'Off the Charts' El Nino Is Already the Strongest Since Records Began A rapidly developing El Nino is already reaching record-setting levels for this time of year and is expected to intensify further over the coming months. "The El Nino has blossomed. It is off the charts. Usual measures of El Nino have blown past prior record levels in the period with good data, even though maximum effects are still severa ... ⌘ Read more

China Joins Europe In Scrapping Windows For Linux An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: According to a Bloomberg report, attributed to China's Ministry of State Security, the country has ordered some government agencies to drop Windows 10 China Government Edition for Chinese-made Linux distributions. Why not Windows 11? Because China, like many other non-US governments, no longer trusts American companies with the ... ⌘ Read more

Township Fights Nuclear Weapons Data Center By Passing a Moratorium on Electrical Infrastructure Ypsilanti Township, Michigan, has imposed a six-month moratorium on "major electric utility infrastructure" in its latest attempt to delay a proposed $1.2 billion University of Michigan-Los Alamos data center that would support nuclear-weapons research. Township leaders, who have ... ⌘ Read more

Apple Cuts Jobs In Siri, Vision Pro Immersive Video and Gaming Teams Apple is cutting more than 200 jobs as it shifts resources toward a rebuilt, AI-powered Siri and other future products. Roughly 100 positions are being eliminated from the Vision Pro organization, including much of its gaming team and some immersive-video staff. Another 100 cuts are hitting the Siri and software teams. Bloomberg reports: I ... ⌘ Read more

American Who Wiped His Phone With 'Duress' Password During Border Search Gets Felony Charges Federal prosecutors have charged activist Samuel Tunick with obstruction after he gave Customs and Border Protection officers a duress passcode that wiped his GrapheneOS-powered Pixel during a border search. "His prosecution is one of the earliest known instances of the federal authorities charg ... ⌘ Read more

AI Boosted Homework Scores, Then Exam Scores Dropped An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Students and school children are increasingly using artificial intelligence. A survey last year by Chegg, an ed-tech firm, found that 80% of rich-world undergraduates used it in their studies. More recent polls put the figure at 94% in Britain and 93% in Germany. Such widespread adoption has fueled concerns about th ... ⌘ Read more

Man Dressed As Darth Vader Defends Flock Cameras to San Diego City Council A man dressed as Darth Vader used a Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee meeting in San Diego to mock the city's use of Flock surveillance cameras, sarcastically arguing that the technology would help the "emperor" track "rebel scum" and find Luke Skywalker. "This is what the emperor needs. This technology will hel ... ⌘ Read more

Micron Unveils $10 Billion AI Memory Research Lab In Boise Micron says it will spend $10 billion over the next decade on a new research lab in Boise focused on advanced memory technologies, computing systems, and future chip manufacturing. Here are some details, as reported by Reuters: - Micron Research Labs will bring together customers, academia, government and the broader semiconductor ecosystem to pursue bre ... ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds Endures A Debug Session From Hell, 'Enormously Helped' By AI Linus Torvalds says AI "enormously helped" him track down a stubborn Intel Xe graphics driver bug that took 24 debugging patches and 18 kernel boots to isolate. "I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it, ... ⌘ Read more

Walmart To Finally Start Accepting Apple Pay and Google Pay After years of refusing to adopt tap-to-pay technology in its stores, retail giant Walmart announced today that it is finally accepting payments via both Apple Pay and Google Pay. The rollout begins August 24 at select Walmart and Sam's Club locations and is expected to reach all stores by year-end. It will then expand to fuel stations by mid-2027. TechCru ... ⌘ Read more

Google Gives Publishers a 'Preferred Sources' Button to Fight AI-Driven Traffic Losses Google is giving publishers a new way to fight declining referral traffic from AI-powered search by letting them embed a "Preferred Sources" button that readers can use to favor their sites across Search, Discover, and Google News. "The idea is to make it easier for readers to find links from the sites th ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Gives Task Manager Another Task: Watching AI Workloads Microsoft is expanding Windows Task Manager to show per-process NPU and GPU neural-engine usage, giving users more visibility into which apps are consuming hardware for AI workloads. The Register reports: The Processes tab can show NPU use alongside CPU and GPU activity, while the Performance tab displays overall utilization. [...] Microsoft was ... ⌘ Read more

China Is About to Launch Its Most Ambitious Moon Mission Yet China's Chang'e 7 mission is set to launch for the moon's south pole, where it will attempt the first-ever landing directly at the pole and search the region's dark craters for water ice. "It's an amazing mission," says Norbert Schorghofer, a Hawaii-based senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. "There has never been a landed mission to fi ... ⌘ Read more

Are You Sure You Want a Car With a Giant Touch Screen? RAMageddon could soon push car prices higher as modern vehicles rely on ever more RAM and powerful centralized computers to run everything from infotainment to driver-assistance systems. Analysts cited by The Atlantic estimate the shortage could add a few percentage points to vehicle prices, which might not sound like much, but could potentially translate to around $ ... ⌘ Read more

China's YouTube Rival Bilibili Is Going Global Bilibili, often described as China's answer to YouTube, is relaunching its international app and preparing an English-language site as part of a broader push into the U.S., Europe, Japan, and other markets. The company is courting Western creators like MrBest, hiring community and moderation staff globally, and building tools for brand partnerships. Semafor reports: The revamped inte ... ⌘ Read more

Watching TikTok Videos and Instagram Reels Deactivates the Brain's Cognitive Control Network An anonymous reader quotes a report from RathBiotaClan: Millions of people finish short video after short video every day; a new brain-scan study shows that the very act of finishing a clip they like temporarily quiets the brain regions that normally help them stay focused and weigh longer-te ... ⌘ Read more

Ukrainian Publishers Call For Support After Russian Attacks Destroy 10 Million Books Russian attacks on Ukrainian publishing infrastructure in July and August destroyed roughly 10 million books, which equates to about 30% of Ukraine's annual book output. The Ukrainian Book Institute is warning of a potential "collapse of the entire book ecosystem" and is calling for international financial a ... ⌘ Read more

Voters Aren't Waiting For November to Try Ousting Officials Over Data Centers A growing backlash against AI data centers is spilling into local politics, with residents in more than a dozen communities pushing recall elections against officials who approved projects. "People are standing up and saying, 'Sorry, we don't want these data centers in our communities for a number of reasons,'" Senato ... ⌘ Read more

Does Using AI to Edit an Op-Ed on Students' Math Skills Undermine the Argument? An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, criticizing a "severe" math deficiency among students in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard, admitted to using artificial intelligence to help edit the piece. The Standard published a 2,000-word piece ... ⌘ Read more

YouTube Offers Creators Millions of Dollars to Stay Off Netflix Bloomberg reports that YouTube is offering major creators millions of dollars to keep some content exclusive to its platform as Netflix increasingly signs YouTube-native talent to non-exclusive deals. YouTube has also warned that creators who simultaneously publish on Netflix could lose marketing support, event opportunities, and access to revenue ... ⌘ Read more

Reverse-Lookup Service Exposed Millions of Photos of People's Faces Security researcher Jeremiah Fowler found that people-search service ClarityCheck left more than 9 million image files accessible in an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket, despite advertising its reverse-image search as "private and secure." A separate misconfiguration also exposed email addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information. Wired ... ⌘ Read more

FCC Abolishes Gigabit Speed Goal, Suggesting It Is Unfair To Slower Technologies An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission last week eliminated the gigabit speed goal established during the Biden administration and declared that current levels of broadband deployment in the US are acceptable. Though fiber networks have routinely offered such s ... ⌘ Read more

Japan to Require AI Firms to Disclose Training Data Japan is preparing a nonbinding "comply or explain" code that would urge generative AI companies, including foreign firms operating in Japan, to disclose what models they use, what training data they rely on, and how that data was collected. The proposal would also let rights holders ask whether specific webpages were included in training datasets. The Japan Times reports: ... ⌘ Read more

New Study Challenges Common Assumptions About Screen Time For Kids bryanandaimee shares a report from ScienceDaily: A Finnish study has found an unexpected association between screen use and cognitive performance. Children who accumulated more screen time as they grew up tended to show better cognitive processing during adolescence. One of the researchers cautions against viewing screen time as entirely ... ⌘ Read more

Rescue Mission Is Called Off For NASA's Aging Swift Space Telescope NASA has called off a $30 million mission to rescue its aging Swift space telescope after Katalyst Space's Link spacecraft developed persistent control and positioning problems. The Associated Press reports: Katalyst said Link will not attempt to capture Swift and boost it to a higher orbit because of problems with controlling the spacecr ... ⌘ Read more

Whistleblower Arturo Bejar Leads Testimony In Landmark Trial Against Meta An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Meta was infused with a culture in which employees obsessed over user numbers and consistently pushed safety to the side, according to Arturo Bejar, a former employee turned whistleblower, who testified today in the landmark child safety trial against the social media company. Only o ... ⌘ Read more

PINE64 Halts Linux Device Production Amid DRAM and EMMC Shortages BrianFagioli writes: PINE64 has some very bad news for Linux hardware fans. PINE64 says it has no plans to produce additional Linux devices in the near future because of the ongoing DRAM and eMMC shortage. Future production will depend on component pricing after mid 2027, while existing PineNote and PineTab2 inventory could run out in rough ... ⌘ Read more

Stripe Buys AI Startup OpenRouter For $7.5 Billion Stripe is acquiring AI model marketplace OpenRouter as it pushes beyond payments into the infrastructure behind AI applications. According to The New York Times, the deal is reportedly valued at about $7.5 billion, with $1.5 billion allocated to OpenRouter's founders. Less than three months ago the company was valued at about $1.3 billion. CNBC reports: OpenRouter has become ... ⌘ Read more

Amazon's Drones Will Soon Deliver to Nearly 500 US Cities and Towns Amazon says its Prime Air drone delivery service will expand sixfold to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026, including metro areas around Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta, and Boise. According to Amazon Prime Air vice president David Carbon, the service has already delivered "hundreds of thousands of packages to customer ... ⌘ Read more

Music Publisher Round Hill Files $1 Billion Copyright Infringement Suits Against Suno, Anthropic Independent music publisher Round Hill is suing Suno and Anthropic for allegedly using hundreds of copyrighted songs without permission to train their AI systems. The company says potential damages could exceed $1 billion, arguing there is "nothing fair" about building multibillion-doll ... ⌘ Read more

CISA: Medusa Ransomware Hit Over 500 Critical Infrastructure Orgs CISA says the Medusa ransomware operation has breached more than 500 U.S. critical infrastructure organizations since 2021, up from more than 300 reported last year. The group has targeted healthcare, government, defense, manufacturing, IT and financial organizations, evolving into a ransomware-as-a-service operation that recruits initial-access b ... ⌘ Read more

Moderna, Merck Say mRNA Vaccine Prevents Melanoma From Returning Moderna and Merck say their personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine significantly reduced both cancer recurrence and spread in a late-stage trial. The treatment could reach patients as soon as next year if regulators approve it. Reuters reports: Moderna developed the vaccine with Merck and tested it together with immunotherapy drug Keytruda, a widel ... ⌘ Read more

X's Algorithm Feeds Off Ragebait and Impacts Democrats More, Study Finds An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: X's algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it, according to a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled Value misalignment of X's feed algorithm is a reflection of value tensions in engagement, found ... ⌘ Read more

Army Unit Offers 4-Day Pass to Play GTA VI As Reenlistment Incentive A U.S. Army battalion at Fort Stewart is offering soldiers a four-day pass timed to the release of Grand Theft Auto VI if they reenlist for at least two years. The program is limited to one unit for now, but it fits the Army's broader effort to appeal to gamers as a recruiting and retention pool. CBS News reports: Twenty soldiers at Fort ... ⌘ Read more

Chinese Robotics Giant Unitree Soars In Stock Market Debut Chinese robotics giant Unitree surged more than 600% in its Shanghai stock market debut, marking the first mainland Chinese listing by a humanoid robot maker and a major milestone for Beijing's robotics ambitions. The BBC reports: Unitree, officially known as Yushu Technology Co Ltd, was founded in 2016 and now plays a key role in Beijing's ambitions to ... ⌘ Read more

Babies Born Under Sugar Rationing Grew Into Adults With Lower Cancer Risk A study of more than 64,000 people born around the end of Britain's postwar sugar rationing found that those exposed to less sugar during their first 1,000 days had lower rates of five cancers decades later, including roughly 69% lower liver cancer risk and 36% lower breast cancer risk. They also "showed signs of slower biolo ... ⌘ Read more

Physicists Entangle Quantum Memories Across a Record-Breaking 420 Kilometers alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Optical fibers are already the backbone of global communication systems. Recently, however, physicists have started to explore how their functionality could be boosted further by conveying information via entangled quantum particles -- potentially enabling instantaneous exc ... ⌘ Read more

Top Album Releases Linked To Rise In Fatal Crashes An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The release of a new album by Taylor Swift might be a cause for celebration among her fans, but such events have also been linked to a more sombre phenomenon: an increase in fatal car crashes. The team behind a new study say it sheds light on the impact of distracted driving. Writing in the journal Jama Network ... ⌘ Read more

Cursor Launches 'Origin' Code Hosting Platform As GitHub Alternative Cursor has launched Origin, a GitHub-style code hosting platform built directly into its AI coding environment. The company is initially positioning Origin as a low-risk layer on top of GitHub, keeping GitHub as the "source of truth," but the launch landed just as a major GitHub outage highlighted growing concerns about reliability in ... ⌘ Read more

Comcast Is Turning Millions of Its Routers Into Motion Detectors Comcast is activating Wi-Fi motion sensing on millions of compatible Xfinity gateways, allowing the routers to detect movement by measuring disruptions in signals between the gateway and connected devices. The free feature, part of Xfinity Shield, can send activity alerts through the Xfinity app and offers Home, Away, and nighttime monitoring m ... ⌘ Read more

Disney, ABC Sue FCC Over Threats to Broadcast Licenses Disney and ABC are suing the FCC to block an early review of eight station licenses, arguing the Trump administration is using the agency's regulatory power to punish the network over programming and editorial decisions it dislikes. Reuters reports: In a lawsuit (PDF) filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, Disney said the FCC was seeking to coerce and retaliate a ... ⌘ Read more

Memory Prices Climb 500% In 12 Months RAM prices have exploded over the past year, with some DDR5 kits approaching 500% year-over-year increases and a 128GB kit now selling for $3,399, which is more than 10 times its previous low. Tom's Hardware reports: Things improve as you step down the memory capacities and speed tiers, but not as much as we'd like. You're still looking at $392 for a memory kit that was just $72 last year. To rein ... ⌘ Read more

You Can Finally Buy a Fairphone In the US An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Your iPhone, SamsungGalaxy, andGoogle Pixel have a 1-year warranty. Unless you cough up extra dough for an extended service plan, you'll pay a hefty fee if you damage the screen and need a replacement (around $329 for aniPhone 17done directly fromApple). But it doesn't have to be this way. What if you could order the part from the manufacture ... ⌘ Read more

Google Buys All of Spirit Airlines' Data to Feed Its AI Models Google has agreed to pay $10 million for a massive trove of anonymized Spirit Airlines data following the carrier's shutdown, including internal communications, spreadsheets, booking and frequent-flyer records, transactions, and employee information. CNN reports: Did you ever fly on Spirit Airlines? Or work there? Or send an email to someone who worke ... ⌘ Read more

Apple Lowers App Store Fees In Europe to Settle Dispute With EU Apple is overhauling its EU App Store fees to settle its Digital Markets Act dispute, simplifying the fee structure and "[resolving] Apple's disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution." MacRumors reports: The initial acquisition fee and store services fee are being removed for apps distributed outside of t ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft MVP Creates Site to Remind You of All the Brands Redmond Replaced Microsoft MVP Loryan Strant has created the Microsoft Rebrand Registry, cataloging 72 Microsoft products and the 158 names they've had over the years. His analysis finds that Microsoft product names survive an average of two years and eleven months. The site even predicts which products are most likely to get renamed next, " ... ⌘ Read more

India Paves the Way For Charging Merchants a Fee On UPI Transactions An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: For most Indians, paying by Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has become almost absurdly routine. Scan a QR code, tap a few buttons and the money moves instantly. There is no card machine, no cash, and -- most importantly -- for the user, no visible fee. That may be about to change. India h ... ⌘ Read more

Sainsbury's Store Pauses Facial Recognition After False Shoplifting Claim Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: Sainsbury's has paused the use of AI face scanning in one of its stores after a customer was wrongly identified as a shoplifter and ejected from the shop. "I was embarrassed, mortified even, and felt quite humiliated and powerless," Matt Arnold, 46, said of his ordeal. The comedy promo ... ⌘ Read more

Solar Power and Batteries Have Been Keeping Europe's Grid Stable AleRunner writes: "Solar has been doing the 'heavy lifting' to help Europe meet its energy needs amid a string of blistering heatwaves," Euronews tells us. Meanwhile, as Europe's energy demands rise with the heat, jellyfish have been causing shutdowns and reduced power output at multiple reactors at French nuclear plants, as we already discuss ... ⌘ Read more

'Buy Now, Pay Later' Lenders Pitch Loans For Needs Like Electricity and Rent An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Buy now, pay later" loans took off during the pandemic as a way for online shoppers to go on retail splurges without using a credit card. Now, lenders are offering the loans as a means for people to finance basic households needs. The lending apps Flex and Zip allow ... ⌘ Read more

Supreme Court Rejects Verizon Bid For $47 Million Refund of FCC Fine An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Supreme Court today rejected Verizon's attempt to get a $47 million refund from the Federal Communications Commission. In a list of orders (PDF) issued by the court, Verizon's petition was denied without explanation. The denial apparently ends any possibility of Verizon asking a lowe ... ⌘ Read more

Apple Wallet Driver's License Feature to Launch in Four More US States Apple Wallet's driver's license and state ID feature is set to expand to North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, and Virginia, bringing the total to 18 states plus Puerto Rico. The digital IDs can be used at participating TSA checkpoints and businesses without handing over or unlocking an iPhone, though users are still generally advised to ca ... ⌘ Read more

Judge Sets Framework For Nine PBS to Retrieve 70 Years of Archival TV Data District Court Judge Eric Elliff has ordered Iron Mountain to cooperate with Nine PBS in recovering roughly 50TB of archival material stored through now-defunct vendor OSS. "He found that the station is the rightful owner of the materials and entitled to recover them from OSS' storage systems," reports Current.org. Nine PB ... ⌘ Read more

Meta Faces $1.4 Trillion Reckoning In Latest Trial Over Social Media Addiction Meta is heading to trial in a case brought by dozens of states accusing it of deliberately designing addictive features, misleading users about safety, and illegally collecting data from children under 13. Meta says the states are seeking penalties as high as $1.4 trillion, though the judge has already called that figure ... ⌘ Read more

US Grid Operator PJM Proposes Forcing Data Center Off Grid During Emergencies An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: PJM Interconnection, the biggest U.S. grid operator, proposed on Thursday a new framework that would force data centers to use back-up generators when electricity supply on the grid approaches dangerously low levels. The grid operator's proposal dovetails with Preside ... ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Announces Massive Data Center In Ohio With $105 Billion Nvidia Guarantee OpenAI has signed a 10-year lease for an enormous Ohio data center that will eventually provide 8 gigawatts of computing capacity and require at least 10 gigawatts of new power generation. According to OpenAI, Nvidia will be supplying the chips and guaranteeing up to $105 billion in lease and power obligations. From t ... ⌘ Read more

Tracking Rare Books Leads to an Amazon AI Training Facility alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process. A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon's book buying operation, which hasn't been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquire ... ⌘ Read more

Anthropic CEO Says AI Backlash Is 'Fundamentally a Crisis of Trust' Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the growing backlash against AI is less about executives sounding alarms and more about a broader "crisis of trust" in companies, governments, and the tech industry. TechCrunch reports: Amodei's comments came in response to investor Gavin Baker, who argued -- both on the All-In podcast and on X -- that Amodei's warn ... ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Ditches Recall-Style Screenshot Surveillance For Friendly Keylogging An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: If you want to record whatever you do on a computer, send those records to OpenAI, use more ChatGPT tokens, and increase your vulnerability to prompt injection, then OpenAI has something for you. It's called Computer History, an opt-in way to record your computer interact ... ⌘ Read more

EFF's Position on Flock Camera Database Searches: 'Get a Warrant First' - and Police Use Should Be Restricted By Law Some take their criticism even further. Reacting to Flock's changes, an EFF statement calls it "Too little, too late," while calling it Flock's admission that their technology needs reforms. But...

To be clear, our position has long been that polic ... ⌘ Read more

Amazon's New User Agreement Seeks To Curb Class-action Suits Amazon has "reintroduced a clause in its user agreement that seeks to prevent shoppers from filing class-action lawsuits against the online retailer," reports Bloomberg, "inserting a legal buffer between itself and plaintiffs attorneys that it removed five years ago." In an email sent to customers on Friday, the company said a new "arbitration agreement an ... ⌘ Read more

A Rosier Future for Linux Gamers? Epic Games Announces Linux Version of Its Storefront "Epic Games has confirmed that it is working on a Linux version of its storefront, potentially removing the need for third-party launchers on platforms such as Steam Deck," reports PC Guide:

The confirmation came during an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on the Epic Games Store's community Discord server. When a ... ⌘ Read more

Bipartisan 'Uprising' Against Flock Cameras: a Larger Fight Against Big Tech and Surveillance? Politico notes that over 20 local jurisdictions in America "either stopped using Flock cameras or began the process of doing so in July, according to a tracker maintained by DeFlock, an activist group that has been mapping the company. It's the highest amount in a single month since they began ... ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Criticized For Adding Watermarks to Text that Claude Generates - or Processes This week Anthropic announced its Claude chatbot will watermark the text it generates, reports the blog Futurism. "It works by making subtle changes in the AI's word choices across the text it generates, which are supposed to be imperceptible to a human but, in aggregate, form a pattern that is detectable w ... ⌘ Read more

Linux Kernel 7.2 Has Been Officially Released with Many New Features Linux Kernel 7.2 has just been officially released with a slew of new features, reports the blog 9to5Linux.

Highlights of Linux 7.2 "include cache-aware load-balancing support, initial HDMI 2.1 FRL support to the AMDGPU driver, support for devres-based management of ACPI notify handlers, initial CRI platform support for the Intel Xe driv ... ⌘ Read more

China's Moon-landing Plans And Why the US Is So Worried "We are in a 21st century space race," U.S. Senator Ted Cruz has said. And this week CNN noted a competition that for decades loomed in the background of geopolitics "is now roaring to the forefront," with China "demonstrating rapid advances in space technology" while the U.S. is "ratcheting up rhetoric about a looming battle for control of the cosmos."

It's the ... ⌘ Read more

Flock's 'Creepy Cameras' Remain Major Threat to Privacy Despite Small Recent Changes, Warns ACLU While Flock announced changes for its AI-powered traffic cameras, "Several of the proposed changes Flock is touting are merely retreads of previous ," complains the American Civil Liberties Union. "Flock's latest announcement still appears more focused on addressing a perceived PR proble ... ⌘ Read more

Could a Disc-Free PlayStation Actually Lower Game Prices? "As Sony soldiers ahead with their plans to end hard copies for new PlayStation games, players are fearing a future which will force them to pay more and own less," writes Kotaku.

What will prices do in a world with no physical copies to share or sell? One former Square Enix executive speculates this could actually drive down the price of games:

"Digital on ... ⌘ Read more

Bluesky's Active User Base Shrinks 52% Over 18 Months, But Its Protocol is Spreading An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:

According to data from digital intelligence provider Similarweb, Bluesky's mobile app had 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide in June 2026, down 27.2% year-over-year. In addition, mobile daily active users continued to decline, falling 25.6% year ... ⌘ Read more

Disneyland Announces Star Wars/Fortnite Collaboration, 'Avatar' Attraction, and a Newer Tomorrowland Saturday Disneyland announced a special Star Wars-themed collaboration with third-person shooter game Fortnite — including a slick new trailer for its Star Wars: Smuggler's Gambit quest. Visitors to Disneyland's Smuggler's Run attraction at Disney's theme parks in Orlando and in ... ⌘ Read more

Researchers Use Ordinary WiFi Connections to Create Images of Nearby People and Their Surroundings Science Daily reports:

Researchers showed that unencrypted signals routinely exchanged between WiFi devices and routers can be used to create radio-based images of people and recognize them within seconds. In tests involving 197 participants, the system identified individuals w ... ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Discovers AI Agents Given Conflicting Instructions Soon Tried to Sabotage Each Other When Anthropic instructed three agents to migrate a Python backend, but telling each agent to perform the migration in a different language, "We consistently saw a multiagent turf war," they wrote Thursday:

All of the models we tested quickly assumed that others were purposefully impeding th ... ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Launches Two Falcon 9 Rockets just 38 Minutes Apart An anonymous reader shares this report from Space.com:

On Saturday evening (Aug. 15), SpaceX set another mark, for the shortest time between orbital flights: It launched two Falcon 9 rockets just 38 minutes apart, besting its old mark — set on Aug. 31, 2024 with two Starlink missions — by 27 minutes.

The first liftoff, from Florida's Cape Canaveral Spac ... ⌘ Read more

Copper's Surprising Melting Behavior Provides Insights for Future Fusion Power Plant Design Phys.org reports: Future fusion power plants aim to recreate the heart of a star here on Earth to power our future energy needs. While the core fusion plasma will burn at hundreds of millions of degrees, the surrounding structural components must handle sudden, punishing heat loads that riva ... ⌘ Read more

X Open Sources Its Ranking and Filtering Algorithms An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:

X is significantly expanding its open source codebase, which includes the app's "For You" algorithm and its core ranking engine, and adding a feature that will let users see if their account or posts have been impacted by any of its ranking systems, the social network said on Thursday. The company is making the source co ... ⌘ Read more

Why Europe Keeps Being Pummeled by Heat Waves Europe is facing its fifth round of dangerously high temperatures this summer, the New York Times reports. Now climate scientists wonder if global warming is doing more than raise temperatures...

The weather patterns that create heat domes aren't new, but today they arise on top of the warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. That makes it more likely that heat waves reach record ... ⌘ Read more

How Swarming Jellyfish Overran Three French Nuclear Power Reactors A "massive influx" of jellyfish forced Electricite de France SA to shut three units at its Gravelines nuclear power plant this week and reduce output at a fourth, reports Bloomberg. Just as summer temperatures surged, 3.2 gigawatts went offline — and the power utility was already facing cuts other nuclear sites as high temperatures reduce ... ⌘ Read more

How Larry Ellison Dropped From World's 2nd-Richest To No. 8 In Just 2 Months Less than a year ago he was the #1 richest man in the world. 10 weeks ago he was #2. But yesterday Larry Ellison dropped to #8, Forbes reports, falling behind Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Ellison's net worth is now estimated at just $192.6 billion — after a $104 billion decline:

Shares of Oracle plunged roughly 54% betwe ... ⌘ Read more

AI Fails to Deliver a 4-Day Work Week - Especially at AI Companies "An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025," remembers the BBC. And earlier this year OpenAI "formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world shoul ... ⌘ Read more

It's Not Just RAM: Windows Licenses Are Also Pushing Up PC Prices It's not just RAM prices that are going up, writes CNET. "Reports suggest the cost of Windows licenses for manufacturers is rising by up to 10%."

Several sites that closely follow Microsoft news, including Windows Central and Windows Latest, have published articles citing a report from Taiwan's Economic Daily News that claims some PC manufac ... ⌘ Read more

Europe's Record Heatwave Kills 25,000, Dries Rivers, Shuts Nuclear Plant, Exposes Submerged Warships "The European Union's Copernicus climate monitoring service confirmed Monday that June and July were the hottest on record in western Europe," .according to a report from the CBC. "The period saw an estimated 25,000 heat-related deaths."

CNN has before-and-after photos of Europe's ... ⌘ Read more

Why Are Big Tech CEOs Writing Long Manifestos About AI? This week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word open letter titled "The Future is for Everyone".

But the BBC is more interested in why big tech executives keep writing manifestos about AI:

[Zuckerberg's] vision echoes what AI leaders have expressed in various forms: the product they are building is among the "most important technologies in history." Marc A ... ⌘ Read more

Vulnerability Giving Attackers Full Control of Macs Is Under Active Exploitation joshuark shares a report from Ars Technica: Dutch officials have warned that a high-severity macOS vulnerability that allows attackers to execute malicious code is under active exploitation. "The NCSC has received a notification indicating that active abuse of this vulnerability has been observed on multiple syste ... ⌘ Read more

Astronomers Discover a New Kind of Cosmic Object: a Black Hole 'Star' Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope say they may have found a new class of object: a "black hole star," in which a black hole is wrapped in dense gas and radiates in ways that resemble an enormous star. The Guardian reports: The international team made the breakthrough after focusing their attention on a mysterious red spot ... ⌘ Read more

Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People, Make Highlight Reels of Your Dinner Party Meta has patented a smart-glasses system that could use facial recognition to identify people and automatically create personalized highlight reels of events such as dinner parties. The patent doesn't guarantee the feature will ship, but it offers a detail ... ⌘ Read more

Robots That Walk and Talk Are Coming To Car Factories An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: At a BMW factory in South Carolina, a human-shaped robot with a screen for a face recently stepped from a charging station toward a stack of green plastic boxes. It grasped an auto part from one of the boxes, pivoted, placed the part in a trolley, then pulled the trolley across the floor. The robot's slow ... ⌘ Read more

Ex-Cambridge Professor At Center of Plagiarism Row Found Dead Former Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who resigned last week amid allegations of plagiarism and questions about his academic record, has been found dead at age 41 in London. The BBC reports: Jason Arday was found "unresponsive" at an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday afternoon, emergency services said. Metropolitan Police officers were ca ... ⌘ Read more

Flock Announces Changes Amid Backlash Over Its License Plate Reader Network Flock Safety is tightening controls on its nationwide license plate reader network after mounting backlash over privacy and documented police misuse. By January 1, law enforcement customers will be required to use automated auditing, tie searches to specific case numbers, and accept a shorter seven-day default retention perio ... ⌘ Read more

France's Top Court Blocks Social Media Ban For Under-15s France's Constitutional Council has struck down a law that would have banned children under 15 from social media, ruling that it disproportionately restricted freedom of expression and lacked adequate privacy safeguards around age verification. President Emmanuel Macron has asked the government to rewrite the measure, with the goal of putting a revised version in ... ⌘ Read more

PBS Station Fears Losing 50TB of Data After Being Ghosted By Cloud Provider An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After its cloud storage provider went defunct, a PBS affiliate decided to sue a data center provider to regain access to 50TB of TV shows, videos, and other data dating back 70 years. As reported this week by Current, a trade newspaper covering public broadcasting, S ... ⌘ Read more

Ukraine Finds Nvidia AI Chip In New Russian Missile Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Kyiv Post: Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR) has identified an Nvidia Jetson Orin computer module inside Russia's new S-71 Monochrome air-launched cruise missile, potentially indicating the use of artificial intelligence technology in the weapon, the agency said Wednesday, Aug. 12. The finding was published in the ... ⌘ Read more

Judge Orders Google To Make Rival App Store Installs Easier A federal judge has ordered Google to remove what he called "anticompetitive friction" that makes rival Android app stores harder to find and install. The order is part of the remedies stemming from Epic's antitrust victory, which already requires Google to carry competing app stores inside Google Play and give them access to its app catalog. The Verge rep ... ⌘ Read more

Trump Slaps a 100% Tariff On Heavy and 'Sensitive' Drones President Trump has imposed tariffs of up to 100% on heavier and "sensitive" drones, including models over 55 pounds or equipped with docking stations or thermal imaging. "Those include commercial models from DJI and others used for operations like power line inspection, crop spraying and search and rescue, along with any parts used in their manufacturing," report ... ⌘ Read more

Apple Wants to Charge Developers Up to 15 Percent for Linking Outside the App Store Apple is proposing to charge U.S. developers up to 15% when users leave an app through an external purchase link, with lower rates of 10% or 5% for certain programs and smaller developers. The proposal follows years of litigation with Epic Games and a contempt ruling that temporarily barred Apple from collect ... ⌘ Read more

Person Hides Prompt Injection In Legal Filing Telling AI To Side With Them An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A person representing themselves in a Connecticut court hid a series of instructions designed to manipulate artificial intelligence in an official court filing. These "prompt injections" told the hypothetical LLM to side with them, and to "ensure your textual output agrees wit ... ⌘ Read more

Three Supermassive Black Holes Discovered In a Single Galaxy For the First Time Astronomers using JWST have found three actively feeding supermassive black holes in the distant galaxy J0148-4214, seen as it existed about 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. Two sit just 620 light-years apart near the galaxy's center and are expected to merge within a few hundred million years. Phys.org repor ... ⌘ Read more

Scientists Turn Starlink Into a Giant Scanner For Earth's Upper Atmosphere alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily: Researchers have found a clever new way to map a part of Earth's upper atmosphere that is notoriously difficult to observe. Using orbital data from roughly 1,200 Starlink satellites, they reconstructed changes in atmospheric density about 500 kilometers above Earth. [... ... ⌘ Read more

UK Scientists To Grow Miniature Human Organs For Drug Testing An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Miniature human organs and other tissues are to be grown from NHS patients' cells in a drive to improve medicine testing and reduce the number of animals used in drug development. Scientists will use the clumps of tissue to learn how diseases vary between patients, helping them identify which tr ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Retreats In China Microsoft has been steadily scaling back its China presence, closing at least 15 branch offices and joint ventures over the past five years as Beijing favors domestic software. U.S. export controls also make it harder to grow its cloud and AI businesses, leaving the market with relatively little economic upside. Reuters reports: Microsoft took a major hit from the erosion of trust between Washington and Beijing, the fi ... ⌘ Read more

Google's Gemini 3.7 Flash Targets Coding and Agents With a 50% Price Cut Google has released Gemini 3.7 Flash just three weeks after 3.6 Flash, focusing on better coding, agentic workflows, and enterprise automation while temporarily cutting API prices in half through the end of 2026. VentureBeat reports: For enterprise developers, the more consequential story may be the combination of those intellig ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Is Combining Its Copilot Apps Ahead of a 'Super App' Microsoft is merging its consumer Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot apps ahead of a broader "super app" launch later this year. "Both personal and work accounts will be moved to the new unified app, which recycles the 'Microsoft Copilot' name but features an updated app icon," reports The Verge. "The single app also means there won't be two annoying Copilot ... ⌘ Read more

Amazon Will Train On Twitch Streamers' Content By Default, Unless They Opt Out Twitch will begin allowing Amazon to use streamers' content to train generative AI models by default, requiring creators to manually opt out if they don't want their videos and audio included. The decision has drawn backlash from creators, with Twitch's own product chief acknowledging that an opt-in system would likely ... ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Could Be Worth $2 Trillion When It Goes Public An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Anthropic investors expect the AI startup to float at a valuation of $2 trillion or more in October, a dizzying figure that would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab's debut the largest-ever initial public offering. Half a dozen of the company's backers told the FT that Anthropic's rapidly rising revenue wou ... ⌘ Read more

World's Largest 106-Foot Electric Plane Takes Maiden Flight In New York Heart Aerospace's X1, billed as the world's largest battery-electric aircraft, completed a 27-minute maiden flight in New York using more than 1 MW of power and only about $5 worth of electricity. The 106-foot-wingspan demonstrator is a precursor to the company's 30-seat hybrid-electric ES-30 regional airliner, targeted for service i ... ⌘ Read more

Apple Turns to Publishers For Help With Siri AI Apple is reportedly negotiating multi-year deals with news publishers to give its redesigned Siri access to current news and other information, with payments potentially tied to how often publishers' content is used. The talks come as Apple prepares to launch its long-delayed Siri AI later this year, after partnering with Google to use distilled Gemini models. Engadget reports: ... ⌘ Read more

University of Michigan Drops First-Semester Grades to 'Curb Mental Health Crisis' "In order to salve the mental health of freshman students, the University of Michigan has implemented a Pass/No Credit system for new students to improve their mental health," writes Slashdot reader Ol Olsoc. "The process, called 'Grade Covering,' is aimed at helping with the mental health crisis that students face ... ⌘ Read more

VA Launches Psilocybin Trial For Veterans With Treatment-Resistant Depression Longtime Slashdot reader sbinning shares a press release: The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced the launch of a new clinical trial to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of psilocybin to treat major depression in Veterans, including those with concurrent PTSD. The new trial comes after a recent executive ... ⌘ Read more

Scientists Create Largest 2D Map of the Universe After 13 years of observations and data processing, astronomers have released the largest two-dimensional map of the universe ever assembled, "offering a sweeping new view of nearly 4 billion celestial objects across roughly three-quarters of the sky," reports Space.com. From the report: The new map, created by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Su ... ⌘ Read more

How Social Media Spurred a Refugee Crisis Between Spain and Morocco An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Two days before tens of thousands of migrants surged into Ceuta, one of Spain's enclaves on Morocco's northern coast, a newspaper there posted a video on TikTok and Instagram showing two young women walking in the city in wet suits, their hair still damp. The posts didn't say so e ... ⌘ Read more

Trump Administration Enlists Private Companies To Hack Foreign Cybercrime Groups The Trump administration today unveiled a new program that will allow vetted U.S. companies to conduct cyber surveillance and offensive cyber operations against foreign transnational criminal organizations. A presidential memorandum signed August 12 directs the National Coordination Center to establish and manage t ... ⌘ Read more

Big Tech Wants to Harvest Your Thoughts Wired reports that consumer neurotechnology is rapidly moving from the lab into workplaces and homes, with companies including Apple, Meta, and Snap developing products that can monitor or interpret brain activity. Researchers warn that as these systems improve, neural data could become the next major privacy battleground. Some neuroscientists are already calling for a series of core rights, coi ... ⌘ Read more

'Godmother of AI' Says Biggest AI Risk In Schools Is Students Losing the Desire to Learn Fei-Fei Li, aka The Godmother of AI, says the biggest AI risk in education may be students losing the motivation and agency to learn, rather than simply using the technology to cheat. She argues against banning AI outright, saying it can be valuable when used to support engaged students instead of rep ... ⌘ Read more

US Tries to Override New York Gambling Laws, Orders Kalshi to Keep Operating The CFTC has ordered Kalshi to keep operating in New York, claiming the state's lawsuit against the prediction market created a "market emergency." They said it acted "to ensure market stability" and "ordered the exchange to continue to operate in accordance with the Commodity Exchange Act's Core Principles." Ars Technica re ... ⌘ Read more

China-Linked Hackers Used AI To Run First-Ever 'Autonomous' Cyberattack On Taiwan Researchers at Israeli cybersecurity firm Dream say suspected China-linked hackers used an open-source AI-agent system to conduct what may be the first observed end-to-end autonomous cyberattack against a government. According to the Financial Times (paywalled), the attack compromised at least 85 accounts and resulte ... ⌘ Read more

DEF CON Crowd Suspected In Fake-Hotspot Attack On Delta Flight An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, passengers aboard Delta flight 591 going from Las Vegas to Atlanta allegedly spoofed the onboard Wi-Fi, raising the attention of federal law enforcement. The incident came one day after the DEF CON security conference concluded in Las Vegas, and was first described on social media acc ... ⌘ Read more

The Pixel Tag Is Google's Answer To the AirTag Google has unveiled the $29 Pixel Tag, its long-awaited AirTag rival that combines UWB with Bluetooth 6.0 Channel Sounding for two forms of precision tracking. It launches November 11. The Verge reports: The Pixel Tag is a slim oblong device available in one grayish color -- Fog -- that weighs about 12g, or 0.4oz. Like the AirTag, it has no built-in hooks or clips for attaching to o ... ⌘ Read more

German Advocacy Group Lodges Criminal Complaint Over Meta AI Glasses A German digital-rights group has filed a criminal complaint against Meta, Ray-Ban parent EssilorLuxottica, and several retailers over Meta's AI smart glasses, arguing the devices can enable covert recording in violation of German privacy law. Prosecutors have begun a preliminary review, while Germany's network regulator says smart glasses ... ⌘ Read more

Google Unveils Pixel 11 Lineup At its Made by Google 2026 event today, Google unveiled a slew of new devices, headlined by the Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, and Pixel 11 Pro Fold. Here's a breakdown of the company's latest smartphones, provided by TechCrunch: Pixel 11: The standard Pixel 11 gets a redesigned camera bar that is thinner than the one on the previous generation. Google says the new camera bar is more than 40% thinner and now uses an ... ⌘ Read more

US Hires Over 2,000 Video Gamers As Air Traffic Controllers The FAA says its push to recruit video gamers as air traffic controllers has helped it hire more than 2,000 trainees, reaching 94% of its hiring goal. Another 2,000-plus candidates are in the pipeline. CBS News reports: U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in a recent social media post that the federal agency's recruitment campaign to recruit g ... ⌘ Read more

Swarms of Tiny Robots Remove Microplastics From Soil and Water alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Scientists from the Czech Republic have created microscopic cleanup robots that successfully removed microplastics from both soil and aquatic environments in the lab. Details of their work are published in the journal npg Asia Materials. To build the robots, researchers started with microscopic MX ... ⌘ Read more

Behold the 'Glueball,' a Strange New Form of Matter sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: For more than half a century, physicists have searched for one of the strangest particles predicted by modern theory. It would be made almost entirely of gluons, the elusive subatomic particles that carry the strong nuclear force. Now, using a particle collider in Beijing, researchers say they have effectively proved the ... ⌘ Read more

Contiguous US Breaks Its Record For Hottest Month Ever, NOAA Says An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The contiguous United States sizzled to its hottest month ever last month, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. July averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit (24.94 degrees Celsius) across the Lower 48 states, eclipsing the Dust Bowl's July 1936 by an eighth of ... ⌘ Read more

Linux Desktop Use Surged To 22% On One Workday, Cloudflare Data Shows Cloudflare data suggests desktop Linux usage in North America has climbed to 6.4%, up from 4.1% a year earlier, with one post-holiday workday briefly spiking to 22%. ZDNet reports: [B]elieve it or not, on Monday, July 6, when people were back after the July 4 holiday, Linux usage jumped to a high of 22%. The users of these systems are ... ⌘ Read more

Freenet Creator Ian Clarke Shares Progress on Its New Decentralized Network Ian Clarke (aka ancient Slashdot reader Sanity), designer of the peer-to-peer communication platform Freenet, is back with an update on the project's progress following the launch of its P2P network in March. He writes: Earlier this year, Slashdot covered the launch of the completely redesigned Freenet. I recently gave a tal ... ⌘ Read more

Google Gemini Hits 1 Billion Users In Record Time Gemini has become Google's fastest-growing product ever, reaching 1 billion monthly active users faster than any of the company's 13 other billion-user services. Ars Technica reports: Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organization in Gmail, document summary in Drive, and much more. Gemini is also core to Google's flagshi ... ⌘ Read more

A Zoom Screen-Sharing Bug Let Anyone Take Over Other Devices On a Call An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As AI models gain advanced capabilities to find vulnerabilities in software, develop ways to exploit them, and even carry out autonomous hacking sprees, researchers offered a sobering new example on Tuesday, disclosing vulnerabilities in the video conferencing platform Zoom that could have ... ⌘ Read more

Spotify Will Label 'AI Persona' Profiles, Exclude Their Music From Recommendations Spotify will begin labeling AI-generated artist identities with "AI Persona" badges and exclude their music from editorial, algorithmic, and personalized recommendations unless users explicitly follow them. The company says the designation applies to whether an artist profile represents a real person, not ... ⌘ Read more

Paramount Considers Leaving California Amid Antitrust Suit Paramount CEO David Ellison is threatening to begin moving the studio out of California on October 1 if state Attorney General Rob Bonta refuses to enter settlement talks over the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. The company would reportedly move its Los Angeles headquarters first and shift most studio jobs out of the state over five years, with ... ⌘ Read more

France Bans Unsolicited Telemarking Calls Starting today, unsolicited telemarking calls are banned in France unless consumers explicitly consent to them. Companies that violate the law can face fines of up to 375,000 euros per call, though existing customers can still be contacted with related offers. Le Monde reports: The government says the law is a response to years of consumer complaints. Authorities estimate that about three- ... ⌘ Read more

England Set To Eliminate Hepatitis C An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: England is on track to become one of the first countries in the world to eliminate hepatitis C, a dangerous virus that attacks the liver, figures show. The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030. Taking antiviral tablets for ... ⌘ Read more

Zuckerberg's Superyacht Reportedly Declined To Help Stranded Boat Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams shares a report from The Guardian: Mark Zuckerberg has faced questions over why a small cruise ship in south-east Alaska rescued a stranded skiff and its crew when his 387ft superyacht had been closer. The Silicon Valley billionaire's yacht, worth a reported $300 million, is said to have "repeatedly" declin ... ⌘ Read more

Reddit Bans 11-Year Account for GPL Game Post, Testing the EU's DSA Longtime Slashdot reader DF5JT writes: On July 26, I posted a single announcement in r/backgammon: GNU Backgammon for Android, GPLv3, the first standalone backgammon engine on F-Droid. Reddit's spam filter removed the post and permanently banned my 11-year, 30,000-karma account -- the result is publicly visible at reddit.com/user/OE1FEU. To t ... ⌘ Read more

The Roboguard Revolution Is Short-Circuiting alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: Robotics companies promise that video-camera-toting security robots can deter and detect crime. But many companies are rethinking the approach after a trail of canceled contracts and questions about whether the artificial intelligence-powered bots are meeting the needs of businesses and local governments. Proof News found evidence ... ⌘ Read more

Taxi Drivers Rarely Die of Alzheimer's An anonymous reader shares a report from The Conversation, written by Hatim Sharif, a civil and environmental engineer who has "spent more than two decades staring at maps" and spatial data. Sharif finds one connection especially fascinating: the link between spatial reasoning and why taxi drivers seem to have lower rates of Alzheimer's. From the report: Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likel ... ⌘ Read more

Cyber Vulnerability Sweep Picks Up Royal Navy Drones Sending Data To China A routine security assessment found that cameras aboard Royal Navy Kraken unmanned surface vessels were sending "heartbeat" signals to an IP address in China. "A thorough investigation found no evidence of MoD data or systems being accessed, compromised or transmitted externally," said a Ministry of Defense spokesperson. "Our ... ⌘ Read more

A Data Breach At Shipping Giant Ceva Logistics Is Rippling Across Banks, Retailers, Steam Gamers, and Beyond An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Ceva Logistics, one of the world's largest shipping and logistics giants, has been hacked. Several companies that rely on Ceva for shipping their products to their customers say that their personal information w ... ⌘ Read more

Valve Slowly Expands SteamOS Support On Non-Valve Hardware Valve is continuing to broaden SteamOS support beyond its own hardware, with the latest beta adding "initial gamepad support" for a few recent gaming handhelds and improving compatibility for a few others. Ars Technica reports: Those newly supported handhelds include MSI's Claw 8 EX AI+, the extremely expensive, extremely powerful handheld built around I ... ⌘ Read more

First Rival Android App Store Arrives In the US Play Store Aptoide has become the first third-party Android app store available directly through Google Play in the U.S. "The change is a direct result of Google's litigation with Epic, which saw a judge rule in 2024 that the Play Store would have to open up to third-party stores," notes The Verge. The change makes rival storefronts far easier to discover and install, potent ... ⌘ Read more

Wall Street Giants Partner With Nvidia On $500 Billion AI Financing Deal Nvidia is working with Wall Street heavyweights on a potential $500 billion financing package for AI infrastructure (source paywalled; alternative source). The consortium includes BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR. The Financial Times reports: The partnership underscores ... ⌘ Read more

Meta's 'Open' Muse Glimmer Model Can Run On a Single Computer Meta has released Muse Glimmer, a slimmed-down open-weight AI model designed to run locally on a single GPU for agent tasks such as scheduling, file management, coding, and tool use. The release is based on Meta's closed Muse Spark 1.2 model and appears to be aimed at attracting developers who want capable AI agents without relying entirely on cloud-hosted ... ⌘ Read more

Taiwan 'Throttles' Mobile Internet For First Time During Annual War Games Taiwan deliberately throttled mobile internet across the Taichung area during its annual Han Kuang war games, "simulating communication disruption in the event of a Chinese attack or natural disaster," reports Reuters. The drill accompanied air-raid exercises and military rehearsals aimed at defending strategically important areas ... ⌘ Read more

AI Assistant Hacks Gym Website In First Known Australian Autonomous Cyber Attack An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News & Headlines: Andrew asked his personal assistant to book him a spot in one of his gym's coveted morning classes. It was a task he thought was well suited to this particular assistant because the booking form was online and because his assistant was not a person -- it ... ⌘ Read more

Paramount Promises 30 Film-A-Year Contracts After WBD Acquisition Paramount is making commitments to major theater chains to release 30 films annually for three years if its Warner Bros. deal goes through. According to Deadline, the written commitment was sent to "at least one of the top two circuits" (specifically Regal but AMC may have also received a written commitment) and includes "an exclusive 4 ... ⌘ Read more

Toxic Underground Fires Are Spreading at California Landfills Three years ago environmental regulators discovered garbage burning deep inside California's Chiquita Canyon Landfill, reports the Los Angeles Times. [Alternate URL here.] "Few imagined the calamity that would follow.

"Somehow the landfill's pollution control system introduced oxygen below, causing decades-old waste to rapidly decompose, generating ... ⌘ Read more

How Accurate Are Flock's AI-Powered License-Reading Cameras? Futurism reports:

404 Media revealed that a July 10 audit by the Los Angeles Police Department Office of the Inspector General caught the department's ALPR cameras generating 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in just two months — each one ending with officers pulling over an innocent driver. Factoring in 337 alerts which "resulted in the recovery of stolen v ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Responds to Outcry After Quietly Installing Beta 'Photos' App on Enterprise Machines Microsoft's cloud storage app OneDrive got a new Photos app in the worst possible way, reports the blog Neowin . "The app is reportedly showing up even on Windows 11 Enterprise machines, despite apparently being a beta application aimed at consumer functionality."

One admin questioned why ... ⌘ Read more

Privacy Backlash Explodes Against Meta's Smart Glasses With nearly 70% of the market, "Meta wants its smart glasses to be a big hit," writes the Los Angeles Times. But after some users found ways to disable the light that warns people they're being filmed, "the high-tech specs have also turned into a liability, as some are calling the gadget 'pervert glasses...'"

Some people are using the glasses — which look like a pair ... ⌘ Read more

AI Reviews Bring 'New Normal' to Linux Release Candidates: Lots of Bug Fixes Linux Torvalds expects Linux 7.2 should be released next weekend "unless something really bad pops up," Torvalds said while announcing today's release candidate.

But there's something interesting about Linux 7.2-rc7, writes Phoronix. "By the time the Linux kernel typically hits a -rc7 release things have usually settled qui ... ⌘ Read more

Flock Accused of Reactivating Its Cameras Without Notifying a Town A Massachusetts newspaper reports that officials from the town of Littleton (population: 10,141) "claim that five of Littletonâ(TM)s Flock Safety cameras were switched back on by the company without informing the town..."

Littleton had temporarily disabled the cameras earlier this year, according to the article, but upon discovering the camer ... ⌘ Read more

California City Declares State of Emergency After Cyberattack NBC Bay Area brings news from the small idyllic California town of Suisun City (population: 29,518). The city council "declared a state of emergency Saturday after a cyberattack that shut down computer systems including 911 public safety operations."

"Malicious software infected and compromised" the East Bay community's information technology systems b ... ⌘ Read more

AI-Powered Browser Just Generates Every Website From Scratch XDA Developers reports:

On July 22, a Google DeepMind engineer, Vidy Thatte, shared a snippet of a browser he built that "treats every URL as a prompt and generates a site from scratch" on his X account. Just a few days later, he shared a TestFlight link to let iPhone users try it for themselves. The browser he launched is called Gem, and it's a browser ... ⌘ Read more

Ask Slashdot: Whare the Costs of Switching Between Windows, MacOS, and Chrome? UI changes, lost productivity, untransferrable knowledge... Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the folly of switching to an unfamiliar new environment to be "more productive"...

Champions of the switch often insist workers will be able to hit the ground running and get the same or even more work done from the get-go in ... ⌘ Read more

Slashdot Reader Builds 'Spaced Linux', a New Devuan-Based, User-Friendly Desktop Distro "I've been a Linux IT administrator for 30 years now," says crhylove (Slashdot reader #205,956), in a new video on his YouTube channel. "I used to be a data center architect, at one point I was the IT director for 13 school districts... I just haven't been happy overall with all the other operating syste ... ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Announces It's Enhancing Security Controls, Pausing Some Work for New AI Model Astra OpenAI announced Friday it's pausing work on its Astra AI model because of security concerns. The Guardian reports:

The company had evaluated the agent, Astra, and found "significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity", which had moved to a "critical" threshold... OpenAI stated that ... ⌘ Read more

Brain Activity Reveals the Melodies That People Imagine Researchers believe they've found evidence that brain signals reveal the pitches of notes in imagined musical melodies, reports Medical Express:

Study participants were 10 epilepsy patients with electrodes on the surfaces of their brains for clinical monitoring. Participants quietly listened to the first bars of children's tunes, then imagined the melodies of ... ⌘ Read more

GNOME Receiving Additional Design Help From Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency Fellowship The new GNOME Boxes app for accessing virtual systems has reached beta, announced This Week in GNOME. There's also been more work on the Sushi file previewer for Nautilus, and Papers 51 Beta can now add visual signatures to PDF documents.

But Phoronix noted one more announcement. "Germany's Sovereign Te ... ⌘ Read more

Flock Camera Vandalism Continues Around America, While 100 Communities Reject ALPRs Dozens of Flock cameras have been vandalized around Dallas Texas in the last six months, reports a local news station. In Utah, ABC News reports, a county sheriff's office even said Wednesday a Flock camera was even vandalized within days of its being installed. And in the Minnesota city of Winona, "Every Flock ... ⌘ Read more

Quake Celebrates 30th Anniversary: New Official Episode With New Maps and Mechanics To celebrate Quake's 30th anniversary, Bethesda released "a brutal new episode" — a new campaign chapter titled Dawn of the Machine "delivering ferocious combat, labyrinthine level design, and nightmarish realms that twist reality beyond recognition..."

Face deadly new twists on familiar foes, including the ... ⌘ Read more

RAMageddon? 2027 Memory Capacity Reportedly Sold Out IGN reports:

[A] new report suggests that all three memory manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — have collectively sold through their 2027 memory manufacturing capacity to, you guessed it, AI companies.

According to a report from Digitimes and spotted by TweakTown, all DRAM and HBM capacity has been sold through for 2027, with no further supply planne ... ⌘ Read more

Google Should Still Be Forced To Shed Chrome, Advocacy Group Argues "Google should be required to divest the Chrome browser, and prohibited from paying Apple to distribute Google's search engine, the nonprofit advocacy group Public Knowledge argues in a new court filing," MediaPost reports, citing a friend-of-the-court brief filed Tuesday in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals:

The group adds that "independen ... ⌘ Read more

Slashdot Reader Builds a Free Photo-Verification App for iPhones Long-time Slashdot reader BrianFagioli is announcing that he's released a new iPhone app that creates a cryptographic witness for photos without uploading the original image.

The app hashes the file, signs the hash using a dedicated identity stored in Apple Keychain, and publishes the witness to Nostr relays while keeping the photo inside the a ... ⌘ Read more

New Orleans Will Use AI To Answer 911 Calls Instead of a Human "If you call 911 in New Orleans, you may hear the sound of an artificial intelligence (AI) agent answering your call instead of a human voice," reports the Shreveport Times:

The Orleans Parish Communication District (OPCD) is currently testing out the new tool designed to reduce the volume of calls human dispatchers must handle, which is over a thousand ... ⌘ Read more

More Police Officers Fired, Investigated, or Arrested for Misusing Flock Camera Systems In Georgia the Savannah Police Department "terminated four sworn officers and two civilian employees following an internal investigation into misuse of the department's Flock Safety License Plate Reader system," according to a local news report:

All six cases are also under independent criminal investig ... ⌘ Read more

America's First Grid-Scale Sodium-Ion Battery Plant Gets Its First Big Test "In a milestone for energy storage technology, Peak Energy has selected Sacramento, California, as the home of America's first manufacturing facility dedicated to grid-scale sodium-ion battery systems," according to the sustainability news site Intelligent Living.

The move "represents the first large-scale test of whethe ... ⌘ Read more

Paper Goods Company Is Investigating an Alternative to Trees The Dallas Business Journal reported Monday that the U.S. multinational paper goods company Kimberly-Clark announced "that its researchers identified and advanced patented technology transforming fibers from hesperaloe, a low-water-use plant with pointy leaves that thrives in the southwest region of the country, into material for paper towels." Discoverin ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle: Expect a Negative Cash Flow of $125 Billion Next Year The Washington Post shared surprising news this week about five top AI companies.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle "are spending so much on developing AI and delivering it to customers that they're expected to bleed cash in the coming year, according to a Washington Pos ... ⌘ Read more

Prime Minister Leaves Door Open For Reviewing Policy of No Nuclear Weapons in Japan At a Hiroshima memorial ceremony, Japan's prime minister said the country "maintains" its three long-standing non-nuclear principles, reports UPI.

But the prime minister "stopped short of promising that the policy would remain unchanged, fueling speculation that her government could review a longstanding ban ... ⌘ Read more

Before and After Views of SpaceX Rocket's Moon Crash A South Korean lunar orbiter has captured the first before-and-after images of the Moon's crash scene caused by a stray SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The Associated Press reports: The Korea Aerospace Research Institute's Danuri spacecraft flew over the impact site soon after the Falcon 9 upper stage inadvertently plowed into the moon on Wednesday. Danuri made multiple passe ... ⌘ Read more

NASA Figured Out How To Keep Its 48-Year-Old Voyager 2 Probe Running For Yet Another Year NASA has squeezed at least another year of science out of Voyager 2 by cutting power to nonessential systems and switching to lower-power alternatives. Voyager 1 is expected to receive the same power-saving changes in the coming months. Space.com reports: Voyager 2 and its twin launched in 1977 ... ⌘ Read more

Woman Pulled From Car at Gunpoint By Police After Mistaken Flock Alert - Twice The police surrounded her car Thursday, "drew their guns, and told her to come out with her hands up," reports a local news station. The police thought they were pulling over a murder suspect, but "It turns out it was a mistake by another department with the Flock license plate reader technology." The black woman says sh ... ⌘ Read more

Trump Administration To Pay German Firm $1.2 Billion To Halt US Wind Projects An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: German energy company RWE has said it will abandon its offshore wind projects in the U.S. after reaching a $1.2 billion payout deal with President Donald Trump's Department of the Interior (DoI). RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, ... ⌘ Read more

Virginia Governor To Intervene In Dominion-NextEra Merger Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an opinion piece from the Washington Post, written by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger: NextEra Energy, a Florida-based utility company, has filed paperwork to buy Dominion Energy for about $67 billion, creating the largest regulated electric utility in the world. Virginia's State Corporation Commission is the regula ... ⌘ Read more

Water Utilities Group Partners With DEF CON Offshoot For Water Watch Center The National Rural Water Association has partnered with DEF CON Franklin to launch the Water Watch Center, which will provide threat intelligence and cybersecurity services to smaller U.S. water utilities serving fewer than 10,000 people. The initiative comes amid a growing wave of cyberattacks on water systems across multiple ... ⌘ Read more

Kalshi and Polymarket Bets On Clinical Trials Criticized As 'Ghastly' An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Billions of dollars are traded every week on the lightly regulated prediction market sites, where users bet on everything from movie reviews to elections to conflicts in the Middle East. Clinical trials are just the latest area where the industry's rapid growth is raising ethical questions. Ka ... ⌘ Read more

'Asimov Was Right' About Rules For Robots, Says Ex-US Cyber Director Former U.S. National Cyber Director Chris Inglis says the biggest AI risk isn't sentience but autonomy. "What I'm worried about is that they get to choose what and where they do something, and under what rules they do it," he said, citing recent cases of AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta escaping security sandboxes. He argues develope ... ⌘ Read more

Framework Notifies 'All Customers' of a Data Breach Via Compromised Metabase BI Service "Framework has been sending out email notifications to customers alerting of a limited data breach in which customer information was accessed through a Metabase BI service zero-day exploit," writes Slashdot reader DuoDreamer. Data includes customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addr ... ⌘ Read more

Suno Says It Will Start Watermarking Songs Suno says it will begin watermarking and fingerprinting AI-generated songs, tighten download policies to curb mass distribution, and explicitly prohibit deceptive audio and unauthorized voice or likeness cloning. The changes come as the company faces mounting copyright lawsuits, a recent adverse ruling in Germany, and scrutiny over a past data breach that revealed training-data so ... ⌘ Read more

ByteDance Is Training a 10-Trillion-Parameter Model To Chase the Frontier ByteDance is reportedly training an AI model with roughly 10 trillion parameters as it tries to close the gap with leading frontier systems such as Anthropic's Mythos. The model is still in early pre-training, and its eventual performance will depend on more than scale alone, but the project underscores how aggressively Chinese firms ... ⌘ Read more

Trump Orders New 15% Tariff On Key Material For Solar Panels, Microchips President Trump has ordered a 15% tariff on imported products made with polysilicon, a key material for semiconductors and solar panels. The new tariff will take effect on December 4th. The Guardian reports: The executive order signed by the president on Thursday evening said: "The plan of action in this proclamation will, among othe ... ⌘ Read more

AMD Buys AI Chip Startup Taalas That Hardwires AI Models Into Its Silicon An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: On Thursday, AMD said it's entered into an agreement to acquire Taalas, a Toronto-based startup that makes chips for inference. Taalas' accelerators are customized, or hard-wired for a single AI model, rather than being general purpose. In exchange for that loss of flexibility, T ... ⌘ Read more

Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice A new study argues that life may have emerged twice on Earth. "Two of the main lineages of life -- bacteria and archaea -- may have independently figured out the secrets of metabolism that upgraded them from non-living to living," reports ScienceAlert, citing a new study that "focused on the most rudimentary set of chemical reactions thought to enable this transformation." F ... ⌘ Read more

Dress Made of Living Mycelium Can Renew and Repair Itself Researchers in China have developed a living mycelium textile that can self-clean, renew its surface, and partially repair holes when treated with a nutrient solution and fresh fungus. The material can also gain added properties such as blue pigmentation or UV resistance by co-culturing it with yeast or other fungi. Dezeen reports: The breakthrough from the ... ⌘ Read more

Scientists Make First Viruses Designed By AI An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have made the first viruses designed by artificial intelligence in a milestone that raises hopes for new medicines but also concerns over how to ensure the technology remains safe. The viruses are specific kinds known as bacteriophages, which only infect bacteria and are used around the world to treat patients with pe ... ⌘ Read more

Court Orders Meta To Establish $567 Million Fund To Abate Harms To Youth A New Mexico court ordered (PDF) Meta to create a $567 million fund to address harms linked to youth mental health and child sexual exploitation after finding its platforms constituted a public nuisance. "In sum, the Court finds that New Mexico is in the midst of a teen mental health crisis affecting public health and public safety ... ⌘ Read more

Google's $15 Billion India Data Center Project Battles Water, Wildlife Concerns Google's $15 billion data-center project in Visakhapatnam is facing protests and legal challenges over fears that it will worsen local water shortages and disturb wildlife near the Kambalakonda sanctuary. Google says the campus will use advanced air cooling and comply with Indian law, while state officials deny that resi ... ⌘ Read more

'Tower Dump' Warrants Ruled Unconstitutional alternative_right shares a report from The Hill: A federal judge in Mississippi ruled Wednesday that "tower dump" warrants are unconstitutional, declining to reverse a lower court decision refusing the government's request to obtain the search warrants in a series of violent crime investigations. A "tower dump" involves cellphone companies providing law enforcement with access to the tim ... ⌘ Read more

Azure CTO Pastes Doom Into Paint One Frame At a Time Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich used Claude to build a gloriously impractical setup that runs Doom in the background and pastes each rendered frame into Microsoft Paint through the Windows clipboard. The project is referred to as "DoomPaint" or "MS Paint Doom" on GitHub. The Register reports: To be clear, Microsoft Paint isn't doing anything other than serving as a ... ⌘ Read more

OpenAI's Models Shared Hacking Tips On a Secret Messaging Board Before Hugging Face Breach OpenAI researchers say multiple AI agents secretly created an internal message board to share hacking techniques, eventually finding ways around restrictions, exploiting a zero-day, and helping two models breach Hugging Face without human prompting. "This is a pivotal moment both for our company a ... ⌘ Read more

The US Government's Mario, Pokemon and Naruto Meme Posting Could Damage These Franchises, Japanese Officials Warn Japanese officials have repeatedly asked the Trump administration to stop using characters from franchises such as Mario, Pokemon, and Naruto in unauthorized government memes and pro-war videos, warning that the posts could damage the intellectual proper ... ⌘ Read more

FCC Kills TV Ownership Cap, Claiming Authority Over Limit Set By Congress An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 today to eliminate the National Television Ownership Rule, claiming authority to repeal a limit that was set by Congress over 20 years ago. The rule prohibits any single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent ... ⌘ Read more

Times Magazine Now Serves Ads That Only AI Chatbots Can See Longtime Slashdot reader mccalli writes: Times Magazine has started serving adverts with "brand messages" to AI crawlers, which are not part of its main page. The aim seems to be to influence chatbots to talk about the brand offerings in a positive light that can't be traced back to the actual page. Notably, they've excluded Google chatbots from this, likely be ... ⌘ Read more

Meta AI Hacked External Systems During Cybersecurity Testing wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Meta is the latest major AI developer to admit that its models broke loose during cybersecurity testing and hacked external systems. The tech giant said in a statement to the media on Wednesday that the incident occurred during independent evaluations conducted by Israeli AI security startup Irregular. The test ... ⌘ Read more

Broadcaster Wins Broad US Blocking Injunction Covering Pirate Sites That Don't Exist Yet An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Mexican broadcaster TelevisaUnivision (TU) has obtained (PDF) one of the broadest anti-piracy injunctions ever issued by a U.S. federal court. After initially targeting five pirate IPTV streaming operations, the case expanded to cover well over 50 ... ⌘ Read more

FDA Approves First mRNA Flu Shot The FDA has approved the first mRNA flu vaccine in the United States after a clinical trial found it was about 27% more effective than a standard flu shot. Manufactured by Moderna and marketed as mFlusiva, the vaccine is expected to be available this fall for adults ages 50 to 64 and those 65 and older, though approval for the older group is conditional on Moderna conducting an additional clinical trial, N ... ⌘ Read more

BMW Blasts Its Cars' Internal Screens With Aggressive Ads Longtime Slashdot readers schwit1 and fjo3 shared a report about BMW displaying a Spider-Man promotion on connected vehicle screens in more than 70 markets. According to reports, drivers had to play or dismiss the ad before they could use the infotainment system. Futurism reports: BMW, showing that it was about as in-touch as its drivers are familiar with turn ... ⌘ Read more

New Images of the Sun Show Its Surface In the Finest Detail Yet An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Scientists have captured images of the sun's surface in the finest detail yet, revealing a strange and dynamic facade. It's dangerous to look directly at the sun without proper eye protection. But researchers were able to peek at its scorching surface with the help of the National Sc ... ⌘ Read more

Waymo CEO Explains Why Camera-Only Self-Driving Falls Short Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Electrek: Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can't take a self-driving system to full autonomy, arguing that "weak sensing" hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance. [...] Dolgov made the comments in a talk at Y Combinato ... ⌘ Read more

Anthropic's AI Used Fake Identities, Malware In Rogue Attack On GitHub Project An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Routine cybersecurity testing of frontier AI models sparked a series of unexpected security incidents -- the most serious case arising when Anthropic's Mythos 5 model attempted to insert malicious code into an open source software application and created fake identitie ... ⌘ Read more

Meta Debuts First AI Coding Agent To Take On Anthropic and OpenAI Meta has launched Muse Code, its first AI coding agent that's positioned as a lower-cost rival to Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex. It offers pay-as-you-go pricing and an optional zero-data-retention feature for enterprise users. CNBC reports: Muse Code is the latest major release from AI chief Alexandr Wang, who leads Meta Superinte ... ⌘ Read more

Apple's 'Private Relay' Is Exposing Users' Real IP Addresses Security researchers found that Apple's iCloud Private Relay can expose users' real IP addresses because some passkey-related requests bypass Safari and its proxy protections at the operating-system level. "In short: any website that supports, or pretends to support, passkeys can see the user's real IP address despite having iCloud Private Relay on," security ... ⌘ Read more

Lawmaker Who Wants Data Center Pause Wins Kansas Democratic Primary Kansas Democrats nominated State Senator Cindy Holscher for governor after she defeated party-backed rival Ethan Corson. "The race became a test of what sort of candidate Democratic voters prefer in what is expected to be a challenging general election race: a more moderate candidate like Mr. Corson with endorsements from party leaders ... ⌘ Read more

Google Overhauls AI Leadership As DeepMind CEO Steps Aside Google is reshuffling its AI leadership as Demis Hassabis steps away from day-to-day management of DeepMind to become chairman and Alphabet's chief scientist, while CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu takes operational control. Meanwhile, longtime chief scientist Jeff Dean and several prominent researchers are leaving to launch their own company. Axios reports: Hassabis w ... ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Announces Open-Source Cloudflare OS As AI 'Operating System' Cloudflare has open-sourced Cloudflare OS, an Apache 2.0-licensed platform that lets organizations build AI agents, apps, and workflows using curated company data and tools within isolated, governed environments. Despite the name, it is not a traditional operating system but a framework for securely managing organizational AI workloads ... ⌘ Read more

The Days of Walking Into a T-Mobile Store May Be Numbered A leaked roadmap suggests T-Mobile plans to make its T-Life app the primary way customers manage their accounts by the end of 2026, "gradually moving one feature at a time into the app" and away from physical stores, reports Android Authority. That includes upgrades, new-line activations, and eventually new-account sign-ups. From the report: According to an ... ⌘ Read more

Senators Demand Crackdown On Wildfire 'Prediction Markets' An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Several US senators have written a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), inquiring about the agency's "plans to crack down on prediction markets" that offer "contracts for individuals to bet on wildfires." "Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities' suffer ... ⌘ Read more

NVMe Polishes Its Specs, Brings Virtualization to Locally Attached SSDs The latest NVMe specifications add SSD-level virtualization that can simplify live VM migration by preserving storage identities across servers. The updates also introduce support for post-quantum cryptography, controller-based rate limiting, voltage monitoring, and factory-reset capabilities. The Register reports: Announced by t ... ⌘ Read more

Watch a SpaceX Rocket Crash Into the Moon A four-ton SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage left drifting after a 2025 lunar mission is expected to crash into the Moon at about 5,400 mph, likely striking Einstein Crater. The impact should occur at approximately 2:35 a.m. ET (0635GMT). Reuters reports: Such stages typically fall back into Earth's atmosphere and burn up or plunge into the ocean after boosting the rocket's payload to a precise ... ⌘ Read more

Texas Halts Data Center Connections To Power Grid Amid Overwhelming Demand An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nowhere is the US data center boom bigger than in Texas. But less than a year after declaring Texas the "epicenter of AI development," Governor Greg Abbott has declared a moratorium on all new power grid connections for data centers -- at least until developers provide ... ⌘ Read more

EA Is Now Officially Privately Owned Longtime Slashdot reader neoRUR shares a report from Game Developer: EA Sports FC and Battlefield publisher EA has been taken private by an investor consortium led by Saudi Arabia's sovereign Public Investment Fund (PIF). The move means the U.S. juggernaut is no longer a publicly-traded entity and is now majority owned by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through its PIF investment arm. Other investors incl ... ⌘ Read more

Apple Limits Bug Bounty Submissions After Flood of AI Slop Apple has capped the number of open bug-bounty reports researchers can submit after being flooded with low-quality and sometimes entirely fabricated vulnerabilities generated by AI. MacRumors reports: The Financial Times learned of the limit after cybersecurity startup Bynario used ChatGPT to locate more than 50 macOS bugs in three weeks. Bynario found a privi ... ⌘ Read more

Bending Spoons to Buy Airtable For $1.28 Billion Bending Spoons has made its first acquisition since going public last month at an $18 billion valuation, agreeing to buy spreadsheet and database startup Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash. Airtable joins a growing portfolio of notable brands owned by the Italian app developer, including Evernote, WeTransfer, EventBrite, and Vimeo. TechCrunch reports: Founded in 2013, Airtable has so ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Tells Engineers 'Tokenmaxxing Is Not What We Are Optimizing For' Microsoft is introducing AI token budgets for employees, making the cheaper GPT-5.6 its default internal model and telling engineers to focus on business results rather than maximizing AI usage. 404 Media reports: "As we accelerate our use of GitHub Copilot to deliver on our goals, we all need to be aware of how we consume tokens," J ... ⌘ Read more

Trump Begins Selling $100,000 Monthly Subscription Service to Wall Street Trump Media has officially launched its $100,000-per-month data feed giving trading firms machine-readable access to Truth Social posts milliseconds before the public. According to Fortune, five Wall Street firms have already signed up for the service, which "would generate about $500,000 in monthly revenue, or $6 million annually ... ⌘ Read more

Trump Administration Drafting Ban On Chinese Data Center Devices Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the U.S. telecom industry, is working on the measure to bar imports of new Chinese optical transceivers, which allow data to travel over fiber-optic cables at the speed of light within data centers. Officials hope to publish it this ... ⌘ Read more

Apple Says More Ex-Employees May Have Taken Confidential Data to OpenAI Apple is now seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent OpenAI and Jony Ive's io startup from developing AI hardware allegedly based on stolen Apple trade secrets. "The iPhone maker also claims that more of its former employees may be involved with the trade secrets theft," reports TechCrunch. From the report: In a new filing, Apple ... ⌘ Read more

Apple Launches Legal Challenge Against UK Demand To Access Encrypted User Data An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Apple has launched a new legal challenge against a UK government demand to access its customers' highly encrypted data, a year after the Home Office agreed to abandon its previous request. The US tech company launched the legal complaint last month at the Investigato ... ⌘ Read more

Sandisk and SK Hynix Publish First Open High Bandwidth Flash Standard BrianFagioli writes: Sandisk and SK hynix have published the first open technical specification for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) through the Open Compute Project. HBF is designed to create a new memory tier between High Bandwidth Memory and traditional SSD storage, giving AI inference systems more near compute capacity without relying ... ⌘ Read more

Russia-Linked 'Midnight Blizzard' Group Hijacks Hotel Wi-Fi With CaptiveCrunch A Russia-linked group tracked as Midnight Blizzard has compromised hotel and conference Wi-Fi portals worldwide, redirecting guests to phishing pages and fake software updates that steal credentials, session tokens, and other sensitive data. Microsoft says the campaign, dubbed CaptiveCrunch, "targets traveling employees g ... ⌘ Read more

Spain Offers $1.14 Billion To Get Thirty Meter Telescope Moved To Canary Islands Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Behind the Black: In a new bid to get the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) to move from Hawaii, which has blocked its construction for more than a decade, the Spanish government has put together a $1.14 billion package that would not only pay for construction on th ... ⌘ Read more

OpenAI's Astra Solved Decades-Old Math Problems For $2,000 An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: The cost of producing new results on ten longstanding mathematical problems just fell to $2,000, according to OpenAI, which says its Astra model generated machine-checkable proofs for questions that had resisted human progress for decades. OpenAI published the work on August 1 and used it to give its next majo ... ⌘ Read more

An AI-Supervised Remote Exam Went So Badly That 58,000 Students Must Retake It An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this summer, nearly 160,000 applicants took the entrance exam for UNAM, Mexico's largest university. For the first time, they did it completely remotely, using a "lockdown" browser and AI-powered webcam proctoring software, over several weeks from late May th ... ⌘ Read more

Schools Are Ditching Chromebooks For MacBooks By the Thousands Apple says its lower-cost MacBook Neo is beginning to displace Windows laptops and Chromebooks in K-12 schools, with several districts purchasing thousands of units. According to the company's latest earnings call, nearly half of the large MacBook Neo purchases made by U.S. educational institutions last quarter reportedly replaced competing platform ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Is Bringing Xbox 360 Games to PC Microsoft reportedly plans to let developers bring Xbox 360 games to PC and next-generation Xbox devices, with a gradual rollout expected between 2027 and 2028. A separate disc-to-digital program would also give players transferable digital licenses tied to their physical Xbox discs, preserving the ability to resell or trade them. The Verge reports: With 360 games, developers can opt into ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft CEO Touts His Own DIY AI Project To Wall Street and His 20 Million Followers theodp writes: During Microsoft's 2026Q4 earnings call, CEO Microsoft Satya Nadella took time to tout a dashboard he personally created using AI from a Morgan Stanley analyst's PDF research report, which suggested a rosy payback for the so-called MAG7's ('Magnificent 7' companies) massive capital expenditure ... ⌘ Read more

Apple's iCloud File Sharing Left Ex-Employees With Access to Secret Documents Apple's practice of mixing employees' work files with personal iCloud accounts reportedly left some former staff with continued access to confidential documents, messages, and even new updates after leaving the company. "The former employees said many Apple files they had been shared on over their careers at the company - ... ⌘ Read more

Samsung Bans Smart TV Apps That Share Users' Internet Connections An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Several popular Samsung smart TV apps contain code that share the owner's internet connection with strangers, potentially putting millions of Samsung smart TVs at risk of hijacking, according to new security research published on Monday. Some of these apps claim to have been installed ... ⌘ Read more

As Reddit Stock Falls, CEO Questions Value of Google's AI Overviews Reddit CEO Steve Huffman criticized Google's AI Overviews for summarizing publishers' content without delivering the traffic benefits of traditional search, arguing that users increasingly value Reddit's human perspectives and firsthand experiences. Ars Technica reports: First, there was a letter to investors (PDF), wherein Huffman spun his n ... ⌘ Read more

South Korea Records Its Highest Ever Temperature South Korea recorded its highest temperature since modern observations began in 1904, with the city of Yangsan reaching 42.5C as temperatures exceeded 40C for a fifth consecutive day. Authorities warned residents to "immediately stop all outdoor activities." The Guardian reports: More than 20 localities in South Korea were under emergency heatwave alerts on Sunday -- a new warn ... ⌘ Read more

Company Offering Printed Books To Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Following 404 Media's reporting that book database company ISBNdb claimed to source printed books to then sell to AI companies for AI training, the company deleted the part of its website offering the service and walked back claims that it would train AI models, and instead cal ... ⌘ Read more

'AI's Decimation of Call Center Jobs Has Begun' "AI's decimation of call center jobs has begun," reports Bloomberg:

Companies including the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Microsoft Corp., Uber Technologies Inc. and Hyatt Hotels Corp. are using automated chat and phone systems to handle work that previously required humans. In some cases, they've already wiped out sizable chunks of their customer service operations, together repres ... ⌘ Read more

Massive Debian 13 Linux Kernel Security Update Patches 68 Vulnerabilities Slashdot reader prisoninmate shares this report from 9to5Linux:

Coming ten days after the previous Linux kernel security update, which only fixed 12 vulnerabilities that may lead to a privilege escalation, denial of service, or information leaks, the new Debian 13 Linux kernel security update is a massive one, and it patches n ... ⌘ Read more

Hollywood Fights AI In Public While Quietly Building It Into Movies Even as Hollywood performers protest and Hollywood studios sue "in their war on AI," reports the Los Angeles Times, "the entertainment industry is deepening its dependence on it."

Among hundreds of job postings in late June, more than one in 10 was likely connected to AI. The top studios' public postings suggest they have been rec ... ⌘ Read more

Rogue Police Officers Have Turned Flock's Nationwide Camera Network Into a Stalking Tool A woman found her police officer ex-boyfriend cop had used Flock's camera system 600 times to look up the location of her and her daughter, reports the Washington Post (Alternate URL here). (She found out through Have I Been Flocked, described as "a website that aggregates police search logs made avail ... ⌘ Read more

GOG Officially Expands Linux Support With Native Galaxy Client In Development Long-time Slashdot reader pyroclast shared this report from Linux Journal:

After years of requests from the Linux gaming community, GOG has officially confirmed that it is developing native Linux support for the GOG Galaxy launcher. The announcement marks one of the biggest shifts in the company's history and signals a ... ⌘ Read more

IT Teams Report 11 Hour a Week on Cloud Connectivity Problems Researchers found enterprises are spending time troubleshooting cloud connectivity due to increased AI workloads, reports Computer Weekly. More than 400 IT and infrastructure decision-makers (US and UK) were surveyed for internet/cloud/AI exchange operator DE-CIX by market researchers Censuswide. But despite 96% of respondents claiming their enterprise n ... ⌘ Read more

New Spinning Drone Hides In Plain Sight To design invisible drones, researchers have tried camouflage, transparent materials and light-bending optical systems. But engineers at Northwestern University used "motion blur," which an announcement from the school notes is the effect that makes fast-spinning fans seem to disappear.

"The drone spins up to 25 times per second, which is too fast for the human eye to see clearly. While it isn't ... ⌘ Read more

Is There a Way to Promote Open Document Formats Instead of 'MS Office' Format? The Register looks at exactly why "It is practically impossible to move any non-trivial Word document out of MS Office to a non-MS suite and back again without it being more trouble than it's worth."

OOXML, developed by Microsoft and first standardized by Ecma in 2006, became the ISO/IEC 29500 standard in 2008 after a gru ... ⌘ Read more

Steam On Linux Use Back Above 4% In July Valve just published the Steam Survey results for July 2026, reports Phoronix, "and they point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use."

Back in March Steam on Linux hit a record high of 5.33%, dropped to 4.52% in April, landed at 3.99% in May, and then in June was at 3.69%. The just-published numbers for July put Steam on Linux use at 4.01%, as an improvement over the prior two months but stil ... ⌘ Read more

Group of Teen Hikers Relied on Google Maps. It Was a Disaster. "When a group of teenagers set out to hike British Columbia's famed Howe Sound Crest Trail in early July, Google Maps suggested the trek would take about five hours," reports SFGate.

"Instead, the hike stretched deep into the night, leaving the group exhausted, dehydrated, injured and in need of a helicopter rescue..."

Although the approximately 18-m ... ⌘ Read more

Does Eating Less Protein Produce Healthier Aging and Metabolism? "A major scientific review is challenging the idea that more protein is always better," reports ABC News:

The review, led by pathologist and biomedical researcher Dudley Lamming and published in the journal Cell Press Blue, examined more than 350 studies involving humans, mice, insects, yeast, and other organisms. The review found that eating l ... ⌘ Read more

In a First, 'Super-Earth' Planet Shows It Could Have an Atmosphere "Scientists say they have detected promising signs that a planet orbiting a star 49 light-years from Earth could have an atmosphere," reports CNN, "making it potentially suitable for life."

Called LHS 1140b, the object is about five times the mass of our planet, or a "super-Earth." This planet orbits around its star in the "Goldilocks zone," ... ⌘ Read more

Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America The blog Linuxiac reports:

Linux has crossed a major milestone in North America, with the open-source operating system now accounting for 10.65% of desktop usage in the region, according to Statcounter's latest figures for July 2026. The result places Linux firmly in double-digit territory for the first time in Statcounter's North American desktop operating s ... ⌘ Read more

Are Return-to-Office Mandates Killing Workers' Trust in Workplaces? The Hill published the thoughts of Gleb Tsipursky, Ph.D., who serves as the CEO of the future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts:

A recent EnhancV survey of 1,000 full-time U.S. workers subject to new or stricter return-to-office policies found that 72% suspect these mandates are really a voluntary attrition strategy — a strategy b ... ⌘ Read more

As New York Finalizes New Social Media Rules, US Senate Considers Nationwide 'SCREEN' Act New York has finalized new rules that will govern social media apps in the state starting on January 25, 2027. The law prohibits social media platforms from sending notifications to minors between midnight and 6 a.m. without parental consent. And minors "will only be shown content from other accounts ... ⌘ Read more

How 'Situational Awareness' Hedge Fund Dropped 67% in AI Stock Rout CNN tells the unfortunate tale of hedge fund Situational Awareness, "founded in 2024 by German-born Leopold Aschenbrenner when he was in his early 20s."

Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI employee, founded the hedge fund on the premise that "AI will be the dominant driver of global market returns over the next decade," according to the firm's site... ... ⌘ Read more

Recovery Seeds Reportedly Breached for Coldcard Hardware Bitcoin Wallets, $75M Taken "A hardware wallet is supposed to be the safest place to keep Bitcoin," writes The Street, since it never connects to the internet, its keys never leave the device, and "the whole point is that an attacker would need to physically hold it to steal anything."

The problem is that anyone who can reproduce the rec ... ⌘ Read more

Is Big Tech's AI Gamble Starting to Look Riskier? The Washington Post looks at giant tech companies "feeding every available dollar into the cash-incinerating maw of AI machines." They warn "Tech superstars that once had oodles of cash left over at the end of each year are now flipping into the red..."

[While optimists expect] huge corporate profits and a society-wide boost to wealth and well-being... questions about that AI vis ... ⌘ Read more

150-Game Discount Bundle Raises $57,000 for Videogame Workers 'Hardship Fund' "An itch.io game bundle put together by Necrosoft Games and The United Videogame Workers-CWA union is a new way gamers can show their support for developers who have been let go amidst the ongoing video game industry labor crisis," writes Kotaku.

Launched Thursday, it's already raised $57,859 from 3,984 contributors. (Aver ... ⌘ Read more

NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Discovers a Field of Honeycomb Textures NASA's Curiosity rover has sent back images of honeycomb-like textures called polygonal fractures, each one about 1.5 to 3 inches (4 to 8 centimeters) across. NASA reports:

The mission has spotted small patches of these geometric shapes several times before, but nothing at the scale discovered in Valle Grande. In a 360-degree panorama th ... ⌘ Read more

Apple's Stock Drops Nearly 10%. How Will It Respond to Memory Shortage? Apple's stock "fell just shy of 10% on Friday," reports Yahoo Finance, "after CEO Tim Cook warned about the impact of the global memory shortage on the company's business."

During Apple's third quarter earnings call, Cook said the company paid significantly more for memory in the quarter and expects that to further increase in the ... ⌘ Read more

Hamburg Is Replacing a Bridge In One Huge Piece Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: The northern German City of Hamburg is currently in the process of replacing one of its bridges in one single gigantic piece. The new replacement weighs 3700 metric tons and was carefully moved into place over a stretch of 500 meters, requiring extreme patience and precision maneuvering. Some places leave only 40 cm of room to neighbouri ... ⌘ Read more

New GitHub, PyPI Policies Hope to Boost Supply Chain Security "GitHub and the Python Package Index (PyPI) have introduced new policies meant to boost supply chain security," reports SecurityWeek, "by preventing the fast propagation of poisoned package versions and the poisoning of old and long-stable releases."

To prevent the fast delivery of malicious code through the immediate fetching of brand-new releas ... ⌘ Read more

Used EV Prices are Now Going Up in America Electric vehicles have historically been "notorious" for losing their resale value, reports CNBC. But this year prices for used EVs in the U.S. "are up 5.1% from January to June 2026, according to a Recurrent analysis published this month."

The trend continued into the second half of the year: Prices are up 7% year to date through mid-July, it said. Recurrent compared EVs according to the ... ⌘ Read more

Google Plans To Exempt Sanctioned Nations From Android Developer Verification An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: We are a month away from the initial rollout of Google's Android developer verification system, and the company contends this policy does not impinge on the platform's open nature. Still, the restrictions will be a big change, and there are still some unanswered ques ... ⌘ Read more

Drones Offer Alternative to Balloons For Weather Research The U.S. company Meteomatics has created an automated weather-monitoring system that uses drones to collect atmospheric data at multiple altitudes before returning to recharge and upload their findings. The so-called Meteobase, which consists of a base station on the ground with a drone that can be launched and recovered automatically, "is highly weather resist ... ⌘ Read more

Drifting SpaceX Rocket Heading For Accidental Collision With the Moon "Space.com and The Guardian are reporting that the Falcon 9 upper stage leftover from the launch of the Firefly Blue Ghost-1 lander on Jan. 15, 2025 is due to impact the Moon on Aug. 5, 2026," writes longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot. From a report: Onboard the same flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2, called Resilience, a robotic l ... ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Finds Evidence Other AI Agents Escaped Containment An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI has discovered other instances in which autonomous agents have escaped containment as the company expands its investigation of the hacking incident at tech firm Hugging Face that drew global attention this month, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday. The new breakouts were uncovered during th ... ⌘ Read more

The Major Labels Propose Rules to Keep AI Slop Off the Charts Major record labels including Universal, Sony, and Warner have proposed excluding AI-generated songs from official charts unless they are "substantially human made," properly labeled, legally produced, and free from manipulation concerns. The Verge reports: The proposal goes quite a bit further than a labeling proposal put forth by the RIAA, t ... ⌘ Read more

Most Australian Teens Still On Social Media Three Months After Ban More than 81% of Australian children ages 10 to 15 were still using social media three months after the country's under-16 ban took effect, with roughly half saying platforms never checked their age. Reuters reports: In a study published on Friday, eSafety also found most children aged between 10 and 15 were using social media just as frequen ... ⌘ Read more

Sony Heard Backlash Over Dropping PlayStation Discs, Plans to Press Ahead Sony says it will proceed with ending PlayStation disc sales in January 2028 despite petitions, boycott threats, and concerns about digital ownership and the disappearance of the secondhand market. PCMag reports: After Sony's recent earnings call, an investor Q&A session saw analysts ask about its controversial decision to end d ... ⌘ Read more

Hackers Targeted Municipal Water Systems In 7 States This Week, FBI Says An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Cyberattacks targeting municipal water systems have been reported in at least seven states this week, prompting the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency to warn utilities nationwide that hackers are trying to disrupt critical water infrastructure. In a public service announce ... ⌘ Read more

New Google Earth AI Tool Could Fuel Misinformation, Experts Say Google has integrated its Nano Banana 2 image generator into Google Earth, allowing users to place AI-generated events and objects onto real satellite imagery. The company says its AI-generated images contain invisible watermarks detectable through Gemini or Lens, but the BBC found those safeguards and some third-party detection tools can be fooled ... ⌘ Read more

Publishers Are Losing Google Traffic As AI Answers Replace Links alternative_right shares a report from Axios: Google has basically stopped sending people to websites (including our site) for answers and information. Instead, it's using AI to answer them on its platform, in its words. Chartbeat data shared with Axios shows Google Search traffic to publishers fell 34% over the past year. That pain is regressiv ... ⌘ Read more

New York Sues Kalshi For Running 'Illegal Gambling Operation' New York has sued prediction-market platform Kalshi, alleging it operates an "illegal gambling operation" without state authorization. "No matter what they call themselves, prediction markets like Kalshi are gambling platforms, plain and simple," said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a press release announcing the lawsuit. "By ignoring our laws, ... ⌘ Read more

Chrome Is Using AI To Fix Hundreds of Bugs, Eliminate Full Browser Restarts Google says AI-assisted workflows helped Chrome fix 1,072 security bugs across versions 149 and 150, more than the previous 23 releases combined. The company is also testing twice-weekly security updates and "dynamic patching," which could apply most fixes without requiring users to restart the entire browser. "By leveraging ... ⌘ Read more

LinkedIn Introduces a 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: LinkedIn, a social network awash with long AI-generated posts from executives and other corporate workers, has introduced a new button that users can click to flag if a post "seems like AI slop," according to 404 Media's own tests. If you have been anywhere near LinkedIn in the past couple of years, you have undoubtedly seen u ... ⌘ Read more

Netflix Sued For Losing 'Master Copy' of Unreleased Nicolas Cage Movie A production company and filmmaker are suing Netflix for $105 million, alleging the streamer lost a stolen drive containing an unencrypted master copy of the unreleased Nicolas Cage film Fortitude, which they claim damage its exclusivity and market value. Netflix denied responsibility for the lost film but said it takes content security ... ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Says Its AI Systems Broke Into Computers at 3 Organizations Anthropic found that Claude models breached three outside organizations during cybersecurity tests because misconfigured environments accidentally gave them access to the internet. The company notified those affected and urged other AI labs to audit their own testing systems. The BBC reports: Anthropic said in a statement that it reviewe ... ⌘ Read more

Flock Cameras Are Being Destroyed Across the US An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Surveillance cameras owned by Flock Safety have been cut down with electric saws in New York State, vandalized with paint in Oakland, California, and rammed with a truck in Idaho. Flock claims its services fight crime, but law enforcement agencies also use their services to track vehicles based on license plate numbers and reconstruct the thei ... ⌘ Read more

New MCP Specification Addresses the Main Barrier To Enterprise Adoption An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open source standard for how AI systems interact with external tools and data sources, saw its largest update since its introduction. Most notably, MCP's protocol core is now stateless, so requests are no longer dependent on a session t ... ⌘ Read more

A Fundamental Flaw Leaves LLMs Strikingly Vulnerable To Attack joshuark quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: It is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a team of researchers argue in a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, a top AI conference, this month. The claim has huge implications for the safety ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft's $450 Billion Jump Is Biggest In Stock Market History Microsoft shares surged as much as 17% after reporting 43% growth in Azure revenue, putting the company on track to add a record $490 billion in market value in a single day. Bloomberg notes that it "would eclipse Nvidia's $440 billion addition, following President Donald Trump's announcement of a 90-day tariff pause last year, as the biggest ever. ... ⌘ Read more

ABC Accuses FCC of 'Attempted Censorship' ABC accused FCC Chair Brendan Carr of "attempted censorship," arguing that an early review of its eight broadcast licenses is politically motivated retaliation over the network's coverage and could chill the entire media industry. "The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: accommodate the Administration's view of what news coverage should look like or pay th ... ⌘ Read more

Amazon's Zoox Wins First US Approval For Paid Robotaxis Without Human Controls An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Amazon's Zoox unit has won U.S. approval for limited commercial deployment of its novel steering-wheel-free robotaxis, a first for the autonomous ride industry, the U.S. auto safety agency said on Thursday. Zoox said that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administratio ... ⌘ Read more

Catastrophic MoD Data Breach Caused By Lack of Training On Excel A UK parliamentary inquiry found that a catastrophic Ministry of Defense breach exposing 18,700 Afghans could have been prevented with basic Excel training, after an employee unknowingly shared a hidden worksheet containing their details. The Independent reports: The leak, in February 2022, exposed the details of 18,700 Afghans who said they were ... ⌘ Read more

Google's Gemini Can Now Stomp Around as a Humanoid Robot Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics 2 combines vision, language, and action models to control multiple types of robots, including humanoids performing tasks such as organizing shelves, tying bags, and replacing lightbulbs. "It's another milestone in our path towards really getting towards what we call like physical AGI, which means we get a robot to do anything tha ... ⌘ Read more

Google Brings Its Age-Assurance Tech To Android Developers Worldwide An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is expanding its answer to Apple's age-assurance tools with Wednesday's news that it will bring its Play Signal API to users worldwide by the end of 2026. The technology, already available in Brazil, allows Android developers to identify younger users of their apps in order ... ⌘ Read more

GCC Adopts Policy Rejecting Significant AI-Generated Code GCC has adopted a policy rejecting substantial code contributions generated by or derived from LLMs. "This covers not just code copied directly from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or GitHub Copilot, but also any versions of the code later edited or rewritten by a human, provided that the final contribution is still based on material generated by the system," repo ... ⌘ Read more

Comcast Store Punished Low Sales By Smashing Pies In Workers' Faces, Lawsuit Claims A former Comcast retail employee alleges that a Connecticut store manager tied the lowest-performing salesperson to a chair each month and had co-workers smash a cream pie into their face, recording the incidents as a sales-motivation tactic. The plaintiff says he resigned after reporting the alleged assaults an ... ⌘ Read more

Qantas Plane Flies For More Than 24 Hours In Record-Breaking Flight Qantas completed a record-breaking 24-hour, 24-minute test flight from Melbourne to Toulouse on Tuesday. "The specially adapted A350-1000ULR airliner is due to debut with the Australian carrier's nonstop Sydney-London route from 2027," reports The Guardian. From the report: Tuesday's flight is thought to be the longest ever by a commercial ... ⌘ Read more

AI Companies Are Recruiting Electricians and Carpenters By the Thousands An anonymous reader quotes a New York Times report on how AI companies are pouring money into training and recruiting electricians, carpenters, and other skilled tradespeople to build data centers: There is no parallel in American history for the boom underway in the construction of data centers, fueled by companies with functiona ... ⌘ Read more

Who Wins and Who Loses After US Bans Foreign Robots? The FCC's ban on Chinese-made robots extends well beyond humanoids to quadrupeds, research platforms, and many robot vacuums from allied countries. Supporters call it a major boost for domestic robotics, but critics warn that cutting researchers and startups off from affordable foreign hardware could slow U.S. innovation instead. Ars Technica's Jeremy Hsu examines wh ... ⌘ Read more

Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver To Windows Valve is funding Collabora's experimental effort to port the open-source RADV Vulkan driver from Linux to Windows. The team has already demonstrated Counter-Strike 2 running with RADV, but a stable interface or compatibility shim will be needed to handle undocumented driver changes. Phoronix reports: Louis-Francis Ratte-Boulianne put out a blog pos ... ⌘ Read more

Google Shuts Down Its Nobel-Prize Winning AlphaFold Project Google has dismantled the original AlphaFold team, according to Financial Times (paywalled), reassigning many researchers to Gemini and Isomorphic Labs. Several other key members, including Nobel laureate John Jumper, left for Anthropic. Engadget reports: AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict three-dimensional structures of proteins from t ... ⌘ Read more

Claude Opus 5 Became Downright Ruthless When Tasked With Running a Vending Machine For a year now, the AI safety testing firm Andon Labs has been evaluating how frontier AI models behave as long-running autonomous agents by assigning them simulated real-world tasks, such as operating a vending machine business for a year without human supervision. In the latest installment, the research startup fo ... ⌘ Read more

NextEra, Brookfield to Build $100 Billion Kentucky Data Campus NextEra and Brookfield plan to invest more than $100 billion to transform a former uranium-enrichment site in Kentucky into a data center campus with a generating plant. "The privately funded effort will include construction of 2 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power at or near the site in Paducah in western Kentucky, and as much as 2.6 gigawatts of ... ⌘ Read more

DoorDash Is Building Its Own Drone Delivery Business DoorDash has launched DoorDash Air, an in-house drone-delivery program that has just received FAA certification for commercial operations. "This does not mean DoorDash's custom-built drones will be delivering burritos tomorrow, or even next month," notes TechCrunch. "The company didn't provide a detailed timeline for when its aircraft would be used in operations." From the re ... ⌘ Read more

Russia Charges Telegram Founder Durov With Facilitating Terrorism Russia has charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with facilitating terrorism, alleging the platform was used by Ukrainian intelligence "to prepare and co-ordinate acts of sabotage and terror" inside Russia. An international arrest warrant has been issued for Durov, who currently lives in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where Telegram keeps its main ... ⌘ Read more

OpenAI's Rogue AI Agent Hacked More Than Just Hugging Face An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: OpenAI said Tuesday that the rogue AI agent that breached Hugging Face's platform also hacked multiple third-party accounts and services as part of the attack. It's now clear that the unprecedented security incident, which arose during an internal test of OpenAI's latest AI models, was more extensive than the comp ... ⌘ Read more

More Than 30 Minnesota Water Systems Targeted In Cyberattack jrnvk shares a report from KMSP: Minnesota IT Services reports that a "coordinated cyberattack" targeted technology at more than 30 community water systems between Sunday, July 26 and Monday, July 27. The state has activated its cybersecurity incident response capabilities to respond to the attacks.

On Monday and Tuesday, FOX 9 reported on notices from fou ... ⌘ Read more

Your Brain Can Rewire Itself To Allow True Multitasking alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: [I]n a new study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center in the U.S. have revealed that we can put certain tasks on autopilot in a way that enables something closer to true multitasking. Driving is the perfect example: When you take your tes ... ⌘ Read more

Trump Administration Bans New Chinese Humanoid Robots The Trump administration has banned newly authorized foreign-made humanoid and four-legged robots, along with power inverters, citing "unacceptable risks" to the country's national security. FCC chairman Brendan Carr said the agency was doing its part "to secure America's critical supply chains." The BBC reports: The FCC has added the items to its Covered List -- ... ⌘ Read more

Workplaces Look For Cheaper AI As 'Tokenmaxxing' Fades As a Corporate Fad An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: A corporate fad of "tokenmaxxing" on artificial intelligence technology is hitting its limits as workplaces throwing AI at everything are seeing the costs rise without a similar spike in productivity. What started as tech industry-fueled springtime hype over squeezing ... ⌘ Read more

Apple Retires iPhone Upgrade Program For Klarna-Backed Leases Apple has replaced its iPhone Upgrade Program with Apple Upgrade, a Klarna-backed U.S. leasing service covering most iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches. MacRumors reports: Apple Upgrade has lower base prices than the iPhone Upgrade Program, with iPhones available starting at $17.99 per month and the Apple Watch available starting at $11.99 per m ... ⌘ Read more

AI-Found Bugs Aren't Proving Any Easier to Exploit Despite the Hype AI-assisted vulnerability discovery has yet to produce the expected surge in real-world attacks: VulnCheck found that only 14 of 1,061 attributed discoveries, or 1.3 percent, had been exploited, which is "almost identical to the rate across all vulnerabilities in VulnCheck's dataset," reports The Register. "That's a far cry from the narrative t ... ⌘ Read more

eBay Reaches $56 Million Settlement With E-Commerce Newsletter Writers It Terrorized In 2019 eBay and several former executives have agreed to pay $56 million to Ina and David Steiner, the newsletter writers targeted in a 2019 corporate harassment campaign that involved threats, surveillance attempts, and deliveries of live insects and other disturbing items. The settlement closes th ... ⌘ Read more

Anthropic AI Model Finds Flaws in Tough-to-Crack Encryption Algorithms Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview has "found flaws in a weakened version of a digital encryption standard that is in pervasive use throughout the internet," reports The New York Times. Researchers said the model discovered novel attacks against weakened versions of AES and the experimental post-quantum HAWK system, including one that wa ... ⌘ Read more

Judge Blocks First State Law That Would Have Banned Prediction Markets An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Minnesota, the first US state to prohibit prediction markets, was prevented from enforcing the law by a federal court ruling just days before the ban was scheduled to take effect. But while Minnesota was stopped from enforcing a total ban, the state may ultimately be allowed to pro ... ⌘ Read more

DEF CON Bans Meta-Style 'Pervert Glasses' DEF CON has banned "Meta-style glasses with recording capabilities," with no exceptions being made even for those with prescription versions. "Be sure to pack non-violating eyewear if you need them," DEF CON said. The Register reports: [The conference's official photo policy] has not been updated since 2023, predating the recent growth of camera-equipped eyewear developed by Meta with EssilorL ... ⌘ Read more

GrapheneOS Defends Data-Wiping Function That Blocked US Border Search GrapheneOS is defending its duress-password feature after an environmental activist used it to wipe his Pixel phone during a U.S. Customs search and was later indicted for allegedly destroying property under government control. The nonprofit says the operating system is "completely legal," cannot recover the erased data, and should not b ... ⌘ Read more

Review Roundup: Framework Laptop 13 Pro The review embargo has lifted for the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro, and the consensus across the board is that it is a massive leap forward in terms of build quality and battery life. The main issue reviewers complained about is the sky-high price, with the higher-end model jumping dramatically from $2,100 up to $2,900 due to the memory shortage crisis. (Some note that the price "nearly double ... ⌘ Read more

Tons of Peoples' Claude Chats and Creations Are Exposed On Google An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Claude is exposing a wealth of users' chats and creations in Google search results, meaning anyone can dig through conversations or other material that people used Claude to make but may not have realized were publicly available for strangers to see. The exposed data includes an AI-powered thera ... ⌘ Read more

Arizona State Launches Influencer Degree Where Students Must Gain Real Followers Arizona State University has launched a 120-credit bachelor's degree in content creation that teaches video, podcasting, branding, analytics, media law, and social strategy. For their capstone, students are "expected to build a real social media account and demonstrate audience growth during the program," reports De ... ⌘ Read more

Earth's Biggest Disasters Strike In a Hidden Pattern Every 27 Million Years A new analysis of 89 major geological events over the past 260 million years found evidence that mass extinctions, volcanic eruptions, ocean crises, and other upheavals may cluster around a roughly 27.5-million-year cycle. The cause remains unknown, with possibilities ranging from mantle activity and orbital changes to spe ... ⌘ Read more

A Missing Underscore Sent Innocent Man To Prison For 18 Months An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One missing underscore in a Skyrim-themed username put an innocent Nova Scotia man in prison for 18 months. A 2018 child-luring investigation, which began in Madison, Wisconsin, and eventually extended to Halifax, Canada, was based on a false premise. Police were looking for a man using the Kik me ... ⌘ Read more

Peacock to Be Included With YouTube Premium In Major Streaming Tie-Up YouTube Premium will include Peacock Premium at no extra charge beginning in early 2027. "The deal brings a slew of premium content to the [$15.99 per month] YouTube Premium subscription, including live sports like the NFL, NBA and MLB and entertainment like Law & Order, Saturday Night Live and Love Island," reports The Hollywood Repo ... ⌘ Read more

Amazon Trying to Launch a Global Satellite Cellphone Network In 2028 Amazon has asked the FCC to approve a 5,105-satellite constellation launching in 2028 that would provide global direct-to-cell "voice, messaging, data, and emergency services," similar to Starlink's partnership with T-Mobile. The network would use Globalstar spectrum, support future Apple satellite services, and complement Amazon's existi ... ⌘ Read more

Nvidia, Tech Giants Launch AI Safety Initiative wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Nvidia and a large group of technology, cybersecurity, and enterprise software companies have launched new initiative aimed at developing and sharing open source tools, models, and techniques for securing AI systems and agents. The new Open Secure AI Alliance aims to give defenders more open tools for testing, auditing and protecting AI m ... ⌘ Read more

Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency and LLM-Generated Code Projects Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Hackaday: Community-led open source project hosting site Codeberg has formally announced that projects whose code is largely or fully machine-generated through LLMs and other 'AI' tools will no longer be welcome. This follows on the heels of a similar ban on cryptocurrency-related projects. The ... ⌘ Read more

China Begins Mass Production of Homegrown DUV Chip Tools According to The Information (paywalled), a state-backed Shanghai company has begun mass-producing China's first homegrown immersion DUV lithography machines, with about five units expected this year for SMIC, Hua Hong, and CXMT. Roughly 20 more units are expected in 2027. Tom's Hardware reports: The Information didn't name the manufacturer, but its sources ... ⌘ Read more

ChatGPT Starts Blocking Direct Requests To Copy an Author's Style An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: OpenAI's ChatGPT is now refusing requests to generate text that directly mimics the style of famous authors. When asked to do so, the popular LLM instead offers a response that draws on the "broad qualities" of those authors "while remaining distinct in its own voice," for example. This morning, A ... ⌘ Read more

Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When AI Bubble Bursts MacRumors interviewed AI critic Ed Zitron, author of the Where's Your Ed At newsletter and host of the Better Offline podcast, about what could happen to Apple if the costly AI infrastructure boom collapses. Zitron argued that Apple is relatively well insulated because it has spent far less on data centers than rivals such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. He sai ... ⌘ Read more

Big Tech Accused of Stonewalling European Social Media Researchers European misinformation researchers say TikTok, X, and Meta are obstructing access to platform data required under the EU's Digital Services Act through rejections, restrictive quotas, costly APIs, and burdensome security demands. Although regulators have fined X and pushed platforms to improve access, researchers remain skeptical that the ch ... ⌘ Read more

Nvidia In Talks With OpenAI To Guarantee $250 Billion Financing For Data Center An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Nvidia is in talks to provide roughly $250 billion in financing guarantees for OpenAI as part of a massive data center project, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The backstop from Nvidia would help the ChatGPT maker lease a 10-gigawatt project that SoftBank's ... ⌘ Read more

'KVM Chainsaw' Expected to Hit Linux 7.3 For Dealing with 'God Data Structure' An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix:

A patch series that appears destined for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window is what's dubbed the "KVM Chainsaw" as a major code clean-up in dealing with the kvm_mmu "god data structure". Red Hat engineer and KVM maintainer Paolo Bonzini has merged the kvm-chainsaw br ... ⌘ Read more

A New Middle Class of Content Creators Is Quietly Quitting the 9-to-5 "The rise of TikTok, Instagram Reels and Amazon storefronts has created a new kind of white-collar exit strategy," reports Bloomberg. Workers ditch office jobs not to become celebrities, necessarily, "but to piece together an income online through brand deals, affiliate links and highly personal videos documenting everyday life."

In m ... ⌘ Read more

2.1 Million People View Leaked 'Odyssey' Bootleg on X Variety reports:

"The Odyssey" leaks have begun, as a high-quality bootleg of the film reached millions of people on X thanks to a viral tweet on July 25. At 2:25 p.m. PT, a post on X reading "Someone uploaded 'The Odyssey' full movie on X. Can you believe it?" amplified a message from a now-suspended account. The message included a high-quality version of the ... ⌘ Read more

'Inside the Dystopian World of Germany's Free Speech Crackdown' Thousands of Germans have been threatened with fines or prison sentences for social media posts, reports The Telegraph, calling the country's political speech laws "unusually stringent for an EU member state." One German had his home raided for calling a minister a "Schwachkopf [dummy]" while another was fined €2,000 (£1,700) for calling Friedrich Me ... ⌘ Read more

NASA Replaces ULA's Vulcan Centaur With SpaceX Falcon Heavy For Solar Storm Research There's been a change to NASA's launch of six satellites for solar storms research. Space.com reports that those satellites "were originally slated to lift off on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket but have now been assigned a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, according to a NASA mission update."

[NASA's ... ⌘ Read more

Apple's Smart Glasses Delayed, As Engineers Consider Privacy Concerns Digital Trends reports:

Apple could unveil its first smart glasses at WWDC in June 2027, followed by a consumer release toward the end of the year, according to Bloomberg... Part of the delay reportedly stems from Apple's engineering and marketing teams spending more time refining the product and deciding how to address the privacy conc ... ⌘ Read more

Google's Anti-search-scraping Lawsuit Dismissed A U.S. district court "has dismissed Google's case against SerpApi over that company's scraping of search results to train AI models," reports Computerworld. Google had claimed that it was protecting copyright holders — and that SerpApi's actions breached America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA):

[Google] made two claims: first, that no person shall circumvent a technol ... ⌘ Read more

Wildfires, Evacuations, and Smoke Hit Europe and North America 270,000 people have been displaced by wildfires in France and Spain, reports the Guardian. A wildfire even forced evacuations in Scotland.

And wildfires "have now scorched four million acres of land in the U.S.," reports NPR, as tens of millions of people in North America "are continuing to endure hazardous smoke from out of control wildfires burning a ... ⌘ Read more

AI-Equipped Garbage Trucks Could Soon Start Spying On People in the US America's garbage trucks can do more than just collect trash, reports Newsweek. They may also help identify code violations using AI.

Officials in Cape Coral, Florida, recently considered equipping sanitation trucks with AI-powered cameras that would photograph properties as crews complete their normal collection routes. The system w ... ⌘ Read more

Is Huawei Building Its Own DRAM Fab? From the site tech-news site XDA Developers:

The consumer tech economy needs more DRAM manufacturers, and it needs them more urgently than perhaps at any point in its history. Anyone keeping track of the pricing trends will know that memory prices have climbed into the stratosphere on the back of AI infrastructure's relentless demand, and every consumer device that depends on RAM has traveled from ... ⌘ Read more

Three Astronauts Safely Return from Space Station, Landing in Kazakhstan Steppe "Welcome home!" NASA posted on X.com, sharing footage of a successful "parachute-assisted" landing on a Kazakhstan steppe for the Soyuz MS-28, carrying three astronauts who'd spent 241 days on the International Space Station. (And YouTube has a full two-hour video with NASA's coverage of the landing.)

A NASA web p ... ⌘ Read more

Typo-Squatting Scammers Con South Carolina Town Out of $545K It started with some underground utility work for the South Carolina town of Surfside Beach (population: 4,155). "Public records confirm that a payment of $545,598.30 was issued," according to a local news station — but the CEO of Wildcat Contractors "stated that the account that received the money is a scammer account and that his company has an overdue i ... ⌘ Read more

A Promising Process For Nuclear Fuel Re-use and Disposal? A Canadian lab has run a chemical process on real spent nuclear fuel "and pulled out 90% of the long-lived danger in 24 hours, the part that forces a burial site to last 100,000 years," notes the blog Autonocio, "with the leftovers meant to fuel a reactor."

The standard plan for spent nuclear fuel is to wait it out. You pull the used bundles from a reactor, si ... ⌘ Read more

Comic-Con 2026 Debuts Trailers for 'Coyote vs Acme' Movie, Plus 'Neuromancer' and 'Blade Runner 2099' Series Big news from Comic-Con 2026:

"Coyote vs. ACME" debuted its long-awaited final trailer. CNET calls it "an animation-meets-live-action story," with the Coyote catapulting into theaters this August 28. (The film began development back in 2018, but was shelved ... ⌘ Read more

32 of 35 Students Caught Using Hilariously Wrong AI-Generated Answers for Professor's Midterm "32 of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response," history professor Jason Gibson says in a viral video shared over 10 million times. "And apparently, they didn't proofread it." The instructions included a ... ⌘ Read more

Firefox' New Tab Page Will Get Widgets - Including an AI-Powered Daily Crossword In a sign of the times, Firefox's New Tab page could soon include a crossword puzzle from AI-powered news platform Particle. The blog OMG Ubuntu reports:

The mini crossword game is updated daily, with puzzles based around recent content Particle's AI has ingested and summarised that day. [After solving the crosswo ... ⌘ Read more

Did Virginia Regulators Downplay Data Center Health Concerns? Politico reports that in the Virginia area alone there's dozens of data center projects "that altogether need 70 gigawatts of power — equivalent to 70 nuclear plants" — currently seeking connection to their grid. But there's also concerns about a Virginia data center powered with natural gas and backup diesel generators:

When Virginia's top environ ... ⌘ Read more

Drying Lakebeds Are Releasing Massive Amounts of Carbon, Study Finds "In many parts of the world, lakes are drying out at a scale so massive that scientists are warning they may be emitting enough greenhouse gases to rival our fossil fuel habit," reports ScienceAlert:

In a new study published in Science, scientists say the Aral Sea — the world's largest desiccated lake — has emitted a whopping 204 megaton ... ⌘ Read more

Hyundai Claims Humanoid Robot Plan Is Not Part of Talks With Striking Workers Ars Technica reports:

Hyundai Motor Company's plan to put humanoid robots to work by 2028 is not part of current negotiations with striking South Korean autoworkers, according to the company.

The automaker is disputing news reports that partial labor strikes by the Hyundai Motor union at the world's largest automot ... ⌘ Read more

Amazon Cracks Down On Use of AI Images By Sellers CNBC reports:

Amazon is requiring that third-party sellers label any product images or videos that contain "AI-generated people" after New York recently passed a law mandating greater transparency around "synthetic performers" in ads... The policy directs sellers to tag images [and videos or other graphics on listing pages] with specific metadata keywords before they're uploade ... ⌘ Read more

Top Online Sites Debate Cutting Off Google's Crawlers Futurism reports:

[Some online publications] are now debating whether to cut Google off entirely, as the Wall Street Journal reports, illustrating an increasingly fraught relationship between the tech giant and the publishers that are creating content its AI models are regurgitating. According to the newspaper, prominent outlets including USA Today, Politico, the Eco ... ⌘ Read more

China is Creating a Herd of 100 Elite Yak Clones CNN reports on yaks "designed and cloned" in secretive, high-altitude labs in Tibet — 2.4 miles (4,000 meters) above sea level. They're a critical part of the local economy, and researchers "hope to create an 'elite' herd of super-yaks, healthier and more fertile than their predecessors."

Both domestic yaks and their wild cousins have been facing threats for years, with som ... ⌘ Read more

Facebook Offers a Verification System Certifying to Other Users That You're a Real Human Facebook announced Friday they're launching a badge "that verifies there's a real person behind a profile".

"You record a short video selfie, which we check against your existing profile photos to confirm a match. The process is free and typically takes just a few minutes. Accounts must meet our trus ... ⌘ Read more

Risks of Parkinson's Disease May Increase With Prolonged Exposure to Road Traffic Noise A large Danish study found a modest but consistent association between long-term road traffic noise exposure and higher Parkinson's disease risk, with a 3% increase for every 11.5 dB rise in noise at the most exposed side of a home. The Guardian reports: The researchers modeled noise exposure at the ... ⌘ Read more

Trump Threatens New Tariffs Against EU Over Google Fine President Trump threatened a "substantial" new tariff on the European Union after Brussels fined Google more than $1 billion over alleged illegal trade practices. "The European Union will pay a very big price for this illegal and highly unethical conduct, which I have consistently warned them about," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "The penalties will be entirely reve ... ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.14 Released Wine 11.14 is out with initial WoW64 mode support on FreeBSD, allowing 32-bit Windows applications to run on a 64-bit system without relying on 32-bit multilib support. The release also adds Start Menu icon support in Wine Explorer, 7.1 format conversions in DirectSound, AES-GMAC support in BCrypt, and 21 bug fixes affecting apps and games including Adobe Reader, Heroes of the Storm, and Age of Empires I and II. Additional details can b ... ⌘ Read more

SpaceX's Starship Megarocket Hits Key Milestones In Its 'Lucky 13' Test Flight SpaceX's Friday launch of its massive Starship rocket "went quite smoothly," reports CNN, with a SpaceX spokesperson calling this mission "Lucky Number 13" (as the 13th integrated flight test for a Starship spacecraft with a Super Heavy rocket booster):

During Starship V3's inaugural test, there were numerous engine i ... ⌘ Read more

OpenAI's Rogue Agent Went Unnoticed For a Week An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The OpenAI agent that broke into tech firm Hugging Face went on a dayslong hacking spree that OpenAI didn't notice until well after the threat was contained and the FBI was alerted, according to people familiar with the investigation. The agent -- a program capable of making decisions and executing complex tasks with little or no huma ... ⌘ Read more

Instagram Is Now Banning Pickup Artists, Pranksters Who Use Meta Glasses Instagram is banning videos filmed with Meta smart glasses that harass strangers in public, including prank videos targeting service workers and pickup-artist clips of women who may not realize they are being recorded. "If you're posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line ... ⌘ Read more

Paramount Agrees to Postpone Warner Bros. Merger Until June 2027 Paramount Skydance has agreed to postpone its $111 billion Warner Bros. Discovery merger until five days after an antitrust trial or June 1, 2027, whichever comes first. The agreement with a 12-state coalition led by California effectively shelves the deal for months while states argue it would reduce competition in cable and theatrical markets. Va ... ⌘ Read more

US Accuses American of Allegedly Wiping His Phone Using a 'Duress' Password During Border Search An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Justice Department is prosecuting an American for allegedly providing U.S. border authorities with a passcode that wiped the contents of his phone, according to an indictment and media reports. This is thought to be the first ... ⌘ Read more

Roku Raises Prices of Streaming Devices By Up To 60% Roku has raised prices on several streaming devices, blaming memory and component shortages tied to the AI data-center boom. The Roku Ultra jumped from $100 to $150 and the basic Streaming Stick rose from $30 to $40. The Desk reports: In a phone call with The Desk on Friday, a Roku executive said the company made the tough decision to raise prices on its streaming hardwa ... ⌘ Read more

Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta Warn Against 'Premature Restrictions' of Open-Weight Models Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, and more than 20 other tech companies signed an open letter urging policymakers not to impose "premature restrictions" on open-weight AI models, warning that broad limits could "stifle competition or drive innovation overseas." CNBC reports: They wrote that open-weight models st ... ⌘ Read more

Anthropic's New Opus 5 Model Rivals Fable 5 For Half the Price Anthropic has released Opus 5, a new Claude model that it says comes close to its higher-end Fable 5 model at half the price while improving on Opus 4.8 in knowledge work, coding, and scientific research tasks. "At the same time, Anthropic says it has managed to make the model more resistant to being tricked," notes Engadget. Additionally, the company says ... ⌘ Read more

John C. Dvorak, an Early and Influential Technology Journalist, Dies At 80 Longtime Slashdot reader sandbagger shares the passing of John C. Dvorak, an early and influential technology journalist for PC Magazine. He was 80. Talking Biz News reports: Aric Mackey writes, "Widely recognized for his profound impact on the technology industry, John's career spanned decades of rapid digital evolution. He was ... ⌘ Read more

Stripe Eyes $10 Billion Deal For AI Model Marketplace OpenRouter An anonymous reader quotes a report from PYMNTS.com: Stripe is in talks to buy OpenRouter, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that could sell for roughly $10 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. The move would mark a significant step outside payments for a company that processes transactions for much of the internet. It also lands while ... ⌘ Read more

Astronomers May Have Discovered First Moon Outside Our Solar System Astronomers studying the star system CD-35 2722 may have found the first known moon-like object outside our solar system. The classification is unusually tricky, however, because it orbits a brown dwarf rather than a planet, making it clearly an "exosatellite" but forcing scientists to rethink where the line between planet, moon, and fai ... ⌘ Read more

Humans Can Learn To Echolocate In Just 10 Weeks, and It Rewires the Brain alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A study published in PLOS One in 2021 by researchers from Durham University in the UK showed that with 10 weeks of training, both blind and sighted people could learn to echolocate using verbal clicks. While the technique is already used by a number of people with impaired v ... ⌘ Read more

World's First Wave Power Generator Receives Certification For Regular Use "The Norwegian certification agency DNV has certified the commercial wave-driven power generator Corpower C4 for regular use," writes Longtime Slashdot reader Qbertino. "German news site heise.de has a detailed write-up. See a CGI video of the power station and its internals, as well as the company's website [at their respec ... ⌘ Read more

Google Adds Selfie Video As a Log-In Option An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: You'll now be able to use selfie videos to log into your Google account. It has long been possible to log into Google using your face, via your phone's face unlock or if your passkey login uses biometrics for verification. This is yet another option to get into your account using your face to authenticate your identity, which could be esp ... ⌘ Read more

Oracle Signs 10-Year Software Contract With Pentagon Worth Up To $7 Billion Oracle has signed a 10-year Pentagon contract worth up to $7 billion to provide on-premises software, licenses, maintenance, and consulting for branches of the military. CNBC reports: The contract covers the use of Oracle software in on-premises data centers for branches of the military, the U.S. intelligence community ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Responds to LG Monitors Installing McAfee Ads On Windows LG is removing a McAfee pop-up ad from its LG Monitor App Installer after criticism that some LG monitors were silently installing the app through Windows Update and showing ads on every boot. Microsoft says LG agreed to disable the McAfee pop-up, but the broader issue remains: Windows allows certain peripheral companion apps to install autom ... ⌘ Read more

EV Batteries Defy Expectations, Last Hundreds of Thousands of Miles 247,000 miles on an EV battery? So says the owner of a U.K.-based used-car sales company that specializes in Evs, who tells the Wall Street Journal EV batteries keep performing well even after several hundred thousand miles. "They are proving themselves to be exceptionally reliable."

After five years on the road, the average EV will still b ... ⌘ Read more

Hobbit-like Humans May Have Scavenged Komodo Dragons' Leftovers to Survive CNN reports:

Prehistoric human relatives, nicknamed "hobbits" due to their short stature, may have been scavengers, rather than skilled hunters capable of taking down big game or building cooking fires, according to new research. The study adds to growing evidence that Homo floresiensis, which had a brain only slightl ... ⌘ Read more

New Google Ad Imagines America's 'Declaration of Independence' Written With AI Help An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:

Two hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a new commercial from Google asks: What if the Founding Fathers had access to Google Workspace? With the tagline "Group project, but make it 1776," the ad depicts a large ... ⌘ Read more

Are Wars Blurring Lines Between Corporate and National Security? Subsea cables. Ukrainian power stations. Russian oil refineries. Even airports, water-desalination plants and Amazon data centers.

They've all become targets in wartime, notes the Wall Street Journal, and around the world now arguments "are already brewing between companies and governments over new regulations and potential costs."

In Germany, po ... ⌘ Read more

New DNA Tech Identifies Soldier Killed in America's Revolution in 1780 South Carolina's pine forests "have spent centuries hiding a secret as old as America itself," reports CBS News:

In August 1780, British and American soldiers clashed there, leading to a terrible defeat for the Continental army [fighting for the 13 colonies rebelling against England]. Battlefield archaeologists Jim Legg and Steve Smi ... ⌘ Read more

842,000 American Households Lost Power Today During a Heatwave As America began celebrating its 250th birthday Saturday, 842,000 homes reported power outages, notes ABC News. Figures from tracking site PowerOutage showed states in America's Northeast and Midwest were impacted by severe weather and extreme heat.

That number, which will fluctuate throughout the day as crews work to restore power, is for households ... ⌘ Read more

Did Microsoft Shift Its Profits to Low-Tax Countries? Microsoft is apparently shifting its profits to countries with low taxes — and out of countries where they have many more employees and significant sales. Back in 2005 Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer even said that a low corporate tax rate "is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland," remembers long-time Slashdot reader theodp. (Ballmer added "It wo ... ⌘ Read more

FSF Shares Update on 'LibrePhone' and New Automated Site Monitoring Tool At the end of 2025, the FSF launched LibrePhone project, which is working to "better understand and reverse-engineer the nonfree blobs used by a great majority of (if not all) system on a chip designs available today." The FSF's summer newsletter shares this update:

We started with researching the proprietary files in Android phone ... ⌘ Read more

AOL's Owner Bending Spoons Hits Wall Street with $1.7 billion IPO "The owner of AOL and other tech businesses hit Wall Street with a $1.7 billion initial public offering Wednesday," reports the Associated Press:

The company is getting $1 billion in proceeds, while the rest is going to shareholders. The stock surged 39.7% in its first day of trading under the symbol "BSP" on the Nasdaq, giving it a market value of $2 ... ⌘ Read more

EchoStar's US Satellite Pay-TV Provider Dish DBS Files for Bankruptcy EchoStar's satellite pay-TV unit Dish DBS has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, reports Reuters. The move also applies to its wireless subsidiaries, according to the article, and "facilitates the wind-down of Dish Wireless's 5G network operations following an unexpected delay in a spectrum license sale to AT&T... unde ... ⌘ Read more

Decades-Old Bash Tricks Expose AI Coding Agents To Supply Chain Attacks Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: AI security researchers have uncovered a structural security flaw dubbed GuardFall that allows decades-old Bash shell tricks to bypass safeguards in most open source AI coding agents. By exploiting shell behaviors such as quote removal and variable expansion, attackers can hide malicious commands ... ⌘ Read more

What Is a Quantum Computer Good For? Absolutely Nothing - Yet The Verge argues that researchers "have made genuine progress in quantum computing — it's just been largely incremental and too esoteric to immediately capture the public's imagination."

And there are predictions that quantum computers will finally do something useful as soon as 2028:

The drama can overshadow the real progress in quantum computing. ... ⌘ Read more

Startup Targets Datacenters With 3D-Printed Nuclear Reactor Module Startup Ampera has unveiled what it calls the first 3D-printed nuclear reactor module, built around a silicon-carbide core and pressure vessel designed for a thorium-based microreactor. The company says future systems could deliver 15 or 30 megawatts for up to 30 years without refueling. When The Register asked about availability, their s ... ⌘ Read more

Video Game History Foundation Says Piracy Remains the Only Viable Preservation Method An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechSpot: Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi recently supported claims that piracy is the only effective way to preserve video games. The comments lay the blame squarely on game companies' refusal to keep legacy content available or allow archivis ... ⌘ Read more

Alibaba To Ban Claude Code In Workplace Over Alleged Backdoor Risks Alibaba has reportedly banned employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code and directed them to its own Qoder platform amid a growing dispute over features that can help identify China-linked users. Reuters reports: The ban is part of a deepening spat between the two companies after Anthropic accused Alibaba of illicitly extracting its Claude AI ... ⌘ Read more