviors, like addictions, the consequences can be severe or downright tragic.

Why do they do this? Researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, suggest that the core issue is that such people don't seem able to make a causal connection between their choices/behavior and the bad outcome, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications Psychology. Nor are they able to integrate new knowledge into their decision-making process effectively to get better results. The results could lead to the development of new intervention strategies for gambling, drug, and alcohol addictions.

In 2023, UNSW neuroscientist Philip Jean-Richard Dit Bressel and colleagues designed an experimental video game to explore the issue of why certain people keep making the same bad choices despite suffering some form of punishment as a result. Participants played the interactive online game by clicking on one of two planets to "trade" with them; choosing the correct planet resulted in earning points.

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Some VMware perpetual license owners are unable to download security patches

Customers will get patches at unspecified “later date,” Broadcom says.

Some VMware perpetual license holders are currently unable to download security patches, The Register reported today. The virtualization company has only said that these users will receive the patches at “a later date,” meaning users are uncertain how long their virtualization environments will be at risk.

Since Broadcom bought VMware and ended perpetual license sales in favor of bundled subscription-based SKUs, some organizations have opted against signing up for a subscription and are running VMware without a support contract. These users are still supposed to have access to zero-day security patches. However, some customers reported to The Register that they have been unable to download VMware patches from Broadcom’s support portal.

VMware customer service has told some of these customers that they may have to wait 90 days before they can download the patches, The Register reported.

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Once a relative haven for adult games, itch.io begins removing explicit titles

Dozens of games deleted with no advance notice, thousands more hidden by “deindexing.”

Indie game clearinghouse itch.io is the latest online gaming storefront to take action to remove or limit the availability of some adult content, bowing to pressure from payment processors spurred by an Australian grassroots group's campaign against certain sexualized content.

Wednesday night, itch.io creators and users began noticing that many adult-oriented games and content were no longer appearing in search results on the platform. Other creators reported that their adult-focused titles had been removed from the platform entirely, without any advance warning.

By early Thursday morning, itch.io had confirmed in a blog post that it had "'deindexed' all adult NSFW content from our browser and search pages." Itch said the move—which it admitted was "sudden and disruptive"—came in response to a pressure campaign from Collective Shout, an Australian nonprofit that describes itself as "a grassroots movement challenging the objectification of women and sexualization of girls in media, advertising, and popular culture."

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Six lesser-known features to like in the macOS 26 Tahoe public beta

Here are some things you can kick the tires on if you install the public beta.

Apple released the macOS 26 Tahoe public beta today, alongside the public betas for iOS, iPadOS, and other operating systems.

The headliner this year is the new Liquid Glass aesthetic that Apple is introducing across its entire product lineup this year, and aside from that, there's nothing coming to the Mac that feels quite as significant as the iPad's new multi-window multitasking interface.

But macOS remains Apple's most powerful, most flexible, and most power-user-friendly operating system, and per usual there are a few new things coming in other than the big headliners. Here are a handful of under-the-hood and lesser-publicized things coming in Tahoe, both for those who install the public beta this summer and who install the final version of the update in the fall.

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iPadOS 26 preview: The rare software update that makes (most) old hardware feel new

Public beta arrives today; here’s what we’ve found in our weeks of testing.

The Mac and the iPad are different devices that do different things. This has been the line from Apple executives, from its initial introduction to the advent of touchscreen PCs to just last month when Apple’s Craig Federighi talked to us about iPadOS 26’s new multitasking features.

But it sometimes feels like this internal commitment to keeping the devices separate has held the iPad back as its hardware has become more capable. A mouse cursor? Sure, we’ll add it, after a few years of insisting on keyboard-and-finger interactions, but we’ll make it round and imprecise instead of pointy because the iPad is Different. Windowed multitasking? Sure, we’ll give you a version of it, but you can’t do whatever you want with the windows, and we’ll tie it to a weird new interface for grouping them, because the iPad is Different.

I respect the desire not to take the path of least resistance here, which would be to imitate the Mac by default without trying to do anything new. And it’s not like you could just move macOS elements over totally unchanged; having a touch-first user interface and touch-first apps means the iPad’s system needs to work well with both touch and a keyboard-and-mouse/trackpad setup. It needs to work well in landscape and portrait modes.

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Apple releases public betas of Liquid Glass-ified next-gen software updates

These versions are still betas, but they should be mostly OK for day-to-day use.

As promised, Apple has just released the first public beta versions for the next-generation versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and most of its other operating systems. The headlining feature of all the updates this year is Apple’s new Liquid Glass user interface, which is rolling out to all of these operating systems simultaneously. It’s the biggest and most comprehensive update to Apple’s software design aesthetic since iOS 7 was released in 2013.

Rather than getting iOS 19, macOS 16, and watchOS 12, all of the new operating systems this year are labeled as version 26, a shift to a new year-based version numbering system meant to make releases more consistent across all of Apple's platforms.

The one major update that isn’t getting a public beta is visionOS 26. If you want to test the new software on a Vision Pro, you’ll need to sign up for the developer betas instead—just know that when Apple chooses not to release a public beta, there’s usually a good reason. You might risk additional instability, an increased risk of data loss, or even damage to your device, so tread especially carefully.

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RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine group sues him: “This is not the Bobby we know”

The group wants a task force that no health secretary has set up since 1998.

A lawyer who represents Children's Health Defense—the rabid anti-vaccine organization founded by the equally fervent anti-vaccine advocate and current US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—has filed a lawsuit against Kennedy, alleging that he has failed to set up a task force to promote safer childhood vaccinations.

The task force's creation is outlined in the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which is mainly known for setting up the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. The program provides compensation to people who have credible claims that they were injured by a vaccination, such as experiencing a very rare, severe side effect. It acts as a no-fault alternative to costly lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies. Otherwise, those lawsuits could deter pharmaceutical companies from marketing and developing vaccines, which would create a grave threat to vaccination rates and public health.

Tucked into the 1986 law is also a provision that states the US health secretary "shall establish a task force on safer childhood vaccines." The task force is intended to "promote the development of childhood vaccines that result in fewer and less serious adverse reactions than those vaccines on the market on the effective date of this part and promote the refinement of such vaccines." The task force is supposed to provide progress reports to Congress, which are to be submitted every two years.

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Anzeige: Sicheres und effizientes Gerätemanagement für Unternehmen

Microsoft Intune ermöglicht die sichere Verwaltung von Windows-, iOS-, MacOS- und Android-Geräten. Dieser Onlineworkshop vermittelt praxisnah, wie IT-Teams das Gerätemanagement optimal einsetzen. (Golem Karrierewelt, Unternehmenssoftware)

Microsoft Intune ermöglicht die sichere Verwaltung von Windows-, iOS-, MacOS- und Android-Geräten. Dieser Onlineworkshop vermittelt praxisnah, wie IT-Teams das Gerätemanagement optimal einsetzen. (Golem Karrierewelt, Unternehmenssoftware)