Month: January 2025

Meta has reportedly ended diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that influenced staff hiring and training, as well as vendor decisions, effective immediately.

According to an internal memo viewed by Axios and verified by Ars, Meta's vice president of human resources, Janelle Gale, told Meta employees that the shift was due to "legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing."

It's another move by Meta that some view as part of the company's larger effort to align with the incoming Trump administration's politics. In December, Donald Trump promised to crack down on DEI initiatives at companies and on college campuses, The Guardian reported.

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The Consumer Electronics Show is a reliable source of announcements about iterative updates to PCs and PC components. A few of those announcements are significant enough in some way that they break through all that noise—Nvidia's RTX 50-series GPUs and their lofty promises about AI-generated frames did that this year, as did Dell's decision to kill multiple decades-old PC brands and replace them with a bland series of "Pro/Premium/Plus" tiers.

But CES is also a place where PC companies and accessory makers get a little weird, taking some bigger (and occasionally questionable) swings alongside a big batch of more predictable incremental refreshes. As we've covered the show from afar this year, here are some of the more notable things we've seen.

Put an E-Ink screen on it: Asus NUC 14 Pro AI+

The NUC 14 Pro AI+ finds a way to combine E-Ink, AI, and turn-of-the-millennium translucent plastic into a single device. Credit: Asus

The strangest CES PCs are usually the ones that try to pull away from "a single screen attached to a keyboard" in some way. Sometimes, those PCs have a second screen stashed somewhere; sometimes, they have a screen that stretches; sometimes, they get rid of the keyboard part and extend the screen down where you expect that keyboard to be.

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The Khadas Mind is a modular computing platform that debuted in 2023 with the launch of a tiny computer sporting an Intel Raptor Lake processor and support for add-ons including a basic docking station and external graphics dock. Last year the company launched a Khadas Mind 2 with an Intel Lunar Lake chip. Now Khadas […]

The post Khadas expands its modular mini PC ecosystem with the Khadas Mind 2S (Arrow Lake) and Mind xPlay (portable display) appeared first on Liliputing.

Welcome to Edition 7.26 of the Rocket Report! Let's pause and reflect on how far the rocket business has come in the last 10 years. On this date in 2015, SpaceX made the first attempt to land a Falcon 9 booster on a drone ship positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. Not surprisingly, the rocket crash-landed. In less than a year and a half, though, SpaceX successfully landed reusable Falcon 9 boosters onshore and offshore, and now has done it nearly 400 times. That was remarkable enough, but we're in a new era now. Within a few days, we could see SpaceX catch its second Super Heavy booster and Blue Origin land its first New Glenn rocket on an offshore platform. Extraordinary.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Our annual ranking of the top 10 US launch companies. You can easily guess who made the top of the list: the company that launched Falcon rockets 134 times in 2024 and launched the most powerful and largest rocket ever built on four test flights, each accomplishing more than the last. The combined 138 launches is more than NASA flew the Space Shuttle over three decades. SpaceX will aim to launch even more often in 2025. These missions have far-reaching impacts, supporting Internet coverage for consumers worldwide, launching payloads for NASA and the US military, and testing technology that will take humans back to the Moon and, someday, Mars.

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The GNU General Public License (GPL) and its "Lesser" version (LGPL) are widely known and used. Still, every so often, a networking hardware maker has to get sued to make sure everyone knows how it works.

The latest such router company to face legal repercussions is AVM, the Berlin-based maker of the most popular home networking products in Germany. Sebastian Steck, a German software developer, bought an AVM Fritz!Box 4020 (PDF) and, being a certain type, requested the source code that had been used to generate certain versions of the firmware on it.

According to Steck's complaint (translated to English and provided in PDF by the Software Freedom Conservancy, or SFC), he needed this code to recompile a networking library and add some logging to "determine which programs on the Fritz!Box establish connections to servers on the Internet and which data they send." But Steck was also concerned about AVM's adherence to GPL 2.0 and LGPL 2.1 licenses, under which its FRITZ!OS and various libraries were licensed. The SFC states that it provided a grant to Steck to pursue the matter.

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When an 84-year-old man in Hong Kong was admitted to a hospital for a condition related to an enlarged prostate, doctors noticed something else about him—he was oddly gray, according to a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

His skin, particularly his face, had an ashen appearance. His fingernails and the whites of his eyes had become silvery. When doctors took a skin biopsy, they could see tiny, dark granules sitting in the fibers of his skin, in his blood vessels, in the membranes of his sweat glands, and in his hair follicles.

A blood test made clear what the problem was: the concentration of silver in his serum was 423 nmol/L, over 40 times the reference level for a normal result, which is less than 10 nmol/L. The man was diagnosed with a rare case of generalized argyria, a buildup of silver in the body's tissue that causes a blueish-gray discoloration—which is generally permanent.

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A British judge ruled against a man who wants to excavate a landfill where he says a hard drive with access to thousands of bitcoins was mistakenly dumped over 11 years ago.

Since 2013, James Howells has been hoping to recover a laptop hard drive that he says contains the private key for cryptocurrency which he says he mined in 2009. We wrote about it at the time, noting that the value of a bitcoin had just passed $1,000, making 7,500 bitcoins worth $7.5 million.

The alleged number of bitcoins has changed a bit, with Howells now saying he lost 8,000 bitcoins. The bitcoin price exceeded $100,000 last month and was worth over $95,636 as of this writing, or $765 million for 8,000 bitcoins.

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Over the last 24 hours or so, the major organizations that keep track of global temperatures have released figures for 2024, and all of them agree: 2024 was the warmest year yet recorded, joining 2023 as an unusual outlier in terms of how rapidly things heated up. At least two of the organizations, the European Union's Copernicus and Berkeley Earth, place the year at about 1.6° C above pre-industrial temperatures, marking the first time that the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5° has been exceeded.

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both place the mark at slightly below 1.5° C over pre-industrial temperatures (as defined by the 1850–1900 average). However, that difference largely reflects the uncertainties in measuring temperatures during that period rather than disagreement over 2024.

It’s hot everywhere

2023 had set a temperature record largely due to a switch to El Niño conditions midway through the year, which made the second half of the year exceptionally hot. It takes some time for that heat to make its way from the ocean into the atmosphere, so the streak of warm months continued into 2024, even as the Pacific switched into its cooler La Niña mode.

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On Wednesday, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its Future of Jobs Report 2025, with CNN immediately highlighting the finding that 40 percent of companies plan workforce reductions due to AI automation. But the report's broader analysis paints a far more nuanced picture than CNN's headline suggests: It finds that AI could create 170 million new jobs globally while eliminating 92 million positions, resulting in a net increase of 78 million jobs by 2030.

"Half of employers plan to re-orient their business in response to AI," writes the WEF in the report. "Two-thirds plan to hire talent with specific AI skills, while 40% anticipate reducing their workforce where AI can automate tasks."

The survey collected data from 1,000 companies that employ 14 million workers globally. The WEF conducts its employment analysis every two years to help policymakers, business leaders, and workers make decisions about hiring trends.

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