• Microsoft announced that it has saved $500 million by increasing reliance on AI and firing thousands of people but mostly by firing thousands of people.  (Yahoo)
  
  Thousands of people hardest hit.
  
  

• Jack Dorsey (one of the original Twitter founders) says his new secure app, Bitchat, has not been tested for security.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  At all.  I mean, why would you?  If it's secure you don't need to test it, and if it's not secure you don't want to test it.
  
  
  
• If you want a good small Android tablet, the Galaxy Z Fold 7 is not it.  (Liliputing)
  
  For one thing it costs $2000.
  
  
  
• The FTC's "click to cancel" rule - that would mandate subscriptions to be as easy to cancel as to set up in the first place - is temporarily dead.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  The FTC has a rule that if a proposed regulation would have an impact of more than $100 million it must first go through a regulatory analysis process.
  
  The FTC deemed the impact less than $100 million and so skipped that process, but the Eighth Circuit disagreed, requiring the FTC to go back, if not to square one, then at least to square four.
  
  
  
• Proving lies: How mathematicians just poked a hole in zero-knowledge proofs.  (Quanta)
  
  Not a fatal hole, by my reading.  The underlying technique - called Fiat-Shamir transforms - has been proven to be secure if the random numbers used are truly random.  The trick here is that if you know how the random numbers are generated, a malicious program can use that information to "prove" things that aren't true.
  
  If you require that the program code be less complicated than your random number generator, though, this attack is foiled.
  
  
  
• Speaking of leaks, there are some in Zen 3 and Zen 4 chips.  (AMD)
  
  Severity is ranked as "medium" and BIOS updates are on their way.
  
  There are also two low-severity issues that leak data that technically should be leaked but which doesn't really matter.  Only the low-severity leaks affect older Zen 1 and Zen 2 chips.
  
  Apparently Zen 5 is unaffected.
  
  
  
• Also speaking of leaks, Qantas.  (The Register)
  
  Well, that's lovely.

So the theme of the summer anime season appears to be dead heroes:

Scooped Up By An S-Rank Adventurer

Lloyd is an apprentice white mage who joins - and then is swiftly ejected from - the hero's party.  But before that, everyone dies.  Pretty literally.  Yes, the sequence of events here is a little peculiar.

Ryo is a normal human who dies and then is reincarnated with water magic.  Standard fare, though competently executed.



Nobody actually dies.  At least, not in the first two episodes.  How did this get on the list?

Kyle is the last survivor of the heroes' party that defeats the Demon King and then...  Finds himself back at square negative four having to do the whole thing all over again.

Alicia is a member of the team of thirteen heroes who take on the Lord of Dark Beasts, Clevatess, without notable success, most of them ending up very, very dead, and Alicia ending up...  Something else.

This one looks like a refugee from the mid-90s.  A high-budget refugee from the mid-90s, true, but the art style is not from this millennium.

Secrets of the Silent Witch

Bocchi.

Onmyo Kaiten

While chasing an incandescent rat, Takeru suffers an accident and is transported to another world.  Again.  Very, very again.

Posted by: Frank at Friday, July 11 2025 02:02 AM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: Jason at Friday, July 11 2025 04:56 AM (hfTJn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 11 2025 05:24 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment