Technology

The Department of Education quietly made an update to how payments are calculated for certain users, then rolled it back.

The recent search feature in Safari is now more prominent, but not everyone may welcome the change.

Check fraud is illegal, and it comes with big consequences.

You might be able to buy a home with no down payment, but you’ll need to be prepared for higher mortgage payments.

Here are hints -- and the answers -- for the NYT Strands puzzle No. 411 for April 18.

Hints and answers for Connections for April 18, #677.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle No. 1,399 for April 18.

Just a day after massive outages on Spotify and Zoom, Walmart was experiencing issues with its online store in the United States. While it wasn't a complete outage, it did prevent folks from viewing products and checking out on the web and via the retailer's app.

During the peak of the outage, which lasted from about 3 PM ET to 5 PM ET, we, along with many others, were unable to successfully search for anything, including products, or even load shopping category pages. For instance, when searching for an item – be it a Nintendo Switch 2 preorder, AirPods Pro, or Lego sets – we received a “Sorry…” graphic.

Down Detector, a site that tracks outages and lets people mark issues, showed over 3,250 reported outages for Walmart as of 3:12 PM ET, which only began to lower closer to 5PM.

The good news is that Walmart's site issues have since been resolved, but the retailer hasn't shed light on what caused the issue or acknowledged it publicly.

Ahead, you can see our live reporting during Walmart’s issues with its online store on April 17, 2025.

Here's a look at what I'm encountering when searching for AirPods: I see a "Sorry..." typeface with a random graphic – in this case, a toaster – as well as the text "We’re having technical issues, but we’ll be back in a flash."

(Image credit: Future)

As you might suspect, the problems currently occurring with Walmart's online store on Walmart.com are also affecting the retailer's apps for Android and iOS.

And as we typically see with outages on sites or services, users are posting on X (formerly Twitter) and Threads.

Post by @unwieldyworldofdisney View on Threads

Damn @Walmart... is somebody sleeping on the job or what?!?! This app has been down for a while now. Get your shit together! pic.twitter.com/rtO9sAQs0RApril 17, 2025

Beyond not being able to search on Walmart.com, there are also issues loading pages, like Electronics, Home, or Grocery, as well as highlighted product cards on the homepage.

Similar to the 'Dogs of Amazon' error, Walmart presents either "Sorry" or "Uh-oh" with a random graphic associated.

Meanwhile, reported outages on Down Detector are over 3,600 as of 3:17 PM ET and still on the rise.

(Image credit: Future)

Here's a look at the error page you'll encounter if you try to click on a department or one of the highlighted products on the homepage. If you're trying to click on one or are searching, know you're not alone in receiving the error page.

(Image credit: Future)

While there are still over 3,160 reported outages on Down Detector and many Walmart customers taking to X (formerly Twitter) and Threads to note issues loading and using both the site and app, the retailer has yet to comment on the issues.

Judging from the comments on Down Detector, the issues accessing Walmart's online store appear to be happening across the United States.

@Walmart Is .com down?April 17, 2025

@Walmart is your app down??April 17, 2025

Some good news for folks trying to shop on Walmart – Search is working for me again and letting me click into products and then add them to my cart. Plus, I can click on departments like Electronics or Fashion again.

If you're not having a good experience with Walmart's online store, it's worth trying again.

(Image credit: Future)

(Image credit: Future)

We'll call it that Walmart's online store appears to be coming back online, as just a few minutes after a few successful searches, that functionality appears to be hit or miss again.

Category pages are still working, though, so hopefully it's a sign that the Walmart team is working to identify, fix, and eventually resolve the issues affecting its online store.

Down Detector reports are starting to lower, now sitting at 2,505 as of 4:07 PM ET.

Are we back?

(Image credit: Future / Walmart)

It looks like the worst may be behind us as Walmart's website seems to be working as far as searching for and adding products to your cart goes. Searching for "ipad" wasn't working properly less than 20 minutes ago, but now it seems to work just fine. Similarly, searching for "macbook air" and "apple juice" all turn up tangible results.

Down Detector reports are falling even lower to just 1,157 at 4:31 PM ET, so we hope this means Walmart is back online and ready for shopping.

We'll keep an eye on Walmart's website and app to let you know if there's any more trouble in paradise.

All appears well for Walmart as Down Detector reports continue to drop further and faster - now at just 489 as of 4:51 PM ET. Searching, adding to cart, and checking out all appear to be fully restored.

The chatbot's memory is in beta and now available on Grok.com and the official iOS and Android apps.

Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Threads no longer have access to Apple Intelligence's writing features.

• At just €6 per terabyte, Storadera undercuts US cloud giants
• It skipped SSDs for HDDs to slash costs while maintaining solid speeds
• Storadera plans to expand into Germany, the UK, and beyond

Storadera, a Tallinn-based cloud startup, is offering some of the best cloud storage for photos with S3-compatible storage at €6/TB/month. This puts it head-to-head with providers like Backblaze, which offers a slightly lower rate of €4.75/TB/month.

The company's pitch lies not just in low pricing but also in jurisdiction. Being a Europe-based startup, its stored data is beyond the direct jurisdiction of non-EU countries, making it appealing to organizations that require data sovereignty.

Storadera’s architecture relies on HDDs rather than SSDs for primary writes. “If we can offer fast enough service on 10x less expensive hardware, then it sounds like magic,” Tommi Kannisto, the founder of Storadera, explained.

Hyperconverged setup

While SSDs are used for metadata, accounting for just 0.05 percent of total disk space, all major writes are done to traditional disks. "QLC 100-plus TB SSDs are still too expensive – and probably will be for the next ten years,” Kannisto said.

The company uses a hyperconverged setup, with all servers writing to JBODs – racks containing 102 conventional Western Digital hard drives – using erasure coding schemes such as 4+2 and 6+2, with 8+2 coming soon. Each server has 32GB of RAM and runs services written in 100,000 lines of Go code.

“All software runs in all servers and all servers write to all JBODs. There is no load balancer unit,” Kannisto said.

The system adapts to load, using “small blocks at times of low load with bigger blocks used at high load times,” and can achieve “close to 300MBps with 2MB files.” It is also preparing to implement higher-capacity shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives to reduce capital expenditure by up to 25 percent. Storadera also offers bucket geo-replication, object locking for immutability, and integrity checks every 60 days.

The company says it is doing well financially, with around 100 customers, including Telia and the Estonian government. It has positioned itself as one of the best cloud storage and cloud backup options available.

Despite making slightly less than €1 million a year, the company says it is sustainable and eyeing further growth. “We are profitable… we make a very good profit [and] we’re growing 5 percent/month in revenue,” Kannisto said.

Storadera plans to expand into Germany by mid-2025, and aims to enter the UK, and possibly North America or the Asia-Pacific region, later in the year

Via Blocksandfiles

You may also like

• Want to transfer your files 9x faster than WeTransfer?
• Take a look at our roundup of the best business VPNs available now
• These are the best cloud document storage solutions to choose from

Can Ruben Amorim's Red Devils make a home field advantage count in this delicately poised quarterfinal?

That foam roller can do more than deliver muscle release. With targeted workouts, you can strengthen muscles, alleviate tightness and improve flexibility.

My latest NotebookLM podcast creation is deeper and more fascinating than anything I've ever created, and I bet it'll shock you, too.

I don't understand string theory. In fact, I bet there's fewer than 1% of the world that can speak cogently on the subject, but I am fascinated by the concept and have read a bit on it. Not enough to understand or explain it to you, but enough to have a steady and abiding curiosity.

AI, on the other hand, I think I understand and now regularly use as a tool. When Google released a recent NotebookLM update that includes, among other things, mind maps, I thought it was time to bring together something at the very outer edges of my understanding and this bleeding-edge artificial intelligence capability.

So I created a String Theory Podcast.

First, a tiny primer on NotebookLM. It is a powerful AI-based research tool in which you can upload sources, and it will turn them into summaries and extrapolated information in the form of text, podcasts, and visual guides like mind maps.

For me, the most fascinating bit has been the podcasts or "Audio Overviews", which churn out chatty audio conversations about virtually any topic you feed into them. I call it a podcast because the audio style walks a well-worn path of most popular podcast series. It's conversational, usually between two people, sometimes funny, and always accessible.

I've been wondering, though, if you can stretch the limits of the format with a topic so deep and, honestly, confusing, that the resulting podcast would be conversational nonsense.

My experiment, however, proved that while the current version of NotebookLM has its limits, it's far better at comprehending dense science bits than me and probably most people you or I know.

(Image credit: Future) Weird science

Once I decided I wanted NotebookLM to help me with the topic, I went in search of string theory content (there's a lot more of it online than you might think), quickly stumbling on this 218-page research paper from 2009 by University of Cambridge researcher Dr. David Tong.

I scanned the doc and could tell that it was rich with string theory detail, and so far over my head, it probably resides somewhere near the rings of Saturn.

Imagine trying to read this document and make sense of it. Maybe if someone explained it to me, I'd understand. Maybe.

I downloaded the PDF and then fed it into NotebookLM, where I requested a podcast and a mind map.

(Image credit: Future)

It took almost 30 minutes for NotebookLM to create the podcast, and I must admit, I was a little anxious as I opened it. What if this mass of detail on one of physics' most confounding topics overwhelmed Google's AI? Might the hosts just be babbling incoherently?

I shouldn't have worried.

I'd heard these podcast hosts before: a somewhat vanilla pair (a man and a woman) who banter casually, while making witty asides. In this case, they were trying to explain string theory to the uninitiated.

Next, I think I should create an AI podcast avatar who can point at this graphic while they talk. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

They started by talking about how they'd walk through the topic, covering bits like general relativity, quantum mechanics, and how, at least as of 2009, we had never directly observed these "strings". Earlier this month, some physicists claimed that they had, in fact, found the "first observational evidence supporting string theory." But I digress.

The hosts spoke like physics experts, but, where possible, in layman's terms. I quickly found myself wishing they had a guest. The podcast would've worked better if they were proxies for me, not understanding much at all, and had an AI-generated expert to interview.

Stringing it all together

(Image credit: Future)

As the podcast progressed, the hosts dug into the details of string theory, specifically, the definition of a "string." They described them as tiny objects that vibrate and added, "all stuff in the universe comes from how tiny strings are vibrating."

Things got more complex from there, and while the AI podcast hosts' tone never changed, I struggled to follow along. I still can't tell you what "relativistic point particle viewed through Einstein's special relativity" really means. Though I did appreciate the analogy of "imagine a string moving through space time."

The AI hosts used various tricks to keep me engaged and not completely confused. The male host would, like a podcast parrot, often repeat a bit of what the female host had just explained, and use some decent analogies to try to make it relatable.

At times, the female host lapsed into what sounded like she was reading straight out of the research paper, but the male host was always there to pull her back to entertainment mode. He did a lot of chatty summarizing.

I felt like I reconnected to the whole thing when they explained how "string morphed into the theory of everything" and added, "bosons and fermions, partners in crime due to supersymmetry."

This was heavy

(Image credit: Future)

After 25 minutes of this, my head was stuffed to the point of bursting with those still-theoretical strings and spinning with terms such as "vertex operators" and "holomorphic."

I hoped for a grand and glorious summary at the end, but the podcast abruptly ended at almost 31 minutes. It cut off as if the hosts ran out of stream, ideas, or information, and walked away from the mics in frustration and without signing off.

In some ways, it feels like this is my fault. After all, I forced these SIMs to learn all this stuff and then explain it to me, because I could never do it. Maybe they got fed up.

I also checked out the mind maps, which are branching diagrams that can help you map out and represent complex topics like string theory. As you can imagine, the mind maps for this topic start simple but get increasingly complex as you expand each branch. Still, they're a nice study companion to the podcast.

It's also worth noting that I could enrich the podcast and mind maps with other research sources. I would simply add them into the sources panel in NotebookLM and rerun the "audio overview".

A real expert weighs in

For as much as I learned and as much as I trust the source material, I wondered about the podcast's accuracy. AI, even with solid information, can hallucinate, or at least misinterpret. I tried contacting the paper's author, Dr. Tong, but never heard back. So, I turned to another physics expert, Michael Lubell, Professor of Physics at City College of CUNY.

Dr. Lubell agreed to listen to the podcast and give me some feedback. A week later, he emailed me this brief note, "Just listened to the string theory podcast. Interestingly presented, but it requires a reasonable amount of expertise to follow it."

When I asked about any obvious errors, Lubell wrote, "Nothing obvious, but I’ve never done string theory research." Fair enough, but I'm willing to bet Lubell understands and knows more about string theory than I do.

Perhaps, the AI podcasters now know more about the subject than either of us.

You might also like

• ChatGPT gets a useful new home for your AI images
• ChatGPT's memory upgrade might just be the biggest AI ...
• I tried Mind Maps in NotebookLM and it's my new favorite ...

Enzo Maresca's Blues look to wrap up this quarter-final matchup at Stamford Bridge.

Credit card debt is expensive enough. Experts advise how you can avoid this costly penalty.

Whether you need a strong internet connection for work, gaming or just browsing, these options don't disappoint.

Spectrum is a top choice for internet in San Benito, but growing fiber availability in the area could bring residents even better options.

The new feature shows Reels your friends like, and hopes you like them, too.

Whether you’re just getting started or need a pro-level machine, these 3D printers stand out for their performance, reliability and value.