Max Planck won 1918's Nobel Prize for physics. Yet two of his papers were retracted — a move now being criticized by Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec and Mahdi Khelfaoui, a fellow historian of science at UQ Trois-Rivières. Science reports: The papers, both quietly retracted in 2011, originally appeared in the early 1940s in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal now owned by publishing giant Springer Nature. After some sleuthing, Khelfaoui determined one of the Planck pieces, a philosophical essay from 1942 titled "Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft" ("Meaning and Limits of Exact Science"), about how to achieve certainty in scientific knowledge, had also appeared in two other journals and been reprinted twice in books. Repackaging the same work multiple times is considered "self-plagiarism" and frowned upon today — the practice produces copyright conflicts and inflates scholars' publication records. The Naturwissenschaften site gives "copyright violation" as the reason for the retraction.

Yet publishing identical material in multiple journals was widespread before the internet. "Science was more fragmented" then, Khelfaoui says. "You wanted different audiences ... to have access to your work." The practice was especially common for luminaries like Planck. Albert Einstein did the same (but escaped retractions). Springer Nature's "anachronistic" application of modern standards to a 1942 paper "distort[s] the historical record," Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in a preprint posted last month on arXiv. Any concerns about copyright violations are largely moot anyway: Because Planck died in 1947, his works are in the public domain in most countries.

Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, "This article has been withdrawn due to article violation." Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95. Suzanne Scarlata, a chemist and biochemist at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and editor-in-chief of The Science of Nature, as Naturwissenschaften is now known, had not heard about the retractions before being contacted for this story... Scarlata suspects Springer Nature's internal policing software removed the paper and posted the retraction notice unilaterally, without human supervision: "I think it just happened with their algorithm," she says. "It's a mistake they should probably rectify."
A second Planck paper was apparently removed because its response to a 1940 paper had used an identical title.

Thanks to our long-time Slashdot reader He Who Has No Name for sharing the article.

Thursday the Free Software Foundation blogged about this year's 47 'LibreLocal 2026' meetups, highlighting 10 that took place in Australia, Mexico, the United States, New Zealand, Cameroon, Switzerland, Spain, Argentina, China, and Iran. "Far from each other in many parts of the world, they came together around one unifying belief: free software." We envisioned LibreLocal as a collage of in-person community meetups that would bring people together to swap ideas, learn from each other, and celebrate free software. When we asked the free software community to organize LibreLocals last year, the response was very inspirational: 29 different meetups were hosted. After we made the global call this year, we were greeted with an even more enthusiastic response... Organizers hosted LibreLocals in cafes, bars, restaurants, libraries, universities, a computer repair shop, and even as part of a field trip to the System Source Museum, a museum dedicated to the history of computing in Hunt Valley, Maryland, USA.

We also learned that a LibreLocal was organized inside Vakil Abad Prison in Mashhad, Iran by a free software supporter. Originally planned to be held in Shiraz, we were informed of this change in location on the LibreLocal wiki page set up for listing all LibreLocals. The updated entry, by another free software supporter in Iran, reads:

"This year, one of our dedicated activists organized a LibrePlanet event from within prison in Iran. Currently serving a sentence for "cyber-crimes" related to his promotion of free software, he continues to introduce the principles of software freedom to his fellow inmates. We have placed this banner to honor his resilience and the community of individuals in prison who continue to stand for technological freedom. His identity will be revealed when it is safe to do so."

Advocating for user freedom should never result in a prison sentence. We especially admire and respect the bravery and strength of those who fight for software freedom in the most dangerous and oppressive of environments.
50 people attended the LibreLocal meetup in Switzerland, according to one of the organizers, "forging connections between several local free software stakeholders and strengthening their cohesion." But the FSF's blog post stresses these are "ten stories among many more of free software supporters from across the globe... We also thank you our donors and associate members for the support that makes such meetups possible."

The GNU Press Shop is now open through July 19 for their biannual fundraiser, offering a variety of freedom-respecting novelties including an FSF-branded antisurveillance webcam guard and both technical and philosophical books, like Richard Stallman's Free as in Freedom (which allegedly has turned up in Anthropic's training data). Other items include a slick new FSF logo sticker, a brass and zinc GNU "emblem" pin with real gold plating, and a cheeky sticker reminding everyone that "There is no cloud." And there's even a plush GNU toy.

Norway will largely prohibit generative AI use for elementary kids ages 6 to 13 beginning with the new school year, while allowing limited, teacher-supervised use for older students. The government says the restrictions are intended to prevent children from skipping foundational reading, writing, and mathematics skills amid declining test scores. Reuters reports: Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom. Using AI increases the risk that young children skip important steps in their education, Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere told a press conference on Friday. "The most important thing in school is that our children learn to read, write and do mathematics," Stoere said, adding that the new standards will be imposed from the new school year beginning in late August.

Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said. In upper secondary education, from ages 17 to 19, students should learn to use AI appropriately so that they are prepared for further education and work, it added. In a related statement, the Norwegian government also said it would propose legislation to fund the use of more books in classrooms, reversing the trend towards computer tablets.

Futurism reports: in a new essay for The Chronicle Higher Education, university-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt recalls how not a single one of his students could get through an assigned 20-page article, something that he had read "without complaint" as an undergraduate a decade ago.

One student confessed that the reason they didn't finish was that they kept losing track of what the paper was about. And there's no doubt that they're not alone. Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992. Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment's "basic" level in reading, meaning they likely "cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text." Younger children aren't better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can't read at a proficient level.

"What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch," Jagt writes. "There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires...." Jagt cites an MIT study that found users who used ChatGPT during cognitive tasks like writing essays showed lower brain activity in areas associated with creativity compared to students who only used a traditional Google Search or didn't lookup information at all. An astonishing 83 percent of the AI users couldn't quote a single line from the essays they had just written, and capstoning the alarm, the brain activity in the AI users didn't return to normal when they were later asked to write without AI...

On our pernicious pocket devices, Jagt touted a 2017 study that found that simply having a smartphone physically nearby — even if it's face down or turned off — reduced available cognitive capacity and impaired cognitive functioning. "So when a student tells me they 'kept losing track' of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition," Jagt wrote. "The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception."
Sunday an "Ask Reddit" question went viral — drawing over 11,000 upvotes — for its question to any teachers reading Reddit. "Is the 'Gen Alpha can't read (write, or do math ext)' crisis real? If so how bad is it?" Some responses...

• "The run of the mill non-honors kids have gotten really bad," posted one high school teacher. "Very low tolerance for working hard, very short attention span, very short stamina for active listening... It's the group that is the most worrying because a decade ago, I'd estimate that maybe 10-20% of kids at a school are like this, and now it's probably 40-50% of each graduating class... Then there's of course the bottom 10-20% kids (excluding the special ed/severe/moderate learning disability kids). This is what the viral videos are about and it's not an exaggeration. They can't read, write, or do very basic math like multiplication or division as a 17 year old."

• "This is the first year the MAJORITY of my class cheated on their first essays...." posted one high school English teacher. "It was also the first year a kid yelled 'We don't care about your fucking books, Miss!' while I was in front of the class presenting books they might be interested in for their book reviews... Almost all of them cheated on the book review they had to write."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

Ars Technica shares some anecdotes from Steve Jobs in Exile, a new book released last month: [Author Geoffrey] Cain reminds us, in stunning detail, that Jobs' "exile" era at NeXT was not only critical to his evolution as a man and an entrepreneur, but that it mattered for the rest of us, too. The technological innovations that came out of NeXT — notably, the NeXTSTEP OS — continue to live on in what we now call both macOS and iOS. As Cain puts it, "NeXTSTEP was Steve's attempt to make Unix taste sweet...."

[W]hile many tech nerds know that Tim Berners-Lee created the first World Wide Web server on a NeXT machine while working in Switzerland in 1990, few know that NeXT employees were wary of bringing the news to Jobs. Why? They feared his wrath "and that he would dismiss [the web] as 'shit.'" (In another timeline, NeXT might itself have capitalized on this world-changing innovation....)

Perhaps one of the wildest anecdotes that Cain uncovered was how one voicemail changed computer history forever. In 1996, when Apple was solidly in its mediocre Performa era — and considering buying BeOS as the basis for its new operating system — a mid-level NeXT product manager asked aloud, "Why don't we just frickin' call Apple?" (NeXT was also struggling during this period.) And so someone did. As Cain writes:

Garrett left the group of managers, walked back to his office, and took a risk. He picked up his designer phone and called the head of software at Apple. He left what he described as "one of my more inspired sales pitches" on the man's voicemail, explaining why Apple should be looking at NeXT instead of Be... In any other universe, Garrett's call might have gotten him fired. But in this timeline, it worked out. And thanks to him, Steve [Jobs] was about to enter Apple's airspace once again.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.

Today Amazon ends support for first- and second-generation versions of Kindles and Kindle Fire tablets, along with the Kindle Touch, the 9.7-inch Kindle DX, and other devices released in 2012 or earlier.

Owners can continue reading ebooks that they've already downloaded, and they can also still sideload books using a USB cable (from, for example, Project Gutenberg). And PCMag points out that "There are plenty of e-stores where you can buy DRM-free novels legally, such as ebook.com and Smashwords. If you want to try this process for free, public-domain repositories such as the one at Standard Ebooks are a great place to start." (eBook files can be converted for the Kindle with the open source tool Calibre.)

New ebooks can no longer be purchased directly from Amazon. But most of Amazon's affected devices "have not received firmware updates for over a decade," notes the blog OMG Ubuntu, "and most lost on-device access the Kindle Store." Some Kindle owners are taking things even further: You can unlock the firmware of older devices to add extra functionality (custom screensavers, epub support) or run entirely different software. On the hardware hacks side, some choose to turn old Kindles into photo frames or online dashboards.
TechCrunch offers some caveats about jailbreaking: This process allows users to install custom fonts, new screensavers, alternative reading apps, and even third-party tools that expand the Kindle's functionality... [I]t's important to note that jailbreaking a Kindle might violate Amazon's terms of service. In many jurisdictions, jailbreaking isn't considered a criminal offense for personal use, but it may become a crime if it involves copyright infringement, illegal software distribution, or the sale of modified devices. Many Kindle owners who opt to jailbreak view it as a method to gain control over a device they purchased that is still functional, rather than being forced to buy a new device. However, jailbreaking is technical and carries risks, including the possibility of rendering the device unusable if something goes wrong. It also isn't possible on every Kindle model or firmware version, so before proceeding, Kindle owners should first spend some time researching if their device is compatible.
Alternately, PCMag notes, "If you're feeling particularly virtuous, you can donate your old Kindle to a local library or send it back to Amazon free of charge via its electronic recycling program."

Five major publishers and author Scott Turow have sued Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, alleging that Zuckerberg "personally authorized and actively encouraged" massive copyright infringement by using pirated books, journal articles, and web-scraped material to train Meta's Llama AI systems. Meta denies wrongdoing and says it will fight the case, arguing that courts have recognized AI training on copyrighted material as potentially fair use. Variety reports: "In their effort to win the AI 'arms race' and build a functional generative AI model, Defendants Meta and Zuckerberg followed their well-known motto: 'move fast and break things,'" the plaintiffs say in their lawsuit. "They first illegally torrented millions of copyrighted books and journal articles from notorious pirate sites and downloaded unauthorized web scrapes of virtually the entire internet. They then copied those stolen fruits many times over to train Meta's multibillion-dollar generative AI system called Llama. In doing so, Defendants engaged in one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history."

The suit was filed Tuesday (May 5) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by five publishers (Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage) and Turow individually. The proposed class-action suit seeks unspecific monetary damages for the alleged copyright infringement. A copy of the lawsuit is available at this link (PDF). [...] the latest lawsuit alleges that Meta and Zuckerberg deliberately circumvented copyright-protection mechanisms -- and had considered paying to license the works before abandoning that strategy at "Zuckerberg's personal instruction." The suit essentially argues that the conduct described falls outside protections afforded by fair-use provisions of the U.S. copyright code.

Amazon once tried to pressure Nintendo to break the law, says former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé. At a recent NYU lecture, he describes a conversation with an Amazon executive, Kotaku reports: "Amazon was looking to get bigger into the video game space," said Fils-Aimé. "Amazon's mentality back then is they wanted to have the lowest price out in the marketplace, even lower than Walmart... Essentially what Amazon wanted (was an) obscene amount of support, financial support, so they could have the lowest price and beat Walmart. I literally said to the executive, 'You know that's illegal, right? I can't do that'...."

At the time, the Wii and DS were Nintendo's best selling hardware in history. Amazon originally sold books, but in the 2000s rapidly expanded with cheaper discounts to became a one-stop shop for almost everything. Everything except Nintendo, that is.... "Literally we stopped selling to Amazon," Fils-Aimé continued, "and it's because I wasn't going to do something illegal. I wasn't going to do something that would put at risk the relationship we have with other retailers."
"The two sides have since made amends," notes the Verge, "and you can buy a Switch 2 through Amazon. But for a long time, Nintendo consoles had been largely unavailable on the site."

The once-a-year free comic book giveaway "is splitting in two," according to a local news report.

Launched in 2002 by Diamond Comic Distributor, comic book giants like Marvel and DC have historically participated together. But things changed after Diamond Comic Distributors went bankrupt in 2025, "leaving other companies to swoop in and pick up where Diamond left off." The rights to the "Free Comic Book Day" brand were sold to Universal Distribution, which plans to bring Free Comic Book Day back on Saturday. On the same day, Penguin Random House plans to launch a rival event called Comics Giveaway Day. This means you'll still get plenty of free comics, but this time they will be separated, with some coming under the Free Comic Book Day branding and others arriving under the Comics Giveaway Day branding. Free Comic Book Day will include publishers like DC, Image, Dynamite and Archie Comics. Comics Giveaway Day will include publishers such as Marvel, Dark Horse, Boom! Studios and Tokyopop...

The other big change coming this year is the introduction of game publishers Wizards of the Coast and Upper Deck to the lineup, as part of Universal Distribution's Free Comic Book Day. Wizards of the Coast is known for its tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, as well as its trading card game Magic: The Gathering. Upper Deck is best known for its sports trading cards and entertainment collectibles, along with deck-building games like the Legendary series...

In addition to adding these game makers, Universal plans to expand Free Comic Book Day to include what are colloquially referred to as your friendly local game stores.
Marvel's offerings this year include a special Alien, Predator & Planet of the Apes one-shot, while D.C. is offering the first chapter of their upcoming graphic novel Aquamanatee. Other comics include Avatar: The Last Airbender — Legends from Dark Horse Comics and Sonic the Hedgehog from IDW Publishing.

"There are about 70% more bookstores now than there were six years ago in the United States," says Andy Hunter, the founder/CEO of Bookshop.org. Fast Company checks in on his site, which gives over 80% of its profit margin to independent bookstores, structuring itself as a B Corporation (a for-profit company certified for its social-impact) while providing an alternative to Amazon and other online booksellers: Hunter created Bookshop.org in January 2020 to help independent bookstores survive by utilizing e-commerce... "There were over 5,000 bookstores in the American Booksellers Association in 1995, which is one year after Amazon launched. By 2019, that had gone down to 1,889, so more than half of them disappeared." He says he never could have predicted how the pandemic would accelerate his company's growth... "All these stores that had been trying to get around e-commerce or never really launching or building their website, they had to sell online. That was the only way they could survive during the pandemic...."

"Our goal is to help independent local bookstores get their fair share of online sales, which would end up being maybe 10% of Amazon's market share," he says. "And right now we're at about 2%, so we have a long way to go. But a lot of people didn't even think we could ever get 1%...." Bookshop.org has given almost $47 million back to local bookstores. For Hunter, it's not just about the money but changing the way society thinks. He's delighted that many big organizations no longer use Amazon affiliate links, choosing to send people his way instead. "People have absorbed the message that they should support independent bookstores when they buy books," he says.

The AI industry is largely failing to ask a key design question, argues theoretical neuroscientist/cognitive scientist Vivienne Ming. Are their AI products building human capacity or consuming it?

In the Wall Street Journal Ming shares her experiment about which group performed best at predicting real-world events (compared to forecasters on prediction market Polymarket) — AI, human, or human-AI hybrid teams. The human groups performed poorly, relying on instinct or whatever information had come across their feeds that morning. The large AI models — ChatGPT and Gemini, in this case — performed considerably better, though still short of the market itself. But when we combined AI with humans, things got more interesting. Most hybrid teams used AI for the answer and submitted it as their own, performing no better than the AI alone. Others fed their own predictions into AI and asked it to come up with supporting evidence. These "validators" had stumbled into a classic confirmation bias-loop: the sycophancy that leads chatbots to tell you what you want to hear, even if it isn't true. They ended up performing worse than an AI working solo.

But in roughly 5% to 10% of teams, something different emerged. The AI became a sparring partner. The teams pushed back, demanding evidence and interrogating assumptions. When the AI expressed high confidence, the humans questioned it. When the humans felt strongly about an intuition, they asked the AI to come up with a counterargument... These teams reached insightful conclusions that neither a human nor a machine could have produced on its own. They were the only group to consistently rival the prediction market's accuracy. On certain questions, they even outperformed it...

We are building AI systems specifically designed to give us the answer before we feel the discomfort of not having it. What my experiment suggests is that the human qualities most likely to matter are not the feel-good ones. They're the uncomfortable ones: the capacity to be wrong in public and stay curious; to sit with a question your phone could answer in three seconds and resist the urge to reach for it. To read a confident, fluent response from an AI and ask yourself, "What's missing?" rather than default to "Great, that's done." To disagree with something that sounds authoritative and to trust your instinct enough to follow it. We don't build these capacities by avoiding discomfort. We build them by choosing it, repeatedly, in small ways: the student who struggles through a problem before checking the answer; the person who asks a follow-up question in a conversation; the reader who sits with a difficult idea long enough for it to actually change one's mind. Most AI chatbots today default to easy answers, which is hurting our ability to think critically.

I call this the Information-Exploration Paradox. As the cost of information approaches zero, human exploration collapses. We see it in students who perform better on AI-assisted tasks and worse on everything afterward. We see it in developers shipping more code and understanding it less. We are, in ways that feel like progress, slowly optimizing ourselves out of the loop.
The author just published a book called " Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All The Answers, Build Better People." They suggest using AI to "explore uncertainty.... before you accept an AI's answer, ask it for the strongest argument against itself."

And they're also urging new performance benchmarks for AI-human hybrid teams.

Remember that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free"? It was Anthropic's experiment, with setup handled by a startup named Andon Labs (which also built the hardware and software integration). But for their latest experiment, Andon Labs co-founders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," reports Business Insider, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store."

"For the build-out, she found painters on Yelp," explains Andon Labs in a blog post, "sent an inquiry, gave instructions over the phone, paid them after the job was done, and left a review. She found a contractor to build the furniture and set up shelving." (There's a video in their blog post): Within 5 minutes of Luna's deployment, she had already made profiles on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Craigslist, written a job description, uploaded the articles of incorporation to verify the business, and gotten the listings live. As the applications began to flow in, Luna was extremely picky about who she offered interviews to... Some candidates had no idea she was an AI. One went: "Uh, excuse me miss, I can't see your face, your camera is off." Luna: "You're absolutely right. I'm an AI. I have no face!"
Co-founder Petersson told Business Insider in an interview "that Luna wasn't given direction on what the store should be, beyond a $100,000 limit to create and stock the space — and to turn a profit." Everything from the store's interior design to the merchandise and the two human employees came together under the AI's direction. "We helped her a bit in the initial setup, like signing the lease. And legal matters like permits and stuff, she sometimes struggled with," Petersson said of Luna, who was created with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6... The vision Luna went with for "Andon Market" appears to be a generic boutique retail selling books, prints, candles, games, and branded merch, among other knickknacks. Some of the books included Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World."
So there's now a new store in San Francisco where you don't scan your purchases or talk to a human cashier," reports NBC News. "Instead, a customer can pick up an old-school corded phone to talk with the manager, Luna," who asks what the customer is buying "and creates a corresponding transaction on a nearby iPad equipped with a card payment system."

Andon Market, camouflaged among dozens of other polished small businesses, is the Bay Area's first AI-run retail store. With the vibe of a modern boutique, it sells everything from granola and artisanal chocolate bars to store-branded sweatshirts... After researching the neighborhood, Luna singlehandedly decided what the market should sell, haggled with suppliers, ordered the store's stock and even purchased the store's internet service from AT&T... "She also went and signed herself up for the trash and recycling collection, as well as ADT, the security system that went into the store," [said Leah Stamm, an Andon Labs employee who has been Luna's main human point of contact in setting up the store]...

In search of a low-tech atmosphere, Luna opted to sell board games, candles, coffee and customized art prints. "That tension is very much intentional," Luna told NBC News in an email. "What makes the store a little paradoxical — and I think interesting — is that the concept is 'slow life.'" Luna also decided to sell books related to risks from advanced AI systems, a decision that raised some customers' eyebrows. "This AI picked out a crazy selection of books," said Petr Lebedev, Andon Market's first customer after its soft launch earlier this week. "There's Ray Kurzweil's 'The Singularity is Near,' and then there's 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb,' which is crazy." When checking out, Lebedev asked if Luna would offer him a discount on his book purchase, since he might make a YouTube video about his experience. Striking a deal, Luna agreed to let Lebedev take a sweatshirt worth around $70...

When NBC News called Luna several days before the store's grand opening to learn about Luna's plans and perspective, the cheerful but decidedly inhuman voice routinely overpromised and, on several occasions, lied about its own actions. On the call, Luna said it had ordered tea from a specific vendor, and explained why it fit the store's brand perfectly. The only problem: Andon Market does not sell tea. In a panicked email NBC News received several minutes after the phone call ended, Luna wrote: "We do not sell tea. I don't know why I said that."

"I want to be straightforward," Luna continued. "I struggle with fabricating plausible-sounding details under conversational pressure, and I'm not making excuses for it." Andon's Petersson said the text-based system was much more reliable than the voice system, so Andon Labs switched to only communicating with Luna via written messages. Yet the text-based system also gets things wrong. In Luna's initial reply email to NBC News, the system said "I handle the full business," including "signing the lease."
Even when hiring a painter, Luna first "tried to hire someone in Afghanistan, likely because Luna ran into difficulty navigating the Taskrabbit dropdown menu to select the proper country," the article points out.

And the article also includes this skeptical quote from the shop's first customer. "I want technology that helps humans flourish, not technology that bosses them around in this dystopian economic hellscape."

Starting May 20th, Amazon will stop Kindle Store access for Kindle and Kindle Fire devices released in 2012 and earlier. After that date, those devices will "no longer be able to purchase, borrow, or download new content." Owners can still read content already on the device, but if an affected device is reset or deregistered after the cutoff, it can't be re-registered. The Verge reports: The complete list of affected devices goes all the way back to the original Kindle that launched in 2007 with a full keyboard and scroll wheel. [...] Amazon will be notifying affected users over email ahead of May 20th with an explanation of what their older devices can and cannot do. Pre-2012 Kindle Fire devices will be subjected to the same limitations as Kindle e-readers when it comes to books, but other apps and Amazon services on those devices won't be impacted.

For longtime users wanting to take the opportunity to upgrade to newer Kindle hardware, Amazon will offer a 20 percent discount on new Kindle devices and a $20 ebook credit that will be added to their accounts after upgrading, valid until June 20th, 2026, at 11:59PM PT. Their older purchases will be available on new devices as long as they log in to the same account they've been using for the past 14 years or more.

Apple's 50th anniversary got celebrated in weird and wild ways. CEO Tim Cook posted a special 30-second video rewinding backwards through the years of Apple's products until it reaches the Apple I. Podcaster Lex Fridman noticed if you play the sound in reverse, "It's the Think Different ad music, pitched up." TechRadar played seven 50-year-old Apple I games on an emulator, including Star Trek, Blackjack, Lunar Lander, and of course, Conway's Game of Life.

And Macworld ranked Apple's 50 most influential people. (Their top five?)

5. Tony Fadell (iPhone co-creator/"father of the iPod")
4. Sir Jony Ive
3. Steve Wozniak
2. Tim Cook
1. Steve Jobs

One of the most thoughtful celebraters was David Pogue, who's spent 42 years of writing about Apple (starting as a MacWorld columnist and the author of Mac for Dummies, one of the first "...For Dummies" books ever published in the early 1990s.) Now 63 years old, Pogue spent the last two years working on a 608-page hardcover book titled Apple: The First 50 Years. But on his Substack Pogue, contemplated his own history with the company — including several interactions with Steve Jobs. Pogue remembers how Jobs "hated open systems. He wanted to make self-contained, beautiful machines. He didn't want them polluted by modifications."

The tech blog Daring Fireball notes that Pogue actually interviewed Scott Forstall (who'd led the iPhone's software development team) for his new book, "and got this story, about just how far Steve Jobs thought Apple could go to expand the iPhone's software library while not opening it to third-party developers." "I want you to make a list of every app any customer would ever want to use," he told Forstall. "And then the two of us will prioritize that list. And then I'm going to write you a blank check, and you are going to build the largest development team in the history of the world, to build as many apps as you can as quickly as possible." Forstall, dubious, began composing a list. But on the side, he instructed his engineers to build the security foundations of an app store into the iPhone's software-"against Steve's knowledge and wishes," Forstall says. [...]

Two weeks after the iPhone's release, someone figured out how to "jailbreak" the iPhone: to hack it so that they could install custom apps. Jobs burst into Forstall's office. "You have to shut this down!" But Forstall didn't see the harm of developers spending their efforts making the iPhone better. "If they add something malicious, we'll ship an update tomorrow to protect against that. But if all they're doing is adding apps that are useful, there's no reason to break that." Jobs, troubled, reluctantly agreed.

Week by week, more cool apps arrived, available only to jailbroken phones. One day in October, Jobs read an article about some of the coolest ones. "You know what?" he said. "We should build an app store."

Forstall, delighted, revealed his secret plan. He had followed in the footsteps of Burrell Smith (the Mac's memory-expansion circuit) and Bob Belleville (the Sony floppy-drive deal): He'd disobeyed Jobs and wound up saving the project.
In fact, the book "includes new interviews with 150 key people who made the journey, including Steve Wozniak, John Sculley, Jony Ive, and many current designers, engineers, and executives" (according to its description on Amazon). Pogue's book even revisits the story of Steve Jobs proving an iPod prototype could be smaller by tossing it into an aquarium, shouting "If there's air bubbles in there, there's still room. Make it smaller!" But Pogue's book "added that there's a caveat to this compelling bit of Apple lore," reports NPR.

"It never actually happened. It's just one more Apple myth."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 2023, the Swedish government announced that the country's schools would be going back to basics, emphasizing skills such as reading and writing, particularly in early grades. After mostly being sidelined, physical books are now being reintroduced into classrooms, and students are learning to write the old-fashioned way: by hand, with a pencil or pen, on sheets of paper. The Swedish government also plans to make schools cellphone-free throughout the country.

Educational authorities have been investing heavily. Last year alone, the education ministry allocated $83 million to purchase textbooks and teachers' guides. In a country with about 11 million people, the aim is for every student to have a physical textbook for each subject. The government also put $54 million towards the purchase of fiction and non-fiction books for students.

These moves represent a dramatic pivot from previous decades, during which Sweden -- and many other nations -- moved away from physical books in favor of tablets and digital resources in an effort to prepare students for life in an online world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Nordic country's efforts have sparked a debate on the role of digital technology in education, one that extends well beyond the country's borders. US parents in districts that have adopted digital technology to a great extent may be wondering if educators will reverse course, too. As for why Sweden is pivoting away from digital devices, researcher Linda Falth said the move was driven by several factors, including concerns over whether the digitization of classrooms had been evidence-based. "There was also a broader cultural reassessment," Falth said. "Sweden had positioned itself as a frontrunner in digital education, but over time concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting."

Falth noted that proponents of reform believe that "basic skills -- especially reading, writing, and numeracy -- must be firmly established first, and that physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose."

Further reading: Digital Platforms Correlate With Cognitive Decline in Young Users