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That leak of Claude Code's source code "revealed "all kinds of juicy details," writes PC World. The more than 500,000 lines of code included: - An 'undercover mode' for Claude that allows it to make 'stealth' contributions to public code bases- An 'always-on' agent for Claude Code- A Tamagotchi-style 'Buddy' for Claude "But one of the stranger bits discovered in the leak is that Claude Code is actively watching our chat messages for words and phrases - including f-bombs and other curses - that serve as signs of user frustration."Specifically, Claude Code includes a file called "userPromptKeywords.ts" with a simple pattern-matching tool called regex, which sweeps each and every message submitted to Claude for certain text matches. In this particular case, the regex pattern is watching for "wtf," "wth," "omfg," "dumbass," "horrible," "awful," "piece of - -" (insert your favorite four-letter word for that one), "f - you," "screw this," "this sucks," and several other colorful metaphors... While the Claude Code leak revealed the existence of the "frustration words" regex, it doesn't give any indication of why Claude Code is scouring messages for these words or what it's doing with them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hundreds of theatres are now showing a new documentary called The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist. Variety calls it "playful and heady,"edited "with a spirit of ADHD alertness." The New York Times suggests it "tries to cover so much that it ends up being more confusing than clarifying, but parts are fascinating." But the Los Angeles Times calls it an "aggravating soup of information and opinion that wants to move at the speed of machine thought." So while co-director Daniel Roher asks whether he should bring a child into a world with AI, "Perhaps more urgently, should Roher have made an AI doc that treats us like children?"First, he parades all the safety doomers, seeming to believe their warnings that an unfeeling superintelligence is upon us and we can't trust it. Then, sufficiently disturbed, he hauls in the AI cheerleaders, a suspiciously positive gang who can envision only medical miracles and grindless lives in which we're all full-time artists. Only then, after this simplistic setup where platitudes reign, do we get the section in which the subject is treated like the brave (and grave) new world it is: geopolitically fraught, economically tenuous and a playground for billionaires. Why couldn't the complexity have been the dialogue from the beginning, instead of the play-dumb cartoon "The AI Doc" feels like for so long? Maybe Roher believes this is what our increasingly gullible, truth-challenged citizenry needs from an explanatory doc: a flashy, kindhearted reminder that we're the change we need to be. Read more reactions here and here. Mashable warns the documentary's director "will ultimately craft a journey that feels like a panic attack in real time. In the end, you may not feel better about mankind's chances against the rise of AI. But you'll likely feel less helpless in the future before us all." They also point out that the film "shares some ways its audience can more actively be apart of the conversation, and provides a link to the film's website for engagement," where 6,948 people have now signed up for its newsletter. ("Demand a seat at the table," urges its signup button, under a warning that "Government and AI companies are designing our future without us. We need to reclaim our voice in shaping the future of AI...")Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meet the "journalist" who "uploads press releases or analyst notes into AI tools and prompts them to spit out articles that he can edit and publish quickly," according to the Wall Street Journal. "AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune's web traffic in the second half of 2025." And most were written by 42-year-old Nick Lichtenberg, who has now written over 600 AI-assisted stories, producing "more stories in six months than any of his colleagues at Fortune delivered in a year." One Wednesday in February, he cranked out seven. "I'm a bit of a freak," Lichtenberg said... A story by Lichtenberg sometimes starts with a prompt entered into Perplexity or Google's NotebookLM, asking it to write something based on a headline he comes up with. He moves the AI tools' initial drafts into a content-management system and edits the stories before publishing them for Fortune's readers... A piece from earlier that morning about Josh D'Amaro being named Disney CEO took 10 minutes to get online, he said... Like other journalists, Lichtenberg vets his stories. He refers back to the original documents to confirm the information he's reporting is correct. He reaches out to companies for comment. But he admits his process isn't as thorough as that of magazine fact-checkers. While Lichtenberg started out saying his stories were co-authored with "Fortune Intelligence", he now typically signs his own name, according to the article, "because he feels the work is mostly his own." (Though his stories "sometimes" disclose generative AI was used as a research tool...) The article asks with he could be "a bellwether for where much of the media business is headed..." "Much of the content people now consume online is generated by artificial intelligence, with some 9% of newly published newspaper articles either partially or fully AI-generated, according to a 2025 study led by the University of Maryland. The number of AI-generated articles on the web surpassed human-written ones in late 2024, according to research and marketing agency Graphite."Some executives have made full-throated declarations about the threat posed by AI. New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said AI "is almost certainly going to usher in an unprecedented torrent of crap," referencing deepfakes as an example. The NewsGuild of New York, the union representing Fortune employees and journalists at other media outlets, said the people are what makes journalism so powerful. "You simply can't replicate lived experiences, human judgment and expertise," said president Susan DeCarava. For Chris Quinn, the editor of local publications Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer, AI tools have helped tame other torrents facing the industry. AI has allowed the outlets to cover counties in Ohio that otherwise might go ignored by scraping information from local websites and sending "tips" to reporters, he said. It has also edited stories and written first drafts so the newsrooms' journalists can focus on the calls, research and reporting needed for their stories.... Newsrooms from the New York Times to The Wall Street Journal are deploying AI in various ways to help reporters and editors work more efficiently.... Not all newsrooms disclose their use of AI, and in some cases have rolled out new tools that resulted in errors or PR gaffes. An October study from the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC, which relied on professional journalists to evaluate the news integrity of more than 3,000 AI responses, found that almost half of all AI responses had at least one significant issue. Last week the New York Times even issued a correction when a freelance book reviewer using an AI tool unknowingly included "language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in The Guardian." But it was actually "the second time in a few days that the Times was called out for potential AI plagiarism," according to the American journalist writing The Handbasket newsletter.We must stem the idea being pushed by tech companies and their billionaire funders who've sunk too much into their products to admit defeat that the infiltration of AI into journalism is inevitable; because from my perch as an independent journalist, it simply is not... Some AI-loving journalists appear to believe that if they're clear enough with the AI program they're using, it will truly understand what they're seeking and not just do what it's made to do: steal shit... If you want to work with machines, get a job that requires it. There are a whole lot more of those than there are writing jobs, so free up space for people who actually want to do the work. You're not doing the world a favor by gifting it your human/AI hybrid. Journalism will not miss you if you leave... But meanwhile, USA Today recently tried hiring for a new position: AI-Assisted reporter. (The lucky reporter will "support the launch and scaling of AI-assisted local journalism in a major U.S. metro," working with tools including Copilot and Perplexity, pioneering possible future expansions and "AI-enabled newsroom operations that support and augment human-led journalism.") And Google is already sponsoring a "publishing innovation award"...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One crime ring scammed 2,000 elderly people of more than $27 million between 2021 and 2023 using tech support/bank impersonation/refund scams. "Victims were in their 70s and 80s," reports the U.S. Attorney's office for California's southern district. Victims were first told they'd received a refund (either online or via phone), but then told they'd been "over-refunded" a massive amount, and asked to return that amount. But 42-year-old Jiandong Chen just admitted Thursday in a U.S. federal court that he was involved in the fraud and money laundering via cryptocurrency - pleading guilty to two charges with maximum penalties of 40 years in prison and a $1 million fine, plus 20 years in prison with a maximum fine of $500,000 or twice the amount laundered. "Chen, a Chinese national, is the second defendant charged in a five-defendant indictment." And what tripped him up seems to be that "Certain members of the conspiracy also did in-person pickups of money directly from victims..." And so YouTube enters the story - when the scammers called pranksters with 1,790,000 subscribers to their "Trilogy Media" channel. In an elaborate three-hour video, the team of pranksters lured the scammer to a rented Airbnb where they're staging a fake funeral with a nun. (One of the men acting in the video remembers "we start doing a prayer... I'm holding the scammer's hand in my nun outfit...") They convince the scammer to collect the cash from a dead man - "Is there anything you'd like to say to him?" Then there's demon voices. The scammer's victim resurrects from the dead. Did the cash mule bring holy water? The end result was a video titled "CONFRONTING SCAMMERS WITH A FAKE FUNERAL (EPIC REACTIONS)". But two and a half years later, their "cash mule sting house" video has racked up over 1.3 million views, 22,000 likes, and 2,979 comments. ("This video is longer than Oppenheimer. Thanks for the laughs fellas.") And the scammer is facing 60 years in prison.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 days ago Apple launched device-level age restrictions in the U.K. There were some glitches, reports the blog 9to5Mac.For me, the experience was an entirely painless one, taking less than 30 seconds. All I had to do was tap a confirm and continue button, and Apple told me that the length of time I'd had an Apple account was used to confirm that I'm 18+. Others, however, experienced difficulties with the process timing out or failing to complete. We summarized some of the steps you can take to try to address this. Apple has since listed additional acceptable ways to verify your age. "You can confirm your age with a credit card, or by scanning a driver's license or one of the following PASS-accredited Proof of Age cards: CitizenCard, My ID Card, TOTUM ID card, or Young Scot National Entitlement Card." If you don't verify your age, then you'll be treated as a child or teenager, meaning that both the web content filter and communication safety features are switched on. Apple is continuing the roll-out in Singapore (population 6 million) and South Korea (population 52 million), the article points out, citing a new Apple support document. South Korea's law actually requires Apple to re-verify someone's age annually.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Google has announced that it's currently testing a new feature for Chrome 148 that could speed up day-to-day browsing," reports PC World:[T]he browser can intelligently postpone the loading of certain elements. Why load all images at the start when it can instead load images as you get close to them while scrolling? Chrome and Chromium-based browsers have had built-in lazy loading support for images and iframes since 2019, but this feature would make browsers capable of lazy loading video and audio elements, too. Note, however, that this won't benefit YouTube video embeds - those are already lazy loadable since they're embedded using iframes. Actual video and audio elements are rarer but not uncommon. In addition to Chrome, lazy loading of video and audio elements is also expected to be added to other Chromium-based browsers, including Microsoft Edge and Vivaldi.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plants, toads, and mushrooms "can all produce psychedelic substances," writes ScienceAlert. "And now their powers have been combined in one plant."[S]cientists have taken the genes these organisms use to make five natural psychedelics and introduced them into a tobacco plant ( Nicotiana benthamiana), which then produced all five compounds simultaneously. As interest grows in psychedelics as potential treatments for illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD, the newly developed system could offer scientists a new way to produce these compounds for research purposes... [P]rogress in this field remains limited, in part due to regulatory restrictions, underscoring the need for more research. This creates practical challenges for scientists. "Traditionally, the supply of psychedelics relies on natural producers, mainly plants, fungi, and the Sonoran Desert toad," the researchers write. "Harvesting these organisms for their psychoactive compounds raises ecological and ethical concerns, being increasingly threatened by habitat loss and overexploitation..." [T]he team carefully monitored the plant's production of five psychedelic tryptamines: DMT originally from plants; psilocin and psilocybin from mushrooms; and bufotenin and 5-MeO-DMT from toads. The modified tobacco plants were found to produce all five compounds simultaneously. The article points out that the researchers "also took it a step further." By tweaking the enzymes they were able to "produce modified versions of the compounds that do not naturally occur in plants, and which may also have therapeutic value."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Canonical is no longer pretending that 4GB is enough," writes the blog How-to-Geek, noting Ubuntu 26.04 LTS "raises the baseline memory to 6GB, alongside a 2GHz dual-core processor, and 25GB of storage..."Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) set the floor at 1GB - a modest ask when it launched more than a decade ago in 2014. Then came the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) that pushed the number to 4GB, surviving quite well in the era of 16GB being considered standard for mid-range laptops.... Ubuntu's new minimum requirement lands in an interesting spot when compared against Windows 11. Microsoft's operating system requires just 4GB RAM, although real-world usage often tells a different story. Usually, 8GB is considered the sweet spot to handle modern apps and multitasking. The blog OMG Ubuntu argues this change is "not because Ubuntu requires 2GB more memory than it did, but more the way we compute does."it's more of an honesty bump. Components that make up the distro - the GNOME desktop and extensions, modern web browsers (and the sites we load in them) and the kinds of apps we use (and keep running) whilst multitasking are more demanding... The Resolute Raccoon's memory requirements better reflect real-world multitasking. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS can be installed on devices with less than 6GB RAM (but not less than 25GB of disk space). The experience may not be as smooth or as responsive as developers intend (so you don't get to complain), but it will work. I installed Ubuntu 26.04 Beta on a laptop with just 2 GB of memory - slow to the point of frustration in use, but otherwise functional. If you have a device with 4 GB RAM and you can't upgrade (soldered memory is a thing, and e-waste can be avoided), then alternatives exist. Many Ubuntu flavours, like Lubuntu, have lower system requirements than the main edition. Plus, there's always the manual option using the Ubuntu netboot installer to install a base system and then built out a more minimal system from there.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's 50th anniversary got celebrated in weird and wild ways. CEO Tim Cook posted a special 30-second video rewinding backwards through the years of Apple's products until it reaches the Apple I. Podcaster Lex Fridman noticed if you play the sound in reverse, "It's the Think Different ad music, pitched up." TechRadar played seven 50-year-old Apple I games on an emulator, including Star Trek, Blackjack, Lunar Lander, and of course, Conway's Game of Life. And Macworld ranked Apple's 50 most influential people. (Their top five?) 5. Tony Fadell (iPhone co-creator/"father of the iPod")4. Sir Jony Ive3. Steve Wozniak2. Tim Cook1. Steve Jobs One of the most thoughtful celebraters was David Pogue, who's spent 42 years of writing about Apple (starting as a MacWorld columnist and the author of Mac for Dummies, one of the first "...For Dummies" books ever published in the early 1990s.) Now 63 years old, Pogue spent the last two years working on a 608-page hardcover book titled Apple: The First 50 Years. But on his Substack Pogue, contemplated his own history with the company - including several interactions with Steve Jobs. Pogue remembers how Jobs "hated open systems. He wanted to make self-contained, beautiful machines. He didn't want them polluted by modifications." The tech blog Daring Fireball notes that Pogue actually interviewed Scott Forstall (who'd led the iPhone's software development team) for his new book, "and got this story, about just how far Steve Jobs thought Apple could go to expand the iPhone's software library while not opening it to third-party developers.""I want you to make a list of every app any customer would ever want to use," he told Forstall. "And then the two of us will prioritize that list. And then I'm going to write you a blank check, and you are going to build the largest development team in the history of the world, to build as many apps as you can as quickly as possible." Forstall, dubious, began composing a list. But on the side, he instructed his engineers to build the security foundations of an app store into the iPhone's software-"against Steve's knowledge and wishes," Forstall says. [...] Two weeks after the iPhone's release, someone figured out how to "jailbreak" the iPhone: to hack it so that they could install custom apps. Jobs burst into Forstall's office. "You have to shut this down!" But Forstall didn't see the harm of developers spending their efforts making the iPhone better. "If they add something malicious, we'll ship an update tomorrow to protect against that. But if all they're doing is adding apps that are useful, there's no reason to break that." Jobs, troubled, reluctantly agreed. Week by week, more cool apps arrived, available only to jailbroken phones. One day in October, Jobs read an article about some of the coolest ones. "You know what?" he said. "We should build an app store." Forstall, delighted, revealed his secret plan. He had followed in the footsteps of Burrell Smith (the Mac's memory-expansion circuit) and Bob Belleville (the Sony floppy-drive deal): He'd disobeyed Jobs and wound up saving the project. In fact, the book "includes new interviews with 150 key people who made the journey, including Steve Wozniak, John Sculley, Jony Ive, and many current designers, engineers, and executives" (according to its description on Amazon). Pogue's book even revisits the story of Steve Jobs proving an iPod prototype could be smaller by tossing it into an aquarium, shouting "If there's air bubbles in there, there's still room. Make it smaller!" But Pogue's book "added that there's a caveat to this compelling bit of Apple lore," reports NPR. "It never actually happened. It's just one more Apple myth."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Hackers briefly turned a widely trusted developer tool into a vehicle for credential-stealing malware that could give attackers ongoing access to infected systems," the news site Axios.com reported Tuesday, citing security researchers at Google. The compromised package - also named axios - simplifies HTTP requests, and reportedly receives millions of downloads each day: The malicious versions were removed within roughly three hours of being published, but Google warned the incident could have "far-reaching impacts" given the package's widespread use, according to John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group. Wiz estimates Axios is downloaded roughly 100 million times per week and is present in about 80% of cloud and code environments. So far, Wiz has observed the malicious versions in roughly 3% of the environments it has scanned. Friday PCMag notes the maintainer's compromised account had two-factor authentication enabled, with the breach ultimately traced "to an elaborate AI deepfake from suspected North Korean hackers that was convincing enough to trick a developer into installing malware," according to a post-mortem published Thursday by lead developer Jason Saayman:[Saayman] fell for a scheme from a North Korean hacking group, dubbed UNC1069, which involves sending out phishing messages and then hosting virtual meetings that use AI deepfakes to clone the face and voices of real executives. The virtual meetings will then create the impression of an audio problem, which can only be "solved" if the victim installs some software or runs a troubleshooting command. In reality, it's an effort to execute malware. The North Koreans have been using the tactic repeatedly, whether it be to phish cryptocurrency firms or to secure jobs from IT companies. Saayman said he faced a similar playbook. "They reached out masquerading as the founder of a company, they had cloned the company's founders likeness as well as the company itself," he wrote. "They then invited me to a real Slack workspace. This workspace was branded... The Slack was thought out very well, they had channels where they were sharing LinkedIn posts. The LinkedIn posts I presume just went to the real company's account, but it was super convincing etc." The hackers then invited him to a virtual meeting on Microsoft Teams. "The meeting had what seemed to be a group of people that were involved. The meeting said something on my system was out of date. I installed the missing item as I presumed it was something to do with Teams, and this was the remote access Trojan," he added. "Everything was extremely well coordinated, looked legit and was done in a professional manner." Friday developer security platform Socket wrote that several more maintainers in the Node.js ecosystem "have come out of the woodwork to report that they were targeted by the same social engineering campaign."The accounts now span some of the most widely depended-upon packages in the npm registry and Node.js core itself, and together they confirm that axios was not a one-off target. It was part of a coordinated, scalable attack pattern aimed at high-trust, high-impact open source maintainers. Attackers also targeted several Socket engineers, including CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross is the creator of WebTorrent, StandardJS, buffer, and dozens of widely used npm packages with billions of downloads... Commenting on the axios post-mortem thread, he noted that this type of targeting [against individual maintainers] is no longer unusual... "We're seeing them across the ecosystem and they're only accelerating." Jordan Harband, John-David Dalton, and other Socket engineers also confirmed they were targeted. Harband, a TC39 member, maintains hundreds of ECMAScript polyfills and shims that are foundational to the JavaScript ecosystem. Dalton is the creator of Lodash, which sees more than 137 million weekly downloads on npm. Between them, the packages they maintain are downloaded billions of times each month. Wes Todd, an Express TC member and member of the Node Package Maintenance Working Group, also confirmed he was targeted. Matteo Collina, co-founder and CTO of Platformatic, Node.js Technical Steering Committee Chair, and lead maintainer of Fastify, Pino, and Undici, disclosed on April 2 that he was also targeted. His packages also see billion downloads per year... Scott Motte, creator of dotenv, the package used by virtually every Node.js project that handles environment variables, with more than 114 million weekly downloads, also confirmed he was targeted using the same Openfort persona. Socket reports that another maintainer was targetted with an invitation to appear on a podcast. (During the recording a suspicious technical issue appeared which required a software fix to resolve....) Even just technical implementation, "This is among the most operationally sophisticated supply chain attacks ever documented against a top-10 npm package," the CI/CD security company StepSecurity wrote TuesdayThe dropper contacts a live command-and-control server, delivers separate second-stage payloads for macOS, Windows, and Linux, then erases itself and replaces its own package.json with a clean decoy... Three payloads were pre-built for three operating systems. Both release branches were poisoned within 39 minutes of each other. Every artifact was designed to self-destruct. Within two seconds of npm install, the malware was already calling home to the attacker's server before npm had even finished resolving dependencies... Both versions were published using the compromised npm credentials of a lead axios maintainer, bypassing the project's normal GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline. "As preventive steps, Saayman has now outlined several changes," reports The Hacker News, "including resetting all devices and credentials, setting up immutable releases, adopting OIDC flow for publishing, and updating GitHub Actions to adopt best practices." The Wall Street Journal called it "the latest in a string of incidents exposing risks in the systems that underpin how modern software is built."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nine days ago Microsoft released a non-security "preview" update for Windows 11 - not mandatory for the average Windows user, notes ZDNet, "but rather as optional, more for IT admins and power users who want to test them." TechRepublic adds that the update "was to bring 'production-ready improvements' and generally ensure system stability by optimizing different Windows services." So it's ironic that some (but not all) users reported instead that the update "blocks users at the door, refusing to install or crashing midway through the process." "It apparently impacted enough people to force Microsoft to take action," writes ZDNet. "Microsoft paused and then pulled the update," and then Tuesday released a new update "designed to replace the glitchy one. This one includes all the new features and improvements from the previous preview update, but also fixes the installation issues that clobbered that update." Meanwhile, as Windows 11 version 24H2 approaches its end of life this October, Microsoft is now force-updating users to the latest version, reports BleepingComputer:"The machine learning-based intelligent rollout has expanded to all devices running Home and Pro editions of Windows 11, version 24H2 that are not managed by IT departments," Microsoft said in a Monday update to the Windows release health dashboard... "No action is required, and you can choose when to restart your device or postpone the update." Neowin reports: The good news is that the update from version 24H2 to 25H2 is a minor enablement package, as the two operating systems share the same codebase. As such, the update won't take long, and you should not encounter any disruptions, compatibility issues, or previously unseen bugs... Microsoft recently promised to implement big changes in how Windows Update works, including the ability to postpone updates for as long as you want. However, Microsoft has yet to clarify if that includes staying on a release beyond its support period. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Ol Olsoc for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A former U.S. spy spoke to The New Yorker about "years of clandestine work for the C.I.A. - which, he said, had 'prevented Iran from getting a nuke'."[Kevin] Chalker told me that, as he understood it, the Pentagon had suggested running commando operations to kill key Iranian scientists, as Israel subsequently did. But the C.I.A. proposed recruiting those scientists to defect, as U.S. spies had once courted Soviet physicists. Chalker paraphrased the agency's pitch: "We can debrief them and learn so much more - and, if they say no, then you can kill them." (A more senior agency official confirmed the broad strokes of his account.) The White House liked the agency's idea, and [president George W.] Bush authorized the C.I.A. to conduct clandestine operations to stop Iran from building a bomb. The C.I.A. program that Chalker described to me became publicly known in 2007, when the Los Angeles Times reported on the existence of an agency project called Brain Drain. But the details of the "invitations" to Iranian scientists have not previously been reported... Chalker typically had about ten minutes to explain, as gently as possible, that he was from the C.I.A., that he had the power to secure the scientist and his family a comfortable new life in the U.S. - and that, if the offer was rejected, the scientist, regrettably, would be assassinated. (Chalker tried to emphasize the happier potential outcome.) Killing a civilian scientist would violate international law. The American government has denied ever doing it, and I found no evidence that the U.S. has carried out any such murders. A former senior agency official familiar with the Brain Drain project told me all that mattered was that Iranian scientists had believed they would be killed, regardless of whether the U.S. actually made good on the threat. And Israel had been conducting a campaign to assassinate Iranian scientists, which made the prospect of lethal reprisal highly plausible. Other former officials with knowledge of the project told me that the C.I.A. sometimes shared intelligence with Mossad which enabled its operatives to locate and kill a scientist. Such information exchanges were kept vague enough to preserve deniability if a more legalistic U.S. Administration later took office... [Chalker] is confident that those who rebuffed him were, in fact, killed - one way or another... One of Chalker's colleagues told me that, against the backdrop of so many Israeli assassinations, Chalker's interactions with Iranian scientists could almost be considered humanitarian - he had been "throwing them a lifeline." Of the many scientists he approached, three-quarters ultimately agreed to cooperate. Their 10,000-word article suggests Chalker may now be resentful the CIA didn't help him in a later unrelated lawsuit, noting it's "nearly unheard of for ex-spies to divulge their past activities." But Chalker also says he "helped obtain pivotal information that laid the groundwork for more than a decade of American efforts to disrupt the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, from the Stuxnet cyberattacks, which occurred around 2010 [destroying 1,000 uranium-enriching centrifuges], to the Obama Administration's nuclear deal, in 2015, to the U.S. air strikes on Iranian atomic-energy facilities in the summer of 2025."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Kirkman14 writes: A year before the Web opened to the public, Texas entrepreneur Don Lokke was trying to syndicate weekly political cartoons to bulletin board systems. His "telecomics," as he called them, represent an overlooked early experiment in online comics. Lokke launched his main series, "Mack the Mouse" at the height of the 1992 Clinton-Bush-Perot presidential race. His mouse protagonist voiced the frustrations felt by everyday Americans about rising taxes and the recession. Lokke gave away "Mack" for free, but sold subscriptions to his other telecomics, betting sysops would pay for exclusive content. The timing wasn't crazy: enthusiasm for BBSes as an industry was surging, with conferences like ONE BBSCON promoting "BBSing for profit." But the Web soon deflated those hopes, and Lokke left BBSes behind in 1995. Decades later, about half of his nearly 300 telecomics were recovered and preserved on 16colors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MarketWatch looks at "surveillance wages," pay rates "based not on an employee's performance or seniority, but on formulas that use their personal data, often collected without employees' knowledge."According to Nina DiSalvo, policy director at labor advocacy group Towards Justice, some systems use signals associated with financial vulnerability - including data on whether a prospective employee has taken out a payday loan or has a high credit-card balance - to infer the lowest pay a candidate might accept. Companies can also scrape candidates' public personal social-media pages, she said... A first-of-its-kind audit of 500 labor-management artificial-intelligence companies by Veena Dubal, a law professor at University of California, Irvine, and Wilneida Negron, a tech strategist, found that employers in the healthcare, customer service, logistics and retail industries are customers of vendors whose tools are designed to enable this practice. Published by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive economic think tank, the August 2025 report... does not claim that all employers using these systems engage in algorithmic wage surveillance. Instead, it warns that the growing use of algorithmic tools to analyze workers' personal data can enable pay practices that prioritize cost-cutting over transparency or fairness... Surveillance wages don't stop at the hiring stage - they follow workers onto the job, too. The vendors that provide such services also offer tools that are built to set bonus or incentive compensation, according to the report. These tools track their productivity, customer interactions and real-time behavior - including, in some cases, audio and video surveillance on the job. Nearly 70% of companies with more than 500 employees were already using employee-monitoring systems in 2022, such as software that monitors computer activity, according to a survey from the International Data Corporation. "The data that they have about you may allow an algorithmic decision system to make assumptions about how much, how big of an incentive, they need to give to a particular worker to generate the behavioral response they seek," DiSalvo said. The article notes that Colorado introduced the "Prohibit Surveillance Data to Set Prices and Wages Act" to ban companies from setting pay rates with algorithms that use payday-loan history, location data or Google search behavior for algorithmically set. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic's making a big and sudden change - and connecting its Claude AI to third-party agentic tools "is about to get a lot more expensive," writes the Verge: Beginning April 4th at 3PM ET, users will "no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw," according to an email sent to users on Friday evening. Instead, if users want to use OpenClaw with Claude, they'll have to use a "pay-as-you-go option" that will be billed separate from their Claude subscription. Anthropic's announcement added these extra usage bundles are "now available at a discount." Users can also try Anthropic's API, notes VentureBeat, "which charges for every token of usage rather than allowing for open-ended usage up to certain limits, as the Pro and Max plans have allowed so far. "The technical reality, according to Anthropic, is that its first-party tools like Claude Code, its AI vibe coding harness, and Claude Cowork, its business app interfacing and control tool, are built to maximize "prompt cache hit rates" - reusing previously processed text to save on compute. Third-party harnesses like OpenClaw often bypass these efficiencies... [Claude Code creator Boris Cherny explained on X that "I did put up a few PRs to improve prompt cache hit rate for OpenClaw in particular, which should help for folks using it with Claude via API/overages."] Growth marketer Aakash Gupta observed on X that the "all-you-can-eat buffet just closed," noting that a single OpenClaw agent running for one day could burn $1,000 to $5,000 in API costs. "Anthropic was eating that difference on every user who routed through a third-party harness," Gupta wrote. "That's the pace of a company watching its margin evaporate in real time." However, Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw who was recently hired by OpenAI, took a more skeptical view of the "capacity" argument."Funny how timings match up," Steinberger posted on X. "First they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source." Indeed, Anthropic recently added some of the same capabilities that helped OpenClaw catch-on - such as the ability to message agents through external services like Discord and Telegram - to Claude Code... User @ashen_one, founder of Telaga Charity, voiced a concern likely shared by other small-scale builders: "If I switch both [OpenClaw instances] to an API key or the extra usage you're recommending here, it's going to be far too expensive to make it worth using. I'll probably have to switch over to a different model at this point." "I know it sucks," Cherny replied. "Fundamentally engineering is about tradeoffs, and one of the things we do to serve a lot of customers is optimize the way subscriptions work to serve as many people as possible with the best mode..." OpenAI appears to be positioning itself as a more "harness-friendly" alternative, potentially using this moment as a customer acquisition channel for disgruntled Claude power users. By restricting subscription limits to their own "closed harness," Anthropic is asserting control over the UI/UX layer. This allows them to collect telemetry and manage rate limits more granularly, but it risks alienating the power-user community that built the "agentic" ecosystem in the first place. Anthropic's decision is a cold calculation of margins versus growth. As Cherny noted, "Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully." In the 2026 AI landscape, the era of subsidized, unlimited compute for third-party automation is over. For the average user on Claude.ai, the experience remains unchanged; for the power users running autonomous offices, the bell has tolled.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The April 1st timing should have been your first clue," writes Gadget Review. TechSpot's false story was just an April Fool's prank - although Gadget Review thinks it's still funny how "something about this particular piece of satire felt uncomfortably plausible." Maybe it's because AMD stock sits around $196 while Intel hovers near $41, or perhaps it's the poetic justice of the underdog finally eating the giant. The semiconductor world has witnessed stranger reversals, but none quite this dramatic. Your gaming rig's CPU battle represents decades of corporate warfare, legal grudges, and technological leapfrogging that makes Game of Thrones look like a friendly board game. Picture this: In 1975, AMD reverse-engineered Intel's 8080 processor, creating the Am9080 clone. The audacity was breathtaking - AMD spent 50 cents per chip to manufacture something they sold for $700. That's a 1,400% markup on borrowed technology, making today's GPU prices look reasonable. This relationship evolved from copying to partnership to bitter rivalry. The companies signed second-sourcing deals in the late 1970s, with AMD becoming Intel's official backup supplier. Then came the lawsuits. AMD sued Intel for antitrust violations in 2005, eventually settling for $1.25 billion in 2009. That settlement money helped fund the Ryzen revolution that's currently eating Intel's lunch. The historical irony runs deeper than your typical tech rivalry. AMD literally started as Intel's shadow, creating chips by studying Intel's designs under microscopes. Today, Intel engineers probably study AMD's Zen architecture the same way... This April Fool's joke works because it captures something true about power shifts in technology. The site TipRanks notes that both companies saw their stock price rise Wednesday, though that might not be related to the false article. "Positive analyst coverage from Wells Fargo could be acting as a catalyst for AMD stock today. Intel also announced plans to buy back its 49% equity interest in a joint venture with Apollo Global Management APO."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon "must negotiate with a labor union representing some 5,000 workers at a company warehouse on Staten Island," reports Reuters, citing a ruling Wednesday from America's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The union formed in 2022, according to the article, and "has been seeking to negotiate with Amazon over pay, working conditions and other matters." The NLRB said in its ruling that Amazon "has engaged in unfair labor practices" by refusing to bargain with the labor group or to recognize its legitimacy... Amazon said on Thursday it disagreed with the NLRB's ruling. "Representatives of the NLRB improperly influenced this election," the company said in a statement, suggesting it planned to appeal. "We're confident an unbiased court will overturn the original certification, and we look forward to the opportunity for our team to fairly voice their opinions." An appeal would likely preclude Amazon from having to comply with the NLRB's order while it makes its way through the courts... Related to the Staten Island case, Amazon has argued that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional and sued to block the agency from ruling on it. The matter is still pending. After forming independently, that union "has since aligned with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters," the article points out. The Teamsters represent 1.3 million American workers, according to a statement they issued this week, which also includes this quote from the president of Amazon Labor Union-e Local 1. "We are making history at Amazon, and we are doing it through undiluted worker power..." Their statement adds that the ruling "came only one day after the union announced another historic victory that upheld Amazon Teamsters' right to strike."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time GNOME/OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice contributorMichael Meeks is now general manager of Collabora Productivity. And earlier this month he complained when LibreOffice decided to bring back its LibreOffice Online project, as reported by Neowin, which had been inactive since 2022. After the original project went dormant - to which Collabora was a major contributor - they forked the code and created their own product, Collabora Online. But this week Meeks blogged about even more changes, writing that the Document Foundation (the nonprofit behind LibreOffice) "has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners.That includes over thirty people who have contributed faithfully to LibreOffice for many years." Meeks argues the ejections were "based on unproven legal concerns and guilt by association."This includes seven of the top ten core committers of all time (excluding release engineers) currently working for Collabora Productivity. The move is the culmination of TDF losing a large number of founders from membership over the last few years with: Thorsten Behrens, Jan 'Kendy' Holesovsky, Rene Engelhard, Caolan McNamara, Michael Meeks, Cor Nouws and Italo Vignoli no longer members. Of the remaining active founders, three of the last four are paid TDF staff (of whom none are programming on the core code). The blog It's FOSS calls it "LibreOffice Drama." They've confirmed the removals happened, also noting recently adopted Community Bylaws requiring members to step down if they're affiliated with a company in an active legal dispute with the Foundation. But The Documentation Foundation "also makes clear that a membership revocation is not a ban from contributing, with the project remaining open to anyone, and expects Collabora to keep contributing 'when the time comes.'" Collabora's Meeks adds in his blog post that there's "bold and ongoing plans to create an entirely new, cut-down, differentiated Collabora Office for users that is smoother, more user friendly, and less feature dense than our Classic product (which will continue to be supported for years for our partners).This gives a chance to innovate faster in a separate place on a smaller, more focused code-base with fewer build configurations, much less legacy, no Java, no database, web-based toolkit and more. We are excited to get executing on that. To make this process easier, and to put to bed complaints about having our distro branches in TDF gerrit [for code review], and to move to self-hosted FOSS tooling we are launching our own gerrit to host our existing branch of core...We will continue to make contributions to LibreOffice where that makes sense (if we are welcome to), but it clearly no longer makes much sense to continue investing heavily in building what remains of TDF's community and product for them - while being excluded from its governance. In this regard, we seem to be back where we were fifteen years ago.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect reasoning or factual flaws in responses. On the other side are those who routinely outsource their critical thinking to what they see as an all-knowing machine. Recent research goes a long way to forming a new psychological framework for that second group, which regularly engages in "cognitive surrender" to AI's seemingly authoritative answers. That research also provides some experimental examination of when and why people are willing to outsource their critical thinking to AI, and how factors like time pressure and external incentives can affect that decision. Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were willing to accept faulty AI reasoning a whopping 73.2 percent of the time, while only overruling it 19.7 percent of the time. The researchers say this "demonstrate[s] that people readily incorporate AI-generated outputs into their decision-making processes, often with minimal friction or skepticism." In general, "fluent, confident outputs [are treated] as epistemically authoritative, lowering the threshold for scrutiny and attenuating the meta-cognitive signals that would ordinarily route a response to deliberation," they write. These kinds of effects weren't uniform across all test subjects, though. Those who scored highly on separate measures of so-called fluid IQ were less likely to rely on the AI for help and were more likely to overrule a faulty AI when it was consulted. Those predisposed to see AI as authoritative in a survey, on the other hand, were much more likely to be led astray by faulty AI-provided answers. Despite the results, though, the researchers point out that "cognitive surrender is not inherently irrational." While relying on an LLM that's wrong half the time (as in these experiments) has obvious downsides, a "statistically superior system" could plausibly give better-than-human results in domains such as "probabilistic settings, risk assessment, or extensive data," the researchers suggest. "As reliance increases, performance tracks AI quality," the researchers write, "rising when accurate and falling when faulty, illustrating the promises of superintelligence and exposing a structural vulnerability of cognitive surrender." In other words, letting an AI do your reasoning means your reasoning is only ever going to be as good as that AI system. As always, let the prompter beware.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Colorado is rolling out an average-speed camera system that tracks vehicles across multiple points instead of catching them at a single camera, making it much harder for drivers to dodge tickets with apps like Waze and Radarbot. Motor1 reports: The state's new automated vehicle identification systems (AVIS) use several cameras to calculate your average speed between them, and if it is 10 miles per hour or more over the limit, you get a ticket. No longer will you be able to slow down as you approach a camera and speed back up after passing it, not that you should be speeding on public roads in the first place. Colorado began deploying this new camera system after legislators changed the law in 2023, allowing AVIS for law enforcement use. The systems, installed on various roads and highways throughout the state, first began issuing warnings, but police began issuing tickets late last year. The most recent section of road to fall under surveillance is a stretch of I-25 north of Denver, which brought the state's growing panopticon to our attention. It began issuing tickets on April 2. The Colorado Department of Transportation installed the cameras along a construction zone. The fine is $75 and zero points for exceeding the speed limit, and the police issue it to the vehicle's owner, regardless of who is driving.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Artemis II crew has passed 100,000 miles from Earth and is now on a "free-return" path around the moon after a successful "translunar" injection burn. "Ladies and gentlemen, I am so, so excited to be able to tell you that for the first time since 1972 during Apollo 17, human beings have left Earth orbit," NASA's Dr Lori Glaze told a news conference. The Guardian reports: The astronauts -- the Americans Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and a Canadian, Jeremy Hansen -- spent their first day in space performing checks on the spacecraft, which had never carried humans before. Later they had time to speak to US TV networks. "I've got to tell you, there is nothing normal about this," Wiseman told ABC News from the cramped interior of the capsule. "Sending four humans 250,000 miles away is a herculean effort, and we are now just realising the gravity of that." Orion will travel about 4,000 miles (6,400km) beyond the moon before turning back, providing unprecedented and illuminated views of the lunar far side. If all proceeds smoothly, the astronauts will set a record by venturing farther from Earth than any human before -- more than 250,000 miles. The mission is part of a longer-term plan to repeatedly return to the moon, with the aim of establishing a permanent base that will offer a platform for further exploration. After the final engine burn, NASA said Wiseman took two "spectacular" images of Earth. The first photo, called Hello, World, "shows the vast expanse of blue that is the Atlantic Ocean, framed by a thin glow of the atmosphere as the Earth eclipses the Sun and green auroras at either pole," reports the BBC. Another photo shows the view of Earth from inside the Orion spacecraft.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Consumer PC parts aren't the only things being gobbled up by the 'AI' industry," writes PCWorld's Michael Crider. "A Starcraft-inspired strategy game is shutting down its multiplayer servers because the hosting company got bought out for 'AI.'" The game will still be playable offline for now, but the shutdown highlights the ripple effects of the AI boom on the gaming industry. Amid the ongoing hardware shortages, AI companies are basically gobbling up as much infrastructure as they can to repurpose it for AI workloads. From the report: The game in question is Stormgate, a crowdfunded revival of the real-time strategy genre that has languished in the last decade or so. The developer Frost Giant Studios told its players on Discord (spotted by PC Gamer) that it would be unable to continue multiplayer access past the end of this month. The "game server orchestration partner" was bought by an AI company -- the developer's words, not mine -- which means that the multiplayer aspects of the game will have a "planned outage." The devs say the game will be patched for offline play, presumably including its single-player campaign mode and co-op modes, but "online modes will not be available at that point." They're hoping to bring back online play in a later update, but that'll depend on "finding a partner to support ongoing operations." That sounds like old-fashioned player-hosted games with lobbies aren't in the cards, at least not yet. Frost Giant's server provider is Hathora, which was bought by a company called Fireworks AI last month. Fireworks describes its offerings as "open-source AI models at blazing speed, optimized for your use case, scaled globally with the Fireworks Inference Cloud." So, yeah, Hathora's infrastructure will likely be used for yet more generative "AI." And according to GamesBeat, it's planning to shut down the game service aspect of its company completely. That means Stormgate probably isn't going to be the last game affected. Hathora also provides online services for Splitgate 2, among others. I'm contacting Hathora for comment and will update this story if I receive a response.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Iranian strikes have reportedly knocked out key AWS availability zones in Bahrain and Dubai, leaving parts of both regions effectively offline for an extended period and forcing Amazon to urge teams and customers to shift workloads elsewhere. "These two regions continue to be impaired, and services should not expect to be operating with normal levels of redundancy and resiliency," an internal Amazon communication memo reads. "We are actively working to free and reserve as much capacity as possible in the region for customers, and services should be scaled to the minimal footprint required to support customer migration." Big Technology reports: With the war now nearing its sixth week, Iran has made Amazon infrastructure in the Gulf an economic target and is now eyeing its peers. Amazon's Bahrain facilities have been hit multiple times, including a Wednesday strike that caused a fire. And its facilities in the UAE also sustained multiple hits. The IRGC is threatening multiple other U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, and Apple. Amazons infrastructure in Bahrain and Dubai each have three 'availability zones' or clusters of compute. Both Bahrain and Dubai have a zones that are "hard down" and and "impaired but functioning," per the internal communication. "We do not have a timeline for when DXB and BAH will return to normal operations," the internal post said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft plans to invest $10 billion in Japan from 2026 to 2029 to expand AI infrastructure, boost local cloud capacity, train 1 million engineers and developers, and deepen cybersecurity cooperation with the Japanese government. Reuters reports: The investment includes the training of 1 million engineers and developers by 2030, Microsoft said, which was unveiled during a visit to Tokyo by Vice Chair and President Brad Smith. In a statement, the company said the plan aligns with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's goal to boost growth through advanced, strategic technologies while safeguarding national security. Microsoft will work with domestic firms including SoftBank and Sakura Internet to expand Japan-based AI computing capacity, allowing Ecompanies and government agencies to keep sensitive data within the country while accessing Microsoft Azure services, it said. It will also deepen cooperation with Japanese authorities on sharing intelligence related to cyber threats and crime prevention.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Rome court ruled that several Netflix price hikes in Italy were unlawful because the company's contracts didn't adequately explain or justify future pricing changes. As a result, Netflix has been ordered to issue refunds that could total roughly 500 euros for some long-term subscribers. Ars Technica reports: The lawsuit was brought by Italian consumer advocacy group Movimento Consumatori, which alleged that the price hikes violate the Consumer Code, Italian legislation that aims to protect consumer rights. The Consumer Code says it's unlawful for a "professional to unilaterally modify the clauses of the contract, or the characteristics of the product or service to be provided, without a justified reason indicated in the contract itself," according to a Google-provided translation. The court's April 1 ruling determined that Netflix's contracts were required to explain in advance why prices or other terms might change in the future. Because the price hikes were found to be imposed without providing customers with valid justifications, the court ruled that the new prices are invalid and ordered Netflix to refund affected subscribers. This comes despite Netflix reportedly providing a 30-day advance notice of the higher fees and allowing customers to cancel their subscriptions to avoid price hikes. The court gave Netflix 90 days to inform millions of current and former customers via email, mail, its website, and Italian newspapers of their right to refunds or else face a penalty of 700 euros per day, Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore reported today. Per Italian law, price increases that Netflix has issued or will issue beyond April 2025 are legal. At that time, Netflix adjusted its terms to state that contract terms could one day change due to technological, security, or regulatory needs, to clarify clauses, or to provide changes to the service, Il Sole 24 Ore reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is officially dropping its "beta" label after 17 years. The Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit behind the fanfiction site, said the site will keep evolving with new improvements even though it's no longer technically in beta. "As the AO3 software has been stable for a long time, the change is mostly cosmetic and does not indicate that everything is finalized or perfectly working," the organizations says. "Exiting beta doesn't mean we'll stop continuing to improve AO3 -- our volunteer coders and community contributors will still be working to add to and improve AO3 every day." Some of the features it's introduced over the years include a tag system, offline fanworks downloads, privacy settings that let creators restrict access to their work, and new modes for multi-chapter works. As it stands, the site says it has more than 10 million registered users and 17 million fanworks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Today at a hearing of the Colorado Senate Business, Labor, and Technology committee, lawmakers voted unanimously to move Colorado state bill SB26-090 -- titled Exempt Critical Infrastructure from Right to Repair -- out of committee and into the state senate and house for a vote. The bill modifies Colorado's Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment act, which was passed in 2024 and went into effect in January 2026. While the protections secured by that act are wide, the new SB26-090 bill aims to "exempt information technology equipment that is intended for use in critical infrastructure from Colorado's consumer right to repair laws." The bill is supported by tech manufacturers like Cisco and IBM, according to lobbying disclosures. These are companies that have vested interests in manufacturing things like routers, server equipment, and computers and stand to profit if they can control who fixes their products and the tools, components, and software used to make those upgrades and repairs. They also cite cybersecurity concerns, saying that giving people access to the tools and systems they would need to repair a device could also enable bad actors to use those methods for nefarious means. (This is a common argument manufacturers make when opposing right-to-repair laws.) [...] During the hearing, more than a dozen repair advocates spoke from organizations like Pirg, the Repair Association, and iFixit opposing the bill. YouTuber and repair advocate Louis Rossmann was there. The main problem, repair advocates say, is that the bill deliberately uses vague language to make the case for controlling who can fix their products. [...] The Colorado Labor and Technology committee advanced the bill, but it still needs to go through votes on the Colorado Senate and House floors before going into effect. Those votes may take place as early as next week. Regardless of how the bill goes in the state, it's likely that manufacturers will continue their push to alter or undo repair legislation in other states across the country. "The 'information technology' and 'critical infrastructure' thing is as cynical as you can possibly be about it," says Nathan Proctor, the leader of Pirg's US right-to-repair campaign. "It sounds scary to lawmakers, but it just means the internet." The current wording of the bill "leaves it up to the manufacturers to determine which items they will need to provide repair tools and parts to owners and independent repairers and which ones they don't," says Danny Katz, executive director CoPIRG, the Colorado branch of the consumer advocate group Pirg. "This is a bad policy and would be a big step back for Coloradans' repair rights." iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said in the hearing: "There's a general principle in cybersecurity that obscurity is not security," iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said in the hearing. "The money that's behind the scenes, that's what's driving the bill."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal shares the "wild behind-the-scenes story" of how the world's largest and most destructive botnet was uncovered and taken down, writes Slashdot reader sturgeon. "At times, the network known as Kimwolf included more than a million compromised home Android devices and digital photo frames -- enough DDoS firepower to disrupt internet traffic across the U.S. and beyond." From the report: Sitting in his dorm room at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Benjamin Brundage was closing in on a mystery that had even seasoned internet investigators baffled. A cat meme helped him crack the case. A growing network of hacked devices was launching the biggest cyberattacks ever seen on the internet. It had become the most powerful cyberweapon ever assembled, large enough to knock a state or even a small country offline. Investigators didn't know exactly who had built it -- or how. Brundage had been following the attacks, too -- and, in between classes, was conducting his own investigation. In September, the college senior started messaging online with an anonymous user who seemed to have insider knowledge. As they chatted on Discord, a platform favored by videogamers, Brundage was eager to get more information, but he didn't want to come off as too serious and shut down the conversation. So every now and then he'd send a funny GIF to lighten the mood. Brundage was fluent in the memes, jokes and technical jargon popular with young gamers and hackers who are extremely online. "It was a bit of just asking over and over again and then like being a bit unserious," said Brundage. At one point, he asked for some technical details. He followed up with the cat meme: a six-second clip that showed a hand adjusting a necktie on a fluffy gray cat. Brundage didn't expect it to work, but he got the information. "It took me by surprise," he said. Eventually the leaker hinted there was a new vulnerability on the internet. Brundage, who is 22, would learn it threatened tens of millions of consumers and as much as a quarter of the world's corporations. As he unraveled the mystery, he impressed veteran researchers with his findings -- including federal law enforcement, which took action against the network two weeks ago. Chad Seaman, a researcher at Akamai, joked at one point that the internet could go down if Brundage spent too much time on his exams.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tony Isaac shares a report from NPR: When it comes to using AI, it seems some lawyers just can't help themselves. Last year saw a rapid increase in court sanctions against attorneys for filing briefs containing errors generated by artificial intelligence tools. The most prominent case was that of the lawyers for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who were fined $3,000 each for filing briefs containing fictitious, AI-generated citations. But as a cautionary tale, it doesn't seem to have had much effect. The numbers started taking off last year, and the rate is still increasing. He counts a total of more than 1,200 to date, of which about 800 are from U.S. courts. "I am surprised that people are still doing this when it's been in the news," says Carla Wale, associate dean of information & technology and director of the law library at the University of Washington School of Law. "Whatever the generative AI tool gives you -- as in, 'Look at these cases' -- you, under the rules of professional conduct, you have to read those cases. You have to read the cases to make sure what you are citing is accurate." "I think that lawyers who understand how to effectively and ethically use generative AI replace lawyers who don't," she says. "That's what I think the future is."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, nearly half of planned U.S. data center projects are being delayed or canceled. "One major reason behind these setbacks is the availability of key electrical components -- such as transformers, switchgear, and batteries -- that are used both at data center sites and outside of them," reports Tom's Hardware. "Meanwhile, grid infrastructure is also stressed by electric vehicles and electrified heating systems." Tom's Hardware reports: Approximately 12 gigawatts (12 GW) of data center capacity is expected to come online in the U.S. in 2026, according to data by market intelligence firm Sightline Climate cited by Bloomberg. Yet only about one-third of that capacity is currently under active construction because of various constraints. Electrical infrastructure represents less than 10% of total data center cost, but it is as vital as compute hardware. A delay in any single element of the power chain can halt the entire project, which makes transformers, switchgear, and similar devices critical items despite their relatively small share of CapEx. Due to high demand, lead times for high-power transformers have expanded dramatically in the U.S.: delivery typically took 24 to 30 months before 2020, but waiting periods can stretch to as long as five years today, according to Sightline Climate cited by Bloomberg. For AI data centers, this is a catastrophe as their deployment cycles are under 18 months. To address shortages, companies are turning to global markets. As a result, Canada, Mexico, and South Korea became the biggest suppliers of high-power transformers for AI data centers to AI data centers. At the same time, imports of high-power transformers from China surged from fewer than 1,500 units in 2022 to more than 8,000 units in 2025 through October, according to Wood Mackenzie data cited by Bloomberg. The volatility of exports from China does not end with transformers, as the PRC accounts for over 40% of U.S. battery imports, while its share in certain transformer and switchgear categories remains near 30%, according to Bloomberg.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Perplexity's AI search engine encourages users to go deeper with their prompts by engaging in chat sessions that a lawsuit has alleged are often shared in their entirety with Google and Meta without users' knowledge or consent. "This happened to every user regardless of whether or not they signed up for a Perplexity account," the lawsuit alleged, while stressing that "enormous volumes of sensitive information from both subscribed and non-subscribed users" are shared. Using developer tools, the lawsuit found that opening prompts are always shared, as are any follow-up questions the search engine asks that a user clicks on. Privacy concerns are seemingly worse for non-subscribed users, the complaint alleged. Their initial prompts are shared with "a URL through which the entire conversation may be accessed by third parties like Meta and Google." Disturbingly, the lawsuit alleged, chats are also shared with personally identifiable information (PII), even when users who want to stay anonymous opt to use Perplexity's "Incognito Mode." That mode, the lawsuit charged, is a "sham." "'Incognito' mode does nothing to protect users from having their conversations shared with Meta and Google," the complaint said. "Even paid users who turned on the 'Incognito' feature still had their conversations shared with Meta and Google, along with their email addresses and other identifiers that allowed Meta and Google to personally identify them." "Perplexity's failure to inform its users that their personal information has been disclosed to Meta and Google or to take any steps to halt the continued disclosure of users' information is malicious, oppressive, and in reckless disregard" of users' rights, the lawsuit alleged. "Nothing on Perplexity's website warns users that their conversations with its AI Machine will be shared with Meta and Google," Doe alleged. "Much less does Perplexity warn subscribed users that its 'Incognito Mode' does not function to protect users' private conversations from disclosure to companies like Meta and Google."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot writes: CU Boulder researchers are reporting that they have discovered an appetite-suppressing compound in python blood that helps the snakes consume enormous meals and go months without eating yet remain metabolically healthy. The findings were published in the journal Natural Metabolism on March 19, 2026. Pythons can grow as big as a telephone pole, swallow an antelope whole, and go months or even years without eating -- all while maintaining a healthy heart and plenty of muscle mass. In the hours after they eat, research has shown, their heart expands 25% and their metabolism speeds up 4,000-fold to help them digest their meal. The team measured blood samples from ball pythons and Burmese pythons, fed once every 28 days, immediately after they ate a meal. In all, they found 208 metabolites that increased significantly after the pythons ate. One molecule, called para-tyramine-O-sulfate (pTOS) soared 1,000-fold. Further studies, done with Baylor University researchers, showed that when they gave high doses of pTOS to obese or lean mice, it acted on the hypothalamus, the appetite center of the brain, prompting weight loss without causing gastrointestinal problems, muscle loss or declines in energy. The study found that pTOS, which is produced by the snake's gut bacteria, is not present in mice naturally. It is present in human urine at low levels and does increase somewhat after a meal. But because most research is done in mice or rats, pTOS has been overlooked. "We've basically discovered an appetite suppressant that works in mice without some of the side-effects that GLP-1 drugs have," said senior author Leslie Leinwand, a distinguished professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology who has been studying pythons in her lab for two decades. Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy act on the hormone glucagon-like petide-1 (GLP-1).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Renewables made up nearly half of global installed electricity capacity by the end of 2025, "accounting for 85.6% of global capacity expansion," reports the Register, citing the International Renewable Energy Agency's (IRENA) 2026 Renewable Capacity Statistics report. "Per IRENA's data, that aforementioned 85.6 percent share of new power capacity additions was actually a decrease from 2024, when renewables were about 92 percent of global capacity additions. Yes, the share of total installed power capacity in 2025 rose again, but non-renewable capacity additions also rebounded sharply last year." From the report: Solar, in turn, was the dominant renewable technology, accounting for nearly three-quarters of last year's renewable capacity additions. Those additions totaled 692 GW in 2025, lifting installed renewable capacity by a record 15.5 percent year over year, IRENA noted. By the end of last year, renewables accounted for 49.4 percent of global installed electricity capacity, while variable renewable sources such as solar and wind represented roughly 35 percent of total capacity. For reference, it was only in 2023 that renewable energy sources crossed the threshold of generating 30 percent of the world's electricity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Responding to public health concerns about microplastics and pharmaceuticals in the nation's drinking water, the Trump administration for the first time has placed them on a draft list of contaminants maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA announced the move Thursday, touting it as a "historic step" for the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement, which often raises concerns about toxic chemicals and plastic pollution in our food and environment. Also Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a $144 million initiative, called STOMP, to develop tools to measure and monitor microplastics in drinking water and in a later stage, to remove them. The Safe Drinking Water Act requires the EPA to publish an updated version of its Contaminant Candidate List every five years. This is the sixth iteration of the list. Microplastics and pharmaceuticals appear in the draft of the upcoming list, alongside per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, and dozens of other chemicals and microbes. Their inclusion on the list gives local regulators a tool to evaluate risks in their water supply, the EPA says, and it can set the stage for more research and regulatory action -- but doesn't actually guarantee that will happen.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from the Kathmandu Post: In Nepal, helicopter rescue on high altitude is, by any measure, a genuine lifesaving operation. At high altitude, where oxygen thins and weather changes without warning, the ability to airlift a stricken trekker to Kathmandu within hours has saved countless lives. But threaded through that legitimate system, exploiting its urgency, its opacity, and its distance from oversight, is one of the most sophisticated insurance fraud networks in the world. Nepal's fake rescue scam is not new. The Kathmandu Post first exposed it in 2018. Months later, the government convened a fact-finding committee, produced a 700-page report, and announced reforms. In February 2019, The Kathmandu Post published a long investigative report. Last year, Nepal Police's Central Investigation Bureau reopened the file, and what they found is that the fraud did not stop -- instead it was growing. The mechanics of the fake rescue racket are straightforward: stage a medical emergency, call in a helicopter, check a tourist into a hospital, and file an insurance claim that bears little resemblance to what actually happened. But the sophistication lies in how each link in the chain is compensated, and how difficult it is for a foreign insurer -- operating from Australia and the United Kingdom -- to verify events that occurred at 3,000 metres in a remote Himalayan valley. The CIB investigation identifies two primary methods for manufacturing an "emergency." The first involves tourists who simply don't want to walk back. After completing a demanding trek -- an Everest Base Camp trek, for instance, can take up to two weeks on foot -- guides offer an alternative: pretend to be sick, and a helicopter will come. The guide handles the rest. The second method is more troubling. At altitudes above 3,000 meters, mild symptoms of altitude sickness are common. Blood oxygen saturation can drop, hands and feet tingle, headaches develop. In most cases, rest, hydration or a gradual descent is all that is needed. But guides and hotel staff, according to the CIB investigation, have been trained to terrify trekkers at precisely this moment. They tell them they are at risk of dying, that only immediate evacuation will save them. In some cases, investigators found that Diamox (Acetazolamide) tablets, used to prevent altitude sickness, were administered alongside excessive water intake to induce the very symptoms that would justify a rescue call. In at least one case cited in the investigation, baking powder was mixed into food to make tourists physically unwell. Once a "rescue" is called, the financial choreography begins. A single helicopter carries multiple passengers. But separate, full-price invoices are submitted to each passenger's insurance company, as if each had their own dedicated flight. A $4,000 charter becomes a $12,000 claim. Fake flight manifests and load sheets are fabricated. At the hospital, medical officers prepare discharge summaries using the digital signatures of senior doctors who were never involved in the case. In some cases, these are done without those doctors' knowledge. Fake admission records are created for tourists who were, in some documented instances, drinking beer in the hospital cafeteria at the time they were supposedly receiving treatment. In one case, an office assistant at Shreedhi Hospital admitted that he had provided his own X-ray report taken about a year ago at a different hospital, to be used as a case for treatment of foreign trekkers to claim insurance. The commission structure that holds the network together was described in detail during police interrogations. Hospitals pay 20 to 25 percent of the insurance payment to trekking companies and a further 20 to 25 percent to helicopter rescue operators in exchange for patient referrals. Trekking guides and their companies benefit from inflated invoices. In some cases, tourists themselves are offered cash incentives to participate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is acquiring tech news podcast TBPN, a fast-growing daily show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays. OpenAI says TBPN will keep its editorial independence, even though the acquisition is widely viewed as part of a broader effort to influence public discourse around AI. CNBC reports: In the announcement, OpenAI CEO of AGI Deployment Fidji Simo wrote that their mission of bringing artificial general intelligence comes with a responsibility to have a space for "constructive conversation about the changes AI creates." Altman has appeared on TBPN multiple times and is a frequent presence across media and podcasts, even hitting NBC's "Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" in December. The announcement says TBPN will maintain editorial independence and continue to choose its own guests. "TBPN is my favorite tech show. We want them to keep that going and for them to do what they do so well," Altman wrote in a post on X. "I don't expect them to go any easier on us, am sure I'll do my part to help enable that with occasional stupid decisions." OpenAI did not disclose the terms of the deal but said TBPN will be housed within its strategy organization. "While we've been critical of the industry at times, after getting to know Sam and the OpenAI team, what stood out most was their openness to feedback and commitment to getting this right," wrote Hays in a statement. "Moving from commentary to real impact in how this technology is distributed and understood globally is incredibly important to us."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon will start charging sellers who use its shipping services a 3.5% "fuel and logistics" surcharge later this month, joining the ranks of shipping companies raising prices as the war in Iran pushes oil prices higher. The fees take effect on April 17 for customers of the company's Fulfillment by Amazon service -- which is used by many of the independent sellers who list their products on Amazon's retail sites -- in the US and Canada. Items shipped by Amazon on behalf of merchants who sell on their own sites or at other retailers will carry the surcharge beginning May 2. "Elevated costs in fuel and logistics have increased the cost of operating across the industry," Ashley Vanicek, an Amazon spokesperson, said on Thursday. "We have absorbed these increases so far, but similar to other major carriers, when costs remain elevated we implement temporary surcharges to partially recover these costs." Vanicek notes that the fee will apply to the sum Amazon charges to ship an item, not the product's sale price. Last month, USPS announced that it would impose its first-ever fuel surcharge on packages.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IBM and Arm are teaming up to let Arm-based software run on IBM Z mainframes. Network World reports: The two companies plan to work on three things: building virtualization tools so Arm software can run on IBM platforms; making sure Arm applications meet the security and data residency rules that regulated industries must follow; and creating common technology layers so enterprises have more software options across both platforms, IBM said in a statement. IBM has not said whether the virtualization work will happen at the hypervisor level, through its existing PR/SM partitioning technology, or via containers -- a question enterprise architects will need answered before they can assess the collaboration's practical value. IBM described the effort as serving enterprises that run regulated workloads and cannot simply move them to the cloud, the statement said. IBM mainframe customers have largely missed out on the efficiency and price-performance gains Arm has already delivered in the cloud. "Arm says close to half of all compute shipped to top hyperscalers in 2025 runs on Arm chips, with AWS, Google, and Microsoft deploying their own Arm silicon through Graviton, Axion, and Cobalt, respectively," reports Network World. That gap is precisely what IBM and Arm's collaboration intends to address. "This is a mainframe adjacency play," says Rachita Rao, senior analyst at Everest Group. "The intent is to extend IBM Z and LinuxONE environments by enabling Arm-compatible workloads to run closer to systems of record. While hyperscalers use Arm to lower their own internal power costs and pass savings to cloud-native tenants, IBM is targeting the sovereign and air-gapped market."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo shares a report from Phoronix: Raspberry Pi prices are going up yet again due to the continued memory squeeze on the industry. To help offset the memory prices for some use-cases, Raspberry Pi also announced the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 3GB model at $83 to help fill the void between the 2GB and 4GB options. The 3GB Raspberry Pi 4 was announced at $83.75 USD for those not needing quite 4GB of RAM and looking to save some memory given the ongoing price increases. The Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 4GB models are seeing new $25 price increases, the 8GB models seeing $50 price increases, and the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 is going up by $100. The Raspberry Pi 500+ is seeing a $150 price increase. The Raspberry Pi Compute Modules are also seeing increases from $11.25 to $100 USD.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's Gemini AI models have improved by leaps and bounds over the past year, but you can only use Gemini on Google's terms. The company's Gemma open-weight models have provided more freedom, but Gemma 3, which launched over a year ago, is getting a bit long in the tooth. Starting today, developers can start working with Gemma 4, which comes in four sizes optimized for local usage. Google has also acknowledged developer frustrations with AI licensing, so it's dumping the custom Gemma license. Like past versions of its open-weight models, Google has designed Gemma 4 to be usable on local machines. That can mean plenty of things, of course. The two large Gemma variants, 26B Mixture of Experts and 31B Dense, are designed to run unquantized in bfloat16 format on a single 80GB Nvidia H100 GPU. Granted, that's a $20,000 AI accelerator, but it's still local hardware. If quantized to run at lower precision, these big models will fit on consumer GPUs. Google also claims it has focused on reducing latency to really take advantage of Gemma's local processing. The 26B Mixture of Experts model activates only 3.8 billion of its 26 billion parameters in inference mode, giving it much higher tokens-per-second than similarly sized models. Meanwhile, 31B Dense is more about quality than speed, but Google expects developers to fine-tune it for specific uses. The other two Gemma 4 models, Effective 2B (E2B) and Effective 4B (E4B), are aimed at mobile devices. These options were designed to maintain low memory usage during inference, running at an effective 2 billion or 4 billion parameters. Google says the Pixel team worked closely with Qualcomm and MediaTek to optimize these models for devices like smartphones, Raspberry Pi, and Jetson Nano. Not only do they use less memory and battery than Gemma 3, but Google also touts "near-zero latency" this time around.The Apache 2.0 license is much more flexible with its terms of use for commercial restrictions, "granting you complete control over your data, infrastructure, and models," says Google. Clement Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, called it "a huge milestone" that will help developers use Gemma for more projects and expand what Google calls the "Gemmaverse."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Even on NASA's Artemis II mission around the moon, astronauts apparently still have to deal with broken Microsoft Outlook. One of the crew members, Reid Wiseman, jokingly reported that he had "two Microsoft Outlooks" and neither worked. 404 Media reports: On April 1, four astronauts from the U.S. and Canada embarked on a 10-day flight to loop around the moon. Spotted by VGBees podcast host Niki Grayson on the NASA livestream of live views from the , around 2 a.m. ET, mission control acknowledges an issue with a process control system and offers to remote in -- yes, like how your office IT guy would pause his CoD campaign to log into Okta for you because you used the wrong password too many times. One of the astronauts, Reid Wiseman, says that's chill, but while they're in there: "I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working." Astronauts are trained for decades in some of the most physically and mentally grueling environments of any career. They're some of the smartest people on the planet, and they have to be, before we strap them to 3.2 million pounds of jet fuel and make them do complex experiments and high-stakes decisions for days on end. And yet, once they get up there, fucking Outlook is borked.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia has begun rolling out a beta feature that automatically compiles game shaders while a PC is idle. It won't eliminate shader compilation the first time a game runs, but Ars Technica reports it could help reduce those repeated wait times. From the report: Nvidia's new Auto Shader Compilation system promises to "reduc[e] the frequency of game runtime compilation after driver updates" for users running Nvidia's GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.97 WHQL or later. When the feature is active and your machine is idle, the app will automatically start rebuilding DirectX drivers for your games so they're all set to roll the next time they launch. While the feature defaults to being turned off when the Nvidia App is first downloaded, users can activate it by going to the Graphics Tab > Global Settings > Shader Cache. There, they can set aside disk space for precompiled shaders and decide how many system resources the compilation process should use. App users can also manually force shader recompilation through the app rather than waiting for the machine to go idle. Unfortunately, Nvidia warns that users will still have to generate shaders in-game after downloading a title for the first time. The Auto Shader Compiler system only generates the new shaders needed after subsequent driver updates following that first run of a new title.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Valve's March 2026 Steam Survey shows Linux gaming usage jumping to a record 5.33% share -- more than double macOS's 2.35%. Phoronix reports: Steam on Linux was never above 5% and easily an all-time high for the Linux gaming marketshare, especially in absolute numbers. It was a massive 3.1% spike in March while macOS also jumped surprisingly by 1.19% to 2.35%. The Steam Survey numbers show Windows losing 4.28%, down to 92.33%. Part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers. Month over month they report a 31.85% drop to the Simplified Chinese language use and English use increasing by 16.82% to 39.09%. Other languages also showed gains amid the massive decline in Simplified Chinese use. The latest numbers for March show around a quarter of the Linux gamers are running Steam OS. Due in part to the Steam Deck APU being a custom AMD product and the popularity of AMD hardware on Linux for its open-source nature, AMD CPU use by Steam on Linux gamers remains just under 70%.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: OpenAI hasn't been shy about spending money lobbying for favorable laws and regulations. But when it comes to its involvement with child safety advocacy groups, the company has apparently decided it's best to stay in the shadows -- even if it means hiding from the people actually pushing for policy changes. According to a report from the San Francisco Standard, a number of people involved in the California-based Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition were blindsided to learn their efforts were secretly being funded by OpenAI. Per the Standard, the Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition was a group formed to push the Parents and Kids Safe AI Act, a piece of California legislation proposed earlier this year that would require AI firms to implement age verification and additional safeguards for users under the age of 18. That bill was backed by OpenAI in partnership with Common Sense Media, which proposed the legislation as a compromise after the two groups had pushed dueling ballot initiatives last year. But when the coalition started to reach out to child safety groups and other advocacy organizations to try to get them to lend support to the bill, OpenAI was apparently conveniently left off the messaging. The AI giant was also left out of the marketing on the coalition's website, according to the Standard. That reportedly led to a number of groups and individuals lending their support to the Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition without realizing that they were aligning themselves with OpenAI. As it turns out, OpenAI isn't just one of the members of the coalition; it is the group's biggest funder. In fact, the Standard characterized the Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition as being "entirely funded" by OpenAI. While it's not clear exactly how much the company has funneled to this particular group, a Wall Street Journal report from January said OpenAI pledged $10 million to push the Parents and Kids Safe AI Act. Gizmodo notes that OpenAI's backing of the Parents and Kids Safe AI Act "could be self-serving for CEO Sam Altman," who just so happens to head a company called World that provides age verification services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists say extreme March heat caused an unusually rapid collapse of snowpack across the American West that's leaving major basins at record or near-record lows. "This year is on a whole other level," said Dr Russ Schumacher, a Colorado State University climatologist. "Seeing this year so far below any of the other years we have data for is very concerning." The Guardian reports: [...] The issue is extremely widespread. Data from a branch of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which logs averages based on levels between 1991 and 2020, shows states across the south-west and intermountain west with eye-popping lows. The Great Basin had only 16% of average on Monday and the lower Colorado region, which includes most of Arizona and parts of Nevada, was at 10%. The Rio Grande, which covers parts of New Mexico, Texas and Colorado, was at 8%. "This year has the potential of being way worse than any of the years we have analogues for in the past," Schumacher said. Even with near-normal precipitation across most of the west, every major river basin across the region was grappling with snow drought when March began, according to federal analysts. Roughly 91% of stations reported below-median snow water equivalent, according to the last federal snow drought update compiled on March 8. Water managers and climate experts had been hopeful for a March miracle -- a strong cold storm that could set the region on the right track. Instead, a blistering heatwave unlike any recorded for this time of year baked the region and spurred a rapid melt-off. "March is often a big month for snowstorms," Schumacher said. "Instead of getting snow we would normally expect we got this unprecedented, way-off-the-scale warmth." More than 1,500 monthly high temperature records were broken in March and hundreds more tied. The event was "likely among the most statistically anomalous extreme heat events ever observed in the American south-west," climate scientist Daniel Swain said in an analysis posted this week. "Beyond the conspicuous 'weirdness' of it all," Swain added, "the most consequential impact of our record-shattering March heat will likely be the decimation of the water year 2025-26 snowpack across nearly all of the American west." Calling the toll left by the heat "nothing short of shocking," Swain noted that California was tied for its worst mountain snowpack value on record. While the highest elevations are still coated in white, "lower slopes are now completely bare nearly statewide."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reuters reports that SpaceX has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO, reportedly targeting a valuation above $1.75 trillion. Reuters reports: SpaceX puts more rockets in space than any other company and promises a chance to invest in humanity's return to the moon and attempt to colonize Mars. The company aspires to put artificial intelligence data centers in space, while running a lucrative satellite communications system that opens up much of the earth to the internet and is increasingly used in war. [...] A public listing at a potential valuation of more than $1.75 trillion comes after SpaceX merged with Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI in a deal that valued the rocket company at $1 trillion and the developer of the Grok chatbot at $250 billion. SpaceX is hosting an analyst day on April 21, encouraging research analysts to attend in person, [...]. The company is also offering analysts an optional visit to xAI's "Macrohard" data center site in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 23, and plans to hold a virtual session on May 4 to discuss financial models with banks' research analysts, the source said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's Artemis II mission has launched four astronauts around the moon and back, marking humanity's first crewed lunar voyage in 53 years and the first test flight of NASA's Orion capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) with people on board. Five minutes into the flight, Commander Reid Wiseman saw the team's target: "We have a beautiful moonrise, we're headed right at it," he said from the capsule. The Associated Press reports: Artemis II set sail from the same Florida launch site that sent Apollo's explorers to the moon so long ago. The handful still alive cheered this next generation's grand adventure as the Space Launch System rocket thundered into the early evening sky, a nearly full moon beckoning some 248,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) away. Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman led the charge into space with "Let's go to the moon!" accompanied by pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada's Jeremy Hansen. It was the most diverse lunar crew ever with the first woman, person of color and non-U.S. citizen riding in NASA's new Orion capsule. Carrying three Americans and one Canadian, the 32-story rocket rose from NASA's Kennedy Space Center where tens of thousands gathered to witness the dawn of this new era. Crowds also jammed the surrounding roads and beaches, reminiscent of the Apollo moonshots in the 1960s and '70s. It is NASA's biggest step yet toward establishing a permanent lunar presence. Visit NASA's Artemis II Launch Day blog for the latest updates. Developing...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader Elektroschock writes: When Ubisoft pulled the plug on The Crew's servers without warning, players were left with a worthless game they'd already paid for. Now, consumer watchdog UFC-Que Choisir is fighting back, demanding gamers' right to play regardless of publisher whims. Supported by the "Stop Killing Games" movement, this landmark case challenges unfair terms before the Creteil Judicial Court (Val-de-Marne near Paris), and aims to protect players from disappearing games. The lawsuit that UFC-Que Choisir filed against Ubisoft on Tuesday alleges that the video game publisher "misled consumers about the permanence of their purchase and imposed abusive contractual clauses stripping players of ownership rights," reports Reuters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZipNada writes: Two software researchers recently demonstrated how modern AI tools can reproduce entire open-source projects, creating proprietary versions that appear both functional and legally distinct. The partly-satirical demonstration shows how quickly artificial intelligence can blur long-standing boundaries between coding innovation, copyright law, and the open-source principles that underpin much of the modern internet. In their presentation, Dylan Ayrey, founder of Truffle Security, and Mike Nolan, a software architect with the UN Development Program, introduced a tool they call malus.sh. For a small fee, the service can "recreate any open-source project," generating what its website describes as "legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems." It's a test case in how intellectual property law -- still rooted in 19th-century precedent -- collides with 21st-century automation. Since the US Supreme Court's Baker v. Selden ruling, copyright has been understood to guard expression, not ideas. That boundary gave rise to clean-room design, a method by which engineers reverse-engineer systems without accessing the original source code. Phoenix Technologies famously used the technique to build its version of the PC BIOS during the 1980s. Ayrey and Nolan's experiment shows how AI can perform a clean-room process in minutes rather than months. But faster doesn't necessarily mean fair. Traditional clean-room efforts required human teams to document and replicate functionality -- a process that demanded both legal oversight and significant labor. By contrast, an AI-mediated "clean room" can be invoked through a few prompts, raising questions about whether such replication still counts as fair use or independent creation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In classic Cloudflare fashion, the CDN provider used April Fool's Day to unveil an actual, "not a joke" product. Today, the company announced EmDash -- an open-source "spiritual successor" to WordPress that aims to solve plugin security. Phoronix reports: With the help of AI coding agents, Cloudflare engineers have been rebuilding the WordPress open-source project "from the ground up." EmDash is written entirely in TypeScript and is a server-less design. Making plug-ins more secure than the WordPress architecture, EmDash plug-ins are sandboxed and run in their own isolate. EmDash builds upon the Astro web framework. EmDash doesn't rely on any WordPress code but is designed to be compatible with WordPress functionality. EmDash is open-source now under the MIT license. The EmDash code is available on GitHub.Read more of this story at Slashdot.