Shapeways, a 3D-printing services pioneer we profiled a decade ago, has now filed for bankruptcy.

Prusa, based in Prague, will now make some printers in the USA. “Our goal is to become the largest manufacturer of 3D printers and filaments in the USA within a year.” It anticipates 15–20 percent of assembled MK4 printers will be made here by 2025.

Nano Dimension is acquiring Desktop Metal.

Emissions from nearly 6 million of its vehicles were about 10 percent higher on average than GM said they were on its greenhouse gas emission compliance reports, an EPA investigation found. GM will retire 50 million metric tons of carbon credits to make up for the excess tailpipe pollution. It’ll also pay $145.8 million in penalties.

The new ice blue Z Flip 6 that Evan Blass just leaked? Now that’s color — shiny blue hinge, shiny blue sides, shiny blue camera lens rings. I own the mint green Flip 5 (see next image in gallery) and it’s mostly just black and silver. Too bad I couldn’t wait a year!

The settlement would resolve an investigation by California’s Civil Rights Department, which had for years been investigating claims from employees who said they were retaliated against for using parental, disability, and family-care leave.

Employees who used these benefits said they were denied raises, promotions, and stock awards as a result. Microsoft, which has previously been lauded for its leave policy, denied the allegations.

Tech giants are rewriting the rules on web scraping, blaming unnamed third parties for disregarding robots.txt, and seemingly claiming the right to reuse anything posted anywhere for AI.

Now, Cloudflare is telling customers on its CDN that it can find and block AI bots that try to get around the rules.

The upshot of this globally aggregated data is that we can immediately detect new scraping tools and their behavior without needing to manually fingerprint the bot, ensuring that customers stay protected from the newest waves of bot activity.

NotebookCheck writes that the first Asus laptops with Ryzen AI 300 chips, codename Strix Point, will launch July 17th at an event originally scheduled for July 8th. Best Buy has changed its ship dates to July 28th, from July 15th originally.

Two weeks till launch, four weeks till availability.

While old-school scams usually target retirees, the people getting catfished are young. So maybe one way to keep your friends from being vulnerable to bad actors is just to give them a call?

From a Bloomberg interview with Hironobu Sakaguchi:

“On a rare occasion — I want to stress ‘rare occasion’ — sometimes one of the Mistwalker team members will hop on Final Fantasy XIV, and I’ll see a message saying, ‘Hey, the meeting’s started,.”

Texas-based Sky Elements has come up with something the entire country can get behind. It says it’s the first company to receive FAA approval “to attach fireworks to drones,” merging a longtime Fourth of July tradition with the aerial light shows that are growing in popularity.

It’s calling the innovation Pyro drones, which should now be mandatory for every national holiday.

“We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!” said Japan’s Digital Minister Taro Kono to Reuters for its report: 

Japan’s government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades since their heyday, reaching a long-awaited milestone in a campaign to modernize the bureaucracy. 

Back in 2019, the US finally stopped using 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate the country’s nuclear forces.