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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Seattle Times: Microsoft is offering buyouts to about 60,000 employees, or roughly a quarter of its workforce, as the company tries to control its head count while avoiding layoffs. The Redmond-based tech giant announced Monday morning that eligible employees at the vice president level and below in the U.S., Canada, India and the United Kingdom would receive a "voluntary exit offer" of a standard severance package, based on their location. In a memo to employees, Microsoft Chief People Officer Amy Coleman said the move was building off the voluntary retirement program earlier this year, which was available to more than 8,700 U.S.-based employees, roughly one-third of whom took the offer. Since May 2025, Microsoft has been trying to reduce its corporate workforce, first through waves of mass layoffs and now through more creative buyout programs. The company laid off about 15,000 employees last year over the course of several months, affecting about 3,200 Washington-based workers. The report notes that the layoffs have continued this year, though on a smaller scale and largely concentrated in the company's gaming division.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic has filed to go public on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, setting the stage for a potentially record-setting IPO that could value the Claude developer at more than $2 trillion. Alongside the extraordinary cost of its AI expansion, Anthropic warned that it "may not generate sufficient revenue to achieve or sustain profitability in the future." "While we have experienced significant revenue growth in recent periods, our business is highly capital intensive," the company said. "Our revenue growth may not be sustainable, and our rate of growth may decrease." NBC News reports: The filing did not include a potential share price, the number of shares to be offered or a valuation for the whole company, all of which will be determined after Anthropic holds a "road show" with investors, prospective investors and its bankers. [...] The company plans to spend at least $110 billion with Amazon for cloud services through April 2036 and another $120 billion with SpaceX through 2029. Anthropic also said it planned to spend $115 billion with Google and $45 billion with Microsoft, both through 2033, for computing infrastructure. The filing said that the company recorded revenue growth of "1,368% year over year for the three months ended June 30, 2026." The cost of renting servers and chips grew by 300% over the same period. Anthropic's net loss for the first six months of 2026 was $80.7 billion. For the entirety of 2025, the company reported a $42 billion net loss. Anthropic added that it expects its current cash and sales to be sufficient for the next 12 months but warned that future revenue growth depends on a number of important factors, including the cost of infrastructure. As a result, it said, "we may be required to seek additional financing sooner than we currently anticipate." The company said it has raised about $141 billion of capital through the end of June and is sitting on $112.4 billion of cash.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kotaku reports:r/opensource, Reddit's primary "subreddit for everything open source related," has banned all AI-assisted and AI-related projects.... As reported by The Verge, the subreddit's October 24 post, titled "Your tokens aren't valuable: No more AI," features four new main rules: all projects must now be at least "1 year old," have "multiple contributors," be posted by someone who must "speak English," and cannot be "made by" or "intended for" AI... [T]he ban on AI is simple; as the subreddit's moderators explain, "AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community." Unsurprisingly, this is the part that's upset the majority of the users in the thread.... [T]he moderator who posted the new guidelines stated in a separate comment that the overwhelmingly negative response is due to "some guy on twitter claiming to be alternative news" who posted an "opinionated editorial pointing hundreds of people to the thread." Given the timing of when the thread was posted, alongside the fact that the X post in question mentions "the Linux kernel," they are presumably referring to this post by The Lunduke Journal. The moderator may be correct, as almost all of the top comments on the post are from users who have never posted in r/opensource before. The use of AI "doesn't change whether something is open source or not," complained one commenter, who added "I guess Linux is no longer allowed here? Linus uses AI for kernel development now." The moderator has since updated their post to acknowledge that Redditors have now already created a rival community called r/OpenSourceAIAllowed - plus three more alternatives: r/TrueOpenSource r/OpenSourceWare r/ActuallyOpenSourceRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Brazil's 80-year-old president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was re-elected Sunday, reports the Guardian, "defeating his far-right opponent, Flavio Bolsonaro, to claim a historic fourth term in power." And the results could impact the climate, suggests the Associated Press, since under da Silva the annual deforestation rate in the Amazon fell to its lowest level since records began in 1988:Official satellite data showed the rainforest lost 3,335 square kilometers (1,300 square miles) from Aug. 2025 through July 2026, the period used to calculate the annual rate... During Jair Bolsonaro's presidency, from 2019 to 2022, Amazon deforestation surged by about 60%, with more than 45,000 square kilometers (17,400 square miles) cleared, according to official data. Under Lula, deforestation has fallen 71% since 2023, the government said. One of Lula's first moves after taking office in January 2023 for a third, non-consecutive term was to revive the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon, known by its Portuguese acronym, PPCDAm. Launched in 2004 during his first administration, the plan had been shelved under Bolsonaro.... The plan has four pillars: strengthening monitoring and enforcement; promoting a sustainable economy; managing protected areas and determining how undesignated public forests should be used; and using regulations and financial incentives to curb deforestation. Measures included restoring sanctions for illegal forest clearing detected by satellites, a practice seen as the most effective tool to curb deforestation that was halted under Bolsonaro. The government also proposed barring properties with illegal deforestation from receiving bank loans and allocated more funding to priority Amazon municipalities that demonstrated reductions in forest loss. It also funded efforts to fight environmental crime and develop subsidized credit for sustainable businesses in the Amazon... Deforestation and other land-use changes are Brazil's largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, which drive global warming. The stakes are especially high in the Amazon, which stores vast amounts of carbon dioxide and generates atmospheric moisture that helps regulate weather far beyond South America... Degradation from wildfires, logging and drought affects about 40% of the Amazon and has outpaced clear-cutting in recent years. A strong El Nino, a periodic warming of the equatorial Pacific, could intensify those threats in 2026 and 2027 by bringing hotter, drier conditions that fuel wildfires. The article notes that Lula's reelection campaign promised zero net deforestation by 2030, plus restoration to offset all forest loss, legal or illegal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The problem? Understanding how AI coding agents interact with the software you build. "Whether you're maintaining an SDK, building a command-line interface, or publishing an MCP server or skills... you need to understand whether agents can discover and use what you ship, and what your team can change." Results can vary, and configurations keep changing, with behaviors influenced by everything from custom instructions and MCP servers to skills and plugins. So after a year of development Microsoft has created Scope, "an open-source platform built on Kubernetes for turning those interactions into evidence product teams can act on." Details are available on... the Microsoft open source blog:Available under the MIT License, Scope supports a continuous Developer Agent Experience (DevAx) learning loop grounded in repeatable experiments. The Azure Cosmos DB team's experience shows what that loop can deliver... "The evaluations led to 20 Agent Kit issues and 27 documentation issues resolved," [says Jay Gordon, Senior Program Manager, Azure Cosmos DB]... These results connect evaluation to decisions a product team can make: which documentation needs clarification, where tooling needs a fix, and whether an update changes agent behavior.... [The gains] demonstrate how targeted changes, informed by observed behavior, can improve the way agents use a product. For more on the shift from building for human developers to supporting agents, watch Your Product Was Built for Humans. Is It Ready for Agents? or join us at AI DevCon NYC conference in November. Scope surfaces everything from incorrect assumptions in documentation (or recurring missed instructions) to whether agents select the intended SDK, initialize it correctly, and use its APIs, leading to clearer descriptions for command-line tool and more actionable errors. Microsoft's open source blog also explains why AI agent evaluation needs an open-source foundation:The challenges behind agent experience aren't unique to one product or organization. SDK maintainers, tool authors, researchers, and agent developers are all asking how agents behave and what helps them succeed. No single team can represent every language, workflow, or integration. An open project can bring more scenarios, more failure cases, and more viewpoints into the evaluation process... Opening Scope's execution and evaluation code gives contributors a way to question the methods, investigate unexpected results, and improve the evaluation itself. A shared foundation also reduces duplicated infrastructure. Agent integrations, reusable criteria, and trace-analysis improvements can help other teams study their own products without rebuilding the same machinery. The goal isn't one universal benchmark or definition of success. It's a common starting point that teams can adapt to their needs. The MIT License lets teams use and extend Scope, while self-managed deployments let them evaluate private workloads without publishing their code or run data.... Scope streams activity as the agent works and retains interactions and workspace snapshots for later review. Your team can follow tool calls, inspect generated files, and connect a failed requirement to the steps that preceded it. Those traces provide observable evidence of what the agent did, helping turn a failure into a concrete documentation, SDK, or tooling improvement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"59% of maintainers report growing contribution volume since the rise of GenAI," according to a new study published by Linux Foundation Research. But 25% of their incoming pull requests "are estimated to be low-quality, also known as 'AI slop'." And on large projects, 69% see growing contributions - and estimate that 31% are low-quality/AI slop. So what do these results show us? "Generative AI is fundamentally changing how people participate in open source," says the head of Open Source Ecosystem Development at Huawei's R&D subsidiary Futurewei, which helped support the study. Specifically GenAI is "lowering barriers to contribution" but also "creating new challenges" for maintainers and communities. Their recommendation? "Build the governance, transparency and trust mechanisms that allow AI-assisted contributions to strengthen, but not overwhelm, the open source ecosystem." "Open source projects need to design for a growing AI-generated contributor base, not simply react to it," said Hilary Carter, SVP of Research at the Linux Foundation. "That means setting clear expectations for GenAI, putting responsibility for testing and disclosure on contributors and giving maintainers better tools to manage incoming pull requests. If we get those fundamentals right, AI can expand participation without overburdening and increasing costs for maintainers." More from the blog It's FOSS:LF Research is the Linux Foundation's research arm. It was set up in 2021 and publishes studies on how open source is built and used, drawing on surveys and project data. Its latest report, Navigating Open Source Software Development in the Generative AI Era, surveyed 234 contributors and maintainers on how generative AI is affecting the way open source gets made... 64% say reviews now take longer. Burnout is their top concern at 63%, narrowly ahead of contribution quality at 60%. You will also find that policies have not caught up to the AI-assisted coding and vulnerability reporting trend. Of the 119 respondents who answered the question, 35% said their project has a formal policy permitting AI use. Another 32% have none and no plans for one, 23% plan to write one, and 10% ban AI contributions outright.... Most maintainers (71%) say AI makes it easier for newcomers to start contributing. Other interesting findings:"Respondents estimate average time reductions across all six OSS development activities measured, including proposal discussions (19%) and code authoring (52%). For high-complexity tasks, however, 21% of respondents report taking more time when using GenAI." "71% of maintainers agree GenAI reduces barriers to entry for OSS, but 53% of maintainers disagree that GenAI has improved community trust."Developers are reinvesting the time they save back into open source: 66% report using productivity gains to address technical debt, 63% to develop new features and 58% for learning and upskilling. Continued investment in human mentorship remains important: 46% of maintainers say GenAI increases the need for mentorship of new contributors, compared with 32% who say it decreases that need. OpenSSF and LF AI & Data also helped support the study.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"As of today in systemd Git it's now possible for the systemd programs to be written in the Rust programming language as an alternative to C," reports Phoronix:Core systemd code like the systemd library doesn't yet support Rust code, but for the various systemd programs / leaf components there is now support for using Rust... The new systemd-keyring-setup utility in Rust is used for provisioning keyrings and enrolling X.509 certificates into the kernel's dm-verity / fs-verity / BPF keyrings during the boot process while dealing them afterward. This systemd-keyring-setup code hasn't been merged yet but is expected soon now that the Rust infrastructure has landed. Originally it was all part of a single big commit before being split-up for the Rust enablement, systemd-keyring-setup, and other preparations for this new component. Systemd developers aren't planning on porting existing C code to Rust, all the Rust code is built with Meson [no Cargo usage], and C linkage only is mandated. Systemd Rust components come out slightly larger than C with a test program being 32KB compared to 20KB for its C twin. For now at least the systemd Rust support is optional and toggled by the -Drust= Meson option with it being auto by default.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the student newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley:Richard Borcherds, a UC Berkeley professor and Fields medalist, no longer grades his students' homework. After seeing how many of his students used AI to consistently receive top scores, he felt there was "no point" in paying readers to grade for correctness in homework, as AI use is now unavoidable. Borcherds revealed this in a sit-down interview Tuesday, following OpenAI's announcement that AI agents apparently solved one of mathematics' most difficult unsolved problems, the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. "If AI continues to improve at present rate, then, in a few years, there'll be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can't do better," Borcherds said. Borcherds said he currently grades on completion if a student hands in their homework. He admitted that it is "not a very good system," but at the moment, he has no alternative... Campus has tried several AI detection tools, including Turnitin and Rumi, but have determined that these tools aren't adequate enough to be standardized on campus. The article points out that at the university, each class's AI policy "is up to the discretion of faculty."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BeamFS creator Aurelien Desbrieres is not calling for a merge, but is requesting feedback on an 18-patch proposal that takes the place of FTRFS, an earlier filesystem he proposed in April. The Linux/Open Source blog It's FOSS reports:Filesystems that can repair damage, like Btrfs and ZFS, usually do it by falling back on a spare copy of the data. BeamFS skips that and stores Reed-Solomon error-correcting codes inside every block. Every read gets checked against those codes, and small amounts of damage are corrected before the data reaches the application. If the filesystem can tell the damage is beyond repair, the read fails with an error instead of returning the wrong bytes... In his technical report, ext4 and ext3 returned wrong data without any error, while Btrfs refused to read the file. BeamFS returned the correct file every time except once, when a flip hit a pointer to the file's data and it refused the read. "Aurelien says he used Anthropic's Claude to write the code, the tool that checks the patches, and the cover letter..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Despite massive investments and widespread hype around AI , the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech," writes the chief economist at U.S. asset management firm Apollo Global. He adds that "there are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth... [M]ainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins."VC-backed companies are spending more and more on tokens, but mainstream corporate America does not need the latest model and is unwilling to pay for it. As long as agentic AI and token spending are confined to a small part of the economy, the macroeconomic effects of AI will be very limited... The question looking ahead is whether, even as models become commoditized, mainstream corporate America can turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins. That may be harder than it sounds. AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment. Judgment depends on context, and the answer varies with which human or which model you ask. Perhaps most importantly, AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins. The bottom line is that the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector. More details from TechCrunch:Apollo's Torsten Slok focuses on what he calls the S&P 493 - the S&P 500, minus Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla - finding that profit margins and revenue per worker appear to be flat, with no evidence that AI is improving productivity... Recent studies have also found that AI has yet to deliver significant productivity gains.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at the National University of Singapore have developed a machine-washable electronic fabric that can turn clothing into an interactive graphical user interface. The prototype reportedly survived 50 gentle machine washes and 1,000 bending cycles, though it still relies on external batteries and controllers. The Register reports: The development could lead - at some point - to a "future in which clothing functions as a pervasive, multimodal human-computer interface," according to the study published in peer-reviewed science journal Nature this week. The paper shows someone interacting with computing devices using the sleeve of a wool sweater (no jokes about the Windows ugly sweater please, this is serious). The researchers, led by Singapore National University research engineer Fu Heng, claim this is a big leap forward. "This fiber-centric approach shifts wearable electronics from flexible panels toward truly textile-native architectures, laying the groundwork for fabrics that visualize, sense, communicate and compute as naturally as the garments they inhabit," the paper says. The researchers claim to have developed a scalable process to make millimeter-thick fibers. Using lasers to strip the insulation from specific spots on the thin copper wires, they attached light-emitting chips to the exposed sections, creating electrical connections to the chips. Thousands of chips were connected to the wires with extreme precision using this process. The fibers were then fed into a transparent plastic tube, and made pressure-sensitive by adding two strips of a compressible, conductive polymer into a second longitudinal channel in the tube. The paper says they could make fibers 10 meters long using this method, and that they are thin and flexible enough to be woven into or attached to fabrics. The researchers were also able to add "peripherals" such as a microphone, a speaker, a temperature sensor and a light sensor.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Frustrated by intrusive ads, sluggish interfaces, and data tracking, smart TV owners are using AI coding tools and open-source projects to strip unwanted software from their televisions and build customized home screens. The Verge reports: Several vibe-coded TV-debloating projects exploded in popularity over the weekend. Cleanyourtv (known as tv-vibehack until the 19th), tv-detox, and dumbtv all claim to accomplish similar things -- remove sponsored ads, debloat the TV so it runs faster, and block unwanted data collection that tracks what you're watching -- without hacking, or rooting, the TV. By default, they all also replace the TV's built-in app launcher with simpler ones. Many users are going a step further and vibe-coding their own replacement launchers, like the Pokemon one below. Most of the projects we've seen so far focus on TVs that run on Android and Google TV operating systems (such as TCL, Hisense, Sony, and older Amazon Fire products), using existing developer modes and the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) to tweak settings and apply (and remove) packages. According to the GitHub pages, they can also work with some Fire TV products that use a custom fork of Android (although likely not on the new Vega-based Fire TV Sticks). Because they use built-in developer tools, they don't require root access or firmware hacking, and they're reversible. Even projects that totally change the look of the interface just use Android's ability to install custom launchers -- in many cases with an assist from Claude Code or a similar tool to create the new launcher, too.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Greece has passed a law banning children under 15 from social media platforms beginning January 1, 2027. The legislation requires platforms to implement reliable age verification and parents to use government-backed apps to restrict access, with penalties for noncompliance under the EU's Digital Services Act. Engadget reports: "It would have been very easy to do absolutely nothing today and wait for the perfect European law. But the challenge is here. Children are sinking into the internet every day, and I believe a responsible government must do what it is obliged to do," said Greece's digital governance and AI minister, Dimitris Papastergiou. The legislation was opposed by Greece's minority parties, so Mitsotakis used his majority government to pass the bill. The nation previously barred mobile phones in schools in 2024, and opinion polls show that the new social media ban for children is widely supported by Greece's adult population. Mitsotakis previously said that his government's "goal is to push the European Union in this direction as well."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX is reportedly seeking access to at least 80,000 cellular tower sites across the U.S. as it prepares to launch Starlink Mobile as a fourth nationwide wireless carrier. "We will be building out our terrestrial networks so there's broad-based connectivity anywhere that SpaceX and Starlink are allowed to operate," Musk said during SpaceX's earnings call this week. Satellite launches plus spectrum acquisition "will pave the way for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the US," he said. Bloomberg reports: One of the companies they're in talks with is Crown Castle, which, along with American Tower and Vertical Bridge Holdings, are among the largest owners of cellular towers. When asked on a Wednesday earnings conference call whether Crown Castle is discussing leases with SpaceX, Amazon.com or other satellite-based telecom providers, Chief Executive Officer Chris Hillabrant said, "You can assume that we're talking to all parties." He declined to discuss specific customer details. Mobile networks rely on antennas placed on towers across the country to transmit wireless signals. Carriers such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and T-Mobile US Inc. typically lease room for their equipment at the tower sites because it's more cost effective than owning and maintaining them, in part because the facilities can be shared. The value of the deals with SpaceX could reach into the billions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Knicks reportedly sent employees a fake offer of complimentary NBA championship rings as part of an internal phishing test, requiring anyone who clicked the link to attend mandatory cybersecurity training. "Congratulations, your Employee Championship Ring is here," the email said. According to The New York Times, Madison Square Garden employees who clicked that link "were forced to attend a mandatory cybersecurity class to help satisfy some of [owner James] Dolan's growing cybersecurity concerns." Ars Technica reports: The offer wasn't implausible, either. "Typically, most employees for NBA teams receive rings, even if they are not as fancy and expensive as the ones the players receive," wrote Joe Vardon, senior NBA writer for The Athletic, which was bought by The New York Times in 2022 and then merged into the parent news organization. Vardon's article was primarily about how Knicks assistant coaches did not get rings on Tuesday when the team raised its first league championship banner since 1973. The assistant coaches were handed boxes without rings inside, though they are expected to receive rings later on. "Ring orders, designs, and measurements can take time, and not every coaching staff for every defending champion gets its rings on ring night... The Knicks assistants were told they would receive championship rings eventually, but many longtime employees at Madison Square Garden, including some who work in the Knicks' business operations, will not receive rings at all, team sources told The Athletic," Vardon wrote. MSG employee hopes were raised "at the end of September when the Knicks sent an email to a long list of employees, which gave recipients a first glimpse at their would-be championship rings," Vardon wrote. The email included "a graphic of two differently styled rings" that the lucky employees could supposedly choose from, the article said. "(Employee name), this one is on the house. MSG is issuing a complimentary employee championship ring. The same jeweler, the same craftsmanship, personalized with your name. No cost to you," the email said. "There are two designs to choose from: Championship Gold and Garden Classic. Reserve the one you want below." Vardon wrote that "multiple team sources" confirmed the email was a phishing test. It's not clear how many employees clicked the link or whether any of the employees who received the email will eventually get some type of championship ring. We contacted the Madison Square Garden Sports organization with these questions and will update this article if we get a response.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: AI agents left to explore a virtual island without a specific task began inventing challenges of their own. MIT researchers say the behavior bears the hallmarks of play. The researchers put 13 AI agents called Eko, each running on Claude Opus 4.7, alone on a simulated desert island for 30 hours. They describe the experiment in a paper posted on arXiv, a site where researchers share studies before peer review. Afterward, they gave the agents specific challenges, like getting as many objects as possible onto the island's tallest rock spire. The Eko agents that had spent those 30 hours playing generally beat identical agents that had never set foot on the island. Today, developers decide in advance what AI should practice and what counts as success. The researchers see this technique -- exploring without a goal -- as a different way for AI agents to learn skills, especially skills that could one day be used to control robots. "We normally develop artificial agents by deciding in advance what they should practice, what they should optimize, and what counts as progress," the researchers write in their report. "Play suggests another regime: give an agent a sufficiently rich and safe world, let it choose what is interesting, and allow useful knowledge to accumulate from the history that follows." UC Berkeley cognitive scientist Eunice Yiu told MIT Technology Review she was impressed with the findings but that more evidence is needed to determine whether AI models are genuinely playing. "It could be the case that the models are genuinely playing, but we don't know based on the paper," says Yiu. "If you only have the behavioral piece, it could be the case that they're just trying to abide by the prompt, trying to imitate humans." MIT professor and coauthor of the paper, Phillip Isola, added: "It's not like this is a system that just suddenly magically decided to play. It's an artifact that learned from our culture, was trained by engineers at Anthropic, and was then placed on an island by us. It does things that surprise us and that are causally related to its future skillful behavior."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has revealed pay-as-you-go pricing for Xbox Cloud Gaming, with introductory packages costing $3.99 for 10 hours, $7.99 for 25 hours, or $11.99 for 50 hours. Starting in November, Game Pass subscribers will receive only 5 to 15 included cloud-gaming hours depending on their tier and will have to buy additional time -- even to stream games they've already purchased. Gizmodo reports: Back in September, before these changes were announced, you paid full purchase price for a game that isn't in the Game Pass library on the assumption that you'd be able to play it via cloud streaming. Maybe your hardware doesn't meet the specs for this fancy new game. Maybe your gaming PC exploded/got stuck on a ship/had a component fail. Maybe you just want to be able to play it in bed on your laptop. Whatever. Now you find that in addition to the cost of the game you bought, you're going to be paying by the hour to play it once your monthly allotment of hours is up. If this is you, I expect you're not particularly amused. Thankfully, Microsoft notes that the playtime you purchase "remains available until it's used," so you won't have to worry about losing any unused time between gaming sessions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ukrainian drone strikes have damaged three major Yandex data centers as well as facilities serving Sberbank and VKontakte (the country's equivalent to Facebook), disrupting cloud services, banking, e-commerce, ride-hailing and other digital services across Russia. The attacks may deal a longer-lasting blow to Russia's AI ambitions: Yandex's affected facilities housed its three top-500 supercomputers, and experts say sanctions and shortages of high-end Nvidia chips could make repairs difficult or even take years. "This effectively sets Russia far behind in the AI race, "said Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society activist group. Fortune reports: Data centers are the latest targets of aerial campaigns waged by both sides against each other's vital infrastructure. [...] Kyiv's attacks on Russian data centers closely followed Moscow's recent strikes on data centers in Ukraine, which disrupted the internet and TV broadcasts. On Oct. 8, Ukrainian drones hit a Yandex data center in Sasovo in the Ryazan region that houses two of the company's three supercomputers. A data center in Kaluga was hit a day later and the one in Vladimir was struck Oct. 11. The data center and AI hub for Sberbank was hit Oct. 14 in Balakovo in the Saratov region, and four days later, Kyiv struck a data center in St. Petersburg serving VKontakte. While oil refineries and warehouses are easy prey, data centers are even softer targets -- massive buildings packed with servers and supporting power and cooling infrastructure. Lasting damage can result from a drone carrying a relatively light load of explosives. [...] Ukraine has stored critical data on servers in allied European countries, helping limit the damage from Russian attacks. But Moscow's strict digital sovereignty policy requires all data storage at home, making it extremely vulnerable. "Because all the infrastructure and all the data is located inside Russia, it's relatively easier to take down," [said Nick Reiners, senior geotechnology analyst at Eurasia Group]. Klimarev predicted the data center attacks could encourage many top Russian companies to move data abroad, while the authorities could ease their efforts to tighten internet controls to minimize the damage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast reportedly plans significant job cuts in its cable division as the firm continues to lose residential broadband and TV customers. Comcast lost 144,000 residential broadband customers in Q3 2026, up from a 91,000-customer loss in the same quarter a year ago, the company said in its earnings report today. Comcast historically capitalized on a lack of competition for high-speed wired broadband. But now it faces stronger competition from fixed wireless providers and from fiber providers in parts of its cable territory. "Fixed wireless remains aggressive and continues to take share, while fiber construction remains elevated, with pockets of irrational pricing and promotional activity," Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh said today in an earnings call. Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said "irrational pricing" from fiber operators includes $30 to $40 monthly broadband offers "in specific markets in the third quarter." He said $30 to $40 pricing is irrational because deploying fiber costs $1,500 or more per home, and is "getting more expensive with construction costs up as you get into more suburban and rural areas." "As we look at the return profile of that, to us, that is irrational competition," Armstrong said. While he didn't name any specific competitors, Verizon has been pitching FiOS fiber plans that start at $30 a month. Comcast's network is a mix of fiber and cable, and it offers fiber-to-the-home in only small portions of its cable territory. Armstrong said more Comcast customers are leaving when they face "pricing transitions," apparently referring to the price hikes customers get when promotional offers expire. "We've been refining our offers and retention strategies to better manage these transitions and strengthen customer retention," he said. Cavanagh said that "satellite is not yet a material factor" in the competition Comcast faces, but that Comcast is focused on "anticipating emerging forms of competition and positioning our business to respond as the market evolves."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Physicists at Northwestern University have successfully trapped a single positron for an entire month, allowing researchers to study its quantum properties with unprecedented precision. "Further investigations using the trap might reveal the secret of why the world around us is made of matter and not antimatter, when things could have presumably gone either way," reports Scientific American. From the report: Every normal particle of matter has an antimatter counterpart with equal mass but opposite charge. To build their trap, physicists started with atoms of sodium 22, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of about two and a half years. When one of these atoms decays, it emits a positron -- the antimatter counterpart of the electron. "The big challenge is to persuade these positrons to slow down and then capture them," says Gerald Gabrielse, a physicist at Northwestern University, who oversaw the project. The team reported its achievement on Wednesday in Physical Review Letters (PDF). The first step is to send the positrons through the crystal lattice of a sliver of cold tungsten. As the particles go pinballing through the material, they slow down and lose energy. "Every time they bang into something, there's a chance of annihilation, but it doesn't always happen," Gabrielse says. "If they make it to the end, they get popped out." Next, the physicists steer the positrons along a channel using electromagnetic fields. Eventually the particles end up in a vacuum, just three tenths of a degree Celsius above absolute zero, trapped by an electric field on top and bottom and a magnetic field on the sides. "If you want to hold on to antimatter, you have to hold it in a container without walls," Gabrielse says. This method allowed the researchers to isolate and study a solitary, lone positron for a montha"and could let them do so indefinitely. The researchers intend to use their trap to make precise measurements of the positron's magnetic moment -- basically the strength and orientation of its magnetic field. To do this, they must determine two things: the energy needed to flip the direction of the positron's spin and the energy needed to make it jump from its ground state to its first excited state. Using a similar trap setup, Gabrielse and his team have already measured the magnetic moment of an electron to a precision of one part in 10 trillion. Taking the equivalent measurement for a positron will allow them to make a crucial comparison. "We're looking to see if they have an exactly opposite magnetic moment," Gabrielse says. That's the prediction of the Standard Model of particle physics. If the two have different values, however, this could help explain why our universe is made of matter instead of antimatter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the first time, the UN has declared that exceeding the Paris Agreement's 1.5C warming limit is "imminent and unavoidable." "We are now saying this window has closed, but we can open it again by making the overshoot as brief as possible," UN Environment Program Executive Director Inger Andersen said on a call with reporters. "This is about how to find a way back as shortly and as quickly as possible with as limited an overshoot as possible." CNN reports: Past reports have examined the distance between countries' emissions reduction commitments and what it would take to limit global warming to 1.5 C above preindustrial levels. However, this year's report redefines the gap. Instead, it examines new emissions overshoot scenarios, and what it would take to limit peak warming to just 1.7 to 1.8 degrees C before bringing temperatures back down to 1.5 C through emissions cuts and the use of carbon removal technologies. The report makes clear that every additional fraction of a degree of warming above 1.5 C "raises the risk of irreversible changes including in ice sheets, permafrost carbon, ocean circulation, and coral systems, along with devastating human impacts." Each added fraction of a degree of warming can have an "immense" impact "as measured in terms of damage, cost and loss of lives," said climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania. Mann was not involved in producing the UNEP report. According to the UNEP, which is based in Nairobi, the lowest overshoot scenario would keep peak warming to between 1.7 and 1.8 degrees C and return global average temperatures to at or below 1.5 C by 2100. However, to follow such a pathway, global greenhouse gas emissions would need to be slashed by far more than anything currently on the table at the upcoming COP31 talks. This would require an 18% cut by 2030, 45% by 2035, and 69% by 2040, relative to 2025 levels. Meeting this lowest-possible overshoot scenario would require a tripling of renewable electricity capacity by 2035, and dramatic cuts to fossil fuels, including the phaseout of coal by 2040, the report states. In addition, there would need to be a major scaling up of carbon removal technologies, which so far have not been proven to work at such a large scale. In stark contrast to these figures, the fulfillment of existing emissions reduction pledges would only yield a 5-to-8% emissions cut by 2030 and an 11-to-15% reduction by 2035, the report found. This would be associated with a peak warming of about 2.6 degrees C. If countries simply follow their current policies, then warming could reach a peak of about 2.8 C. That estimate has increased since last year, in part because of the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement and retraction of its emissions reduction commitments, the report states. Even the scenario that assumes countries meet their existing reduction commitments, and nations with net-zero pledges succeed in fulfilling them, still brings warming to a peak of 2.1 C.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts, with some agents attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources tell Axios. The difficulty in distinguishing between a human and an unauthorized bot is forcing banks to block the technology and rapidly rewrite their terms of service. [...] This presents significant security risks: banking executives fear the steps agents with login access might take, especially if a user has granted purchase authority or the ability to shift funds. In other instances, some banks have tracked activity when agents -- programmed to fulfill requests or complete tasks on a user's behalf -- contact call centers or appear to take actions independent of user instructions, the people said. Bank executives described the situation as horrifying, with one official saying the industry has grave concerns about agents gaining access to customer accounts and taking steps that could impact user finances. The concerns are at the root of the decision by several banks to restrict third-party AI agent access, the people said. Morgan Stanley has begun blocking third-party agents from accessing its platforms, sources familiar with the decision said. JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi are also restricting agents. [...] Many banks are broadly not able to parse whether agent account activity is user-directed, sources said. [...] On one hand, banks are best positioned to respond to the threats and opportunities of AI given their cash on hand and experience as critical infrastructure. But money isn't necessarily enough to solve this problem, one source said, because of how quickly the technology is developing and revealing new weaknesses in real time. Banks are investing in preventing worst-case scenarios, but they are also preparing for when those could happen, including with "day after" scenario planning that would allow them to quickly secure or restore customer access, sources said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is funding one of the nation's largest "virtual power plants," paying homes and businesses indirectly to reduce electricity consumption during periods of peak demand so more grid capacity can be available for data centers. Under its expanded deal with Voltus, the program could provide up to 1,070 megawatts in the Mid-Atlantic PJM grid -- roughly the output of a large nuclear reactor. The New York Times reports: That electricity won't come from new power plants. Instead, Voltus will sign up homes and businesses and give them financial incentives to curb their usage when local power demand is high or the grid is strained. Many of these reductions could occur automatically, such as through smart thermostats that dial back air-conditioning during peak summer hours or batteries that can provide temporary on-site power. Each of these tweaks frees up only a small amount of power on its own. But by aggregating them across thousands of businesses and homes, Voltus says it can reliably provide lots of extra capacity when it's most needed, and do so within a few years. While tech companies will likely ultimately need to build traditional power plants if they want to keep building large data centers, this approach could be a faster, cheaper and less-polluting option in the interim. "We really see virtual power plants as a critical short-term solution," said Ellen Zuckerman, head of energy market development for North and South America at Google. "It's a way to invest in our communities, really double down on our clean energy ambition, but also meet capacity at speed and scale."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer: Microsoft says it mistakenly flagged a bug causing Always On VPN connection issues as fixed in the October 2026 Windows 11 cumulative updates. Always On VPN replaced the legacy DirectAccess technology and supports domain-joined, non-domain-joined, and Microsoft Entra ID-joined devices running Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server. It runs in the background and establishes secure tunnels back to the user's corporate network whenever their device connects to the internet. Microsoft first acknowledged the issue in a service alert sent to IT administrators in late September, saying it was triggered on systems running Windows 11 24H2 and later after installing the September 2026 security updates when the initial Always On VPN connection failed (e.g., when using automatic protocol selection with IKEv2 and SSTP). "When automatic protocol selection or protocol fallback was configured, affected VPN connections could remain stuck in a Connecting state or fail to connect after an initial connection attempt failed," it said. "In some cases, subsequent connection attempts could display the error, 'The specified port is already in use.'" After releasing the October 2026 Patch Tuesday Windows 11 cumulative updates, Microsoft marked the bug as resolved, but in a Tuesday update it said the issues weren't actually addressed and that a fix would ship later. "This disclosure was mistakenly updated to Resolved status on October 13, 2026. We have returned its status to Mitigated," it said in a service alert sent to IT admins. "A resolution for this issue is planned to be included in an update to be released in the coming weeks. We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion." While Microsoft continues working on a permanent solution, it shared a temporary fix that requires affected customers to choose one of two VPN tunneling protocols to work around the issue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Browser Company is shutting down its Arc browser on December 22 and encouraging users to migrate to Dia, its newer AI-powered browser for Apple Silicon Macs and Windows 11 PCs. Thurrott reports: In the message explaining why it was sunsetting Arc, The Browser Company explained that maintaining two separate browsers was difficult to justify, especially from a security perspective. "Dia was built from the ground up to meet today's security standards, so that's where our engineering and security teams will focus moving forward," the company wrote. The retirement of Arc will be gradual: While nothing changes for existing Arc users, it's no longer possible to create new Arc accounts as of today. On November 23, tab sync, Browse for Me, and other AI features will be disabled on the iOS and Android versions of Arc. Lastly, the desktop version of Arc will stop working on December 22, and Arc accounts will be deactivated.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Moderna shares plunged as much as 25% after partial clinical trial data leaked for its personalized cancer vaccine developed with Merck, despite the full results showing promising outcomes for melanoma patients. Analysts attribute the selloff largely to inflated investor expectations rather than disappointing clinical results. CNBC reports: The personalized vaccine, known as intismeran autogene, paired with Merck's immunotherapy Keytruda reduced the risk of recurrence or death in certain melanoma patients by 42% compared with Keytruda alone. The data also showed the shot along with Keytruda reduced the risk of cancer spreading to distant parts of the body or death by 38%, compared with just the immunotherapy. The companies say about 82% of patients who received the personalized cancer vaccine alongside Keytruda were alive without their melanoma returning at two years, compared with 70% of those who received Keytruda alone. [...] Investors see the targeted vaccine as a possible breakthrough treatment, with the potential to be used in other forms of cancer in the future. It could also offer Moderna a critical additional commercial product in its pipeline, following vaccines for Covid-19, the flu and respiratory syncytial virus. "We assert this relative reduction in recurrence/death is clinically meaningful," said BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan Seigerman. "Such a reaction likely reflects inflated expectations into the full data release, rather than a true indictment on the efficacy of the combo therapy." UBS analysts said "this is overall a strong data set" and gives more confidence in upcoming studies of the vaccine in kidney and bladder cancers. They added the stock reaction may be due more to massive expectations than disappointing data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Longtime audio giant Bose announced on Wednesday that it's acquiring Skullcandy, the lifestyle brand known for its bass-heavy headphones. Skullcandy will remain a separate company within Bose's Premium Consumer Audio business and will still be based in Park City, Utah. The acquisition isn't out of left field. Bose has lent its audio expertise to Skullcandy over the past year under its Sound by Bose licensing program. Skullcandy designs the headphones and then works with Bose on the audio front. The relationship began with the Skullcandy Method 360 ANC earbuds in 2025 and more recently, with the Crusher 1080 ANC headphones in July. [...] This is hardly Bose's first audio acquisition (though it may be the most mainstream). Bose acquired McIntosh Group, owners of luxury audio brands McIntosh Laboratory and Sonus Faber, back in 2024. But Bose seems to be after Skullcandy's connection to its community. "What does the brand stand for? Does it have meaning for consumers? Is it relevant to a group of consumers that, frankly, we otherwise aren't reaching?" Bose CEO Lila Snyder tells WIRED. "If you think about McIntosh, Sonus Faber, and Skullcandy, they all fit into that realm. Skullcandy gives us access to a customer base that we think we're largely missing with the Bose brand." That's why Bose has no plans to relocate Skullcandy from Park City, Utah, which Snyder says is the epicenter of board sports culture. "We want to make sure we're right at the heart of it, as they always have been," she says. Skullcandy products are also affordable, especially compared to other Bose products and Bose-owned brands, which lets Bose compete at both ends of the market.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BBC technology editor Zoe Kleinman likens the recently discovered PHP security vulnerabilities to an unexploded bomb, writing, "The PHP story feels like the cyber equivalent of an unexploded bomb -- I have never seen such a dramatic, public and global response to a cyber event that hasn't happened yet." Although no successful attacks have been confirmed, the AI-assisted discovery of long-hidden flaws has triggered a worldwide security scramble, with websites taken offline as a precaution and administrators racing to deploy patches before attackers can exploit the vulnerabilities. From the report: The weaknesses found in the PHP programming language, which is used by millions of websites, had been quietly resting there for years and are not easy to exploit. One cyber security researcher told me he'd been up all night trying to do it as an experiment, but it was proving very difficult. [...] It was supposed to be kept quiet until everyone had a chance to fix their sites -- but the news was leaked. From that point the clock started ticking. As I write this, there are no reports that anyone or anything has succeeded in using the flaws to attack a site. "There's a real dilemma," said Prof Alan Woodward from Surrey University. "How do you alert people they need to be ready, and then that a patch is urgently required, whilst not alerting attackers? Basically you're telling everyone about the problem at the same time and hoping the defenders aren't awake enough to act as soon as the patch is out." But we do know from large web companies like Cloudflare and Palo Alto Networks that millions of attempts have been made. We probably won't know for a while whether it has worked for any criminals, because the companies affected might not be aware yet either. As far as we know the unexploded bomb remains intact for now, and for some experts this is a success. "We've seen how a team of people supported by the large AI company have used AI to find the problem, work for months together to solve it and get everybody ready to be safe and secure," Gina Neff, Professor of Responsible AI at Queen Mary University, told the Today Program on BBC Radio 4. "We have enormous capability to handle these risks."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic has launched Claude Duet, an AI agent aimed at professionals and small businesses that competes with Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots. Here's Anthropic's description of what it can do: Each morning, it sends you a short brief on the most important items across your connected apps. Throughout the day, it keeps tabs on those apps and messages you only when something needs your attention. You can also hand it tasks of all shapes -- from simple administrative tasks of scheduling meetings to more complex ones, such as building dashboards with dozens of tools, creating financial or sales forecasts, prototyping, and building web apps. The Verge reports: Claude Duet pulls in memory, skills, and connected apps from Claude, and it has a virtual machine with a browser that it can use for completing work. Before any big step, like sending a payment or deleting something, Claude Duet messages you for approval. Given that Duet may be taking action on sensitive information, it has a new "new dedicated classifier and safety system prompt" that are "designed to reject requests to share the strictest tier of information," such as credit card numbers. Anthropic says Claude Duet is currently an "early version" and that it "still might misread a thread or miscalibrate what's urgent." It's also not "as strong" at personal errands like booking tickets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative appears to have accidentally disclosed several unpatched Linux kernel vulnerabilities on the public LKML instead of the private security list, including two CVSS 9.0 flaws that could enable remote code execution through SMB Direct and KSMBD. "This seemingly was a mistake with Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman responding to each report asking about their submission to the public mailing list," adds Phoronix. The newly-disclosed vulnerabilities include: ZDI-CAN-33549 as a CVSS 9.0 scored vulnerability for SMB Direct remote code execution vulnerability due to integer underflow. For this one there is a patch in a Git branch of code intended for Linux v7.5 but now presumably will be expedited for getting to mainline. ZDI-CAN-33774 as a KSMBD race condition that can lead to remote code execution. Another CVSS 9.0 rated vulnerability. ZDI-CAN-33367 is a vulneravbility for skbuff skb_zerocopy in the network code that can lead to local privilege escalation. For this one Linux kernel developers received a security report from another source last week over the same issue and a patch is expected to be posted soon. ZDI-CAN-34068 as a VMWGFX VMware graphics driver bug with an out-of-bounds write leading to local privilege escalation. ZDI-CAN-34076 an uninitialized resource in the NVMET code leading to information disclosure. ZDI-CAN-32005 was also posted to the mailing list a day prior for a search-domain TCP query stack buffer overflow leading to local privilege escalation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Google is facing a backlash from some staff members over the company's deployment of its AI technology for military use. The BBC has spoken to several tech workers who have either recently resigned from Google's AI company, Google DeepMind, or are in the process of leaving, over concerns with the tech firm's military contracts. Sofia Liguori, a London-based research engineer, is one of them. She resigned from Google DeepMind this week and spoke about her concerns exclusively with the BBC, despite her contract restricting her from doing so. "Realizing my company is pushing more and more for AI systems in military operations makes me feel ashamed to work at Google," Liguori said, speaking in a personal capacity. [...] After working for the company for three years, Liguori said she decided to resign over Google's increasing work with the US and Israeli militaries. "I don't agree with this direction and this has led me to lose faith in my company being true to its stated ethical values," she said. Those values, according to Google's AI Principles, include implementing AI with "human oversight" and aligning the technology with "international law and human rights." But former and current staff at the company, and experts the BBC spoke to, said they were concerned about the level of human oversight at critical moments. The tech workers said they are particularly worried about the AI military deals signed this year, because they greatly increase the scope of what the Pentagon can use the technology for. Andreas Kirsch, an AI researcher, also resigned from Google DeepMind earlier this month over his concerns. Kirsch told the BBC that he believes "Google's governance and oversight are not sufficient or meaningful enough to deploy AI safely and responsibly in military and classified settings" or "to develop artificial superintelligence safely in the future." "Google seems to have no right to control or veto how the Pentagon uses its AI and also seems to have limited visibility into how it's being deployed," he added. [...] Employees at Google have told the BBC that staff are scared to speak out about AI safety and its uses in warfare because their employment contracts prohibit them from publicly criticizing the company. "In principle I'm not allowed to criticize Google for the duration of my life," Sofia Liguori told the BBC. But she decided to do so "because I believe it's important for these things to be known and I also think that talking about facts is not criticizing." Liguori added that at Google "people are scared of retaliation and putting their career at risk. You feel you are being watched, you can't speak." A current employee at Google DeepMind, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation, told the BBC that "a lot of motivated employees who signed up for [the company's] original mission could leave -- but there's also a pipeline of people at the start of the careers who could fill those positions. It could be a changing of the guard." Another Google DeepMind staff member, who also wished to remain anonymous, told the BBC: "A lot of people have left the company that feel strongly about this [how Google DeepMind has changed its ethics position]." "Some people are putting up a fight, others are thinking: 'it's a big company. What do you expect to change?'", the employee said. In response, a Google spokesperson told the BBC: "We work with public sector organisations worldwide and follow a consistent process for reviewing and entering these contracts, including compliance with our acceptable use policies and AI principles." "We also have dedicated channels for employees to safely raise any concerns -- ranging from business ethics to misconduct -- and have strict workplace policies in place to prevent retaliation of any kind."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Airbnb is banning hosts from requiring guests to perform time-consuming checkout chores, including washing dishes, stripping beds, doing laundry, and taking trash off-site. The updated policy applies to reservations booked on or after November 20. The Verge reports: Airbnb is displaying hosts' requests more prominently now in a new "rules and requests" section on listings. You might see an "includes cleaning requests" warning if a host leaves chore requests in their listing after the new policy goes into effect. Hosts aren't allowed to sneak in extra rules in messages to guests or on signs around their property, either. Some hosts pushed back on the house rules restrictions on Airbnb's forums, saying they pose health risks and arguing that guests can simply choose not to stay at listings with overly-strict rules. Airbnb says there can be exceptions to the limits on checkout chores, like asking guests to "dispose of trash in an animal-proof container in bear country."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader destinyland shares a report from CNN: The Pentagon has given the Department of Homeland Security permission to test a military-grade heat ray and develop tactics to potentially use it in operations at the southern US border, according to a memo signed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last month and obtained by CNN. The heat ray, officially known as the Active Denial System, is a nonlethal weapon that shoots an invisible beam of electromagnetic waves that can reach a little more than half a mile away, according to the US military. The energy beam causes a burning sensation when it comes into contact with the human skin -- which Pentagon officials have previously compared to feeling a blast of heat when opening a hot oven. Military officials have said the resulting "tingling effect" lasts between 10 and 15 minutes but also generates "an instinctive and irresistible urge to run from the effect."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: For the first time, scientists say they have used viruses designed by artificial intelligence to treat a human patient. Researchers announced on Tuesday that they had administered the virus, known as a phage, to a patient suffering from a deadly bacterial infection. Phages attack bacteria, and the hope is that this one will kill the microbes causing the infection.Radical Numerics, the start-up that created the viruses, posted a technical report about them on its website. But the company declined to provide information about the patient or the doctors running the trial, citing confidentiality requirements. [...] In 2025, researchers at the Arc Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., created an A.I. model called Evo 2, which they trained on millions of DNA sequences, including phage genes. They prompted Evo 2 to make new genomes similar to those in a group of phage species. The A.I. generated 700,000 virus genomes. The team synthesized DNA molecules from 285 genomes and inserted them into bacteria. The researchers found that 16 of the genomes gave rise to viable viruses. Three members of the Evo team, including Dr. Nguyen, left to found Radical Numerics. In June, the company unveiled a new A.I. model, called Omnii, based on some of the same principles as Evo. Omnii can be trained not just on DNA but also on other aspects of biology, such as the structures of proteins and molecules that keep genes turned on or off. The company is now using Omnii to tackle a range of challenges, including designing cancer vaccines and recognizing the risk that a virus may cause a pandemic. Among these efforts is the first trial of A.I.-designed phage therapy. The researchers created variations of a phage called T7. The virus, which only infects E. coli, looks like a microscopic Apollo lunar lander: a ball-shaped protein shell that holds its DNA atop six leglike protrusions. To infect a bacterium, T7 lands on its surface, using its legs to anchor in place. It then injects its DNA into the cell. Omnii generated new viral genes altering the shapes of T7's legs, according to Dr. Nguyen and his colleagues. While some of the new legs were significantly different from natural ones, Omnii's phages could still infect bacteria. Once the researchers were confident their strategy had worked, they partnered with doctors treating a patient with a stubborn E. coli infection. The bacteria had resisted not just antibiotics but all the available phages. The researchers said they had trained Omnii with information about the resistant strain and told it to design T7 phages with legs that could grab onto the bacteria. Once the A.I. generated genomes for new viruses, the scientists said they produced the corresponding DNA molecules and inserted them in bacteria. The bacteria became infected and produced T7 phages that could successfully infect, and kill, other microbes. After running tests to make sure the phages were safe, Radical Numerics presented them to the doctors. The F.D.A. authorized a trial. While the trial was authorized by the FDA, it's worth noting that the research has not yet been peer-reviewed in a scientific journal and there's no guarantee the AI-designed phages will work. However, if it does prove successful, it could help speed phage therapy by cutting down the time it takes to create a new virus tailored to each patient's infection. "We think we can get it done in days," said Dr. Eric Nguyen, the chief executive officer of Radical Numerics.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eBay plans to cut about 1,000 jobs, or 9% of its workforce, as CEO Jamie Iannone moves to redirect resources toward the company's fastest-growing businesses. Reuters reports: The company had 12,300 employees at the end of last year. It also let go about 6% of its workforce, or 800 employees, in February as part of efforts to streamline operations. EBay has set itself apart from rivals by pushing into authenticated luxury goods, collectibles and refurbished products, which draw enthusiasts willing to pay more for valuable items. That has helped its shares rise nearly 40% this year, outperforming the benchmark S&P 500's around 12% gain. "Our strategy is working," Iannone said in the memo, adding that "continuing to capture the significant opportunity ahead requires us to make thoughtful choices about where we focus and invest." He said affected staff would be informed in the coming days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AMD has published Linux kernel patches for an official Ryzen overclocking driver that allows users to adjust CPU power and current limits through a firmware interface exposed via sysfs. Phoronix reports: AMD engineer Shyam Sundar S K posted the patches for the AMD Overclocking "AOD" WMI driver as an interface to the platform firmware for managing overclocking and power/current limits of modern Ryzen CPUs. The driver in its initial form allows setting via sysfs a number of CPU tunables including the Package Power Tracking (PPT), Thermal Design Current (TDC), and Electrical Design Current (EDC) limits along with reading their supported range. SMT toggling can also be done via the interface as an alternative to the likes of Linux's "nosmt" option in disabling SMT at the platform level rather than kernel disabling. The current memory clocks can also be read via this AOD driver. The power tunables aren't applied in real-time but go into effect at next reboot. The firmware does support many more commands compared to the few initially wired up and hopefully in time more of these controls will be enabled with this driver.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A CBC investigation found that more than 1.5 million Canadian Crime Stoppers tips spanning 25 years were exposed in a breach of the P3 Global Intel tip-management platform. About 850,000 records contained personally identifiable information, including addresses, phone numbers, emails, license plates and some banking details. Longtime Slashdot reader doconnor shares the report: The data was stolen last March by hacktivist collective Internet Yiff Machine. In a manifesto, the group said it wanted to disprove the claim by P3 Global Intel -- the company hired by Crime Stoppers to manage its tips -- that the platform was "anonymous" and "secure." A copy of the hacked data was made available to researchers and journalists, including CBC, by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a U.S. non-profit that archives and publishes hacked and leaked documents it deems to be in the public interest. The report found that more than 4,300 Crime Stoppers tipsters identified themselves by their full name, with hundreds of records containing staff warnings that individuals had "self-identified" or been "exposed," yet their information remained unredacted. The leaked data included sensitive allegations involving murder, terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime, with nearly 49,000 tips linked to cases cleared through arrests or criminal charges. Cybersecurity experts criticized the retention of decades-old records... "If a tip is closed, does that need to stay online?" asked cybersecurity expert Ben Coon. "The answer to that, to me, is no." The RCMP was initially told Canadian data was unaffected, then assured that exposed Canadian records contained no personally identifiable information. This appears to contradict the CBC's findings. Furthermore, affected individuals have not been systematically notified because contacting them could further jeopardize their anonymity. "For a system that has been designed to promise anonymity to the users, that has failed categorically," said Prof. Ali Dehghantanha, the Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence at the University of Guelph.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: We haven't heard many details about Microsoft's upcoming "Project Helix" gaming hardware since the company announced it in March as a device that will "play your Xbox and PC games." In a new wide-ranging profile of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, though, Fortune alludes to a dual release strategy for upcoming Microsoft gaming hardware, with "a next-generation handheld device" planned by the end of next year and a 2028 holiday season console release that could cost between $1,200 and $1,800. That future console price range is based on what has "internally been projected" at the company, according to Fortune. But the price for consumers could come down if "Microsoft decides to subsidize the cost," the outlet says, as many console makers have done in the past. While a $1,200 starting price would be historically high for the game console market, even accounting for inflation, it also reflects a new normal: The slowdown in Moore's Law and AI-driven component shortages mean cutting-edge gaming hardware just isn't as cheap as it used to be. This year, the Steam Machine broke the $1,000 starting price, while the 2-year-old technology in the PlayStation 5 Pro is now going for $900, and the 6-year-old Xbox Series X now starts at $750.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found Facebook liable for deceiving users about privacy during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. State Attorney General Raul Torrez called it "one of the largest, if not the single largest state verdict against a company in American history." While Meta plans to appeal the ruling, the funds that are to be collected will go toward state education spending. The Associated Press reports: Jurors in September found Meta liable for over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws when a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, harvested Facebook user data to generate targeted political ads for the 2016 election. Forty-eight other states settled with Facebook in a nationwide case, but New Mexico chose to take the social media company to court on its own. [...] During the trial, jurors assessed whether Facebook misled users about privacy and content moderation 34 separate times. State prosecutors, though, argued Facebook's statements deceived the entire population of New Mexico and extended beyond social media users. In the end, jurors agreed with this premise and found Facebook liable for 2.1 million violations on certain counts, bringing the total number of violations to over 43 million. Facebook's attorneys have argued in subsequent court filings that the state's consumer protection laws don't apply to people in New Mexico who weren't using the platform at the time. [...] In one of the few wins for the defense, jurors found the state didn't prove that Facebook made false claims about removing harmful content, including misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. The state said the company favored certain accounts and allowed for violent or inaccurate content to proliferate. Attorney Randi McGinn said in her closing argument for the state that Facebook profited off harmful content, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied during his video deposition. Zuckerberg said the company has to carefully balance freedom of speech with content moderation. Attorneys for Facebook said the company has adapted its policies since the state's lawsuit was filed in 2021 and that it removes 99% of content that violates standards.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"According to a recent report by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier (paywalled), EA has reportedly decided to shut down BioWare," the studio behind the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, writes longtime Slashdot reader atari_kid. Quartz reports: Chief Studios Officer Cam Weber and Chief Operating Officer David Tinson wrote that "over the past several months, we've taken a hard look at our business." They said a small BioWare team had been doing early groundwork on a Mass Effect game, but EA chose to drop the effort. That decision means closing the studio and its Edmonton workspace, they wrote. "We do not take this decision lightly," Weber and Tinson said of the BioWare closure, according to Variety. EA will keep investing in Apex Legends and is continuing work on two upcoming launches, Marvel's Iron Man and the next Star Wars Jedi game, the executives said. They added that EA's Respawn and DICE studios will join forces on an upcoming project, in addition to new Battlefield titles. Bloomberg said the project is probably a new installment of the Star Wars: Battlefront franchise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is bringing its models to Google Cloud's model garden and Antigravity coding tool, putting its technology on all three major U.S. cloud platforms after Microsoft's exclusive license ended earlier this year. "Google Cloud's longstanding investment in machine learning and AI has made it a destination for AI workloads and the developers and data scientists building them," OpenAI said in a blog post. It continues: [...] The integration will pair OpenAI's frontier models with Google Cloud's built-in access controls, centralized data governance, and high-performance infrastructure to support demanding enterprise workloads. Google Cloud customers will be able to purchase OpenAI frontier models via model garden, transacted through the Google Cloud Marketplace. Enterprises with Google Cloud spend commitments will be able to draw down their GCP commitments for these purchases. Additionally, OpenAI models will soon be available in Google Antigravity and the Gemini Agent, providing enterprise customers with model choice flexibility and the best model for each task. [...] For context, Microsoft previously held exclusive licensing rights to OpenAI's intellectual property, but that arrangement ended less than six months ago as OpenAI began expanding its partnerships with other cloud providers. Just one day after Microsoft's exclusivity ended, Amazon announced plans to host OpenAI's models on its cloud platform in April.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"PHP disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in their programming language and urged web site operators to immediately apply the fix," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "As a result, government web sites in Europe and elsewhere temporarily went dark on Wednesday as operators worked to protect their systems." The Independent reports: Dane Knecht, the chief technology officer of Web and cloud security firm Cloudflare, said that attacks were emerging and Cloudflare was updating its firewall rules as a stopgap measure. "We are seeing early attacks emerging and are updating mitigations as new vectors show up. This is a STOPGAP only. Patch as soon as PHP releases the update," he said on X. Officials have said that all PHP versions from PHP 5 onward could be affected, although PHP has not yet disclosed which versions are vulnerable. Special thanks to Slashdot readers Alain Williams and mrspoonsi for sharing this critical PHP security release. For more details, read the official PHP announcement and guidance on what to do next.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Website admins, brace yourselves. Fixes for what are believed to be uncommonly severe vulnerabilities are scheduled to drop in a little more than 12 hours for PHP, a programming language that powers websites and Web applications everywhere. PHP maintainers said Monday that they planned to release patches for two vulnerabilities, both with severity ratings of 9.2 out of a possible 10. "All PHP users are encouraged to prepare now so they can upgrade as soon as the release is available," the advisory stated. "We reserve the right to release earlier should details of either vulnerability become public, or should evidence of active exploitation appear in the wild." The maintainers published the advisory following the leaking of purported details, which have yet to be confirmed. The report showed a video of an exploit tool dubbed PHP2Shell executing code on webservers running WordPress 7.1.3, MediaWiki 1.46.2, phpBB 3.3.17, Magento 2.4.9, Joomla 6.2.0, Laravel 13.36.0, Laravel 8.83.29, Symphony 8.1.9, Drupal 11.4.10, and WHMCS 9.0.9, all of which use PHP. A video depicting the tool has been reposted here. Attempts to locate the unconfirmed report were unsuccessful, but security firm watchTowr said it claimed to affect every PHP version from PHP 5, released in 2004, onward. The security firm went on to say it has confirmed that the vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, are real. Researchers from separate security firm Sansec said they "expect mass attacks to start within 15 minutes of the release." A third security firm, Webfence, also urged admins to prepare now. Huntress has also issued an advisory.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elon Musk says a merger between Tesla and SpaceX is under active consideration, with special committees at both companies evaluating a deal that could combine businesses valued at roughly $3.5 trillion. "Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," Musk said during a call with financial analysts over the quarterly business results of SpaceX on Tuesday. The BBC reports: While Musk noted the certainty of such a merger should not be assumed, and it would need shareholders' support, he said special committees within both companies have been formed to examine the move. "The special committees have not reached agreement on terms of any transaction and there's no guarantee that they will," Musk added. "But I do think there is a lot of merit to merging and a lot to be gained." [...] The company, which builds space rockets and Starlink internet satellites, is now expanding into offering cloud compute capacity for other tech companies, like Anthropic and Google. That line of business has become the most profitable part of SpaceX, bringing in $7.5bn according to the latest quarterly results (PDF). Starlink also tallied revenue of $5.2bn. SpaceX as a whole, however, is not profitable and has lost $1.1bn so far this year. [...] Musk said on Tuesday a full merger between the two companies would make sense for the work each is doing around chips, artificial intelligence, software and more. He described himself as a "conflicted party" as the chief executive of Tesla and of SpaceX. Even commenting on the possibility of a merger between the two companies, Musk compared to "tap dancing through a minefield." He added a merger would ultimately be decided by shareholders. At least 50% of Tesla's shareholders would need to approve the merger, which Musk described as "quite a high hurdle to achieve."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from TWZ: A Russian satellite, Kosmos 2612, may have passed within approximately 85 feet (26 meters) of a U.S.-registered satellite belonging to commercial imagery provider ICEYE. This would be an extraordinarily close and potentially dangerous pass-by for two objects in space traveling at thousands of miles per hour. For weeks beforehand, ICEYE-X36, which would be of special interest to Russia, had already found itself in increasingly close orbital alignment with its pursuer. The two satellites now look to be drifting further and further apart, but the episode has been a clear sign of what is to come as the potential for conflict in space only continues to grow. Publicly available space tracking data from the satellitemap.space and orbitalradar.com websites show that Kosmos 2612 (also written sometimes Cosmos 2612 and abbreviated K2612) and ICEYE X36 had their especially close encounter at approximately 16:07 UTC today. Private space services company LeoLabs also told TWZ today that it could not "confirm or contradict what other data sources have stated publicly," but that it has "high-confidence that the objects came within approximately [emphasis in the original] 500 meters [1,640 feet] of each other." Kosmos 2612 had been making progressively closer passes by ICEYE X36 in recent days. "This is the most advanced and potentially dangerous uncooperative RPO we've observed," Adam Marsh, LeoLabs vice president for technical solutions, separately told Breaking Defense. "It's important to note that 'red' on 'blue' engagements, such as this, are relatively uncommon in Low Earth Orbit (LEO)," LeoLabs' report points out. At the same time, "this was not a routine conjunction or 'fly by.' The sequence included a controlled approach, changes in relative position, close-proximity loitering, additional small maneuvers, and a controlled departure. The behavior is consistent with sophisticated rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO)." "We can only speculate about the operation's goal, but it could have been anything from simply intimidation to outright destruction or sabotage of a U.S.-registered satellite," CSIS' Clayton Swope told TWZ. "Perhaps the operation is on hold. There are, however, several other satellites that shadowed ICEYE X36 back in May that could be brought in[to] action too."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books. These logs would presumably reveal how Meta's torrent clients were set up, including any changes to their upload settings. [...] The server logs could reveal what happened on Meta's machines. However, publisher Entrepreneur Media also wants to know who approved the torrenting activity. Entrepreneur Media, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine, filed one of the related lawsuits where it accuses Meta of contributing to piracy by uploading (seeding) works to third parties, similar to the authors' contributory infringement claim. To find out more, the publisher asked Meta to identify everyone who "made, authorized, or approved" the decisions to obtain the shadow library datasets, and to do so via BitTorrent. Meta's answers named several people who are believed to have been involved in data-related decisions. However, Meta said it couldn't identify anyone who "formally" made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models. Those decisions were often the result of team consensus, Meta argued. When it came to the torrenting itself, Meta pointed to the employees who ran the downloads, describing their choices as technical decisions. Meta added that the acquisition of data from Anna's Archive went through an internal legal review in early 2024, which involved its in-house lawyers. In other words, the company didn't name anyone higher up who approved the use of BitTorrent. "On that construction no one at Meta decided to torrent anything, yet Meta torrented shadow libraries repeatedly from 2022-2024," Entrepreneur Media countered. An internal Meta logbook warned that using torrents would involve sharing copyrighted material with others. "Using torrents would entail seeding the file such as sharing content outside. This would be legally not okay," the logbook stated. Although Meta admits downloading data from LibGen and Anna's Archive via BitTorrent, it claims no one "made, authorized, or approved" a decision to distribute the material and that measures were taken to limit seeding. Meta's own expert previously estimated that uploads from its AWS servers amounted to no more than roughly 30% of the data downloaded during a period in 2024. Judge Thomas Hixson is not convinced and ordered (PDF) the company to identify everyone involved in approving the downloads, including those who decided "whether or how to seed, or to mitigate seeding."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ukraine says it carried out the world's first evacuation of a wounded soldier by aerial drone, using a heavy-lift hexacopter after enemy drones and landmines made conventional ground evacuation too dangerous. NBC News reports: Shared by the 92nd Separate Assault Brigade on Monday, the video shows the soldier strapping himself into a large drone and being flown at what appears to be relatively low altitude over blurred-out territory. The drone carefully lowers him, and the drone operator greets him with "Welcome back to the ground!" The video also shows blurred faces of drone operators who carried out the mission. The post said the unidentified infantryman was wounded at his position. "Due to intense enemy drone activity and the presence of landmines, evacuation using conventional unmanned ground vehicles was impossible," the brigade said. "At that point, the specialists in our unit took it upon themselves to attempt something that had never been done before: evacuating a serviceman using an aerial drone," it added. The craft was a heavy-lift hexacopter, it said, originally designed as a bomber by a Ukrainian manufacturer. It looks about twice the size of the soldier in the video. The specialists working on the mission had to ensure the drone could carry a human being without flipping over or swaying excessively, according to the unit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony has revived its Walkman lineup with three Android 16-powered high-end music players ranging from $1,900 to $5,900, topped by the gold-plated NW-WM1ZM3 with 256GB of storage. The Register reports: The Japanese giant named the new models the NW-WM1ZM3, NW-WM1AM3 and NW-ZX900. All can store and play many codecs, including MP3s, WMA, and FLAC files, plus others like Direct Stream Digital (DSD) and Apple Lossless, which use various tricks to avoid nasty artefacts accruing during the digitization process. Sony also says it has used "key components made from oxygen-free copper" because that apparently delivers "uncompromising sound quality." The machines also include "screws featuring a low-resistance gold-plated treatment ... providing a stable ground connection that delivers powerful bass, an expansive soundstage and smooth, extended high frequencies." Sony claims even the cabling it's used in the devices "further reduces noise and preserves signal integrity for rich, detailed sound." They're also housed in carefully-milled slabs of copper -- gold-plated in the case of the NW-WM1ZM3 -- because that apparently improves sound, too. And then Sony's gone and spoiled it all by offering Bluetooth connectivity, a notorious music-mangler, in addition to wired headphone ports. Sony's US site lists all three devices, which run Android 16 and include Wi-Fi so they can access streaming music services. All are USB-chargeable and Sony claims their batteries allow 30-odd hours of music playback.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AMD is expanding its FSR 4.1 upscaling technology beyond Radeon RX 9000-series GPUs to Xbox Series X/S consoles, Xbox Ally handhelds, laptops, and Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards. The Verge reports: AMD launched its FSR 4.1 update for Radeon RX 9000-series graphics cards in March, and promised to bring the technology to older GPUs and handhelds this year. FSR 4.1 can improve performance in more than 300 supported games, including Cyberpunk 2077, Battlefield 6, and Assassin's Creed Shadows. [...] While owners of Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs and Gorgon Halo- or Strix Halo-powered devices will get FSR 4.1 today with the latest Adrenalin Edition 26.10.1 drivers, Xbox console owners will have to wait a little longer. "We've worked very closely with AMD to optimize this technology, giving developers another powerful tool for great performance and visual quality for players," says Xbox CTO Scott Van Vilet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is beginning to replace traditional support articles with "Ask Google Help," a Gemini-powered interface that summarizes documentation and lets users troubleshoot through a chatbot. 9to5Google reports: "Ask Google Help" will display a condensed version of the support article with direct troubleshooting steps, with the user then able to type in queries to have Gemini help figure out the next step forward. A "View Sources" button at the bottom of the AI response allows users to still access the original article, but direct links to any of these articles now defaults to the AI experience. An example can be seen below on the "Secure a hacked or compromised Google account" page that Google's own support account directed users to within the past few days. It can also be seen on the "Fix common issues with 2-Step Verification" page and, as far as we can tell, any support pages on the Google Account Help forum. Google, as of right now, appears to only be testing this on select support topics. The Google Pixel Help section, for instance, still defaults to articles, whereas the Google Chrome topic has also moved to the new experience. Beyond support pages alone, this new design also impacts the central hub, with links to topics no longer showing by default in exchange for an AI chatbot that helps you find the relevant page.Read more of this story at Slashdot.