It's raining ads in Windows 11. The Microsoft Weather app in the operating system now displays more ads.

You may recall that a year ago, Microsoft had actually removed the ads from the app, and it appeared that the company had finally listened to feedback from users. But the annoying banners are back, and there's two of them now on the Forecast page. For those unaware, the old version of Microsoft Weather was a UWP app, but the company replaced it with an Edge WebView, which is a container that uses the Edge Engine. In other words, the Weather app is technically just a web wrapper for MSN.com/weather. You can test this yourself, just open the website in your browser and temporarily disable your ad blocker to take a look at the ads, now open the desktop app, and you can see that the same ads appear in the Weather app.

More than 60 per cent of the world’s population endured extreme heat driven by the climate crisis over nine days in mid-June, according to a new study.

Approximately 5 billion people lived in extreme temperatures that were made at least three times more likely due to the climate crisis.

The study, published by Climate Central, covered the period from 16 to 24 June.

In India, which recorded its longest-ever heatwave this summer, at least 619 million people, over half of the population, experienced severe heat, with maximum temperatures approaching 50C and night-time lows of 37C.

The intense heatwave led to over 40,000 cases of heatstroke and over 100 deaths, according to official figures which are likely an undercount.

China too saw temperatures hitting 50C, the highest-ever recorded in June. Wuhan warned of potential electricity rationing due to increased demand for air conditioning.

In Saudi Arabia, at least 1,300 people died from heat-related illnesses during the Hajj pilgrimage, with temperatures in some cities surpassing 50C.

The US faced back-to-back heatwaves with southern states experiencing temperatures of 52C.

New York saw a 500-600 per cent increase in heat-related emergency visits, with temperatures made up to 2C hotter due to the climate crisis.

The Mediterranean also suffered, with Greece’s Acropolis shutting down after temperatures rose above 43C. Six tourists, including British Tv doctor Michael Mosley, died.

In Egypt, nearly 50C temperatures led to daily power cuts to manage the surge in energy consumption.

The extreme heat extended to the Southern Hemisphere, breaking records in Paraguay and Peru.

Extreme heatwaves that occurred once every 50 years now arrive nearly five times more often and are 1.5C warmer, according to the IPCC, the UN’s panel of top climate scientists.

Every spring, when warm rays of sunshine herald the start of South Korea’s baking summer, fountains across Seoul’s central Gwanghwamun plaza suddenly burst into life, sending cooling jets of water into the air.

In any other city in the world, such an inviting sight would tempt young children to charge through the spray. But in the heart of the Korean capital, shouts of childlike delight are rare.

For a first-time visitor to Korea, there is a gnawing feeling that something is missing. Then it finally dawns – the children.

South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, and it continues to plummet, reaching new record-breaking troughs every year.

The latest figures show it fell by another 8 per cent in 2023 to 0.72, which is the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime.

For South Korea’s kindergarten teachers, the national dearth of children is already painfully evident and impacting their career prospects.

The country’s record-low birth rates are projected to cause the closure of roughly one-third of daycare centres and kindergartens by 2028, a report by the Korea Institute of Child Care and Education warned in January.

This would mean the number of these institutions slipping from 39,053 in 2022 to just 26,637 in 2028, with 12,416 at risk of shutting down.

It’s a situation that London could soon find itself in. In Britain, nurseries are already closing due to government underfunding; babies are also quickly becoming a “luxury item”, says Joeli Brearley, the chief executive and founder of mothers charity Pregnant Then Screwed. “We’re running out of them. It is no surprise to us that fertility rates have hit the floor. We have one of the most expensive childcare sectors in the world, so much so that for three quarters of mothers, it no longer makes financial sense to work. With childcare fees outstripping the cost of housing for more than two thirds of families, almost half of families are borrowing money to pay their childcare bills.”

In England and Wales, the average birth rate declined to 1.49 children per woman in 2022, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. With its birth rate of just 0.72 children per woman, South Korea’s fertility rate is so critically low that experts predict the population will have halved by the year 2100.

When 31-year-old Dutch farmer Bastiaan Blok dug up his latest crop, the weather had taken a disastrous toll. His onions – 117,000 kilos of them – were the size of shallots.

“We had a very wet spring and a dry, warm summer, so the plants made very small roots,” said Blok, who farms 90 hectares in Swifterbant, in the reclaimed province of Flevoland. “Half of them were less than 40mm and normally at this size they aren’t even processed. We would have probably sold them for very little for biomass, or maybe to Poland for onion oil. It’s either far too wet and cold, or far too warm and dry, and there’s no normal growing period in between.”

The wettest autumn, winter and spring on record have threatened the spinach and potato crops, leading to parliamentary questions and warnings from farming union LTO. Evelien Drenth, LTO agriculture specialist, said 61% of Dutch farmers report lost yields due to extreme weather, diseases are up and sowing is late or sometimes missed. “Consumers and supermarkets need to get used to empty shelves sometimes for short-season crops like spinach … and also irregular-sized Brussels sprouts and broccoli,” she added.

The workweek is about to get a lot longer for some employees in Greece.

Starting July 1, workers in the private sector could be going into the office six days a week—as the 48-hour workweek goes into effect.

Select industrial and manufacturing facilities, along with businesses that provide 24/7 services, are eligible to extend the workweek beyond five days under new labor laws. Food service and tourism workers are not included in the longer workweeks.

The change to the labor laws was approved last September following productivity issues in the country, which have led many workers to put in extra hours and often not be compensated for the time. Officials also note there has been a shortage of skilled workers due to a shrinking population.

Windows 11 is getting out of hand with its push for advertisments, frankly - remember the recent full-screen pop-up to persuade users to install Edge or other Microsoft services? Then another advertisment was placed in the Start menu, and now Microsoft has finally worn my temper thin - with a new Game Pass ad coming to the Settings app.

This will likely arrive in the July update for Windows 11, or at least it’s almost certain to do so. It was present in the latest preview update Microsoft just released for the OS (and quickly paused due to a bug, but that’s another story). It’s also worth noting that the ad has been present in earlier test versions of Windows 11.

Intel sent in as the sole patch for this week's Linux power management subsystem updates is an important fix for Intel Core hybrid systems with buggy firmware. The Intel P-State driver fix can address as much as a 50% performance hit seen with existing Linux kernel versions on affected Intel hybrid platforms.

A Kubuntu Focus developer last week reported a power management issue that breaks scheduling on heterogeneous core Intel systems with buggy firmware. It turns out systems failing to report ACPI CPPC v2 capabilities could lead to very poor performance going all the way back to Linux 5.19. On systems like with an Intel Core i5 13500H and using the EEVDF scheduler, as much as a 50% performance hit could be observed with Geekbench. There have also been other similar bug reports in recent times.

Toronto inhabitants fed up with rising rents are flooding city-run lotteries for affordable housing in new developments, but the chance of being selected for a subsidized unit is often less than 1%.

One new development in the city’s West End recently offered a random public draw to allocate 135 units with rents pegged to income ceilings that would cost hundreds of dollars less than market rates. Nearly 12,500 people entered the draw for the homes aimed at middle-income earners in the Galleria on the Park development.

Rents across Canada rose 9.3% in the year to May to reach C$2,202 (US$1,607), with prices in Toronto averaging C$2,479, according to a recent report.

In comparison a one-bedroom lottery unit in the Galleria on the Park development would cost C$1,589 a month to someone with an annual income of C$82,000.

If it's free then, you're the product

Last July, Google made an eight-word change to its privacy policy that represented a significant step in its race to build the next generation of artificial intelligence.

Buried thousands of words into its document, Google tweaked the phrasing for how it used data for its products, adding that public information could be used to train its A.I. chatbot and other services.

We use publicly available information to help train Google’s language AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.

The subtle change was not unique to Google. As companies look to train their A.I. models on data that is protected by privacy laws, they’re carefully rewriting their terms and conditions to include words like “artificial intelligence,” “machine learning” and “generative A.I.”

Those terms and conditions — which many people have long ignored — are now being contested by some users who are writers, illustrators and visual artists and worry that their work is being used to train the products that threaten to replace them.

Archive : https://archive.is/SOe5w

With the recently released KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop environment, those still relying on old Intel integrated graphics should have a much more pleasant experience thanks to improvements made to the KWin compositor. For very old Intel integrated graphics, it can effectively be a night and day difference upgrading to the new Plasma 6.1 desktop.

KWin lead developer Xaver Hugl is out with a new blog post about the improved KDE Plasma desktop performance as of Plasma 6.1, which can be especially noticeable with old integrated graphics hardware such as the common Intel graphics in aging laptops. The biggest improvement to bettering the KDE Plasma desktop graphics performance is thanks to dynamic triple buffering support.

Dozens of bodies were discovered in Delhi during a two-day stretch this week when even sundown brought no relief from sweltering heat and humidity. Tourists died or went missing as the mercury surged in Greece. Hundreds of pilgrims perished before they could reach Islam’s holiest site, struck down by temperatures as high as 125° F.

The scorching heat across five continents in recent days, scientists say, provided yet more proof that human-caused global warming has so raised the baseline of normal temperatures that once-unthinkable catastrophes have become commonplace.

‘Exceptional’ heat is arriving sooner and lasting longer

Though not all temperatures seen around the world this week were unprecedented, they were nonetheless evidence of how the climate has shifted in a way that makes hot weather more likely to arrive earlier and last longer.

All week long, “exceptional” conditions could be found across much of Africa, the Middle East, southern Europe and Southeast Asia. Surging air-conditioning demand crippled power grids in Albania and Kuwait. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the past week has seen more than 1,400 high temperature records fall around the globe.

***** Archive : https://archive.is/4p7Wb

Your workplace emails, spreadsheets and files might look a bit different going forward as Google officially rolls out its Gemini AI tools across the Workspace suite.

In a Google Workspace Updates blog post, the company confirmed the general availability of Gemini as a new side panel across popular apps including Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive - however only paying Google Workspace customers will be able to access it for the time being.

The company says this new AI-powered update should help users everywhere unlock new levels of productivity and efficiency, as well as introducing Gemini to millions of users across the world in the battle for AI supremacy.

****

This is terrible since Google has millions of user data.

Microsoft broke the European Union's antitrust regulations by "tying" collaboration tool Teams to its dominant online Office productivity suite, according to preliminary findings from an investigation begun in July 2023.

The EU's antitrust team informed the Redmond-based biz in a Statement of Objections document, and the company told The Register it is willing to make further concessions, thereby staving off the threat of possible legal action and potentially significant fines.

"Microsoft has been tying Teams with its core SaaS productivity applications, thereby restricting competition on the market for communication and collaboration products and defending its market position in productivity software and its suites-centric model from competing suppliers of individual software," the EC said in a statement.

"In particular, the Commission is concerned that Microsoft may have granted Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice whether or not to acquire access to Teams when they subscribe to their SaaS productivity applications.

"This advantage may have been further exacerbated by interoperability limitations between Teams' competitors and Microsoft's offerings. The conduct may have prevented Teams' rivals from competing, and in turn innovating, to the detriment of customers in the European Economic Area."

A few months after opening a non-compliance case on Apple and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the European Commission has shared its preliminary findings with Apple. And the bottom line is that the current App Store rules are in breach of the DMA. Confirmed violations of the DMA can lead to fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover.

“‘Act different’ should be their new slogan,” the EU’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, wrote on X. “For too long, Apple has been squeezing out innovative companies — denying consumers new opportunities & choices.”

In this particular case, the European Commission believes third-party developers should be able to inform customers of alternative purchasing possibilities — free of charge.

For instance, developers who have released apps on the App Store can’t advertise different prices or alternative distribution channels in their apps. While Apple now allows developers to include a link to their site, the European Commission believes there are too many restrictions with this link-out mechanism.

Even if developers redirect users to their websites and handle transactions on their websites, they have to report transactions to Apple and pay a commission. Apple only waives a 3% payment processing fee for web purchases.

Microsoft has been pushing hard for its users to sign into Windows with a Microsoft Account. The newest Windows 11 installer removed the easy bypass to the requirement that you make an account or login with your existing account. If you didn't install Windows 11 without a Microsoft Account and now want to stop sending the company your data, you can still switch to a local account after the fact. Microsoft even had instructions on how to do this on its official support website - or at least it used to...

A new ADP Research Institute report shows employment for software developers has declined from January 2018. Data elsewhere show fewer opportunities for people to fill software development and tech roles after the US labor market is no longer as hot as it was a few years ago.

"The tech job market has undeniably slowed since the end of 2022, cooling after a few years of rapid hiring during the pandemic recovery," Daniel Zhao, Glassdoor's lead economist, said in a written statement. "Rising interest rates, the end of pandemic-era trends and a slowing economy overall has crimped demand for tech workers."

A major hourslong power outage hit much of the Balkans on Friday as the southern European region sweltered in an early heat wave that sent temperatures soaring to more than 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).

Montenegrin authorities said that an outage that lasted for several hours in the country’s power distribution system left almost the entire nation without electricity, while similar problems were reported in the coastal part of Croatia, and in Bosnia and Albania.

Nada Pavicevic, a spokeswoman for Montenegro’s state power distribution company, described the outage as a “disturbance of regional proportion,” and said authorities were still working to determine what happened.

A lawsuit accusing Google of breaking America's child privacy laws will proceed to trial as a judge denied the web goliath's motion to throw out the case.

Filed in June last year, the suit alleges Google ignored state child privacy laws in California, Florida, and New York, which prohibit targeted advertising to children under the age of 13 and collecting their data.

Specifically, the suit is going after Google for setting up a program in 2015 called Designed for Families (DFF). That essentially allowed developers to declare their apps were all above board regarding advertising to children and that only appropriate content would be shown. Apps verified as such by the DFF program would be presented to parents in the Google Play store as safe for kids.

Would you use Edge as your default browser on Windows 11 if Microsoft nags you with a 3D banner? Microsoft thinks you would. In a new experiment, which appears to be rolling out to Edge stable on Windows 11, Microsoft has turned on a banner that uses 3D graphics to promote the browser.

First spotted by Windows Latest, Microsoft has been testing the new 3D banner for a while now, but it’s now rolling out to more people. If Edge is not your default browser and you open it directly or through files like PDFs, a new banner will remind you to change your default browser settings.

The banner explains that using Edge as your default browser can help protect you from phishing and malware attacks. It asks you to confirm this change by clicking “Set default,” and then you need to confirm again in the Windows settings app.

The pop-up screen will appear after you install the new Windows updates. If you skip the banner, you’ll get another reminder to use Edge when you open the browser.