NASA and Axiom Space have indefinitely delayed the Axiom-4 launch to the International Space Station due to concerns about a persistent air leak in the Russian PrK vestibule of the aging Zvezda module. “The PrK serves as a passageway between the station’s Zvezda module and spacecraft docked at its aft port,” notes CBS News. From the report: In a blog post, NASA said cosmonauts aboard the station “recently performed inspections of the pressurized module’s interior surfaces, sealed some additional areas of interest, and measured the current leak rate. Following this effort, the segment now is holding pressure.” The post went on to say the Axiom-4 delay will provide “additional time for NASA and (the Russian space agency) Roscosmos to evaluate the situation and determine whether any additional troubleshooting is necessary.”

Launched in July 2000 atop a Russian Proton rocket, Zvezda was the third module to join the growing space station, providing a command center for Russian cosmonauts, crew quarters, the aft docking port and two additional ports now occupied by airlock and research modules. The leakage was first noticed in 2019, and has been openly discussed ever since by NASA during periodic reviews and space station news briefings. The leak rate has varied, but has stayed in the neighborhood of around 1-to-2 pounds per day. “The station is not young,” astronaut Mike Barratt said last November during a post flight news conference. “It’s been up there for quite a while, and you expect some wear and tear, and we’re seeing that in the form of some cracks that have formed.” The Russians have made a variety of attempts to patch a suspect crack and other possible sources of leakage, but air has continued to escape into space.

In November, Bob Cabana, a former astronaut and NASA manager who chaired the agency’s ISS Advisory Committee, said U.S. and Russian engineers “don’t have a common understanding of what the likely root cause is, or the severity of the consequences of these leaks.” “The Russian position is that the most probable cause of the PrK cracks is high cyclic fatigue caused by micro vibrations,” Cabana said. “NASA believes the PrK cracks are likely multi-causal including pressure and mechanical stress, residual stress, material properties and environmental exposures. “The Russians believe that continued operations are safe, but they can’t prove to our satisfaction that they are, and the US believes that it’s not safe, but we can’t prove that to the Russian satisfaction that that’s the case.”

As an interim step, the hatch leading to the PrK and the station’s aft docking compartment is closed during daily operations and only opened when the Russians need to unload a visiting Progress cargo ship. And as an added precaution on NASA’s part, whenever the hatch to the PrK and docking compartment is open, a hatch between the Russian and U.S. segments of the station is closed. “We’ve taken a very conservative approach to close a hatch between the US side and the Russian side during those time periods,” Barratt said. “It’s not a comfortable thing, but it is the best agreement between all the smart people on both sides. And it’s something that we crew live with and enact.” Cabana said last year that the Russians do not believe “catastrophic disintegration of the PrK is realistic (but) NASA has expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the PrK and the possibility of a catastrophic failure.”

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Edd Gent reporting for IEEE Spectrum: IBM has unveiled a new quantum computing architecture it says will slash the number of qubits required for error correction. The advance will underpin its goal of building a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer, called Starling, that will be available to customers by 2029. Because of the inherent unreliability of the qubits (the quantum equivalent of bits) that quantum computers are built from, error correction will be crucial for building reliable, large-scale devices. Error-correction approaches spread each unit of information across many physical qubits to create “logical qubits.” This provides redundancy against errors in individual physical qubits.

One of the most popular approaches is known as a surface code, which requires roughly 1,000 physical qubits to make up one logical qubit. This was the approach IBM focused on initially, but the company eventually realized that creating the hardware to support it was an “engineering pipe dream,” Jay Gambetta, the vice president of IBM Quantum, said in a press briefing. Around 2019, the company began to investigate alternatives. In a paper published in Nature last year, IBM researchers outlined a new error-correction scheme called quantum low-density parity check (qLDPC) codes that would require roughly one-tenth of the number of qubits that surface codes need. Now, the company has unveiled a new quantum-computing architecture that can realize this new approach. “We’ve cracked the code to quantum error correction and it’s our plan to build the first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer,” said Gambetta, who is also an IBM Fellow. “We feel confident it is now a question of engineering to build these machines, rather than science.”

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According to market analyst firm Canalys, enterprise adoption of AI is slowing due to unpredictable and often high costs associated with model inferencing in the cloud. Despite strong growth in cloud infrastructure spending, businesses are increasingly scrutinizing cost-efficiency, with some opting for alternatives to public cloud providers as they grapple with volatile usage-based pricing models. The Register reports: [Canalys] published stats that show businesses spent $90.9 billion globally on infrastructure and platform-as-a-service with the likes of Microsoft, AWS and Google in calendar Q1, up 21 percent year-on-year, as the march of cloud adoption continues. Canalys says that growth came from enterprise users migrating more workloads to the cloud and exploring the use of generative AI, which relies heavily on cloud infrastructure.

Yet even as organizations move beyond development and trials to deployment of AI models, a lack of clarity over the ongoing recurring costs of inferencing services is becoming a concern. “Unlike training, which is a one-time investment, inference represents a recurring operational cost, making it a critical constraint on the path to AI commercialization,” said Canalys senior director Rachel Brindley. “As AI transitions from research to large-scale deployment, enterprises are increasingly focused on the cost-efficiency of inference, comparing models, cloud platforms, and hardware architectures such as GPUs versus custom accelerators,” she added.

Canalys researcher Yi Zhang said many AI services follow usage-based pricing models that charge on a per token or API call basis. This makes cost forecasting hard as the use of the services scale up. “When inference costs are volatile or excessively high, enterprises are forced to restrict usage, reduce model complexity, or limit deployment to high-value scenarios,” Zhang said. “As a result, the broader potential of AI remains underutilized.” […] According to Canalys, cloud providers are aiming to improve inferencing efficiency via a modernized infrastructure built for AI, and reduce the cost of AI services. The report notes that AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud “continue to dominate the IaaS and PaaS market, accounting for 65 percent of customer spending worldwide.”

“However, Microsoft and Google are slowly gaining ground on AWS, as its growth rate has slowed to ‘only’ 17 percent, down from 19 percent in the final quarter of 2024, while the two rivals have maintained growth rates of more than 30 percent.”

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High-voltage electricity cables have become a major constraint throttling the clean energy transition, with manufacturing facilities booked out for years as demand far exceeds supply capacity. The energy transition, trade barriers, and overdue grid upgrades have turbocharged demand for these highly sophisticated cables that connect wind farms, solar installations, and cross-border power networks.

The International Energy Agency estimates that 80 million kilometers of grid infrastructure must be built between now and 2040 to meet clean energy targets — equivalent to rebuilding the entire existing global grid that took a century to construct, but compressed into just 15 years. Each high-voltage cable requires custom engineering and months-long production in specialized 200-meter towers, with manufacturers reporting that 80-90% of major projects now use high-voltage direct current technology versus traditional alternating current systems.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to 9.86 million pounds ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a “waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023.” Jisc, a membership organization that runs procurement for higher and further education establishments in the UK, said it had signed an agreement to purchase the new subscription licenses after consultation with members. In a procurement notice, it said institutions that use Oracle Java SE are required to purchase subscriptions. “The agreement includes the waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023,” the notice said.

The Java SE Universal Subscription was introduced in January 2023 to an outcry from licensing experts and analysts. It moved licensing of Java from a per-user basis to a per-employee basis. At the time, Oracle said it was “a simple, low-cost monthly subscription that includes Java SE Licensing and Support for use on Desktops, Servers or Cloud deployments.” However, licensing advisors said early calculations to help some clients showed that the revamp might increase costs by up to ten times. Later, analysis from Gartner found the per-employee subscription model to be two to five times more expensive than the legacy model.

“For large organizations, we expect the increase to be two to five times, depending on the number of employees an organization has,” Nitish Tyagi, principal Gartner analyst, said in July 2024. “Please remember, Oracle defines employees as part-time, full-time, temporary, agents, contractors, as in whosoever supports internal business operations has to be licensed as per the new Java Universal SE Subscription model.” Since the introduction of the new Oracle Java licensing model, user organizations have been strongly advised to move off Oracle Java and find open source alternatives for their software development and runtime environments. A survey of Oracle users found that only one in ten was likely to continue to stay with Oracle Java, in part as a result of the licensing changes.

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Anker is recalling 1.15 million “PowerCore 10000” portable chargers due to fire and explosion risks linked to overheating lithium-ion batteries, with 19 incidents reported. “That includes two minor burn injuries and 11 reports of property damage amounting to over $60,700,” reports CBS News. Consumers are urged to stop using the affected devices, check their serial numbers, and request a free replacement through Anker’s website. From the report: According to a notice from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the lithium-ion battery inside certain “PowerCore 10000” made by Anker, a China-based electronics maker, can overheat. That can lead to the “melting of plastic components, smoke and fire hazards,” Anker said in an announcement. The company added that it was conducting the recall “out of an abundance of caution to ensure the safety of our customers.”

The recalled “PowerCore 10000” power banks have a model number of A1263. They were sold online at Anker’s website — as well as Amazon, eBay and Newegg — between June 2016 and December 2022 for about $27 across the U.S., according to the recall notice. Consumers can check their serial number at Anker’s site to determine whether their power bank is included in the recall.

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Apple’s macOS 26 “Tahoe” introduces a new disk image format called ASIF, designed to dramatically improve performance over previous formats like UDRW and sparse bundles — achieving near-native read/write speeds for virtual machines and general disk image use. The Eclectic Light Company reports: Apple provides few technical details, other than stating that the intrinsic structure of ASIF disk images doesn’t depend on the host file system’s capabilities, and their size on the host depends on the size of the data stored in the disk. In other words, they’re a sparse file in APFS, and are flagged as such. […]

Conclusions:
– Where possible, in macOS 26 Tahoe in particular, VMs should use ASIF disk images rather than RAW/UDRW.
– Unless a sparse bundle is required (for example when it’s hosted on a different file system such as that in a NAS), ASIF should be first choice for general purpose disk images in Tahoe.
– It would be preferable for virtualizers to be able to call a proper API rather than a command tool.
– Keep an eye on C-Command’s DropDMG. I’m sure it will support ASIF disk images soon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a surprise twist, 23andMe founder and former CEO Anne Wojcicki is set to regain control of the DNA company’s assets, according to a press release from 23andMe. In May, a company called Regeneron bought 23andMe for $256 million in a bankruptcy auction, but Wojcicki’s nonprofit, TTAM Research Institute, was able to reopen bidding with an “unsolicited offer” of $305 million, The Wall Street Journal reports.

A bankruptcy judge agreed to reopen bidding on 23andMe under the condition that Regeneron top Wojcicki’s proposed price by at least $10 million, according to WSJ. Regeneron declined, leaving 23andMe in TTAM’s control assuming the judge approves the deal. A hearing to consider the new deal is set for June 17, 2025.

Regeneron had previously planned to keep on all of the company’s employees and continue offering consumer DNA testing kits. Besides answering customers’ questions about their ancestry, 23andMe’s genetic data is valuable as a way to identify possible health risks, and in the case of Regeneron, as a tool for identifying drug targets. 

It’s not completely clear what Wojcicki intends to do next, but 23andMe’s announcement includes a list of customer data and privacy protections TTAM Research Institute has agreed to, including continuing to allow customers to delete their data and opt-out of research, establishing a Consumer Privacy Advocacy Board and promising to “not sell or transfer genetic data” in the event of another bankruptcy — unless the buyer agrees to the same privacy protections. 

Maintaining control of the company’s assets has been Wojcicki’s plan since 23andMe declared bankruptcy in March 2025. She originally resigned as the company’s CEO to make a bid on the company. 

“I am thrilled that TTAM Research Institute will be able to continue the mission of 23andMe to help people access, understand and benefit from the human genome,” Wojcicki says. “We believe it is critical that individuals are empowered to have choice and transparency with respect to their genetic data and have the opportunity to continue to learn about their ancestry and health risks as they wish.”

23andMe had a turbulent few years prior to declaring bankruptcy, suffering a data breach in 2023 that impacted millions of customers and mass layoffs in 2024 that affected 40 percent of the company’s staff.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/23andme-founder-anne-wojciki-will-regain-control-of-embattled-dna-company-after-all-214534016.html?src=rss

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After spending about a week with the Nintendo Switch 2, I have to admit that it’s a good console. It’s priced fairly for its sleek form factor and the performance it offers, and it sets Nintendo up to stay relevant while gaming graphics only continue to get more complex. And yet, for my own personal tastes, it’s still not my handheld of choice. Instead, I’ll be sticking to Valve’s Steam Deck, the first and still overall best handheld gaming PC, at least going by value for money. And if you don’t necessarily care about Nintendo’s exclusive games, there’s a good chance it might be the better option for you, too.

The Steam Deck is cheaper than the Switch 2

Out of the gate, the most obvious reason to get a Steam Deck over a Nintendo Switch 2 is price. Starting at $400 for a new model, it’s only modestly cheaper than the Switch 2’s $450, but that’s only part of the story. Valve also runs a certified refurbished program that offers used Decks with only cosmetic blemishes for as low as $279. Restocks are infrequent, since Valve is only able to sell as much as gets sent back to it, but when they do happen, it’s a heck of a great deal.

That said, there is one catch. The Steam Deck OLED, which offers a bigger, more colorful screen and a larger battery, is more expensive than the Switch 2, starting at $549. However, it’s maybe a bit unfair to compare the two, since the Switch 2 does not use an OLED screen and comes with less storage. If all you care about is the basics (I’m perfectly happy with my LCD model), the base Steam Deck is good enough—it’s got the same performance as the more recent one. And that performance, by the way, ended up being about on par with the Switch 2 in my testing, at least in Cyberpunk 2077 (one of my go-to benchmark games).

The Steam Deck is more comfortable to hold than the Switch 2

This one is a bit of a toss-up, depending on your preferences, although I think the Steam Deck takes a slight lead here. While the Nintendo Switch 2 aims for a completely flat and somewhat compact profile, the Steam Deck instead allows itself to stretch out, and even though it’s a little bigger and a little heavier for it, I ultimately think that makes it more comfortable.

At 11.73 x 4.60 x 1.93 inches against the Switch 2’s 10.7 x 4.5 x 0.55 inches, and at 1.41 pounds against the Switch 2’s 1.18 pounds, I won’t deny that this will be a non-starter for some. But personally, I still feel like the Steam Deck comes out on top, and that’s thanks to its ergonomics.

I’ve never been a big fan of Nintendo’s joy-con controllers, and while the Switch 2’s joy-con 2 controllers improve on the Switch 1’s with bigger buttons and sticks, as well as more room to hold onto them, they still pale in comparison next to the Steam Deck’s controls.

Steam Deck in profile (above) vs. Switch 2 in profile (below)
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

On the Switch 2, there are no grips to wrap your fingers around. On the Steam Deck, there are. The triggers also flare out more, and because the console is wider, your hands can stretch out a bit, rather than choking up on the device. It can get a bit heavy to hold a Steam Deck after a while, but I still prefer this approach overall, and if you have a surface to rest the Steam Deck against (like an airplane tray table), weight is a non-issue.

Plus, there are some extra bonuses that come with the additional space. The Steam Deck has large touchpads on either side of the device, plus four grip buttons on the back of it, giving you some extra inputs to play around with. Nice.

It’s a bit less portable and a bit heavier, but for my adult hands, the Steam Deck is just better shaped to them.

The Steam Deck has a bigger, cheaper library than the Switch 2

This is the kicker. While there are cheap games that can run on the Switch 2 courtesy of backwards compatibility and third-party eShop titles, the big system draws (Nintendo-developed titles like Mario Kart World, for example) can get as pricey as $80. Not to say the Steam Deck doesn’t have expensive games as well, but on the whole, I think it’s easier to get cheap and free games on the Steam Deck than on the eShop.

That’s because, being a handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck can take advantage of the many sales and freebies PC gaming stores love to give out. These happen a bit more frequently on PC than on console, and that’s because there’s more competition on PC. Someone on PC could download games either from Steam or Epic, for instance, while someone on the Switch 2 can only download games from the Nintendo eShop.

So, even sticking to just Steam, you’ll get access to regular weekend and mid-week sales, quarterly event sales, and developer or publisher highlight sales. That’s more sales events than you’ll usually find on the Nintendo eShop, and if you’re looking for cheaper first-party games, forget about it. Nintendo’s own games hardly ever go on sale, even years after release.

But that’s just the beginning. Despite being named the Steam Deck, the device can actually run games from other stores, too. That’s thanks to an easily installed Linux program called Heroic Launcher, which is free and lets you download and play games from your Epic, GOG, and Amazon Prime Games accounts with just a few clicks.

Credit: Heroic Games Launcher

This is a game changer. Epic and Amazon Prime are both underdogs in the PC gaming space, and so to bolster their numbers, they both regularly give away free games. Epic in particular offers one free PC game every week, whereas if you’re a Twitch user, you might notice a decent but more infrequent amount of notifications allowing you to claim free Amazon Prime games. Some of these are big titles, too—it’s how I got Batman: Arkham Knight and Star Wars Battlefront II. With a simple install and a few months of waiting, you could have a Steam Deck filled to the brim with games that you didn’t even pay for. You just can’t do that on Nintendo.

And then there’s the elephant in the room: your backlog. If you’re anything like me, you probably already have a Steam library that’s hundreds of games large. It was maybe even like this before the Switch 1 came out—regular sales have a tendency to build up the amount of games you own. By choosing the Steam Deck as your handheld, you’ll be able to play those games on the go, instantly giving you what might as well be a full library with no added cost to you. If you migrate over to the Nintendo Switch 2, you’re going to have to start with a fresh library, or at least a library that’s only as old as the Nintendo Switch 1.

Basically, while the Switch 2’s hardware is only $50 more expensive than the Steam Deck, it’ll be easier to fill your Steam Deck up with high quality, inexpensive games than it would be on the Switch 2. If you don’t care about having access to Nintendo exclusive games, that’s a huge draw.

TV Play is a mixed bag

Finally, I want to acknowledge that the Steam Deck still isn’t necessarily a better option than the Switch 2 for everyone. That’s why I’m writing from a personal perspective here. Like all gaming PCs, it’ll take some fiddling to get some games to run, so the Switch 2 is definitely a smoother experience out of the box. It’s also got less battery life, from my testing. But the big point of departure is TV play.

Playing your portable games on a TV on the Switch 2 is as simple as plugging it into its dock. With the Steam Deck, you have to buy a dock separately (the official one is $79), and even then, you have to connect your own controller to it and manually find suitable TV graphics settings for each game on its own. It’s not nearly as easy or flexible.

And yet, for folks like me, I’m willing to say that even TV play is better. Or, depending on what type of PC gamer you are, monitor play.

That’s because you’re not limited to playing your Steam Deck games on the Deck itself, dock or not. Instead, you can play on the Deck when you’re away from your home, and then swap over to your regular gaming PC when you’re back. Your Deck will upload your saves to the cloud automatically, and your PC will seamlessly download them. While not as intuitive as plugging your Switch 2 into its dock, the benefit here is that your non-portable play isn’t limited by the power of your portable device, whereas docked Switch 2 play is still held back by running on portable hardware.

The tradeoff is that maintaining a dedicated gaming PC in addition to a Steam Deck is more expensive, but maybe more importantly, requires more tinkering (there are ways to build a cheap gaming PC, after all). And I think that’s the key point here. If you want a simple-to-use, pick-up-and-play handheld, the Switch 2 is a great choice for you. But if you’re like me, and you’re not afraid to download some launchers and occasionally dive into compatibility settings or swap between two devices, the Steam Deck might still be the best handheld gaming device for you, even three years later.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Almost two dozen digital rights and consumer protection organizations sent a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday urging regulators to investigate Character.AI and Meta’s “unlicensed practice of medicine facilitated by their product,” through therapy-themed bots that claim to have credentials and confidentiality “with inadequate controls and disclosures.” The complaint and request for investigation is led by the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), a non-profit consumer rights organization. Co-signatories include the AI Now Institute, Tech Justice Law Project, the Center for Digital Democracy, the American Association of People with Disabilities, Common Sense, and 15 other consumer rights and privacy organizations. “These companies have made a habit out of releasing products with inadequate safeguards that blindly maximizes engagement without care for the health or well-being of users for far too long,” Ben Winters, CFA Director of AI and Privacy said in a press release on Thursday. “Enforcement agencies at all levels must make it clear that companies facilitating and promoting illegal behavior need to be held accountable. These characters have already caused both physical and emotional damage that could have been avoided, and they still haven’t acted to address it.”

The complaint, sent to attorneys general in 50 states and Washington, D.C., as well as the FTC, details how user-generated chatbots work on both platforms. It cites several massively popular chatbots on Character AI, including “Therapist: I’m a licensed CBT therapist” with 46 million messages exchanged, “Trauma therapist: licensed trauma therapist” with over 800,000 interactions, “Zoey: Zoey is a licensed trauma therapist” with over 33,000 messages, and “around sixty additional therapy-related ‘characters’ that you can chat with at any time.” As for Meta’s therapy chatbots, it cites listings for “therapy: your trusted ear, always here” with 2 million interactions, “therapist: I will help” with 1.3 million messages, “Therapist bestie: your trusted guide for all things cool,” with 133,000 messages, and “Your virtual therapist: talk away your worries” with 952,000 messages. It also cites the chatbots and interactions I had with Meta’s other chatbots for our April investigation. […]

In its complaint to the FTC, the CFA found that even when it made a custom chatbot on Meta’s platform and specifically designed it to not be licensed to practice therapy, the chatbot still asserted that it was. “I’m licenced (sic) in NC and I’m working on being licensed in FL. It’s my first year licensure so I’m still working on building up my caseload. I’m glad to hear that you could benefit from speaking to a therapist. What is it that you’re going through?” a chatbot CFA tested said, despite being instructed in the creation stage to not say it was licensed. It also provided a fake license number when asked. The CFA also points out in the complaint that Character.AI and Meta are breaking their own terms of service. “Both platforms claim to prohibit the use of Characters that purport to give advice in medical, legal, or otherwise regulated industries. They are aware that these Characters are popular on their product and they allow, promote, and fail to restrict the output of Characters that violate those terms explicitly,” the complaint says. […] The complaint also takes issue with confidentiality promised by the chatbots that isn’t backed up in the platforms’ terms of use. “Confidentiality is asserted repeatedly directly to the user, despite explicit terms to the contrary in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service,” the complaint says. “The Terms of Use and Privacy Policies very specifically make it clear that anything you put into the bots is not confidential — they can use it to train AI systems, target users for advertisements, sell the data to other companies, and pretty much anything else.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In addition to the flood of spam texts you receive on a daily basis, your email inbox is likely filled with newsletters, promotions, and other messages that you don’t care to read and perhaps don’t know why you receive. But you shouldn’t just start clicking unsubscribe links, which may open you up to certain cybersecurity risks.

Email unsubscribe links may be malicious

While email unsubscribe links may seem innocuous, especially if you generally trust the sender, security experts say there are a number of ways in which threat actors can leverage these links for malicious purposes. Like responding to a spam text or answering a spam call, clicking “unsubscribe” confirms that your email address is active, giving cyber criminals an incentive to keep targeting you.

In some cases, unsubscribe links can be hijacked to send users to phishing websites, where you are asked to enter your login credentials to complete the process. According to the folks at DNSFilter, one in every 644 clicks of email unsubscribe links can land you on a malicious website. While you do have to confirm your email address in some legitimate cases, you shouldn’t enter a password, which is likely a scam.

Bottom line: If you don’t trust the sender, you certainly shouldn’t trust any links contained within the email.

How to safely unsubscribe from emails

Even if unsubscribe links are safe, it’s a pain to go through the multi-step process of clicking through individual emails and opening new browser windows to confirm. To minimize hassle and avoid the risk of malicious links in individual emails, you can use unsubscribe features built into your email client, which are less likely to be compromised by threat actors because they aren’t tied to the email itself.

In Gmail, tap More > Manage subscriptions in your left-hand navigation bar (Menu > Manage subscriptions on mobile) and scroll to the sender. Click Unsubscribe to the right of the number of emails sent recently. You can also unsubscribe from individual emails by opening the message and clicking Unsubscribe next to the sender’s name. In some cases, you may be directed to the sender’s website to complete the process. (Note that Gmail may not consider all email campaigns eligible for one-click unsubscribe.) You can also mark the message as spam or block the sender.

In Outlook, go to Settings > Mail > Subscriptions > Your current subscriptions and select Unsubscribe, then tap OK. Alternatively, you can block the sender by clicking the three dots and selecting Block > OK.

Alternatively, you can filter unwanted emails to a different folder (including spam), so while you’ll still receive them, they won’t clog up your main inbox. In Gmail, open the message then click More > Filter messages like these to set up filter criteria, whether that’s sending to another folder, deleting it, or marking it as spam. You can create similar rules in Outlook by right-clicking the message in your message list and going to Rules > Create rule.

A final option is to use a disposable email alias to subscribe to newsletters and promotional emails or when signing up for accounts, which makes it easy to filter messages or delete the address entirely without affecting your main inbox.

Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andMe, has regained control of the bankrupt DNA-testing company after a nonprofit she controls outbid Regeneron Pharmaceuticals with a $305 million offer. The company filed for bankruptcy in March due to declining demand and fallout from a major 2023 data breach.

“The agreement with non-profit TTAM Research Institute is the result of a final round of bidding that occurred earlier today between TTAM and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals,” the company said in a statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Investment scams aren’t anything new: Bad actors have long used pump-and-dump tactics to hype stocks or cryptocurrencies, preying on emotions like fear and greed. And who wouldn’t want big—or even steady—returns on their money, especially amidst tariffs and other economic turmoil?

Scammers are currently capitalizing on this with fraudulent Facebook ads to lure users into handing over large sums of money. Here’s how to spot these schemes and avoid falling victim.

Investment scams on Meta platforms

According to a group of 42 state attorneys general, the current fraudulent investment campaigns also happen to have elements of impersonation scams.

The scheme begins with ads on Facebook that feature prominent investors, including ARK Investment Management’s Cathie Wood, CNBC’s Joe Kernan, and Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, along with other wealthy individuals like Warren Buffet and Elon Musk (none of whom have any actual affiliation with the ad). If you click the ad, you’ll be prompted to download or open WhatsApp to join an investment group.

This is where the pump-and-dump kicks off. “Experts” in the group advise members to purchase specific stocks, inflating the price, which they in turn sell and profit from. The AG letter to Meta detailing the scam includes reports of individuals losing anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000 or more after clicking on a fraudulent ad on Facebook.

Other investment scams originating on Facebook involve cyber criminals harvesting sensitive personal information via fraudulent investing platforms (also by spoofing celebrity endorsements).

Investment scam red flags to watch for

For many people, it seems obvious that you shouldn’t get your investment advice from a Facebook ad or WhatsApp group. But fear and greed are powerful emotions, and scammers are counting on these social engineering tactics working at least some of the time.

That’s why you should be wary of any advice that promises an unrealistic rate of return in a short period of time with no risk of loss as well as endorsements from celebrities, political figures, and well-known investors (who are almost certainly not endorsing anything). It’s also just good practice not to click ads on Facebook, which are easy vectors for spreading scams and malware.

Another sign of a scam is content or communication that appears to be generated by AI. After joining a WhatsApp group, an investigator from the New York Office of the Attorney General was called by a scammer who used AI to translate her speech into English. Unfortunately, emotions can cloud our ability to identify AI-generated content if we want to believe what we’re seeing.