Google Maps renames "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" even faster than US government

Google Maps renames "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" even faster than US government

fivenewscrypto    septembre 01, 2026   

Trade talks between the US and Canada broke down last week, leading to a wave of tariffs and retaliatory tariffs. US President Donald Trump also fell back on an old favorite to needle his opponents, signing an executive order on Thursday to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America."

The body of water, which straddles the US-Canada border, gave its name to the Canadian province rather than the other way around. Regardless, the US government now refers to this great lake as Lake America—or it will soon. Official US government maps have yet to be updated, but Google wasted no time adopting the new, Trumpian name.

Google began rolling out this change for US users on Saturday. The company posted a brief update on its Google Maps blog, noting that it follows the US Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) for its maps, so the company implies it had no choice but to rename Lake Ontario in Google Maps, which is the most popular mapping platform in the US by a wide margin.

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ChatGPT and Reddit now face EU's toughest online safety rules

ChatGPT and Reddit now face EU's toughest online safety rules

fivenewscrypto    septembre 01, 2026   

OpenAI’s ChatGPT will have to comply with tougher EU rules such as removing illegal content or face potential fines, the European Commission said on Monday, as Brussels grapples with how its existing digital regulation applies to rapidly evolving AI services.

The Commission said the chatbot, social media forum Reddit, and gaming platform Roblox would be classified as so-called very large online platforms under the EU Digital Services Act, its landmark online safety regime.

The designation means all three services will face additional obligations such as removing illegal content and protecting the privacy and security of minors and could face fines of up to 6 percent of their global revenue if they fail to comply.

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NASA's next "great observatory" begins mission to widen our view of the Universe

NASA's next "great observatory" begins mission to widen our view of the Universe

fivenewscrypto    septembre 01, 2026   

NASA's $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, equipped with a 300-megapixel camera sighted through a refurbished spy mirror, launched Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a mission to reveal the mysterious forces driving the Universe.

The new mission will extend the vision of NASA's other famous observatories, providing a field of view 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope and complementing the groundbreaking work of the James Webb Space Telescope. Roman is just the second NASA-led astrophysics mission to launch this century, following the launch of Webb in 2021.

Unlike Webb, which suffered many years of delays before reaching space, Roman arrived at the launch pad nine months before NASA's commitment to send it skyward by May 2027.

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Pocket's AI made my game ideas real. Now Meta controls the results.

Pocket's AI made my game ideas real. Now Meta controls the results.

fivenewscrypto    août 31, 2026   

The relatively recent rise of AI-assisted coding tools and the whole concept of "vibe coding" have effectively upended entire software development workflows. While these tools have been available to novice coders willing to put in the work to set them up, those with little to no coding experience could still be a little put off by the CLIs, IDEs, and terminal-based tinkering needed to create a complex AI-coded project these days.

Meta's latest AI-based project launch wants to make that kind of vibe coding as instantly accessible as posting on social media. Pocket—which launched in the US last Friday, August 21, after Meta acquired the staff behind the now-defunct vibe-coding app Gizmo in March—is a mobile app that lets users create fully functional interactive "gizmos" just by typing prompts into a text box, without even the option to look at a line of code. Those gizmos can then be shared with the world in a TikTok-style endless scroll complete with likes, comments, reposts, and all the other hallmarks of social media addiction.

After playing around with Pocket for the better part of a week, I found myself getting hooked on the simple process of quickly standing up functional, relatively feature-rich game prototypes simply by chatting with an LLM. But the result of all that time and AI effort is a couple of interactive toys that are effectively trapped in Meta's new walled garden, without any real way to turn them into something separate.

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A 12TB Steam “teraleak” spills more than a decade of lost PC gaming history

A 12TB Steam “teraleak” spills more than a decade of lost PC gaming history

fivenewscrypto    août 31, 2026   

Here at Ars, we're intimately familiar with data leaks surrounding Valve's games, hardware, and the workings of Steam itself. But nothing could have prepared us for this weekend's "terarelease" encompassing more than 12TB of content related to seemingly every title available on Steam between 2003 and 2013.

What's being sold as an "as-complete-as-possible ... content server dump" of Steam's defunct "Steam2" server architecture from that time period is now circulating around via a BitTorrent tracker that Valve seems unlikely to ever completely purge from the Internet. The massive collection includes thousands of "depots" representing what seems to be every version of every game uploaded to those old Steam2 servers. That includes public release builds, of course, but in many cases also covers previously unseen pre-release, prototype, and playtest versions of popular titles published by Valve and third-party Steam publishers.

Steam2: Electric Boogaloo

The reason this weekend's leaked content cuts off abruptly in 2013 is because that's when Valve updated its content distribution system from "Steam2" to the current SteamPipe system. In moving from a proprietary file distribution format to standard HTTP file trees, the new system removed various update approval bottlenecks on Valve's end and streamlined update and patch downloads so they only reflected file differentials.

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Why it matters that President Trump just dialed in to a NASA news conference

Why it matters that President Trump just dialed in to a NASA news conference

fivenewscrypto    août 31, 2026   

As is standard procedure for major NASA missions, the US space agency held a post-launch news conference on Sunday morning at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to provide information about how the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was faring during its initial maneuvers.

What was not standard, however, is what happened in the middle of the news conference. A little less than half an hour in, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman looked down at his mobile phone, and then stood up and walked away from the dais where he had been seated behind a table along with other NASA officials. He briefly left the room.

Isaacman returned about a minute later, phone in hand, apologizing for interrupting NASA's chief of science, Nicky Fox, as she was speaking about the mission. "The President of the United States of America would like to address and congratulate everyone on this mission," Isaacman said, returning to his seat.

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Inside Meta’s push to put robots to work in data centers

Inside Meta’s push to put robots to work in data centers

fivenewscrypto    août 31, 2026   

Meta is testing robots that can plug in cables, reset servers, and handle other tasks inside its data centers, according to several current and former workers familiar with the projects. The ongoing effort, which has not been previously reported, may eventually allow Meta to operate its rapidly expanding data center footprint with fewer humans, keeping labor costs in check as its spending on AI infrastructure soars.

Meta is using robots and related hardware from several different vendors, including Watney Robotics, Kinova, and ABB, according to the same workers, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media. Kinova and ABB declined to comment. Watney didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In one experiment, Meta is evaluating whether a Kinova Gen3 robotic arm could be used for power cycling or cutting off electricity to servers. The company is also testing a different robot to swap networking cables. One Meta data center worker estimates that if it’s successful, the bot could replace up to 80 percent of some people’s workloads. “We thought those of us performing the physical tasks were safe for a while, but not anymore,” says the worker. “It’s coming for us all, unfortunately.”

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