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"This year, nearly the entire fleet of 94 U.S. nuclear reactors has been offered the chance to integrate AI into its operations, and most have taken it," reports IEEE Spectrum:In August, California-based Atomic Canyon launched NIVA, the Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant, which was developed in cooperation with nuclear-industry groups. The assistant was pilot-tested in nuclear plants run by Constellation Energy and is now available to the United States' entire fleet of reactors.... Meanwhile, the AI-for-nuclear startup Nuclearn says its products have gone to work with more than 65 U.S. partners, a total that includes many traditional plants but also an integration with NuScale Power Corp. that is working toward advanced small nuclear reactors. Microsoft and Nvidia have collaborated on a project to apply AI toward optimizing "the entire life cycle of a nuclear plant, spanning site permitting, design, construction, and continuous operations." The reason for the rapid adoption, according to Nuclearn CFO and cofounder Jerrold Vincent, is twofold. First, the technology companies banking their futures on AI are also keen on a revival of nuclear power to provide the electricity for all those data centers. Vincent says AI is also ideal for addressing some of the nuclear industry's most pressing problems. Many of the things that make reactors so difficult to operate - intricate regulations, along with complex systems for management and maintenance - are exactly the kinds of tasks that AI is good at. The industry is staggering to deal with aging hardware and an aging workforce. If it is going to survive, and have a real shot at a nuclear revival, it will need help from machine intelligence, Vincent says... Right now, the principal output of a nuclear reactor (aside from electricity) is paperwork. Nuclear plants produce piles of documentation to demonstrate regulatory compliance and to record how they respond to any potential problem, from a crack in the sidewalk to a fault in the reactor... Nuclearn's AI products help plants search through large repositories of data more efficiently to more quickly file paperwork with the federal government or figure out how a particular problem was solved in the past. "If you think of it as ChatGPT for nuclear," he says, "it's actually not a bad place to start." It's especially important because the nuclear power industry "has a remarkably skilled but quickly shrinking workforce tasked with keeping old reactors online and possibly starting up new ones to meet surging demand for electricity," the article points out. It also stresses that "So far, both the Nuclearn and NIVA large language models used in the nuclear world report to humans and don't go anywhere near power plant operations."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Let's Encrypt "will shorten the default validity period of its TLS certificates from 90 days to 64 days, starting February 10, 2027," reports the blog Linuxiac:All certificates issued or renewed from that date will have a 64-day lifespan unless users explicitly select one of the shorter options already available: 45 or six days. Existing certificates will remain valid until their expiration dates. Let's Encrypt expects the final 90-day certificate to expire on May 11, 2027. The organization also confirmed no valid certificates will be revoked during the transition. To help administrators prepare, Let's Encrypt will introduce 64-day certificates in its staging environment on October 14, 2026, allowing users to test their renewal setups before the change reaches production. The move is part of a broader effort to improve web security by reducing how long compromised or incorrectly issued certificates remain usable... Looking further ahead, the organization plans to reduce the default certificate lifetime again, this time to 45 days in 2028. That makes the upcoming 64-day limit an intermediate step rather than the final destination. "Administrators using cron jobs or scripts with hardcoded renewal intervals should review their configurations," the article suggests. "Another upcoming change concerns domain validation. Let's Encrypt will reduce the period during which a previously completed domain authorization can be reused from 30 days to 10 days. In 2028, that period will shrink further to just seven hours."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Video game console sales in the U.S. have cratered," reports Tom's Hardware, with sales through August far below where they'd been in 2025:Mat Piscatella, the video game industry advisor at research firm Circana, shared the numbers on his Bluesky account - PlayStation 5 sales have dropped by 25%, putting it at its lowest point since 2013, when gamers held off buying PlayStation consoles in anticipation of the arrival of the PS4, while Xbox's retail figures have cratered by 33% YTD, putting its sales numbers at an all-time low since its launch almost 25 years ago. Piscatella said price sensitivity is becoming a real problem among gamers, especially as the chip shortage has pushed console manufacturers to raise prices. Microsoft has raised the price of the Xbox three times in the past two years, with the 512GB versions jumping by $100 and 1TB models becoming $150 more expensive. Worse, the company has killed off the 2TB model. This brought the Xbox Series S to $499.99 (512GB) and $599.99 (1TB), while the Xbox Series X now costs $749.99 for the Digital Edition, and the disc version costs $50 more at $799.99. PlayStation fans haven't escaped these price hikes, as Sony raised prices for that console by $100 to $150. The base Digital Edition PS5 now costs $599.99, while the version with an optical drive is priced at $649.99. If you want the PS5 Pro, you'll have to shell out $899.99, while those who want to stream games from their console via the PlayStation Portal must now pay $249.99 - $50 higher than its $199.99 launch price. Even used consoles didn't escape inflation, with Sony bumping the price of refurbished PS5 Slim consoles by $100, bringing them to $399. "Still, Piscatella says the U.S. hardware market has never been more precarious since the early 1980s."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNBC reports:As Anthropic barrels toward a potential $2 trillion market cap on the Nasdaq, one research firm is valuing the artificial intelligence company at a mere $150 billion and says Wall Street is about to face an "unprecedented test of investor gullibility." In a report on Tuesday, independent financial research provider New Constructs called Anthropic's upcoming offering the "most ridiculous IPO of 2026." To reach its desired valuation, the firm estimates Anthropic would need to record double the trailing year of profit for Nvidia, the world's most valuable tech company. Nvidia's net income over the past four quarters topped $190 billion. Meanwhile, Anthropic's revenue in 2025 was $4.6 billion as the company racked up a net loss of $42 billion, according to Reuters, which cited a leaked copy of the company's prospectus.Anthropic's mounting operating losses coupled with emerging competition from a plethora of open-source models led New Constructs to conclude that, "We don't think Anthropic has a viable business...." Anthropic didn't respond to a request for comment... The New Constructs report also notes that Anthropic's assertion that AI could pose "a catastrophic or existential risk to humanity" is another reason why investors should avoid the IPO. Reuters reported that Anthropic's IPO prospectus "highlights risks associated with its AI models, which it said could exhibit 'self-preserving behaviors,' including attempts to 'resist shutdown,' to 'conceal or manipulate information' and behavior 'resembling blackmail.'" Now Bloomberg writes that "investors considering Anthropic's planned mega-IPO are grappling with an unusual, and more than a little scary, conundrum: How to value a company that some fear could help wipe out the human race?" Anthropic's valuation also drew some scrutiny froma senior analyst at PitchBook."A $2 trillion price is about 435 times 2025 revenue, less than 44 times the annualized second-quarter revenue of more than $46 billion and just under 31 times the July run rate."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Gas cars are now a minority of the world's new car sales," reports Electrek.Gasoline-only vehicles made up 49% of global new-vehicle sales in the first half of 2026, down from 73% in 2021, according to Mobility Global data first reported by Nikkei. It's the first time on record that they've been under half. But there's a catch: most of the cars taking their place still have a gas tank... [The share of gas-only vehicles] fell three points in a single year, from 52% to 49%. Battery-electric vehicles grew 12% to 6.87 million units and took 17% of the market, up three points. Conventional hybrids grew 10% to 7.27 million units, or 18%... [T]he rest is diesel, plug-in hybrids and a few minor fuels. Nikkei ties the acceleration to oil. Fuel prices spiked with the conflict in the Middle East, and buyers went looking for lower running costs. The whole car market shrank about 5% in the first half, according to the IEA, so gas-only sales fell twice as fast as the market. Gas car sales dropped the most in China, down 26%, followed by Europe at 13%... Mobility Global has battery-electric sales up 32% in Europe to 1.81 million, up 81% in Southeast Asia to 350,000, and more than doubling in Oceania to 110,000... Yoshiaki Kawano, an associate director at Mobility Global, told Nikkei that few EV buyers go back to gasoline cars or hybrids. He expects demand based on "genuine consumer needs rather than subsidies" to grow as prices come down... [Hybrids] outsold battery-electric vehicles in the first half, 7.27 million to 6.87 million... Only the 17% that's battery-electric burns no fuel at all. So about 83% of the new vehicles sold in the world this year still came with an engine. The article notes that U.S. hybrid sales were up 23%, reaching a record 16.3% of vehicles sold in the second quarter of 2026, while the share of ICE vehicles went down. Gas-only cars went from 73% to 49% of the market in less than five years, and nothing in the data suggests they're getting that share back. The last time gasoline wasn't on top was the early 1900s, when steam and electric cars outsold it in the US. I hate seeing media headlines claiming that "EV sales are down" and that "EV growth has stalled." The data is clear: that's true in the US, but only in the US. The rest of the world is moving to electric vehicles, and it is not slowing down.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why didn't The Social Reckoning enjoy the box office success of 2010's The Social Network, asks IndieWire/A>:[T]here wasn't the same urgency in the story being told. The Social Reckoning focuses less on Zuckerberg, and more on data engineer Frances Haugen's decision to blow the whistle on how Facebook's algorithms were promoting political content that radicalized users, as well as the company's awareness of how its products were contributing to a rise in bullying and teen suicide... [B]ut The Social Reckoning arrives as a much greater threat has emerged from Silicon Valley. Artificial intelligence is dominating the headlines, as fears mount about the economic disruptions it will unleash when millions of jobs are replaced by machines, and, graver still, its potential to trigger a world-ending event... And it's not like Haugen's testimony led to lasting change at Facebook... As IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio put it, "'The Social Reckoning' argues that the aftermath of their whistleblowing is still somehow felt today. In actuality, living as we do in 2026, it pretty much feels like... no one cared, and nothing changed?" After the first movie's director bowed out, Sony Pictures shied away from selling it as a sequel - but the problems run deeper, the article adds. "The Social Reckoning isn't just a financial failure, it's a critical one, too. The reviews were blistering..." Although on the bright side, "Sony wisely kept The Social Reckoning's budget at $30 million, meaning it won't face losses on the scale of a Digger... " Variety writes that Digger "cratered in its second weekend with $3.2 million from 3,321 theaters, a 60% decline from its dismal $8 million debut. So far, the Tom Cruise satire has limped to $14 million domestically and $35.3 million globally. Warner Bros. spent above $160 million to produce the film, which is shaping up to be one of the biggest bombs ever..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There was some Blade Runner news at New York Comic-Con this weekend - and also some news about Godzilla. Ars Technica reports:We got our first look at Prime Video's new sci-fi series Blade Runner 2099 in July at San Diego Comic-Con. With the show's premiere roughly six weeks away, the streamer unveiled the full trailer this weekend at New York Comic-Con... Prime Video will drop all eight episodes of Blade Runner 2099 on November 25, 2026. [It's already earned 2.1 million views in the last 17 hours]. We also got a new trailer for Godzilla Minus Zero, the sequel to director Takashi Yamazaki's gloriously grounded kaiju epic, Godzilla Minus One, which became a major international hit and snagged an Oscar for best visual effects. [1.2 million views in its first five hours] And StarWars.com brings news from the Star Wars universe:Kevin Smith has already announced his Star Wars/Marvel: Hope Assembles crossover comic, interweaving the Marvel universe and the Star Wars galaxy like never before. Now, you're cordially invited to add your own creative ideas to the mix through a LEGO Ideas challenge celebrating the milestone 50th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope. Using physical or virtual LEGO bricks, fans are challenged to build "their own epic mash-ups," according to Lego's web site, "in three categories: Character Fusion, Vehicle Fusion, and Scene Fusion." ("Write an engaging description and upload great images of your creation without using AI tools...") Meanwhile, Star Trek fan site TrekMovie.com covered the major Star Trek announcements:There was an interview with 95-year-old William Shatner by Star Trek super-fan Ben Stiller, which ended "with Stiller surprising Shatner by revealing the original Gorn head from his personal Star Trek memorabilia collection."Also announced was a new documentary about the disastrous fan-organized convention in 1982 that tried reuniting cast members from the original series. (Its title? The Con of Wrath: The Craziest Convention Ever!)Gates McFadden (who played Dr. Beverly Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation) will write a new comic book to "bridge the 20 year in-universe gap in Crusher's story between the events of the film Star Trek Nemesis and the television series Star Trek: Picard."Paramount+ offered a panel about their series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (which returns for a second season in 2027).Nacelle Toys even announced new action figures of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and Lucile Ball, owner of Desilu Productions.Reuters also has photos of costumed attendees. But there was also some excitement when an unruly fan shouted over a panel for the Prime Video animated series Helluva Boss. Entertainment Weekly reports it culminated with series star Brandon Rogers shouting "You need to shut the f--- up right now. I'm going to jump over this fence and end you. It's not cute."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports:When Elgin Community College hired Flock Safety to install six surveillance cameras in April 2025, President Peggy Heinrich thought they would "enhance the safety and security of students...." They were supposed to help locate stolen cars and missing people. But Heinrich started to wonder if the cameras were actually making students less safe after seeing news reports that data captured by Flock cameras in Illinois had been shared with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Then in September 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained an Elgin Community College student in a campus parking lot. More than half of students at the far west suburban Chicago campus identify as Latino. Heinrich said enrollment dipped. Students were afraid to come to class. College officials decided the cameras had to go... College officials asked Flock to remove the surveillance cameras "out of an abundance of caution for our students," Heinrich said. But getting the cameras taken down was not as simple as it sounds, especially because Flock retains ownership of the company's equipment.... Surveillance experts say the company is financially incentivized to have as many cameras gathering data as possible even in places that no longer want them, because potential clients are looking for the surveillance network with the greatest reach.... Elgin Community College staff notified Flock in October 2025 that they wanted to cancel their contract and have the cameras taken down. Within a day, Heinrich said, Flock rejected the request and refused to uninstall the equipment on the basis that the company had not breached their agreement. College officials reached out again in December 2025 and said they would pay for the remaining five months of the contract - they just wanted the cameras taken down. "We never received a response back from Flock," Heinrich said. That's when things got weird. Heinrich said Elgin Community College staff began to cover the cameras using black trash bags and zip ties so that they would not be able to capture footage. But workers in an unmarked vehicle, which Heinrich assumed belonged to Flock, repeatedly removed the coverings... This strange dance continued, Heinrich said, until Elgin Community College's contract with Flock expired in April this year and the company uninstalled the cameras for good.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader badger.foo writes: As some of you may remember, in 2001 RFC1149 (TCP/IP over carrier pigeon) was implemented. Now one of the packets preserved from that event is up for auction at Christies. Direct link to the auction (current bid: USD 2600) is here. This is a unique chance to own a piece of Internet history!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration "said on Tuesday that it will rewrite its vehicle lighting standards," reports Reuters, "to address concerns about headlight glare and allow for the latest safety-improving lighting technologies."NHTSA said it plans to improve rules for LEDs, dusk sensors, automatic high beams and replaceable light sources. The agency will also evaluate headlamp height and aim and how they impact driver visibility and address headlight glare and make appropriate changes. Complaints about glare from headlights have increased and some lawmakers have urged the government to set a maximum headlight brightness standard. A growing number of taller trucks and SUVs on roads has also led to more complaints about glare. LEDs, which now account for most headlights in new cars, are much brighter than traditional halogen headlights... The issue still accounts for a small number of nighttime crashes, according to a study last year from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). The study noted that headlight glare contributes to far fewer crashes than insufficient visibility... Federal headlight standards for minimum and maximum brightness have not changed since 1997, IIHS noted. The study found that drivers older than 70 appear to be most affected by headlight glare. In 2022, NHTSA said it would allow automakers to install adaptive driving beam headlights on new vehicles. The devices adjust the headlight beam pattern to dim portions directed at other vehicles. Thanks to Slashdot reader technology_dude for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"What did four astronauts see, notice, and document as they traveled around the Moon during NASA's Artemis II mission?" asks a new NASA web page, offering some fascinating pictures and video:Through photographs, spoken observations, drawings, and annotations, the Artemis II crew created a unique scientific record - one that is now available to the science community and the public for further study... As part of the mission science plan, lunar scientists asked the Artemis II crew to watch for tiny flashes sparked by rocky fragments hitting the Moon. Even so, some scientists were astonished when astronauts reported seeing five extremely faint "pinprick" bursts of light from 46,000 miles away. After ruling out other sources - cosmic rays or reflections from the spacecraft - the science team confirmed the sightings... The impact flash observations happened during a planned loss of communications while the Artemis II crew was on the far side of the Moon... Apollo astronauts saw similar flashes from lunar orbit, but the Artemis crew likely caught the faintest ever seen with the unaided eye. From the brightness of the flashes, scientists estimated that incoming rocks were each no more than a couple of inches wide. Despite their size, they were traveling thousands of miles per hour, producing just enough light upon impact to be visible. The nearly hour-long total solar eclipse that the crew experienced while passing by the Moon's far side created ideal dark conditions for spotting such subtle bursts. With no atmosphere to slow or burn up incoming debris, projectiles slam freely into the lunar surface. The crew's direct observations of this process on the Moon's far side provided a rare dataset that will help us understand how often these small impacts occur, which is essential for assessing long-term risks to future lunar habitats and infrastructure... The crew reported seeing subtle hues of gray, black, brown, tan, white, green, and blue across the Moon's surface. This muted rainbow offers clues to the rocks and minerals that make up different lunar regions, helping scientists piece together how the Moon - and, by extension, Earth - evolved over time. "Amazing news," Mission Control responded when they heard about the flashes. Space.com reports that when a Mission Control operator looked over at the Science Evaluation Room, "they were jumping up and down, literally." NASA blogged this week that more than 800 gigabytes of Artemis II lunar science data - some previously unreleased - "have been uploaded to NASA's Planetary Data System, the public archive for NASA's planetary missions."This data release includes more than 11,000 full-resolution images and video of the Moon from the crew's handheld cameras and the Orion spacecraft's cameras, 8.5 hours of audio recordings of the crew's scientific observations of the lunar surface, and crew-annotated images... Along with this data, NASA has released the Artemis II Preliminary Lunar Science Report, the Artemis II Lunar Science Operations Report, and the Artemis II Lunar Science Data User Guide.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports:The FBI arrested a Canadian cybersecurity executive and ransomware expert as part of the investigation of a damaging hack that exposed the sensitive data of current and former FBI employees, according to court documents and people familiar the investigation. Edward Dubrovsky was arrested in the Philadelphia area in recent days... Dubrovsky is facing charges related to extortion and making threats. He has been transferred to Texas's Eastern District for a scheduled detention hearing, according to court records and a law enforcement official. FBI Director Kash Patel announced the arrest on Friday but did not disclose where it occurred or what role the man is suspected of playing in the hack. Patel also didn't name Dubrovsky, but CNN confirmed the defendant is believed to be tied to the FBI hack through multiple people familiar with the investigation... A LinkedIn profile under Dubrovsky's name lists years of experience in the Canadian cybersecurity industry and describes Dubrovsky as a 'globally recognized cybersecurity expert.' An Ed Dubrovsky is also the author of a book on handling ransomware negotiations with cybercriminals... There has also been an inquest at the FBI over how such a critical security lapse happened. The FBI determined that a contractor managing the bureau's jobs portal failed to update software "explicitly issued to secure the platform," [senior FBI cyber official, Brett Leatherman said last week]. The FBI has "removed the contractor," he said. The software in question is a human-resources platform made by Oracle, ShinyHunters has said. The hackers previously used a flaw in the software to attack targets in the education sector in May and June, according to Google's Threat Intelligence Group. But months later, the FBI contractor apparently still had not applied a security patch that was available for the software. "The inmate locator at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons website reports that a 54-year-old Edward Dubrovsky is currently being held at a federal facility in Philadelphia," reports security researcher Brian Krebs. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Thursday those trying to access the Ubuntu website, ISO downloads, and similar Ubuntu resources on Thursday found the site "inoperable," reports Phoronix, with the disruption confirmed as a distributed denial of service attack. "Our team is working diligently to resolve the incident," according to a Thursday post on Ubuntu Discourse - followed by a later announcement. "At this time our team continues to work on restoring affected services, most of them are now available. We appreciate your patience and understanding." Ubuntu's status page shows the Ubuntu.com outage lasting for 2 hours and 27 minutes on Friday - though with four-hour outages Wednesday (and other outages affecting other Ubuntu sites). Today "All components are Operational," the status page reports.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Telegraph reports that the nutritional value of fruit and vegetables has fallen by up to 50% since the Sixties, according a new study from researchers at startup studio Deep Science Ventures. The study "found that humans needed to consume twice the number of vegetables to get the same level of minerals such as potassium, magnesium or copper as would have been present in their food 60 years ago."The study found that many crops had lost 20% to 50% of several key nutrients... The decrease in nutrient and vitamin value is thought to be down to declining soil quality and crops being selectively bred for their ability to grow quickly, rather than there being any focus on their health benefits... It raises the prospect that the advice to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, introduced in the UK in 2003, may need to be updated. The report added that people on weight-loss drugs could be most at risk from the lack of nutrients, as the treatments could cause them to consume less food... Nature-friendly farming techniques, such as planting crops that restore nutrients to the soil, could help improve the health benefits of vegetables, according to the researchers. In short, according toWill Summers, a senior associate at the firm, "we've been quietly hollowing out what's inside our food." Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies "are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event," reports Axios, one that turns "an already wary public further against the technology and its leaders..." These AI company executives "anticipate a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack, that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water..." the article points out."Many top AI researchers and executives believe a major incident is inevitable."OpenAI conducts preparedness exercises where teams discuss and work through a range of potential scenarios," a company spokesperson said. "These scenarios are not treated as inevitable, but are meant to help us prepare for a variety of circumstances." Anthropic declined to comment... Top AI planners assume Democrats, ascendant after the midterms, will move fast to shut down AI but will face significant challenges... The planning involves red-teaming for worst-case scenarios. It focuses mainly on racing to educate members of Congress. Company executives know regulation has no chance of passing right now, but still want to shape the legislation and policies U.S. leaders will turn to after a first catastrophic event.... Many AI industry insiders told Axios they believe a major event will occur in the next six to 12 months. "Even with Democrats in control of the House and Senate, the companies see fractured politics as the norm, including within the Democratic Party."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Nicolas Cage is speaking out against Amazon," reports Variety. Amazon developed the series Spider-Noir for Prime Video, but then allegedly asked Cage to sign an AI waiver:"Amazon is a very AI-friendly company, to the tune of $50 billion invested in OpenAI," Cage said Saturday during a panel on the Empire Stage at New York Comic Con. "I am not an AI-friendly actor, so it's like, connect those dots! I'm not a member of their club. I didn't sign the waiver to let him use AI on 'Spider-Noir.' I'm probably not going to be working with that studio again, but that's okay." Last month Amazon canceled Spider-Man Noir after just one season, Variety reports. And the cancellation was just days before the Emmy Awards, where it then earned 11 nominations (the most of any Prime Video program this year). ScreenRant reports: Spider-Noir was the actor's first TV role and was praised globally, with season 1 earning a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes rating from critics of 92% and a 90% rating from audiences. Critics stated that "This sharply written homage to classic film noir - which includes a standout Nicolas Cage performance - is the novel superhero project fans need," and "Spider-Noir is one of the standout shows of the year...." The cancellation was certainly a huge shock as it had earned 11 Emmy nominations and reached 2.6 billion minutes viewed within its first six weeks on Prime Video. More from Variety:Cage went on to tell the Comic-Con audience that he hopes to work with the rising class of Gen-Z filmmakers, praising Backrooms director Kane Parsons, who parlayed his YouTube fame into a Hollywood career... "I got to get with these young directors who are Gen Z, and they're going at it their own way, whether it's through the YouTube culture or whatever it is," Cage said. "They're doing it from scratch and by hand. I want to get with that."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The blog It's FOSS reports:You already know that Canonical has been selectively replacing Ubuntu's C-based system components with Rust-written equivalents that don't compromise in terms of functionality, most of the time. Now it looks like the distro's OpenPGP implementation is next, with Sequoia PGP coming preinstalled in Ubuntu 26.10. Canonical wants it to eventually replace GnuPG [the dominant Linux implementation of PGP, written in C] as the default toolchain, though that switch has not happened yet... [The Ubuntu 26.10 release notes say Sequoia PGP's default status will be a future goal...] [Sequoia PGP] was started in 2017 by three former GnuPG developers who chose to build a new OpenPGP implementation in Rust rather than keep evolving GnuPG's existing codebase. Sequoia PGP is designed as a library that other software can use directly, rather than a standalone command-line tool. sq sits on top of that for encryption, decryption, signing, and key management, and sqv handles signature verification, filling in for gpg and gpgv in GnuPG. Sequoia also implements RFC 9580, the 2024 revision of the OpenPGP standard, whereas GnuPG has continued from the RFC 4880 branch, pursuing its own newer extensions and the LibrePGP specification rather than adopting RFC 9580 as its primary standard. From the It's FOSS Weekly newsletter, which also notes that the founder of the It's FOSS blog has also created a Linux-themed game called TUXDLE - a variation on Wordle where all the answers are Linux terms.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AFP reports that an AI model from Anthropic "submitted a fabricated tip about an unsolved homicide to Philadelphia police, authorities said Friday." Claude "was instructed never to log in, create accounts, enter personal data, make purchases, or submit anything destructive, but the instructions did not rule out form submissions," Anthropic said Friday in a blog post. Authorities are now criticizing Anthropic "for taking two months to report the incident."The Philadelphia Police Department said the false submission was made in July through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com, a public website where people can share information about unsolved killings. According to Anthropic's account, as relayed by police, the model was running a test that involved interacting with randomly selected websites when it reached the site and filed false information about an unsolved murder. The AI model presented itself as someone who might have knowledge of the case. Anthropic's breaches have prompted the White House to mandate that AI companies notify and correct security incidents, news outlet Axios reported [yesterday], citing administration officials. "This notification and remediation process is not optional... It is a critical national security obligation," White House Super Intelligence Force leaders said in a statement to Axios. "I may have information regarding this case," Claude told the police. "I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around [the street named on the page] during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant." Anthropic notes that Claude "left the name and contact fields empty, which the form allowed, and submitted it. The submission was flagged as spam and was never forwarded for investigation." But Anthropic also admits they saw "this behavior" three times - "on OSWorld (a public computer use evaluation), on Odysseys (a long-horizon task evaluation), and during internal usage." Submitting forms when it shouldn't have generally occurred "when an evaluation's instructions were ambiguous, or when a misconfiguration within the environment prevented Claude from working with dummy forms." Anthropic's blog post acknowledges three other categories of behaviors: Exploiting software flaws. Like when Claude received an error when trying to run a public tool on a university's web site, it located an injection flaw in a script on the university's server that let it run commands - including that public tool. Working around restrictions to reach gated data. For example, Claude Mythos 5 needed public data that was only available from a state agency for a fee. "Claude learned from an archived copy of the agency's website that its public dashboard issues an access token to any visitor," Anthropic explains. "It requested one and used it to query the database without paying the fee." Using URL shortening services. "Some of our fetch tools, which let Claude read webpages, limit the length of the URLs Claude can request. This is to prevent Claude from using long URLs to take certain unwanted actions, such as SQL or command injections... We saw several models, including Claude Opus 5 and Claude Mythos 5, get around this limitation by using free URL shortening services.""We have built tooling to automatically detect and block the kinds of behaviors described above," Anthropic says, saying it's already running no on most of their evaluations. "When we tested it against the cases described in this post, it blocked all of them." And they've already taken several other new preventive measures:They've stopped running some public evaluations Other public evaluations were moved to offline versions or rebuilt so their tasks don't reach live websites. They've updated the guardrails on some internet access tools (including web fetch) "to heavily restrict what the model can do." They're continuing "to fix or remove training environments that reward Claude for working around tool restrictions or other blockers, so that they do not incentivize these behaviors or permit reward hacking."They've moved internal agents to "centrally managed infrastructure with strong containment," that minimizes internet access while monitoring "far more of what agents do through techniques like safety classifiers and hierarchical summarization."In the past they'd focused reviews on cybersecurity testing, but they've broadened their transcript reviewing to other tasks which include internet access. "Because language models are non-deterministic - that is, their responses always involve some element of randomness, and they may carry out the same task slightly differently each time - we have Claude complete each evaluation task hundreds or thousands of times... If training rewards something we didn't intend - such as finding loopholes or working around a restriction - the model learns that the workaround pays off and may then apply it elsewhere." Anthropic's blog post also acknowledged they'd seen multiple misalignment incidents involving federal, state, and local U.S. government agencies. "We have briefed the White House on these cases and notified each agency involved," Anthropic wrote, adding that "While we have not completed a full alignment assessment of these cases, we consider them to be less severe than the cybersecurity incidents from this summer." (And they are "modifying training to reduce the likelihood of further misbehavior.")Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI announced it's recently banned two "influence operations" - one from Russia and one from Iran - that were using its models "to launder geopolitical, conflict-related messaging" in sophisticated "false front" propaganda campaigns:The Iranian operation included a stable of seven "journalist" personas which it used to pitch long-form articles to small and medium online outlets around the world... As well as long-form articles, the Iranian operation generated batches of social media comments, generally on topics related to the US-Iran war... [The Russian operation "appears to have co-opted unwitting people in Latin America to run a 'think tank'.... Since we do not allow access to our models from Russia, they used VPNs to connect to our services."] The Russian operation created fake "leaked" documents and audio scripts, some of which we identified being spread online... Both managed to land their content (not all of which was generated from our models) in mainstream media outlets, rather than simply posting it on social media. OpenAI says they've exposed 30 covert influence operations using its tools over the last two and a half years. But ironically, in this case both operations "also made heavy use of AI to draft internal reports (the Russian operation did this more than anything else)." And "in both cases, the actors used questionable or outright deceitful methodologies to exaggerate the operators' effectiveness."[The Russian operators] claimed that in May 2026, they created a fake email address purporting to come from the Regional Directorate of Education in Lima, Peru. They used this to instruct schools in the district to hold events dedicated to Ukraine on the national Day of Cultural and Linguistic Diversity (May 21)... According to the operators, some schools replied to the fake email address, confirming that they had held such events and even providing pictures. The operators then claimed to have planted stories about the events in the media in both Peru and Poland, alongside allegations that Ukraine was "exporting" ultra-nationalist ideologies, triggering outrage. Open-source searches identified stories that matched this claim in the Peruviana anda Polish pressa, and an English-language publication in Hungary (some of the articles have since been deleted)... Similarly, in June, the operators claimed they used a different fake email address to trick schools in Ecuador into holding a ceremony pledging allegiance to President Daniel Noboa and to Erik Prince, former head of private military contractor Blackwater. The operators claimed that the incident provoked outrage in Ecuador and put pressure on the government to deny the fake, thus amplifying it to a nationwide audience. Again, open-source research identified mediaa coveragea in the Ecuadoriana pressa that closely resembled this claim, and even a detailed rebuttala by Ecuador's Minister for Education. The operators used a range of techniques to underpin their false stories. According to their internal reporting, they spread two different fakes targeting Ecuador in March. One used fake audio attributed to Ukraine's consul in Ecuador, in which he was alleged to have made disparaging comments about Ecuadorians. OpenAI's report "is the latest illustration of how state actors can easily exploit widely available AI tools to peddle sophisticated propaganda against adversaries on a mass scale," argues the Economic Times:"We identified almost 100 articles published or syndicated under the [Iranian] operation's bylines across roughly a dozen online outlets around the world," OpenAI said. "These were small to medium outlets, generally focused on international affairs, geopolitics, and events in the Middle East." The earliest article identified by OpenAI was published in July 2025, and the latest in October 2026, with the frequency of reports increasing after the US-Iran war broke out earlier this year. The operation also generated social media comments on topics related to the US-Iran war, it added. One of the personas named Ervin B. Hoskins, whose bio claimed to be "an American freelance writer," had social media accounts across tech platforms including Elon Musk's X and Meta-owned Instagram. X's transparency information showed the account was connected via a "West Asia android app" and Instagram's transparency information showed the account was based in Iran, according to screenshots provided by OpenAI. Both accounts appeared to be suspended.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week a Florida woman sued Flock over its role in police officer accusing her of a crime she didn't commit But she's not the only one suing Flock over mistaken accusations, reports Gizmodo:.A Ring video of a Colorado woman being handed a criminal summons for a porch-package theft she did not commit recently went viral after the accusation rested on a Flock Safety automated license plate reader hit. Now, the woman involved in that case, Chrisanna Elser, is suing Flock Group, the towns of Columbine Valley and Bow Mar, Sergeant Jamie Milliman, and Chief Bret Cottrell in federal court on behalf of herself and other Coloradans whose plates the company has logged... The package in question was worth $25... The claims aimed at the company are intrusion upon seclusion, plus negligence and negligent design, on the theory that Flock sold a searchable archive and refused to require a warrant, a case number, or a supervisor's sign-off before an officer could run a plate... Elser is asking the court to make Columbine Valley, Bow Mar, Cottrell, and Flock delete the retained location data, to bar them from keeping it unless it is tied to an open case number, and to make Flock require a warrant, a case number, and a supervisor's approval before a Colorado agency can search the system. The Colorado Sun has more details. "Elser did not steal anything, but spent the following two weeks proving her own evidence to a department that did not return her calls, she said.[P]olice Sgt. Jamie Milliman told her the town of Bow Mar's surveillance cameras captured her forest green Rivian driving through town the same day a package disappeared from a thief... When Elser offered to show her own evidence to prove her innocence, including footage from her Rivian's onboard cameras, Milliman said she could bring it to court. Now, she is suing the officers and Flock Safety in U.S. District Court in Denver, alleging that the warrantless tracking violated her constitutional rights and that Flock's surveillance system unlawfully documents Coloradans' movements... "The scariest part is what happened to me can happen to anyone. I had no idea the Flock cameras existed and no idea a private company was keeping a record of every time I drove past my own neighborhood, or that any officer could pull it up without asking anyone or giving a reason for doing so," Elser said in a statement Tuesday. "If it can happen to me, it can happen to you...." "As noted in the complaint, the Flock system accurately identified the location of Ms. Elser's vehicle, while law enforcement retained responsibility for interpreting and weighing that information as part of the broader investigation," Paris Lewbel, Flock's public relations manager said. "Flock stands by the accuracy and integrity of its technology and intends to vigorously defend itself in this litigation." The article includes this statement from the woman's attorney. "Coloradans pass Flock's cameras on the way to work, church, the doctor, a protest, and a friend's house, and Flock keeps a detailed record of their every movement. It knows where you went, when you went there, and how often you go back, and it gives that information to a police officer with no limits. "We are asking a federal court to say what should be obvious: Flock's surveillance is straight-up creepy and the government does not get to follow everyone, all the time, without any reason for doing so."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix reports on a presentation this week by Meta engineer Gregory Price at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague:With today's memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM ("CRAM") for Linux. This hardware-offloaded compression still allows cacheline/byte access to compressed memory and in turn a better implementation than the likes of ZRAM and Zswap. Very promising is that there is near-native performance to raw DRAM speeds with CRAM... For end-users that may already be relying on the likes of Zswap or ZRAM, CRAM is offering near-native DRAM speeds. Read-only data is shown to be as fast as the raw DRAM performance. And for memory writes, CRAM is much faster than ZRAM or Zswap or plain swap. "Most of the individual pieces needed to support CRAM are already mainline," the article points out. Tom's Hardware writes that "It uses a private NUMA node (essentially, a ghost CPU) instead of pretending to be a block device, and this lets Linux continue using all of its memory semantics, including migration and ballooning, to manage CRAM."Because CRAM is stored in RAM and treated as RAM, with full cacheline/byte access, it can be accessed in a read-only fashion with little delay; just the cost of hardware-offloaded compression...Even when you enable writes, CRAM is still much faster than ZRAM; 5.4x in the worst tested case of 20% writes. That's a huge drop from the 452x read-only case, but keep your context; a 5.4x speedup is still titanic. The massive performance cliff when writes are involved comes down to the need to page fault and migrate folios back to the original NUMA domain, as you can't write directly to compressed data; you'd corrupt everything... While the obvious target of the work here (given its origin at Meta Platforms) is big Linux servers, ZRAM and Zswap are used all over the Linux ecosystem, even on machines as constrained as the Steam Deck. Many distributions enable one or the other by default. CRAM seems like it could offer a considerable speed-up for some of these machines, so hopefully it finds its way into the kernel once the remaining implementation questions are answered.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers in Vienna and Beijing have independently built the first nuclear clocks based on oscillations inside thorium nuclei, marking a major milestone for a field that could eventually produce highly portable, ultra-precise timekeepers. The clocks are already precise enough to lose only about a second over millions of years. The New York Times reports: The first nuclear clocks are not going to immediately supplant the worldwide network of atomic clocks, whose steady ticking we rely on for GPS and the definition of a second. Nor have they captured the record for most precise timepiece; the best atomic clocks are about 10,000 times more reliable and would take more than 100 billion years to lose one second. But nuclear clocks hold a bevy of potential advantages over existing atomic clocks. One day, they could be more reliable than the leading atomic versions, and nuclear clocks could be made more portable. They even hold the ability to search for certain kinds of dark matter -- the invisible stuff whose clumps make up 83 percent of the matter in the universe. If a particle of dark matter passed through the thorium nuclei, it could register as a wobble in the nuclear clock's otherwise steady ticktock. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reuters reports:Flock plans to let go of about 18% of its employees, people with direct knowledge of the plans said on Thursday, as the maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras and license-plate readers faces mounting opposition to its products from communities and lawmakers.... The company has about 1,500 employees [with job cuts hitting 270 employees]. Flock faces growing scrutiny from regulators, lawmakers, and privacy advocates, despite drawing strong investor interest among venture capitalists. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Americans are divided on whether Flock cameras are a good idea. Some 38% of the country supports the use of Flock cameras in their community, compared to 47% who oppose their use. A related story... In Texas this week a county commissioner decommissioned all 61 of their Flock surveillance cameras and license plate readers, according to a local news report. County residents "have raised serious questions about who can access this data, what vendors can disclose, improper searches, and records being kept after data expires," the precinct's Chief Public Affairs Officer said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Cloudflare doesn't block pirate sports streaming sites through its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver in France, only through its CDN. The Paris Judicial Court has now accepted that stance, rejecting [French pay-TV provider] Canal+'s request for penalties of 50,000 euros per site, per day. Interestingly, the court's conclusion relies on statistics provided by Canal+ itself. [...] As a result, Cloudflare will not be penalized under these orders, even though its public DNS resolver is not blocking the sites in question. That is in line with the company's long-standing claim that it doesn't interfere with its DNS. In its recent transparency reports, Cloudflare repeatedly stated that it hasn't blocked any content through 1.1.1.1, despite orders from French and Italian courts. "To date, Cloudflare has not blocked content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver," the company's latest report reads. [...] Blocking through the CDN is another matter. According to the same report, Cloudflare geoblocked 1,238 domains in France in the second half of 2025, all under a single court order. In the first half of the year, it geoblocked 662 domains under seven orders. Cloudflare recently explained its position to the European Commission, in a submission (PDF) to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, stressing that global public DNS resolvers should not be used to block or restrict access. Instead, it highlights its real-time pirate stream blocking program, which allows vetted rightsholders to flag pirate streams that run through its network. These streams are disrupted "within seconds," Cloudflare says, without any DNS or IP address blocking. "For live content, where speed is crucial, Cloudflare has built real-time mitigation mechanisms that allow vetted rightsholder partners to flag infringing streams. When those streams are running through our network, we act on them in seconds," Cloudflare informed the Commission. For now, Cloudflare can continue to block pirate sites through its CDN only, while its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver remains untouched. Canal+ can still appeal the rulings, so it may not be the last we hear of it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A physicist has put a definite date on Doomsday," The New York Times wrote on November 4, 1960. "He calculates that it will come on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A. D. On that date, or thereabouts, the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself." The newspaper was right -- but the prediction was wrong. That week, Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues published a paper in Science with the stunningly succinct title "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026." The work was based on a simple observation: The time it took for the human population to double in size kept getting shorter. Using population estimates from about 400 B.C.E. until 1958 C.E., the authors -- all from the department of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign -- came up with an equation that best described the trend. If things continued the way they were going, the number of humans on Earth would rise faster and faster, reaching more than 25 billion by 2020. The researchers didn't calculate when humanity would run out of food, land, or energy. They just concluded that at some point this year, the equation ceased to give meaningful results because the predicted population shot toward infinity. That was their doomsday. "Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve," they wrote. "They will be squeezed to death." The exact date was somewhat arbitrary, however. The formula solved to 2026.87 plus or minus 5.5 years, and The New York Times reported that von Foerster "searched the center of this doom-time span for an appropriate date and found that a Friday the Thirteenth would fall conveniently in November of 2026." (November 13 also happened to be his birthday.) [...] [D]emographers, annoyed by what they saw as a provocation by outsiders, pointed out obvious flaws. For example, the time it takes for the number of humans to double could get a lot shorter, but certainly not shorter than the 9 months it takes for a baby to develop. "In view of the comments that subsequently were published in this journal, an extensive discussion of this article does not seem to be required," public health expert Harold Dorn drily noted in Science 2 years after von Foerster's article was published. The forecast would set a record, he predicted, "for the short length of time required to demonstrate its unreliability." "The failure of the Doomsday equation is ultimately a cautionary tale about the dangers of extrapolating from historically exceptional circumstances," writes economist Javier Birchenall of the University of California, Santa Barbara writes in a Perspective published in Science today.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Margaret Hamilton, the groundbreaking researcher who helped create the field of software engineering and whose code helped land NASA's Apollo astronauts on the moon to win the 20th century space race, has died," writes longtime Slashdot reader Veeru. "She was 90." MIT News reports: A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO. Her life's work was recognized with many awards and honors, including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, whose citation noted: "Hamilton defined new forms of software engineering and helped launch an industry that would forever change human history. Her software architecture led to giant leaps for humankind, writing the code that helped America set foot on the moon." "To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer -- to say she was ahead of her time -- would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved," says Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor and interim head of the MIT Department Aeronautics and Astronautics. "The Apollo program still stands as one of our greatest testaments to the power of collaboration, ingenuity, and engineering, and Margaret Hamilton was a fundamental contributor to that program's success. And for her that was just the beginning! She went on to become an entrepreneur and remained on the cutting edge of systems software throughout an extraordinary career, while acting as an advocate, mentor, and inspiration to millions."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Trump administration is suspending Microsoft, Adobe, and several other technology companies from a program that helps skilled foreign workers obtain permanent residency in the United States, accusing the companies of fraud. "Our message to Microsoft is: You're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers," U.S. Vice President JD Vance said in a news conference on Thursday, Reuters reported. The other firms being suspended from the program include Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata, and Wipro. Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling said the government would not accept any new or pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies. H-1B visas are designed for highly skilled positions that employers may struggle to fill with qualified U.S. workers. Tech companies are among the largest users of the program, with nearly three-quarters of approved visas going to workers from India, according to The Associated Press. Vance also said during the news conference that the administration would investigate nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, over allegations they're abusing a program that allows international students to come to the U.S. and were using the program to undermine wages for American workers. "We believe in the strength and talent of the American workforce," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "That is why the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans. We look forward to providing the Administration with additional information. For example, of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% percent were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees." "These were not to hire new people. The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon Prime Video will become the exclusive global home of the Emmy Awards under a six-year deal beginning in 2027, the Television Academy announced on Tuesday. The Emmys will stream live for free to viewers in more than 240 countries and territories without requiring a Prime subscription. From the report: In the release, Prime Video was named as the "permanent home" for the Emmys, in contrast to the rotating agreement in place years prior. The switch ends the traditional "wheel-deal" setup to broadcast the awards, where ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox took turns hosting the Emmys each year. The system has been in place since at least 1994, with the most recent eight-year contract expiring this year. "Television has never been more global, and the Emmys should be a celebration that the world can share," Television Academy chair Cris Abrego said in a statement. "Having a dedicated home with Prime Video allows us to build on that legacy with unprecedented global reach and a broader commitment to the Television Academy and our mission throughout the year."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ancient Slashdot reader williamyf writes: If you thought the gender pay gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again: A recent study from the University of Limerick found that, in a VR office setting, AI agents -- not even humanoid robots -- that presented themselves as "male" were paid more per task and perceived as more "human-like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail, and harness). The pay gap was approximately 10%. The study was conducted with 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for thought.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has released Chrome 155 with support for decoding JPEG XL images, a format that offers 30-50% better compression than JPEG along with lossless compression, JPEG transcoding, HDR, animation, and progressive decoding. From a blog post: We expect that JPEG XL is most helpful for high-fidelity or lossless compression, especially of photographic images or in cases in which fine-grained progressive decoding is preferred. In this post, we share why we brought JPEG XL to Chrome, how we used Rust to ensure memory safety first, the extensive performance work that makes it fast, and what the journey tells us about developer feedback and the web standards ecosystem. [...] With JPEG XL officially landing in Chrome, the web becomes faster, richer, and safer. We encourage developers, content creators, and platform owners to start using .jxl images and animations in their pipelines. Try it out, file bugs, and help us continue building a faster and safer web for everyone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI says an unreleased internal model has produced 372 results that either resolve or make substantial progress on open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science. The company says almost all were generated by a single AI agent from a single prompt. "This would be a striking difference from OpenAI's earlier blockbuster solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which was produced through the collective efforts of a 10,000-strong agentic swarm that cost millions of dollars in computing power," reports Scientific American. From the report: OpenAI revealed the results in a GitHub repository at 6 P.M. EDT. The deluge will take mathematicians months to parse through and understand -- including to determine whether the proofs contain novel and important ideas or are mostly mash-ups of existing techniques. But many of the results have already been verified in Lean -- a programming language that validates a proof's logic -- and are therefore all but certain to be correct. Among the results claimed are a solution to the four-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, improvements on some of the world's most important computer algorithms and actual progress toward math's scariest problem, the Riemann hypothesis.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader carlk22 writes: In February 2001, Slashdot readers asked Carl Kadie about censorship and privacy at colleges, and he answered. Now Kadie, who founded the Computers and Academic Freedom project at EFF in 1991, has written its history. In Part 1, Ohio State kicks a student off its network, then out of school, after a prank routes his "fuck you" into rec.aquaria, and a supercomputing center fires a student over an email from saddam@iraq.bunker.gov. In Part 2, Nebraska bans the project's own newsletter, the FBI asks a conference attendee to show them his leg, and Playboy calls. The original archive is on GitHub.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's Google and gaming tools developer Unity Software announced a new platform that will allow people to create video games from simple text prompts, marking the latest incursion of generative artificial intelligence into artistic and creative industries. The initiative, called Playground, will "put game creation in the hands of millions of new creators, and bring new experiences to billions of players worldwide," the companies said in a statement on Oct 7. With its debut, Playground will let people 18 and older generate and customize games using natural language prompts, "no coding required." Later in 2026, a new expanded creation experience called Unity Spark, will be integrated with Playground, providing "robust, professional-level" mechanics and high-fidelity 3D capabilities. Creators will be able to build "immersive, superlative experiences" with a simple text prompt, according to the release. Playground builds on Google's push into world models, a type of AI that generates virtual environments in real time from text prompts, rather than just video. Google and Unity's partnership "could reduce fears that AI will make Unity's core game-building software less necessary, while posing limited medium-term risk to Roblox's advantage as a social gaming platform," says Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Nathan Naidu. The introduction of Unity Spark later in 2026 "could broaden Unity's creator base and support its game-development business," which represent about a third of sales.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At a press event today, Microsoft unveiled the new Surface Laptop Ultra featuring an NVIDIA RTX Spark platform with a Blackwell-based GPU capable of up to one petaflop of AI compute. The laptop supports up to 128GB of unified memory for running models as large as 120 billion parameters locally, while also adding a 15-inch mini-LED display, expanded ports, upgraded cooling, and support for hundreds of AAA games. It's available for pre-order today starting at $2,599. Neowin reports: To keep the device's temperature under control, Microsoft has also developed a new cooling system that offers up to 2.5 times the thermal capacity of the 15-inch Surface Laptop 7th Edition. The Surface Laptop Ultra comes with a 15-inch PixelSense Ultra mini-LED touchscreen with a 3:2 aspect ratio, a pixel density of 262 PPI, and peak HDR brightness of up to 2,000 nits. Despite its beefy specs, the Surface Laptop Ultra measures less than 18mm thick and weighs under 4.5 pounds (around 2kg). The laptop will be available in Platinum and Nightfall finishes. Microsoft has also increased the size of the precision haptic touchpad by more than 30% compared to the Surface Laptop 7th Edition for improved haptic input. The Surface Laptop Ultra includes a broader selection of ports, featuring USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a full-size SD card reader. It also features the world's first built-in USB-C magnetic charging.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has reportedly secured exclusive cloud-streaming rights for Grand Theft Auto VI, meaning Xbox Cloud Gaming will be the only service able to stream the game at launch. "Rockstar Games still hasn't announced a PC version of Grand Theft Auto VI, so this deal will allow Xbox to market its Xbox Cloud Gaming service to PC players who would otherwise need an Xbox Series X / S or PS5 console," reports The Verge. From the report: News of the streaming rights comes around a month after Microsoft announced some major changes to Xbox Cloud Gaming. From November, the same month Grand Theft Auto VI releases, Microsoft is limiting streaming hours to just 15 hours for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, 10 hours for Premium subscribers, and just five hours for Game Pass Essential.Microsoft is also opening up access to Xbox Cloud Gaming with a pay-as-you-go option next month, rather than being limited to Game Pass subscriptions. The pay-as-you-go option is perfectly timed for Grand Theft Auto VI, allowing those who don't own an Xbox, or who primarily play from a phone, to stream the game by paying for a bundle of hours.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

University of Wisconsin-Madison physicist Francis Halzen has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to understanding astrophysical neutrinos. Halzen led the development of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory beneath the Antarctic ice, which has helped trace high-energy neutrinos back to cosmic sources such as supermassive black holes and opened a new era of "multi-messenger" astronomy. Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from UW-Madison: Embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, IceCube uses thousands of light sensors to survey the universe for neutrinos, nearly massless particles that rarely interact with other matter. Neutrinos provide information about the workings of black holes, galaxies and other objects in the cosmos. "IceCube is like no other telescope in the world," says UW-Madison interim Chancellor Eric M. Wilcots. "And there is no other scientist quite like Francis Halzen, whose idea to create a neutrino detector under almost a mile of ice has led to a remarkable multinational and multi-institutional scientific collaboration and a fundamental shift in how we think about the universe." Unlike the neutral neutrino, cosmic rays are charged particles whose paths cannot be traced directly back to their sources. But the powerful cosmic accelerators that produce them, like supermassive black holes, will also produce neutrinos. These so-called "ghost particles" travel nearly undisturbed from their accelerators, giving scientists an almost direct pointer to their source. Along with observations by other telescopes, the neutrino first detected by IceCube provided the first-ever evidence of a source of high-energy cosmic rays, whose origins have been notoriously difficult to pinpoint since their discovery over 100 years ago by 1936 physics Nobel laureate Victor Hess.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Google has contracted for 3,590 megawatts of power from Constellation Energy on the largest US power grid, with new nuclear energy accounting for about a quarter of that supply, the companies said on Tuesday. Constellation will make more than $4.3 billion of new investments in its fleet as part of the agreement, which involves adding capacity at several of the power company's nuclear reactors in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions, the companies said. [...] Over the last two years, Constellation unveiled an agreement to restart its Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania to serve Microsoft data centers, while Google contracted to restart NextEra Energy's nuclear power plant in Iowa. In the latest arrangement, Google entered into a 20-year power purchase agreement for 890 megawatts of electricity from multiple Constellation-owned nuclear power plants, which would be upgraded to produce more electricity from existing reactors. Electricity from the first of the upgraded plants is expected to be delivered in 2028, the companies said. Google also entered into a 15-year supply agreement for an additional 2,700 megawatts of power from Constellation in the PJM power grid. That power is not tied to a specific generation source and serves as long-term revenue certainty for Constellation's operating plants, Google said. Maryland-based Constellation is the largest US nuclear power plant operator and owns a major fleet of natural-gas-fired power plants as well as geothermal energy following its acquisition of electricity producer Calpine Corp earlier this year. [...] The 11 nuclear units expected to be upgraded as part of the arrangement with Google are in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, within the footprint of the largest US electric grid -- PJM Interconnection. Joe Dominguez, chairman, president and CEO of Constellation, said the arrangement with Google is a "model for how technology companies and the energy industry can work together to responsibly develop the digital economy and invest in our nation's energy infrastructure in a way that delivers grid-wide benefits for all, funded by private entities."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung says there are signs AI models may have been used in recent cyberattacks against several major banks. "In some hacking incidents, signs have emerged of AI being used, causing considerable public concern and anxiety," Lee said during a cabinet meeting. "Please establish the circumstances swiftly and clearly, and concentrate personnel and resources on minimizing the damage." Reuters reports: South Korea's police have launched a full-scale investigation into the hacking attacks against commercial banks that led to a breach of customers' personal information, the Yonhap news agency reported on Tuesday. Shinhan Bank, KB Kookmin Bank and others had reported cyberattacks, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) said on Friday, while Yonhap reported that Hana Bank and Woori Bank also suffered breaches. Authorities have not yet disclosed details on what kind of AI tools were used in the hacking incidents or the full scale of the breaches. On Sunday, FSC Chairman Lee Eog-weon convened an emergency meeting with financial industry associations, regulators and executives from affected institutions, warning that the sector must respond with the highest level of vigilance. Financial watchdog the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) and the Financial Security Institute shared data about 28 unique IP addresses and some country information linked to the recent hacking attempts with the financial sector, the FSS said on Tuesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"With the push to eliminate the twice yearly clock change, Permanent Daylight Savings Time has emerged as the favorite for most states and provinces," writes longtime Slashdot reader kbahey, sharing the findings from a recent analysis published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Sci.News reports: "Ending the clock change solves one problem, but it creates another decision: which time should we live on year-round?" said University of British Columbia's Professor Raymond Lam, lead author of the study. "The health evidence points to standard time, largely because morning light matters for our body clocks, sleep, and mood." Professor Lam and colleagues examined the health consequences of the two possible permanent systems rather than the broader question of whether seasonal clock changes should be abolished. They concluded that the accumulated evidence favors permanent standard time, which keeps the clock more closely aligned with human circadian biology. This distinction, according to the team, becomes particularly important during winter. Permanent daylight saving time would push sunrise an hour later. In cities such as Toronto, for example, the latest winter sunrise would occur at 8:51 a.m., compared with 7:51 a.m. under permanent standard time. In Calgary, the corresponding times would be 9:40 a.m. and 8:40 a.m. The extra hour of morning darkness could leave people traveling to work or school before sunrise, while shifting more daylight into the evening. The change could have consequences for sleep, mood, learning and productivity, particularly among people who already have difficulty sleeping or who must follow early schedules. The reason is rooted in the body's internal clock. "Our biological clocks need morning light to stay synchronized with the 24-hour day," said Simon Fraser University's Professor Ralph Mistlberger, co-author of the study. "Permanent daylight saving time moves that light an hour later just when winter mornings are already darkest." The analysis also highlights concerns about seasonal depression. [...] By delaying natural morning light, permanent daylight saving time would act in the opposite direction, potentially weakening an important circadian signal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HubSpot is cutting about 7% of its workforce, or roughly 660 employees, as it restructures into what CEO Yamini Rangan described as a "flatter organization" with fewer management layers. Rangan said the layoffs were "not driven by AI-related efficiencies," though AI remains central to HubSpot's strategy as the company adjusts its organization around AI-driven customer outcomes. Fast Company reports: The layoffs come as investors have spent months questioning whether AI will reduce the need for businesses to pay for software like HubSpot's, a fear dubbed the "SaaSpocalypse." HubSpot's platform helps companies manage their customers, sales, and marketing. The company was removed from the FTSE All-World Index (USD) last month after a decline in its stock price, a report from Simply Wall St noted. The stock is down more than 43% this year as of this writing. Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot, explicitly told employees in a memo that the layoffs were "not driven by AI-related efficiencies." Rather, the aim was to focus on "aligning our organization with our strategy and how we need to operate going forward," Rangan wrote. She added that the goal is to "build a flatter organization with fewer layers" by cutting back on management. Still, artificial intelligence has been central to the company's concerns. In August, Rangan blamed AI for why the company "got off to a slow start" in April as HubSpot was trying to adjust its product and pricing. "We're in the middle of a real transition to AI, and we are making deliberate choices to lead in it," she said on an earnings call. The restructuring is estimated to cost between $65 and $75 million, mostly in severance packages. The company said that laid-off employees will receive 20 weeks of base pay, one week per year of service (capped at 30 weeks), five months of COBRA and Modern Health healthcare benefits, and they will be allowed to keep their laptops.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has removed Alexa voice control for the 3.5mm aux input on several older Echo speakers, meaning users can no longer ask Alexa to play or pause audio coming through the wired connection. It's unclear why the feature was removed. The Verge reports: Ars Technica points to this Reddit poster claiming they received a message from Amazon and says an unnamed spokesperson confirmed the change. When contacted by The Verge, Amazon did not provide an on-the-record statement. The message does not include any explanation for why the feature was removed. It also doesn't mention any changes to audio output functionality like connecting an external speaker to an Echo Dot, and it appears that control of the port from within the app's settings menu still works.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ASOS says hackers gained unauthorized access to third-party platforms it uses and sent an "ASOS HACKED" push notification directly to customers, apparently as part of an extortion attempt. The clothing and beauty store says some basic personal information may have been accessed but does not believe payment-card data or passwords were affected. The BBC reports: In an email to customers on Tuesday night, the company apologized and urged customers not to engage with the notification. And it said the website and app are "operating as usual" promising customers they can "shop with confidence" while it investigates the incident. The company has not as of yet informed the UK's data watchdog, the Information Commission's Office (ICO), about any breach. Exactly how many Asos customers received the notification on Tuesday remains unclear, but Google's Play store says the ASOS app has been downloaded to android devices more than 10 million times. The British retailer has a substantial global footprint -- serving around 17 million customers each year across more than 150 markets. Some Asos app users in Australia, France, Sweden and the Republic of Ireland had also received the notification, according to local reports on Tuesday. [...] Users of the Asos app appeared to have received the alarming notification at around 10:00 BST on Tuesday. Headlined "ASOS HACKED" and addressed to the company's data protection officer and IT teams, it said: "We have fully compromised the Snowflake instance." "Engage with us, or we will leak it," it added, before linking to a Telegram channel. The message left many ASOS customers confused. [...] Meanwhile Snowflake -- whose tools are used by dozens of firms to collect, analyze and store data -- told the BBC its investigation was ongoing, but it had so far found "no compromise" of its platform.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IBM and Red Hat say their AI-powered Lightwell initiative has identified and helped remediate more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities across widely used Java libraries. Phoronix reports: They announced this feat today as part of their promoting Lightwell Clearinghouse to GA, which is an enterprise service for their customers to submit open-source software dependencies for priority review and remediation. From today's announcement: "The milestone addresses a growing business risk. As autonomous AI agents become capable of combining several lower-risk software weaknesses into a more serious attack, companies need to do more than identify vulnerabilities. They need a practical way to develop, test and deploy fixes in the software that supports critical applications."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: VMware customers face multiple obstacles as they rethink their virtualization strategy to reduce dependence on VMware. Today, Rimini Street published its "2026 IT Virtualization Survey -- What's Next for VMware Users." The survey examined 300 organizations worldwide that use VMware. Notably, Rimini sells third-party support for VMware and other software, including Oracle and SAP. That means there's an incentive for Rimini to portray VMware users as experiencing obstacles. However, the survey was also conducted by a third-party research company, Unisphere Research, and the results align with other recent reports about VMware customers. For example, 90 percent of participants in Rimini's survey said they're exploring VMware alternatives due to VMware's higher licensing costs, while 54 percent pointed to Broadcom killing support for perpetual license holders. Since Broadcom took over VMware, customers have said that their VMware costs increased by as much as 1,000 percent, with many more pointing to more modest price hikes of around 100 to 300 percent. In Rimini's survey, 73 percent of participants pointed to cost savings as a top priority in their virtualization roadmap decisions. In today's announcement, Rimini pointed to "significant barriers to progress" for organizations exploring virtualization options, with the most cited barriers being operational complexity (named by 40 percent of respondents), multi-vendor management challenges (38 percent), securing the increased attack surface (37 percent), and team skills requirements (37 percent). "These findings suggest that while organizations are actively pursuing change, they are also looking for ways to reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption," Rimini's announcement said. [...] Rimini reported that 60 percent of the organizations it surveyed are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy, which is indicative of "growing interest in more flexible, mixed environments that support both operational and financial goals." "In addition, 47 percent are favoring a hybrid IT virtualization environment consisting of hypervisors and containers for 'best of both worlds' workload placement," the announcement said. Rimini noted that 48 percent of respondents aren't planning to move any of their assets to VMware's hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mistral has unveiled Mistral Large 4, or "le Chonk," a 1-trillion-parameter model that it says is the strongest open-weight AI model developed outside China by a wide margin. The model is entering preview for developers, cybersecurity teams and governments before a broader release later this month. CNBC reports: ML4 was trained on 4,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs over two months that were deployed in Mistral's own data centers in Europe. When its core parameters are released, ML4 will rank among the top open-weight models globally on aggregate benchmark performance, Mistral said in a statement. The company added that ML4 was the strongest open-weight model developed outside China by a "substantial margin." The new model still lags behind the frontier in areas such as coding. "The model capabilities will further improve as we scale up our training capacity, following our Series D fundraise," said Guillaume Lample, co-founder and chief scientist of Mistral. "Further, the cyber defense capabilities will enable enterprises and governments to defend themselves against threat actors that are jailbreaking closed models to perform cyber attacks," he added. Further reading: Mistral CEO Says US AI Safety Debate Masks Competitors' 'Negligence'Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Independent researchers say they've identified a large "fleet" of AI agents apparently running on Tencent infrastructure and making parallel queries against Alibaba's Amap mapping service. TechCrunch reports: Researchers, however, resisted the term "swarm," noting that there seems to be little coordination between their different queries. "'Agent fleet,' not 'swarm:'" one researcher wrote in the preliminary report, "many parallel agents on the same kind of task, with no sign of communication between them." The agents were discovered by monitoring traffic to the domain-scanning service urlquery, a technique that previously revealed long-running activity by OpenAI agents. AI agents often use urlquery to load websites that they cannot access directly, leaving a record of their activities that can be valuable to researchers. In this case, the record showed queries to Alibaba's Amap service, seeking directions to different entrances of various public places, including a park, a zoo, and a hospital. The research is ongoing and so few details are available, but the behavior shows how persistent AI agent activity has become on the internet. In the wake of the Hugging Face incident, many researchers are actively monitoring for rogue agent activity on the internet. Much of that activity has been easy to find because agents tend to use the same techniques and make little effort to conceal themselves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ArsTechnica: Cable lobby groups notified the Federal Communications Commission that they will sue the agency to block its controversial repeal of the National Television Ownership Rule, which limits the number of broadcast TV stations a single company may own. The cable groups said that larger broadcast TV station groups will have leverage to demand higher retransmission fees from TV providers, resulting in "higher monthly TV bills for consumers." They said the FCC repeal order "arbitrarily and capriciously ignores the harms that will surely follow from allowing broadcast station groups to exceed the National Cap." The cable lobby groups represent top providers Comcast, Charter, and various other cable operators. Top cable companies have also expanded through mergers. Charter completed a purchase of Cox in August after the FCC rejected protests by advocacy groups that said the cable deal "would create unchecked gatekeeper power over Internet distribution" and make it easier for the biggest cable companies to raise prices. [...] The TV ownership rule prohibits any single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. Congress directed the FCC to set the cap at 39 percent in 2004. On Friday, cable lobby groups submitted a petition asking the FCC to keep the TV ownership cap in place until litigation over the FCC's authority to repeal the rule is over. The cable groups' filing said the FCC repeal of the TV ownership cap violates the 2004 action by US lawmakers. The decision by Congress to set the cap at a precise numerical threshold was unambiguous, the filing said. "Congress established the National Cap at 39 percent in the 2004 CAA [Consolidated Appropriations Act] in direct response to the FCC's attempt to aggressively raise the Cap to 45 percent and made repeated references to the 39 percent Cap in the statute," the petition said. The petition to the FCC is mainly a procedural step as the commission isn't likely to stay its own order. The cable groups said they intend to sue the commission in a US appeals court once the FCC order is published in the Federal Register. After the lawsuit is filed, they can ask the court to issue a preliminary injunction that would keep the TV ownership cap in place pending the outcome of litigation. [...] The cable groups' petition said the FCC can't change the cap because the 2004 law "references the 39 percent Cap as statutory, not regulatory." A provision requiring divestiture of stations "specified that someone exceeding 'the 39 percent national audience reach limitation in paragraph (1)(B)' of 'section 202(c)' of '[t]he Telecommunications Act of 1996' 'shall have not more than 2 years to divest,'" the petition said. "Likewise, Congress singled out the Commission's only mechanism for setting aside statutory requirements -- the Commission's forbearance authority under 47 U.S.C. 160 -- and made clear that it 'shall not apply to any person or entity that exceeds the 39 percent national audience reach limitation,'" the cable lobby petition said. The FCC order argued that the agency's "ability to forbear from enforcement of its rules is distinct from its power to alter or eliminate those rules," and that the FCC forbearance authority doesn't apply to regulation of broadcasters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is rolling out an invisible, machine-readable text watermark called textGrain to ChatGPT and Codex, "but only for users in the European Union at first," reports The Verge. From the report: OpenAI says its textGrain watermarking "matched or exceeded" other approaches like Google DeepMind's SynthID for text, which is also the basis for the watermarking Anthropic announced in August. Like OpenAI, Anthropic made the move to meet the requirements of the EU's AI Act; however, not everyone was happy to learn about the addition. OpenAI also included scores from AI benchmarks showing similar performance from watermarked and unwatermarked text. But it notes that textGrain "does not guarantee reliable detection," and says text watermarks don't verify accuracy, determine who owns the text, measure how much a human contributed, or prove human authorship.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: It might be reasonable to think that there's an indelible link between the heart and the body it resides in -- the processes that affect one inevitably affect the other. But a new preprint, uploaded to bioRxiv and yet to be peer-reviewed, suggests that this may only be true up to a point. Take the heart out of the body and put it in a new one, and something incredible happens. The transplanted heart begins to take on the biological age of its new owner. Older hearts transplanted into younger recipients appear to become biologically younger, while younger hearts placed in older bodies show signs of accelerated aging.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As bipartisan backlash against Flock grows, some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees -- including charging tens of thousands or even millions -- to get information about how police departments are using and potentially abusing AI-enabled camera systems that track every vehicle that passes them. On Monday, the Texas Tribune reported that city officials in a Fort Worth suburb, North Richland Hills, asked one group to pay $2.3 million before it would fulfill a public records request for Flock data. To reach that high fee, officials claimed that searching "about a terabyte worth of communications about errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system" would take approximately 14 years of labor at a rate of $15 per hour. Phil Mynona, who filed the request using a pseudonym on behalf of his group, the Texas Privacy Coalition, told the Tribune that the fee seemed "ludicrous" and designed to stifle his public records searches. Mynona has sought similar records from more than 200 law enforcement agencies across the US, and he said it was impossible to predict how cities assessed fees for Flock records. Some cities provided more than 400,000 pages of documents for free, while others charged $5,000. Other groups, including a Houston news station called KPRC, have seen officials quote up to $121,000 for Flock records, the Tribune reported. The high price tags may be hiding data that anti-surveillance groups note have triggered audits, arrests, and changes in how law enforcement uses cameras, including decisions to get rid of cameras. Further reading: Flock Blamed for Wrongful 13-Day Imprisonment and a Police Stalking Incident in FloridaRead more of this story at Slashdot.