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The Associated Press reports:Italy announced an 805 million ($887 million) fine against Meta on Saturday for using photos and videos from Android users' galleries on Facebook without specific consent or adequate disclosure...Investigators found that the feature was enabled by default and that Facebook requested gallery access through a single permission covering multiple app functions with different purposes. The authority gave Meta 60 days to disable the feature and seek separate consent for its use. Italy has about 20 million Android users, notes the BBC, and this fine "is among the largest an Italian authority has ever imposed on a tech giant."The charge is related to a feature which suggests photos and videos from a user's phone gallery as ideas for posts... According to the Italian regulator, a preceding [authorization] notice did not make clear that this would also allow Facebook to generate suggestions based on photos in their gallery. The regulator said it took into account "the high number of people affected" and the fact it is "still ongoing for those who have not updated the app and for those who have already given their consent to the system". It also cited "Meta's lack of co-operation". "A Meta spokesperson told the BBC that it planned to appeal..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In three years "Megaspeed International" went from from inactive Chinese gaming subsidiary "to one of Asia's biggest buyers of cutting-edge semiconductors from the US," reports CNN. "It is incredibly hard to look at this and not see a Chinese state-sponsored network for bypassing US export control networks," trade data investigator William George told CNN. As Nvidia's Jensen Huang had an affair with Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, "Megaspeed quietly instilled billions of dollars of Nvidia chips in data centers across Southeast Asia," CNN writes, noting scrutiny of the company from the Singapore government and US officials "concerned that the company was passing those chips on to unauthorized Chinese buyers..."In 2022, the US began restricting sales of semiconductors to China, including Nvidia's most advanced. While the controls were meant to curb China's tech industry, they also spawned opportunities for intermediaries willing to help circumvent them. US officials believe Megaspeed may be one of those... [T]rade records show Megaspeed has purchased more than $4 billion in chips and equipment from Nvidia... Based on indictments and investigative reports, research institute Epoch AI estimates that anywhere between 290,000 to 1.6 million advanced US semiconductors were sent to China in violation of export controls last year... Singapore also initiated investigations into Megaspeed and its controllers, including Alice Huang, for potential false declarations relating to the company's server purchases and their final destinations. In a statement, Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs said there was insufficient evidence that Huang had committed any related offenses, but she had been barred from re-entering the country after providing inaccurate information "to downplay her role" at Megaspeed. The other investigations are ongoing. The exact scale of Chinese chip smuggling is impossible to quantify. However, its existence has become something of an open secret in the industry, as well as an indication that US efforts to keep adversaries from securing high-stakes technology still have fundamental flaws. A May report from the short seller Culper Research claimed that despite tightening trade restrictions, Chinese end-users still account for about 20% of Nvidia chip sales via illegal diversion and intermediaries in Southeast Asia. CNN reminds readers that Jensen Huang accompanied US President Trump to events with Chinese leader Xi Jinping twice this year, and also lobbied for the US to relax controls on Chinese chip imports. "The US government ultimately approved several buyers for less-advanced Nvidia chips, known as H200, while collecting a quarter of the revenue." "However, blacklisted companies have continued to obtain sensitive semiconductors as well," they add. And the Taiwanese government is even seeking to criminalize unauthorized exports of advanced AI chips to China, "as prosecutors there charged nine people in a scheme to sneak Nvidia chips into China through Japan, Indonesia and Hong Kong."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In three years "Megaspeed International" went from from inactive Chinese gaming subsidiary "to one of Asia's biggest buyers of cutting-edge semiconductors from the US," reports CNN. "It is incredibly hard to look at this and not see a Chinese state-sponsored network for bypassing US export control networks," trade data investigator William George told CNN. As Nvidia's Jensen Huang had an affair with Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, "Megaspeed quietly instilled billions of dollars of Nvidia chips in data centers across Southeast Asia," CNN writes, noting scrutiny of the company from the Singapore government and US officials "concerned that the company was passing those chips on to unauthorized Chinese buyers..."In 2022, the US began restricting sales of semiconductors to China, including Nvidia's most advanced. While the controls were meant to curb China's tech industry, they also spawned opportunities for intermediaries willing to help circumvent them. US officials believe Megaspeed may be one of those... [T]rade records show Megaspeed has purchased more than $4 billion in chips and equipment from Nvidia... Based on indictments and investigative reports, research institute Epoch AI estimates that anywhere between 290,000 to 1.6 million advanced US semiconductors were sent to China in violation of export controls last year... Singapore also initiated investigations into Megaspeed and its controllers, including Alice Huang, for potential false declarations relating to the company's server purchases and their final destinations. In a statement, Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs said there was insufficient evidence that Huang had committed any related offenses, but she had been barred from re-entering the country after providing inaccurate information "to downplay her role" at Megaspeed. The other investigations are ongoing. The exact scale of Chinese chip smuggling is impossible to quantify. However, its existence has become something of an open secret in the industry, as well as an indication that US efforts to keep adversaries from securing high-stakes technology still have fundamental flaws. A May report from the short seller Culper Research claimed that despite tightening trade restrictions, Chinese end-users still account for about 20% of Nvidia chip sales via illegal diversion and intermediaries in Southeast Asia. CNN reminds readers that Jensen Huang accompanied US President Trump to events with Chinese leader Xi Jinping twice this year, and also lobbied for the US to relax controls on Chinese chip imports. "The US government ultimately approved several buyers for less-advanced Nvidia chips, known as H200, while collecting a quarter of the revenue." "However, blacklisted companies have continued to obtain sensitive semiconductors as well," they add. And the Taiwanese government is even seeking to criminalize unauthorized exports of advanced AI chips to China, "as prosecutors there charged nine people in a scheme to sneak Nvidia chips into China through Japan, Indonesia and Hong Kong."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Lucasfilm and Disney have restored the original Star Wars (1977) and will release the film in multiple formats, including Imax 70mm [starting February 19], as part of the franchise's 50th anniversary celebrations," reports Deadline. The original film will also be displayed in its original 16:9 format on the center of Cosm's 12K+ LED Dome, in a special presentation developed with Disney, Lucasfilm, ILM, and MakeMake. They're calling it a "Shared Reality production" where "the surrounding visual environments dynamically evolve to immerse the audience in iconic Star Wars locations and moments." Deadline reports more 50th anniversary celebrationsIn addition to the Imax 70mm screenings, the film will also be presented in Digital Imax, Digital Cinema, 70mm, 35mm, and 4DX. On May 4th, 2027, Lucasfilm will release a new behind-the-scenes documentary, The Hero Awakens, from filmmaker R.J. Cutler on Disney+. Star Wars events already on the calendar for 2027 include Shawn Levy's [movie] Star Wars: Starfighter, which will be released May 28. There's also a new poster paying homage to the original 1977 film, reports the Disney news site Mickey Visit, plus a newly orchestrated score by John Williams that they assume "will be used on all the projects that debut this year."On April 2-3, [Disney] will debut the new "Star Wars in Concert: The Skywalker Saga" at the Hollywood Bowl. The show will be hosted by Anthony Daniels, known for his role as C-3PO. Special performances of John Williams' iconic film scores will feature scenes and music from all nine Skywalker Saga films. The concert is a sweeping celebration of the stories, themes, and music that have inspired audiences around the world for five decades... They also teased that new and legacy licensees - including Hasbro, the LEGO Group, adidas, Mars, Aston Martin, Steinway, Hajime Sorayama presented by Complex, and more - will introduce 50th-anniversary collections... In the opening of the press release, Disney mentioned that as part of the announcements there will be "reimagined Disney Parks and Cruise Line offerings." The article adds that the April's Star Wars Celebration at the Los Angeles Convention Center has already sold out. There's more Star Wars news, writes long-time Slashdot reader schwit1A light saber used by Darth Vader in the "Star Wars" movies The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi sold Thursday for nearly $5 million in an auction. The light saber, which was used in the climactic duel in Cloud City in which Vader tells Luke Skywalker "I am your father" sold for $4.875 million at the Ultimate Star Wars Auction held by Heritage Auctions. The sale marks a world auction record for any "Star Wars" collectible, according to the auction house. The previous record was Heritage's $3,750,000 sale of Luke Skywalker's lightsaber and severed hand effects rig on July 15, 2026. And they're still auctioning more Star Wars memorabilia...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

October 3: $84,680Today: $64,108 Bitcoin dropped 24.2% in 46 days. And it "fell more than 4% on Friday to $68,500," reports Fortune, "wiping out gains built over the past three months and casting doubt on whether its bear market was ever really over."The asset also faces weaker investor appetite, according to crypto analytics provider CryptoQuant. The firm's demand indicator recorded its weakest reading since December 2023, while Bitcoin exchange-traded funds became net sellers again. The recent downturn has also extended to other parts of the crypto market. That includes Tether's USDT, the largest cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar, whose total value shrank by $7.7 billion over the past two months, according to CryptoQuant, a sign that less cash is available in crypto markets. This time around, inflation has been the main culprit. Tuesday's Consumer Price Index report showed prices rose 0.4% in October, more than economists expected. Even stripping out food and energy, inflation ran hotter than forecast. Traders now overwhelmingly expect the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates by a quarter percentage point in December, with some betting on an even bigger increase. "Because these are non-yielding assets, and we expect inflation to rise... people are chucking stuff like gold and Bitcoin to find... government bonds that are going up, providing you [with] income," Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at financial technology company IG Group, told Fortune... Heavy borrowing and spending on AI have created what 21Shares calls an "AI black hole," drawing money toward the sector and away from assets like Bitcoin and gold. But Bitcoin remains "joined at the hip" with tech stocks, according to Beauchamp. That leaves it in an awkward position: It faces competition for investment dollars when enthusiasm for AI runs high, yet can get dragged down when that enthusiasm fades. Fast Company points out Bitcoin "remains down more than 20% since the beginning of 2026."[Nvidia] has seen its shares lose more than 27% of their value over the past month. The tech sell-off seems to have dragged down the crypto markets, too, as the two sectors are, on some levels, intermingled... On top of that, outflows from Bitcoin funds may also be contributing to the slide. More than $1 billion in leveraged crypto positions were closed in recent days, which may have added to declining demand, affecting BTC prices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reuters reports:The Pan American Health Organization has revoked the United States' measles-elimination status, ending a 26-year run after determining the country failed to halt continuous transmission of the highly contagious virus for more than a year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday... The reported decision by the Americas branch of the World Health Organization comes as the US battles the highest number of measles cases it has seen in more than three decades. Some 7,500 people in the US have been infected with measles and 13 have died since 2025. That period coincides with falling immunization rates and rising vaccine hesitancy under US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has for years spread doubts, without scientific evidence, about the safety of measles vaccines...Canada, Spain and the UK recently lost measles-elimination status after review by WHO experts.... "It is a fully preventable disease. It is unconscionable that we have this amount of measles," said Noel Brewer, a public health professor at the University of North Carolina... William Moss, an epidemiology professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said loss of measles elimination was a hit to the United States' reputation as a public health powerhouse... For the average American, he added, it means that the United States will continue to have large outbreaks, putting people at risk of disease, hospitalization and death.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arch-based Manjaro Linux "has announced that Manjaro Project e.V. is now officially registered as a non-profit in Germany," reports Linuxiac, "and is therefore a legally separate entity from the commercial Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG... after months of internal wrangling over who was in charge of the project, who had access to the infrastructure and who didn't, and the relationship between the dev team and the commercial company..."The restructuring goes back to March, when the Manjaro developers released the Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto, which was a very public critique of the way Manjaro was being run. The document claims that decision-making has effectively become the sole domain of the project founder, Philip Muller, with the other developers having very limited access to the infrastructure. There's also a concern about the drop in participation, the persistent technical issues, and the continued prioritization of commercial interests over the actual development of the distribution... The manifesto proposed the transfer of all project infrastructure, domains, repositories and community funds to the new organization, together with arrangements for the use of the Manjaro trademark. The contributors were warning that they might well consider forking the distro if the talks didn't go their way. Muller then indicated that he'd be happy to talk about the proposed structure once the non-profit was in place. The association is now formally registered, and so one of the key aims of the manifesto has been realized... Perhaps the most important point is the actual evolution of the distribution. The most recent testing and stable updates were kicked off by the Manjaro team themselves, without any oversight from Muller. This points to the developers having already started to operate on their own in an area which was previously the preserve of the project's founder. They're also in the process of optimizing their dev infrastructure, in part as a response to the continued automated bot attacks on the existing infrastructure. Thanks to Slashdot reader king*jojo for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"When we need medical care, we expect decisions about our treatment to be made by our doctors, not a tech company's algorithm," writes the EFF newsletter EFFector. But in January America's federal government launched a program called WISeR that uses AI to evaluate authorization requests for certain procedures from America's federal health insurance program for seniors, Medicare. EFF sued for records and discovered "additional issues" with the program that they say "could jeopardize Medicare beneficiaries' access to care." The records we received revealed that WISeR has resulted in widespread delays and denials of care, operational chaos, and reports of patient harm. Further documents obtained by EFF show a rushed and rocky rollout, highlighting the dangers that arise when governments treat AI like a silver bullet for complex problems. EFF has now published hundreds of pages of documents obtained through our lawsuit, available here... The documents also highlight the need for more transparency about safeguards against inappropriate, AI-driven denials. EFF has long argued that AI has no place in consequential government decisions about peoples' rights or access to benefits, such as immigration enforcement and policing decisions. That's because using automated decision-making in these contexts risks decisions that violate people's rights or deprive them of benefits they're entitled to based on biased or inappropriate considerations and without proper due process or accountability if there is an error. By outsourcing decision-making to private AI companies without sufficient transparency, testing, or legal limits, WISeR jeopardizes seniors' access to medical care. Congress should step in to place greater legal limits on the use of automated decision-making in Medicare. The new documents "show why we need stronger legal limits around government use of automated decision-making..." according to the newsletter. And another EFF page argues that the American public "still lacks the information needed to assess whether clinician review is providing meaningful oversight of AI systems and whether appropriate data is being used to evaluate prior authorization requests."WISeR's payment structure gives vendors, as the government put it, "an incentive to deny as many claims as possible...." [One company] denied more requests than it approved in the first few months of the program, and CMS inquired about "denials that appear inaccurate or inconsistent with applicable criteria." Ultimately, the records obtained by EFF raise more questions than they answer about the safeguards used by WISeR vendors... A growing body of scholarship points to the substantial limitations of "human in the loop" policies as guardrails for AI systems. AI-generated recommendations can unduly influence human decisions, leading reviewers to over-rely on automated judgements and rubber stamp them as correct. Even worse, at least one health insurance company actively pressured clinical reviewers to accept its AI systems' recommendations. Another company built a system that allowed clinical reviewers to reject claims without opening patient files; clinical reviewers using this system spent an average of just 1.2 seconds on each case.. As the government expands its use of automated decision-making, the potential for consequential mistakes increases rapidly. The records we've obtained so far raise questions about the rushed rollout and lack of guardrails for automated decision-making by the U.S. government. EFF urges transparency, oversight, and legal limits to protect people from the harms of automated decision-making in high risk systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports on something peculiar about support for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang online after he'd told the world he'd been unfaithful to his wife (before reports of his second extramarital affair):Joining the chorus online were voices of seemingly everyday people: a chef, a stock trader, a Hebrew teacher and several environmental activists. But at least 400 of them were fake, according to research from the nonprofit Midas Project, with links to a public relations firm involved in previous so-called "sockpuppet" campaigns... Many of the fake accounts, according to Midas Project executive director Tyler Johnston, replied to journalists, former U.S. officials and other prominent figures and backed not just Huang but Nvidia's push to sell its cutting-edge chips to Chinese firms. Like other documented influence campaigns, the posts appeared to have limited reach; the most-viewed tweet garnered about 8,000 views and 32 likes. Still, some of the posts targeted lawmakers, including accounts for the [U.S.] House Select Committee on China, Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts). "That's a place where you might not need a lot of views, but maybe the staffers who are running the lawmakers' account are paying attention to how their messages are received," said Johnston, whose group advocates for safe AI development... There were other clues that helped identify accounts as being part of an apparently coordinated campaign, according to the Midas Project. Some of them were created minutes or hours apart, and had user names and profile photos refreshed at similar times. They also sometimes engaged on oddly specific issues ranging from Qatar to Nippon Steel's bid for U.S. Steel and a waste management plant in Oregon.... Any one one of the posts - often replies to other posts - might have not looked suspicious in isolation. But the various clues taken together, Johnston said, gave evidence that they were linked. Some of the accounts then rushed to delete posts after he posted his findings online, and at least 260 of them have been deactivated or suspended by X.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In August, Amazon announced it was expanding its airborne shipping to suburban areas in nearly 500 U.S. cities," reports the Chicago Sun-Times, "including the Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland and Boise, Idaho, metro areas." And on Tuesday Amazon cut the ribbon on its new drone delivery center Tuesday 24 miles south of Chicago. But Amazon's drones are already servicing parts of Texas, notes the Houston Chronicle. And north of Houston, Theresa Gibbons complains "It was kind of cool and fascinating at first, but now it is driving me crazy."Her home in the Bridgestone neighborhood is nestled right in the flight path of Amazon's drone service. Gibson said she hears roughly a dozen drones flying over her home each day. Noise pollution has become a frequent complaint in Texas neighborhoods where the service operates. Residents have compared the sound to everything from a massive beehive to a full-on air raid. "It does not sound like a [single] bumble bee. It sounds like a large swarm of bees at a much higher volume than a normal swarm of bees. And it's all day long," said Gibson. Amazon's drone delivery service is currently operating in four Texas cities, including Houston, Waco, San Antonio and Richardson. The company announced major expansion plans in August, but growing complaints in pilot neighborhoods could foreshadow complications later down the line, with regions such as Harris County already taking legal action in response... So far, a group of fifteen states, plus Harris County, [Texas] have formed a coalition that has filed a petition in the US Court of Appeals challenging the Federal Aviation Administration's environmental review, citing that it failed to adequately address the effects of expanding drone deliveries. And meanwhile near Boise, Idaho, local news station KTVB reports....Less than two weeks after Amazon began delivering packages by drone in Nampa, the cities of Nampa and Meridian say they have received complaints over the noise and how often the drones fly... Amazon began Prime Air drone deliveries Oct. 30 from its East Franklin Road fulfillment center, making Nampa the company's first Idaho drone site... How people feel about the drones depends on whom you ask. A Meridian man who has received drone deliveries says the noise doesn't bother him. Neighbors closest to the launch site say the drones fly from sunup to sundown and are disturbing their peace. Randy Nye, who has lived in Cherry Creek Estates for 17 years, compared it to living in a beehive. "It's just a constant presence," he said.... Nye, who works from home, said he and his neighbors who technically are just outside city limits had no idea this was coming. He said the city approved the drones in May, and they were never given written notice this was coming, despite living so close. He said they were shocked when deliveries started by drones just 12 days ago. Nye said he hopes something can change. A few homes down, Kerri Wattier has started counting. On Wednesday with KTVB, she clicked a handheld counter each time a drone passed over her home. She started at 3:30 p.m. By 4:18 p.m., she had counted 39. "It sounds like lawnmowers and leaf blowers flying over our house," Wattier said. "Amazon says it is evaluating changes, including adjusting flight paths," the article adds. Ironically at that ribbon-cutting ceremony near Chicago, the speakers were occasionally drowned out by the roar of the drones, reports the Chicago Tribune, since they're "relatively loud when they are close to the ground." ("At the point of delivery they top out at 68 decibels," said Amazon economic development manager Sam Bailey, adding that "It's very brief exposure and it only occurs during daytime hours.") But that site has been operational since October 12, and has "generally" hit its maximum capacity of 300 drone orders daily, Bailey told the Chicago Tribune, adding that scaling up is "something that we're always considering." And since October 12 they've already seen "thousands" of orders delivered by their 21 drones just across that 7.5-mile radius:Bailey said customers should clear the area when a drone delivery is incoming. The drones drop packages from about 12 feet. If the drone detects movement in the area, he said, the delivery will be canceled. "You want your kids inside the house," Bailey said. "We will not drop a package in an unsafe location. People who want to stand below and try to catch it, don't do that." The Chicago Sun-Times points out that Walmart already offers some drone deliveries from over 75 stores across Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Texas, and "earlier this year said it planned to expand drone delivery service to 150 more stores in partnership with Wing, a division of Google parent company Alphabet, giving it 270 drone delivery locations by 2027."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UPDATE: FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said Saturday that U,S. airlines will likely cancel 4,000 to 5,000 of the roughly 41,000 flights scheduled for Saturday, reports Yahoo News. And as to the cause of the incident... [U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean] Duffy said a router involved in the switch from copper wire to fiber "started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system." The system saw "over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds," he said. That disrupted communications with airplanes and radar. America's nationwide grounding of flights on Friday happened "amid growing scrutiny... of a new AI-powered air traffic management system" deployed by America's Federal Aviation Administration, reports Texas news station KXAN. Ironically, that system is called SMART - but the outage happened "following warnings" from members of the U.S. Congress about this new AI system's safety, reliability and oversight:In an Oct. 13 letter to the Government Accountability Office, more than 20 members of Congress requested an independent review of the FAA's development and implementation of its Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories system, known as SMART. The lawmakers questioned whether the technology was being deployed with adequate input from frontline air traffic controllers, sufficient training and appropriate safety evaluations... In their letter to the GAO, the lawmakers specifically questioned whether the FAA had adequately evaluated risks associated with SMART's artificial intelligence capabilities, including the potential for the technology to interfere with experienced controllers' decision-making or generate inaccurate safety-critical information. "The nation's frontline aviation safety workforce apparently had little to no input into SMART's development and have received limited training and information during the current deployment process," the lawmakers wrote. The letter also questioned the FAA's decision to initially pilot the technology in heavily congested airspace, including the National Capital Region. "Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data," U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy acknowledged Friday. But FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said Saturday that officials have found "zero evidence of anything AI related" in Friday's outage, according to Yahoo News. An article from The Hill.com notes that Duffy also said the new AI tool had nothing to do with the ground stop, and that he said the system "isn't plugged in.""This is completely disconnected, and I love that some people have said this would be the root cause. By the way, if it was, I'll tell you that, but this is not even plugged in," he said. "So, there's no possible way SMART would have impacted." Duffy also asked Congress for $50 billion to rebuild what he described as an "incredibly old" air traffic control system. Duffy had posted the day before that the AI system had been at least partially rolled out and that it was already working (adding "Soon this technology is going NATIONWIDE") And Friday CNN's aviation analyst said they believed that AI system could be connected to the nationwide outage, calling it "a tremendous amount of coincidence," according to a report from Mediaite: CNN Aviation Analyst: "Many times in the past, what we have seen, and this has gone back decades, is that because air traffic control is this piecemeal, mishmash of a whole bunch of different systems... some going back to radio, telephones and floppy disks... when they put in new computer systems, they often have difficulty talking with, communicating with, or working with the much older systems. And I have to say, it's a tremendous amount of coincidence... If they're putting in new software now, this new SMART system to start managing that, and now we have a communications outage, I'm - we've seen this so many times in the past. I don't know if they're linked, but it's just too much coincidence that they were trying to start that moving today, and now we have problems with the en route system. So if I was to guess - and we haven't heard any, you know, it's not that it's threats or criminals or terrorists. We haven't heard anything like that. So I am guessing that once again we have a problem with new air traffic control computer systems, AI - you know, modern systems trying to communicate with old systems. And we have just seen this so many times in the past, and it's a big problem... Our whole national airspace system is you know, pieces and parts. It's kind of a Franken-system. And that would be my guess, that they are having computer issues by putting the new software in with the old, just because today they announced that that were going to do this new system. KXAN describes some of the complexity of the newly-launched AI system:According to the FAA, the system consolidates approximately 200 data streams, including airline schedules, flight paths, weather patterns, airport capacity, airspace conditions and air traffic controller staffing metrics. The agency says SMART uses artificial intelligence to analyze that information, predict traffic flows, identify potential conflicts and recommend adjustments to flight routes and departure schedules before disruptions occur. The FAA describes the technology as a shift from a reactive approach to a predictive one, allowing aviation officials to identify congestion, weather-related restrictions and other operational problems hours, days or even weeks in advance... The congressional letter raised questions about whether the FAA's implementation strategy was moving faster than its safety evaluations, workforce training and independent oversight could support. Ironically, the article points out that the FAA promoted anticipated benefits from the technology including fewer delays and flight cancellations. (Other anticipated benefits included improved on-time performance and faster recovery from weather disruptions.) Although the FAA has realized one of the system's anticipated benefits: reduced fuel consumption.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's nationwide grounding of flights on Friday happened "amid growing scrutiny... of a new AI-powered air traffic management system" deployed by America's Federal Aviation Administration, reports Texas news station KXAN. Ironically, the system is called SMART - but the outage happened "following warnings" from members of the U.S. Congress about this new AI system's safety, reliability and oversight:In an Oct. 13 letter to the Government Accountability Office, more than 20 members of Congress requested an independent review of the FAA's development and implementation of its Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories system, known as SMART. The lawmakers questioned whether the technology was being deployed with adequate input from frontline air traffic controllers, sufficient training and appropriate safety evaluations... In their letter to the GAO, the lawmakers specifically questioned whether the FAA had adequately evaluated risks associated with SMART's artificial intelligence capabilities, including the potential for the technology to interfere with experienced controllers' decision-making or generate inaccurate safety-critical information. "The nation's frontline aviation safety workforce apparently had little to no input into SMART's development and have received limited training and information during the current deployment process," the lawmakers wrote. The letter also questioned the FAA's decision to initially pilot the technology in heavily congested airspace, including the National Capital Region. "Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data," U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy acknowledged Friday. But an article from The Hill.com notes that Duffy also said the new AI tool had nothing to do with the ground stop, and that he said the system "isn't plugged in.""This is completely disconnected, and I love that some people have said this would be the root cause. By the way, if it was, I'll tell you that, but this is not even plugged in," he said. "So, there's no possible way SMART would have impacted." Duffy also asked Congress for $50 billion to rebuild what he described as an "incredibly old" air traffic control system. Duffy had posted the day before that the AI system had been at least partially rolled out and that it was already working (adding "Soon this technology is going NATIONWIDE") And Friday CNN's aviation analyst said they believed that AI system could be connected to the nationwide outage, calling it "a tremendous amount of coincidence," according to a report from Mediaite: CNN Aviation Analyst: "Many times in the past, what we have seen, and this has gone back decades, is that because air traffic control is this piecemeal, mishmash of a whole bunch of different systems... some going back to radio, telephones and floppy disks... when they put in new computer systems, they often have difficulty talking with, communicating with, or working with the much older systems. And I have to say, it's a tremendous amount of coincidence... If they're putting in new software now, this new SMART system to start managing that, and now we have a communications outage, I'm - we've seen this so many times in the past. I don't know if they're linked, but it's just too much coincidence that they were trying to start that moving today, and now we have problems with the en route system. So if I was to guess - and we haven't heard any, you know, it's not that it's threats or criminals or terrorists. We haven't heard anything like that. So I am guessing that once again we have a problem with new air traffic control computer systems, AI - you know, modern systems trying to communicate with old systems. And we have just seen this so many times in the past, and it's a big problem... Our whole national airspace system is you know, pieces and parts. It's kind of a Franken-system. And that would be my guess, that they are having computer issues by putting the new software in with the old, just because today they announced that that were going to do this new system. KXAN describes some of the complexity of the newly-launched AI system:According to the FAA, the system consolidates approximately 200 data streams, including airline schedules, flight paths, weather patterns, airport capacity, airspace conditions and air traffic controller staffing metrics. The agency says SMART uses artificial intelligence to analyze that information, predict traffic flows, identify potential conflicts and recommend adjustments to flight routes and departure schedules before disruptions occur. The FAA describes the technology as a shift from a reactive approach to a predictive one, allowing aviation officials to identify congestion, weather-related restrictions and other operational problems hours, days or even weeks in advance... The congressional letter raised questions about whether the FAA's implementation strategy was moving faster than its safety evaluations, workforce training and independent oversight could support. Ironically, the article points out that the FAA promoted anticipated benefits from the technology including fewer delays and flight cancellations. (Other anticipated benefits included improved on-time performance and faster recovery from weather disruptions.) Although the FAA has realized one of the system's anticipated benefits: reduced fuel consumption.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Register writes that "The worst of the patchpocalypse may be behind us, according to Linus Torvalds." In his weekly kernel update post, Torvalds said Linux 7.4 rc2 was a big release partly because it contained code he'd left out of rc1 because he'd been busy and it was already the largest such release in kernel history. But Torvalds said the other reason rc2 was big was "various AI fixes."Such fixes are necessary because ever since Anthropic launched its Mythos bug-finding model in April, developers have been able to find more software flaws than was previously possible. Microsoft, for example, addressed a record 974 flaws in September - its third record fixing spree this year after it whacked 622 flaws in July and 206 in June. Oracle addressed 1,449 flaws in a single month. That's many more patches than IT teams are set up to handle, yet they must find ways to deal with bugs more quickly because attackers are increasingly targeting flaws found by AI. Torvalds' post suggests that, perhaps, the worst of this is behind us. "This time around Alexei claims that on the bpf side at least the fixes are now coming in faster than the new reports, and that sounds lovely if true," he wrote. That's a reference to Alexei Starovoitov, co-creator and lead dev on the Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), the project that makes it possible to run sandboxed programs within the Linux kernel. "I think most other areas haven't reached that point yet, but it's at least a sign that we _may_ be starting to see the tide starting to turn," he added. The patchpocalypse has already affected Linux kernel developer Lorenzo Stoakes, a principal software engineer at Arm, The Register reported Friday:Earlier this week he posted an email to the Linux kernel mailing list to say that he was planning to drop some of his workload. He explained: "Given the current throughput in the kernel resulting from AI-generated series, I unfortunately lack the bandwidth to generally be able to offer review except in those areas I maintain. [...] Apologies for doing this, but given the current trends I'd like to do something to make my inbox a little more manageable." Stoakes told The Register, "I just want my inbox to be less horrendous. And yeah, AI is part of the reason; in general, it's gone from 'once a week' to 'daily' to 'half of what I see in review'."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PC Gamer reports:The Australian STEM Videogame Challenge, a "free national videogame development competition for students," has confirmed that the rise of generative AI means this year's event will be the last...Speculation as to the cause of the program's cancellation focused primarily on the presence of AI in entries: Another self-proclaimed judge said the problem wasn't merely the use of AI in itself but that "some students just completely generate their games with AI...." [T]he Australian Council for Educational Research has confirmed that the cancellation was in fact due to AI.... "making it harder to judge what students made themselves, and moving the program away from its original purpose." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader neoRUR for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang misled several of the company's leaders, including general counsel Tim Teter and chief marketing officer Alison Wagonfeld, about the nature of his relationship with Chinese businesswoman Alice Huang, with whom he had an affair, according to two people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence reviewed by Reuters. [...] During the autumn of 2025 and in October 2026, in response to press queries that drew some Nvidia leaders' attention to his relationship with Megaspeed and Alice Huang, Huang at both times described their interactions as appropriate, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Reuters only reviewed messages from the exchanges in October, not the ones from 2025. In two separate messages in October, Huang told Nvidia leaders, including Teter and Wagonfeld, that the interactions reflected standard business dealings with customers. In other messages, Huang affirmed the routine nature of his interactions with Megaspeed. Nvidia's Huang also discussed taking legal action against the New York Times after it published an article in October of last year that drew attention to his meetings in public with Alice Huang, the people said. That article had prompted Jensen Huang to communicate with some Nvidia leaders in 2025 about their interactions, which he did not describe as an affair, the people said. Ultimately, neither Nvidia nor Huang filed a lawsuit against the paper. A spokesperson for the New York Times said the paper received no legal demand. It is unclear when his relationship with Alice Huang became intimate. Photos posted online and verified by Reuters show them together in the US, China and elsewhere, dating as far back as December 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is considering a "World Product Graph" that would index information about products sold across the internet in an effort to keep shoppers and AI agents from turning to Google, Reddit or other sources for product research. The proposed database could also improve Amazon's AI shopping assistant by addressing inaccurate or incomplete answers and allowing it to use cheaper models. "Amazon cannot be the go-destination for every shopping mission if customers must leave to research product relationships on Google, brand websites, and review sites," according to an internal Amazon document. "These answers exist, but the only way to find them has been to leave Amazon for painstaking research on brand websites, third party review sites and tech forums." Reuters could not determine if or when this plan may be implemented, though the document, written like a press release, has an aspirational future release date of October 1, 2027. Amazon said in a statement: "Draft, outdated documents often paint an incomplete picture and the existence of a brainstorming document such as this one doesn't necessarily reflect our current plans. We're constantly working on new ideas and technologies to make Amazon's product catalog comprehensive, accurate, and helpful for customers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nightmare Eclipse, the pseudonym of a researcher with an ongoing, very public beef with Microsoft, has dropped yet another Windows zero-day. On Tuesday, Nightmare Eclipse disclosed SignDrop, a vulnerability that gives local users full System rights on some versions of Windows. The vulnerability resides in the Common Log File System, which Microsoft describes as a "general-purpose logging service used by software clients running in user-mode or kernel-mode." By forcing a privileged process such as Windows Defender to open a crafted CLFS container, an attacker with ordinary user rights can abuse the privileged file creation to elevate privileges to System. [...] Researcher Will Dormann said in an interview that he has been able to reproduce the exploit and that it works as described, but not on all versions of Windows 11. But there's a catch, he said. "The requirements are important in that it seems to require Windows 26H2, and one that has existed for more than 90 days, it seems," he explained. "That is, you can't just take a new 26H2 system and install updates and have it work." For a system to be vulnerable, Dormann said, the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CLFS\Authentication\Modevalue must be 0 or 1." Of the many machines Dormann uses, only a single one met this requirement. Microsoft said in a statement that it was investigating the vulnerability and had no evidence it was being exploited in the wild. The company also said Defender blocks potential exploitation attempts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot readers cold fjord and sinij share news that the FAA grounded flights nationwide after a communications failure disrupted air traffic control centers across the country. By Friday evening, the outage had resulted in nearly 5,000 flight cancellations and roughly 10,000 delays, with no timeline for restoring normal operations. Rumors are swirling that this could be related to the FAA's newly deployed SMART AI system or Microsoft's recent global outage, but both the agency and Microsoft said they had no indication that their technology was responsible. Business Insider reports: US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said just after 4:15 pm. Eastern time that the nationwide flight traffic halt came "following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers." "FAA technicians are investigating the issue," he said in a post on X. The outage comes the same week as the FAA deployed SMART, a new AI tool to help air traffic control. ASI, the company that makes the SMART system for the FAA, said that Friday's issues weren't "based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC." Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a press conference Friday, when asked if the AI system might be related to the outage: "That's what we're looking at." Microsoft, which faced massive issues across its services this week, also said that it had "no indication" the ground stop was related to any Microsoft services. Meanwhile, the FAA said that the ground stop was due to "extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety." UPDATE 1:33 UTC: Secretary Mullin and Secretary Duffy are currently briefing members of the press on the issue. UPDATE 1:46 UTC: The FAA has lifted the nationwide ground stop after more than four hours. Officials said the disruption appears to have stemmed from a network router issue that cascaded nationwide, with no evidence of a cyberattack or connection to Microsoft's recent outage. Airlines warned that disruptions could continue in Saturday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX's 15th Starship test flight successfully reached orbit Friday, but its historic attempt to catch both stages at the launch tower was derailed when the Super Heavy booster malfunctioned, forcing controllers to abort its return before it exploded after splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico. The upper-stage Starship did, however, successfully deploy 26 Starlink satellites and is scheduled to complete 15 orbits before attempting an unprecedented tower catch on Saturday. If successful, it would mark the first time a spacecraft has returned from orbit to land vertically at a launch tower. The Bakersfield Californian reports: The original goal was to retrieve every single piece of the rocket for the purpose of future recycling, something yet to be achieved anywhere in the world. Musk sees this leading to the kind of fast and consistent launch rates necessary for building moon bases and sending people to Mars. Shortly after reaching orbit, Starship dropped off 26 of the company's most advanced Starlink satellites. The plan is for Starship to complete 15 laps around the world at an altitude of around 170 miles (275 kilometers) before heading back to the launch site for Saturday's grand finale. SpaceX had already made three booster grabs at the company's sprawling Starbase near the U.S.-Mexico border. That made Friday's miss all the more surprising. "Well, that certainly isn't the news that we had hoped to hear for today," observed SpaceX launch commentator Kate Tice, adding that it was in line with the many rigorous safety checks to protect the pad. No explanation was provided for what went wrong. This was the first attempt to capture the upgraded version of the booster that stretches 236 feet (72 meters) -- the production model for moon and Mars expeditions. It will also be the first time the company attempts to catch the spacecraft, which spans 171 feet (52 meters). Together, they form the world's biggest and most powerful rocket -- an astounding 407 feet (124 meters) in height. The spacecraft portion of the 14 previous Starships ended up in the ocean, either by design at flight's end or by accident in a stream of flaming wreckage. During the first full-scale test flight in 2023, multiple engines failed to ignite and the tumbling rocket's self-destruct system was activated. The last test, in September, was the first to reach orbit, but SpaceX did not try to recover any of the rocket stages. You can watch a recorded livestream of the launch on YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LEGO's BrickLink marketplace is back online after a week-long outage caused by what the company described as a "cyber incident," during which an unauthorized third party accessed some user data. Details about exactly what data was accessed remain unclear. The site went offline on November 5 and remained unavailable until November 12, preventing users from buying or selling LEGO sets and parts during the busy holiday shopping season. According to Brick Fanatics, LEGO initially described the outage as "necessary work" before confirming that the platform had suffered a security incident. In an email to users, LEGO acknowledged that "some of the information associated with your account was accessed and disclosed by an unauthorized party," including potentially usernames and IP addresses. However, the company insisted that "your password, postal address, and financial information were not disclosed." Those assurances have since come under scrutiny following reports of convincing phishing emails containing detailed personal and purchase information. The outage also dealt a significant blow to independent sellers who rely on BrickLink for income. Simon Webster, who operates stores on both BrickLink and rival marketplace Brick Owl, reported that his overall sales revenue fell 52% over a four-day period, even as sales through Brick Owl rose 79%. "Their comms are amateur at the best of times, but surely they should be able to send an email to let sellers and buyers alike know what is happening and what they're doing to rectify it," Webster said. "But no, we're all left in the dark." The incident has renewed concerns about BrickLink's aging infrastructure. Founded in 2000 and acquired by LEGO in 2019, the marketplace reportedly runs on a complex collection of interconnected systems that makes modernization difficult. The Brick Fanatics report questions whether the 25-year-old platform remains fit for purpose and whether prolonged outages and security concerns could push sellers toward competing marketplaces like Brick Owl.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. authorities have seized or restrained more than $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency stolen during Binance's $6 billion October hack, which the FBI attributes to North Korean military-linked hackers known as "TraderTraitor." The DOJ also said it disrupted infrastructure behind the "FaceStealer" deepfake scam, blamed for stealing more than $400 million in cryptocurrency. CNBC reports: Collective efforts between the U.S. government and private sector have resulted in more than $2.7 billion of that amount being frozen. [...] The DOJ said it was taking coordinated action against what it called the North Korean government's "schemes to fund its regime through the massive theft of cryptocurrency." That includes "the court-authorized seizure and restraint of more than $1.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency recently stolen from Binance," it said. DOJ units, law enforcement partners and virtual asset service providers have been working to intercept the stolen assets. But efforts to track and freeze the assets are ongoing, as TraderTraitor actors continue to launder them through various cryptocurrency channels. Authorities have also seized cloud-based infrastructure used in a massive identity impersonation scam known as "FaceStealer," which has seen more than $400 million worth of cryptocurrency stolen over 18 months, the DOJ said. The scheme sees hackers set up fake video meetings using stolen accounts and recordings of people known to the target by using AI-generated deepfakes. The hackers then say a technical problem requires a fix, install malware on a computer and take over the victim's communications, steal their cryptocurrency and target their contacts -- sometimes months or more than a year after the initial compromise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla is shutting down Solo, its AI-powered website builder and hosting service, on November 30. A notice on the Soloist.ai homepage reads: "We've made the difficult decision to close Solo. We have appreciated all of your support building and growing this product, and the feedback we've received from all of you. Solo will cease operations on Nov 30, 2026." The Register reports: Mozilla launched Solo in December 2023 as a "Mozilla Innovation Project," aimed at helping sole traders to build themselves a webpage for their services. Some 54,000 people used its LLM to build pages, and relied on Mozilla to host them -- complete with custom domain names. Users now have just over two weeks left to find a new home for their pages, although Mozilla says it first notified them on October 1. According to the support FAQ, users can download a ZIP containing an HTML export, contact form and newsletter submissions, and a CSV linking to their images. The images themselves must be downloaded separately. Domains purchased through Solo Domains must also be moved to Name.com, with Mozilla handling the transfer after users create an account and supply its code.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A global outage taking down a wide range of Microsoft 365 services remains ongoing Friday morning. The outage started midday Thursday, impacting users of Microsoft email, cloud, and AI services. Microsoft has documented the full list of services impacted by the error, while moving early Friday morning to protect customers around the world from losing emails during the extended disruptions. "Recovery actions are ongoing," the Microsoft 365 Status account confirmed on X. "To help preserve delayed mail during this event, we've extended email timeout to 48 hours." Similar to recent world-shaking outages of widely used tech like Amazon Web Services and CrowdStrike, the Microsoft disruption looks like "one of the biggest outages of all time," Ciaran Martin, the former head of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre, told NBC News. Possibly even "worse," he suggested. Businesses, hospitals, police departments, and schools were among those scrambling to work around the outage. In Japan, it disrupted government IT infrastructure, according to deputy chief cabinet secretary Masanao Ozaki. NBC's report documented various harms, noting that "few public bodies were immune from the outage." In some cases, doctors couldn't send patients "important" updates on medication changes or follow-up care. The financial sector suffered, too, with people blocked from making bank transfers since they couldn't receive verification codes. Justice systems were also hobbled. The Supreme Court in the Philippines saw its legal work derailed, NBC reported. And one US sheriff's office in Colorado reported that the outage made it difficult for people to post bond for prisoners' immediate release. It's unclear how many users were affected, but Microsoft estimated in January that the total number of paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions exceeded 450 million. Microsoft's most recent updates confirmed that it's seeing "broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific." "Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation continues across remaining affected infrastructure," Microsoft said. "Our focus remains on stabilizing recovered infrastructure, completing mitigation in remaining impacted areas, and reducing delayed email queues and backlogs while we validate service consistency across connection methods."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Wallet, a feature that lets its Dots AI agents help users choose products and complete purchases on their behalf. TechCrunch reports: The option will initially be available to a limited number of U.S. ChatGPT Pro subscribers, ages 18 and up, with a U.S.-issued Visa, Mastercard, or American Express. OpenAI says that users are fully in control of the purchases, as they're able to review the items, the total, and the payment card that will be used to complete the transaction before the checkout occurs. In addition, users will approve the purchases directly with a security check like Face ID or a fingerprint, which creates a record of their transaction. [...] The company notes that customers who shop via their dots will still be able to earn their credit card rewards and be able to take advantage of protections that typically come with cards, like being able to dispute transactions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A coalition of online safety and consumer advocacy groups has sued five of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies, asking a California judge to halt the development and deployment of new AI models until the companies can address what the plaintiffs describe as potentially "catastrophic" risks. The lawsuit alleges the companies are violating California unfair competition law by endangering public health and computer systems, arguing that increasingly autonomous AI could ultimately escape human control. The Associated Press reports: The filing, first reported on by The Associated Press, asks a judge to stop Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI and SpaceXSI from developing or deploying new AI models, pointing to documented examples of cyberattacks and other harmful actions by AI systems and the companies' own alarming acknowledgments that their technology has the potential to someday destroy humanity. "No other industry is allowed to treat its own development of unsafe products -- much less ones that could kill us all -- as inevitable," reads the complaint from the Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen, Heat Initiative and the Alliance for Secure AI. "Plaintiffs bring this suit to stop Defendants from continuing their unlawful path to disaster." [...] The plaintiffs, all nonprofits, allege that the companies named in the lawsuit have violated a California unfair competition law by endangering public health and interfering with the use of property such as computer systems. They claim they've had to divert resources away from other planned work to address the acute harms threatened by each of the companies' advancing AI models. They also warn that the companies' goals of creating AI systems that are broadly as smart as humans and can increasingly manage tasks and learn things autonomously could result in a permanent loss of control of the technology and heighten existential risks to humanity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Some Nvidia employees are calling for Jensen Huang's return even after his multiple reported extramarital affairs and abrupt resignation, according to internal correspondence reviewed by WIRED. An internal "suggestion box" post submitted before Huang's resignation by a longtime engineer at Nvidia urged the company's board to take employee sentiment into consideration prior to taking any action. The submission has attracted more than 1,600 comments since then, with several asking board members to find a way to bring back Huang. "If you believe in the mission, bring back THE boss," wrote one anonymous commenter. "We are all humans and can make mistakes. Jensen did so many good things and he needs a second chance," wrote another. One employee went as far as sending a companywide email demanding transparency into Huang's exit. "I stand by Jensen," the staffer wrote. "Not because I believe any person is infallible, but because I refuse to believe that standing for fairness must mean standing at a distance from someone whose leadership has meant so much to us." [...] It's been business as usual inside the company throughout this week, but Huang's resignation left many employees stunned. In the hours after, about two dozen employees posted on LinkedIn in support of Huang, with one describing their faith in his leadership as unwavering. Over the same period, WIRED couldn't identify any posts from Nvidia employees in support of his resignation. One employee who has been at Nvidia for a couple of years and wasn't authorized to speak publicly says they perceive the desire for Huang's reinstatement as widespread. They worry the company will eventually suffer without its founder at the helm and say that the board must bring him back. "Nvidia is Nvidia because of Jensen," the employee tells WIRED. Many employees had expected a board investigation to conclude before any big changes would occur. For instance, the suggestion-box post called on the board to share its findings with employees and formally solicit their sentiment "about Jensen's continuing as our CEO." Instead, Huang left just as the inquiry had begun. Staffers are seeking to better understand why. "If America fails the man who helped build its future," the employee in the companywide email stated, "then this world does not deserve Jensen Huang."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Parents and teachers across the US are criticizing Google's announcement that schools choosing to block AI tools could also lose access to Google Search. Google announced last week a range of new AI tools for schools and classrooms, alongside options allowing teachers and administrators to restrict their use. The company said schools should have control over whether students use AI in the classroom, but that schools that choose to block Google's AI tools will also lose access to its search engine. [...] Parents and teachers across the country raised concerns to the Guardian about AI's potential to weaken students' critical-thinking skills and the growing influence of big tech in education. Some called on schools to consider alternative search engines, while others argued that students should be taught how to use AI responsibly rather than prevented from accessing it altogether. Jen Atay, a 51-year-old teacher in Hawaii, lambasted Google's approach, saying: "When the software is free, you are the product, and it is inappropriate for Google to test or develop AI with minors. This should not be allowed at all." A 44-year-old father of two boys in Amissville, Virginia, said he worries that "AI will weaken people's ability to think critically. I use AI in my work, but it would not be effective if I did not have well over a decade of experience under my belt. Even the best models are often flat-out wrong in their responses." [...] Others questioned why schools should depend on Google at all. An 84-year-old retiree and mother in Maryland, said: "Google decided to follow the evil path to riches. When they started, they were great. Today they are simply evil money grubbers Schools should tell Google to go pound sand and simply have kids use DuckDuckGo or one of the other search engines There is nothing Google offers that is not available from some other source." [...] Not everyone believes blocking AI is the answer. Some argued that schools should focus on teaching students how to use the technology responsibly. A 67-year-old emerging technology teacher in Texas said: "I do not blame Google. AI is not going away. I've been very frustrated this year trying to teach AI literacy with AI blocked. Schools need to teach how to properly use AI, not block it." A California resident echoed that view, arguing that schools could use Google's AI tools to teach students to question the information they receive. "Google Search has existed since the 90s and it's crazy of them to completely remove it instead of just removing Gemini. That being said, I would like to see schools actually permit the use of Gemini and use it as an opportunity to show students how its sources aren't always valid and you can't trust everything an AI tells you," they said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FAA is expanding its $875 million AI-powered SMART system to all 22 U.S. air traffic control centers across the country. Since being implemented over Washington, DC, on September 21, the system has helped reroute 180 flights, saving an average of 10 minutes and nearly 80 gallons of fuel per flight. Ars Technica reports: The FAA fact sheet describes SMART as a cloud-based system that combines information about "weather patterns, flight paths, traffic flow and controller staffing metrics" to predict air traffic patterns. It is designed to make scheduling recommendations, identify optimal flight routes, and determine the best order of arrivals for aircraft. However, a human team of FAA specialists based in DC is ultimately responsible for validating the SMART system recommendations before passing them along to air traffic control facilities across the country, according to the agency. Furthermore, the AI-powered SMART system "cannot be used to replace the critical role air traffic controllers play or take over control of an aircraft," the FAA clarified in the September 21 announcement about the initial deployment. Local air traffic controllers can decide whether or not to accept the SMART system recommendations. [...] Following the initial deployment in airspace above DC, the FAA expanded the SMART system's coverage to air route traffic control centers in Atlanta along with Jacksonville and Miami in Florida, according to The Dallas Morning News. The FAA also shared an example with The Dallas Morning News about how SMART recommended a shorter and faster route for a cargo flight arriving at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, although the newspaper noted that the agency did not identify the flight involved and has not provided information about how SMART may have assisted passenger flight traffic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Space Agency has released the largest dataset yet from its Euclid space telescope, containing 1.7 petabytes of observations covering more than 900 million galaxies. "The data unveiled on Thursday covered a survey of the sky equal to about 9,500 times the size of the moon as viewed from Earth," reports Reuters. "The mission's goal is to complete the "largest-ever three-dimensional atlas of the cosmos, spanning more than a third of the sky, in 2031." From the report: "It marks a major milestone for ESA's Euclid mission and for everyone involved," said astrophysicist Valeria Pettorino, ESA's Euclid project scientist. Euclid, launched from Florida in 2023, is gathering data on how the universe has expanded and how its structure has formed over time while amassing information about the nature of dark energy and dark matter and the role of gravity on large scales. "Euclid will not just take images of galaxies in the sky, in two dimensions, but will also measure their distance, the third dimension. This will tell us where galaxies are in space and time, across 10 billion years, and in all directions beyond our galactic plane," Pettorino said. "Galaxies cluster along filaments, surrounded by empty space, and form a network that we call the cosmic web. Euclid will reconstruct the cosmic web and how it has grown over time. This is important because the exact configuration of the cosmic web, how many clusters or voids are there, how fast it changed, depend on the properties of dark energy and dark matter," Pettorino said. [...] Previous Euclid data releases covered only a few days of observations. The newly released dataset includes more than a year of data and still spans only 14% of the total sky area Euclid is due to survey in visible and near-infrared light over six years. This data release will be completed next year with the first results on dark energy and dark matter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Hill: Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to invest more than $74 billion into building two data centers in Texas and Arizona, the company announced Thursday, marketing them as projects that will boost local communities amid backlash surrounding such facilities. "These investments will expand local tax bases, generate substantial new revenue for schools and public services, and create economic opportunities that extend far beyond the facilities themselves," the company said in a release. SpaceX said it will put more than $24 billion into a new project in Texas's Rio Grande Valley, expanding the company's headquarters in Starbase -- a coastal town the tech giant established in 2025 in a previously unincorporated area of Cameron County. In Arizona, SpaceX will invest around $50 billion in Cochise County, a rural area east of Tucson bordering Mexico and New Mexico. SpaceX pledged the new projects will be created cooperatively with the surrounding communities and will be environmentally conscious. The company said the project in Texas would generate its own power and invest $220 million to expand the water supply in nearby Brownsville. While in Arizona, it vowed to work with local electric cooperatives and "potentially" reduce electric bills, saying the site would use dry cooling without water consumption. "They require strong partnerships with local communities, responsible environmental stewardship, and stable, competitive policies that give companies the confidence to make long-term investments," the company said in a release. Both sites promise hundreds of permanent jobs even once construction is complete.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Whoop has launched Humans, a social network built into its fitness app where every account is a real person with a "verified heartbeat." The wearable company claims its platform is "entirely human," unlike other social media platforms that are "saturated with artificial intelligence, automated accounts and bots, and manufactured content." The Verge reports: Starting Thursday, Whoop members can share their data from its wearables on the app's new Whoop Humans social network. Users can make their metrics, activities, and achievements visible to other Whoop wearers, post Story-like "Moments" with photos and captions, and add comments and reactions on other members' posts. [...] In the Community tab in Whoop's app, users can scroll through Moments from people they're following, like tapping through your Stories feed on Instagram but with your friends' fitness tracker data. In one of Whoop's examples, swiping up on a user's Moments post with a photo from their run shows a map with their route and details like their pace and distance. The Community tab also shows cards for people in your "community" with their sleep, recovery, and strain scores. Whoop says users choose which activities, achievements, and metrics they want to share on Humans, including Recovery, Strain, Sleep, HRV, and resting heart rate. Any activities marked as sensitive aren't shared by default. There's also an option to keep Moments posts private and a "Stealth Mode" for temporarily hiding health and performance data without changing your sharing settings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo has issued four DMCA takedown notices targeting two Nintendo Switch emulators, Yuzu and Citron Neo, along with mod chip firmware such as Picofly, SX Core and HWFLY. As a result, 144 repositories containing firmware used to circumvent the console's copy protections have been removed by GitHub and replaced by a DMCA takedown notice. IGN reports: GitHub has posted Nintendo's November 6 DMCA notice, which says, "The Nintendo Switch console and video games contain technological protection measures ('TPMs') that permit the Nintendo Switch console to interact only with legitimate Nintendo video game files. This process protects Nintendo's copyright-protected video games, (...) by preventing users from playing pirated copies of Nintendo's video games on the Nintendo Switch console and by preventing users from unlawfully copying and playing Nintendo's video games on unauthorized devices." However, while this takedown has effectively wiped out a ton of repositories with mod chip firmware, it seems like it's still being hosted elsewhere on the site, according to TorrentFreak. It's possible, though, that Nintendo isn't finished yet; back in 2024, Nintendo effectively took down 8,500 copies of Yuzu by issuing a takedown that targeted 12 different mirrors of the emulator. This particular takedown also comes a few days after emulators were able to run the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on PC, so this could be a sign that Nintendo is winding up its lawyers to crack down on emulation once again.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reuters reports that former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had an intimate relationship with a third woman (source paywalled; alternative source ), an unnamed Nvidia employee. The revelation follows reports of two other extramarital affairs: one with Nvidia VP Kimberly Powell and another with Alice Huang, whom U.S. intelligence reportedly suspects of being a Chinese spy. The latter relationship has also prompted a shareholder lawsuit alleging Nvidia misled investors about its ties to a company suspected of circumventing U.S. chip export restrictions. Jensen Huang has since resigned as Nvidia's CEO and stepped down from its board on Thursday. CFO Colette Kress has been appointed interim CEO while the company searches for a permanent successor.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Singapore says U.S. authorities provided limited assistance in its investigation of Megaspeed, the company run by Alice Huang, the Chinese businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence suspects is a Chinese spy and whose relationship with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has drawn scrutiny. According to Singapore, authorities held Alice Huang's passport from June 2025 until February while investigating "potential false declarations," but ultimately released her with a "stern warning" and barred her from re-entering the country. The New York Times reports: The statement raises new questions about the response of the Trump administration to the case and why the U.S. government did not more forcefully intervene. According to the timeline in the statement, Singaporean authorities had been holding Ms. Huang's passport well after President Trump was briefed last fall about her relationship with Nvidia's chief executive and the belief that she was a Chinese intelligence asset. The New York Times has reported that Taiwan began monitoring Ms. Huang in 2024 at the guidance of the U.S. government. In its statement, Singapore said that it had sought information from an American server maker and close Nvidia business partner, Supermicro, but that the company had provided "limited cooperation." Supermicro, a firm that packages Nvidia's A.I. chips onto servers that can be used in data centers, has been at the center of a number of chip smuggling investigations across the globe. Supermicro was a supplier to Megaspeed, a company incorporated in Singapore and run by Ms. Huang, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. Singapore said in the statement its authorities raised Supermicro's "limited cooperation" with the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation in July 2025 and "requested their assistance in securing the company's cooperation." "Despite these repeated requests, Singapore has to date received limited information or assistance in respect of the company," the statement said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is suffering a major Microsoft 365 outage that's disrupting Outlook, Teams, Copilot and SharePoint for users across the Americas, with more than 129,000 problem reports logged on Downdetector shortly after the disruption began. Microsoft blames the connectivity problems on an unexpectedly large number of unavailable servers that overloaded the remaining infrastructure. The company says it's redistributing traffic and restarting affected systems. From a report: Microsoft was not providing an estimated time by which it expects service to return. Both individual Outlook users and those on enterprise accounts experienced problems logging in to the service. The outage also affected other Microsoft services, including Microsoft Teams, the Copilot 365 AI service and SharePoint Online. "Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services," the company said on its Service Health Status page. UPDATE 11/12/26, 19:50 UTC: From Microsoft 365 Status: "We're testing a configuration change to address a problem that's causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are monitoring health as they return to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as http://status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you." UPDATE 11/12/26, 20:19 UTC: From Microsoft 365 Status: "We've not identified any recent change correlated with the start of impact; however, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that's responsible for processing server health. We've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as http://status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you. UPDATE 11/12/26, 20:29 UTC: "According to https://downdetector.com/, much of the major services are down," writes Slashdot reader xocmot2. "AWS, Microsoft, Meta, on and on. Clearly not a Microsoft thing." UPDATE 11/12/26, 6:17 UTC: Microsoft is still struggling to resolve the outage, which is confirmed to be global with disruptions reported across 74 countries and territories. The outage has disrupted businesses and government services in countries including Japan, Singapore, India, and Australia, while OpenAI and Anthropic have also reported related problems. Microsoft says its recovery efforts have produced some improvements, but the fixes are not delivering "sustained recovery." Microsoft has ruled out a cybersecurity incident, and experts warn that the prolonged disruption could result in significant economic losses. Developing...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is launching its first Gemini-powered smart glasses, with Samsung supplying the computing hardware. Given their built-in 12-megapixel camera, Google is emphasizing privacy protections, including a tamper-resistant recording light, automatic face redaction, and restrictions on real-time facial recognition and livestreaming. The company also promises not to use captured photos or videos for AI training or targeted advertising. Ars Technica reports: Google says the frames all weigh about 41 grams, which is not terrible but is definitely near the top for glasses generally. They will, naturally, weigh much more when you account for lenses. That will also determine the final pricing. So far, we only have the starting prices for these devices, including non-prescription lenses. The setup here is similar to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses we've seen for a few years. There are no screens in the lenses, but you can interact with the AI system via voice or by activating the integrated camera. The experience should be similar to using Gemini Live on your phone, but it will be a lot easier to fire up the AI. You can say "Hey Gemini" or tap a touch-sensitive area of the frame to start interacting with the robot. Since this is the same chatbot that operates across the Google ecosystem, it has access to your data and preferences. You can ask questions and get personalized answers, have Google Maps guide you by voice, or just talk with the AI to kill time. The glasses use custom open-ear speakers to limit distractions for those around you. Google notes the directional microphones should not pick up speech from other people, either. Adding the camera feed is where things get interesting. When the AI can see what you see, it has the potential to do more work on your behalf. Google suggests asking Gemini for recommendations when looking at a bookshelf or glancing at an event poster to have the AI add it to your calendar. The glasses will also support Gemini Guided Vision, which provides conversational audio descriptions for people who are visually impaired. The new frames are available for preorder today starting at $395.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: On April 10 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration revealed the first picture of a black hole. The object is at the centre of a galaxy known as M87, about 55 million light-years away. The iconic ring structure instantly became one of the most recognized scientific images of the modern era. It showed a black hole "shadow" outlined by light from swirling hot gas -- just as predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. The result supported the long-standing idea that the centers of galaxies house supermassive black holes. However, scientists have since had some disagreements on whether the details and structure of the ring in the original publication were accurate. Our new research, published today in Nature, used new techniques to investigate the original datasets. Not only do our results validate the original work, but they also provide a fresh perspective on the ring structure. Our independent results enhance confidence in one of the most significant modern scientific results. And we bring the image of a black hole millions of light-years away back into focus. [...] When compared directly to images from the EHT collaboration, our result is consistent in diameter and overall orientation. Naturally, there are some differences in the fine details of ring width and surface brightness along the circumference, but the overall structure matches. This provides a fresh perspective on the iconic black hole ring while also resolving previous discrepancies. To prove this success didn't depend solely on advanced machine learning, we also developed a complementary imaging method based on traditional statistical techniques. This entirely different method also validated our structure using the new closure invariant data we produced. Overall, our work delivers a strong independent validation of the supermassive black hole structure at the centre of galaxy M87. And it could do more in the future. Our technique could also be useful in other situations where data from multiple sensors are combined to map unknown structures -- such as medical imaging or mapping earthquakes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A critical flaw in Apache HTTP Server's HTTP/2 module could allow unauthenticated attackers to remotely execute code and potentially take control of affected server processes. Tracked as CVE-2026-119618, the vulnerability affects Apache HTTP Server 2.4.55 through 2.4.70 when HTTP/2 is enabled and is fixed in version 2.4.71. The Hacker News reports: The vendor's assessment, published yesterday, also says "public research has demonstrated a reliable exploit" against a server in its default configuration with mod_http2 enabled. It does not name or link that research. Security company Wiz said later that day that no exploit was available and that no exploitation in the wild had been reported. HTTP/2 runs only where the Protocols directive turns it on, as the module documentation explains. The directive uses h2 for HTTP/2 over TLS and h2c for HTTP/2 over plain TCP. It can be set for the whole server or for a single virtual host, so admins should check the server-wide setting and every virtual host. Standalone builds of the module, released on GitHub as mod_h2, are affected from version 2.0.8 through 2.0.42. Admins who run the Apache HTTP Server project's own releases should move to version 2.4.71, the fixed release named in its security advisory. That release also fixes a crash in mod_md, rated important, and a one-byte overwrite of stack memory in mod_vhost_alias, rated low.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jensen Huang has stepped down as CEO of Nvidia after 33 years leading the company, with CFO Colette Kress taking over as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent replacement. "The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company's operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption," said board chair Harvey Jones in a release announcing the news. The abrupt departure follows revelations about Huang's affairs, including one with a woman U.S. intelligence reportedly believes was a Chinese spy. CNBC reports: Huang, 63, apologized on Sunday for being "unfaithful to my wife," though he provided no details about the affair with businesswoman Alice Huang, who has worked for a Chinese company and Nvidia customer called Megaspeed. Late Wednesday, The New York Times reported that the Nvidia CEO also had a separate affair, this one with Kimberly Powell, vice president of health care at the chipmaker. Later that afternoon The Times and other outlets reported that Nvidia's board met to discuss the company's future. Jensen Huang denied allegations that he had compromised national security or Nvidia secrets after reports of the Alice Huang affair. The news sparked concerns that Nvidia knew companies based in Singapore and Malaysia had been evading U.S. export controls in accessing its technology. The board said on Tuesday that it had hired Wachtell Lipton to investigate the intelligence allegations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tim Peters, one of Python's earliest and most influential contributors, died on July 15 at age 74. Known as Python's second real user, Peters created the Zen of Python and Timsort sorting algorithm while contributing to numerous core components. He also served as a Python Software Foundation director from 2001 to 2014. Adafruit remembers Peters in a blog post: He's best known for the Zen of Python, PEP 20, still printed by typing import this. In 2002, he gave Python Timsort, the sorting algorithm he designed for lists, later adopted by Java and Android. He also polished the cyclic garbage collector and the pymalloc allocator, worked on the dict implementation, the float object, the math module and Karatsuba multiplication in longobject, and wrote the first version of doctest, plus difflib, pickletools and tabnanny. He was a director of the Python Software Foundation from 2001 to 2014. Before Python, he wrote compilers at Cray Research and speech-to-text software at Dragon Systems. The thread is full of recollections from core developers about his patient, detailed answers on the mailing lists, signed with his trademark . Python creator Guido van Rossum also paid tribute to Peters in a post on discuss.python.org, writing: "It's hard to overestimate Tim's influence on Python. He's probably best known for writing the Zen of Python (PEP 20), but to me he was a mentor and language co-designer long before that..." Further discussions can be found on Hacker News and Reddit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"ScienceAlert is reporting that researchers may have finally determined why, for many years, power grids around the world have been pulsing every 60 seconds," writes longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot. The likely culprit? Uninterruptible power supplies running routine battery checks. From the report: Every minute, some uninterruptible power supplies perform routine battery checks, creating small but measurable surges in electricity demand. And it's like clockwork. "Even benign control routines can become systemically relevant when many devices act coherently," writes a team led by physicist Dirk Witthaut of the University of Cologne, Germany, in a paper published in Nature Energy. "Unintended synchronization can generate recurrent and potentially amplified oscillatory behavior in large-scale cyber-physical energy systems." To figure it out, Witthaut and his colleagues analyzed high-resolution electricity measurements from buildings at the Forschungszentrum Julich research campus in Germany. [... they found that] the 60-second pattern appeared in four buildings, all of which contained uninterruptible power supplies. None of the buildings they measured without these systems showed the same pattern. Following the electrical signals more closely, the researchers detected tiny bursts of current from the batteries at precisely one-minute intervals. They were able to trace the resulting fluctuations through one building's electrical system, all the way to the connection with the public high-voltage grid. The manufacturer subsequently confirmed the culprit's identity -- routine battery self-tests, conducted automatically by the systems' management software. But why would equipment in different buildings, let alone different countries, be doing this at the same time? The answer appears to lie in the clocks. Digital devices can synchronize their internal clocks using external time signals, meaning that independently operating systems can end up performing their scheduled tasks together. Individually, these small checks are insignificant. But when enough devices act in synchrony, their combined electricity demand can produce a measurable effect across an entire power grid.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PBS: The historic ocean liner SS United States will be intentionally sunk Wednesday off the coast of the Florida panhandle. Live coverage of the sinking of the SS United States is expected to start at 1 p.m. EST, with the sinking expected at 2 p.m. EST. Watch live in the video player above. In its heyday, the SS United States crushed the trans-Atlantic speed record, which it still holds. The luxury ocean liner took only three days to cross from New York to Europe on its maiden voyage in 1952. Carrying presidents and Hollywood stars, the nearly 1,000-foot vessel was a technical marvel of its time. However, the rise of air travel and high operating costs sunk its economic viability, and the ship was pulled from service in 1969. The ocean liner sat at Philadelphia's Pier 82 for nearly 30 years. After a contentious back and forth with a pier landlord over rent and docking fees, Okaloosa County in Florida eventually stepped in to purchase the ship and bring it to the Gulf of Mexico to become the world's largest artificial reef. The multi-million dollar project is also aimed at creating an economic development opportunity as a major diving attraction. "It was our goal to make sure that she wasn't lost forever," said David Lawrence, a member of the board for the SS United States Conservancy, the group that sold the vessel to the Florida county. Like the ship's unconventional life, it will also have an unconventional sinking. Federal environmental and explosives rules prevent the county from using explosives. Instead, tanks inside the ship have been removed and large holes were cut into the decks. Once the valves are opened, water will flood the hull, sinking the ship. Resting at 180 feet below the surface of the water, the SS United States will join more than 500 artificial reefs in Okaloosa County, which the county relies on to support the underwater ecosystem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

United Airlines is banning unauthorized third-party AI agents from booking flights, checking in passengers or making account changes on travelers' behalf. CBS News reports: To make an airline booking, an AI agent requires access to a customer's personal information, including credentials like payment information. United has a problem with that, saying that "sharing account credentials with personal, third-party, AI assistants can expose sensitive information, and actions taken by these tools may result in unintended purchases, account changes, or use of MileagePlus miles." The carrier also said that using an AI agent to, for example, check in for a flight could violate federal regulations, including rules requiring travelers to verify in person that their luggage does not contain banned substances. "As a result, United is taking steps to restrict access -- directly within our digital platforms and indirectly via travel agencies and aggregators -- to prohibit use by unauthorized, third-party personal AI agents or assistants," said the airline, which is updating its booking and ticketing policies to reflect the new rule. "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies," said Henry Harteveldt, an aviation analyst at Atmosphere Research Group. "Flight searches cost airlines money, and undoubtedly United wants to avoid the expense associated with the surge of AI bot flight searches."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is facing scrutiny over an affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Now, The New York Times reports that Mr. Huang also had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, the company's vice president of health care and a direct report, raising questions about conflicts of interest and compliance with the company's policies governing personal relationships. From the report: The relationship, which has not been previously reported, was with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care, said the people, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information. Under Nvidia's code of conduct, employees are told to "avoid situations where our actions create conflict" including "personal relationships," and the company states that it "promptly investigates reports of misconduct." Many corporations have policies against managers having relationships with subordinates. Mr. Huang, 63, and Ms. Powell, 48, were captured on video being affectionate at a San Jose, Calif., hotel during a Nvidia conference in March, according to two of the people who worked at the company. The New York Times has not seen the video. Both Mr. Huang and Ms. Powell are married to other people. [...] One bystander captured the interaction on their phone, three people briefed on the incident said. Mr. Huang's security witnessed the bystander with their phone and sequestered them, the people said. They made the person an offer to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Further reading: Nvidia and Jensen Huang Face Shareholder Lawsuit Alleging Investors Were Misled About Spy AffairRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Charlotte Web shares a report from the Associated Press: A shareholder has sued Nvidia and its CEO, Jensen Huang, accusing them of deceiving investors in their responses to media reports about Huang's affair with a purported Chinese spy that threatens national security. [...] The news reports said that the Commerce Department was investigating Alice Huang's company, Singapore-based Megaspeed, on suspicions that it was helping to sidestep U.S. export restrictions blocking Nvidia chips from being sold to China. But Nvidia said then that its compliance team checked and determined that Megaspeed wasn't doing anything illegal. But, according to the complaint, the statements were misleading because they were made when Jensen Huang was having an affair with Alice Huang, who is "suspected of seeking to help smuggle Nvidia products into China." It accuses Nvidia and Huang of failing to disclose the affair and issuing false statements about Nvidia's relationship with Megaspeed, which posed a "material risk" to Nvidia's reputation and business prospects. [...] "As a result of Defendants' wrongful acts and omissions, and the precipitous decline in the market value of the Company's securities, Plaintiff and other Class members have suffered significant losses and damages," the complaint said. Had investors known the truth, they wouldn't have purchased Nvidia's shares "at the artificially inflated prices that they did, or at all," the complaint said. "Fun fact: Nvidia donated $25 million to Trump's White House ballroom fund," notes Slashdot reader Charlotte Web. UPDATE: The New York Times reports that Huang also also had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, the company's vice president of health care and a direct report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York has forced T-Mobile to remove a 50GB monthly data cap from its $15 low-income broadband plan after regulators found customers who exceeded the limit had their speeds cut by more than 97%, to just 650 Kbps. "Additionally, the [Office of the Attorney General (OAG)] found T-Mobile restricted [New York's Affordable Broadband Act (ABA)] plans to areas with 5G coverage, despite offering standard-rate 25 Mbps plans in 4G areas, and intentionally coded its website to hide affordable plans from search engines," reports RochestFirst. From the report: Under the terms of the settlement, T-Mobile must: - Eliminate data caps on its ABA plans and deliver guaranteed 25 Mbps download speeds.- Expand ABA plan availability to all geographic areas where it offers fixed-wireless home internet service.- Make its ABA webpage indexed and easily discoverable via standard web searches.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia's Yandex says 2.84% of customer data has been permanently lost following Ukrainian strikes on data centers in the country. "According to the company, recovery is impossible because of critical damage to equipment and the lack of backup copies on the platform," reports UNITED24 Media. From the report: Yandex clarified that customers who had previously enabled the platform's backup tools did not experience any data loss, as their information remained fully preserved. The incident has prompted the company to revise its approach to data protection and disaster recovery, particularly the default settings for cloud infrastructure. Under the updated policy, automatic backups will be enabled by default whenever customers create new virtual machines on Yandex Cloud. Users will retain the option to disable the feature manually through the management console. In addition to changing its backup policy, Yandex Cloud announced the launch of a new availability zone, designated ru-central1-f. The new availability zone operates from a separate location, improving the resilience and reliability of the services. The report says Ukrainian drones targeted three Yandex data centers in Russia over four days, beginning October 8 with a strike on a facility in the Ryazan region that houses two of the company's three supercomputers. A second attack hit Yandex's largest data center in the Kaluga region on October 9, followed by a third strike on October 11 targeting a facility in the Vladimir region that houses the company's remaining supercomputer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Trump administration's fight to stop suspected leaks of top-secret military information on LinkedIn can't sweep in "a vast number of confidential sources" of random journalists "who have no conceivable relationship" to the Department of Justice's investigation, an appeals court ruled (PDF) Tuesday. The order came after the DOJ asked LinkedIn to turn over 18 months of communications from targeted journalists who collectively published more than 1,000 articles on many different topics over that time period. The request was not limited to journalists involved in a controversial report from a news outlet that Trump said exposed confidential military information in a foreign country. (The outlet is not being named to protect national security secrets.) Instead, the DOJ cast a wide net, requesting extensive LinkedIn data on journalists who had any possible link to the journalists around the time the report was drafted. The majority of journalists have LinkedIn accounts and publish their contact information to encourage sources to connect on the platform, LinkedIn argued. So allowing that government overreach went beyond harming targeted journalists and threatened to undermine a critical platform where journalists frequently connect with confidential sources, judges ruled. Even more concerning, the Trump administration secured a secrecy order barring LinkedIn from telling anyone about the sweeping request for a year. That left journalists unaware for far too long that their First Amendment rights had been compromised, judges ruled. "A request by the government to scoop up reporters' records wholesale and ascertain the identity of their sources would tip the balance against informed discourse in a manner inimical to democratic health," Wilkinson wrote. He criticized the lower court for approving the request simply because the records were technically feasible to collect, emphasizing that "serious security and speech claims are in tension in this case. There is space under law for both." While declining to quash the order entirely, Wilkinson also directed the lower court to reconsider a limited exception to the government's secrecy order that would allow LinkedIn to notify an attorney representing the news outlet under investigation. Bruce D. Brown, President of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), celebrated the ruling, saying: "This ruling is a big deal and will quickly become one of the leading opinions in the area -- one we will be quoting from it for a long time. The court recognized that confidential sources are the 'lifeblood' of investigative reporting and that dragnet demands from technology companies to reveal those sources violate the law."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Under a new "Logi Game Day" initiative, Logitech is giving all 7,000 of its employees an extra paid day off to play GTA 6 when it launches on November 19. Employees and interns can use the day off anytime over the next year. Tom's Hardware reports: As for Logitech, the company believes that it's time for people to move away from the belief that playing games is a waste of time, hence its new initiative. It makes sense for a company that makes gaming accessories to say that, of course, but CEO Hanneke Faber argues that the company sees "how engagement in one sphere supports performance in the other." The hope will be that, by allowing employees to play games, a productivity boost will follow.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is shutting down its Apple Support Community forum on November 20, ending a user-to-user support platform whose history stretches back to the 1998 launch as the Apple Tech Exchange. The forum is already read-only, and Apple has not said whether the nearly three decades of community posts will be preserved or disappear when the site closes. Here's the full banner notice that's currently displayed on the website: "The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state. You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site. We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products." Apple told MacRumors that it decided to sunset the forum after a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.