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Revolutionary Eye Injection Saved My Sight, Says First-Ever Patient
Doctors say they have achieved the previously impossible -- restoring sight and preventing blindness in people with a rare but dangerous eye conditon called hypotony. From a report: Moorfields hospital in London is the world's first dedicated clinic for the disorder and seven out of eight patients given the pioneering treatment have responded to the therapy, a pilot study shows. One of them -- the first-ever -- is Nicki Guy, 47, who is sharing her story exclusively with the BBC.
She says the results are incredible: "It's life-changing. It's given me everything back. I can see my child grow up. "I've gone from counting fingers and everything being really blurry to being able to see." Currently, she can see and read most lines of letters on an eye test chart. She is one line away from what is legally required for driving - a massive change from being partially sighted, using a magnifying glass for anything close up and having to navigate around the house and outside largely using memory.
"If my vision stays like this for the rest of my life it would be absolutely brilliant. I may not ever be able to drive again but I'll take that!" she says. With hypotony, pressure within the eyeball becomes dangerously low, leading it to cave in on itself.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Pega cuts dozens of global jobs in AI push
The cuts come to "better align roles and capacity to an AI-first delivery model," the Waltham software firm said.
Organ transplant firm to move to Assembly Square with help from tax breaks
A tech company that helps coordinate organ transplants will occupy an entire building in Somerville’s Assembly Square — nearly 500,000 square feet — in a boon for the area’s lab market.
Why It Is Difficult To Resize Windows on MacOS 26
The dramatically larger corner radius Apple introduced in macOS 26 Tahoe has pushed the invisible resize hit target for windows mostly outside the window itself -- roughly 75% of the 19Ã--19 pixel clickable area now lies beyond the visible boundary. In previous macOS versions, about 62% of that resize target would fall inside the window corner.
Apple removed the visible resize grippy-strip from window corners in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in July 2011. The visual indicator had served two purposes: showing users where to click and signaling whether a window could be resized at all. Users since then have relied on muscle memory and the reasonable assumption that clicking near the inside corner would initiate a resize. DaringFireball's John Gruber advice: don't upgrade to macOS 26, or downgrade if you already have. he wrote Monday: "Why suffer willingly with a user interface that presents you with absurdities like window resizing affordances that are 75 percent outside the window?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Exercise is as Effective as Medication in Treating Depression, Study Finds
A major new review by the Cochrane collaboration -- an independent network of researchers -- evaluated 73 randomized controlled trials involving about 5,000 people with depression and found that exercise matched the effectiveness of both pharmacological treatments and psychological therapies.
The biological mechanisms overlap considerably with antidepressants. "Exercise can help improve neurotransmitter function, like serotonin as well as dopamine and endorphins," said Dr. Stephen Mateka, medical director of psychiatry at Inspira Health. Dr. Nicholas Fabiano of the University of Ottawa added that exercise triggers the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which he calls "Miracle-Gro for the brain."
Exercise has been adopted as a first-line treatment in depression guidelines globally, though Fabiano noted it remains underutilized. The meta-analysis found that combining aerobic exercise and resistance training appeared more effective than aerobic exercise alone, and that 13 to 36 workouts led to improvements in depressive symptoms. Light to moderate exercise proved as beneficial as vigorous workouts, at least initially.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Instagram denies breach after many receive emails asking to reset password
The social media platform has said there was "no breach of its systems" but questions remain.
Instagram denies breach after many receive emails asking to reset password
The social media platform has said there was "no breach of its systems" but questions remain.
Instagram denies breach after many receive emails asking to reset password
The social media platform has said there was "no breach of its systems" but questions remain.
Apple Partners With Google on Siri Upgrade, Declares Gemini 'Most Capable Foundation'
Apple has struck a multi-year partnership with Google to power a more capable version of Siri using Gemini AI models, ending months of speculation about which company would help the iPhone maker catch up in the generative AI race. In a statement, Apple said it had determined after "careful evaluation" that "Google's technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models."
The deal comes after Apple delayed its planned Siri AI upgrade last March, acknowledging that the project was taking "longer than we thought." Bloomberg had reported in August that Apple was in early talks with Google about using a custom Gemini model. Apple also explored potential partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, and CEO Tim Cook has said the company plans to integrate with more AI companies over time. The upgraded Siri is expected to perform actions on users' behalf and understand personal context.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US President Calls for 10% Credit Card Interest Cap, Banks Push Back
President Donald Trump revived a campaign pledge Friday night by calling for a one-year, 10% cap on credit card interest rates, a proposal that banking groups immediately opposed despite the industry's heavy donations to his 2024 campaign and support for his second-term agenda.
Trump posted on Truth Social that he hoped the cap would be in place by January 20, one year after he took office, though he did not specify whether it would come through executive action or legislation.
Americans currently pay between 19.65% and 21.5% interest on credit cards on average and carry roughly $1.23 trillion in credit card debt, according to the New York Federal Reserve. Researchers found that a 10% cap would save Americans roughly $100 billion in interest annually. The American Bankers Association warned that such a cap "would only drive consumers toward less regulated, more costly alternatives."
Further reading: How Trump's proposed cap on credit card rates could reshape consumer lending.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cloudflare Threatens Italy Exit After $16.3M Fine For Refusing Piracy Blocks
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has threatened to withdraw free cybersecurity services from Italy's Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics and potentially exit the country after Italy's telecommunications regulator fined the company approximately 14 million euros for failing to comply with anti-piracy blocking orders. The penalty equals 1% of Cloudflare's global annual revenue but exceeds twice what the company earned from Italy in 2024.
Prince called Italy's Autorita per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni a "quasi-judicial body" administering a "scheme to censor the Internet" on behalf of "a shadowy cabal of European media elites." The fine stems from Cloudflare's refusal to comply with Italy's Piracy Shield law, which requires internet service providers and DNS operators to block sites within 30 minutes of receiving blocking requests from copyright holders. Prince said Cloudflare may discontinue free services for Italian users, remove servers from Italian cities and cancel plans to build an Italian office.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ofcom investigates Elon Musk's X over Grok AI sexual deepfakes
The watchdog said it had received reports of the platform's Grok AI chatbot creating undressed images of people.
Ofcom investigates Elon Musk's X over Grok AI sexual deepfakes
The watchdog said it had received reports of the platform's Grok AI chatbot creating undressed images of people.
Ofcom investigates Elon Musk's X over Grok AI sexual deepfakes
The watchdog said it had received reports of the platform's Grok AI chatbot creating undressed images of people.
Streamer Spend To Top $100B For First Time In 2026
Streamer spend on content is set to top the $100 billion mark for the first time this year, according to an Ampere Analysis report. From a report: The landmark figure will be met as global streamers "remain the primary driver of growth in content investment," according to Ampere. Spend by the likes of Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, HBO Max, Paramount+ and Apple TV will shoot up 6% this year, helping lead to a 2% increase in overall global content spend, Ampere forecast. The $101 billion figure, the first time streamer spend has crossed that major $100 Billion landmark, will represent around two-fifths of the overall figure.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Linux Hit a New All-Time High for Steam Market Share in December
A year ago the Steam Survey showed a 2.29% marketshare for Linux. Last May it reached 2.69%, its highest level since 2018. November saw another all-time high of 3.2%.
But December brought a surprise, reports Phoronix:
Back on the 1st Valve published the Steam Survey results for December 2025 and they put the Linux gaming marketshare at 3.19%, a 0.01% dip from November. But now the December results have been revised... [and] put the Linux marketshare at 3.58%, a 0.38% increase over November. Valve didn't publish any explanation for the revision but occasionally they do put out monthly revised data. This is easily an all-time high... both in percentage terms and surely in absolute terms too.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Best Travel Cameras (2026), Tested and Reviewed
We’ve found the best travel cameras—from point-and-shoot to full-frame—to help you bring home the perfect vacation photos.
Hyte X50 PC Case Review: Computers Should Be Cute
Hyte’s rounded glass case brings a fun, bubbly aesthetic to your desk.
Ubisoft Closes Game Studio Where Workers Voted to Unionize Two Weeks Ago
Ubisoft announced Wednesday it will close its studio in Halifax, Nova Scotia — two weeks after 74% of its staff voted to unionize.
This means laying off the 71 people at the studio, reports the gaming news site Aftermath:
[Communications Workers of America's Canadian affiliate, CWA Canada] said in a statement to Aftermath the union will "pursue every legal recourse to ensure that the rights of these workers are respected and not infringed in any way." The union said in a news release that it's illegal in Canada for companies to close businesses because of unionization. That's not necessarily what happened here, according to the news release, but the union is "demanding information from Ubisoft about the reason for the sudden decision to close."
"We will be looking for Ubisoft to show us that this had nothing to do with the employees joining a union," former Ubisoft Halifax programmer and bargaining committee member Jon Huffman said in a statement. "The workers, their families, the people of Nova Scotia, and all of us who love video games made in Canada, deserve nothing less...."
Before joining Ubisoft, the studio was best known for its work on the Rocksmith franchise; under Ubisoft, it focused squarely on mobile games.
Ubisoft Halifax was quickly removed from the Ubisoft website on Wednesday...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How Long Does It Take to Fix Linux Kernel Bugs?
An anonymous reader shared this report from It's FOSS:
Jenny Guanni Qu, a researcher at [VC fund] Pebblebed, analyzed 125,183 bugs from 20 years of Linux kernel development history (on Git). The findings show that the average bug takes 2.1 years to find. [Though the median is 0.7 years, with the average possibly skewed by "outliers" discovered after years of hiding.] The longest-lived bug, a buffer overflow in networking code, went unnoticed for 20.7 years! [But 86.5% of bugs are found within five years.]
The research was carried out by relying on the Fixes: tag that is used in kernel development. Basically, when a commit fixes a bug, it includes a tag pointing to the commit that introduced the bug. Jenny wrote a tool that extracted these tags from the kernel's git history going back to 2005. The tool finds all fixing commits, extracts the referenced commit hash, pulls dates from both commits, and calculates the time frame. As for the dataset, it includes over 125k records from Linux 6.19-rc3, covering bugs from April 2005 to January 2026. Out of these, 119,449 were unique fixing commits from 9,159 different authors, and only 158 bugs had CVE IDs assigned.
It took six hours to assemble the dataset, according to the blog post, which concludes that the percentage of bugs found within one year has improved dramatically, from 0% in 2010 to 69% by 2022. The blog post says this can likely be attributed to:
The Syzkaller fuzzer (released in 2015)
Dynamic memory error detectors like KASAN, KMSAN, KCSAN sanitizers
Better static analysis
More contributors reviewing code
But "We're simultaneously catching new bugs faster AND slowly working through ~5,400 ancient bugs that have been hiding for over 5 years."
They've also developed an AI model called VulnBERT that predicts whether a commit introduces a vulnerability, claiming that of all actual bug-introducing commits, it catches 92.2%. "The goal isn't to replace human reviewers but to point them at the 10% of commits most likely to be problematic, so they can focus attention where it matters..."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
