Horizon Worlds, Meta’s first pass at a metaverse, will be inaccessible via virtual reality headset after June 15, 2026. The company shared plans to separate Horizon Worlds from Quest VR platform and focus exclusively on the smartphone version of the app in February, and now in a new post on its community forums, Meta detailed when the VR version of Horizon Worlds will be deprecated.

By March 31, Meta says individual Horizon Worlds and Events will no longer be listed in the Quest’s Store and headset owners will be unable to visit worlds like “Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju and Bobber Bay.” Then, after June 15, the app will be removed from Quest headsets and worlds will be completely unavailable to visit in VR. From that point on, the easiest place to visit Horizon Worlds will be in the Meta Horizon app for iOS and Android.

Additionally, Hyperscape Capture, a recently added beta feature that allows Quest headset owners to capture, share and visit each other in detailed 3D scans of real-life locations, is also being removed from Horizon Worlds. Meta says users will still be able to capture and view Hyperscapes, “but sharing, inviting, and co-experiencing Hyperscapes with others will no longer be supported.”

While Meta’s original blog detailing its 2026 VR strategy left open the possibility that a committed Quest owner might still be able to access some part of Meta’s original VR metaverse, that apparently was never the company’s plan. Meta saw enough “positive momentum” focusing on supporting the mobile version of Horizon Worlds in 2025 that it made sense to completely abandon the VR one in 2026. While that seems to run contrary to Meta’s positioning as a “metaverse company,” it does reflect where the company is spending the most money and seeing the most (relative) success: AI and smart glasses.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler: Over the last few months, various academics and AI companies have attempted to predict how artificial intelligence is going to impact the labor market. These studies, including a high-profile paper published by Anthropic earlier this month, largely try to take the things AI is good at, or could be good at, and match them to existing job categories and job tasks. But the papers ignore some of the most impactful and most common uses of AI today: AI porn and AI slop.

Anthropic’s paper, called “Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence,” essentially attempts to find 1:1 correlations between tasks that people do today at their jobs and things people are using Claude for. The researchers also try to predict if a job’s tasks “are theoretically possible with AI,” which resulted in this chart, which has gone somewhat viral and was included in a newsletter by MSNOW’s Phillip Bump and threaded about by tech journalist Christopher Mims. (Because everything is terrible, the research is now also feeding into a gambling website where you can see the apparent odds of having your job replaced by AI.) In his thread, Mims makes the case that the “theoretical capability” of AI to do different jobs in different sectors is totally made up, and that this chart basically means nothing. Mims makes a good and fair observation: The nature of the many, many studies that attempt to predict which people are going to lose their jobs to AI are all flawed because the inputs must be guessed, to some degree.

But I believe most of these studies are flawed in a deeper way: They do not take into account how people are actually actually using AI, though Anthropic claims that that is exactly what it is doing. “We introduce a new measure of AI displacement risk, observed exposure, that combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting automated (rather than augmentative) and work-related uses more heavily,” the researchers write. This is based in part on the “Anthropic Economic Index,” which was introduced in an extremely long paper published in January that tries to catalog all the high-minded uses of AI in specific work-related contexts. These uses include “Complete humanities and social science academic assignments across multiple disciplines,” “Draft and revise professional workplace correspondence and business communications,” and “Build, debug, and customize web applications and websites.” Not included in any of Anthropic’s research are extremely popular uses of AI such as “create AI porn” and “create AI slop and spam.” These uses are destroying discoverability on the internet, cause cascading societal and economic harms. “Anthropic’s research continues a time-honored tradition by AI companies who want to highlight the ‘good’ uses of AI that show up in their marketing materials while ignoring the world-destroying applications that people actually use it for,” argues Koebler. “Meanwhile, as we have repeatedly shown, huge parts of social media websites and Google search results have been overtaken by AI slop. Chatbots themselves have killed traffic to lots of websites that were once able to rely on ad revenue to employ people, so on and so forth…”

“This is all to say that these studies about the economic impacts of AI are ignoring a hugely important piece of context: AI is eating and breaking the internet and social media,” writes Koebler, in closing. “We are moving from a many-to-many publishing environment that created untold millions of jobs and businesses towards a system where AI tools can easily overwhelm human-created websites, businesses, art, writing, videos, and human activity on the internet. What’s happening may be too chaotic, messy, and unpleasant for AI companies to want to reckon with, but to ignore it entirely is malpractice.”

The Council of the European Union has sanctioned three Chinese and Iranian companies and two individuals for cyberattacks targeting devices and critical infrastructure.

One of the two sanctioned Chinese companies, identified as Integrity Technology Group, provided “technical and material support” between 2022 and 2023 that led to hacking more than 65,000 devices in six EU states.

The other Chinese company is Anxun Information Technology, which provided hacking services targeting “critical infrastructure and critical functions of member states and third countries.”

The two individuals added to the Council’s sanctions list are the co-founders of Anxun Information Technology, believed to have played a significant role in cyberattacks against EU member states.

The sanctioned Iranian company is Emennet Pasargad, which has been attributed multiple influence campaigns and the compromise of an SMS service in Sweden.

Emennet Pasargad has been involved in hijacking advertising billboards to spread misinformation during the 2024 Paris Olympics.

According to Microsoft, using the moniker Holy Souls on a hacker forum, the actor also offered in early January 2023 to sell personal information of 230,000 subscribers of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Holy Souls asked for 20 bitcoins, worth around $340,000 at the time, and published a sample of the stolen details, which included Charlie Hebdo subscriber names and addresses.

Emennet Pasargad is believed to have provided cybersecurity services for the Iranian government and has a long history of influence campaigns. In November 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice offered a $10 million reward for two Iranian nationals who worked as contractors for the company.

“Those listed today under both regimes are subject to an asset freeze, and EU citizens and companies are forbidden from making funds, financial assets, or economic resources available to them. Natural persons also face a travel ban that prohibits them from entering or transiting through EU territories,” notes the European Council.

Integrity Technology Group was connected by the FBI in 2024 to the ‘Raptor Train’ botnet, believed to be operated by the Chinese state-sponsored threat actor ‘Flax Typhoon.’

In January 2025, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the company for its involvement in these cyberattacks, allowing the Raptor Train to build a massive network of 260,000 infected devices.

In March 2025, the U.S. Justice Department sanctioned Anxun Information Technology (also known as i-Soon) for advertising hacker-for-hire services and carrying out cyberattacks since at least 2011.

In mid-February 2024, i-Soon suffered a data leak that exposed the company’s internal operations as a China-affiliated hacking contractor and its offensive toolkit.

The U.S. authorities also announced rewards of up to $10 million for valid information leading to the location of 10 Anxun Information Technology executives and technical staff members.

The European Union started imposing cyber sanctions in 2019 and, as of today, the restrictions target 19 individuals and seven entities responsible for malicious cyber activities.

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The 2026 AWS Pioneers cohort spans healthcare, climate, and conflict zones, and lands alongside a stark warning that Europe risks losing its best innovators if the regulatory environment doesn’t change.

Amazon Web Services announced today the second annual cohort of its Pioneers Project: twelve European companies using AI and cloud infrastructure to tackle problems that range from the molecular to the geopolitical.

One maps unmapped ocean floor with zero-emission autonomous vessels. Another warns two million civilians in northwest Syria when an airstrike is incoming. A third can diagnose rare leukaemia subtypes in hours rather than the weeks it typically takes.

The announcement is tied to a new AWS-commissioned study, “Unlocking Europe’s AI Potential”, conducted by research firm Strand Partners across 17 European markets and 34,000 respondents.

Its headline figures are bullish,  91% of AI-first startups surveyed say AI has accelerated their innovation, 89% report productivity gains, but the report also surfaces a harder finding: 38% of European startups would consider relocating outside Europe to scale, rising to 51% among the fastest-growing cohort.

When asked what would persuade them to stay, 65% cited a clearer and more proportionate regulatory environment. The research figures are self-reported from an AWS-commissioned survey and should be read with that context in mind.

The twelve companies named span France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, and the UK, and were selected, AWS says, for placing measurable global impact at the heart of their work rather than for commercial scale alone.

The most immediately striking entry is MLL Munich Leukaemia Laboratory, a German diagnostics organisation that combines genomics at cloud scale with deep haematological expertise to diagnose rare leukaemia subtypes in hours or days.

The company says it has analysed over 1.4 million cases to date, though that figure comes from AWS’s own press materials and has not been independently verified.

XOCEAN, the Irish company, operates a global fleet of autonomous surface vessels roughly the size of a car, powered by battery and solar rather than a crew.

The company has been deploying these in offshore wind surveys for clients including SSE Renewables, Ørsted, BP, and Shell, and says its vessels emit a fraction of the carbon of conventional survey ships.

AWS describes XOCEAN as operating across 23 jurisdictions; the company’s own public materials confirm a global footprint spanning Ireland, the UK, Norway, the US, Canada, and Australia, though the 23-jurisdiction figure comes from the press release alone.

Hala Systems, headquartered in Lisbon, began in Syria. Its Sentry platform, an indication and warning system combining acoustic sensors, volunteer observer networks, AI prediction, and remotely activated sirens, has provided advance warning of airstrikes to civilians in northwest Syria and, more recently, has contributed to war crimes documentation efforts in Ukraine.

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has acquired Sentry hardware for its collection; the system is the subject of the world’s first ICC Article 15 war crimes dossier featuring cryptographically secured evidence, according to the company.

myTomorrows, the Dutch healthtech company, runs an AI-powered platform connecting patients and physicians to clinical trials and expanded access programmes for pre-approval treatments.

AWS’s press release states the company has helped over 17,700 patients in 135 countries; the most recent independently verifiable figures, from a November 2025 press release at the time of the company’s €25 million funding round, put the number at approximately 16,900 patients across 133 countries.

The figures will have grown since then, and the direction is consistent, but editors should confirm the current number directly with myTomorrows before publication.

Quandela, the French quantum computing company, is building photonic quantum machines that operate at room temperature and use existing fibre networks, a design choice that distinguishes it from most quantum computing approaches, which require cooling to near absolute zero.

The inclusion of a quantum computing startup in a cohort alongside humanitarian and climate companies is a reflection of AWS’s broader argument that deep infrastructure investment and societal benefit are not in tension.

The remaining six companies are Callyope (France), which uses AI to detect early signs of mental health relapse before a crisis.

CareMates (Germany), which has cut hospital patient admission time from five hours to one using AI-powered software.

ETERNO (Germany), whose AI assistant LENI is designed to help clinicians make better use of brief consultations; Iktos (France), which combines AI with laboratory robotics to accelerate drug molecule design.

Mindflow (France), an enterprise automation platform that bundles AI agents, no-code workflows, and over 4,000 integrations; Paebbl (Sweden and Netherlands), which accelerates natural mineralisation to reduce the carbon footprint of concrete.

And Proximie (UK), a surgical coordination platform aimed at the estimated five billion people who currently lack access to safe surgery.

“These innovators are advancing Europe’s position as a global AI leader, mapping the oceans, revolutionising patient care, accelerating drug discovery, and predicting imminent threats to help save lives,” said Sasha Rubel, who AWS describes as its Head of AI and Generative AI Policy for EMEA. 

The research report accompanying the announcement attempts to quantify what Europe stands to lose if its AI startups leave.

It cites an estimate that cloud-enabled AI could generate €1.5 trillion of global GDP by 2030, and warns that 78% of startups say they are prepared for agentic AI, compared to just 19% of businesses overall. Both figures are from the AWS-commissioned Strand Partners study and carry the usual caveats of self-reported, sponsor-funded research.

AWS also used the announcement to highlight existing commitments: $1 billion in cloud credits for startups developing generative AI solutions, and $100 million over five years to support underserved learners through its Education Equity Initiative.

Whether those commitments are enough to address the relocation pressures the same report identifies is a question the Pioneers cohort itself may eventually answer.

Apple has released its first Background Security Improvements update to fix a WebKit flaw tracked as CVE-2026-20643 on iPhones, iPads, and Macs without requiring a full operating system upgrade.

The CVE-2026-20643 flaw allows malicious web content to bypass the browser’s Same Origin Policy.

Apple says the flaw is a cross-origin issue in the Navigation API that was addressed with improved input validation.

The vulnerability was discovered by security researcher Thomas Espach, with the new update available on iOS 26.3.1, iPadOS 26.3.1, macOS 26.3.1, and macOS 26.3.2.

This release is the first time Apple has pushed a security fix through its new Background Security Improvements feature, which is used to deliver small out-of-band patches outside the normal security update cycle.

“Background Security Improvements deliver lightweight security releases for components such as the Safari browser, WebKit framework stack, and other system libraries that benefit from smaller, ongoing security patches between software updates,” explains Apple.

“In rare instances of compatibility issues, Background Security Improvements may be temporarily removed and then enhanced in a subsequent software update.”

In the past, Apple security updates required users to install a new OS version and restart their device. However, with Background Security Improvements, Apple can now deliver small updates that are applied to specific components in the background.

Apple added the feature in iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS 26.1, stating it was to be used to quickly patch security flaws between releases.

Users can access the feature through their device settings under the Privacy & Security menu.

• On iPhone and iPad: Go to Settings, then tap Privacy & Security.
• On Mac: From the Apple menu, choose System Settings. Then click Privacy & Security.

Apple warns that uninstalling a Background Security Improvements update removes all previously applied background patches, reverting the device to the baseline OS version (such as iOS 26.3.1) without any of the incremental security fixes.

This effectively removes the rapid-response security protections delivered through this feature, leaving devices at the baseline security level until the updates are reapplied or included in a future full update.

Therefore, unless a baseline security improvement causes an issue on your device, it is strongly recommended that they not be uninstalled.

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from the full-circle dept

It’s been a long and winding road to mostly get us right back to where we started in the battle between pop star Katy Perry and Aussie clothing designer Katie Perry. If you’re not familiar with this saga, here is a brief summary. Note that I will be mostly using only Katy and Katie when naming the players here to avoid confusion.

Katie Taylor is the real name of the Aussie designer, but she began selling clothing under the name “Katie Perry” in 2008 and secured a trademark for the name in Australia for clothing. While Katy’s team initially sent a C&D to Katie’s business around that same time, it appears nothing came of that C&D, even as the singer went on a worldwide tour that included Australia in 2014. That’s when Katie sued Katy, arguing that clothing merch sold on her local tour constituted trademark infringement, as the public might be confused between the two entities and who was producing what and for whom. She won her initial lawsuit, but Katy appealed and won, with the court not only clearing her of trademark infringement but also canceling Katie’s trademark entirely. Rather than leaving well enough alone, Katie appealed that ruling to Australia’s High Court.

And that brings us to an unlikely present, in which the High Court partially agreed with Katie’s appeal, reinstating her trademark, but not ruling that Katy Perry infringed upon it. I’m going to stay away from the first part of CNN’s post on the matter, because it does a horrible job of framing all of this, mostly in that in paints Katie Perry as some kind of underdog victim in all of this when she very much is not. But as for the ruling itself:

But on Wednesday, Australia’s High Court overturned the ruling, arguing the cancellation of the trademark was not warranted, and the use of the “Katie Perry” trademark was not likely to deceive or cause confusion.

Taylor said the court battle was a long and difficult process, but she did it to show that trademarks are there to protect small businesses, not just large brands.

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“So many people said to me, like, why don’t you just give up? It’s not worth it. I really believe in standing up for your values. Truth and justice are part of my core and my values.”

And this is where I’m once again frustrated with CNN’s posture in its reporting. Katie sued Katy. That’s how this whole episode really started. Katie talking about how she is glad this all isn’t hanging over her head when she started the lawsuit that led to all of this is insane. This was a self-inflicted wound of epic proportions on a timeline equally crazy.

But the key part to me is that the logic behind ruling that Katie can have her trademark back is that Katie’s and Katy’s trademarks can coexist without any real concern for deception or confusion. That same logic is what I stated at the start of this whole ordeal as the reason this trademark lawsuit battle never should have been started in the first place.

Started by Katie Perry, I’ll remind you. And so we’ve come full circle, with both groups having their trademarks but without any actual infringement having occurred. It’s been a wild, stupid trip, but I guess we got where we were going: right back to where we started.

Filed Under: australia, katie perry, katy perry, trademark

Subnautica 2 has weathered the storm and has rescheduled its early access release. IGN reported today that the sequel to the underwater survival game will begin early access on PC and Xbox in May, although a more specific date was not provided.

The news comes a day after a judge ruled that former Unknown Worlds Entertainment CEO Ted Gill should be rehired at the game studio. That decision capped off a dramatic year for the team behind Subnautica, which was acquired by Krafton in 2021. The studio and its new owners entered a legal battle because the purchase of Unknown Worlds included a promise of an up to $250 million payout from Krafton if the team met certain performance goals by the end of 2025. In July of that year, however, Krafton fired several studio leaders and then delayed the sequel’s early access launch. The court case has raised questions about which side was trying to either secure or avoid making that multi-million payment.

With yesterday’s ruling, a rep from Krafton said that “we are evaluating our options as we determine our path forward.” It’s unclear if that path, or the other litigation still underway over the project, will create further delays to the planned early access date.