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Delta Air Lines has walked back previous statements about individualized pricing after lawmakers questioned the airline's AI-assisted dynamic pricing model. In November, Delta president Glen Hauenstein told investors the company would have pricing "available on that flight, on that time, to you, the individual." Responding to senators' concerns in July, EVP Peter Carter now states Delta has never used, is not testing, and does not plan to use individualized pricing based on personal data. Carter describes the AI technology, developed by Fetcherr, as a decision-support tool that uses aggregated data to assist analysts rather than target individual customers with personalized fares.

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Microsoft announced last month that Chinese state-sponsored hackers exploited vulnerabilities in SharePoint to breach hundreds of companies and government agencies, including the National Nuclear Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security. The company omitted that SharePoint support is handled by China-based engineers who have maintained the software for years. ProPublica reviewed screenshots of Microsoft's internal systems showing China-based employees recently fixing bugs for SharePoint "OnPrem," the version targeted in the attacks. Microsoft told the publication that the China-based team operates under U.S. supervision and the company is relocating this work.

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AI startup Perplexity is deploying undeclared web crawlers that masquerade as regular Chrome browsers to access content from websites that have explicitly blocked its official bots, according to a Cloudflare report published Monday. When Perplexity's declared crawlers encounter robots.txt restrictions or network blocks, the company switches to a generic Mozilla user agent that impersonates "Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" running on macOS, the web infrastructure firm reported. Cloudflare engineers tested the behavior by creating new domains with robots.txt files prohibiting all automated access. Despite the restrictions, Perplexity provided detailed information about the protected content when queried, while the stealth crawler generated 3-6 million daily requests across tens of thousands of domains. The undeclared crawler rotated through multiple IP addresses and network providers to evade detection.

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Fujifilm has raised prices on cameras and lenses across its lineup, with price hikes reaching into the hundreds of dollars. From a report: Among the hikes is an increase to the price of Fuji's ultra-popular X100VI from $1,599 to $1,799. The capable X-T5 has gone from $1,699 to $1,899. And the already very expensive GFX100 II has gone from $7,499 to $8,299 -- an $800 increase. Increases to lens prices appear to be somewhat more modest, with bumps in the $50 to $150 range.

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The management consulting industry is facing potential disruption as AI companies enter the advisory business and traditional firms struggle to maintain growth. McKinsey, approaching its 100th anniversary, reduced its workforce by 5,000 employees since late 2023 while its revenue growth slowed to 2% in 2024. Boston Consulting Group closed the gap significantly, growing 10% and reducing McKinsey's revenue advantage from more than double in 2012 to just one-fifth larger today. Technology companies including Palantir and OpenAI now offer consulting-like services to help businesses implement AI models, with Palantir's revenue growing 39% year-over-year. The shift threatens consulting's core business model, as clients may eventually question paying premium fees when AI can perform much of the analytical work traditionally done by human consultants.

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The Associated Press investigates whether tech industry layoffs are really being caused by AI. Their conclusion? "The reality is more complicated..." "We're kind of in this period where the tech job market is weak, but other areas of the job market have also cooled at a similar pace," said Brendon Bernard, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. "Tech job postings have actually evolved pretty similarly to the rest of the economy, including relative to job postings where there really isn't that much exposure to AI...." Tech hiring has particularly plunged in AI hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Boston and Seattle, according to Indeed. But in looking more closely at which tech workers were least likely to get hired, Indeed found the deepest impact on entry-level jobs in the tech industry, with those with at least five years of experience faring better. The hiring declines were sharpest in entry-level tech industry jobs that involve marketing, administrative assistance and human resources, which all involve tasks that overlap with the strength of the latest generative AI tools that can help create documents and images... Microsoft, which is staking its future on AI in the workplace, has also had its own researchers look into the jobs most vulnerable to the current strengths of AI technology. At the top of the list are knowledge work jobs such as language interpreters or translators, as well as historians, passenger attendants, sales representatives, writers and customer service representatives, according to Microsoft's working paper. On the other end, leading in work more immune to AI changes were phlebotomists, or healthcare workers who draw blood, followed by nursing assistants, workers who remove hazardous materials, painters and embalmers.

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"Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin launched a crypto billionaire and five other people to the final frontier on Sunday," reports Space.com: The mission — known as NS-34, because it was the 34th overall flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle — lifted off from the company's West Texas spaceport at 8:43 a.m. EDT (1243 GMT; 7:43 a.m. local time in West Texas). The highest-profile NS-34 passenger was Justin Sun, a 34-year-old billionaire who founded the blockchain platform Tron. In June 2021, Sun won an auction for a seat aboard the first-ever crewed flight of New Shepard, plunking down $28 million. [Sun was unable to take that flight due to a scheduling conflict, but Blue Origin says "the proceeds from the $28 million bid benefitted 19 space-focused charities"...] The people flying with Sun on Sunday were Arvinder (Arvi) Singh Bahal, an Indian-born American real estate investor and adventurer; Turkish businessman and photographer Gökhan Erdem; Deborah Martorell, a journalist and meteorologist from Puerto Rico; Englishman Lionel Pitchford, who has run an orphanage in Nepal for three decades; and American entrepreneur James (J.D.) Russell... All six passengers were spaceflight rookies except Russell, who flew on Blue Origin's NS-28 mission in November 2024. NS-34 was the 14th human spaceflight to date for New Shepard, which consists of a rocket topped by a crew capsule. Both of these elements are reusable; the rocket comes back to Earth for a vertical, powered touchdown like those performed by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets, and the capsule lands softly under parachutes. Each New Shepard flight lasts 10 to 12 minutes from liftoff to capsule touchdown. "New Shepard has now flown 75 people into space," Blue Origin said in a statement, "including five people who have flown twice."

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Disney "cloned" Dwayne Johnson when filming a live-action Moana, reports the Wall Street Journal, using an AI process that they were ultimately afraid to use: Under the plan they devised, Johnson's similarly buff cousin Tanoai Reed — who is 6-foot-3 and 250 pounds — would fill in as a body double for a small number of shots. Disney would work with AI company Metaphysic to create deepfakes of Johnson's face that could be layered on top of Reed's performance in the footage — a "digital double" that effectively allowed Johnson to be in two places at once... Johnson approved the plan, but the use of a new technology had Disney attorneys hammering out details over how it could be deployed, what security precautions would protect the data and a host of other concerns. They also worried that the studio ultimately couldn't claim ownership over every element of the film if AI generated parts of it, people involved in the negotiations said. Disney and Metaphysic spent 18 months negotiating on and off over the terms of the contract and work on the digital double. But none of the footage will be in the final film when it's released next summer... Interviews with more than 20 current and former employees and partners present an entertainment giant torn between the inevitability of AI's advance and concerns about how to use it. Progress has at times been slowed by bureaucracy and hand-wringing over the company's social contract with its fans, not to mention its legal contract with unions representing actors, writers and other creative partners... For Disney, protecting its characters and stories while also embracing new AI technology is key. "We have been around for 100 years and we intend to be around for the next 100 years," said the company's legal chief, Horacio Gutierrez, in an interview. "AI will be transformative, but it doesn't need to be lawless...." [As recently as June, a Disney/Comcast Universal lawsuit had argued that Midjourney "is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism."] Concerns about bad publicity were a big reason that Disney scrapped a plan to use AI in Tron: Ares — a movie set for release in October about an AI-generated soldier entering the real world. Since the movie is about artificial intelligence, executives pitched the idea of actually incorporating AI into one of the characters... as a buzzy marketing strategy, according to people familiar with the matter. A writer would provide context on the animated character — a sidekick to Jeff Bridges' lead role named Bit — to a generative AI program. Then on screen, the AI program, voiced by an actor, would respond to questions as Bit as cameras rolled. But with negotiations with unions representing writers and actors over contracts happening at the same time, Disney dismissed the idea, and executives internally were told that the company couldn't risk the bad publicity, the people said... Disney's own history speaks to how studios have navigated technological crossroads before. When Disney hired Pixar to produce a handful of graphic images for its 1989 hit The Little Mermaid, executives kept the incorporation a secret, fearing backlash from fans if they learned that not every frame of the animated film had been hand-drawn. Such knowledge, executives feared, might "take away the magic." Disney invested $1.5 billion in Fortnite creator Epic Games, acccording to the article, and is planning a world in Fortnite where gamers can interact with Marvel superheroes and creatures from Avatar. But "an experiment to allow gamers to interact with an AI-generated Darth Vader was fraught. Within minutes of launching the AI bot, gamers had figured out a way to make it curse in James Earl Jones's signature baritone." (Though Epic patched the workaround within 30 minutes.) But the article spells out another concern for Disney executives. "If a Fortnite gamer creates a Darth Vader and Spider-Man dance that goes viral on YouTube, who owns that dance?

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Napster's latest AI pivot "is the latest in a series of attempts by various owners to ride its brand cachet during emerging tech waves," Fast Company reported in July. In March, it sold for $207 million to Infinite Reality, an immersive digital media and e-commerce company, which also rebranded as Napster last month. Since 2020, other owners have included a British VR music startup (to create VR concerts) and two crypto-focused companies that bought it to anchor a Web3 music platform. Napster's launch follows a growing number of attempts to drive AI adoption beyond smartphones and laptops. And tonight the Washington Post re-visited the legacy of Napster's original mp3-sharing model, arguing Napster "inspired successive generations of entrepreneurs to risk flouting the law so they could grow enough to get the laws changed to suit them, including Airbnb and Uber." "Napster to me embodies the idea that it is better to seek forgiveness than permission," said Mark Lemley, director of Stanford Law School's Program in Law, Science & Technology. "It didn't work out well for Napster or for many of the others who got sued, but it worked out very well for everyone else — users, and eventually the content industry, too, which is making record profits...." [Napster co-founder Sean] Parker later advised Spotify, and Napster marketing chief Oliver Schusser is now Apple's vice president for music. Although many users saw Napster as an extension of rock-and-roll rebellion, that was not the company's real plan. First Fanning's majority-owning uncle, and then venture capital firm Hummer Winblad, wanted the start-up to leverage its knowledge of individual music consumers to make lucrative deals with the labels, according to internal documents this reporter found in researching a book on Napster. They warned that if no agreement were reached and Napster failed, more decentralized pirate services would take the audience and offer the labels nothing. But settlement talks failed. The litigation blitz also took down a Napster competitor called Scour, which a young Travis Kalanick had joined shortly after its founding. Kalanick later created Uber, dedicated to overthrowing taxi regulations. The article concludes that "Now it is Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google, among the largest companies in the world, bankrolling the consumption of all media. "They, too, have absorbed Napster's lessons in realpolitik, namely to build it first and hope the regulators will either yield or catch up."

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NBC News reports that in the U.S., many recent graduates looking to enter the labor force "are painting a dire picture of their job search." NBC News asked people who recently finished technical school, college or graduate school how their job application process was going, and in more than 100 responses, the graduates described months spent searching for a job, hundreds of applications and zero responses from employers — even with degrees once thought to be in high demand, like computer science or engineering. Some said they struggled to get an hourly retail position or are making salaries well below what they had been expecting in fields they hadn't planned to work in. "It was very frustrating," said Jensen Kornfeind, who graduated this spring from Temple University with a degree in international trade. "Out of 70-plus job applications, I had three job interviews, and out of those three, I got ghosted from two of them." The national economic data backs up their experience. The unemployment rate among recent graduates has been increasing this year to an average of 5.3%, compared to around 4% for the labor force as a whole, making it one of the toughest job markets for recent graduates since 2015, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released Friday. "Recent college graduates are on the margin of the labor market, and so they're the first to feel when the labor market slows and hiring slows," said Jaison Abel, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Across the economy, hiring in recent months has ground to its slowest pace since the start of the pandemic, with employers adding just 73,000 jobs in July, according to data released Friday... Tech workers have been some of the hardest hit in a slowing job market, with more than 400 employers including Meta, Intel and Cisco announcing more than 130,000 jobs cut in 2025, according to tech job site TrueUp. The article cites an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab who believes early adoption of AI "is also likely driving some of the cuts and leading employers to rethink hiring plans in anticipation of AI's future role." So besides federal policy changes, the article blames "the emergence of AI, which some companies have said they are using to replace certain entry-level jobs, like those in customer support or basic software development." Seven months after graduating, one CS major told NBC News he'd applied for 100 jobs, and got one job offer — for the 4 a.m. shift at Starbucks.

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"Hyundai sold 79,543 vehicles in the U.S. last month," reports the EV news site Electrek — Hyundai's best July ever, and 15% higher than last year. "The growth was mainly driven by electrified vehicles, including EVs and hybrids..." Hyundai said that electrified vehicle sales "reached new heights," after climbing 50% compared to July 2024. Electrified vehicles accounted for nearly a third (32%) of Hyundai's retail sales in July 2025, with several popular nameplates setting new all-time monthly sales records, including the new IONIQ 5. Hyundai IONIQ 5 sales surged 71% in July with 5,818 units sold. Through the first seven months of 2025, Hyundai has now sold nearly 25,000 IONIQ 5 models in the US. Hyundai's electric SUV remains one of the top-selling EVs in the US, boasting a long driving range, ultra-fast charging capabilities, advanced technology, and a stylish design. After upgrading it for the 2025 model year, the IONIQ 5 now features a range of up to 318 miles, an upgraded infotainment system, and a built-in NACS port, allowing you to charge at Tesla Superchargers... Hyundai is also offering a complimentary ChargePoint L2 home EV charger with the purchase or lease of a new 2025 IONIQ 5 or 2026 IONIQ 9.

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Started in 1984, it's been described as the internet's longest-running contest. And yesterday 2025's International Obfuscated C Code Contest concluded — with 23 new winners announced in a special four-and-a-half-hour livestreamed ceremony! Programmers submitted their funniest programs showcasing C's unusual/obscure subtleties while having some fun. (And demonstrating the importance of clarity and style by setting some very bad examples...) Among this year's winners were an OpenRISC 32-bit CPU emulator, a virtual machine capable of running Doom, and some kind of salmon recipe that makes clever use of C's U"string" literal prefix... But yes, every entry's source code is ridiculously obfuscated. ("Before you set off on your adventure to decode this program's logic, make sure you have enough food, ammo, clothes, oxen, and programming supplies," read the judge's remarks on the winner of this year's "diabolical logistics" prize. "You'll be driving for 2170 miles through a wild wilderness inspired by Oregon Trail...") And one entrant also struggled mightily in adapting a rough port of their program's old Atari 2600 version, but was never gonna give it up... Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader achowe for bringing the news (who has submitted winning entries in four different decades, starting in 1991 and continuing through 2024)... Including a 2004 award for the best abuse of the contest's guidelines. ("We are not exactly sure how many organisations will be upset with this entry, but we are considering starting an IOCCC standards body just to reign in the likes of Mr Howe....")

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Slashdot reader ffkom writes: The air around you mostly consists of nitrogen [78%]. And in that air exist happy little monogamous pairs of two nitrogen atoms per molecule, also known as N2. Researchers from the University of Giessen, Germany, recently managed to synthesize N6 molecules, "the first, to our knowledge, experimentally realized neutral molecular nitrogen allotrope beyond N2 that exhibits unexpected stability." And these appear to be pretty angry little molecules, as they detonate at more than twice the energy density than good old TNT: A kiloton of N6 is 1.19×10**7mol, which can release an energy of 2.20×109kcal (9.21terajoules) based on the enthalpy. Considering that the standard kiloton TNT equivalent is 4.184terajoules, N6 can release 2.2 times the energy of TNT of the same weight. On the basis of the documented TNT equivalent based on weight for HMX (1.15) and RDX (1.15), N6 can release 1.9 times the energy of HMX or RDX with the same weight. In interviews the researchers contemplated the possibility of using N6 as rocket fuel, given its superior energy density and that its reaction product is just N2, so basically air, but no smoke, no CO2 or other potentially harmful substances.

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IBM's legendary Model M keyboard was sturdy and solid. But "What would happen if you took the classic layout and look of the Model M and rebuilt it with modern mechanical guts?" asks long-time Slashdot reader uninet. Writing for the long-running tech blog Open for Business , they review a new wireless keyboard from Vortex that was clearly inspired by the Model M: The result is a unique keyboard with one foot in two different decades... Let's call it the Vortex M for simplicity's sake. I first became aware of it on a Facebook ad and was immediately fascinated. It looked so close to the original Model M, I wondered if someone else had gotten access to an original mold and was trying Unicomp's game. No, they've just managed to copy the aesthetic to a nearly uncanny level... The Vortex M eschews the normal eye candy we expect on modern keyboards and attempts the closest duplication of IBM's staid early PC design sensibility I can imagine. Off-white, rugged and absolutely no frills of lighting. If you're looking for cutesy, forget it. The keyboard's casing has the same highly textured plastic that looks and feels instantly familiar to anyone who spent too many hours interacting with early PCs. Model M to a tee. The keycaps likewise look the part... The Vortex M looks like a Model M. Its build quality feels like a Model M. But one key press and it becomes clear this is a different beast. Underneath the Model M-styled skin, Vortex's keyboard is a very modern design — everything the Unicomp is not. For our test, Vortex provided a keyboard with Cherry MX Blues, the classic clicky option the company and I both thought would best match up against Model M's buckling springs... Vortex's product configurator offers a variety of common and less common Cherry and Gateron options, if you want to get a different sort of feel in lieu of the clicky I tested. This is possible with an MX switch-style keyboard and impossible with buckling springs with their one option of bold clicky. Not only can this be done when ordering, but also later on, thanks to hot swap switches that allow changes without soldering. Following the modern premium board theme, Vortex paired high end switches with a gasket mount and foam padding. The combination provides a solid feeling, sound dampened typing experience. Ironically, though, for a keyboard that apes the design of perhaps the loudest keyboard on the market today, the Vortex M is (relatively) quiet even with the clicky Blues on tap... The review's highlights: "The keyboard is exquisitely crafted to look like the IBM original... " "The Vortex M supports connecting to three different devices via Bluetooth, along with a 2.4 GHz receiver and a USB Type-C wired connection. " There's a full complement of media hot keys — "including an emoji key ala recent Macs. " "For repetitive tasks, the keyboard is programmable with macros... And unlike Unicomp's boards, Vortex's can switch between PC and Mac layouts with the press of a hotkey." The keyboard uses AA batteries rather than having a built-in rechargeable battery The keyboard ultimately gave the reviewer some cognitive dissonance. "How am I typing on a Model M and not making a racket...?" "Pricing varies based on options, but as tested, it clocked in at $154. That's the low end of the 'premium' market and this is an exceptional board for that price."

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America's nonprofit College Board lets high school students take college-level classes — including a computer programming course that culminates with a 90-minute test. But students did better on questions about If-Then statements than they did on questions about arrays, according to the head of the program. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp explains: Students exhibited "strong performance on primitive types, Boolean expressions, and If statements; 44% of students earned 7-8 of these 8 points," says program head Trevor Packard. But students were challenged by "questions on Arrays, ArrayLists, and 2D Arrays; 17% of students earned 11-12 of these 12 points." "The most challenging AP Computer Science A free-response question was #4, the 2D array number puzzle; 19% of students earned 8-9 of the 9 points possible." You can see that question here. ("You will write the constructor and one method of the SumOrSameGame class... Array elements are initialized with random integers between 1 and 9, inclusive, each with an equal chance of being assigned to each element of puzzle...") Although to be fair, it was the last question on the test — appearing on page 16 — so maybe some students just didn't get to it. theodp shares a sample Java solution and one in Excel VBA solution (which includes a visual presentation). There's tests in 38 subjects — but CS and Statistics are the subjects where the highest number of students earned the test's lowest-possible score (1 out of 5). That end of the graph also includes notoriously difficult subjects like Latin, Japanese Language, and Physics. There's also a table showing scores for the last 23 years, with fewer than 67% of students achieving a passing grade (3+) for the first 11 years. But in 2013 and 2017, more than 67% of students achieved that passsing grade, and the percentage has stayed above that line ever since (except for 2021), vascillating between 67% and 70.4%. 2018: 67.8% 2019: 69.6% 2020: 70.4% 2021: 65.1% 2022: 67.6% 2023: 68.0% 2024: 67.2% 2025: 67.0%

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The Chinese government "has embarked on an all-out drive to transform the technology from a remote concept to a newfangled reality, with applications on factory floors and in hospitals and government offices..." reports the Washington Post. "[E]xperts say Beijing is pursuing an alternative playbook in an attempt to bridge the gap" with America: "aggressively pushing for the adoption of AI across the government and private sector." DeepSeek has been put to work over the last six months on a wide variety of government tasks. Procurement documents show military hospitals in Shaanxi and Guangxi provinces specifically requesting DeepSeek to build online consultation and health record systems. Local government websites describe state organs using DeepSeek for things like diverting calls from the public and streamlining police work. DeepSeek helps "quickly discover case clues and predict crime trends," which "greatly improves the accuracy and timeliness of crime fighting," a city government in China's Inner Mongolia region explained in a February social media post. Anti-corruption investigations — long a priority for Chinese leader Xi Jinping — are another frequent DeepSeek application, in which models are deployed to comb through dry spreadsheets to find suspicious irregularities. In April, China's main anti-graft agency even included a book called "Efficiently Using DeepSeek" on its official book recommendation list... Alfred Wu, an expert on China's public governance at the National University of Singapore, said Beijing has disseminated a "top-down" directive to local governments to use AI. This is motivated, Wu said, by a desire to improve China's AI prowess amid a fierce rivalry with Washington by providing models access to vast stores of government data. But not everyone is convinced that China has the winning hand, even as it attempts to push AI application nationwide. For one, China's sluggish economy will impact the AI industry's ability to grow and access funding, said Scott Singer [an expert on China's AI sector at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was attending the conference]... Others point out that local governments trumpeting their usage of DeepSeek is more about signaling than real technology uptake. Shen Yang, a professor at Tsinghua University's school of artificial intelligence, said DeepSeek is not being used at scale in anti-corruption work, for example, because the cases involve sensitive information and deploying new tools in these investigations requires long and complex approval processes.

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Microsoft's AI coding assistant "GitHub Copilot" has now had 20 million "all-time users," a GitHub spokesperson told TechCrunch. That means 5 million people have tried out GitHub Copilot for the first time in the last three months — the company reported in April the tool had reached 15 million users. Microsoft and GitHub don't report how many of these 20 million people have continued to use the AI coding tool on a monthly or daily basis — though those metrics are likely far lower. Microsoft also reported that GitHub Copilot, which is among the most popular AI coding tools offered today, is used by 90% of the Fortune 100. The product's growth among enterprise customers has also grown about 75% compared to last quarter, according to the company... In 2024, Nadella said GitHub Copilot was a larger business than all of GitHub was when Microsoft acquired it in 2018. In the year since, it seems GitHub Copilot's growth rate has continued in a positive direction.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget: Nintendo sold 5.82 million Switch 2s in less than four weeks and is on pace to hit its target of 15 million units by April 2026, the company said in its latest earnings report. If that pans out, the Switch 2 would easily outsell the original Switch, which took a full year to hit that same 15 million sales number... Despite those superb sales figures, Nintendo says demand is outstripping supply in many regions and promises to boost production as soon as possible. There's some insight into Nintendo's available inventory elsewhere in the earnings report. The 5.82 million number counts sales up to June 30, and the company says that as of July 25, it had sold through "more than 6 million" consoles. That's not the clearest figure, but it definitely shows sales cratered in July despite consistent demand. Switch 2 software sales were also strong with 8.67 million units sold... "Nintendo had a very good quarter, more than doubling revenue over last year..."

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"Did Craigslist drive the downfall of print classifieds?" That's the question asked in a new article from the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies: "I've always wondered about that," Newmark said in a Zoom interview July 1. "I think it had an effect." But portraying him and the list as torpedoing an otherwise great business model is way overblown, he still believes. Citing an influential essay by Thomas Baekdal, Newmark contends that the root of newspapers' trouble was the loss of readers. "TV hit hard. ... (And) l'm like the folks on 'CSI,' I follow the evidence. That goes back at least to the '60s." Bad in itself, the loss also took away newspapers' dominant share of local audiences and ability to charge premium classified ad rates. The slide in circulation looks even worse, Baekdal pointed out, when compared to continued increases in the number of households over the years. Still, Craigslist came to symbolize the shift. Dozens of other vertical digital sites cropped up, before and after, all offering a deadly competitive pairing of an effective and much cheaper service than newspaper classifieds. Even if Craigslist was just one of many, though, it was arguably Newmark who put a face on the massive disruption... By the early 2000s, newspaper executives had a dawning awareness of the business challenge from Craigslist and similar sites. They took minimal action to meet it... The biggest response was that three big companies — Knight-Ridder, Tribune and Gannett — bought a copycat of Monster called CareerBuilder... By the time newspapers acted, online classifieds had a full head of steam... By 2010, 70% of the newspaper industry's print classified business was gone. Reliable statistics are no longer kept, but the trend continued over the last 15 years... Newspapers continue to do well only with paid obituaries and legal notices, though the latter is now also under threat by digital startups. The article cites a 2019 analysis from Peter Zollman, whose AIM Group consultancy has followed the classified business for 25 years. "Craigslist has often been blamed for killing newspapers, but that's a gross canard. It just isn't true." American newspapers stumbled while several well-managed counterparts in places like Scandinavia found ways to prosper, he argued.

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"Digital storefront Itch.io is reindexing its free adult games," reports Engadget, "and is talking to its partnered payment processors about plans to gradually reintroduce paid NSFW content..." In a statement included in the Itch.io update, Stripe said it hasn't closed the door on the possibility of being able to support adult content again in the future. In the meantime, Itch.io says it is talking to its other payment partners about accepting the card payments Stripe is currently no longer able to process. Itch's founder told the gaming news site Aftermath that it was a notice from Visa that led to the sudden deindexing of so many games. But Aftermath notes that Visa and Mastercard have now "both released statements effectively washing their hands of the situation but also, paradoxically, justifying any actions they might have taken." - Visa: "When a legally operating merchant faces an elevated risk of illegal activity, we require enhanced safeguards for the banks supporting those merchants..." - Mastercard: "Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content." Aftermath's take? The part where the two companies act as though their hands have been tied by the long arm of the law is, frankly, bullshit. None of the games removed from Steam or Itch were illegal. They depict actions that are perfectly legal in other mediums. To re-quote Mike Stabile, director of policy at the Free Speech Coalition: "The stuff [companies] are talking about is entirely legal. It's legal to have in a book, it's legal to have in a game. They are making decisions based on their brand, based on public pressure from anti-porn groups, and that can be reversed." Meanwhile, gamers are still pushing back: It's difficult to say just how many people have spent the past several days tying up the lines of card companies and payment processors, but the movement has made itself visible enough to gain support from larger industry bodies like the Communications Workers of America [the largest communications/media labor union in America] and the International Game Developers Association.

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