TECH

Samsung rides the wave of TSMC

Samsung's chip manufacturing business is experiencing a golden moment. After a first quarter of 2026 with record-breaking operating profits, the South Korean manufacturer is preparing to host even more heavyweights in the technology industry, desperately seeking a viable alternative.

The reason behind this mass migration is simple: TSMC can't keep up. The explosion in demand for artificial intelligence and high-performance chips has completely exhausted the production capacity of the Taiwanese giant, forcing companies to rapidly diversify their supply lines.

To avoid being held hostage by bottlenecks in the supply chain, technology companies like Google and AMD are turning to Samsung. It's the classic case of "not putting all your eggs in one basket," and the South Korean brand is capitalizing on this competitive crisis in an exemplary way.

With TSMC practically at full capacity, the list of clients adopting the "dual-sourcing" strategy (splitting orders between two foundries) continues to grow. AMD, for example, is already in negotiations for Samsung to manufacture its future processors starting in 2028.

If you thought Google would be left out, think again. The search giant is deepening ties for the production of next-generation Axion processors and has already asked Samsung to take over some of the critical Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) intended for heavy artificial intelligence tasks.

As you might expect, this diversification movement isn't limited to the most obvious technologies. Even the automotive industry is preparing for shortages, securing its space on the South Korean brand's assembly lines:

-Tesla: You've already confirmed that your next AI6 chip will be entirely manufactured at Samsung's facilities in Texas.

-BYD: The world's largest electric vehicle manufacturer is in advanced discussions for the production of its autonomous driving chips.

-Groq: The well-known AI startup backed by NVIDIA already uses Samsung's foundry and is expected to maintain the partnership for future versions of its specialized chips.

The chip market is narrowing...Looking coldly at the current market, the reality is that there are only three names capable of manufacturing truly advanced semiconductors: TSMC, Samsung, and Intel. Since Intel's external manufacturing division is still in its infancy, Samsung naturally assumes the status of a major and unique alternative to TSMC's dominance.

It's undeniable that TSMC still holds the crown in producing the world's most advanced chips. However, this chronic inability to meet rampant demand is proving costly in the long run, opening the door for the South Korean company to gain momentum that seemed almost impossible just a short time ago.

It remains to be seen whether Samsung will be able to maintain this breakneck pace and convince these companies to stay on its side, even when the storm passes. For now, it's at least curious to observe how the competitive crisis ended up being the best news the brand's executives could receive this year.

Water and talent shortages...The scarcity of water and skilled labor in Taiwan has left TSMC worried, potentially jeopardizing the production of advanced chips for generative artificial intelligence solutions. The warning was given on Friday (12) by the company's CEO, CC Wei.

The Asian country has experienced several periods of drought in recent years, even imposing consumption controls in 2021, when it faced one of the worst droughts in its history. Therefore, the head of the world's largest chip manufacturer has not yet completely ruled out hiring water trucks to keep its factories running.

Addressing the issue during the inauguration of a science park in Pingtung, the executive said that the President of Taiwan, Lai Ching-te, presented plans to solve the water shortage problem. One of the ideas is to interconnect the island's reservoirs, which have refilled with recent rains.

When the project is completed, water distribution throughout the country will become more efficient, guaranteeing access even during crises, including for industries;

“In that case, in the future I will no longer need to say that land, water or electricity may be lacking,” declared Wei;

He was referring to the historical “five bottlenecks” of the local industry, which are water, energy, land, labor and talent;

The last two themes were also cited by the CEO of TSMC, who stated that he suffers from a lack of specialized professionals to hire.

On this, the Taiwanese president revealed that the government is trying to attract and retain foreign talent, especially for the technology sector. The strategy includes making the work authorization processes in the country less bureaucratic.

Even in the face of these difficulties, the head of the semiconductor manufacturer reiterated that the company will maintain its main research, development and manufacturing centers in the country. It is worth remembering that TSMC invested US$ 165 billion in the construction of a complex in Arizona (United States).

The high water consumption related to AI also generates concern among other technology giants, such as Google. Learn about the plans of the Mountain View company to make the use of water resources more efficient.

mundophone

TECH

In game theory, generalists sometimes win out over specialists, finds research

Whether you're playing poker against a single opponent or find yourself in a bidding war over a home purchase with another prospective buyer, you are operating under conditions of imperfect information. You know what cards you're holding in the poker game, and you also know how much above the home's asking price you can afford, but you don't know your opponent's hand in the card game or how high the other home buyer is willing to go.

A paper co-authored by MIT researchers and presented in April at the International Conference on Learning Representations in Rio De Janeiro won't tell you what to do in these situations, specifically. But it does offer new insights into so-called imperfect-information games that involve two contestants facing off in a "zero-sum" competition, where one player's gain means the other player's loss.

MIT researchers on the project include Sobhan Mohammadpour, a PhD student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS); and Gabriele Farina, an assistant professor in EECS and a principal investigator at LIDS. Additional co-authors include Max Rudolph of the University of Texas at Austin (UT), Nathan Lichtlé of the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), Alexandre Bayen of UCB, J. Zico Kolter of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Amy X. Zhang of UT; Eugene Vinitsky of New York University; and Samuel Sokota of CMU.

The focus of the new work is on algorithms that could be used to train neural networks to participate in imperfect-information games. The assumption, long held in the field, was that algorithms grounded in principles of game theory would, in this setting, clearly outcompete a general-purpose variety of algorithms called policy gradient methods, which came into use for decision-making in the 1990s.

The term "policy" in this context basically means strategy, whereas "gradient" refers to a path that leads in the direction of greatest change—to the top (or bottom) of a hill, for example. Policy gradient methods are being used to train neural networks to make decisions that move—in small, sequential steps—toward a particular goal (like reaching a summit, metaphorically speaking), with continual adjustments and course corrections made along the way to bring the agent closer to the intended destination.

Although strategic games were not on the original agenda when policy gradient methods were conceived in the early 1990s, the authors of the new paper still wondered how this class of algorithms might fare in two-player games. These methods become more complicated to analyze in multi-agent settings, according to Farina.

"There is still a direction you can move in to improve your circumstances, but, because of the other player's actions, that direction can constantly change over the course of the game. And those shifts can be rapid," says Farina.

"It had been pretty much taken for granted that specialized game-theoretic algorithms were the right approach for this setting," says Sokota. "Our study showed that policy gradient methods can work better than these specialized algorithms, and that the specialized algorithms may not work as well as people thought—which raises an interesting sociological question about why this went unnoticed for so long. Part of the answer is that the field hadn't done the engineering work required to rigorously evaluate the algorithms, so it was hard to tell what worked and what didn't."

Consequently, a major contribution of this work has been to provide an even-handed way of appraising different algorithms that can teach agents—i.e., neural networks—how to compete in imperfect-information games.

"We're taking a different approach," notes Rudolph. "Unlike many of the papers published in this field, we're not proposing a new algorithm that can beat out other algorithms. We're proposing a benchmark that can assess these algorithms."

Simply put, a benchmark consists of software designed to rate the performance of algorithms. "What we're offering are testing grounds, or playing grounds, where people can take their algorithms, train them for a specific task, and see how well they do," says Farina.

The group calculates a player's performance in terms of a concept called exploitability, which measures how well a player does against the "worst-case adversary," Sokota explains. "In a game like poker, this opponent wouldn't know what my hand is, but would know how I would behave for any given hand." Achieving a zero on this scale implies perfect play, whereas a high exploitability score indicates far-from-optimal play.

Five games were played in experiments carried out by the team: two versions of Phantom Tic-Tac-Toe, in which players can't see what their opponent has done, along with two imperfect-information variants of a board game called Hex, and another game of deception called Liar's Dice.

The biggest challenge faced by the researchers was getting the exploitability measure to work on games of this size, which may include as many as 30 billion states. A "state" in this case is not just all the possible board positions, but also encompasses the entire history of the game, including every step and misstep along the way.

"It's like looking into a dark room that's filled with objects you can't see," says Mohammadpour. "Somehow, you need to figure out where these objects are and exactly how they got there." Previous researchers, Mohammadpour adds, have typically used exploitability for games that are 100,000 times smaller than the ones analyzed in their study.

In the experiments carried out on these five games, neural networks trained with policy gradient algorithms got better (lower) exploitability scores than networks trained on game theory-based algorithms. In head-to-head competitions, which took place in the next round, the policy gradient-trained networks again beat their game theory-trained opponents.

"Those results were reassuring," Rudolph says, "because they give us more confidence in our benchmarking approach."

The team has made their benchmarking software freely available and convenient to use.

"You don't need a supercomputer," Mohammadpour says. "You can run it on an ordinary laptop. And all you have to do is add a single line of code to a commonly used collection of benchmarking software called OpenSpiel."

Although their experiments involved some fairly obscure games, Farina would like to put this work into a broader context.

"Keep in mind that the term 'game' really applies to any multi-agent strategic interaction," he says. "So the lessons we learn from this research are by no means limited to recreational games."

Vinitsky agrees. "Hidden information is a very important property of the world," he says. "It pervades a range of things—including military operations, trading scenarios, and negotiations—all of which are carried out under conditions of hidden information. The idea that we can improve on these games suggests that we can also do better in these other settings as well."

Ian Gemp—a computer scientist and game theory expert at Google DeepMind who was not involved in this study—finds these results encouraging.

"This work serves as a compelling reminder," he says, "that modernizing classical tools [like policy gradient methods] remains a highly productive path for solving complex strategic problems."

Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

TECH

Redesigned high-NA lithography optical system aims to overcome challenges in semiconductor chipmaking

From data centers powering next-generation AI to vital medical technology, cars, and the mobile device or computer you're probably reading this on, semiconductor-based computer chips are essential to modern life.

As technology advances and power consumption increases, scientists are hoping to create ever-smaller computer chips, requiring delicate chip designs on the individual nanometer (nm) scale. Methods such as extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography are providing new paths to these smaller chips, but they come with major physics, engineering and financial challenges, limiting current application and scalability.

Published in the Journal of Micro/Nanopatterning, Materials, and Metrology, Professor Tsumoru Shintake of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) has proposed a radical redesign of the illumination systems and projectors used in high numerical aperture (high-NA) EUV lithography.

Simulations suggest that his design could eliminate troublesome optical (so-called "mask 3D") effects, enhance resolution and enable the manufacture of smaller computer chips at lower cost than current EUV methods.

This diagram shows Shintake's proposed high-NA EUV lithography projector design. The collector mirrors in the illumination system have a simpler design to bring short wavelengths of light from the EUV source to the photomask. The two sets of mirrors in the projector increase numerical aperture. The circuit pattern on the photomask is projected onto the wafer, followed by chemical etching that produces dense nanometer lines on the silicon surface. This process is carried out on more than 20 layers of wafer that are stacked to ultimately produce a functional chip. Credit: Tsumoru Shintake, OIST

Shintake says, "Current EUV lithography systems cost hundreds of millions of euros per machine. My new design should achieve fine, 2–3 nm scale details, in a much cheaper way compared to today's state-of-the-art machines."

He highlights the downstream applications of these smaller semiconductor chips in the context of growing AI demands.

"The International Energy Agency predicts that data center electricity consumption will double by 2030 due to demand from energy-intensive applications like AI agents. However, the higher density of features on high-NA-produced chips means signals should travel shorter distances, minimizing energy loss. This can reduce power cost per computation," explains Shintake.

"These denser chips should also release less heat, lowering power required for cooling. Such improvements could have significant impacts for data center energy usage."

What is EUV lithography? Understanding semiconductor chip synthesis...In EUV lithography, light with an extremely short wavelength (13.5 nm) is generated and guided through an illumination system, where it strikes a reflective photomask that contains a template of the circuit pattern. The reflected light pattern then passes through a projector, which uses a series of mirrors to shrink and focus the image onto a silicon wafer. The pattern is then etched onto the wafer through further processing.

To print a higher density of circuit components, researchers are turning to high-NA EUV lithography. NA is linked to the range of angles at which an optical system can accept or emit light. A higher NA captures a wider angle of light, enabling the lens to resolve finer details. In theory, the resolution limit (the smallest detail that can be resolved) is inversely proportional to NA, so a higher NA provides finer printing capability for semiconductor chips.

Professor Shintake examines a premade, commercial silicon wafer. He stands behind a prototype of his last design for in-line, EUV lithography. Efforts are underway to make a prototype for his current in-line design for high-NA EUV lithography. Credit: Andrew Scott, OIST

In the early days of EUV lithography research in the 1990s, scientists explored optical designs for high-NA lithography that were similar to Shintake's, in which the photomask, projector and wafer were aligned. While these in-line configurations were attractively simple, researchers were unable to find solutions to distortions, blurring and other optical errors that occurred, particularly as the NA increased.

To address these challenges, Shintake first investigated whether a simple pair of mirrors—one concave and one convex—could serve as the projector. His design eventually evolved into a two-stage configuration, with a concave-convex mirror pair in each stage.

While initially unsuccessful, Shintake soon realized that multiple reflections between carefully arranged mirrors could potentially cancel out optical defects while maintaining high NA. After spending many months running calculations on OpTaliX, an optical simulation system, he determined the ideal curvature and positioning of the mirrors needed to achieve high NA while preserving image quality.

A step toward scalable semiconductor production...As with every research project, there are some limitations. The simulations assume that mirrors will be 100% reflective and defect-free, and moving from simulation to real-world implementation will require expert engineering. Building a physical prototype is Shintake's next step, and his team has now started developing EUV hardware, with the aim of producing lower-cost, high-performance EUV lithography.

"This design can make high-NA technology much simpler and cheaper to produce, opening new possibilities for semiconductor manufacturing. We should be able to create machines that are a quarter of the cost of those currently on the market," concludes Shintake.

"By achieving finer designs, we can make higher-density memory and more efficient logic chips. This technology may have transformative impacts on society, powering data centers and the future of AI, and making electronics faster, more energy-efficient and potentially cheaper to run."

Provided by Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology

DIGITAL LIFE

Google Chrome and the dictatorship of ads: the end of the line for traditional Ad Blockers

If you're one of those users who can't live without a clean internet free of annoying ads, we have bad news. Google has finally decided to deliver the coup de grâce to the traditional ad blockers we use daily in its browser.

The controversial transition to the new Manifest V3 architecture has been announced for years, but now the company has begun ruthlessly disabling extensions based on the old system. This means your browsing experience is about to change drastically.

The official justification from the search giant focuses on the privacy and security of the entire ecosystem, but the tech community has little doubt. For most experts, the real reason for this move is to shield and protect its billion-dollar online advertising empire.

To understand the magnitude of this resource cut, Manifest V3 fundamentally changes how extensions interact with your browser. By drastically limiting network rules and dynamic filtering, powerful and complex blockers, such as the famous uBlock Origin, simply cease to operate at their full potential.

It's frustrating, to say the least, to see Google using the pretext of security to crush tools that users legitimately installed to protect their own privacy. With this change to the codebase, the effective interception of network requests – the real magic behind blocking aggressive ads on YouTube or Twitch – becomes an almost impossible task to accomplish in Chrome.

What Google took away and why it took it...The technical change is the replacement of Chrome’s webRequest API with the declarativeNetRequest API.

Under the old system, extensions like uBlock Origin could watch your browser’s traffic as it happened, see an ad or tracker trying to load, and block it on the spot before it ever reached your screen.

Under the new system, extensions have to hand Google a pre-written list of things to block and Chrome decides whether to follow those instructions. The lists are capped at a fixed number of rules, and the extension can’t react to anything that isn’t already on the list.

uBlock Origin’s developer, Raymond Hill, has been clear that a Manifest V3 version cannot replicate the original’s full capabilities. A stripped-down version called uBlock Origin Lite exists for MV3, but it handles only a fraction of the filter lists, the community-maintained databases of known ads and trackers, that the original supported.

It also can’t perform cosmetic filtering, the process of hiding ad containers and promotional elements that remain on a page even after the ad itself is blocked. Without it, you get blank boxes where ads used to be, or sponsored content that looks native to the page. For more than 40 million Chrome users who relied on the original, the replacement is a downgrade by design.

Google engineer Devlin Cronin confirmed the timeline in a Chromium code review commit, a logged change to Chrome’s underlying source code that other developers can inspect, writing that “MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them and the associated functionality. We won’t be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we’ve actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately). Of course, other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire.”

Cronin’s sign-off, that “other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire,” suggests the removal as a Chrome-specific choice. It isn’t. Google controls 65% of the desktop browser market and the MV2 code being stripped from Chromium, the open-source project that Chrome and many other browsers are built on top of, affects every browser that shares that foundation.

Google justifies the migration on security grounds and there’s some substance to the argument. The old webRequest API gives extensions deep access to every network request a browser makes, from images and page loads to login credentials, and the extension sees the data before Chrome acts on it.

A compromised or malicious extension with that access can read your passwords as you type them, redirect you to fake websites, or slip harmful code into pages you trust.

The declarativeNetRequest API is designed to prevent exactly this kind of attack by restricting extensions to predefined rule sets. Instead of giving an extension free rein over your browser traffic, Chrome only lets it submit a list of instructions in advance and handles the blocking itself. That narrows the ways a bad actor can exploit an extension because the extension never gets to touch your data directly.

But Google generated roughly $239.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2025, and content blockers directly reduce the number of ads users see. The MV3 restrictions don’t ban ad blocking entirely. They cap how many rules an extension can use and eliminate dynamic blocking, the ability to recognize and stop new ad formats and trackers as they appear in real time.

Ad companies constantly change how they deliver ads, rotating domains and disguising tracking scripts, and the old extensions could keep up with that. The new ones can only block what’s already on a list that was written before the ad loaded. The result is ad blockers that work against yesterday’s ads but struggle against the ones that adapt daily.

The same company that built Chrome and sells the ads it displays also wrote the rules governing what ad blockers can do inside it. Whether those incentives shaped MV3’s design is the most obvious question in the room, and Google has never given a convincing answer.

Microsoft Edge and Opera, both built on Google’s Chromium engine, are expected to follow suit because the MV2 code being removed is shared across all Chromium-based browsers. Maintaining it independently would require significant engineering resources that most of those browsers are unlikely to commit.

Brave, also Chromium-based, supports MV2 but also sidesteps the problem by building its own ad-blocking engine directly into the browser, bypassing the extension framework entirely.

Firefox, which runs on its own engine, continues to support Manifest V2 and uBlock Origin without restriction. Mozilla implemented its own version of Manifest V3 but kept the old webRequest API working alongside it, so extensions that need real-time traffic access can still use it. That proves security improvements and effective content blocking can coexist. Google chose not to make them coexist.

What you can do...For Chrome users who want effective content blocking, the options are leaving Chrome or accepting reduced protection.

Firefox supports uBlock Origin in full and shows no signs of changing that. Brave blocks ads natively. Both are free and work well, and switching takes about ten minutes.

You can also install uBlock Origin Lite on Chrome and accept that it blocks less, adapts more slowly to new threats and can’t match the original. Or you can do nothing, and Chrome 150 will disable the extension through a routine update and show you a notification that it’s no longer supported.

Your current alternatives and solutions...With the forced deactivation of Manifest V2 in the stable version of Chrome, you can't simply ignore the problem. You'll have to make some firm decisions about the software you use to browse the internet if you want to keep your sanity intact and your screen free of visual distractions.

The transition requires you to take immediate action to avoid being inundated with intrusive advertising. Fortunately, the development community hasn't thrown in the towel and has already begun preparing concrete answers and alternative paths to mitigate this genuine technological headache.

To help you navigate this new and grim reality, we've compiled the main options available to you to circumvent these severe restrictions:

Install uBlock Origin Lite, a version officially adapted to Manifest V3, although considerably less effective on video platforms.

Transfer to tools like AdGuard or Blockify, which have already been rewritten from scratch and optimized for this new imposed architecture.

Switch to Brave, which offers a robust native shield against ads without relying on external extensions at all.

Adopt Firefox as your main browser, as Mozilla has already promised to maintain continuous and lifetime support for the full version of uBlock Origin.

Regardless of the path you choose, it's clear that Google's absolute dominance over the Chromium engine has given it total power to dictate the rules in its favor. Now we must wait patiently to see if this controversial stance will ultimately motivate a significant exodus of users to rival, more open and free ecosystems.

TECH

Advanced 3D printing creates origami-inspired structures

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have introduced an innovation in additive manufacturing by integrating origami-inspired 3D printing techniques with hybrid composites—materials made from mixed reinforcing components. By eliminating the need for molds to fabricate a part, this process produces lightweight, cost-efficient structures with faster build times and greater adaptability.

Traditional composite manufacturing, while highly effective for producing strong, durable components, can involve long lead times and high mold costs that limit design flexibility. The ORNL method uses hybrid materials in an additive process without molds to produce flat-to-foldable structures that merge flexible and rigid components into a single design.

"This pioneering method redefines advanced manufacturing by fusing material science with transformative design principles," said ORNL's Steven Guzorek, lead researcher on the project. "By applying origami-inspired principles to hybrid composites, we are improving the efficiency and scalability of large-structure manufacturing and achieving forms unattainable with traditional additive approaches—advancing robust, cost-effective solutions for a broad range of applications."

ORNL's Steven Guzorek demonstrates the lab's hybrid 3D printing method, which deposits an integration layer and composite material directly onto flexible nylon fabric, creating a mold-free, flat-to-foldable structure that reduces production costs and increases design flexibility. Credit: Amy Smotherman Burgess/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

The innovative process works by depositing materials onto a flexible, fabric-based surface, allowing precise control over the material's form and strength. This flexibility enables foldable 3D forms without molds or extensive finishing.

The structures are composed of a high-strength fabric base such as nylon, glass fiber or resin-infused composite fibers, followed by an integration or bonding layer such as thermoplastic polyurethane for compatibility and adhesion. The reinforcing layer is then applied using deposited composite materials, including thermoplastic carbon-fiber acrylonitrile butadiene styrene for lightweight structural performance or thermoset formulations such as styrene-based or epoxy-based resins for enhanced stiffness, geometry control and durability. The materials bond at the molecular level, forming a strong connection between the grid and the outer layer.

Guzorek said the key to this bond lies in material selection. "By understanding the materials science, we chose materials that we knew would bond effectively, producing a truly integrated component."

This advancement opens the door to next-generation composite manufacturing strategies that bypass molds and expand the boundaries of lightweight structural design.

Integrated fold geometries and structural reinforcement patterns enable this origami-inspired composite to transition from a flat panel into a three-dimensional form. Credit: Andrew Sproles/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Benefits of mold-free hybrid composite 3D printing...The method enables the production of complex geometries that traditional mold-based methods cannot economically achieve. It also allows the fabrication of objects larger than the printing machine itself, reducing capital costs and boosting production efficiency. In a test print, researchers found that eliminating molds reduced fabrication time by 95% and costs by 90% for printing a unique design compared with conventional mold-based composite manufacturing.

The new method eliminates mold storage challenges, enables rapid deployment and facilitates rapid printing of flat components directly onto sheet materials, which keeps costs down and supports both thermoplastic and thermoset materials.

"Our goal is to make this innovation scalable so manufacturers across industries can harness its potential," said Guzorek. "By broadening access to mold-free hybrid composites, we're empowering manufacturers to explore new design possibilities and unlock entirely new applications for this transformative technology."

ORNL has filed a patent, and the team is preparing the innovation for future licensing.

In addition to Guzorek, the research team includes Ahmed Arabi Hassen, Katie Copenhaver, Duncan Frazier, Brian Post and Tyler Smith with ORNL's Manufacturing Science Division.

Provided by Oak Ridge National Laboratory 

 

DIGITAL LIFE

Is net neutrality at risk in Europe? organizations warn of the Impact of the digital networks act

In a statement, a group of organizations condemns two aspects of the proposal presented by the European Commission for the Digital Networks Act, pointing to risks to net neutrality and asking legislators to review it.

At the beginning of the year, the European Commission presented the Digital Networks Act (DNA) proposal with the aim of revising the rules of the telecommunications sector. At the time, industry opinions were divided and now, in a joint statement, a group of organizations expresses its concerns about the effects of the proposal on net neutrality.

As explained by the Portuguese chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC Portugal), which is part of the group of organizations represented, the joint statement specifically condemns two aspects of the proposal presented by the European Commission for the DNA.

On the one hand, the statement warns of the possibility that the proposed framework could open the door to mechanisms for intervention in the internet network interconnection market, including "Sender Pays" type models, in which digital platforms and services could bear additional costs for the traffic generated.

ISOC Portugal points out that the introduction of these mechanisms was already proposed by the European Commission about three years ago, and was publicly condemned.

On the other hand, the organizations express concern about the introduction of new rules on net neutrality, replacing the current European regulation, which defends and imposes the principle of "Net Neutrality".

"This is an attempt to create regulatory chaos that invalidates the principle of 'Net Neutrality' currently enshrined in European regulation," they argue.

In the statement, the organizations consider that, given the significant impact on the European digital ecosystem, the proposals of the European Commission "raise serious questions about their proportionality and necessity," risking "weakening fundamental safeguards that protect European consumers and businesses," including SMEs and startups, while "harming the digital single market."

The organizations are calling on the European Union co-legislators to amend the proposal to ensure a telecommunications regulatory framework that is "clear and evidence-based, maintaining and protecting net neutrality," arguing that the final version of the DNA should promote "innovation, fair competition and consumer protection, while preserving an open Internet."

"We've lost the internet"... "Currently it's impossible" to store data entirely in Europe, because European cyber defenses are dependent on cooperation with American private companies, says the director of the Belgian Cybersecurity Center

European digital infrastructure is losing ground to the United States, which may be getting closer and closer to dominating the internet empire.

"We've lost the entire cloud. Let's be honest, we've lost the internet." This is the understanding of Miguel De Bruycker, director of the Belgian Cybersecurity Center (CCB), who warns of a "huge security problem" for the European Union.

In statements to the Financial Times, he explained that it is increasingly less "realistic," and even "impossible," to imagine that our information can remain "100% in the EU," since Europe's cyber defenses are dependent on the cooperation of private companies - most of them American. "In cyberspace, everything is commercial, everything is private property," he stressed.

According to the director of the CCB, the US's progress has been ensured by innovation and the development of "crucial" technologies such as cloud computing and Artificial Intelligence, essential in combating cyberattacks.

De Bruycker points to legislation as part of the problem, accusing it of "blocking" innovation. This is the case with the European Artificial Intelligence Act, he notes, designed to regulate the development of this technology and guarantee the "transparency and security" of systems in the market.

While reiterating the continent's concern regarding American dependence, the director calls for reflection on a possible "technological sovereignty" for Europe. "I think that, at the EU level, we should clearly identify what sovereignty in the digital domain means for us," De Bruycker told the newspaper, adding that, "instead of focusing on how we can stop the US 'hyperscalers' [the large cloud computing providers], perhaps we should invest our energy in building something for ourselves."

To that end, it is up to European governments to support private initiatives to gain traction in areas such as cloud computing or digital identification technologies, argued the director of the CCB, recalling the time when Europe united in a similar initiative to manufacture Airbus aircraft: “Everyone supported Airbus initiatives for decades. We need the same initiative at the EU level in the cyber domain.”

Although there has been an undeniable increase in attacks, De Bruycker does not consider them particularly harmful, admitting that they mainly serve to cause disruption. “It’s temporary and doesn’t steal any information. In fact, it disrupts the normal functioning of the website or portal,” says the expert.

Despite the dependence that worries Europeans, De Bruycker acknowledges the importance of American “hyperscalers” in combating the Russian cyber offensive and expressed hope regarding continued cooperation with American companies.

Sapotek-Portugal

DIGITAL LIFE

Love at first prompt? How AI-assisted courtship is rewriting the rules of online dating

In the famous French play Cyrano de Bergerac, the brilliant but insecure Cyrano lends his eloquence to the handsome, tongue-tied Christian to help him woo his lover. Today, a remarkably similar scene is playing out among millions of dating app users, with the role of the lovelorn poet played not by a human but by AI. New research from Constructor University professor Dr. Lennart Ante analyzes the growing impact of dating app users outsourcing the delicate work of courtship—from the witty opening line to the flirtatious reply—to AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini or even specialized "wingman" apps like Rizz and Winggg.

The paper, "The Cyrano Effect: LLM-Assisted Impression Management and Authenticity in Online Dating," published in Telematics and Informatics, examines the implications of AI's growing incursion into the human dating pool. Recent surveys suggest more than 1 in 4 singles in the United States have already used AI to augment their dating lives, while a majority of dating app users believe they have exchanged messages with an algorithm at some point.

Drawing on 45 in-depth interviews with dating app users—including both those who use AI to write their messages and those who have received AI-assisted messages from a match—Ante's study contributes vital understanding of a phenomenon that is rapidly reshaping how millions of people meet, court and connect online.

"I had been seeing more and more stories in the news and online about LLMs, lovebots and people forming romantic relationships with these AI tools, something I find utterly fascinating," said Ante on the inspiration behind the research project. "While my own experience with dating apps is limited to occasionally seeing my friends swipe through Tinder, I couldn't help but wonder how AI might be creeping into these spaces as well."

How AI is changing dating...Over the past decade, online dating has become the definitive mainstream pathway to romantic relationships. It is now the most common way couples meet in the U.S. and is underpinned by a $3.2 billion dating app industry boasting hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Against this backdrop, generative AI is not a marginal curiosity but a tool that is becoming increasingly embedded in one of the most intimate domains of everyday life.

When the words that spark a first connection are no longer entirely one's own, it raises fundamental questions about what it means to be authentic, the nature of the human connections being formed and the real-world implications when AI-augmented online personas eventually meet in person and unassisted across a dinner table.

To address these questions, Ante conducted semistructured interviews with two distinct groups of dating app users: 23 individuals who reported using LLMs to help write profiles or messages, and 22 individuals who suspected or confirmed that a match had used AI in their communication. Participants were recruited from English-language online dating communities based primarily in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and parts of Europe. The interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, an interpretive approach designed to identify and understand the meanings that participants themselves attach to their experiences.

"What we see in the result is a nuanced, qualitative portrait of an emerging social practice that quantitative studies have so far only been able to gesture at," Ante said. "Existing surveys and experimental work convincingly show that disclosing AI involvement tends to reduce trust and attraction. While this establishes that a problem exists, it doesn't tell us why, or what people are actually feeling in these moments.

"A number on a trust scale doesn't capture a recipient's experience of feeling 'violated' or 'stupid' for opening up emotionally, only to learn that they are interacting with AI responses. This is where the true value of this research lies."

Three themes from the study...Ante's study found three notable themes emerging from the data:

"The Authenticity Paradox" describes how users justify AI use not as deception, but as a way to express their "true" selves more accurately, with AI acting as a sort of prosthesis for social anxiety, linguistic insecurity or the perceived inefficiency of online dating.

"The Digital Betrayal" captures the experience of recipients who describe the moment they suspect or discover AI use as a violation of trust, and a sense that something fundamental about the interaction has been "faked."

"The Persona-to-Person Leap" traces the anxiety of moving from an AI-polished chat to an unassisted offline encounter—a transition that, in many cases, exposes a gap too wide to bridge.

Together, these themes give rise to what Ante calls the "Cyrano Effect": the entanglement of human and algorithmic authorship that reconfigures impression management, authenticity and trust in digitally mediated romance.

"My research focuses on actual lived experiences, where the real mechanism lives," Ante said. "By directly speaking with people, both those using the tools and those on the receiving end, I was able to assess the full arc, from the justification to the reveal, and finally, the awkward first date."

"What surprised me most was how coherent the justifications of AI users were, and at the same time, how deeply betrayed the recipients felt," Ante said. "The same act—such as using ChatGPT to draft a flirtatious message—can be experienced from one side as the ability to finally express one's true self, and yet from the other side as a fundamental violation of trust. That asymmetry is what makes this phenomenon so difficult for users, platforms and the broader culture of online dating."

Broader implications for online romance...Ante's study contributes to research on computer-mediated communication by extending classical theories of impression management, authenticity and trust into the age of generative AI. It introduces the notion of "prosthetic authenticity"—the idea that authenticity may increasingly be understood not as the absence of mediation but as alignment between one's inner self and outward expression, even when that expression is algorithmically augmented—and points to an emerging crisis of authorship, in which the once-safe assumption that "the person who writes is the person who speaks" no longer holds.

The findings also speak to a longer cultural trajectory in which intimate relationships are increasingly framed through the logic of markets, efficiency and self-optimization, with AI now extending that logic from the search for a partner to the communicative act itself.

Beyond its theoretical contribution, the study has direct practical implications. For platform designers, it raises the difficult question of how to respond to AI assistance. Outright bans are difficult to enforce and may penalize users who rely on AI for legitimate reasons, such as overcoming language barriers or communication anxiety, while a laissez-faire approach risks an undeclared arms race between AI generation and human detection.

The article argues that some form of transparency—optional, verifiable disclosure of AI assistance—may be the most viable, if imperfect, path forward. For individuals, it points to the need for a new kind of digital literacy: the ability to recognize when an eloquent message on screen may not be authored by the person on the other side, without sliding into blanket cynicism that makes genuine connection impossible.

"Ultimately, the question that animated Cyrano de Bergerac remains unresolved in AI-mediated romance," Ante said. "When we fall for these words, who or what are we really falling for? How we as scholars, designers and users answer that question will shape not only the future of online dating, but also our broader understanding of agency, responsibility and intimacy in a world where algorithms increasingly speak in our name."

Provided by Constructor University