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Blue Origin is pausing its space tourist flights to work on lunar landers for NASA

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Blue Origin plans to put a focus on the development of its human lunar capabilities, so it won’t be sending tourists to space for at least the next two years. That means we won’t be seeing any New Shepard launches for quite some time. Blue Origin is one of the companies NASA chose to develop human landing systems for its Artemis program, along with SpaceX. Specifically, it will work on landers for the Artemis III and Artemis V missions.

The company was originally contracted to build the human landing system that would transfer astronauts from NASA’s Gateway station to the moon’s South Pole region for the Artemis V mission. But last year, NASA asked Blue Origin to design an alternative lander for Artemis III after SpaceX experienced delays due to Starship’s failed tests. Artemis III is expected to be the first crewed moon landing mission of the program, and the Trump administration wants it to happen before the end of the president’s term.

New Shepard takes tourists to suborbital space, where they experience a few minutes of weightlessness before the spacecraft makes its way back to Earth. Jeff Bezos was one of the passengers on New Shepard’s first tourist flight back in 2021. Since then, it has flown and landed 37 more times and carried 98 passengers to the Karman line, including Katy Perry and William Shatner.

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The Gas In CA Is Completely Different From The Rest Of The US

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Assuming you aren’t currently hiding under a very large rock, you’ve likely noticed that gas prices spiked dramatically in early March. Pain at the pump can be attributed to the war in Iran, specifically the difficulty of getting ships through the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of all exported oil and natural gas typically passes. Until recently, gas prices were relatively low, averaging just below $3 a gallon in the U.S. At time of writing, the average price of a gallon is $3.79, but of course, you may pay more or less depending on where you live.

According to GasBuddy, the cheapest gas can currently be found in Oklahoma, where residents will pay about $3.20, and residents of the Golden State are getting hit the hardest. Californians are paying more than $5.53 per gallon as of mid-March. One station in Los Angeles raised prices to more than $8 a gallon. Why is gas so much more expensive in California, especially when the state is home to several refineries? It all comes down to science — the formula of the gas, to be specific.

Fuel standards differ from state to state and often reflect local air quality needs. The federal Clean Air Act sets national standards but permits states to set their own specialized programs. In 1996, California’s Air Resources Board mandated that the state sell a unique blend to help reduce pollution. It’s cleaner than gas sold elsewhere, but more expensive to make because it requires more processing. Because California is the only state with this requirement, it can’t simply import gas from other states.

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Other contributors to cost

California’s strict fuel standards aren’t the only contributors to its high fuel costs. There’s also an age-old complaint: taxes. The state pays more in taxes per gallon than any other part of the country. A whopping $0.90 of each gallon is a combination of local, state, and federal taxes. In addition to high taxes, California’s tough environmental standards impact more than just the blend of the fuel. The Cap-and-Invest Program, previously called Cap-and-Trade, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and its Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which is designed to decrease the carbon intensity of fuel, both increase costs at the pump.

California is also considered a fuel island — an isolated market that refines most of its own fuel. There are no pipelines across the Rocky Mountains and only a few from the Gulf Coast. Additionally, there are few refineries outside the state that can meet California’s strict blend requirements. To further complicate the issue, the state is losing refineries at an alarming rate. The Phillips 66 Wilmington refinery closed in late 2025, and Valero Energy Corporation plans to close its refinery in Benicia this year.

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In 2023, California passed a law that would allow it to cap refinery profits and penalize oil companies for price gouging, legislation that many hoped would help when prices skyrocketed. The law has never been used, however, and in 2025, the California Energy Commission delayed it for five years, worried that penalizing refineries could lead to more closures. Critics of the law maintain it doesn’t address the real issue — the state’s isolation — while proponents argue that the state remains dangerously exposed to global shakeups in the energy market.



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Family Sharing no longer means sharing a credit card in iOS 26.4

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Apple is finally fixing one of Family Sharing’s most awkward limitations in iOS 26.4, letting multiple adults on one family pay for their own purchases without breaking shared access.

iPhone screen showing Apple Cash add money screen, selecting 20 dollars, with text indicating new Apple Cash balance of 30 dollars on a dark background
Apple updates payments for Family Sharing

For years, Family Sharing forced everyone into a single payment method whenever purchase sharing was enabled. The approach worked for traditional households, but it created friction for anyone sharing with friends, partners, or extended family.
One person effectively became the default payer, even when it made no practical sense. iOS 26.4 changes the structure by letting adult members use their own payment methods while still joining shared purchases.
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AI training lawsuit drags Apple in yet again for alleged use of pirated book dataset

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AI training with sketchy data repository “The Pile” returns to the courts in a lawsuit by Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC accusing just about all of big tech of piracy. The problem is, Apple denies using it to train Apple Intelligence.

Glowing multicolored Siri orb with overlapping light ribbons centered inside a neon gradient atomic-style looped outline that is the Apple Intelligence logo on a solid black background
Apple accused of using ‘The Pile’ for AI training yet again

Artificial intelligence is a term that has virtually lost all meaning because of its being applied to everything. In that sense, it seems a lawsuit has mistakenly included Apple when it has previously denied utilizing the dataset in question.
According to a lawsuit from Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC, Apple, Meta, xAI, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, and NVIDIA are all in violation of copyright thanks to training their respective artificial intelligence tools on a dataset known as “The Pile.” While that dataset is filled with proprietary content, like YouTube subtitle files, it wasn’t used by Apple to train Apple Intelligence.
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ENIAC, the General-Purpose Digital Computer, Is 80

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Happy 80th anniversary, ENIAC! The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the first large-scale, general-purpose, programmable electronic digital computer, helped shape our world.

On 15 February 1946, ENIAC—developed in the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia—was publicly demonstrated for the first time. Although primitive by today’s standards, ENIAC’s purely electronic design and programmability were breakthroughs in computing at the time. ENIAC made high-speed, general-purpose computing practicable and laid the foundation for today’s machines.

On the eve of its unveiling, the U.S. Department of War issued a news release hailing it as a new machine “expected to revolutionize the mathematics of engineering and change many of our industrial design methods.” Without a doubt, electronic computers have transformed engineering and mathematics, as well as practically every other domain, including politics and spirituality.

ENIAC’s success ushered the modern computing industry and laid the foundation for today’s digital economy. During the past eight decades, computing has grown from a niche scientific endeavor into an engine of economic growth, the backbone of billion-dollar enterprises, and a catalyst for global innovation. Computing has led to a chain of innovations and developments such as stored programs, semiconductor electronics, integrated circuits, networking, software, the Internet, and distributed large-scale systems.

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Inside the ENIAC

The motivation for developing ENIAC was the need for faster computation during World War II. The U.S. military wanted to produce extensive artillery firing tables for field gunners to quickly determine settings for a specific weapon, a target, and conditions. Calculating the tables by hand took “human computers” several days, and the available mechanical machines were far too slow to meet the demand.

In 1942 John Mauchly, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Penn’s Moore School, suggested using vacuum tubes to speed up computer calculations. Following up on his theory, the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, which was responsible for providing artillery settings to soldiers in the field, commissioned Mauchly and his colleagues J. Presper Eckert and Adele Katz Goldstine, to work on a new high-speed computer. Eckert was a lab instructor at Moore, and Goldstine became one of ENIAC’s programmers. It took them a year to design ENIAC and 18 months to build it.

The computer contained about 18,000 vacuum tubes, which were cooled by 80 air blowers. More than 30 meters long, it filled a 9 m by 15 m room and weighed about 30 kilograms. It consumed as much electricity as a small town.

Programming the machine was difficult. ENIAC did not have stored programs, so to reprogram the machine, operators manually reconfigured cables with switches and plugboards, a process that took several days.

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By the 1950s, large universities either had acquired or built their own machines to rival ENIAC. The schools included Cambridge (EDSAC), MIT (Whirlwind), and Princeton (IAS). Researchers used the computers to model physical phenomena, solve mathematical problems, and perform simulations.

After almost nine years of operation, ENIAC officially was decommissioned on 2 October 1955.

ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer, a book by Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope, describes the design, construction, and testing processes and dives into its afterlife use. The book also outlines the complex relationship between ENIAC and its designers, as well as the revolutionary approaches to computer architecture.

In the early 1970s, there was a controversy over who invented the electronic computer and who would be assigned the patent. In 1973 Judge Earl Richard Larson of U.S. District Court in Minnesota ruled in the Honeywell v. Sperry Rand case that Eckert and Mauchly did not invent the automatic electronic digital computer but instead had derived their subject matter from a computer prototyped in 1939 by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University). The ruling granted Atanasoff legal recognition as the inventor of the first electronic digital computer.

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IEEE’s ENIAC Milestone

In 1987 IEEE designated ENIAC as an IEEE Milestone, citing it as “a major advance in the history of computing” and saying the machine “established the practicality of large-scale electronic digital computers and strongly influenced the development of the modern, stored-program, general-purpose computer.”

The commemorative Milestone plaque is displayed at the Moore School, by the entrance to the classroom where ENIAC was built.

“The ENIAC legacy heralded the computer age, transforming not only science and industry but also education, research, and human communication and interaction.”

A paper on the machine, published in 1996 in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and available in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library, is a valuable source of technical information.

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The Second Life of ENIAC,” an article published in the annals in 2006, covers a lesser-known chapter in the machine’s history, about how it evolved from a static system—configured and reconfigured through laborious cable plugging—into a precursor of today’s stored-program computers.

A classic history paper on ENIAC was published in the December 1995 IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.

The IEEE Inspiring Technology: 34 Breakthroughs book, published in 2023, features an ENIAC chapter.

The women behind ENIAC

One of the most remarkable aspects of the ENIAC story is the pivotal role women played, according to the book Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer, highlighted in an article in The Institute. There were no “programmers” at that time; only schematics existed for the computer. Six women, known as the ENIAC 6, became the machine’s first programmers.

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The ENIAC 6 were Kathleen Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence, and Ruth Teitelbaum.

“These six women found out what it took to run this computer, and they really did incredible things,” a Penn professor, Mitch Marcus, said in a 2006 PhillyVoice article. Marcus teaches in Penn’s computer and information science department.

In 1997 all six female programmers were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, in Los Angeles.

Two other women contributed to the programming. Goldstine wrote ENIAC’s five-volume manual, and Klára Dán von Neumann, wife of John von Neumann, helped train the programmers and debug and verify their code.

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To honor the women of ENIAC, the IEEE Computer Society established the annual Computer Pioneer Award in 1981. Eckert and Mauchly were among the award’s first recipients. In 2008 Bartik was honored with the award. Nominations are open to all professionals, regardless of gender.

An ENIAC replica

Last year a group of 80 autistic students, ages 12 to 16, from PS Academy Arizona, in Gilbert, recreated the ENIAC using 22,000 custom parts. It took the students almost six months to assemble.

A ceremony was held in January to display their creation. The full-scale replica features actual-size panels made from layered cardboard and wood. Although all electronic components are simulated, they are not electrically active. The machine, illuminated by hundreds of LEDs, is accompanied by a soundtrack that simulates the deep hum of ENIAC’s transformers and the rhythmic clicking of relays.

A white woman using a computer-adding machine in the 1940\u2019s. The device resembles a bulky typewriter and prints large stacks of paper with tabulated answers.

This machine prints and tabulates the answers to the problems solved by the ENIAC.

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Bettmann/Getty Images

“Every major unit, accumulators, function tables, initiator, and master programmer is present and placed exactly where it was on the original machine,” Tom Burick, the teacher who mentored the project, said at the ceremony.

The replica, still on display at the school, is expected to be moved to a more permanent spot in the near future.

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ENIAC’s legacy

ENIAC’s significance is both technical and symbolic. Technically, it marks the beginning of the chain of innovations that created today’s computational infrastructure. Symbolically, it made governments, militaries, universities, and industry view computation as a tool for improvement and for innovative applications that had previously been impossible. It marked a tectonic shift in the way humans approach problem-solving, modeling, and scientific reasoning.

The ENIAC legacy heralded the computer age, transforming not only science and industry but also education, research, and human communication and interaction.

As Eckert is reported to have said, “There are two epochs in computer history: Before ENIAC and After ENIAC.”

The remarkable evolution of computer hardware during the past 80 years has been sparked by advances in programming languages—the essential drivers of computing.

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From the manual rewiring of ENIAC to the orchestration of intelligent, distributed systems, programming languages have steadily evolved to make computers more powerful, expressive, and accessible.

Predictions for computing in the decades ahead

The evolution of computing will continue along multiple trajectories, with the emphasis moving from generalization to specialization (for AI, graphics, security, and networking), from monolithic system design to modular integration, and from performance-centric metrics alone to energy efficiency and sustainability as primary objectives.

Increasingly, security will be built into hardware by design. Computing paradigms will expand beyond traditional deterministic models to embrace probabilistic, approximate, and hybrid approaches for certain tasks.

Those developments will usher in a new era of computing and a new class of applications.

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HP Study Finds Many Indian SMBs Still Ignore Printer Security Risks

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Cybersecurity in 2026 is one of the most pressing issues since everything we interact with is connected to the internet. HP has just released a new report titled The Workflow Wakeup, highlighting how everyday workplace technologies, including printers, can impact cybersecurity in modern organizations. According to the study, 51% of SMBs consider print security a low priority, even as businesses increasingly adopt digital tools and hybrid work environments.

Print Security Still a Blind Spot

The research was based on responses from 200 IT decision-makers and 600 knowledge workers across Indian SMBs with 50 to 1,000 employees.

One of the most notable findings is that employees often underestimate the risks associated with printers connected to office networks. Around 75% of knowledge workers assume network printers are secure, while 48% do not consider printers to be a cybersecurity threat.

At the same time, concerns about document privacy remain significant. Nearly 49% of workers worry about confidential documents being printed and accessed by the wrong person. The study outlines several key risks organizations worry about when it comes to printing infrastructure:

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  1. Cybersecurity threats linked to connected printers
  2. Employees mishandling or misprinting sensitive documents
  3. Managing security across multiple printers in an organization
  4. Unauthorized access to print queues or files
  5. Security risks tied to cloud-based scanning workflows

Smart Printing Technology Could Help

A person giving showing someone a printed paper

While the report highlights several challenges, HP also suggests that adopting smarter print management systems can improve security.

Among SMBs that have implemented smart printing technology, 88% reported improved security outcomes. Businesses cited three main benefits:

  • Better visibility into printing and scanning activity (90%)
  • Improved compliance with security standards (85%)
  • Stronger enforcement of printing rules and restrictions (83%)

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Prof Lynne Taylor and Dr Sarah O’Keeffe awarded 2026 St Patrick’s Day Medal

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The Research Ireland St Patrick’s Day Medal honours exceptional academic and industry leaders with strong Irish roots.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin, TD has presented Prof Lynne Taylor, a Retter distinguished professor of pharmacy at Purdue University, and Dr Sarah O’Keeffe, the group vice-president for product research and development at Eli Lilly, with the Research Ireland St Patrick’s Day medal.

The medal is awarded each year to academic and industry leaders with established Irish roots, who from their positions in the US, support and champion Ireland’s research community. Previous winners include computer scientist Dr Eamonn Keogh, Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison and Dr Ann Kelleher

A global authority on drug formulation science, Taylor’s research provides the foundation technologies that support the delivery of life-saving treatments for diseases such as cancer and hepatitis C. An Irish citizen, she is a vocal advocate for Ireland’s pharma space through her advisory roles with the Research Ireland Centre for Pharmaceuticals and collaboration with universities. 

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She is also the editor-in-chief of Molecular Pharmaceutics and is committed to supporting other women in STEM via the mentorship of emerging scientists and has built a formidable talent pipeline, with many former group members now holding prominent positions globally.

Commenting on the award, Taylor said: “It is a great honour to receive this award from Ireland’s research and innovation agency. For many years I have been involved with championing Irish research and supporting scientists at every stage of their development, across Ireland and globally. 

“Whether serving as a mentor, adviser, collaborator or guest speaker, these interactions with Irish scientists have been deeply rewarding. It is a privilege to continue playing a role in fostering greater connectivity and knowledge exchange between the United States and Ireland, and I am confident that the long-standing bonds between our two countries will grow even stronger into the future.”

O’Keeffe is considered among one of Ireland’s most senior leaders in global pharmaceutical R&D and she oversees more than 1,000 scientists and engineers who translate discovery molecules into medicines for patients worldwide. She has been central to a number of major advances in drug development, including in the development of the investigational drug candidate orforglipron, which was recognised by Time magazine for its potential global health impact in the management of diabetes and obesity.

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Beginning her career with Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, O’Keeffe played a central role in advancing manufacturing capabilities at the company’s Kinsale site, earning the facility the IPSE Global Facility of the Year Award for Innovation in 2017 and is a central figure in the development of the $4.5bn Lilly Medicine Foundry.

Of her win, she said: “I am delighted and proud to receive this recognition from Research Ireland. I would like, firstly, to acknowledge UCC for being the launchpad for my career in industry. I’d also like to thank all my Lilly colleagues in Ireland, United States and internationally over the last two decades, for their extraordinary commitment and relentless pursuit of excellence. 

“Pharmaceutical research endeavours are a team pursuit, and collective passion and perseverance through times of challenge and often, failure is how progress and success happens. It has been a pleasure to have shared my journey to date with such talented colleagues who have the patient front and centre in all that they do.”

Presenting both recipients with their medals in Washington DC, Martin stated: “Today, we honour two outstanding scientific leaders whose achievements exemplify the very best of our global research community. Prof Taylor and Dr O’Keeffe demonstrate how members of the Irish diaspora, working at the highest levels in the United States, are helping to shape the future of medicine and strengthen international partnerships. 

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“Their respective work has enhanced Ireland’s reputation as a leader in research and innovation, and reflects both the deep and enduring ties between Ireland and the US, and our shared commitment to scientific excellence. I am delighted to recognise their leadership and achievements here today, and to celebrate the impact they continue to make on behalf of Ireland.”

Updated, 3.35pm, 18 March 2026: This article was amended to clarify that O’Keeffe helped Eli Lilly’s Kinsale site earn the IPSE Global Facility of the Year Award for Innovation.

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CISA orders feds to patch Zimbra XSS flaw exploited in attacks

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Email

CISA has ordered U.S. government agencies to secure their servers against an actively exploited vulnerability in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS).

Zimbra is a very popular email and collaboration software suite used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, including thousands of businesses and hundreds of government agencies.

Tracked as CVE-2025-66376 and patched in early November, this high-severity security flaw stems from a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) weakness in the Classic UI that remote unauthenticated attackers could exploit by abusing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) @import directives in email HTML.

While Synacor (the company behind Zimbra) didn’t share any details on the impact of a successful CVE-2025-66376 attack, it can likely be exploited to execute arbitrary JavaScript via malicious HTML-based emails, potentially allowing attackers to hijack user sessions and steal sensitive data within the compromised Zimbra environment.

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CISA added it to its catalog of vulnerabilities exploited in the wild on Wednesday and gave Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies two weeks to secure their servers by April 1st, as mandated by the Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01 issued in November 2021.

Although BOD 22-01 applies only to federal agencies, the U.S. cybersecurity agency encouraged all organizations, including those in the private sector, to patch this actively exploited flaw as soon as possible.

“Apply mitigations per vendor instructions, follow applicable BOD 22-01 guidance for cloud services, or discontinue use of the product if mitigations are unavailable,” CISA warned. “These types of vulnerabilities are frequent attack vectors for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risks to the federal enterprise.”

Zimbra servers under attack

Zimbra security flaws are frequently targeted in attacks and have been exploited to breach thousands of vulnerable email servers worldwide in recent years.

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For instance, as early as June 2022, Zimbra auth-bypass and remote code execution bugs were abused to breach more than 1,000 servers.

Starting in September 2022, hackers exploited a zero-day vulnerability in Zimbra Collaboration Suite, breaching nearly 900 servers within two months after gaining remote code execution on compromised instances.

The Russian state-backed Winter Vivern hacking group also used reflected XSS exploits to breach the Zimbra webmail portals of NATO-aligned governments and the mailboxes of government officials, military personnel, and diplomats.

More recently, threat actors exploited another Zimbra XSS vulnerability (CVE-2025-27915) in zero-day attacks to execute arbitrary JavaScript code, enabling them to set email filters that redirect messages to attacker-controlled servers.

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Malware is getting smarter. The Red Report 2026 reveals how new threats use math to detect sandboxes and hide in plain sight.

Download our analysis of 1.1 million malicious samples to uncover the top 10 techniques and see if your security stack is blinded.

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Inventec’s bizarre VeilBook laptop hides its touchpad under a sliding keyboard just to give cooling fans a little breathing room

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  • Inventec VeilBook rearranges keyboard and touchpad to prioritize airflow inside thin laptop
  • Sliding keyboard design exposes ventilation openings normally hidden beneath traditional notebook layouts
  • VeilBook’s cooling strategy sacrifices touchpad access during heavier computing workloads

Taiwanese manufacturer Inventec has revealed an experimental laptop called the VeilBook, a concept device built around an unusual keyboard placement and thermal design.

The machine features a 14-inch display and an ultra-thin chassis measuring less than 10mm thick, placing it among the slimmer notebook concepts proposed in recent years.

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The Jehovah’s Witnesses Are Back Abusing Copyright Law To Unmask Their Critics. Again.

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from the dmca-surveillance dept

EFF announced last week that it has stepped in to defend yet another anonymous Jehovah’s Witness critic from having their identity exposed through bogus copyright claims. The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society — the organizational arm of the Jehovah’s Witnesses — has sent DMCA subpoenas to both Google and Cloudflare seeking information to unmask the anonymous operator of a website called JWS Library. If you’re getting a sense of déjà vu here, that’s because we’ve written about Watch Tower doing this exact thing more than once before, and they keep coming back to the same playbook.

EFF’s client, identified as J. Doe, is a current member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who got curious about the history of the organization’s public statements and how they’ve changed over time. So Doe did something pretty straightforwardly useful. As EFF explains:

They created research tools to analyze those documents and ultimately created a website, JWS Library, allowing others to use those tools and verify their findings through an archive that included documents suppressed by the church. Doe and others discovered prophecies that failed to come true, erasure of a leader’s disgrace, increased calls for obedience and donations, and other insights about the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ practices. Doe also used machine translation on a foreign-language document to help the community understand what the church was saying to different audiences and also to help understand potential changes in the organization’s attitudes towards dissent.

That’s about as clearly transformative and non-commercial as fair use gets — it’s for research and commentary, after all. But Watch Tower doesn’t care about whether the copyright claim is actually viable. It cares about finding out who Doe is. And everyone involved knows exactly why. Again EFF’s Kit Walsh explains:

Within the church, dissent or even asking questions has often been punished by labeling members as apostates and ostracizing—or “disfellowshipping”— them. As a result, Doe and others choose to speak anonymously to avoid retaliation that could cost them family, friend, and professional relationships.

Watch Tower knows all of this, of course. That’s precisely the point. They’re not sending DMCA subpoenas to Google and Cloudflare because they have a genuine interest in protecting their copyrights — they’re using the subpoena process as a surveillance tool with a built-in punishment mechanism waiting at the other end.

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We know this because we’ve watched the pattern play out in extraordinary detail multiple times. When Paul Levy of Public Citizen’s Litigation Group dug into Watch Tower’s history back in 2022, he found that the organization had filed an astounding 72 copyright subpoenas since 2017. And how many of those subpoenas resulted in an actual copyright infringement lawsuit? Essentially zero. As Levy documented:

As can be seen from this list of Watch Tower copyright infringement lawsuits, Watch Tower has never used the information obtained from these subpoenas to file an infringement action. The only infringement lawsuit that Watch Tower has filed against the target of one of its DMCA subpoenas is a current case (discussed below) in which enforcement of the subpoena was denied!

So they file subpoena after subpoena claiming they need to identify alleged infringers to bring a lawsuit, and then they never bring the lawsuit. What they do with the information, as Levy uncovered, is identify critics and then initiate disfellowship proceedings against them. The copyright claim is just the crowbar they use to pry open the door.

The one time Watch Tower actually did file a lawsuit — against a critic using the pseudonym Kevin McFree — things went badly for them. Once a judge started paying close attention to what was actually going on, Watch Tower fled the case, dismissing with prejudice. Among the more remarkable moments in that case: Watch Tower’s counsel tried to claim the organization lacked “significant funds” to pursue litigation — despite Watch Tower’s publicly available tax filings showing it has more than a billion dollars in assets. The organization also tried to use the infringement lawsuit as a vehicle to investigate how McFree had obtained leaked unpublished videos — something that had nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with plugging leaks and identifying internal dissidents.

Which makes the history here so galling. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have one of the most impressive First Amendment track records of any organization in American legal history. Starting with Lovell v. City of Griffin in 1938, they brought a string of landmark cases establishing core free speech protections that benefit all of us today. They fought for the right to go door-to-door without identifying themselves, and against compelled speech. Watch Tower’s own in-house counsel, Paul Polidoro — the same lawyer who has been issuing many of these DMCA subpoenas — successfully argued before the Supreme Court for the right of Jehovah’s Witnesses to speak anonymously.

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And now that same organization is systematically using copyright law’s cheapest, lowest-bar procedural tool to strip anonymity from its own members who dare to ask questions. As EFF puts it:

The First Amendment does not permit the unmasking of anonymous speakers based on such weak claims. Indeed, the First Amendment protects anonymous speakers precisely because some would be deterred from speaking if they faced retribution for doing so.

Watch Tower got caught doing this in 2019. They got caught again in 2022 and ran away from court once a judge saw through the scheme. And here they are in 2026, right back at it. There’s no honest way to treat these as isolated incidents — this is a deliberate, ongoing policy of abusing copyright as a weapon against internal dissent. The DMCA subpoena process — designed to be quick and cheap — is working exactly as Watch Tower wants: a low-cost intelligence-gathering operation that most targets can’t afford to fight.

EFF is pushing back, at least. But it shouldn’t require EFF — or, as in the last case, Paul Levy and Public Citizen Litigation Group — to show up every single time before a court will acknowledge that an organization with a billion dollars in assets and a decade-long pattern of filing subpoenas it never converts into actual lawsuits is abusing the process. At some point, courts should be able to connect these dots on their own.

Filed Under: copyfraud, copyright, dmca, fair use, jehovah’s witnesses

Companies: eff, watch tower bible and tract society

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Commission says EU Inc will be in place by end of 2026

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Many activists and lobbyists had called for a European company register as part of EU Inc. Today’s EU legislative proposal has indeed included one.

Today saw the official launch of the EU Inc or ‘28th Regime’ legislative proposal by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels, after it got its first outing at Davos in January. It includes the much requested European company register, despite earlier indications that this would be unwieldy and not be part of the proposal.

“It can still take weeks or even months to set up a company or to start doing business in another country within the single market,” von der Leyen said this morning in Brussels.

“Barriers inside Europe hurt us more than tariffs from the outside. Across our union, entrepreneurs who want to scale up are the first victims of regulatory fragmentation. Instead of one market, they face 27 legal systems and more than 60 national company forms. And the consequences are real.”

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“The time and money spent filling paperwork is not spent on creating or innovating,” she said. “Obviously, this must change and fast. And so here comes EU Inc, the 28th regime.”

The EU Inc movement had gathered steam since its launch back in 2024, and the announcement from von der Leyen at the World Economic Forum in Davos was widely celebrated as progress. The initiative launched today includes many of the elements for which the start-up community lobbied hard.

What’s included?

The 48-hour incorporation benchmark – the Holy Grail for many in the European start-up sector – is there, as had been anticipated given it was included in von der Leyen’s Davos speech. Less expected was the confirmation that the proposal includes the EU Business registry for EU Inc companies.

“EU Inc creates a single European company framework,” said von der Leyen. “It is one simple set of rules that works across our entire single market of 450m consumers. It will make it drastically easier to start and to grow a business in Europe. Any entrepreneur will be able to create a company within 48 hours from anywhere in the European Union, fully digitalised for less than €100 and without minimum share capital.

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“At the heart of this proposal is one simple principle that says, ‘once only’. Companies will provide their information to public authority, the data one time only, and that information will then be shared automatically between relevant administrations, from business registers to taxes to social security … and this information will be stored and easily accessible in a new EU Business register for EU Inc companies.”

A third element of EU Inc will be around talent, she said.

“Now, with EU Inc, employee stock options will be simpler to offer and easier to manage across borders, so it will help you in companies to compete for the best people, and founders will be able to protect companies and employees from unwanted takeovers,” said von der Leyen.

Finally, she addressed the much-discussed ‘risk factor’. Many in the community had pointed to the lack of a risk culture in Europe, where failure was not recognised as a necessary part of any true start-up ecosystem.

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“In business, failure should not be the end of the road,” said von der Leyen. “It should be part of the journey. With EU Inc, we want to reward entrepreneurship and make it less risky, and this is why we will fully digitalise insolvency procedures and introduce a fast-track insolvency process for start-ups so that entrepreneurs can start again more easily.”

She also addressed the concerns of labour activists and trade unions around EU Inc.

“Let me be very clear on one important point. The EU Inc proposal will in every way respect existing social standards and labour law, and this includes all employees’ rights to participate in companies’ boards. This proposal includes strong safeguards to ensure that such rules are applied.”

Boosting EU start-ups and scale-ups

EU-INC, a movement with more than 22,000 signatories including the founders of Stripe and venture capital players from Sequioa to Index, had been running a policy campaign since October 2024 pushing for the creation of the so-called 28th regime, and in 2025 presented legal proposals to the Commission.

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DC Cahalane is a venture partner at Sure Valley Ventures. In a SiliconRepublic.com op-ed in September last year, he described EU Inc as “Europe’s greatest opportunity to build a unified tech ecosystem that can compete globally”.

Simon Paris is CEO of Unit4, an Utrecht-headquartered enterprise software company. He told SiliconRepublic.com he is very positive about the potential for Europe to create European software champions, and that he sees EU Inc as a positive step in the right direction.

“Some are saying we are better off focusing efforts elsewhere, as we’re too far behind the US and China,” he said. “I disagree. I would remind critics of Europe’s decision to build Airbus in response to the need for an alternative to Boeing. A collective decision was made to define this as a strategic priority for the region, despite all the risks it entailed. As the Airbus example shows, we have been here before, and we made it happen.”

Capital challenge

Availability of capital remains a major challenge for European scale-ups in comparison to their US and Chinese counterparts, and von der Leyen did address this briefly, saying there are plans afoot to tackle the issue.

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“This is only the beginning. We will make it easier for venture capital to flow to businesses,” she said. “This will be done by the savings and investment union. We will explore new possibilities for cross-border telework, for start-ups and scale-ups. And today, we also adopted a recommendation to harmonise the definition of innovative start-ups and scale-ups across Europe so that we can design better policies to help our businesses to grow and to thrive in Europe.”

At a later press conference, Henna Virkkunen, executive vice-president of the European Commission, said the intention was to have the EU Inc regime in place by the end of 2026.

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