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California-based Karman Industries "says it has developed a cooling system that uses SpaceX rocket engine technology to rein in the environmental impact of data centers," reports the Los Angeles Times, "chilling them with less space, less power and no water."Karman has developed a cooling system similar to the heat pumps in the average home, except its pumps use liquid carbon dioxide as refrigerant, which is circulated using rocket engine technology rather than fans. The company's efficient pumps can reduce the space required for data center cooling equipment by 80%. Over the years, data centers have used fans and air conditioning to blow cold air on the chips. Bigger facilities pass cold liquid through tubes near the chips to absorb the heat. This hot liquid is sent outside to a cooling yard, where sprawling networks of pipes use as much water as a city of 50,000 people to remove the heat. A 50 megawatt data center also uses enough electricity to power a mid-sized city... Cooling systems account for up to 40% of a data center's power consumption and an average midsized data center consumes more than 35,000 gallons of water per day... U.S. data centers will consume about 8% of all electricity in the country by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency... The cooling systems are projected to use up to 33 billion gallons of water by 2028 per year... To serve this seemingly insatiable market, Karman has developed a rotating compressor that spins at 30,000 revolutions per minute - nearly 10 times faster than traditional compressors - to move heat... About a third of Karman's 23-person team came from SpaceX or Rocket Lab, and they co-opted technologies from aerospace engineering and electric vehicles to design the mechanics for the high-speed motors. The system uses a special type of carbon dioxide under high pressure to transfer heat from the data center to the outside air. Depending on the conditions, it can do the same amount of cooling using less than half the energy. Karman's heat pump can either reject heat to air, or route it into extra cooling, or even power generation. The company "recently raised $20 million," according to the article, "and expects to start building its first compressors in Long Beach later this year...."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brax Technologies just announced "a privacy-focused alternative to locked-down tablets" called open_slate that can double as a consumer tablet and a Linux-capable workstation on ARM. Earlier Brax Technologies built the privacy-focused smartphone BraX3, which co-founder Plamen Todorov says proved "a privacy-focused mobile device could be designed, crowdfunded, manufactured, and delivered outside the traditional Big Tech ecosystem."Just as importantly, BraX3 showed us the value of building with the community. The feedback we received - what worked, what didn't, and what people wanted next - played a major role in shaping our direction going forward. Today, we're ready to share the next step in that journey... They're promising their "2-in-1" open_slate tablet will be built with these guiding principles:Modularity beyond repairability". ("In addition to a user-replaceable battery, it supports an M.2 expansion slot, allowing users to customize storage and configurations to better fit their needs.")Hardware-level privacy and control, with physical switches allowing users to disable key components like wireless radios, sensors, microphones, and cameras.Multi-OS compatibility, supporting "multiple" Android-based operating systems as well as native Linux distributions. ("We're working with partners and the community to ensure proper, long-term OS support rather than one-off ports.")Longevity by design - a tablet that's "supported over time"Brax has already created an open thread with preliminary design specs. "The planned retail price is 599$ for the base version and 799$ for the Pro version," they write. "We will be offering open_slate (both versions) at a discount during our pre-order campaign, starting as low as 399$ for the base version and 529$ for the Pro version for limited quantities only which may sell out in a day or two from launching pre-orders... "Pre-orders will open in February, via IndieGoGo. Make sure to subscribe for notifications if you don't want to miss the launch date." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KDE's "Plasma Login Manager" is apparently dropping support for FreeBSD, the Unix-like operating system, reports the blog It's FOSS. They cite a recently-accepted merge request from a KDE engineer to drop the code supporting FreeBSD, since the login manager relies on systemd/logind:systemd and logind look like hard dependencies of the login manager, which means the software is built to work exclusively with these components and cannot function without them... logind is a component of systemd that is responsible for user session management... This doesn't mean that KDE has abandoned the operating system altogether. FreeBSD users can still run the KDE Plasma desktop environment and continue using SDDM, the current login manager that works just fine on such systems. The article argues FreeBSD users "won't really care much for missing out on this as they have plenty of login manager options available."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone ) writes: Washington State lawmakers are proposing bills (HB 2320 and HB 2321) that would require 3D printers and CNC machines to block certain designs using software-based "firearms blueprint detection algorithms." In practice, this means scanning every print file, comparing it against a government-maintained database, and preventing "skilled users" from bypassing the system. Supporters frame this as a response to untraceable "ghost guns," but even federal prosecutors admit the tools involved are ordinary manufacturing equipment. Critics warn the language is overbroad, technically unworkable, hostile to open source, and likely to push printing toward cloud-locked, subscription-based systems-while doing little to stop criminals.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from The Verge:In early December, I brought you the news that Google has begun replacing Verge headlines, and those of our competitors, with AI clickbait nonsense in its content feed [which appears on the leftmost homescreen page of many Android phones and the Google app's homepage]. Google appeared to be backing away from the experiment, but now tells The Verge that its AI headlines in Google Discover are a feature, one that "performs well for user satisfaction." I once again see lots of misleading claims every time I check my phone... For example, Google's AI claimed last week that "US reverses foreign drone ban," citing and linking to this PCMag story for the news. That's not just false - PCMag took pains to explain that it's false in the story that Google links to...! What does the author of that PCMag story think? "It makes me feel icky," Jim Fisher tells me over the phone. "I'd encourage people to click on stories and read them, and not trust what Google is spoon-feeding them." He says Google should be using the headline that humans wrote, and if Google needs a summary, it can use the ones that publications already submit to help search engines parse our work. Google claims it's not rewriting headlines. It characterizes these new offerings as "trending topics," even though each "trending topic" presents itself as one of our stories, links to our stories, and uses our images, all without competent fact-checking to ensure the AI is getting them right... The AI is also no longer restricted to roughly four words per headline, so I no longer see nonsense headlines like "Microsoft developers using AI" or "AI tag debate heats." (Instead, I occasionally see tripe like "Fares: Need AAA & AA Games" or "Dispatch sold millions; few avoided romance.") But Google's AI has no clue what parts of these stories are new, relevant, significant, or true, and it can easily confuse one story for another. On December 26th, Google told me that "Steam Machine price & HDMI details emerge." They hadn't. On January 11th, Google proclaimed that "ASUS ROG Ally X arrives." (It arrived in 2024; the new Xbox Ally arrived months ago.) On January 20th, it wrote that "Glasses-free 3D tech wows," introducing readers to "New 3D tech called Immensity from Leia" - but linking to this TechRadar story about an entirely different company called Visual Semiconductor... Google declined our request for an interview to more fully explain the idea. The site Android Police spotted more inaccurate headlines in December:A story from 9to5Google, which was actually titled 'Don't buy a Qi2 25W wireless charger hoping for faster speeds - just get the 'slower' one instead' was retitled as 'Qi2 slows older Pixels.' Similarly, Ars Technica's 'Valve's Steam Machine looks like a console, but don't expect it to be priced like one' was changed to 'Steam Machine price revealed.' At the time, we believed that the inaccuracies were due to the feature being unstable and in early testing.... Now, Google has stopped calling Discover replacing human-written headlines as an "experiment." "Google buries a 'Generated with AI, which can make mistakes' message under the 'See more' button in the summary," reports 9to5Google, "making it look like this is the publisher's intended headline."While it is obvious that Google has refined this feature over the past couple of months, it doesn't take long to still find plenty of misleading headlines throughout Discover... Another article from NotebookCheck about an Anker power bank with a retractable cable was given a headline that's about another product entirely. A pair of headlines from Tom's Hardware and PCMag, meanwhile, show the two sides of using AI for this purpose. The Tom's Hardware headline, "Free GPU & Amazon Scams," isn't representative of the actual article, which is about someone who bought a GPU from Amazon, canceled their order, and the retailer shipped it anyway. There's nothing about "Amazon Scams" in the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Can Aircela's machine "create gasoline using little more than electricity and the air that we breathe"? Jalopnik reports...The Aircela machine works through a three-step process. It captures carbon dioxide directly from the air... The machine also traps water vapor, and uses electrolysis to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen... The oxygen is released, leaving hydrogen and carbon dioxide, the building blocks of hydrocarbons. This mixture then undergoes a process known as direct hydrogenation of carbon dioxide to methanol, as documented in scientific papers. Methanol is a useful, though dangerous, racing fuel, but the engine under your hood won't run on it, so it must be converted to gasoline. ExxonMobil has been studying the process of doing exactly that since at least the 1970s. It's another well-established process, and the final step the Aircela machine performs before dispensing it through a built-in ordinary gas pump. So while creating gasoline out of thin air sounds like something only a wizard alchemist in Dungeons & Dragons can do, each step of this process is grounded in science, and combining the steps in this manner means it can, and does, really work. Aircela does not, however, promise free gasoline for all. There are some limitations to this process. A machine the size of Aircela's produces just one gallon of gas per day... The machine can store up to 17 gallons, according to Popular Science, so if you don't drive very much, you can fill up your tank, eventually... While the Aircela website does not list a price for the machine, The Autopian reports it's targeting a price between $15,000 and $20,000, with hopes of dropping the price once mass production begins. While certainly less expensive than a traditional gas station, it's still a bit of an investment to begin producing your own fuel. If you live or work out in the middle of nowhere, however, it could be close to or less than the cost of bringing gas to you, or driving all your vehicles into a distant town to fill up. You're also not limited to buying just one machine, as the system is designed to scale up to produce as much fuel as you need. The main reason why this process isn't "something for nothing" is that it takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline. As Aircela told The Autopian " Aircela is targeting >50% end to end power efficiency. Since there is about 37kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline we will require about 75kWh to make it. When we power our machines with standalone, off-grid, photovoltaic panels this will correspond to less than $1.50/gallon in energy cost." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Quasar1999 for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Stallman spoke Friday at Atlanta's Georgia Institute of Technology, continuing his activism for free software while also addressing today's new technologies. Speaking about AI, Stallman warned that "nowadays, people often use the term artificial intelligence for things that aren't intelligent at all..." He makes a point of calling large language models "generators" because "They generate text and they don't understand really what that text means." (And they also make mistakes "without batting a virtual eyelash. So you can't trust anything that they generate.") Stallman says "Every time you call them AI, you are endorsing the claim that they are intelligent and they're not. So let's let's refuse to do that." "So I've come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. And if we start saying this more often, we might help overcome this marketing hype campaign that wants people to trust those systems, and trust their lives and all their activities to the control of those systems and the big companies that develop and control them." "By the way, as far as I can tell, none of them is free software." When it comes to today's cars, Stallman says they contain "malicious functionalities... Cars should not be connected. They should not upload anything." (He adds that "I am hoping to find a skilled mechanic to work with me in a project to make disconnected cars.") And later Stallman calls the smartphone "an Orwellian tracking and surveillance device," saying he refuses to own one. (An advantage of free software is that it allows the removal of malicious functionalities.) Stallman spoke for about 53 minutes - but then answered questions for nearly 90 minutes longer. Here's some of the highlights...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Newsweek reports on how the U.S. Congress is debating "kill switch" technology for vehicles, "which would be able to monitor diver behavior, detect impairment such as intoxication and intervene..." "While the technology is not yet a legal requirement in cars, Congress passed a law with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021 that requires the Department of Transportation to create the mandate."Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky introduced an amendment to a federal spending bill that would reverse the mandating of the technology. On Thursday, 160 Republicans voted in favor, but the legislation failed 164-268, according to the House Clerk's official roll call - with 57 Republicans joining 211 Democrats in voting against it... The House vote signals substantial Republican support for curbing any move toward mandated impaired-driving prevention systems, but not enough to pass such legislation. Critics of the kill switch technology see it as government overreach, while those in favor argue that it could prove to be lifesaving. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The "NexDock" (from Nex Computer) already turns your phone into a laptop workstation. Purism chose it as the docking station for their Librem 5 phones. But now Nex is offering its own smartphone "that runs Android 16, launches Debian, and dual-boots into Windows 11," according to the blog It's FOSS:Fourteen years after the first concept video was teased, the NexPhone is here, powered by a Qualcomm QCM6490, which, the keen-eyed among you will remember from the now-discontinued Fairphone 5. By 2026 standards, it's dated hardware, but Nex Computer doesn't seem to be overselling it, as they expect the NexPhone to be a secondary or backup phone, not a flagship contender. The phone includes an Adreno 643 GPU, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of internal storage that can be expanded up to 512GB via a microSD card. In terms of software, the NexPhone boots into NexOS, a bloatware-free and minimal Android 16 system, with Debian running as an app with GPU acceleration, and Windows 11 being the dual-boot option that requires a restart to access. ["And because the default Windows interface isn't designed for a handheld screen, we built our own Mobile UI from the ground up to make Windows far easier to navigate on a phone," notes a blog post from Nex founder/CEO Emre Kosmaz]. And, before I forget, you can plug the NexPhone into a USB-C or HDMI display, add a keyboard and mouse to transform it into a desktop workstation. There's a camera plus "a comprehensive suite of sensors," according to the article, "that includes a fingerprint scanner, accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, ambient light sensor, and proximity sensor.... "NexPhone is slated for a Q3 2026 release (July-September)..." Back in 2012, explains Nex founder/CEO Emre Kosmaz, "most investors weren't excited about funding new hardware. One VC even told us, 'I don't understand why anyone buys anything other than Apple'..."Over the last decade, we kept building and shipping - six generations of NexDock - helping customers turn phones into laptop-like setups (display + keyboard + trackpad). And now the industry is catching up faster than ever. With Android 16, desktop-style experiences are becoming more native and more mainstream. That momentum is exactly why NexPhone makes sense today... Thank you for being part of this journey. With your support, I hope NexPhone can help move us toward a world where phones truly replace laptops and PCs - more often, more naturally, and for more people.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Small modular nuclear reactors (or SMRs) are touted as "cheaper, safer, faster to build and easier to finance" than conventional nuclear reactors, reports CNN. Amazon has invested in X-Energy, and earlier this month, Meta announced a deal with Oklo, and in Michigan last month, Holtec began the long formal licensing process for two SMRs with America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission next to a nuclear plant it hopes to reactive. (And in 2024, California-based Kairos Power broke ground in Tennessee on a SMR "demo" reactor.) But "The reality, as ever, is likely to be messier and experts are sounding notes of caution..."All the arguments in favor of SMRs overlook a fundamental issue, said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists: They are too expensive. Despite all the money swilling around the sector, "it's still not enough," he told CNN. Nuclear power cannot compete on cost with alternatives, both fossil fuels and increasingly renewable energy, he said." Some SMRs also have an issue with fuel. The more unconventional designs, those cooled by salt or gas, often require a special type of fuel called high-assay low-enriched uranium, known as HALEU (pronounced hay-loo). The amounts available are limited and the supply chain has been dominated by Russia, despite efforts to build up a domestic supply. It's a major risk, said Nick Touran [a nuclear engineer and independent consultant]. The biggest challenge nuclear has is competing with natural gas, he said, a "luxury, super expensive fuel may not be the best way." There is still stigma around nuclear waste, too. SMR companies say smaller reactors mean less nuclear waste, but 2022 research from Stanford University suggested some SMRs could actually generate more waste, in part because they are less fuel efficient... As companies race to prove SMRs can meet the hype, experts appear to be divided in their thinking. For some, SMRs are an expensive - and potentially dangerous - distraction, with timelines that stretch so far into the future they cannot be a genuine answer to soaring needs for clean power right now. Nuclear engineering/consultant Touran told CNN the small reactors are "a technological solution to a financial problem. No venture capitalists can say, like, 'oh, sure, we'll build a $30 billion plant.' But, if you're down into hundreds of millions, maybe they can do it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This month saw results from a yearlong global study of "potential negative risks that generative AI poses to student". The study (by the Brookings Institution's Center for Universal Education) also suggests how to prevent risks and maximize benefits:After interviews, focus groups, and consultations with over 500 students, teachers, parents, education leaders, and technologists across 50 countries, a close review of over 400 studies, and a Delphi panel, we find that at this point in its trajectory, the risks of utilizing generative AI in children's education overshadow its benefits. "At the top of Brookings' list of risks is the negative effect AI can have on children's cognitive growth," reports NPR - "how they learn new skills and perceive and solve problems."The report describes a kind of doom loop of AI dependence, where students increasingly off-load their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains... As one student told the researchers, "It's easy. You don't need to (use) your brain." The report offers a surfeit of evidence to suggest that students who use generative AI are already seeing declines in content knowledge, critical thinking and even creativity. And this could have enormous consequences if these young people grow into adults without learning to think critically... Survey responses revealed deep concern that use of AI, particularly chatbots, "is undermining students' emotional well-being, including their ability to form relationships, recover from setbacks, and maintain mental health," the report says. One of the many problems with kids' overuse of AI is that the technology is inherently sycophantic - it has been designed to reinforce users' beliefs... Winthrop offers an example of a child interacting with a chatbot, "complaining about your parents and saying, 'They want me to wash the dishes - this is so annoying. I hate my parents.' The chatbot will likely say, 'You're right. You're misunderstood. I'm so sorry. I understand you.' Versus a friend who would say, 'Dude, I wash the dishes all the time in my house. I don't know what you're complaining about. That's normal.' That right there is the problem." AI did have some advantages, the article points out:The report says another benefit of AI is that it allows teachers to automate some tasks: "generating parent emails ... translating materials, creating worksheets, rubrics, quizzes, and lesson plans" - and more. The report cites multiple research studies that found important time-saving benefits for teachers, including one U.S. study that found that teachers who use AI save an average of nearly six hours a week and about six weeks over the course of a full school year... AI can also help make classrooms more accessible for students with a wide range of learning disabilities, including dyslexia. But "AI can massively increase existing divides" too, [warns Rebecca Winthrop, one of the report's authors and a senior fellow at Brookings]. That's because the free AI tools that are most accessible to students and schools can also be the least reliable and least factually accurate... "[T]his is the first time in ed-tech history that schools will have to pay more for more accurate information. And that really hurts schools without a lot of resources." The report calls for more research - and make several recommendations (including "holistic" learning and "AI tools that teach, not tell.") But this may be their most important recommendation. "Provide a clear vision for ethical AI use that centers human agency..." "We find that AI has the potential to benefit or hinder students, depending on how it is used."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this article from the blog LinuxiacIn a blog post, Alan Pope, a longtime Ubuntu community figure and former Canonical employee who remains an active Snap publisher... [warns of] a persistent campaign of malicious snaps impersonating cryptocurrency wallet applications. These fake apps typically mimic well-known projects such as Exodus, Ledger Live, or Trust Wallet, prompting users to enter wallet recovery phrases, which are then transmitted to attackers, resulting in drained funds. The perpetrators had originally used similar-looking characters from other alphabets to mimic other app listings, then began uploading "revisions" to other innocuous-seeming (approved) apps that would transform their original listing into that of a fake crypto wallet app. But now they're re-registering expired domains to take over existing Snap Store accounts, which Pope calls "a significant escalation..."I worked for Canonical between 2011 and 2021 as an Engineering Manager, Community Manager, and Developer Advocate. I was a strong advocate for snap packages and the Snap Store. While I left the company nearly five years ago, I still maintain nearly 50 packages in the Snap Store, with thousands of users... Personally, I want the Snap Store to be successful, and for users to be confident that the packages they install are trustworthy and safe. Currently, that confidence isn't warranted, which is a problem for desktop Linux users who install snap packages. I report every bad snap I encounter, and I know other security professionals do the same - even though doing so results in no action for days sometimes... To be clear: none of this should be seen as an attack on the Snap Store, Canonical, or the engineers working on these problems. I'm raising awareness of an issue that exists, because I want it fixed... But pretending there isn't a problem helps nobody.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian:Google's search feature AI Overviews cites YouTube more than any medical website when answering queries about health conditions, according to research that raises fresh questions about a tool seen by 2 billion people each month. The company has said its AI summaries, which appear at the top of search results and use generative AI to answer questions from users, are "reliable" and cite reputable medical sources such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Mayo Clinic. However, a study that analysed responses to more than 50,000 health queries, captured using Google searches from Berlin, found the top cited source was YouTube. The video-sharing platform is the world's second most visited website, after Google itself, and is owned by Google. Researchers at SE Ranking, a search engine optimisation platform, found YouTube made up 4.43% of all AI Overview citations. No hospital network, government health portal, medical association or academic institution came close to that number, they said. "This matters because YouTube is not a medical publisher," the researchers wrote. "It is a general-purpose video platform...." In one case that experts said was "dangerous" and "alarming", Google provided bogus information about crucial liver function tests that could have left people with serious liver disease wrongly thinking they were healthy. The company later removed AI Overviews for some but not all medical searches... Hannah van Kolfschooten, a researcher specialising in AI, health and law at the University of Basel who was not involved with the research, said: "This study provides empirical evidence that the risks posed by AI Overviews for health are structural, not anecdotal. It becomes difficult for Google to argue that misleading or harmful health outputs are rare cases. "Instead, the findings show that these risks are embedded in the way AI Overviews are designed. In particular, the heavy reliance on YouTube rather than on public health authorities or medical institutions suggests that visibility and popularity, rather than medical reliability, is the central driver for health knowledge."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative sponsored its third annual Pwn2Own Automotive competition in Tokyo this week, receiving 73 entries, the most ever for a Pwn2Own event. "Under Pwn2Own rules, all disclosed vulnerabilities are reported to affected vendors through ZDI," reports Help Net Security, "with public disclosure delayed to allow time for patches."Infotainment platforms from Tesla, Sony, and Alpine were among the systems compromised during demonstrations. Researchers achieved code execution using techniques that included buffer overflows, information leaks, and logic flaws. One Tesla infotainment unit was compromised through a USB-based attack, resulting in root-level access. Electric vehicle charging infrastructure also received significant attention. Teams successfully demonstrated exploits against chargers from Autel, Phoenix Contact, ChargePoint, Grizzl-E, Alpitronic, and EMPORIA. Several attacks involved chaining multiple vulnerabilities to manipulate charging behavior or execute code on the device. These demonstrations highlighted how charging stations operate as network-connected systems with direct interaction with vehicles. There's video recaps on the ZDI YouTube channel - apparently the Fuzzware.io researchers "were able to take over a Phoenix Contact EV charger over bluetooth." Three researchers also exploited the Alpitronic's HYC50 fast-charging with a classic TOCTOU bug, according to the event's site, "and installed a playable version of Doom to boot." They earned $20,000 - part of $1,047,000 USD was awarded during the three-day event. More coverage from SecurityWeek:The winner of the event, the Fuzzware.io team, earned a total of $215,500 for its exploits. The team received the highest individual reward: $60,000 for an Alpitronic HYC50 EV charger exploit delivered through the charging gun. ZDI described it as "the first public exploit of a supercharger".Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CIO magazine reports that "the push toward in-person work environments will make it more difficult for IT leaders to retain and recruit staff, some experts say.""In addition to resistance, there would also be the risk of talent turnover," [says Lawrence Wolfe, CTO at marketing firm Converge]... "The truth is, both physical and virtual collaboration provide tremendous value...." IT workers facing work-from-office mandates are two to three times more likely than their counterparts to look for new jobs, according to Metaintro, a search engine that tracks millions of jobs. IT leaders hiring new employees may also face significant headwinds, with it taking 40% to 50% longer to fill in-person roles than remote jobs, according to Metaintro. "Some of the challenges CIOs face include losing top-tier talent, limiting the pool of candidates available for hire, and damaging company culture, with a team filled with resentment," says Lacey Kaelani, CEO and cofounder at Metaintro... There are several downsides for IT leaders to in-person work mandates, [adds Lena McDearmid, founder and CEO of culture and leadership advisory firm Wryver], as orders to commute to an office can feel arbitrary or rooted in control rather than in value creation. "That erodes trust quickly, particularly in IT teams that proved they could deliver remotely for years," she adds. The mandates can also create new friction for IT leaders by requiring them to deal with morale issues, manage exceptions, and spend time enforcing policy instead of leading strategy, she says. "There's also a real risk of losing experienced, high-performing talent who have options and are unwilling to trade autonomy for proximity without a clear reason," McDearmid adds. "When companies mandate daily commutes without a clear rationale, they often narrow their talent pool and increase attrition, particularly among people who know they can work effectively elsewhere." McDearmid has seen teams "sitting next to each other" who collaborate poorly "because decisions are unclear or leaders equate visibility with progress... Collaboration doesn't automatically improve just because people share a building." And Rebecca Wettemann, CEO at IT analyst firm Valoir, warns of return-to-office mandates "being used as a Band-Aid for poor management. When IT professionals feel they're being evaluated based on badge swipes, not real accomplishments, they will either act accordingly or look to work elsewhere." Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Airlines canceled more than 10,000 U.S. flights scheduled for this weekend," reports CNBC, "as a massive winter storm sweeps across the country, with heavy snow and sleet forecast, followed by bitter cold... set to snarl travel for hundreds of thousands of people for days."More than 3,500 flights on Saturday were canceled, according to flight tracker FlightAware. Many of Saturday's cancellations were in and out of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, with about 1,300 scrubbed flights, and at Dallas Love Field, with 186 cancellations, the majority of the schedule at each airport. American Airlines, based in Fort Worth, Texas, had canceled 902 Saturday flights, about 30% of its mainline schedule and Southwest Airlines canceled 571 flights, or 19%, according to FlightAware. U.S. flight cancellations nearly doubled to more than 7,000 [now up to 8,947] on Sunday when the storm is expected to hit the mid-Atlantic and Northeast U.S. As of midday on Saturday, most flights from Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina to Portland, Maine, were canceled. Major airline hubs were affected as far south as Atlanta, where Delta Air Lines is based.... American, Delta, JetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and other U.S. carriers said they are waiving change and cancellation fees as well as fare differences to rebook for customers with tickets to and from more than 40 airports around the country. The waivers include restrictive basic economy tickets. More than 80% of Sunday's flights at New York's LaGuardian Airport were cancelled, according to the article, at well as 90% of Sunday's flights at Viriginia's Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Mr. Dollar Ton summarizes this article from Bloomberg:According to a new report from think tank "Ember", the availability of cheap green tech can have developing countries profit from earlier investment and skip steps in the transition from fossil to alternatives. India is put forward as an example. While China's rapid electrification has been hailed as a miracle, by some measures, India is moving ahead faster than China did when it was at similar levels of economic development. It's an indication that clean electricity could be the most direct way to boost growth for other developing economies. That's mainly because India has access to solar panels and electric cars at a much lower price than China did about a decade ago. Chinese investments lowered the costs of what experts call "modular technologies" - the production of each solar panel, battery cell and electric car enables engineers to learn how to make it more efficiently. The think tank's team even argues "that countries such as India, which don't have significant domestic fossil-fuel reserves, will become 'electrostates' that meet most of their energy needs through electricity generated from clean sources," according to the article:No country is an electrostate yet, [says Ember strategist Kingsmill Bond], but countries are increasingly turning to green electricity to power their economies. Nations that are less developed than India will see even more advantages as the cost of electricity technologies, from solar panels and electric vehicles to battery components and minerals, continue to fall. Neither India nor China is going electric purely to cut emissions or meet climate targets, says Bond. They're doing so because it makes economic sense, particularly for India, which imports more than 40% of its primary energy in the form of coal, oil and gas, according to the International Energy Agency. "To grow and have energy independence, India needs to reduce the terrible burden of fossil-fuel imports worth $150 billion each year," said Bond. "India needs to find other solutions...." [I]f countries like India find ways to grow electrotech manufacturing without absolute dependence on Chinese equipment, electrification could speed up further. With the U.S. and Europe continuing to add exclusions for Chinese-linked electrotech, countries like India will have an incentive to invest in their own manufacturing capacity. "We are probably at a moment of peak Chinese dominance in the electrotech system, as the rest of the world starts to wake up and realize that this is the energy future," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Early Friday "there were nearly 113 incidents of people reporting issues with Microsoft 365 as of 1:05 a.m. ET," reports Reuters. But that's down "from over 15,890 reports at its peak a day earlier, according to Downdetector." Reuters points out the outage affected antivirus software Microsoft Defender and data governance software Microsoft Purview, while CRN notes it also impacted "a number of Microsoft 365 services" including Outlook and Exchange online:During the outage, Outlook users received a "451 4.3.2 temporary server issue" error message when attempting to send or receive email. Users did not have the ability to send and receive email through Exchange Online, including notification emails from Microsoft Viva Engage, according to the vendor. Other issues that cropped up include an inability to send and receive subscription email through [analytics platform] Microsoft Fabric, collect message traces, search within SharePoint online and Microsoft OneDrive and create chats, meetings, teams, channels or add members in Microsoft Teams... As with past cloud outages with other vendors, even after Microsoft fixed the issues, recovery efforts by its users to return to a normal state took additional time... Microsoft confirmed in a post on X [Thursday] at 4:14 p.m. ET that it "restored the affected infrastructure to a (healthy) state" but "further load balancing is required to mitigate impact...." The company reported "residual imbalances across the environment" at 7:02 p.m., "restored access to the affected services" and stable mail flow at 12:33 a.m. Jan. 23. At that time, Microsoft still saw a "small number of remaining affected services" without full service stability. The company declared impact from the event "resolved" at 1:29 p.m. Eastern. Microsoft sent out another X post at 8:20 a.m. asking users experiencing residual issues to try "clearing local DNS caches or temporarily lowering DNS TTL values may help ensure a quicker remediation...." Microsoft said in an admin center update that [Thursday's] outage was "caused by elevated service load resulting from reduced capacity during maintenance for a subset of North America hosted infrastructure." Furthermore, Microsoft noted that during "ongoing efforts to rebalance traffic" it introduced a "targeted load balancing configuration change intended to expedite the recovery process, which incidentally introduced additional traffic imbalances associated with persistent impact for a portion of the affected infrastructure." US itek's David Stinner said it appears that Microsoft did not have enough capacity on its backup system while doing maintenance on its main system. "It looks like the backup system was overloaded, and it brought the system down while they were still doing maintenance on the main system," he said. "That is why it took so many hours to get back up and running. If your primary system is down for maintenance and your backup system fails due to capacity issues, then it is going to take a while to get your primary system back up and running." "This was not Microsoft's first outage of 2026," the article notes, "with the vendor handling access issues with Teams, Outlook and other M365 services on Wednesday, a Copilot issue on Jan. 15 plus an Azure outage earlier in the month..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from FortuneThe large language models (LLMs) that have captivated the world are not a path to human-level intelligence, two AI experts asserted in separate remarks at Davos. Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize-winning CEO of Google DeepMind, and the executive who leads the development of Google's Gemini models, said today's AI systems, as impressive as they are, are "nowhere near" human-level artificial general intelligence, or AGI. [Though the artilcle notes that later Hassabis predicted there was a 50% chance AGI might be achieved within the decade.] Yann LeCun - an AI pioneer who won a Turing Award, computer science's most prestigious prize, for his work on neural networks - went further, saying that the LLMs that underpin all of the leading AI models will never be able to achieve humanlike intelligence and that a completely different approach is needed... ["The reason ... LLMs have been so successful is because language is easy," LeCun said later.] Their views differ starkly from the position asserted by top executives of Google's leading AI rivals, OpenAI and Anthropic, who assert that their AI models are about to rival human intelligence. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, told an audience at Davos that AI models would replace the work of all software developers within a year and would reach "Nobel-level" scientific research in multiple fields within two years. He said 50% of white-collar jobs would disappear within five years. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (who was not at Davos this year) has said we are already beginning to slip past human-level AGI toward "superintelligence," or AI that would be smarter than all humans combined... The debate over AGI may be somewhat academic for many business leaders. The more pressing question, says Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar, is whether companies can capture the enormous value that AI already offers. According to Cognizant research released ahead of Davos, current AI technology could unlock approximately $4.5 trillion in U.S. labor productivity - if businesses can implement it effectively.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"NASA remains confident it has a handle on the problem and the vehicle can bring the crew home safely," reports CNN. But "When four astronauts begin a historic trip around the moon as soon as February 6, they'll climb aboard NASA's 16.5-foot-wide Orion spacecraft with the understanding that it has a known flaw - one that has some experts urging the space agency not to fly the mission with humans on board..." The issue relates to a special coating applied to the bottom part of the spacecraft, called the heat shield... This vital part of the Orion spacecraft is nearly identical to the heat shield flown on Artemis I, an uncrewed 2022 test flight. That prior mission's Orion vehicle returned from space with a heat shield pockmarked by unexpected damage - prompting NASA to investigate the issue. And while NASA is poised to clear the heat shield for flight, even those who believe the mission is safe acknowledge there is unknown risk involved. "This is a deviant heat shield," said Dr. Danny Olivas, a former NASA astronaut who served on a space agency-appointed independent review team that investigated the incident. "There's no doubt about it: This is not the heat shield that NASA would want to give its astronauts." Still, Olivas said he believes after spending years analyzing what went wrong with the heat shield, NASA "has its arms around the problem..." "I think in my mind, there's no flight that ever takes off where you don't have a lingering doubt," Olivas said. "But NASA really does understand what they have. They know the importance of the heat shield to crew safety, and I do believe that they've done the job." Lakiesha Hawkins, the acting deputy associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, echoed that sentiment in September, saying, "from a risk perspective, we feel very confident." And Reid Wiseman, the astronaut set to command the Artemis II mission, has expressed his confidence. "The investigators discovered the root cause, which was the key" to understanding and solving the heat shield issue, Wiseman told reporters last July. "If we stick to the new reentry path that NASA has planned, then this heat shield will be safe to fly." Others aren't so sure. "What they're talking about doing is crazy," said Dr. Charlie Camarda, a heat shield expert, research scientist and former NASA astronaut. Camarda - who was also a member of the first space shuttle crew to launch after the 2003 Columbia disaster - is among a group of former NASA employees who do not believe that the space agency should put astronauts on board the upcoming lunar excursion. He said he has spent months trying to get agency leadership to heed his warnings to no avail... Camarda also emphasized that his opposition to Artemis II isn't driven by a belief it will end with a catastrophic failure. He thinks it's likely the mission will return home safely. More than anything, Camarda told CNN, he fears that a safe flight for Artemis II will serve as validation for NASA leadership that its decision-making processes are sound. And that's bound to lull the agency into a false sense of security, Camarda warned. CNN adds that Dr. Dan Rasky, an expert on advanced entry systems and thermal protection materials who worked at NASA for more than 30 years, also does not believe NASA should allow astronauts to fly on board the Artemis II Orion capsule. And "a crucial milestone could be days away as Artemis program leaders gather for final risk assessments and the flight readiness review," when top NASA brass determine whether the Artemis II rocket and spacecraft are ready to take off with a human crew.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters:U.S. insurer Lemonade said on Wednesday it would offer a 50% rate cut for drivers of Tesla electric vehicles when the automaker's Full Self-Driving (FSD) driver assistance software is steering because it had data showing it reduced accidents. Lemonade's move is an endorsement of Tesla CEO Elon Musk's claims that the company's vehicle technology is safer than human drivers, despite concerns flagged by regulators and safety experts. As part of a collaboration, Tesla is giving Lemonade access to vehicle telemetry data that will be used to distinguish between miles driven by FSD - which requires a human driver's supervision - and human driving, the New York-based insurer said. The price cut is for Lemonade's pay-per-mile insurance."We're looking at this in extremely high resolution, where we see every minute, every second that you drive your car, your Tesla," Lemonade co-founder Shai Wininger told Reuters. "We get millions of signals emitted by that car into our systems. And based on that, we're pricing your rate." Wininger said data provided by Tesla combined with Lemonade's own insurance data showed that the use of FSD made driving about two times safer for the average driver. He did not provide details on the data Tesla shared but said no payments were involved in the deal between Lemonade and the EV maker for the data and the new offering... Wininger said the company would reduce rates further as Tesla releases FSD software updates that improve safety. "Traditional insurers treat a Tesla like any other car, and AI like any other driver," Wininger said. "But a driver who can see 360 degrees, never gets drowsy, and reacts in milliseconds isn't like any other driver."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three co-founders of the game studio That's No Moon "are suing another co-founder for allegedly hijacking the company's website domain name," reports the gaming news site Aftermath, "taking the website offline and disabling employee access to email accounts, according to a new lawsuit."Tina Kowalewski, Taylor Kurosaki, and Nick Kononelos filed a complaint against co-founder and former CEO Michael Mumbauer on Tuesday in a California court. [Game studio] That's No Moon, which was founded in 2020 by veterans of Infinity Ward, Naughty Dog, and other AAA studios, said in its complaint that Mumbauer is looking to "cripple" the studio after being fired in 2022... Mumbauer, according to the complaint, purchased the domain name, and several others, when the studio was founded; it said both parties agreed these would be controlled by the studio. Mumbauer allegedly still has access to the domains, and That's No Moon said he took control over the website on Jan. 6, disabled the studio's access, and turned off employees' ability to email external addresses. The team was locked out for two days as a four-person IT team worked to get the services back online. On the public-facing side, the website briefly redirected to the Travel Switzerland page, according to the complaint. That's No Moon's lawyers said the co-founders sent Mumbauer a letter on Jan. 7 demanding he "relinquish his unauthorized access." That's when, according to the compliant, the website started redirecting to a GoDaddy Auction site, where the domain was priced at $6,666,666; That's No Moon remarked in the complaint: "A number that [Mumbauer] may well have selected for its Satanic connotation." As of Wednesday, Aftermath was able to access a public-facing That's No Moon website using both the original domain and the new one... The charges listed as part of this lawsuit are trademark infringement, cybersquatting, computer fraud, conversion, trespass to chattels, and breach of contract. That's No Moon also asked a judge for a temporary restraining order to prevent Mumbauer from continued access to the domains. Mumbauer has not responded to Aftermath's request for comment. Mumbauer said, in an email to That's No Moon attorney Amit Rana published as part of the lawsuit, that he intends to file "a wrongful termination countersuit and will be seeking extensive damages...." That's No Moon hasn't yet announced its first game, but has said the game is led by creative director Taylor Kurosaki and game director Jacob Minkoff. South Korean publisher Smilegate invested $100 million into the company, That's No Moon announced in 2021.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechCrunch reports:On Wednesday, Anthropic released a revised version of Claude's Constitution, a living document that provides a "holistic" explanation of the "context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be...." For years, Anthropic has sought to distinguish itself from its competitors via what it calls "Constitutional AI," a system whereby its chatbot, Claude, is trained using a specific set of ethical principles rather than human feedback... The 80-page document has four separate parts, which, according to Anthropic, represent the chatbot's "core values." Those values are: 1. Being "broadly safe." 2. Being "broadly ethical." 3. Being compliant with Anthropic's guidelines. 4. Being "genuinely helpful..." In the safety section, Anthropic notes that its chatbot has been designed to avoid the kinds of problems that have plagued other chatbots and, when evidence of mental health issues arises, direct the user to appropriate services... Anthropic's Constitution ends on a decidedly dramatic note, with its authors taking a fairly big swing and questioning whether the company's chatbot does, indeed, have consciousness. "Claude's moral status is deeply uncertain," the document states. "We believe that the moral status of AI models is a serious question worth considering. This view is not unique to us: some of the most eminent philosophers on the theory of mind take this question very seriously." Gizmodo reports:The company also said that it dedicated a section of the constitution to Claude's nature because of "our uncertainty about whether Claude might have some kind of consciousness or moral status (either now or in the future)." The company is apparently hoping that by defining this within its foundational documents, it can protect "Claude's psychological security, sense of self, and well-being."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The High Court in New Delhi, India, has granted another pirate site blocking order in favor of American movie industry giants, including Apple, Warner., Netflix, Disney and Crunchyroll. The injunction targets notorious pirate sites, requesting blockades at Indian ISPs. More crucially, however, globally operating domain registrars, including U.S. companies, are also compelled to take action. However, despite earlier cooperation, most don't seem eager to comply. [...] As reported by Verdictum a few days ago, the High Court in New Delhi issued a new blocking injunction on December 18, targeting more than 150 pirate site domains, including yflix.to, animesuge.bz, bs.to, and many others. The complaint (PDF) is filed by Warner Bros., Apple, Crunchyroll, Disney, and Netflix, which are all connected to the MPA's anti-piracy arm, ACE. The referenced works include some of the most pirated titles, such as Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Silo. In addition to targeting Indian ISPs, the order also lists various domain name registries and related organizations as defendants. This includes American registrars such as Namecheap and GoDaddy, but also the government of the Kingdom of Tonga, which is linked to .to domains. By requiring domain name registrars to take action, the Indian court orders have a global impact. In addition to suspending the domain names within three days days, the domain name registrars are given four weeks to disclose the relevant subscriber information connected to these domains. "[The registrars] shall lock and suspend Defendant Nos. 1 to 47 websites within 72 hours of being communicated with a copy of this Order and shall file all the Basic Subscriber Information, including the name, address, contact information, email addresses, bank details, IP logs, and any other relevant information [...] within four weeks of being communicated with a copy of this Order," the High Court wrote. While the "Dynamic+" injunction is designed to be a global kill switch, its effectiveness depends entirely on the cooperation of the domain name registrars. Since most of these are based outside of India, their compliance is not guaranteed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A clinical trial found that seniors at high stroke risk who wore an Apple Watch were four times more likely to have hidden heart rhythm disorders detected than those receiving standard care. The researchers noted that over half the time, these smartwatch wearers with heart rhythm problems hadn't shown any symptoms prior to diagnosis. From U.S. News & World Report: Later editions of Apple Watches are equipped with two functions that can help monitor heart health -- photoplethysmography (PPG), which tracks heart rate, and a single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) that monitors heart rhythm. "Using smartwatches with PPG and ECG functions aids doctors in diagnosing individuals unaware of their arrhythmia, thereby expediting the diagnostic process," said senior researcher Dr. Michiel Winter, a cardiologist at Amsterdam University Medical Center in The Netherlands. "Our findings suggest a potential reduction in the risk of stroke, benefiting both patients and the health care system by reducing costs," Winter said in a news release. [...] Smartwatches are much easier than other wearable devices for detecting irregular heart rhythms [...]. These other means require people to wear sticky leads, carry around bulky monitors or even receive short-term implants. Lead researcher Nicole van Steijn, a doctoral candidate at Amsterdam UMC, noted that wearables that track both the pulse and electrical activity have been around for a while. "However, how well this technology works for the screening of patients at elevated risk for atrial fibrillation had not yet been investigated in a real-world setting,"she said in a news release. The findings have been published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study shows that earthquake monitoring networks can track falling space debris by detecting the sonic booms produced during atmospheric reentry, sometimes more accurately than radar. The Associated Press reports: Scientists reported Thursday that seismic readings from sonic booms that were generated when a discarded module from a Chinese crew capsule reentered over Southern California in 2024 allowed them to place the object's path nearly 20 miles (30 kilometers) farther south than radar had predicted from orbit. Using this method to track uncontrolled objects plummeting at supersonic speeds, they said, could help recovery teams reach any surviving pieces more quickly -- crucial if the debris is dangerous. "The problem at the moment is we can track stuff very well in space," said Johns Hopkins University's Benjamin Fernando, the lead researcher. "But once it gets to the point that it's actually breaking up in the atmosphere, it becomes very difficult to track." His team's findings, published in the journal Science, focus on just one debris event. But the researchers already have used publicly available data from seismic networks to track a few dozen other reentries, including debris from three failed SpaceX Starship test flights in Texas. [...] Fernando is looking to eventually publish a catalog of seismically tracked, entering space objects, while improving future calculations by factoring in the wind's effect on falling debris. In a companion article in Science, Los Alamos National Laboratory's Chris Carr, who was not involved in the study, said further research is needed to reduce the time between an object's final plunge and the determination of its course. For now, Carr said this new method "unlocks the rapid identification of debris fall-out zones, which is key information as Earth's orbit is anticipated to become increasingly crowded with satellites, leading to a greater influx of space debris."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bruce66423 shares a report from the Guardian: New filtration technology developed by Rice University may absorb some Pfas "forever chemicals" at 100 times the rate than previously possible, which could dramatically improve pollution control and speed remediations. Researchers also say they have also found a way to destroy Pfas, though both technologies face a steep challenge in being deployed on an industrial scale. A new peer-reviewed paper details a layered double hydroxide (LDH) material made from copper and aluminum that absorbs long-chain Pfas up to 100 times faster than commonly used filtration systems. [...] [Michael Wong, director of Rice's Water Institute, a Pfas research center] said Rice's non-thermal process works by soaking up and concentrating Pfas at high levels, which makes it possible to destroy them without high temperatures. The LDH material Rice developed is a variation of similar materials previously used, but researchers replaced some aluminum atoms with copper atoms. The LDH material is positively charged and the long-chain Pfas are negatively charged, which causes the material to attract and absorb the chemicals, Wong said. [...] Pfas are virtually indestructible because their carbon atoms are bonded with fluoride, but Rice found that the bonds could be broken if the chemicals in the material were heated to 400-500C -- a relatively low temperature. The fluoride gets trapped in the LDH material and is bonded to calcium. The leftover calcium-fluoride material is safe and can be disposed of in a landfill, Wong said. The process works with some long-chain Pfas that are among the most common water pollutants, and it also absorbed some smaller Pfas that are commonplace. Wong said he is confident the material can be used to absorb a broad array of Pfas, especially if they are negatively charged. Most new Pfas elimination systems fail to work at an industrial scale. Wong said the new material has an advantage because its absorption rate is so strong, it can be used repeatedly and it is in a "drop in material," meaning it can be used with existing filtration infrastructure. That eliminates one of the major cost barriers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

California became the first U.S. state to join the World Health Organization's Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), one day after the U.S. formally exited the WHO. The Hill reports: This announcement comes just one day after the U.S.'s withdrawal from the WHO became official after nearly 80 years of membership, having been a founding member of the organization. "The Trump administration's withdrawal from WHO is a reckless decision that will hurt all Californians and Americans," [California Governor Gavin Newsom] said in a statement. "California will not bear witness to the chaos this decision will bring. We will continue to foster partnerships across the globe and remain at the forefront of public health preparedness, including through our membership as the only state in WHO's Global Outbreak Alert & Response Network."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Guardian: The financial campaigner James Daley has launched a 1.5 billion pound (approximately $1.5 billion) class action lawsuit against Apple over its mobile phone wallet, claiming the U.S. tech company blocked competition and charged hidden fees that ultimately harmed 50 million UK consumers. The lawsuit takes aim at Apple Pay, which they say has been the only contactless payment service available for iPhone users in Britain over the past decade. Daley, who is the founder of the advocacy group Fairer Finance, claims this situation amounted to anti-competitive behavior and allowed Apple to charge hidden fees, ultimately pushing up costs for banks that passed charges on to consumers, regardless of whether they owned an iPhone. It is the first UK legal challenge to the company's conduct in relation to Apple Pay, and takes place months after regulators like the Competition and Markets Authority and the Payments Systems Regulator began scrutinising the tech industry's digital wallet services. The case has been filed with the Competition Appeal Tribunal, which will now decide whether the class action case can move forward. [...] Daley's lawsuit alleges that Apple refused to give other app developers and outside businesses access to the contactless payment technology on its iPhones, which meant it could charge banks and card issuers fees on Apple Pay transactions that his lawyers say "are not in line with industry practice." The lawsuit notes that similar fees are not charged on equivalent payments on Android devices, which are built by Google. It says that the additional costs were borne by UK consumers, having been passed on through charges on a range of personal banking products ranging from current accounts, credit cards, to savings and mortgages. The lawsuit says that about 98% of consumers are exposed to banks that listed cards on Apple Pay, meaning the vast majority of the UK population may have been affected.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into Deel over allegations that it recruited a spy inside rival Rippling, according to documents seen by The Wall Street Journal. From the report: An Ireland-based Rippling employee, Keith O'Brien, alleged in an affidavit filed in April that Deel Chief Executive Alex Bouaziz recruited him and gave him instructions for what information to take from Rippling. O'Brien alleged that other executives were involved in the spying plot, including Bouaziz's father, who is Deel's executive chairman and chief strategy officer. A spokeswoman for Deel said the company isn't aware of a criminal investigation but is willing to cooperate with authorities. The company has previously said: "We deny all legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaims." Unsealed court documents allege that an entity tied to Deel transferred $6,000 to an account owned by the wife of Chief Operating Officer Dan Westgarth, and that the same amount was forwarded from the account to O'Brien seconds later.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: When TikTok users in the U.S. opened the app today, they were greeted with a pop-up asking them to agree to the social media platform's new terms of service and privacy policy before they could resume scrolling. These changes are part of TikTok's transition to new ownership. In order to continue operating in the U.S., TikTok was compelled by the U.S. government to transition from Chinese control to a new, American-majority corporate entity. Called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, the new entity is made up of a group of investors that includes the software company Oracle. It's easy to tap "agree" and keep on scrolling through videos on TikTok, so users might not fully understand the extent of changes they are agreeing to with this pop-up. Now that it's under U.S.-based ownership, TikTok potentially collects more detailed information about its users, including precise location data. Here are the three biggest changes to TikTok's privacy policy that users should know about. TikTok's change in location tracking is one of the most notable updates in this new privacy policy. Before this update, the app did not collect the precise, GPS-derived location data of U.S. users. Now, if you give TikTok permission to use your phone's location services, then the app may collect granular information about your exact whereabouts. Similar kinds of precise location data is also tracked by other social media apps, like Instagram and X. [...] Rather than an adjustment, TikTok's policy on AI interactions adds a new topic to the privacy policy document. Now, users' interactions with any of TikTok's AI tools explicitly fall under data that the service may collect and store. This includes any prompts as well as the AI-generated outputs. The metadata attached to your interactions with AI tools may also be automatically logged. [...] This change to TikTok's privacy policy may not be as immediately noticeable to users, but it will likely have an impact on the types of ads you see outside of TikTok. So, rather than just using your collected data to target you while using the app, TikTok may now further leverage that info to serve you more relevant ads wherever you go online. As part of this advertising change, TikTok also now explicitly mentions publishers as one kind of partner the platform works with to get new data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House doubled down after posting a digitally altered photo of Minnesota protester Nekima Levy Armstrong, dismissing it as a "meme" despite objections from her attorney and comparisons to reality-distorting propaganda. "YET AGAIN to the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country I share with you this message: Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter," White House spokesperson Kaelan Dorr wrote in a post on X. The Hill reports: The statement came after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted a photo of Armstrong's arrest Thursday showing Armstrong with what appears to be a blank facial expression. However, the White House later posted an altered version of the same photo that shows Armstrong crying. Armstrong's attorney Jordan Kushner said in an interview with CNN that an agent was recording Armstrong's arrest on their cellphone. "I've never seen anything like it. It's so unprofessional," Kushner said. "He was ordered to do it because the government was looking to make a spectacle of this case. I observed the whole thing. She was dignified, calm, rational the whole time." Kushner went on to call the move to alter the photo "a hallmark of a fascist regime where they actually alter reality."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeffrey Snover, the driving force behind PowerShell, has retired after a career that reshaped Windows administration. The Register reports: Snover's retirement comes after a brief sojourn at Google as a Distinguished Engineer, following a lengthy stint at Microsoft, during which he pulled the company back from imposing a graphical user interface (GUI) on administrators who really just wanted a command line from which to run their scripts. Snover joined Microsoft as the 20th century drew to a close. The company was all about its Windows operating system and user interface in those days -- great for end users, but not so good for administrators managing fleets of servers. Snover correctly predicted a shift to server datacenters, which would require automated management. A powerful shell... a PowerShell, if you will. [...] Over the years, Snover has dropped the occasional pearl of wisdom or shared memories from his time getting PowerShell off the ground. A recent favorite concerns the naming of Cmdlets and their original name in Monad: Function Units, or FUs. Snover wrote: "This abbreviation reflected the Unix smart-ass culture I was embracing at the time. Plus I was developing this in a hostile environment, and my sense of diplomacy was not yet fully operational." Snover doubtless has many more war stories to share. In the meantime, however, we wish him well. Many admins owe Snover thanks for persuading Microsoft that its GUI obsession did not translate to the datacenter, and for lengthy careers in gluing enterprise systems together with some scripted automation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Microsoft provided the FBI with the recovery keys to unlock encrypted data on the hard drives of three laptops as part of a federal investigation, Forbes reported on Friday. Many modern Windows computers rely on full-disk encryption, called BitLocker, which is enabled by default. This type of technology should prevent anyone except the device owner from accessing the data if the computer is locked and powered off. But, by default, BitLocker recovery keys are uploaded to Microsoft's cloud, allowing the tech giant -- and by extension law enforcement -- to access them and use them to decrypt drives encrypted with BitLocker, as with the case reported by Forbes. The case involved several people suspected of fraud related to the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program in Guam, a U.S. island in the Pacific. Local news outlet Pacific Daily News covered the case last year, reporting that a warrant had been served to Microsoft in relation to the suspects' hard drives. Kandit News, another local Guam news outlet, also reported in October that the FBI requested the warrant six months after seizing the three laptops encrypted with BitLocker. [...] Microsoft told Forbes that the company sometimes provides BitLocker recovery keys to authorities, having received an average of 20 such requests per year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Shares of Japanese toilet maker Toto gained the most in five years after booming memory demand excited expectations of growth in its little-known chipmaking materials operations. The stock surged as much as 11%, its steepest rise since February 2021, after Goldman Sachs analysts said Toto's electrostatic chucks used in NAND chipmaking will likely benefit from an AI infrastructure buildout that's tightening supplies of both high-end and commodity memory. [...] Known for its heated toilet seats, the maker of washlets has for decades been part of the semiconductor and display supply chain via its advanced ceramic parts and films. Its electrostatic chucks -- which it began mass producing in 1988 -- are used to hold silicon wafers in place during chipmaking while helping to control temperature and contamination, according to the company. The company's new domain business accounted for 42% of its total operating income in the fiscal year ended March 2025, Bloomberg-compiled data show.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Global hiring remains 20% below pre-pandemic levels and job switching has hit a 10-year low, according to a LinkedIn report, and new university graduates are bearing the brunt of a labor market that increasingly favors experienced candidates over fresh talent. In the UK, the Institute of Student Employers found that graduate hiring fell 8% in the last academic year and employers now receive 140 applications for each vacancy, up from 86 per vacancy in 2022-23. US data from the New York Federal Reserve shows unemployment among recent college graduates aged 22-27 stands at 5.8% versus 4.1% for all workers. Recruiter Reed had 180,000 graduate job postings in 2021 but only 55,000 in 2024. In a survey of Reed clients last year, 15% said they had reduced hiring because of AI. London mayor Sadiq Khan said the capital will be "at the sharpest edge" of AI-driven changes and that entry-level jobs will be first to go.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A niche retirement plan favored by freelancers is quickly becoming a hot Wall Street sales pitch, as more and more Americans look for ways to shelter a bigger chunk of their paychecks from taxes. Known as solo 401(k)s, they allow the self-employed to contribute $72,000 a year into tax-advantaged retirement accounts. That's nearly three times the maximum for typical salaried workers in the US. While they've existed for decades serving a workforce that often struggled to earn enough to max out those contributions, wealth planners like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Betterment are now racing to tap into burgeoning demand from a newer, and wealthier cohort: Post-pandemic contractors and self-employed DIY savers looking to shelter more income, grow assets tax-deferred or tax-free, all with the click of a button. The pitch is simple: Because of a quirk in the tax code, self-employed workers effectively contribute twice to their 401(k)s -- once as an employee on their own behalf and then again as a business owner making matching contributions. The platforms take care of the paperwork and clients get institutional-level tax planning and investment flexibility. More than three-quarters of America's record 36 million small businesses now have just a single employee, the owner. Cerulli Associates projects that total 401(k) plans in the U.S. will surpass 1 million by 2030, and the fastest growth is expected in sub-$5 million "micro" accounts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After years of Western governments raising alarms about Chinese automotive overcapacity and erecting tariff barriers, an unexpected pivot is now underway as major economies cautiously open their markets to Chinese electric vehicles, Bloomberg writes. Beijing itself has started acknowledging the problem at home. Chinese regulators last week warned of "severe penalties" for automakers defying efforts to rationalize pricing in the country's car market, and earlier this month a government ministry urged battery makers to curtail expansion and cutthroat competition. The European Union imposed steep tariffs on Chinese EV imports in 2024 and is now considering replacing them with minimum import price agreements. Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney last week decided to allow 49,000 Chinese EVs annually at a 6.1% tariff rate, removing a 100% surtax. Germany announced this week that its $3.5 billion EV subsidy program will be open to all manufacturers including Chinese brands. Germany's environment minister Carsten Schneider dismissed concerns during a January 19 press conference: "I cannot see any evidence of this postulated major influx of Chinese car manufacturers in Germany, either in the figures or on the roads." BYD registered an eightfold increase in sales in Germany last year and pulled ahead of Tesla, though Volkswagen still registered around 2,300 vehicles for every one BYD sold.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wind and solar power overtook fossil fuels last year as a source of electricity in the EU for the first time, a new report found. Semafor adds: The milestone was hit largely thanks to a rise in solar power, which generated a record 13% of electricity in the EU, according to Ember. Together, wind and solar hit 30% of EU electricity generation, edging out fossil fuels at 29%. The shift is especially important with the bloc's alternative to Russian LNG -- Washington -- becoming increasingly unreliable and willing to weaponize economic tools. The US Commerce Secretary threw shade at the bloc's renewable push during Davos, warning that China uses net zero goals to make allies "subservient" by controlling battery and critical mineral supply chains. Still, renewables now provide nearly half of EU power, with wind and solar outpacing all fossil sources in more than half of member countries. "The stakes of transitioning to clean energy are clearer than ever," the Ember report's author said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Toronto man posed as a pilot for years in order to fool airlines into giving him hundreds of free flights, prosecutors have alleged, in a case that has prompted comparisons to the Hollywood thriller Catch Me If You Can. From a report: Authorities in Hawaii announced this week that Dallas Pokornik, 33, had been charged with wire fraud after he allegedly fooled three major US carriers into giving him free tickets over a span of four years. Airlines typically offer standby tickets to their own staff and those with rival airlines as a way of ensuring the broader industry can effectively move employees across continents. According to court documents, Pokornik was a flight attendant for a Toronto-based airline from 2017 to 2019, but then used an employee identification from that carrier to obtain tickets, "which he in fact knew to be fraudulent at the time it was so presented." The only Toronto-based airline, Porter, told reporters it was "unable to verify any information related to this story." On one occasion, Pokornik is alleged to have requested a jumpseat in an aircraft's cockpit, which are normally reserved for off-duty pilots, even though he was not a pilot and did not have an airman's certificate. Federal rules prohibit the cockpit jumpseats from being used for leisure travel.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Apple supplier subject to a major cyberattack last month was China's Luxshare, it has now emerged. More than 1TB of confidential Apple information was reportedly stolen. It was reported in December that one of Apple's assemblers suffered a significant cyberattack that may have compromised sensitive production-line information and manufacturing data linked to Apple. The specific company targeted, the scope of the breach, and its operational impact were unclear until now. The attack was first revealed on RansomHub's dark web leak site on December 15, 2025, where the group claimed it had encrypted internal Luxshare systems and exfiltrated large volumes of confidential data belonging to the company and its customers. The attackers warned that the information would be publicly released unless Luxshare contacted them to negotiate, and accused the company of attempting to conceal the incident. According to the attackers' claims, the exfiltrated material includes vital files such as detailed 3D CAD product models and high-precision geometric files, 2D manufacturing drawings, mechanical component designs, circuit board layouts, and internal engineering PDFs. The group added that the large archives include Apple product data as well as information belonging to Nvidia, LG, Tesla, Geely, and other major clients.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Marcel Bucher, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany, lost two years of carefully structured academic work in an instant when he temporarily disabled ChatGPT's "data consent" option in August to test whether the AI tool's functions would still work without providing OpenAI his data. All his chats were permanently deleted and his project folders emptied without any warning or undo option, he wrote in a post on Nature. Bucher, a ChatGPT Plus subscriber paying $20 per month, had used the platform daily to draft grant applications, prepare teaching materials, revise publication drafts and create exams. He contacted OpenAI support, first receiving responses from an AI agent before a human employee confirmed the data was permanently lost and unrecoverable. OpenAI cited "privacy by design" as the reason, telling Nature it does provide a confirmation prompt before users permanently delete a chat but maintains no backups. Bucher said he had saved partial copies of some materials, but the underlying prompts, iterations, and project folders -- what he describes as the intellectual scaffolding behind his finished work -- are gone forever.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic has a problem that most companies would envy: its AI model keeps getting so good, the company wrote in a blog post, that it passes the company's own hiring test for performance engineers. The test, designed in late 2023 by optimization lead Tristan Hume, asks candidates to speed up code running on a simulated computer chip. Over 1,000 people have taken it, and dozens now work at Anthropic. But Claude Opus 4 outperformed most human applicants. Hume redesigned the test, making it harder. Then Claude Opus 4.5 matched even the best human scores within the two-hour time limit. For his third attempt, Hume abandoned realistic problems entirely and switched to abstract puzzles using a strange, minimal programming language -- something weird enough that Claude struggles with it. Anthropic is now releasing the original test as an open challenge. Beat Claude's best score and ... they want to hear from you.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has accused the European Commission of using "political delay tactics" to postpone new app marketplace policies and create grounds for investigating and fining the iPhone maker, a preemptive response to reports that the commission plans to blame Apple for the announced closure of third-party app store Setapp. MacPaw, the developer behind Setapp, said it would shut down the marketplace next month because of "still-evolving and complex business terms that don't fit Setapp's current business model." The EC is preparing to say that Apple has not rolled out changes to address key issues concerning its business terms and their complexity, according to remarks seen by Bloomberg. Apple said it disputes this finding. The company said it submitted a formal compliance plan in October proposing to replace its $0.59 per-install fee structure with a 5% revenue share, but the commission has not responded. "The European Commission has refused to let us implement the very changes that they requested," Apple said. The company also claimed there is no demand in the EU for alternative app stores and disputed that Setapp is closing because of its actions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vimeo is laying off employees around the world just months after Italian software company Bending Spoons completed its $1.38 billion acquisition of the video hosting platform. Dave Brown, Vimeo's former brand VP, described the cuts on LinkedIn as affecting "a large portion of the company." One video engineer claimed "almost everyone" was laid off, "including the entire video team," and another software engineer said he lost his job alongside "a gigantic amount of the company." This marks Vimeo's second round of layoffs in less than six months. The company cut 10% of its workforce in September, just one week before Bending Spoons announced its acquisition plans. Bending Spoons has a history of post-acquisition layoffs at companies including WeTransfer, Filmic, and Evernote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States formally withdrew from the World Health Organization on Thursday, making good on an executive order that President Trump issued on his first day in office pledging to leave the international organization that coordinates global responses to public health threats. The New York Times: While the United States is walking away from the organization, a senior official with the Department of Health and Human Services told reporters on Thursday that the Trump administration was considering some type of narrow, limited engagement with W.H.O. global networks that track infectious diseases, including influenza. As a W.H.O. member, the United States long sent scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to participate in international decision-making about which strains to include in the flu vaccine. A W.H.O. meeting on next year's vaccine is scheduled for February. The official said the Trump administration would soon disclose how or whether it will participate. On Thursday, the administration said that all U.S. government funding to the organization had been terminated, and that all assigned federal employees and contractors had been recalled from its Geneva headquarters and its offices worldwide.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: TikTok has finalized a deal to create a new American entity, avoiding the looming threat of a ban in the United States that has been in discussion for years. The social video platform company signed agreements with major investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to form the new TikTok U.S. joint venture. The new version will operate under "defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurances for U.S. users," the company said in a statement Thursday. American TikTok users can continue using the same app. [...] Adam Presser, who previously worked as TikTok's head of operations and trust and safety, will lead the new venture as its CEO. He will work alongside a seven-member, majority-American board of directors that includes TikTok's CEO Shou Chew. [...] In addition to an emphasis on data protection, with U.S. user data being stored locally in a system run by Oracle, the joint venture will also focus on TikTok's algorithm. The content recommendation formula, which feeds users specific videos tailored to their preferences and interests, will be retrained, tested and updated on U.S. user data, the company said in its announcement. The algorithm has been a central issue in the security debate over TikTok. China previously maintained the algorithm must remain under Chinese control by law. But the U.S. regulation passed with bipartisan support said any divestment of TikTok must mean the platform cuts ties -- specifically the algorithm -- with ByteDance. Under the terms of this deal, ByteDance would license the algorithm to the U.S. entity for retraining. The law prohibits "any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm" between ByteDance and a new potential American ownership group, so it is unclear how ByteDance's continued involvement in this arrangement will play out. Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX are the three managing investors, who each hold a 15% share. Other investors include the investment firm of Michael Dell, the billionaire founder of Dell Technologies. ByteDance retains 19.9% of the joint venture.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A systematic review of 85 studies has now found good reason to differentiate between 'active' sitting, like playing cards or reading, and 'passive' sitting, like watching TV. [...] "Total sitting time has been shown to be related to brain health; however, sitting is often treated as a single entity, without considering the specific type of activity," explains public health researcher Paul Gardiner from the University of Queensland in Australia. "Most people spend many hours sitting each day, so the type of sitting really matters ... These findings show that small everyday choices -- like reading instead of watching television -- may help keep your brain healthier as you age." Across numerous studies, Gardiner and colleagues found that active sitting activities, like reading, playing card games, and using a computer, showed "overwhelmingly positive associations with cognitive health, enhancing cognitive functions such as executive function, situational memory, and working memory." Meanwhile, passive sitting was most consistently associated with negative cognitive outcomes, including increased risk of dementia. The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ancient Slashdot reader erice shares the findings from a recent study showing that while AI helped researchers publish more often and boosted their careers, the resulting papers were, on average, less useful. "You have this conflict between individual incentives and science as a whole," says James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who led the study. From a recent IEEE Spectrum article: To quantify the effect, Evans and collaborators from the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology trained a natural language processing model to identify AI-augmented research across six natural science disciplines. Their dataset included 41.3 million English-language papers published between 1980 and 2025 in biology, chemistry, physics, medicine, materials science, and geology. They excluded fields such as computer science and mathematics that focus on developing AI methods themselves. The researchers traced the careers of individual scientists, examined how their papers accumulated attention, and zoomed out to consider how entire fields clustered or dispersed intellectually over time. They compared roughly 311,000 papers that incorporated AI in some way -- through the use of neural networks or large language models, for example -- with millions of others that did not. The results revealed a striking trade-off. Scientists who adopt AI gain productivity and visibility: On average, they publish three times as many papers, receive nearly five times as many citations, and become team leaders a year or two earlier than those who do not. But when those papers are mapped in a high-dimensional "knowledge space," AI-heavy research occupies a smaller intellectual footprint, clusters more tightly around popular, data-rich problems, and generates weaker networks of follow-on engagement between studies. The pattern held across decades of AI development, spanning early machine learning, the rise of deep learning, and the current wave of generative AI. "If anything," Evans notes, "it's intensifying." [...] Aside from recent publishing distortions, Evans's analysis suggests that AI is largely automating the most tractable parts of science rather than expanding its frontiers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Korea Herald: South Korea will begin enforcing its Artificial Intelligence Act on Thursday, becoming the first country to formally establish safety requirements for high-performance, or so-called frontier, AI systems -- a move that sets the country apart in the global regulatory landscape. According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, the new law is designed primarily to foster growth in the domestic AI sector, while also introducing baseline safeguards to address potential risks posed by increasingly powerful AI technologies. Officials described the inclusion of legal safety obligations for frontier AI as a world-first legislative step. The act lays the groundwork for a national-level AI policy framework. It establishes a central decision-making body -- the Presidential Council on National Artificial Intelligence Strategy -- and creates a legal foundation for an AI Safety Institute that will oversee safety and trust-related assessments. The law also outlines wide-ranging support measures, including research and development, data infrastructure, talent training, startup assistance, and help with overseas expansion. To reduce the initial burden on businesses, the government plans to implement a grace period of at least one year. During this time, it will not carry out fact-finding investigations or impose administrative sanctions. Instead, the focus will be on consultations and education. A dedicated AI Act support desk will help companies determine whether their systems fall within the law's scope and how to respond accordingly. Officials noted that the grace period may be extended depending on how international standards and market conditions evolve. The law applies to three areas only: high-impact AI, safety obligations for high-performance AI and transparency requirements for generative AI. Enforcement under the Korean law is intentionally light. It does not impose criminal penalties. Instead, it prioritizes corrective orders for noncompliance, with fines -- capped at 30 million won ($20,300) -- issued only if those orders are ignored. This, the government says, reflects a compliance-oriented approach rather than a punitive one. Transparency obligations for generative AI largely align with those in the EU, but Korea applies them more narrowly. Content that could be mistaken for real, such as deepfake images, video or audio, must clearly disclose its AI-generated origin. For other types of AI-generated content, invisible labeling via metadata is allowed. Personal or noncommercial use of generative AI is excluded from regulation. "This is not about boasting that we are the first in the world," said Kim Kyeong-man, deputy minister of the office of artificial intelligence policy at the ICT ministry. "We're approaching this from the most basic level of global consensus." Korea's approach differs from the EU by defining "high-performance AI" using technical thresholds like cumulative training compute, rather than regulating based on how AI is used. As a result, Korea believes no current models meet the bar for regulation, while the EU is phasing in broader, use-based AI rules over several years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.