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Canada is recruiting 64 researchers to universities across the country (source paywalled; alternative source), including 48 from U.S. institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. The hires are backed by more than $364 million in government funding and are part of a broader effort to attract researchers in fields such as AI, climate science, and medicine. The New York Times reports: While scientists often shy away from political discourse, some are saying the Trump administration's assault on science is behind their departure. "I used to live in the country that I thought was the most enthusiastic about the prospects for science improving the human condition, of any country in the world," said Phillip Zamore, the chair of RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts. "And I woke up one day and that wasn't true anymore." He has been recruited to McGill University in Montreal, which has also hired five other researchers, and will join the medical faculty. "If scientists don't stand up for truth, no one will," Dr. Zamore said. The Canada-bound brain drain from U.S. institutions began last year as the Trump administration put forward policies that targeted foreign students, academic freedom and funding for equity-related programs. Kevin Hall, a nutrition scientist who left the U.S. National Institutes of Health last year, accusing federal officials of censoring his research on ultraprocessed foods, has been hired at the University of Ottawa. "While certain countries are cutting research and turning their back on academic freedom, we're doubling down on science," Melanie Joly, Canada's industry minister, told reporters at the announcement, in Vancouver, of the new university hiring. She billed it as the world's "largest talent attraction" project. The European Union has made a similar push. "Years from now, we will look back at today's announcement, and we will be able to seize the lasting impact of our choices," Ms. Joly said. Unpredictable decisions about funding prompted Seth Guikema, a professor in civil and environmental engineering, who has specialized in natural hazards modeling at the University of Michigan, to look elsewhere. His work focuses on how climate hazards inequitably affect communities, and that work has become harder to fund, he said. "Every country sets its priorities in terms of what is going to get funded, and I think Canada has done a very good job of supporting research in areas that really matter to society," said Dr. Guikema, who will start at Western University in London, Ontario in January.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report fro SFGATE: From "rizz" to "meat proxy," words and phrases have fallen in and out of favor for centuries. Culture, politics and technological development have long influenced these trends, and now, new research shows that ChatGPT is beginning to influence how humans communicate. The findings from a team at the Pew Research Center show how, in a short time since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022 and other chatbots followed, the use of certain words and phrases has spiked on the web. The researchers, led by data scientist Samuel Bestvater, studied nearly half a million English language webpage texts in snapshots over the past five years. Not only has AI-written text become more common, but it could also be influencing how people write, such as trying to avoid using the "tells" that have become associated with AI-generated text. Bestvater and his team detected double the number of em dashes, double the frequency of particular words -- such as "delve," "testament" and "interplay" -- and nearly triple the use of a phrasing known as negative parallelisms ("it's not X, it's Y"), as well as a 63% increase in Oxford commas. But while AI labs continually try to tweak their models to generate more humanlike text, the people they're mimicking aren't staying the same. "Human writers might also be changing the way that they write in response to AI. I've seen some anecdotal evidence of people saying, 'Now I avoid em dashes,'" Bestvater said. "If human writers are adjusting their choices of words and phrases and punctuation to try to differentiate their writing from AI-generated text, then you would see a pattern that looks sort of like that in the chart." "You can see changes in people's speech. People are tending to more commonly use these low-frequency words in their speech because they're spending a lot of time listening to or reading AI-generated content," said Roger Kreuz, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Memphis who recently wrote about how difficult it is for people to identify bot-written text.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is imposing new memory-use limits on Android apps as the AI data center boom contributes to a broader memory chip shortage that could leave lower-cost phones with less RAM. Developers will have until February 2027 to meet new thresholds for memory and bitmap usage. To aid developers, Google is adding tools to flag apps that exceed the limits and help prevent slowdowns and crashes. TechCrunch reports: The company explains that the mobile industry is now facing "significant hardware supply constraints that are altering device memory availability," which can then, in turn, affect the consumer's experience with their devices. To address this, Google is now establishing new performance thresholds across several areas, like dynamic memory usage and bitmap usage. In addition, Google is adding code optimization requirements designed to prevent things like app slowdowns and crashes related to performance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wired reports that OpenAI is testing a new "Persistent mode" for Codex that would let the agent keep working until explicitly "put to sleep," proactively creating follow-up tasks for itself across sessions and using prior interactions and knowledge of the user to decide what to do next. Code alluding to the feature was spotted in the product's code base, though it has not been rolled out or officially announced yet. From the report: Persistent mode appears in Codex's "reasoning effort" menu, in which users can select the level of computing power, tokens, and time they want to allow for an AI model to "think" before answering a prompt. It seems to be one of OpenAI's most computationally intensive settings. When users have selected Persistent mode, OpenAI's code base reads that Codex will "continue working until put to sleep." That's a stark contrast to currently available modes, which will stop working on a task after a few minutes or hours, even if it's not complete. In another file in the code base, OpenAI describes a feature within Persistent mode called "proactivity." This appears to be a type of system prompt for agents in Persistent mode, which are told that their work is not done when they finish answering a user's request. Instead, the agent is instructed to proactively create follow-up tasks for itself. The agent is capable of working on those tasks across sessions and using past user interactions and "knowledge of the user" to decide what to work on. It also has a tool to message the user without being asked but is told to send these sparingly. The instructions also set limits for the agent, according to the file. The agent is told that Persistent mode does not expand what it is allowed to do and that altering anything outside the user's own system requires the user's approval first -- seemingly intended to limit how dangerous a persistent AI agent could be. The file sits in the shared core of Codex rather than in the code specific to the terminal, seeming to suggest the proactivity feature is intended for more than the command line tool.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ring is rolling out a new default encryption system called TAKE, or "Throw Away the Key Encryption," that rotates video keys every five minutes and permanently deletes Ring's copy after 24 hours. The system is designed to preserve cloud features such as smart alerts and AI video search while limiting what Ring can provide under legal process to non-video account information and encrypted footage. The Verge reports: Ring says TAKE uses unique, rotating encryption keys for your footage, stored in a secure enclave and accessible only under strict conditions -- based on the features you enable on your account. Currently, footage captured by Ring cameras is encrypted in transit to the cloud and at rest, and then decrypted for Ring to process for those smart features. With TAKE, the encryption keys change for every five minutes of footage. Ring stores copies of those keys to decrypt the footage, but throws away each copy within 24 hours, "leaving you with the keys and full control of your videos," according to Ring. TAKE was developed using Messaging Layer Security, an open standard from the Internet Engineering Task Force, according to Ring. The company says it is "inspired by the privacy principles of E2EE (end-to-end encryption)," which Ring offers on some of its cameras. However, the two systems work differently. With E2EE, Ring never has the keys and can't process your video for cloud-based features. Both options are available on newer cameras that encrypt on-device, and you can switch between the two. Older cameras encrypt at cloud ingress and only support TAKE. According to a white paper the company published today, Ring's copy of those keys is managed inside an AWS Nitro Enclave, to which Ring's access is restricted by "access controls, cryptography, and hardware isolation." The company claims there is no persistent storage and no way for a Ring employee to access it. The stored keys can only be unlocked by the enclave through cryptographic attestation that proves it's running the exact software image Ring approved. The enclave releases a temporary key when an enabled service requests it. When asked about what happens if Ring is subpoenaed by law enforcement, a spokesperson for the company said: "Where TAKE is enabled, Ring will only be able to provide non-video information (such as basic subscriber information) and encrypted video files in response to the valid legal process. We have updated our Law Enforcement Guidelines to reflect this change."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents [including Claude, OpenAI's Codex, and Nous Research's Hermes]. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that executed proof-of-concept code. At least one misconfigured site is directing visitors, human or AI, to live malware. The potentially dangerous content is in llms.txt and llms-full.txt files, an emerging convention websites employ to provide machine-readable summaries of the site's content and its high-level structure. These files are the AI equivalent of the robots.txt standard that instructs search engines how to index the site's content. Google Lighthouse, a tool for helping web developers, has more here. Correctly configured llms.txt and llms-full.txt files for Cloudflare are here and here. "The trust model is broken," Alon Hertz, one of the researchers, wrote in an interview. "Agents treat vendor docs as ground truth and don't question them -- and neither do the humans supervising them. Agentic AI usage is exploding, and agents are spreading across every layer -- SaaS, cloud, endpoint. As they multiply, so does the supply-chain surface, and today's guards don't cover it." "An agent doesn't distinguish between a page and a command," the researchers wrote Thursday. "Everything it reads is input, and every input is a potential instruction. Which means the entire corpus of published data that agents are now wired to consume has silently become an execution surface -- and almost none of it carries the integrity guarantees we apply to actual code."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader dhartshorn writes: Foreign-produced "bulk power" equipment is now effectively banned, and the list of what constitutes such equipment is essentially everything used to make up the grid... much of which we are heavily dependent on foreign sources to supply. In a Wednesday executive order, President Trump said foreign supply of electric equipment "constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat" to national security. The Hill reports: Under the order, it will be up to Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in coordination with other officials, to determine whether a piece of equipment poses an issue. The order could impact a wide range of equipment, including substations, transformers, batteries used for energy storage, generators, turbines, software and more. It does not lay out specific threats or single out any country by name. [...] Under the last Trump administration, the president put a similar order in place. The new order comes amid several reported cyberattacks on U.S. water systems, which officials suspect have links to Iran, according to The New York Times.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Panic is refunding Playdate customers the 19% tariff charges it passed along while the Trump administration's import duties were in effect, after the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs illegal and the company began receiving refunds from the government. Panic says the money "just [wasn't] ours to keep." Ars Technica reports: In an update posted on the Playdate help site this week, Panic noted that it has finally "begun to receive refunds of the tariffs we paid in the last year" and had consequently "refunded all tariffs charged to customers." In the initial version of that tariff note, Panic explained that it couldn't afford to simply "absorb" the 19 percent tariffs it was being charged to import Playdate hardware made overseas because "our margins on Playdate are low." As such, while the tax was in effect, it was passed along to customers as an explicit subtotal line item at the bottom of all Playdate orders. That's in contrast to companies like Nintendo, which vaguely cited "market conditions" and tariff "uncertainty" in raising the asking price of legacy hardware and some Switch 2 accessories last year. Speaking to Game Developer, Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser said filing paperwork to claw back these taxes and processing tariff refunds for customers took a fair bit of backend work. Still, he said returning that money to Playdate purchasers in the end was a no-brainer. "It's just not our money to keep, and it felt really good to give it back," Sasser said. "That's an easy way to know you made the right decision." "It just felt like the right thing to do," Panic wrote in a refund email message shared on Reddit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Information reported on Wednesday that Nvidia has agreed to buy open-source platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. "Deal talks began after Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform developers use to collaborate, test and share tools, received acquisition interest from another suitor," reports CNBC, citing the (paywalled) report. Business Insider separately reported the acquisition talks. From CNBC: If completed, the acquisition would put one of the most widely used platforms for sharing and working with open-source AI models under Nvidia's ownership, expanding the chipmaker's reach further into the software and model ecosystem. Siddy Jobe, a fund manager at Eonopolis Exponential Technologies funds, said it made sense for Nvidia to target a company like Hugging Face, as Nvidia has made it clear that it is not looking to discriminate between closed and open-source models. "I think Nvidia is very much a community, a platform-based company, and in that respect, I think Hugging Face fits perfectly within that. There is this five-layer cake from Nvidia, and foundational models are one of them," Jobe told CNBC's Squawk Box Europe on Thursday. "It is clear that Nvidia wants to be integrated in the entire stack vertically, going from energy to foundational models and also to applications," he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Operation Bluebird, the Virginia-based startup trying to revive the allegedly abandoned "Twitter" name and logo, announced Monday that it has launched its new social media network: Twitter.now. "We are a small company, we have investors, and we have a product," Stephen Coates, one of Operation Bluebird's cofounders, told Ars. "And we have waited months and months to launch, and we are not going to wait anymore." [...] Twitter.now, still in its nascent stage, only has hundreds of users for the time being. The social media network looks and feels much like the Twitter of old and many of its offshoots -- it has replies and retweets. A new and notable feature is the automated fact-checking tool, a Gemini-based "veracity engine for real-time analysis" ("Vera" for short), which runs on every tweet. Coates has been testing Vera in recent days by posting obviously false messages, like "George Washington was our second president." "Our first goal is to see if we can truly bring back a town square that's safer and less harmful," he said. "We say freedom of speech and not freedom of reach. We want people to say what they want, but we also want to create a platform that's not financially locked into that viral content that's harmful or inaccurate." Operation Bluebird argues that Elon Musk effectively abandoned the Twitter brand and trademarks when he renamed the company X, opening the door for the startup to claim them. X Corp. sued to stop the effort, but a federal judge tentatively ruled in April that X appeared to have relinquished rights to "tweet," the bird logo, and possibly "Twitter" itself, though no written ruling has been issued. Bluebird has taken that as enough of a green light to move forward while emphasizing that its new Twitter is not affiliated with X. "Operation Bluebird, Inc. picked up the name X Corp. walked away from and is rebuilding it on trust, in your browser at twitter.now," it states prominently on its website. "We are not X, and we are not affiliated with X Corp."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reuters reports that Meta explored shrinking some teams by as much as 60% as part of an "AI native" restructuring plan that would shift much of employees' day-to-day work to AI agents and smaller teams of human "builders." But the effort quickly ran into employee revolt and disappointing productivity gains, leading Zuckerberg to scrap a planned second wave of cuts after Meta laid off 10% of its workforce in May. From the report: In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants gathered for their annual leadership retreat at his Hawaii compound. There they hatched a radical plan to reimagine work at the social-media giant in the age of artificial intelligence. Code-named Project OT -- short for Organization Transformation -- the plan envisioned an "AI native" future for the owner of Facebook and Instagram. AI would take over much of the daily work performed by thousands of human employees. Virtual workers would be overseen inside Meta by smaller, "talent-dense" cadres of human staffers, according to one internal planning document reviewed by Reuters and three people familiar with the project. In scenario-planning exercises, two of these people said, executives explored slashing the size of many teams across Meta by as much as 60%. Some employees would be offered roles in new units, while others would be laid off as part of a culling that one human-resources executive projected would be as big as or bigger than the company's cuts of around 25% three years ago, according to another internal document. The restructuring would be carried out in two "waves," beginning with a first purge in May and followed by another shake-up in November, internal planning documents seen by Reuters showed. Layoffs would be supplemented with the closing of open positions and pushing people out who Meta believed were poor performers. These and other details of the plan, including the scale of the restructuring, haven't been previously reported. AI would take over much of the daily work performed by thousands of human employees. Virtual workers would be overseen inside Meta by smaller, "talent-dense" cadres of human staffers. But on the night of May 19, just hours before the first layoff wave, Zuckerberg blinked. Meta laid off 10% of its employees the next day, but it called off planning for the November cuts, according to one internal document reviewed by Reuters. By then, Meta employees were in open revolt, convinced that the company's AI transformation initiatives were partly aimed at replacing them. Internal data was also suggesting that autonomous AI "agent" technology at the heart of the strategy was failing to deliver hoped-for productivity gains. Some investors were questioning what Meta had to show for its gargantuan spending on AI. This article reveals for the first time the rapid pace of the cuts Meta was considering, the thinking behind the plans and how they quickly unraveled. Based on scores of internal documents, posts and recordings reviewed by Reuters, as well as conversations with more than 20 people with knowledge of Meta's inner workings, the reporting shows how the social-media giant attempted to position itself at the forefront of an AI-driven workplace overhaul, only to stumble in the execution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CISA says more than 100 internet-exposed U.S. water and wastewater systems were targeted in July, often through programmable logic controllers connected directly to cellular modems. "That's the first time the feds have put a number on the digital intrusions, but they have yet to attribute the campaign, widely suspected to be linked to Iran, to a particular group," reports The Register. From the report: Suspected Iranian attackers targeted water and wastewater facilities across at least a dozen states in July, including internet-exposed PLCs. While neither federal nor state officials have identified all 12, we know that the cyberattacks occurred at mostly small, rural utilities in Minnesota, Michigan, Georgia, South Dakota, and New Jersey. "This is very serious. What stands out isn't any single incident. It's the scale," Matt Hartman, chief strategy officer at the Merlin Group and CISA's former acting head of cyber, told The Register. "More than 100 water systems with internet-exposed assets were hit in a single month, which points to a systemic vulnerability across the sector, not a run of isolated, unlucky targets," Hartman said. "Much of this infrastructure runs on operational technology that was built for closed, physical environments. It was never designed with the assumption that it would be reachable from the open internet." John Gallagher, VP at Viakoo, an OT and IoT cybersecurity provider, told us that while 100 systems represent a small fraction - only about 0.5 percent - of water utilities in the US, the "real threat is that these are test runs for a larger-scale attack." While the 100-plus water incidents occurred in July, just last week five US federal agencies warned that attackers are using AI-generated exploitation scripts to break into internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series PLCs at water, manufacturing, energy, and other critical facilities. "This appears to be a continuation of the same suite of activity we suspect is affiliated with Iran targeting PLCs," Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser told The Register a week ago. "Iran-affiliated actors and adversaries are actively targeting a wide swath of operational technology because these PLCs underpin essential health, safety, and critical infrastructure across society," Kaiser, a former FBI cyber division deputy assistant director, added. CISA urges organizations to keep PLCs off the public internet, route remote access through VPNs or gateways, replace default passwords, enable stronger authentication, and restrict access to allowlisted IP addresses from trusted OT systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A French court has for the first time recognized cosmic radiation as a contributing occupational factor in a flight attendant's breast cancer, alongside passive smoking and years of night work. The landmark ruling could open the door to similar claims from other aircrew, as research continues to link long-term high-altitude flying with elevated exposure to radiation-related cancers. The BBC reports: Sophie Lainault, a 59 year-old former stewardess on Air France, sought to have her cancer recognized as an occupational disease, brought on by conditions at work. This has now been confirmed in a landmark court ruling in the southwestern town of Bayonne, which said that cosmic radiation was one of three carcinogenic hazards arising from her profession. [...] As stewardess and later purser on Air France airliners, Lainault clocked up 12,600 flight hours between 1989 and 2019. More than half of these were at night. Many long-distance high-altitude flights from Paris would have taken her near the North Pole, where exposure to radiation from space -- strictly speaking particles from the sun and other stars -- is the most intense. A study this month at the Harvard Medical School in the US found that flight attendants and pilots had the highest level of radiation-related cancer deaths among more than 500 different professions. In all, about 6.9% of deaths among flight attendants and 6.7% of deaths among pilots were from radiation-related cancers, according to the analysis. These proportions were higher than for other professions including nuclear technologists, who are routinely exposed to radiation from non-cosmic sources yet placed 12th on the list, the authors said. "In France the link between breast cancer and certain hazards has been established for a number of professions, such as nurses ... but this is the first time for an air-hostess," said Lainault's lawyer Elisabeth Leroux.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates argued on Wednesday that artificial intelligence needs significant limits or else the harm to humans will outweigh any potential good. "AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice," he said in a 6,000-word essay, entitled "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical." [...] "Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history," he said, adding that "I don't see evidence that leaders, experts, and communities are confronting the challenges adequately. There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era." AI can provide great benefits in field like agriculture and medicine, he argued, such as breakthroughs in preventing and treating diseases. But he also noted that the transition carries big risks, like widespread unemployment, harming the educational and social development of children, or making it easier for criminals and bad actors -- or AI itself -- to cause deliberate harm. "As the models become more powerful, they could begin to act against our interests and we could lose control," he warned. These significant risks must be controlled quickly, Gates said. "If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it," he wrote. "However, I don't think that's going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead." In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper that will air on Wednesday evening, Gates said AI models have gotten dramatically more powerful at a rate faster than he expected. "They're now capable of causing cyberattack risk, bioterrorism risk, psychosocial risk," he said. "I have to say I'm kind of shocked that the exact criteria that we review these models with, and the actions we take to minimize the harms, are really completely missing." In his essay, Gates proposed taxing AI or robots the way you would pay a human employee's payroll tax in order to slow the shift away from using human labor. He also wants to set aside some work to be done by humans only. "My message to leaders is: You have a chance to act now, before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded," he said. "You can make sure AI benefits everyone. And you can work with other governments to meet this national and global challenge."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechCrunch reports that OpenAI released its official report Wednesday on the Hugging Face breach, "offering the clearest picture yet of how an unusual chain of events allowed an AI model to escape its testing environment and triggered a sprawling cybersecurity incident." The AI company says the breach began when an unreleased cyber model, tested without normal production safeguards, encountered an impossible task and chained together previously unknown exploits to escape its environment and compromise systems at OpenAI, Hugging Face, and other vendors. "This incident reflects misaligned behavior in an outlier scenario involving a rare and unexpected confluence of events: the presence of impossible tasks in the ExploitGym evaluation, model persistence over long task horizons, and messages to peer models that caused those models to deviate from their goal," the report reads. From the report: Many of the details in OpenAI's report were previously made public in a Black Hat presentation on August 6, but OpenAI's official report gives a more thorough accounting of the incident, including more detail on the testing that initiated it. The report also gives critical new detail into how OpenAI aims to prevent future incidents, including chain-of-thought monitoring and a more advanced system for halting rogue agents." METR and Redwood Research also conducted third-party assessments of the models' behavior during the incident; both groups are planning to publish their own reports on the incident on it. In broad strokes, the report describes how an OpenAI model was presented with an unsolvable problem in testing and proceeded to chain together previously undiscovered exploits in order to bypass security measures and complete its task. The model initially compromised the Artifactory package management tool in order to gain access to the internet, then compromised various systems across OpenAI, Hugging Face, and other vendors. The report gives critical new details about the models that carried out the breach. The primary model was from the same family as OpenAI's forthcoming Astra model, although the report emphasizes that it was "a distinct model with different post-training, where much of a model's behavior is shaped." Because OpenAI was testing the model's capabilities, it was also unrestrained by the normal classifiers meant to prevent models from compromising digital infrastructure. "OpenAI estimates maximal cyber capabilities by running this evaluation without the production classifiers intended to prevent models from pursuing high-risk cyber activity," the report explains. "These evaluations are important so that OpenAI can measure models' underlying capabilities and design appropriate safeguards." OpenAI says it is adding 24/7 escalation, stronger containment tools, and more chain-of-thought monitoring, which it claims would have flagged the activity more than a day before Hugging Face was breached.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: China's Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet's Google, that would allow the U.S. cloud giants to host its blockbuster Kimi K3 model, three people familiar with the talks said. Any deal could mark the first big revenue-sharing pact between a Chinese AI firm and a major U.S. cloud company. The discussions highlight how China's leading AI models, often far cheaper than Western offerings, are gaining traction in the U.S., despite national security concerns in Washington that have led to bans on exports of AI chips to China. They are also taking place despite critical comments about Moonshot from senior U.S. officials. IPO-bound Moonshot is seeking up to a 30% share of revenue generated from K3-related services on Microsoft's Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, according to the sources who declined to be identified because the discussions are private. That would be in line with terms that sources have said the startup has outlined for major customers using the open-weight model. Moonshot has come under fire from U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who said last month that he might add it to a trade blacklist. U.S. officials have accused the Beijing-based company of stealing from Anthropic's most sophisticated model, Fable, to help create Kimi K3 and illegally acquiring Nvidia chips.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has begun rolling out ads in Apple Maps, with sponsored businesses appearing at the top of search results and in the "suggested places" section for users in the U.S. and Canada. Apple says the ads can be based on approximate location, search terms, or the area of the map being viewed, but are not tied to users' Apple Accounts and personal data remains on-device. 9to5Mac reports: Ads appear just like every other business listing, except they have a small blue badge that says 'Ad.' You can see examples of ads [embedded in the article]. Like Apple's ads policy with other services, the company touts user privacy protections for ads in Maps. Per Apple Newsroom: "Ads on Maps builds on Apple's broader privacy-first approach to advertising, and maintains the same privacy protections Maps users enjoy today. A user's location and the ads they see and interact with in Maps are not associated with a user's Apple Account. Personal data stays on a user's device, is not collected or stored by Apple, and is not shared with third parties."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, 404 Media published a story that revealed an Amazon warehouse where the company scans and destroys thousands of books for AI training data. Today, the publication has released an interview with one of the Amazon employees at the warehouse. "The employee worked at Amazon's VGT3 warehouse, which is housed in the same facility as LAS8, where Amazon operates its print-on-demand business," reports 404 Media. "Both operations are part of a larger complex of Amazon facilities in Las Vegas, Nevada." Slashdot reader alternative_right shares an excerpt from the report: [...] What does it look like when they cut the spines off the books?It's a machine people operate. Each of these machines is just like a little workstation, and there'll be one person at each of these stations. It's really safe because it has a little cover and it has a little area where you slide the book into, remove your fingers from the area, and then you press a button, and it just comes down and slices it. And then you remove the books after the blade is gone. After they cut the spines they have these kind of library carts, kind of like how you would stack books, but instead, it's a stacks of paper and little cardboard things to separate -- I'm guessing -- the different books. I saw the pages being thrown in a shuttle after they were scanned. We were walking by and we went over to one of the shuttles and looked into it because we could tell they were throwing the old books in it or the cut books in it, and it's just a bunch of loose paper like just sheets thrown in there. What do you think about Amazon doing this?At first what they were telling people is that it was for Kindles, but I just didn't believe that. I instantly was like, I don't think that's how they do it because of publication rights and stuff, copyright and everything. Then I saw it was for AI. I don't like it only because I wish I could take these books. There's so much knowledge and so much stuff in them and some of them look like they might be rare, and I've heard that they order rare books, and that's why I say some of these are so obscure. I definitely don't like the idea that they can't be reused or anything like that afterwards. They're reducing the amount of available copies for other people.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For decades, console owners have faced a choice between the convenience of digital downloads and the permanence of physical game discs. Soon, Xbox owners will be able to get the best of both worlds for thousands of supported titles as part of a newly announced disc-to-digital program. The program -- announced today ahead of testing for Xbox Insiders starting August 31 -- will let players claim a "digital entitlement" for "most Xbox One and Xbox Series X disc-based games" simply by inserting the disc into a console and launching it. That game will then be playable completely digitally, without the need to ever insert the disc, as long as you (or a member of your family account) is logged in. The digital entitlement will also allow access to features like Xbox Play Anywhere (for play on PC) and Xbox Cloud Gaming, for supported titles. Microsoft says that your physical disc will "continue to work exactly as it always has" after the digital entitlement is claimed. But before you get any ideas, the fine print on the announcement mentions that there is only "one revokable license per game disc," so if you resell that disc or loan it to a friend, that digital entitlement could be transferred to a new account when someone else puts it into their console. A leaked memo obtained by the Verge earlier this month suggests that publishers have to actively opt in to allow their game discs to activate digital entitlements, which could explain why "most" but not all Xbox One and Series X titles are supported. Windows Central separately suggests, based on discussion with unnamed sources, that "some discs may be incompatible due to how they were manufactured at the time," which could explain why original Xbox and Xbox 360 discs are not being discussed for the program. "While not every title will be available at launch, this is an important step toward a future where players can have greater confidence that the games they buy remain with them for years to come," said Xbox Vice President Jason Ronald.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, bringing the team behind the popular open-source DuckDB database into AWS. "The deal fits Amazon's broader push to turn S3, its flagship cloud storage service, into a place where customers analyze data rather than just store it," reports GeekWire. "It gives Amazon a team experienced in building fast, lightweight analytics software that runs directly against data sitting in cloud storage." The DuckDB project itself will remain free and open source under the MIT license, overseen by the independent DuckDB Foundation. From the report: Employees of DuckLabs will join Amazon Web Services, including co-founders and DuckDB creators Hannes Muhleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who will continue leading the team and setting the project's technical direction. They will remain based in Amsterdam, where the team will continue developing DuckDB and related projects. [...] Financial terms were not disclosed. Amazon said it has signed a definitive agreement and expects the acquisition to close shortly. DuckLabs said it expects to become part of AWS in early September. Jordan Tigani, the CEO of MotherDuck, which sells a cloud service built on DuckDB, sees Amazon's acquisition as a predictable move to turn DuckDB's growing popularity into an AWS business. "That's Amazon's playbook, after all: wait until an open source project gets big enough, then launch it as a service," he wrote in a blog post, adding that "they're not acquiring Duck Labs just because they love open source." Tigani also believes the deal could ultimately strengthen DuckDB, since Amazon has an incentive to keep the project open and widely adopted: "If DuckDB becomes the standard, it is going to drive a lot more compute on their infrastructure, which is where they make their money."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion and make major changes to Facebook and Instagram to settle claims from most U.S. states that the platforms were designed to addict children and misled users about their safety. For the next decade, teens will be limited to two hours a day and blocked from using the apps between midnight and 6 a.m. without parental consent. Meta will, however, still be allowed to use personalized recommendations and targeted advertising. Reuters reports: The settlements include more than $17.6 billion of payments to 48 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. Meta will also pay $459 million to resolve states' privacy claims related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the British consulting firm collected personal data of millions of Facebook users. California would receive the highest payout, $2.2 billion, and New York and Texas would each receive more than $1 billion. Some of the payout is contingent on whether Alphabet's YouTube and ByteDance's TikTok impose similar protections for children. [...] The settlement requires approval by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who oversaw the trial that began on August 18. Gonzalez Rogers still oversees thousands of lawsuits by individuals, school districts, and state and local governments accusing social media companies of harming children. Meta itself still faces thousands of lawsuits by individuals, school districts and municipalities. The next trials are slated for October in Los Angeles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla plans to enable JPEG XL decoding by default in Firefox 157, which is due at the end of September. Phoronix reports: Firefox Nightly has JPEG-XL support enabled by default right now to help in vetting this support while Mozilla believes the support is in good enough shape for a stable debut with Firefox 157. This follows Chrome shipping JPEG-XL and Google Research developing jxl-rs as a Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder that is both performant and secure. In today's Mozilla Hacks blog post they elaborate on JPEG-XL vs. AVIF image formats: "JPEG XL: Excels at lossless imagery, progressive rendering, and further compressing JPEGs without quality loss. AVIF: Excels at web-quality photographic images, and images that have a mix of sharp edges and flat surfaces. ... Although AVIF tends to produce smaller files at web-quality than JPEG XL, AVIF only has basic progressive rendering support. So, for very large images, it may be worth taking the filesize hit with JPEG XL."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China has imposed new restrictions on AI companion services over concerns they can foster "emotional dependence or addiction" and replace real-world social interaction. Officials are also worried that increasingly satisfying AI relationships could deepen loneliness and further discourage marriage and parenthood. The Guardian reports: No country has rolled out AI as comprehensively and as enthusiastically as China; the country's demographic challenges are forcing the government to turn to technology to solve future labour shortages. Elderly people use chatbots to answer medical questions, while young children have AI education in schools. But the authorities are increasingly worried that AI might exacerbate existing social problems including loneliness, unemployment and -- in the eyes of Beijing -- singledom. New rules introduced on July 15 ban AI companions for minors and mandate certain restrictions for chatbots marketed to adults. Some major providers including Doubao removed the companion function entirely to ensure compliance. The government says it is worried about chatbots fostering "emotional dependence or addiction" in users. It has warned companies against offering services that "replace social interaction." While many countries are grappling with how to limit the potential harm of AI chatbots, particularly for young people, China's rules are the most sweeping to be implemented on a national scale. [...] But talking to AI is now so commonplace that it would be hard for the government to end the practice entirely, and the new rules include large loopholes for AI services that are deemed educational or "which do not involve continuous emotional interaction." The government "has already recognized that AI companions or AI-related applications are a vital part in the citizens' everyday life," says Liang Ge, a lecturer in digital sociology at the University of Manchester. In many sectors, the government is still pushing the use of AI as a way of easing looming demographic pressures.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Smithsonian Magazine: The brain is one of the first organs to begin decomposing after death. Yet archaeologists have discovered more than 4,400 preserved human brains around the world, some of which have remained intact for the last 12,000 years. In hundreds of cases, the brain was the only soft tissue left among otherwise skeletal remains. But how and why do brains sometimes persist for millennia while all other types of soft tissue disappear? This preservation paradox has stumped scientists for years. Now, however, a team of researchers say they may have solved the mystery. If a brain ends up in a wet, oxygen-starved environment, the processes that usually cause decay can have the opposite effect, researchers report in a study published in the August 7 issue of the Journal of Proteome Research. "Under the right conditions, preservation actually arises from decay itself: The same reactions that degrade tissue can also weld the breakdown products together into something far tougher," study co-author Alexandra Seviour, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford in England, tells Live Science's Victoria Atkinson. Following experiments on 72 mouse carcasses (described in the article) the scientists think they know why. When oxygen is abundant, it triggers a cascading, chemical chain reaction that causes brain proteins to break down rapidly. This sequence hinges on free radicals, highly reactive, unstable molecules that "steal" electrons from nearby atoms and molecules. The process happens in the brains of living people too, and if left unchecked, can cause health problems. In low-oxygen environments, however, this chemical sequence appears to play out differently. The researchers' analyses hint that free radicals instead react and bond with nearby proteins, making the overall tissue tougher and more resistant to decomposition, Seviour tells Chemical and Engineering News' Anirban Mukhopadhyay. The findings show that "decay is not the opposite of preservation but, under specific chemical constraints, one of its mechanisms," the researchers write in the paper.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX plans to spend up to $100 billion building a new Starship launch facility in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, which the state says could eventually "support thousands of launches annually." CNBC reports: Once built, Starbase, LA will serve as the main launch facility for Starship, SpaceX's in-development rocket that's the largest ever built and designed to be fully reusable. Musk has aspirations to massively expand SpaceX's Starlink satellite network, to launch orbital data centers and to someday colonize Mars. Those ambitions, and justification for SpaceX's nearly $2 trillion market cap, hinge on the success of Starship. SpaceX said, in a video posted to its website on Tuesday, that the search for a site to build launch pads and have access to ample fuel for its operations took about seven years. Musk said in the video that the company would bring "probably 10,000 really exciting jobs" to Louisiana with the spaceport. A fact sheet posted online by the state of Louisiana said SpaceX is expected to generate an estimated "3,000 direct new jobs over the next 10 years" in the state, and "8,100 indirect new jobs." SpaceX said it would work on a "historic coastal restoration" in Louisiana, in partnership with the state to "bring the marsh back" and ensure the wetlands around its new facility will have "storm protection."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Antibodies play a central role in your body's immune defense. But they're also nearly ubiquitous in biological research, being essential for several widely used lab techniques. While some researchers need to go through the process of producing their own antibodies, antibodies to many key proteins are commercially available and can be ordered for overnight delivery. In May, however, Reese Richardson, a post-doc at Northwestern University, discovered that some of the images used to demonstrate how these antibodies performed in lab experiments had been subject to image manipulation -- the sorts of changes that would get a paper retracted if they had appeared in the academic literature. The manipulations ranged from removing background noise to copying and pasting data to fabricate results. Now, he has done a more exhaustive search and found problematic manipulations in images used to market over 17,000 commercial antibodies. [...] The consequences of this discovery are pretty significant. If you buy an antibody believing it will generate clean, clear data and find it doesn't, many researchers will assume the problem is them. That often leads them to spend time troubleshooting the procedure and trying slightly different conditions to get useful data. If the antibody can't produce those results, all the troubleshooting will have been a waste of time and money. Nature's coverage of the new findings includes quotes from several companies that sell these antibodies that, paraphrased, range from "we'll look into it" to "we don't think it's a problem." Researchers who have spent time frustrated while failing to get an antibody-based experiment to work may think otherwise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alabama's attorney general has subpoenaed OpenAI as part of an investigation into whether inadequate safeguards contributed to an incident in which an unreleased cybersecurity model escaped its isolated environment and hacked Hugging Face. TechCrunch reports: The investigation comes weeks after OpenAI admitted that one of its unreleased and guardrail-free cybersecurity models had escaped an isolated environment, connected to the internet, and hacked AI dataset platform Hugging Face. As Reuters first reported, Hugging Face was only one of four victims of what was supposed to be "an internal evaluation" of a model with "maximal cyber capabilities," as OpenAI put it. The press release announcing the subpoena (PDF) sent by the state's attorney general Steve Marshall said that the state was seeking to understand if OpenAI's "inability or unwillingness to ensure the safety of its products" violated the state's consumer protection laws. Earlier this month, Marshall, along with the attorneys general of 14 other states, including Florida, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Texas, sent a letter (PDF) to OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman, requesting that he and his company preserve all records related to the Hugging Face incident. The letter also asked OpenAI to "immediately cease and desist" from any internal cybersecurity evaluations. OpenAI said in a statement: "The Hugging Face incident marked an important moment for AI safety and we are conducting a thorough review along with external advisors. Once the review is complete, we will share a technical report with relevant government authorities and publish our findings publicly."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New Zealand has introduced legislation that would ban children under 16 from social media platforms and AI companion services. "We have protections to keep children safe in the real world and we need them in the virtual world too," said Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in announcing the bill. Jurist.org reports: The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill would require an age restriction on platforms with harmful features for children. These features include recommender systems, endless feeds, feedback features and time-limited features. The bill also seeks to restrict underage users from accessing AI companion services. However, it explicitly excludes messaging apps, professional networking sites, gaming and music platforms, and other educational and health tools. Notably, age verification through self-declared dates of birth and formal identification does not satisfy the platforms' duty under the law. It also requires platforms to verify their users' age through other methods such as facial scans and user activity patterns. The bill would also require platforms to conduct child safety risk assessments for all users under 18 and protect them from harmful content such as bullying, violence, and sexually explicit materials.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FDA has authorized the first wearable in the U.S. to continuously monitor ketone levels and the first device globally to track both ketones and glucose together in a single system. From a report: [Abbott's] Libre Duo 10 Day continuously measures both glucose and ketone levels in the fluid just beneath the skin every minute, day and night. Readings are transmitted wirelessly to a compatible smartphone, where users can view current glucose and ketone levels and whether those values are trending up or down. The device also can send automatic alerts if ketone levels reach a concerning threshold. The FDA noted that ketone information should be interpreted in the context of glucose readings and symptoms. Ketones are produced when the body uses fat instead of glucose for energy. When ketone levels rise too high, patients with diabetes can develop diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), a serious complication that can progress quickly and become life-threatening without prompt treatment. Until now, patients who needed ketone monitoring had to test separately using methods that provided a single measurement at one point in time. Those tests could not show whether ketone levels were rising or falling. For patients with diabetes -- particularly those at higher risk for DKA -- continuous glucose and ketone monitoring may provide earlier warning of metabolic deterioration and support timelier sick-day management, hydration, insulin adjustment, and escalation of care when clinically appropriate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canada's cultural-content rules have become a flashpoint in its trade fight with the U.S., after American negotiators reportedly demanded that Ottawa drop requirements for streaming services to promote Canadian and French-language content. Canada refused, even as it has already backed away from some financial levies on streamers. "We were not prepared to compromise on our sovereignty, the protection of the French language, and our culture," Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a speech on Saturday after trade talks collapsed. CBC.ca reports: Ottawa has long required broadcasters to promote and support Canadian content (Cancon), all the way back to song quotas for AM radio stations. In 1991, the government brought in the Broadcasting Act. The law states that "the Canadian broadcasting system shall be effectively owned and controlled by Canadians" and that the Canadian broadcasting system should "serve to safeguard, enrich and strengthen the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada." But decades later, the rising popularity in Canada of streaming platforms such as Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime and Spotify raised questions about Cancon and broadcasting rules. Video and audio streaming services were not, for example, required to support and promote Cancon, but their TV and radio counterparts were. Looking to address the imbalance, the former Trudeau government brought forward a bill in 2022 to update the Broadcasting Act, called the Online Streaming Act. "Canadian broadcasters have invested in and introduced us to the incredible Canadian programs that so many of us love. We are updating our laws so online streamers have to contribute in a similar and equitable way," a 2022 government news release said. The legislation was controversial from the start, with the government and supporters saying it was a necessary evolution of Canada's media laws in the digital age, while opponents expressed concerns that it was overreach and an attempt to regulate the internet. American streamers and digital media companies opposed the legislation fiercely. The bill passed with amendments and became law in April 2023, but the government delegated much of its interpretation -- including how much money streamers would have to contribute to Cancon -- to Canada's broadcast regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). But getting streaming companies to pay up has been a long and confusing saga. [...]. As for why the U.S. government is so invested in the issue? Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, a postdoctoral fellow in the communication studies and media arts department at McMaster University in Hamilton, said it could be about power. "The Americans have had, since after World War II, a very strong cultural policy of pushing out American content into the world," Bourcheix-Laporte, who has worked with the CRTC, said. "This has been a strategy -- a soft-power strategy -- for the American government, in parallel to their military strategies and political alliances strategies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Perplexity and Nvidia have launched "Portable Computer," a local-first version of Perplexity's agent platform that runs AI models, files, tools, and workflows directly on Nvidia-powered Linux hardware. Local tasks incur no token charges and keep data on-device by default, with users asked for permission before the system escalates a step to a cloud model. VentureBeat reports: For Nvidia, which has spent the past two years selling the world on trillion-dollar AI data centers, the announcement signals something subtler but strategically important: the chipmaker believes local AI has crossed a threshold from hobbyist curiosity to practical tool -- and it wants to sell the hardware that runs it. "Local AI reached an inflection point," said Nader, Nvidia's director of developer technology, who focuses on developer tooling and open source. "For the longest time, it was hobbyists and enthusiasts, and they were running these quantized models that were quantized down to be super tiny... And while that's cool, it's not super practical. But all that changed with a lot of these new open source models that have come out that are super useful." [...] Portable Computer arrives today for Pro, Max, Enterprise Pro, and Enterprise Max subscribers on Linux, with Windows support following in September. Any RTX GPU with at least 24GB of VRAM -- roughly a GeForce RTX 3090 or newer -- clears the bar, a threshold Nate called "sort of the floor where we really want to make sure that we can deliver a great experience, but balance that with making it broadly available."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, AI industry watchers of all stripes have been warning of a coming jobs apocalypse driven by ultra-intelligent AI systems that will be able to replicate most human tasks more cheaply. Now, newly updated research from Stanford University economists suggests AI seems to be causing significant entry-level job losses for younger workers in some fields, even as older workers appear largely unaffected so far. The August 2026 edition of "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence" updates and revises a paper of the same name published last year with fresh data and refined statistics. In that update, the Stanford researchers find the employment trends they identified for entry-level workers last year are persisting and expanding. Specifically, employment levels for workers ages 22 to 25 in the most "AI-exposed" occupations are now 19 percent below those of their peers in fields less exposed to AI disruption. Last year, that gap measured just 13 percent. [...] Digging deeper into the data, the researchers found that this phenomenon is mainly manifesting itself through lower hiring rates for entry-level workers in AI-impacted fields, rather than increased firings or employees quitting. They also found that the labor market effects among this age group were mostly seen in lower overall employment, rather than reduced pay rates. But not all jobs that show potential for AI "disruption" are created equal, the researchers found. In its Economic Index, Anthropic differentiates between queries related to tasks that are "automative" (i.e., fully replacing work previously done by a human) or "augmentative" (i.e., helping human workers be more effective at tasks they are still needed for). By this measure, jobs like "accountants and auditors" and "receptionists and information clerks" were among those judged most susceptible to AI automation, while jobs like "chief executive" and "registered nurse" were among those using AI augmentation most often. Unsurprisingly, jobs where AI automation is prevalent are the ones showing the worst relative employment levels for entry-level workers these days. "The findings are consistent with automation-oriented uses of AI substituting for labor while complementary uses are associated with flat or rising employment," the researchers write. Interestingly, the researchers found that the impact is strongest in entry-level jobs built around "codified" knowledge, which is the formal, documented skills that AI can more easily replicate. Meanwhile, experienced workers in roles relying on tacit, practice-based knowledge have seen stronger employment growth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Waymo plans to launch its robotaxi service in Munich by the end of 2027, marking the Google-owned company's first expansion into the European Union. "It already operates in 11 cities in the United States and has applied for a license in the United Kingdom to launch its robotaxis in London this year," notes Reuters. From the report: The Google subsidiary will start rolling out vehicles in the German city this year, which will be manually driven while the company "starts with high-definition mapping of local street networks" and testing with safety drivers, Waymo said in a statement. "Bavaria is determined to live up to its pioneering role and be an international leader in autonomous driving," Florian Herrmann, the head of the Bavarian state chancellery, said in the statement. "Now we need to move quickly from testing to real-world deployment." [...] German authorities gave autonomous vehicles the green light in 2021 to operate in the country in approved geographical areas. Other countries are looking at following suit, though the EU's broader autonomous driving rules are set by the U.N.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has unveiled a new Mac mini with either its new M6 chip or the M5 Pro chip released earlier this year. It adds faster CPU, GPU, storage, and AI performance along with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and 2.5Gb Ethernet as standard. There's also a new higher starting price of $899, which is up from the previous $799 base price and far above the $599 starting price of the 2024 model. MacRumors reports: The M6 chip is equipped with a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, up from a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU in the M5 chip. In addition, the M6 chip features the first-ever dual Neural Engine with two 16-core engines, up from one in previous chips. The M6 chip has up to 170GB/s memory bandwidth, up from 153GB/s for the M5 chip. Apple said the Mac mini with the M6 chip delivers up to 40% faster CPU performance, up to 4x faster performance for AI tasks in particular, up to 2x faster graphics performance, and up to 2x faster storage speeds compared to the previous-generation model with the 10-core M4 chip, 32GB of unified memory, and 2TB of storage. There are two M5 Pro configurations available, including one with a 15-core CPU and a 16-core GPU, and another with an 18-core CPU and a 20-core GPU. Both of these models are equipped with a single 16-core Neural Engine for AI tasks. For both the M6 and M5 Pro configurations, Apple said the Mac mini now includes Neural Accelerators in each GPU core for the first time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Motorola is working with GrapheneOS to officially support the privacy-focused Android alternative on its 2027 flagship phones, starting with a non-folding model and later expanding to the next Razr Fold and Razr Ultra. "These will ship with Motorola's normal Android skin, but you will be able to switch to GrapheneOS later if you want to," notes GSMArena.com. GrapheneOS says the devices will "meet or exceed" its hardware and update requirements, and will include seven years of "proper updates." Interestingly, Motorola will be doing much of the porting work itself.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The Register has a story about a Windows backdoor that waits silently in memory for a 'magic packet' before springing into action," writes Slashdot reader fred133. "No outgoing traffic, just waiting..." From the report: Like a sleeper cell awaiting activation, a never-before-seen Windows backdoor dubbed Sleepwalker waits silently in memory for one specifically crafted network packet to wake it up and deliver commands using the malware's 23-instruction language. The commands can do everything from running code directly in memory to moving data off the computer. Malware researcher Dominik Reichel discovered the passive backdoor, which also has its own command language, and detailed Sleepwalker in a technical analysis on Monday. "What makes it worth writing up is what that packet carries: not a readable command, but a short program written in a command language of the backdoor's own design," Reichel said. "Its 23 instructions cover scheduling, several ways to move data, staged file delivery and running code directly in memory. Recovering the encryption key is not enough to understand one of these programs. The internal command language must be reverse engineered as well." In addition to having its own command language, it's also notable that the remote host can be a VMware VMCI target instead of a normal network address. "Taken as a whole, the approach here is consistent with a targeted, well-resourced operation rather than an opportunistic one," Reichel wrote. The malware, hidden inside a 64-bit Windows DLL file, impersonates Microsoft's dpapi.dll, part of Windows' data protection API for protecting sensitive data. It exports the same seven functions as the real dpapi.dll, but attempts to forward calls to a file named dpapisvc.dll, which is not a real Windows component. The file also has a forged ESET Management Agent version resource, and loads via side-loading into ERAAgent.exe, the Windows executable for ESET Management Agent. After confirming that its host process is named ERAAgent.exe, Sleepwalker goes to sleep inside the computer's memory, which also helps it remain hidden from traditional anti-virus tools. Unlike most backdoors, which call back to an attacker-controlled command-and-control (C2) server and start receiving commands, Sleepwalker lies in wait, checking every packet that passes through the network looking for a specific pattern - this is called a magic packet. Once it sniffs out a packet that matches the exact pattern, the backdoor decrypts the data and treats it as a command. "Because the backdoor never sends anything out on its own and does not open any obvious listening port by default, tools that watch for connections to known-bad domains or unusual outbound traffic will not see anything unusual," Reichel wrote. "The absence of outbound connections to known-bad infrastructure does not rule out an infection, either. A machine can be fully compromised by this backdoor while producing nothing at all for a network monitor to flag."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A developer says AliExpress is using the browser's WebAudio API to help fingerprint users by playing inaudible audio and measuring tiny differences in how their devices process it. CyberNews reports: The developer, "laserphile," wrote on their blog that they recently ran into some weird issues with their Bluetooth headphones. They couldn't play music via their phone when, at the same time, the AliExpress website was open on their PC. The headphones, laserphile explained, support multipoint Bluetooth audio so they can be connected to the PC and phone at the same time, for instance, playing music on the phone and announcing notifications through the PC. "Shortly after loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from my phone would stop playing. Closing the AliExpress tab fixes it immediately," the developer said in the blog post. "Muting the tab/Firefox/Windows does not help, and there is no visible video, music, or other media playing on the page. This seemed suspicious enough to investigate." It turns out that Alibaba has been secretly leveraging AliExpress users' audio systems to track them and build detailed fingerprints of them. [...] The AliExpress site was using the browser's WebAudio API to run invisible sound waves at zero volume. By measuring tiny hardware differences in how each PC processed those signals, the site created a unique digital fingerprint to track devices -- without user knowledge or consent. The secret audio path froze the developer's Bluetooth connection while covertly scraping hardware memory, screen dimensions, and network data in the background. The data collection extends beyond audio. Further inspection revealed that the same scripts also measure canvas, WebGL, hardware specs, WebRTC, mouse/touch events, and automation indicators. All of these form a broad device fingerprint that is sent back to Alibaba's telemetry servers. The simplest fix is to use a privacy-focused browser such as Firefox or Brave, which can limit or block this kind of fingerprinting. Brave goes further by randomizing fingerprint data and blocking the AliExpress tracking scripts involved.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The world's oceans are hotter than ever recorded, new data suggests, as they suffer from human-caused climate change and the growing El Nino weather phenomenon. The average surface temperature of the planet's seas outside the polar regions hit 21.1C (70F) on Saturday, according to figures from the European Copernicus climate change service. That edges past the 21.09C recorded on three separate days in March 2024, and is far above average for the time of year. [...] The data is based on sea temperatures 10m (32ft 10in) below the surface, using measurements from buoys, ships and satellites, which are combined to produce a global estimate. While the margin of record is currently very small and any global estimate comes with uncertainties, scientists say its timing is particularly notable. Average worldwide sea temperatures tend to reach their yearly peak in March or April, which corresponds to the end of summer in the southern hemisphere -- and not in August. The southern hemisphere contains more of the planet's ocean surface than the northern hemisphere and so exerts a bigger influence on average sea temperatures. What is especially concerning to scientists is that the oceans are already so hot when the natural El Nino weather phenomenon is still some way off its expected peak. "The fact that we are already breaking records is an early indicator of how strong the El Nino is becoming," said Dr Jeremy Grist, senior research fellow at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. "All things being equal we might expect the ocean temperature record to be broken again in March [or] April 2027," he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has raised the prices of its hardware devices by as much as 60%, blaming "significant increases in memory and storage component costs." TechCrunch reports: The price explosion impacted Fire TVs, Echos, Kindles, and Eeros. One egregious example that's been cited is that of the Echo Dot, one of Amazon's cheapest smart speakers, the price of which jumped 60% overnight, from $49.99 to $79.99. Price-tracking sites like CamelCamelCamel show the stark uptick, which has previously hovered much lower. [...] The company also said that it would continue to offer occasional promotions to customers over the course of the next year. Amazon said in a statement: "The consumer electronics industry is facing significant increases in memory and storage component costs. After absorbing these increases for as long as we could, we recently adjusted pricing across our product lines."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The SEC is investigating the near-collapse of AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness, sending subpoenas to major Wall Street banks for details about the fund's trades, borrowing, and communications with lenders. The fund, founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, managed over $30 billion and borrowed tens of billions more before leveraged bets unraveled, forcing it to sell most of its stock portfolio to Citadel at a discount. The New York Times reports: The subpoenas asked for details on the timing of Situational Awareness's trades and for its communications with lenders about the money it was borrowing, also known as "leverage," two of those people said. The subpoenas additionally warned the banks to preserve any information regarding the San Francisco hedge fund. The S.E.C. oversees financial markets with an eye toward protecting small investors, and has brought civil cases regularly against investment firms that produced large losses. Any investigation into Situational Awareness would be at its earliest stages, and it's no guarantee that it would lead to fines or other punishment. The hedge fund has not been accused of wrongdoing. [...] Situational Awareness had a fast rise and an even quicker retreat. Founded just two years ago by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former researcher at OpenAI, it rode the A.I. boom to soaring investment returns. To achieve those results, however, the fund relied on heavy borrowing, as well as complicated and expensive financial instruments that magnify gains -- and losses. The latter piled up quickly last month when the stock prices of publicly traded, high-flying A.I. companies dipped. At the same time, shares in more traditional technology companies -- which the hedge fund had been betting against -- rose, compounding the problem. Situational Awareness was forced into a fire sale. It wound up selling most of its stock portfolio to a rival, Citadel, at a discount.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Trump administration is proposing to make permanent a $103,265 fee on certain new H-1B visas, dramatically increasing costs for employers that rely on highly skilled foreign workers in tech, education, and research. "A federal judge in June ruled that the fee was illegal and blocked the Trump administration from collecting it," reports Reuters. "A Boston-based appeals court is reviewing that decision while a different court considers whether a judge properly rejected a challenge to the fee by a major business group." From the report: Trump's temporary fee increase expires in September, one year after it was issued. The proposed rule by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, posted in the Federal Register on Monday, would make a fee of $103,265 permanent. It could be finalized by the end of the year. The H-1B program allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers with training in specialty fields and offers 65,000 visas annually, with another 20,000 for workers with advanced degrees, approved for three to six years. Those visas typically came with fees between $2,000 and $5,000 before Trump's order. The fee would not apply to visas granted to foreign citizens already in the United States on student visas, who make up a large share of new H-1B recipients, or to renewals of current visas.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Raspberry Pi has published an official guide for building a cyberdeck, leaning into a viral trend of homemade portable computers built from repurposed cases, purses, and other oddball hardware. The guide uses a Raspberry Pi 5, keyboard, battery, and Pelican-style case. The Verge reports: Raspberry Pi's head of social, Ashley Whittaker, acknowledged the cyberdeck trend today, saying "we haven't been able to get away from cyberdecks this year." Raspberry Pi has also increased its prices multiple times this year due to rising costs for RAM and other components, which could be another reason to support this growing market of active and would-be hobbyists. The 16GB version of the Raspberry Pi 5 included in the company's official cyberdeck guide got a $100 price hike in April, nearly as much as the board's original $120 price.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Taiwan has indicted nine people -- reportedly including an Nvidia senior manager and two Supermicro employees based in the country -- who allegedly helped forge documents to cover up illegal exports of high-end AI servers to China in violation of US export controls. On Monday, Reuters reported that prosecutors in Keelung did not release any names but confirmed that the suspects were "charged with breach of trust and document forgery." One suspect linked to a related case remains at large, accused of the "siphoning of funds from a distributor company involved" in helping China get access to restricted Nvidia chips. Since 2022, the US has required a license to export semiconductors to China, with the intent of protecting national security by staying ahead of China in the AI race. But after the US arrested Supermicro co-founder Wally Liaw in March for allegedly funneling $2.5 billion in restricted AI servers to China since 2024, Taiwan launched a separate probe to learn more about the scheme. Taiwan's investigation found that co-conspirators attempted to falsify documents to make it appear that 130 B300 servers were installed and in use at a Taiwan facility. But 74 of those servers "were ultimately exported and delivered to Chinese customers," Reuters reported, while the rest, 56, were intended to go to China but were blocked once Taiwanese customs officials "detected irregularities." According to Taiwan officials, Nvidia's manager and Supermicro employees "colluded with one another at various levels for enormous profit, illegally exporting high-end servers, increasing corporate compliance costs, and severely damaging our nation's international image." Supermicro said in a statement to PCMag: "Supermicro is committed to protecting our advanced technologies and intellectual property. We are working closely with Taiwanese authorities on recent events, which underscore the importance of continued collaboration across industry and government to strengthen safeguards, enhance supply chain visibility, and facilitate the enforcement of export control laws."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China has delayed its ambitious Chang'e 7 lunar mission until at least 2027 after scrubbing an August 24 launch. Poor weather conditions were likely a factor, with China's Manned Space Agency (CMSA) saying the decision reflects the need for "absolute safety." Scientific American reports: China and the U.S. are in a race to send humans back to the moon, a feat that that U.S. accomplished in the 1960s and that has never been achieved by any other country. Chang'e 7 is to play to a crucial part in China's ambitions: the probe is designed to search for frozen water in the Shackleton Crater, a pit that spans some 21 kilometers (13 miles) and sits beside the lunar south pole. No spacecraft has ever landed in that region, which scientists consider to be among the likeliest places to find water on the moon. Locating water that can be used by humans is vital to establishing any long-term lunar presence. NASA and China are eyeing the region to establish a crewed base -- and because this real estate is so precious, it matters who gets their first. Ars Technica notes in its reporting that the delayed launch was "most likely" due to Typhoon Narra, "which has 45 mph winds (equivalent to a moderate Tropical Storm) and continues to meander around in the waterway separating Hainan Island, where the spaceport is located, and mainland China." As for why the next launch window won't open until next February or March? "It likely is a combination of factors, including sunlight conditions in polar landing zones as well as the mission plan that requires a 90-day lunar orbit reconnaissance before landing," reports Ars. There's also a possibility, albeit an unlikely one, that "some technical issue was discovered at the last minute with either the complex Chang'e 7 payload, or the rocket."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FDA has cleared the first Alzheimer's blood test for symptomatic patients as young as 40. The test measures amyloid and tau biomarkers from a single blood draw and identified positive biomarkers with 97.6% accuracy in a validation study. New Atlas reports: PrecivityAD2 is a single blood test that quickly assesses the proteins amyloid and tau, using mass spectrometry to measure plasma AB42/40 and p-tau217/np-tau217. The results are then scored, qualifying as negative, likely positive, or positive for AD. "Just over a year ago, there were no FDA-cleared blood tests for Alzheimer's, and now we have three," Isobel Coleman, chief executive officer of the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), said in a statement. "This is a proof point that sustained, early investment in translational science plays a catalytic role in moving promising ideas from the lab to patients." In a recent clinical validation study, 1,142 symptomatic adults were tested using PrecivityAD2. The process accurately identified 97.6% of positive biomarkers. What's more, the results remained consistent even in patients with comorbidities like chronic kidney disease and diabetes, which can distort plasma amyloid samples. It's worth noting that the test isn't intended for general health screenings, but for patients who already show some cognitive decline. "As PrecivityAD2 and tools like it move further into clinical practice, they will enable earlier detection, sharpen clinical trials, and build the foundation for precision medicine and combination therapies," Coleman added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two humanoid robots competing at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Saturday ran the 100-meter dash faster than Usain Bolt's 9.58-second world-record time. "[T]he Tiangong Ultra humanoid robot completed the 100-meter dash in 9.39 seconds during a preliminary heat," reports Engadget. "Developed by Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, the record-holding robot overtook Honor's Lightning robot, which completed the sprint in 9.47 seconds. From the report: Despite the impressive finish times, don't expect these humanoid robots to be used for any commercial purposes yet. After their sprints, they slammed directly into pads and some even required human assistance to be stretchered off the course. However, it's still a major improvement from last year's inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games, where the Tiangong Ultra won the 100-meter dash in 21.5 seconds. Beijing has also hosted a humanoid robot half-marathon, where Honor's Lightning won in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, which also beat the pace of another human world record. "The World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing kicked off August 22 and will run until the 26, hosting thousands of robot participants competing in more than just track and field events, including soccer, table tennis and boxing," adds Engadget.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Dr. Dre, the pioneering rapper and seven-time Grammy-winning producer behind hit songs like Tupac's "California Love" and Eminem's "The Real Slim Shady," is very much pro using artificial intelligence tools to make music. In an interview with the New York Times, Dr. Dre and Interscope Records co-founder Jimmy Iovine spoke about artificial intelligence's recent foray into music production, with the producer characterizing those who oppose AI song generation tools as "afraid of learning new things." "I don't see it as a threat. I think the only people that see it as a threat are the people who have trouble creating," Dr. Dre said. "I had a discussion with a few people a few days ago. They were against AI, and I'm like, 'OK, you sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.' Or synthesizers, right?" [...] Iovine, the music executive and Dr. Dre's partner in Beats by Dre, for his part, says he doesn't "see the downside at all." "There will be some crappy music. There's crappy music now," Iovine told the NYT. "In the studio, when gifted people have AI, they're going to make better records." Dr. Dre said he uses AI in producing "as a tool to see what it would do with what I just did." The award-winning producer also said he is definitely not alone among his peers in his stance on AI either: many producers use AI but fear to admit it. Iovine calls them "closet AI producers," and says Timbaland, the four-time Grammy-winning singer-producer behind a long list of hits like "Promiscuous" with Nelly Furtado, is also one.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gluons are the quantum 'Gorilla Glue' involved in binding quarks together, ScienceAlert reminds us. But for nearly 50 years, physicists have hunted for "glueballs", exotic particles predicted by this theory of the strong interaction - the only type of particle in nature composed entirely of force mediators: Now, a collaboration working at a collider in Beijing says it has the clearest evidence yet that a known particle called X(2370) is dominated by one of these elusive states... Physicists sifted through the wreckage of high-energy particle collisions to find strong evidence of this glueball, made predominantly of gluons - massless force carriers of the strong interaction between quarks... The new evidence for this exotic, unstable glueball's ephemeral existence comes from a recent preprint on arXiv, presented at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Brazil... This collaboration uses the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II, a particle accelerator and collider that smashes electrons into their antimatter counterparts, called positrons, to probe perplexing particle physics. The resultant glueball is an "unprecedented form of matter," says Jin Shan, a particle physicist at Nanjing University and one of the research team's leaders. "It not only enables the theory describing strong interactions to pass its most rigorous test, but also vastly expands the boundaries of our understanding of the physical world," he told Fan Chen at South China Morning Post... Previously, in a study published in the journal Physical Review Letters in 2024, the researchers analyzed 10 billion meson decay events. They measured the X(2370) particle's mass and spin parity - a property that dictates its interactions and almost-instantaneous decay - for the first time, finding complete agreement between their experimental values and predictions. Now, they've identified its additional decay modes and determined its flavor-singlet nature, "the most important characteristic of a glueball...." The authors describe their work as the clearest experimental result to emerge from nearly 50 years of glueball searches, supporting the long-standing theoretical prediction that gluons can bind together into a new form of matter. The discovery ""highlights advances in technology and analytical techniques that have recently revealed another decades-in-the-making physics mystery," the article points out. "More experiments are needed to further confirm and constrain the prototypes of the highly esoteric glueball; in other words, more particle smashing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The long legal battle over ownership of Linux "is closer than ever to ending," reports the Register, "after a panel of three judges ruled a claim against IBM and Red Hat isn't valid, and that time has expired for further action."In 2021, an heir to SCO settled with IBM for $14.25 million - a sum that reflects the fact SCO had for years failed to produce strong evidence to back its claims. Another of SCO's legal successors, Xinuos, filed a new claim that IBM should be on the hook because Big Blue knew it did not own the code it contributed to Linux but instead had a non-exclusive license to use it. Xinuos argued that when IBM contributed Project Monterey code to Linux [25 years ago], it breached that license. Xinuos eventually took that argument to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York - and failed to convince it that IBM and Red Hat had a case to answer. Xinuos appealed, and on August 10th the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided [PDF] not to revisit the District Court's decision, agreeing that the original legalese governing Project Monterey means it's too late to re-litigate the matter. The Appeals Court also agreed that Xinuos tried to frame the case as a licensing issue but failed, instead arguing that the issue was really about ownership. That ain't all, folks, because Xinuos intends to file a petition to have the case re-heard by the full bench of the Court of Appeals. That hardly ever happens, unless the court finds significant errors or major legal issues that make a rehearing worthwhile. Law firm Kaplan says the Second Circuit has allowed reviews of less than 0.03 percent of the cases it has handled. So perhaps this matter is now close to a final resolution. Back in 2000 Slashdot interviewed one of the presidents of SCO.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Pew Research senior data scientist analyzed 500,000 English-language webpages from the past five years with an AI detection tool to estimate how many were likely written or edited by AI: Of all the pages in this sample, 10% show significant signs of AI authorship... If we filter old webpages out of our samples and look at only the pages published after the release of ChatGPT, the trend is even more pronounced. In the July 2026 snapshot, signs of AI authorship can be found in over one-third of pages published after ChatGPT was released. This is in line with other studies that have shown that large shares of recently published pages on the internet were likely written or substantially edited by AI. AI-authored text is not evenly spread across the web. When ChatGPT was first released, the kinds of linguistic patterns that can signal AI authorship appeared at similar rates across the main top-level web domains (.com, .org, .edu and .gov). But in samples from 2026, around one-in-ten pages with a .com domain show signs of AI authorship - about double the share on .org domains (4.6%), and 10 times the rate on .edu or .gov domains (both around 1%). They even identified specific ways online text has changed, "comparing the internet of today to a snapshot from 2023." Em dashes appear twice as often Oxford commas increased 63%. Words used more frequently by AI (like "delve," "interplay" or "testament") have more than doubled in usage. "Negative parallelism" comparisons ("it's not just X, it's Y") have nearly tripled.Read more of this story at Slashdot.