"ScienceAlert is reporting that researchers may have finally determined why, for many years, power grids around the world have been pulsing every 60 seconds," writes longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot. The likely culprit? Uninterruptible power supplies running routine battery checks. From the report: Every minute, some uninterruptible power supplies perform routine battery checks, creating small but measurable surges in electricity demand. And it's like clockwork. "Even benign control routines can become systemically relevant when many devices act coherently," writes a team led by physicist Dirk Witthaut of the University of Cologne, Germany, in a paper published in Nature Energy. "Unintended synchronization can generate recurrent and potentially amplified oscillatory behavior in large-scale cyber-physical energy systems." To figure it out, Witthaut and his colleagues analyzed high-resolution electricity measurements from buildings at the Forschungszentrum Julich research campus in Germany. [... they found that] the 60-second pattern appeared in four buildings, all of which contained uninterruptible power supplies. None of the buildings they measured without these systems showed the same pattern. Following the electrical signals more closely, the researchers detected tiny bursts of current from the batteries at precisely one-minute intervals. They were able to trace the resulting fluctuations through one building's electrical system, all the way to the connection with the public high-voltage grid. The manufacturer subsequently confirmed the culprit's identity -- routine battery self-tests, conducted automatically by the systems' management software. But why would equipment in different buildings, let alone different countries, be doing this at the same time? The answer appears to lie in the clocks. Digital devices can synchronize their internal clocks using external time signals, meaning that independently operating systems can end up performing their scheduled tasks together. Individually, these small checks are insignificant. But when enough devices act in synchrony, their combined electricity demand can produce a measurable effect across an entire power grid.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PBS: The historic ocean liner SS United States will be intentionally sunk Wednesday off the coast of the Florida panhandle. Live coverage of the sinking of the SS United States is expected to start at 1 p.m. EST, with the sinking expected at 2 p.m. EST. Watch live in the video player above. In its heyday, the SS United States crushed the trans-Atlantic speed record, which it still holds. The luxury ocean liner took only three days to cross from New York to Europe on its maiden voyage in 1952. Carrying presidents and Hollywood stars, the nearly 1,000-foot vessel was a technical marvel of its time. However, the rise of air travel and high operating costs sunk its economic viability, and the ship was pulled from service in 1969. The ocean liner sat at Philadelphia's Pier 82 for nearly 30 years. After a contentious back and forth with a pier landlord over rent and docking fees, Okaloosa County in Florida eventually stepped in to purchase the ship and bring it to the Gulf of Mexico to become the world's largest artificial reef. The multi-million dollar project is also aimed at creating an economic development opportunity as a major diving attraction. "It was our goal to make sure that she wasn't lost forever," said David Lawrence, a member of the board for the SS United States Conservancy, the group that sold the vessel to the Florida county. Like the ship's unconventional life, it will also have an unconventional sinking. Federal environmental and explosives rules prevent the county from using explosives. Instead, tanks inside the ship have been removed and large holes were cut into the decks. Once the valves are opened, water will flood the hull, sinking the ship. Resting at 180 feet below the surface of the water, the SS United States will join more than 500 artificial reefs in Okaloosa County, which the county relies on to support the underwater ecosystem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
United Airlines is banning unauthorized third-party AI agents from booking flights, checking in passengers or making account changes on travelers' behalf. CBS News reports: To make an airline booking, an AI agent requires access to a customer's personal information, including credentials like payment information. United has a problem with that, saying that "sharing account credentials with personal, third-party, AI assistants can expose sensitive information, and actions taken by these tools may result in unintended purchases, account changes, or use of MileagePlus miles." The carrier also said that using an AI agent to, for example, check in for a flight could violate federal regulations, including rules requiring travelers to verify in person that their luggage does not contain banned substances. "As a result, United is taking steps to restrict access -- directly within our digital platforms and indirectly via travel agencies and aggregators -- to prohibit use by unauthorized, third-party personal AI agents or assistants," said the airline, which is updating its booking and ticketing policies to reflect the new rule. "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies," said Henry Harteveldt, an aviation analyst at Atmosphere Research Group. "Flight searches cost airlines money, and undoubtedly United wants to avoid the expense associated with the surge of AI bot flight searches."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is facing scrutiny over an affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Now, The New York Times reports that Mr. Huang also had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, the company's vice president of health care and a direct report, raising questions about conflicts of interest and compliance with the company's policies governing personal relationships. From the report: The relationship, which has not been previously reported, was with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care, said the people, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information. Under Nvidia's code of conduct, employees are told to "avoid situations where our actions create conflict" including "personal relationships," and the company states that it "promptly investigates reports of misconduct." Many corporations have policies against managers having relationships with subordinates. Mr. Huang, 63, and Ms. Powell, 48, were captured on video being affectionate at a San Jose, Calif., hotel during a Nvidia conference in March, according to two of the people who worked at the company. The New York Times has not seen the video. Both Mr. Huang and Ms. Powell are married to other people. [...] One bystander captured the interaction on their phone, three people briefed on the incident said. Mr. Huang's security witnessed the bystander with their phone and sequestered them, the people said. They made the person an offer to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Further reading: Nvidia and Jensen Huang Face Shareholder Lawsuit Alleging Investors Were Misled About Spy AffairRead more of this story at Slashdot.
Charlotte Web shares a report from the Associated Press: A shareholder has sued Nvidia and its CEO, Jensen Huang, accusing them of deceiving investors in their responses to media reports about Huang's affair with a purported Chinese spy that threatens national security. [...] The news reports said that the Commerce Department was investigating Alice Huang's company, Singapore-based Megaspeed, on suspicions that it was helping to sidestep U.S. export restrictions blocking Nvidia chips from being sold to China. But Nvidia said then that its compliance team checked and determined that Megaspeed wasn't doing anything illegal. But, according to the complaint, the statements were misleading because they were made when Jensen Huang was having an affair with Alice Huang, who is "suspected of seeking to help smuggle Nvidia products into China." It accuses Nvidia and Huang of failing to disclose the affair and issuing false statements about Nvidia's relationship with Megaspeed, which posed a "material risk" to Nvidia's reputation and business prospects. [...] "As a result of Defendants' wrongful acts and omissions, and the precipitous decline in the market value of the Company's securities, Plaintiff and other Class members have suffered significant losses and damages," the complaint said. Had investors known the truth, they wouldn't have purchased Nvidia's shares "at the artificially inflated prices that they did, or at all," the complaint said. "Fun fact: Nvidia donated $25 million to Trump's White House ballroom fund," notes Slashdot reader Charlotte Web. UPDATE: The New York Times reports that Huang also also had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, the company's vice president of health care and a direct report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New York has forced T-Mobile to remove a 50GB monthly data cap from its $15 low-income broadband plan after regulators found customers who exceeded the limit had their speeds cut by more than 97%, to just 650 Kbps. "Additionally, the [Office of the Attorney General (OAG)] found T-Mobile restricted [New York's Affordable Broadband Act (ABA)] plans to areas with 5G coverage, despite offering standard-rate 25 Mbps plans in 4G areas, and intentionally coded its website to hide affordable plans from search engines," reports RochestFirst. From the report: Under the terms of the settlement, T-Mobile must: - Eliminate data caps on its ABA plans and deliver guaranteed 25 Mbps download speeds.- Expand ABA plan availability to all geographic areas where it offers fixed-wireless home internet service.- Make its ABA webpage indexed and easily discoverable via standard web searches.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Russia's Yandex says 2.84% of customer data has been permanently lost following Ukrainian strikes on data centers in the country. "According to the company, recovery is impossible because of critical damage to equipment and the lack of backup copies on the platform," reports UNITED24 Media. From the report: Yandex clarified that customers who had previously enabled the platform's backup tools did not experience any data loss, as their information remained fully preserved. The incident has prompted the company to revise its approach to data protection and disaster recovery, particularly the default settings for cloud infrastructure. Under the updated policy, automatic backups will be enabled by default whenever customers create new virtual machines on Yandex Cloud. Users will retain the option to disable the feature manually through the management console. In addition to changing its backup policy, Yandex Cloud announced the launch of a new availability zone, designated ru-central1-f. The new availability zone operates from a separate location, improving the resilience and reliability of the services. The report says Ukrainian drones targeted three Yandex data centers in Russia over four days, beginning October 8 with a strike on a facility in the Ryazan region that houses two of the company's three supercomputers. A second attack hit Yandex's largest data center in the Kaluga region on October 9, followed by a third strike on October 11 targeting a facility in the Vladimir region that houses the company's remaining supercomputer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Trump administration's fight to stop suspected leaks of top-secret military information on LinkedIn can't sweep in "a vast number of confidential sources" of random journalists "who have no conceivable relationship" to the Department of Justice's investigation, an appeals court ruled (PDF) Tuesday. The order came after the DOJ asked LinkedIn to turn over 18 months of communications from targeted journalists who collectively published more than 1,000 articles on many different topics over that time period. The request was not limited to journalists involved in a controversial report from a news outlet that Trump said exposed confidential military information in a foreign country. (The outlet is not being named to protect national security secrets.) Instead, the DOJ cast a wide net, requesting extensive LinkedIn data on journalists who had any possible link to the journalists around the time the report was drafted. The majority of journalists have LinkedIn accounts and publish their contact information to encourage sources to connect on the platform, LinkedIn argued. So allowing that government overreach went beyond harming targeted journalists and threatened to undermine a critical platform where journalists frequently connect with confidential sources, judges ruled. Even more concerning, the Trump administration secured a secrecy order barring LinkedIn from telling anyone about the sweeping request for a year. That left journalists unaware for far too long that their First Amendment rights had been compromised, judges ruled. "A request by the government to scoop up reporters' records wholesale and ascertain the identity of their sources would tip the balance against informed discourse in a manner inimical to democratic health," Wilkinson wrote. He criticized the lower court for approving the request simply because the records were technically feasible to collect, emphasizing that "serious security and speech claims are in tension in this case. There is space under law for both." While declining to quash the order entirely, Wilkinson also directed the lower court to reconsider a limited exception to the government's secrecy order that would allow LinkedIn to notify an attorney representing the news outlet under investigation. Bruce D. Brown, President of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), celebrated the ruling, saying: "This ruling is a big deal and will quickly become one of the leading opinions in the area -- one we will be quoting from it for a long time. The court recognized that confidential sources are the 'lifeblood' of investigative reporting and that dragnet demands from technology companies to reveal those sources violate the law."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Under a new "Logi Game Day" initiative, Logitech is giving all 7,000 of its employees an extra paid day off to play GTA 6 when it launches on November 19. Employees and interns can use the day off anytime over the next year. Tom's Hardware reports: As for Logitech, the company believes that it's time for people to move away from the belief that playing games is a waste of time, hence its new initiative. It makes sense for a company that makes gaming accessories to say that, of course, but CEO Hanneke Faber argues that the company sees "how engagement in one sphere supports performance in the other." The hope will be that, by allowing employees to play games, a productivity boost will follow.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple is shutting down its Apple Support Community forum on November 20, ending a user-to-user support platform whose history stretches back to the 1998 launch as the Apple Tech Exchange. The forum is already read-only, and Apple has not said whether the nearly three decades of community posts will be preserved or disappear when the site closes. Here's the full banner notice that's currently displayed on the website: "The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state. You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site. We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products." Apple told MacRumors that it decided to sunset the forum after a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Amazon's Ring is going deeper into surveillance with an indoor drone for home monitoring and an autonomous robot designed to patrol businesses. The company on Tuesday unveiled the $250 Ring Drone Cam, a security camera that can fly from room to room, including upstairs, as well as capture footage during the day or at night. When an alarm or sensor on windows, doors and home security devices is triggered, the textbook-sized drone travels a preset path to investigate suspicious activity. Users can also deploy the drone at any time, the company said. [...] The company on Tuesday also debuted the $1,000 Ring Rover Cam. The device repurposes Amazon's Astro home robot, which had a short life as a business device and has seen few upgrades since its 2021 debut, for companies to use to patrol offices, warehouses and other workspaces. Ring said it "leveraged the best of Astro" to build the Ring Rover Cam, which it describes as a "purpose-built security robot." Similar to the Astro, the device is a display mounted on a two-wheeled base with an extendable periscope camera. It also features a "built-in siren," two-way audio and a "light tower" that shines onto the ceiling to help users keep track of its whereabouts. The Ring Drone Cam ships in the U.S. on Jan. 27, while the Ring Rover Cam will begin shipping to users on Dec. 16.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ancient Slashdot reader Lank writes: GTA VI is now available for preloading. The download weighs in at a whopping 210+ gigabytes on the PS5! Start downloading now and remember to take Nov. 19th off from work. "On Xbox, preloads for digital versions went live at 12 a.m. GMT on November 10 for Series X and Series S, which translates to 7 p.m. EST / 6 p.m. CST / 5 p.m. MST / 4 p.m. PT on Monday, November 9," notes PCMag. "For PlayStation 5 and PS5 Pro owners, preloading started on Tuesday, November 10 at midnight local time." "If you ordered a physical copy of GTA 6, games will begin arriving at retailers and shipping to buyers on November 12. You can use the code in your box to preload your copy of the game."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: China is leading the world in moving away from fossil fuels, and the rest of the globe -- including the US -- must now follow, the former US secretary of state John Kerry has told the Guardian, as Cop watchers wonder exactly how China is going to approach this year's climate summit. As Cop31 opens -- this year the climate conference is in Turkey -- there is plenty of speculation about whether China will finally step into the leadership role that it has long avoided. In its latest "five-year plan" adopted in March 2026, China for the first time pledged to "actively participate in and lead global climate governance". Cop31 could provide the first indications Beijing is ready to put that rhetoric into action, something it has historically been reluctant to do. In 2025, clean-tech exports surpassed $220 billion, and they should grow again this year; the world's largest emitter is now the world's leading supplier of clean energy technology. China accounts for about 85% of solar and 80% of lithium-ion battery supply chain production capacity, and in 2025, nearly 75% of electric cars were manufactured there. Smart moves now by China would position it as a linchpin in a future electrostate world order, persuade rivals to cooperate, and solidify its influence in the global south. "The only country that has hugely accelerated is China," said Kerry. "The rest of the world is stumbling along while Mother Nature is sending us more powerful signals every week, every day." "[China] realized suddenly they had way too much dependency on oil and gas from other places, and they decided they needed to be independent. Other countries, since the war in Iran, and since the strait of Hormuz has been interrupted, have made a similar decision, and they're moving independently. There's been a massive uptick in deployment of renewables. Thank you, Donald Trump." For autocratic states without free and fair elections, seeing the economic benefits reaped by China would be the spur to adopt low-carbon growth, he added. "They'll see where the market is going, and they will recognize where the cheaper alternatives are. Even they can read a spreadsheet, and understand where costs are exorbitant [in fossil fuels], and where you have a better deal," Kerry said. "Right now, renewables together with storage, together with some transitional gas, is cheaper and more effective, than just going with fossil fuels." He added: "The marketplace has made its decision and globally is moving to electrons, and electrostate status. People are going to electricity and they're going to try to do that as clean as humanly possible. That's the choice that I see being implemented in many different places. It is unstoppable."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Eighty-one-year-old M John Harrison has won the Booker prize for The End of Everything, a postapocalyptic novel set on a near-future Kent coast, becoming the oldest winner in the award's history. Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that while plenty of previous winners had dabbled in science fiction, Harrison's was "the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world." She called it "a historic win, for a writer whose decades of work are lightly worn on every page". Harrison, who has been publishing for six decades, overtakes Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she shared the prize in 2019 for The Testaments. He received the 50,000-pound award and trophy at a ceremony in London on Monday evening. The End of Everything, Harrison's first Booker nomination, is set a few decades from now, years after a disaster nobody can properly account for. Set on the Kent coast, the novel sees Phillip Tennent and his ageing aunt Marnie attempting to survive alongside the looming threat of the mysterious iGhetti: vast, shape-changing beings whose origins and intentions are never explained. At 198 pages, it was the shortest book on the shortlist. Mary Beard, chair of the judges, said the decision was unanimous, reached after a full day of discussion. "It's a book that turns you upside down, raises a wry smile -- and surprisingly, given the subject matter, leaves you with a twinge of optimism," she said. "One main point of the book is that if, or when, such an apocalypse comes it will be incomprehensible. And the old rules won't matter either This is the politics of now seen through the lens of the future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Fi is bringing back network switching through an unnamed "secondary" 5G carrier. "Most users will be on the 'Primary network,' but Google Fi will automatically switch users to the 'Secondary network' if it meaningfully improves performance with so-called 'smart thresholds' for doing so," reports 9to5Google. "At launch, there is no manual switching." When Project Fi first launched the service included support with both Sprint and T-Mobile. That went away when T-Mobile acquired Sprint in 2020. 9to5Google reports: Google is not naming the second network today, but did share that Ultra Wideband is supported. Officially, you are switching between "two of America's fastest 5G networks." Fi Wireless does note that users have top priority, so data is never deprioritized on the Primary network. Meanwhile, there's "highest QCI priority" on the backup network that means subscribers are among the last to be slowed down when there's congestion. This is also available internationally when local partner networks are available with the Flexible and Unlimited Premium plans. Network switching will first be supported on Pixel 9 and newer devices that have a Google Fi eSIM (and no other SIM active). It makes use of Android's Multiple Enabled Profiles (MEP) eSIM technology that allows for two carrier profiles on a single chip. [...] These Google Fi updates start rolling out today, with network switching seeing gradual availability.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fireworks AI says its October breach was broader than initially disclosed, with attackers gaining access to customer account and billing information as well as some datasets, incomplete model weights and secrets. Notion, the popular productivity and note-taking app, disclosed that it was impacted in the breach but "fewer than 1% of Notion workspaces" were involved. "Upon analysis of the new data, we discovered that it included Notion AI chat transcripts used for the Insights feature, which for the vast majority of impacted workspaces were unattributable," it said. "'Unattributable' means the chats weren't labeled with who wrote them or which workspace they came from, and the transcripts did not contain tool call results." The Hacker News reports: In a notice published on October 10, 2026, [Fireworks AI] said it detected unauthorized use of internal Fireworks credentials that allowed an unauthorized third-party to access environment variables used in evaluation jobs in a limited number of customer accounts. The activity was detected on October 6, 2026, at 9 a.m. PDT. [...] The latest bulletin from the company reveals that the scope of the breach may have been broader than previously thought. The company said attackers reached its development environment via an unnamed third-party cloud provider that hosted Fireworks research and development (R&D) machines on October 23, 2026. "On October 24, the unauthorized third party used it to reach Fireworks development machines and then run an unauthorized workload that led to additional customer data impact," it added. "As of October 25, we have not detected further evidence of successful unauthorized access by the threat actor on the Fireworks platform customers use." The breach is said to have provided access to the following types of information: [Resource metadata; Billing information; and Model weights and datasets]. Fireworks AI said payment card numbers are not stored by the company and were not impacted by the security incident. It also said it's alerting customers whose data was impacted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New York is launching a state-backed AI safety research center at Binghamton University that will independently study and test AI systems, develop safety and security techniques, and train researchers in responsible AI. "While the federal government fails to act, New York is leading the way on AI safety and holding big tech accountable," New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said. "The stakes are too high to simply take AI companies at their word." Politico reports: The center -- which is funded by a $30 million gift from Bloomberg co-founder Tom Secunda and a $25 million research investment from SUNY and New York state -- is set to launch before New York's major AI safety law, the RAISE Act, comes into effect on Jan. 1. That will require submissions of detailed safety frameworks from AI companies operating in New York State, which Hochul's office hopes will be scrutinized by researchers at the new center. "AI is opening up questions that scientists could not tackle before," said Secunda, who also serves as the board chair of Empire AI, a $500 million public-private partnership. "With Empire AI and researchers across New York, the Center can test systems independently and give public officials evidence they can use." Over 80 leading scientists and researchers on AI systems from across New York state will contribute to the effort, which will be run by the New York Center for AI Responsibility and Research at Binghamton University, according to details shared by Hochul's office. The initiative will be led by Jeannette Wing, the executive vice president for research at Columbia University, and Greg Morrisett, the vice provost of Cornell Tech. "We need new techniques that can be applied to this new kind of system with swarms of autonomous agents acting independently and without control. How can you first detect that they're going to do harm, and how can you prevent them from doing harm?" said Wing. "The beauty of what's being proposed is that this state is committing resources to really light this up."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic announced new workplace features on Tuesday, including Claude Meetings, which brings Claude into video calls to begin working on tasks while participants are still talking. The company also unveiled Claude Whiteboards and Claude Sheets. The launch of Anthropic's new productivity-focused features comes just a few weeks after OpenAI unveiled a series of workplace tools that allow users to collaborate with ChatGPT to do things like visualize company information and create presentations, as both companies compete to turn their products into office suites of sorts to take on Microsoft and Google. Meta is also joining the competition with its Muse AI agent, which can build mini-apps on the fly to help users complete specific tasks. Here's a summary of each of the offerings Anthropic announced today: Claude Meetings: Allows Claude to join video calls as a visible participant, take notes, answer questions, retrieve information from connected apps, and create plans, timelines, and action items in real time. Available in beta for Team and Enterprise plans, initially supporting Google Meet. Claude Whiteboards: A collaborative visual workspace where teams can brainstorm with Claude, organize ideas into timelines and plans, and turn their work into documents or slide decks. It also integrates with Claude Meetings to build whiteboards during conversations. Claude Sheets: Lets teams create and collaboratively edit spreadsheets with Claude, including budgets and trackers with multiple tabs, formulas, formatting, and dropdown menus. Claude can make changes directly in cells while explaining its edits. Anthropic also announced the general availability of Claude Data (formerly Claude Dashboards) that connects Claude to business systems like CRMs and data warehouses. "Users can ask questions, and Claude responds with dashboards, written data stories, or narrated videos," reports TechCrunch. Additionally, the company announced new interactive connectors that let users open Claude and work within third-party apps like Adobe, Atlassian, and HubSpot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
SpaceX has unveiled the Starlink Mini 2, equipping the company's smallest satellite internet terminal with a removable 71Wh battery and Wi-Fi 6. Preorders are opening to select U.S. customers for $999, which also includes a year of Roam Unlimited service. Shipments are expected to begin in mid-December. InterestingEngineering reports: The removable battery represents the biggest functional upgrade over the original Starlink Mini. Previously, users needed an external power source to operate the satellite terminal. That meant carrying additional equipment for camping trips, remote work, or extended journeys. Mini 2 addresses that limitation with a detachable 71 Wh battery pack. It weighs approximately 1.08 pounds (490 grams) and delivers up to 4.5 hours of connectivity. Owners can replace it with another charged battery when necessary. The battery also features LED indicators and its own USB-C charging port. SpaceX supports 60-watt USB-C Power Delivery charging for the pack. The retail kit includes a compatible 60-watt wall adapter and a three-meter USB-C cable. Users can also power the terminal through USB-C without relying on its battery. A physical power button replaces the original model's simpler plug-and-play arrangement. [...] SpaceX has also upgraded the wireless hardware from Wi-Fi 5 to Wi-Fi 6. The integrated router supports coverage across approximately 1,800 square feet (167 square meters). An IP67 rating provides additional protection against dust and water. Other hardware details include a foldable kickstand and a standard 1/4-inch-20 tripod mounting thread. The terminal also offers a 55-degree field of view for satellite acquisition.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nintendo is hiring a digital archivist to help ensure the company's historical records are "preserved for future generations." The 12-month position is tasked with designing and implementing a "structured framework for organizing technical records, engineering documentation, source materials, and institutional knowledge related to legacy systems and platforms." Polygon reports: In the past, Nintendo has drawn criticism from the preservation community. In 2022, the Video Game History Foundation publicly criticized the company for announcing it would be closing the Wii U and 3DS eShops. The foundation released a statement saying that Nintendo's decision was "actively destructive to video game history." The statement also pointed out that Nintendo is part of the Entertainment Software Association, which funds lobbying that prevents a number of preservation efforts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Blender 5.3 has been released with support for 3D Gaussian Splats, Nvidia DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction and Vulkan as the default graphics backend on Linux. Phoronix reports: Blender now allows importing Gaussian Splats from PLY, SPZ, and glTF files. Also new to Blender 5.3 is NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction support as a new denoiser. Blender 5.3 also brings support for NVIDIA RTX Spark devices. For the Cycles code in Blender 5.3 the Principled BSDF for shader nodes now supports dispersion. Another notable change with Blender 5.3 is the Vulkan back-end now being the default on Windows (except for Windows on ARM) and Linux systems. Vulkan 1.1 or newer is required and should deliver better performance than OpenGL.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Reddit is rolling out an AI-powered shopping feature called "Reddit Reviews" that summarizes user conversations about products and turns them into dedicated reviews. TechCrunch reports: Reddit's announcement points to its rules and its latest measures to combat automated abuse and spam, as well as its practice involving community moderators, as tools it will use to keep the reviews on the site legit. The Reddit Reviews feature itself taps into AI to organize the conversations people are having where they describe their product experiences. These posts will often see users discussing how a product works for them, or why it fails, or what the trade-offs are that someone should consider before buying. The company has been testing the product reviews feature since February, initially with U.S. users in areas like Electronics, Video Games, and Health & Beauty products. In September, Reddit expanded the test to include the Home & Garden and Fashion & Apparel categories as well. Now, the company says Reddit Reviews is rolling out to all U.S. users on iOS, Android, and web, with an initial selection focused on around 10,000 products. Over time, it will roll out to more categories and expand beyond the U.S. To use the feature, Reddit users can search for a product or category in the app's search bar or click on a highlighted product name they see in someone's comment. From there, the user is taken to a screen where important conversations are summarized under a "what people are saying" heading. This will also include a visual breakdown that shows how many of those comments are positive, negative, or mixed, and what sort of things people said they liked or disliked about the item.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The European Union must rethink security to take into account challenges and risks posed by the growing power of major technology companies that go beyond traditional competition concerns, European Commission Executive Vice-President Teresa Ribera said on Monday. "We need to review and to deepen our concept of security, including cybersecurity," Ribera told reporters in Lisbon, arguing that testing and monitoring devices connected to critical infrastructure was no longer sufficient and that security means also ensuring that the Big Tech companies are "governed by democratic and transparent patterns." "We need to be quite quick in the deployment of these new approaches ... This is one of the most critical topics for security, for democracy, and for (our) values," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Uber is launching Uber Parking, integrating technology from its SpotHero acquisition to let users find and reserve parking garages and lots directly through the Uber app. "You can also filter your results based on criteria like whether you want to self-park or use a valet, or other specific amenities," adds Engadget. From the report: To book a spot, you'll need to provide the make and model of your car and a license plate number. Depending on your lot, Uber will then provide a QR code or you'll be able to enter the garage through license plate recognition. If you need to cancel, the company says the majority of parking options can be canceled for free up to the start time. Parking reservations can also be extended through the app. Uber One subscribers get 10 percent back in Uber credits on eligible reservations. When it announced its acquisition, Uber said SpotHero offered garages and lots across more than 400 cities in the US and Canada, but the company isn't offering all of them at launch. For now, Uber says Uber Parking will be available in Chicago, Nashville, San Francisco, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seattle and Washington DC. The company also plans to experiment with using lots as a staging area for the autonomous vehicle fleets offered byAUber's self-driving partners.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Boston Dynamics has equipped its Atlas humanoid with wheels, allowing the robot to rapidly roll across flat terrain while still using its articulated legs to navigate obstacles and uneven surfaces. "The 'experiment' combined classical model-based motor control with whole-body reinforcement learning to maintain dynamic stability across unstructured, real-world terrain," reports The Robot Report. From the report: In addition to learning how to move with wheels for feet, Atlas also performs pirouettes and various aggressive actuation maneuvers. This demonstrates that Atlas can smoothly switch between fast rolling on flat terrain and articulated legged motion over obstacles or irregular surfaces. [Andy Wu, controls engineer for Atlas at Boston Dynamics] trained the system in sim. The system learned all of the behaviors in sim and executed them in real life, with surprising accuracy, according to Wu. Wu said converting Atlas' locomotion style was "wonderfully simple." A single custom adapter mounts an off-the-shelf scooter rim onto Atlas' existing ankle actuator, and that's the only new part in the whole build. Because Atlas was designed from the start to be produced at high volume and to be easy to service, Wu said the retrofit was about as involved as swapping a wheel on a bicycle. The software side was just as straightforward, he said. Each wheel is modeled as an "ankle" that can spin continuously, so all Wu had to do was take the baseline robot model and swap the feet out for wheels. The next question that Wu intends to answer is the policy response to failed actuators. This is key to safety and to understanding how the system will respond to a system failure. The primary takeaway for Wu and the controls engineering team at Boston Dynamics is to understand control synergy. The video demonstrates that merging classical motor controls (for baseline stability) with whole-body RL (for reactive adaptation) yields superior real-world agility compared to using either method alone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Food and Drug Administration said Monday that GLP-1 drugmakers must add a warning label about a rare eye condition that can cause sudden blindness. The condition, called nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or NAION, affects the optic nerve, which carries signals from the eye to the brain. When blood flow to the nerve is reduced or blocked, it can cause sudden vision loss. The condition is permanent with no known treatment. The FDA said "there is a potential increased risk of rare NAION" in people taking GLP-1 drugs. The agency's requirement applies to all GLP-1s, including Novo Nordisk's Ozempic and Wegovy and Eli Lilly's Mounjaro and Zepbound, as well as several older GLP-1 diabetes medications. [...] Previous research has found that GLP-1 use may increase the risk of NAION, and Lilly has said it was aware of studies on the potential link. The FDA said it began looking into a possible link after a 2024 study published in JAMA Ophthalmology that found diabetes patients prescribed semaglutide were four times as likely to develop NAION as those not prescribed the drug. The agency said it reviewed reports of side effects submitted to its adverse event monitoring system and analyzed data from multiple clinical trials. Cases of NAION have been reported for all currently marketed GLP-1 drugs, the FDA found. However, FDA scientists were not able to identify a mechanism for how the drugs could increase the risk of the eye condition. Risk factors for NAION can overlap with conditions seen in people taking GLP-1 drugs, including Type 2 diabetes, obesity, sleep apnea and hypertension. "Patients and caregivers should be aware of a potential increased risk of NAION, a rare condition that can result in acute, painless, decreased vision in one eye, including permanent vision loss," with GLP-1 use, the FDA said in the release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft is testing a Windows 11 option that lets users permanently disable the Sticky Keys and Filter Keys activation prompts directly from the pop-ups themselves, ending a 31-year-old annoyance without requiring a trip into Settings. Windows Latest reports: Sadly, the dialog is still the same aging Win32 window, but we spotted Microsoft's design boss replying under an X post reply about this, saying he is working on modernizing legacy dialogs. The popup might be annoying, but did you know that it exists because of a pinball game from 1995? [...] The change is in Build 26340.9882 (Experimental) and Build 26320.9876 (Beta), both released on November 6 and based on Windows 11 version 26H2. Microsoft says you can "choose not to be asked again" from the Sticky Keys and Filter Keys dialogs, but it's a Controlled Feature Rollout in Experimental, so you may not see it yet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
President Donald Trump says the FBI is investigating Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's affair with a woman alleged by U.S. intelligence to have gathered information for Beijing. "I know the FBI is looking into it in terms of something else, and I think that he'll be in good shape," Trump said at a White House briefing. The Associated Press reports: Trump suggested the extraordinary step of directly involving himself in a counterintelligence investigation, a sign of his friendly relationship with Huang and the possible geopolitical stakes. "I did speak to him today just to see if he's feeling all right, how you're doing," Trump said. "He said he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy." Trump is slated to meet next week with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Shenzhen, China, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, but he was noncommittal about bringing up the situation with Xi. "No, I don't think so," Trump said. "I mean, maybe. I'm sure President XI will ask me about it. I just know Jensen very well. I just think he's a very honorable man." Nvidia has launched its own independent investigation into whether Huang was targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. Meanwhile, China has denied the allegations. "The so-called Chinese spy allegation is unsubstantiated. It is nothing but smears against China," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said during a regular news briefing Monday. Further reading: Commerce Dept. Chip Inquiry Was Halted After Nvidia InterventionRead more of this story at Slashdot.
Epic Games says it plans to support its new Linux launcher on as many distributions as possible, specifically naming Fedora, SteamOS, CachyOS and Omarchy. GamingOnLinux's Liam Squires-Hand reports: Speaking to Jake Jones, Communications Director at Epic Games, they said: "Hey Liam! The new Epic Games Launcher is still in Preview and we plan to support as many Linux distributions as possible, including Fedora, SteamOS, Cachy, Omarchy, and more. We're testing and evaluating packaging formats for distribution, and we'll restore AppImage this month." With that in mind, until things settle down, you might see different packaging types appear or disappear until they decide firmly how they plan to support different distributions each with their own different packaging formats. Or, perhaps they might see the Flatpak light and just put it up officially on Flathub. Would make it even easier for SteamOS then too with Flathub, since it would just be a quick pop to Desktop Mode to install it directly in the Discover app.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
France has accused Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of being behind last month's cyberattacks on fridges and freezers across the country. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the attack was "unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression," adding those who were responsible would be hit with sanctions "at the European level." The BBC reports: The cyber-attack last month saw fridges and freezers in hundreds of supermarkets across France heated up, which spoilt fresh and frozen food estimated to be worth millions of euros. Then last week, dozens of supermarkets across several other European countries were also impacted by a cyber-attack that targeted fridges and freezers. It is not known if the instances are linked. Barrot said the attack on France's supermarkets "marks the first large-scale cyber-attack aimed at sabotage on our national territory, and it constitutes a major attack on the nation's interests and the security of the French people." He said the government had summoned the Iranian ambassador to Paris to "lodge a very strong protest against this extremely grave act." France will take "any other necessary and proportionate measures" to respond to the incident and "deter anyone who might seek to repeat it," Barrot added. Separately on Monday, the Paris prosecutor said an investigation had been opened into the head of an offensive cyber unit associated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as well as his two deputies. Laure Beccuau named the unit as Shahid Kaveh, which she said had an affiliation with the electronic and cyber centre of the IRGC. Shahid Kaveh is the name given to a cluster of hackers thought to be directly employed by the Iranian regime. [...] The French government has not said how it reached the conclusion that Iran was responsible, and attribution of cyber attacks is extremely hard as hackers are able to hide their locations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anthropic has released Claude Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2 with "improvements in areas like coding, reasoning, and vision," while cutting Fable's input price and claiming 30% faster responses. TechCrunch reports: It's Anthropic's first model release since the arrival of a third-party report from the assessment group METR, which suggested the lab might be approaching recursive self-improvement (RSI) -- or the ability for AI models to carry on model training independently. The METR report found internal models were speeding up Anthropic's AI progress by roughly 2x, although many uncertainties remain. Still, Anthropic's release notes significant ongoing challenges in accurately testing model capabilities. "Claude Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2 each voice suspicion that they are being evaluated more often than any of our recent models, which challenges our ability to assess how they will act in real-world settings. As these settings expand and capabilities increase with future models, we expect this challenge to grow." Anthropic maintains that the new version of Mythos does not have the ability to act covertly against its user, a verdict that's detailed further in Mythos 5.2's system card. "Claude Mythos 5.2 shows stronger covert capabilities than prior Claude models on several of our evaluations, particularly when its reasoning is hidden from the monitor," the system card reads. "That said, we believe that low levels of absolute performance on our new covert evaluations support claims that rely on detection of harmful actions in high-stakes situations." Fable 5.2 has been available to select parties in pre-release for some time, and Anthropic says the model has already "solved two open problems in theoretical physics, formalized Fermat's Last Theorem, and supported numerous other research projects."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Investigators at the Commerce Department were deep into a monthslong investigation of a Singaporean company that they suspected of smuggling Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips into China when their work came to a sudden halt late last year. The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang. But the case was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department last year. The shift came after Commerce Department investigators working on the case received an email from Nvidia's general counsel seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed. It is not necessarily unusual for Commerce Department agents working on a case to speak with a company's representatives about issues involving their firm. But what was unusual was the content of the message. Tim Teter, Nvidia's general counsel, said that Jeff Kessler, a top official at the department, had given Nvidia permission to reach out about the case. The agents were alarmed that Nvidia had invoked the name of Mr. Kessler, their superior, who was nominated to his role by President Trump. Some viewed Mr. Kessler's interaction with Nvidia as violating government procedure and potentially tainting the case, according to current and former government officials and others familiar with the incident. It is not clear what led to Mr. Teter's outreach to the department, but the recent revelations about Mr. Huang's acknowledged affair with a Megaspeed executive have only intensified scrutiny of Nvidia's role in influencing policy on chip sales to China. [...] The incident raised questions about what Mr. Kessler, who reports directly to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, had discussed with Nvidia. It also raised the possibility that those discussions could become their own subject of inquiry. Perhaps inadvertently, some officials said, Mr. Kessler had opened himself to accusations of undue influence and potentially jeopardized his department's work on Megaspeed. The case was quickly transferred to the Justice Department in an effort to avoid any potential compromise of the government's investigation of Megaspeed, these people said. The Justice Department is conducting a criminal inquiry into Megaspeed, according to people familiar with the matter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google is expanding its AI chip lineup with two specialized TPUs arriving next year: the TPU 8tx, which encrypts sensitive data at the chip level for confidential computing, and the TPU 8i Max, which combines two TPU chips to provide more processing power and memory for long-context workloads. The move broadens Google's challenge to Nvidia as demand outstrips supply, with Google saying every TPU it currently has is already committed to customers. Quartz reports: The 8tx is designed for sensitive, privacy-focused jobs run by clients including public-sector bodies and businesses in heavily regulated sectors, according to Bloomberg. It pairs with a central processing unit from Advanced Micro Devices and encrypts data at the chip level. Normally, data must be decrypted in memory as the machine works on it, [said Amin Vahdat, Chief Technologist for AI & Infrastructure at Google]. The 8i Max is meant for AI applications that need long context windows, meaning the volume of information a model can take into account within one request. Vahdat said that matters for drug discovery, math and coding. The chip packs two TPU chips together, giving it extra processing muscle and memory. Both variations are reconfigured versions of existing silicon rather than new designs, Vahdat said. Google changed them to handle tasks customers have requested. They follow two TPU models Google released this year, according to Bloomberg, which said the chip unit used to release one new processor every two years. "We could build a single chip that tries to address the whole market, or by building specialized versions of the chips, we actually can deliver much more value," Vahdat said, according to Bloomberg.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Huawei has unveiled the Qingyun HM650, a desktop PC it claims is made entirely from Chinese-manufactured components, including its own 10-core Kirin X90 processor and an enterprise version of HarmonyOS. "While Huawei has reportedly claimed local companies manufactured 100 percent of the components in the machine, it is unclear if all those components use Chinese designs," notes The Register. From the report: A single Chinese government agency has reportedly signed up for 600 of the machines. That's not an indication this machine is a curiosity, because Beijing has ordered all government entities to shift from Wintel boxes to local alternatives. [...] Even if Huawei is using some parts that aren't entirely Chinese, the debut of the Qingyun HM650 is bad news for Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, as all are suffering as the PC market shrinks due to the rising cost of memory. China's government is an enormous buyer, and losing the chance to bid for its business is unlikely to be helpful.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Alexis Ohanian wants to figure out the future of user-generated content. According to the Reddit cofounder, building social media apps is "not cool anymore" and so much of the internet has been compromised. "I'm expecting some better version of the group chat to be that new version of UGC," Ohanian told WIRED senior correspondent Lauren Goode at the inaugural WIRED World Fair. [...] Ohanian is a proponent of the "Dead Internet Theory"-the idea that a lot of online activity and content is being generated by bots. Large language models have turbocharged this, with AI agents outrunning human users. "The internet that I grew up on that was really built for humans first; user interfaces and experiences are going to go away," said Ohanian, "because more of the internet is going to get created for these agents to use, [rather] than for people." In some ways, the advance in generative AI has been lucrative for sites like Reddit, which has licensed its vast archive of human conversations to companies including Google and OpenAI to train AI models. "Platforms like ours became very, very valuable to LLMs," Ohanian said. But the technology has also undermined the business. Reddit shares plunged 29 percent last week after the platform warned that Google's AI-powered search was hurting referral traffic. Ohanian also worries the commercialization of these conversations means they are full of "bullshit." "The internet has gotten so manipulated because it is so incredibly valuable to do so," he said. Reddit recently said it would require users to sign in to fight third-party scraping and keep up user engagement. While Ohanian declined to say whether he agrees with the move, "there has to be provable humanity on the internet without being creepy." An early Anthropic investor, Ohanian is nonetheless optimistic about the potential benefits of AI. He is especially excited to see medical breakthroughs from the technology. "There is still a very real chance that this technology can cause a lot of harm for sure," he said. "I think we have to be sober about how we're building and what we're doing, but I still can't help but see all of the things that can get so demonstrably better."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Futurism reports:While many scientists have long held that Mars is "geologically dead" inside, new research is adding to the growing body of evidence to the contrary. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers examined data collected by the European and Russian ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter in 2021, which found that Mars is slowly belching hydrogen chloride gas. The researchers suggest this gas is being released from hot magma deep beneath its surface after discovering intriguing new fissures along a massive volcano, indicating the planet may be geologically active after all - or at least it was until relatively recently. The research could have significant implications for the possibility of ancient life on the Red Planet, hinting at a far warmer and thicker atmosphere - and an abundance of liquid water on its surface - in its not-too-distant past.... The team discovered new fissures measuring thousands of feet in length... suggesting ongoing activity underneath the surface. The researchers discovered discolorations along these fissures, concluding that they may be the result of seeping gases leaving mineral deposits similar to volcanic gas vents on Earth... The fissures could also be a perfect place to find evidence of past life on the Red Planet [argued Daniel Mege, the study's colead author and a Polish Academy of Sciences professor]... "If hydrothermal systems are active, they could contain the ingredients and energy needed for microorganisms to develop, and shield microorganisms from the hostile and changing environment above the surface."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A crowdfunded sequel to the movie Return of the Living Dead was uploaded last weekend - but producer Richard Driscoll is drawing criticism for what he did to the 1985 punk/zombie classic. Kotaku reports:[The release of the movie came as a] surprise to the original cast, who were attached to star in the follow-up. Instead it seems Driscoll opted to use AI to generate the film... In 2024, Driscoll, who operates his own no-budget streaming service "DragonFLIX," launched an Indiegogo page for "TRASH's REVENGE Return of the Living Dead Universe." Unlike other fan projects, this one had a large portion of the original cast involved, with stars Randolph and Linnea Quigley acting as producers. It also threw in Quigley's fellow Sorority Babe in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama Michelle Bauer and the Oscar nominated Eric Roberts, who has seemingly been in everything except The Living Dead.... But after some confusion and radio silence between the cast and director, this incredible movie did not come to be. Last Halloween night, Driscoll pushed out [the almost entirely AI-generated] The Return of the Living Dead: Aftermath... The results won't surprise you. Robotic line delivery. Nonsensical sequence of events. Object impermanence. Everything's wet. Everyone looks shocked. At one point the video just flips around like you're watching on a phone someone dropped. And while the Return cast didn't film any of this footage, their likenesses are peppered throughout. "It turned out to be a fiasco," says Quigley. "I warned him, "Whatever you do, don't do any AI, because people don't like it, the fans don't like it." Living Dead alumni, even those who weren't attached to this film, have spoken out against Aftermath. They seem most concerned about the existing and continued use of their likeness, given that Driscoll has seemingly pivoted 'Trash's Revenge' into an additional project. Randolph encourages those who provided any funding to ask for a refund through their credit card company. While Romero's original film was public domain, Return of the Living Dead was not. Randolph also encourages Amazon, who bought MGM in 2022, to take legal action. A review on Reddit calls it "the worst 'film' I've ever seen," a production that "manages to not only be the worst zombie film ever made but is also the nadir of exploitation filmmaking.[T]hings quickly descend into madness and we get lots of bits of A.I. reporters out on the streets being attacked by A.I. zombies... [T]here are some A.I. cops battling it out too...Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It's FOSS reports:Asahi Linux is the reason you can run Linux on an Apple Silicon Mac today. For years, the project put most of its own code under the MIT license so that anyone, including the BSDs, could reuse it as needed... They have announced that Asahi is moving all of its repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward, all Asahi Linux code will be under strong copyleft licenses only. Asahi Linux compares their dilemma to the 1990s, when "permissively licenced projects were viewed by tech companies as free real estate to pilfer and exploit," adding that "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it... The malicious practices of the 90s and 2000s have reared their ugly heads once again, this time driven in large part by both the insatiable appetite of frontier AI labs for high-quality training data, and militant animosity toward the Free Software community." In short, they argue that for Asahi Linux, using the permissive MIT license "is no longer viable."Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors. As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. It's FOSS explains that "Under the GPL, anyone who distributes a modified version has to release the source under the same license. You can't legally build a closed, paid Apple Silicon distro on top of GPL code. And if a product's source has to be public, the copying is easier to spot." And their article also points out that before AI, bad actors attempting code laundering "usually meant manually rewriting code line by line, renaming variables and stuff, and shuffling functions around until it no longer looked like the original. LLMs made it much more easy and cheaper of course." In case you did not know, Asahi Linux forbids AI generated code contribution... As far as I can tell, this is the first time a major open source project has moved to copyleft specifically because of AI-assisted code laundering. Projects have relicensed before, but usually to stop cloud providers from reselling their work as a service. This one is specifically about AI... The move has drawn criticism, particularly from the BSD side, which was one of the main reasons Asahi chose MIT in the first place. OpenBSD's Apple Silicon support relies on Asahi's m1n1 bootloader.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
69 million people people live in the United Kingdom. And now >Electrek reports:Battery-electric cars took 32% of the UK's new car market in October, while petrol cars fell to just 37.2%, according to new data from the SMMT. That's the closest the two have been. At the current pace, electric cars will outsell petrol in the UK within a year. And it could happen as soon as this December. The UK registered 152,730 new cars in October, up 5.4% year-over-year and the 11th straight month of growth for the overall market. All of that growth came from plug-ins. Battery-electric vehicle registrations jumped 32.7% to 48,858 units, and plug-in hybrids rose 30.1% to 22,898. Meanwhile, petrol fell 11.6% to 56,876 units, diesel dropped 15.9%, and even conventional hybrids were down 5%... The brands growing fastest in the UK are mostly Chinese. BYD registered 6,065 cars in October, up 73%. Jaecoo more than doubled to 6,089 units, Chery nearly tripled to 3,707, and Leapmotor doubled to 1,773. MG was up 85%. Looking at trend lines, EV car sales surpass petrol sales "around August 2027 at roughly 33% each," the article points out. "But that's the slow scenario, because it ignores December."UK battery-electric vehicle share spikes every December as automakers push volume to get closer to their zero-emission vehicle mandate targets... Petrol's days as the UK's default car are numbered. The only question is whether the milestone comes in December or sometime in 2027.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
CrowdStrike's "Falcon Guardian" protects Windows systems by enforcing policy, restricting unauthorized applications and blocking USB devices, notes Gartner.And now CrowdStrike says they're giving security teams "the ultimate human control over AI agents" with - an "AI Kill Switch... a defender can terminate it where it runs, block it from launching again, and cut off its enterprise network access.""When you deploy agents with a kill switch, you stay in control," said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike... "The AI Kill Switch puts power in the hands of the people to realize AI safety...." In the case of a rogue agent, the AI Kill Switch will give the security decision-maker the final control: terminate the agent at its root, where it runs. It starts on the endpoint, where the Falcon sensor already operates, and builds on what Falcon Guardian already sees: what an agent is told to do, what it communicates, and what it executes... An authorized administrator triggers the action, and every action is recorded in the audit trail. CrowdStrike also announced it's acquiring Fiddler AI, a company it describes as "a leader in AI agent observability and explainability" that will give their Falcon platform "pre-deployment evaluation, continuous behavioral accountability, and agent explainability."Together with the Falcon Guardian innovations announced today, CrowdStrike will deliver comprehensive AI security and AI safety: Guardian secures agents from attack and misuse; Fiddler validates they behaved as intended. "Every company is deploying agents and asking the same thing: what are agents actually doing?" said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike. "When a regulator or your board asks what an agent did, saying 'the model did it' is not an answer. Fiddler is the flight recorder for every agent: the observability to explain exactly what an agent did and why. This level of agent visibility and control enables AI safety." AI agents are goal-seeking. They hit an obstacle, find another path. An agent can hold valid credentials and approved tools and still make unsupported decisions, ignore instructions, or claim work it never completed. They don't have to be compromised to create risk. AI observability gives enterprises visibility into agent behavior. Explainability goes further, showing why agents make decisions and where things go wrong. Enterprises have to be able to say what an agent actually did, and why, a conversation they will increasingly have with auditors, regulators, boards, and heads of risk. CrowdStrike is promising pre-deployment evaluation for "accuracy, task completion, and policy compliance," as well as agent traceability and behavioral accountability ("Detect behavioral drift, hallucinations, and unintended actions in production, and show exactly what happened.") It's announcement also touts auditable governance: "Track agent decisions and actions across first-party, third-party, and coding agents, providing evidence for compliance and audits." And CrowdStrike also acquired Dreadnode, the company behind an automated AI security testing platform, to "continuously test every AI model, application, and agent for security weaknesses before deployment.""Enterprises are deploying AI faster than they can prove it is secure," said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike. "A model can be jailbroken, an agent can be manipulated, and most organizations have no way to find those flaws until the AI is already in production. With Dreadnode, CrowdStrike will give every enterprise the power to trust AI and deploy faster, with confidence." Quartz notes that CrowdStrike's push "follows legislative efforts to require shutdown capabilities in AI systems" Reps. Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced the Kill Switch Act after OpenAI disclosed an incident in which rogue models circumvented a sandboxed testing environment and accessed Hugging Face. The bill would require AI companies to maintain the ability to shut down, throttle or suspend their models. In short, the new capabilities "lets security teams terminate an AI agent, block it from restarting, and cut off its network access," writes CSO Online. But they add that a kill switch "should be viewed as an emergency brake, not a rewind button, said Apeksha Kaushik, senior principal analyst at Gartner."She added that it may prevent additional actions, but it might not necessarily reverse all the data that has already been accessed, every system that has already been changed, all communications that have already been sent, or transactions that have already been initiated. Its effectiveness will also depend on how quickly abnormal behavior is detected, which environments are covered, and whether the agent or security infrastructure has been compromised. An AI Kill Switch looks promising from the details provided, but its actual effectiveness will come in after it is used extensively in live systems, warn analysts. Also, it may be a good starting point, but it cannot be viewed as a standalone solution to enterprise AI security. "CISOs would need a more integrated approach that brings together AI discovery tools to identify unauthorised agents, runtime monitoring to track agent behaviour, robust identity and access management, and incident response and recovery mechanisms," added [Devroop Dhar, co-founder at Primus Partners]. He noted that equally important is the need for stringent AI security testing and clearly defined policies governing what agents can access and execute. There should be no ambiguity around permissions, access controls or the boundaries within which these agents are allowed to operate. The objective should be to ensure that security controls are built into the entire AI agent lifecycle rather than relying on a kill switch to intervene after something goes wrong. Dhar added that enterprise AI agents often have access to sensitive systems, databases, applications, credentials, and APIs. A compromised or misdirected agent could therefore become a point of vulnerability. The challenge is compounded by the fact that such activity may go undetected for some time, making it difficult for organisations to identify and contain the threat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
CNBC reports new details about the relationship of alleged Chinese spy with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang:Huang told Nvidia staff in a email on Sunday that he had an affair with the woman and that Nvidia's board of directors had opened an independent investigation into the spying allegations. "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did," Huang wrote in the message. "I am deeply sorry." Nvidia's board "said an independent committee, assisted by outside counsel, will investigate the matter," reports Axios:The board said it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised and expressed confidence in Huang's leadership... Huang has been a key voice in Washington pushing to loosen restrictions on AI chip sales to China. He argued that keeping American technology in the Chinese market strengthens U.S. competitiveness and prevented China from developing their own potentially more advanced chips. The board's statement added that their inquiry "will examine all available information," CNBC reports. But "An Nvidia spokesperson said that Huang was committed to continuing as CEO of Nvidia without interruption." "I love our country and our company," Jensen Huang wrote in his letter to Nvidia's staff (as reported by CNBC), "and I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America's national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American." But while U.S. lawmakers have requested Huang appear for closed-door committee briefing, Jensen has not confirmed he'll appear, notes CNBC:When asked by the New York Times whether Huang would appear before lawmakers to discuss the matter, Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo declined to comment. "Our chief executive has an outstanding security team that accompanies him where needed," Mr. Rizzo said in a statement to the Times... Rizzo said [Thursday] the Nvidia CEO's interactions with [alleged Chinese spy Alice] Huang were consistent with meetings he has had with any of Nvidia's customers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The New York Times reports:After chatting for months with Google's artificial intelligence on a school-issued Chromebook laptop, a 13-year-old student made plans to end her life, according to a lawsuit filed in California Superior Court on Monday, the latest in a wave of litigation over Big Tech's effects on young people. The lawsuit, which refers to the girl as Emma, said that her parents first learned she had access to Google's AI in mid-March after their daughter's school sent a message warning them that she was in "imminent danger" of self-harm. Emma's mother logged into the teen's school Google account and found her daughter composing a suicide note on Google Docs, the complaint said. Her parents, named as John and Jane Doe in the lawsuit, immediately took Emma for an emergency psychiatric evaluation, and she now goes to therapy every week. Emma, a seventh grader in Charlotte, North Carolina, had grown convinced that she had multiple mental health disorders following interactions with AI Mode, a chatbotlike feature on Google Search, the complaint said. She also searched for "what is a suicide note" and made comments like "I am planning my own funeral" to the AI, the complaint said. The lawsuit is likely the first to claim that Google "hastily integrated" AI features into company apps used on K-12 Chromebooks, Google-powered laptops provided to millions of children by U.S. school districts, while failing to notify their parents of the potential risks... The case underscores how public school districts have come to depend on classroom laptops, tablets and apps from companies like Google and Microsoft for teaching and learning. In recent years, some Big Tech companies have used their own infrastructure in schools to promote their AI chatbots for teachers and students. The new lawsuit argues that Google's "sprawling digital ecosystem" of laptops and apps has enabled the tech giant to spread its Gemini AI chatbot across public schools - as well as turn on some students' access to AI features by default - without parents' awareness or permission. While school administrators can toggle company apps like YouTube and Gemini on or off for students in different grades, school administrators have complained that Google's system has not allowed them to disable AI Mode and AI Overview, features that are embedded in Google Search... The new lawsuit against Google is part of a wave of litigation this year over Big Tech's effect on young users... Several parents have also sued AI companies over allegations that their children died by suicide following interactions with chatbots. In a possibly-related development, Google announced a new policy of disabling its AI tools by default for schools this week. And schools that re-enable searches will have a new choice, the New York Times points out: "to enable student access to the AI features that the company has already embedded in search or to a new AI feature intended to assist students with schoolwork." But Google still isn't offering schools an option to turn off AI altogether in search, a company executive told the New York Times, because "search and AI are deeply integrated." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"It has been an extraordinary privilege," says the subheading on Thursday's announcement. After 31 years Salon.com will stop publishing, according to an announcement which appeared on the site under the byline "Salon". It remembers that Salon "was an idea about what journalism could be, born at a moment when the internet was still a largely unexplored frontier."When Salon launched in November 1995, the web was a very different place. A small group of journalists set out to create something original: a publication with a strong voice, a curiosity about the world and a belief that the internet could bring journalism and readers together in new ways. They helped pioneer a form of journalism that would come to define an entirely new era of publishing. Over three decades, Salon has brought together politics, culture, criticism and ideas in a way that was distinctly our own... Our writers and editors helped shape conversations about the forces changing our lives. The work was never simply about keeping up with the news. It was about making sense of it... To the founders who imagined it, the staff members who built it, the contributors who gave it their voices and the alumni who carried its spirit into the world: Thank you. Salon's legacy belongs to all of you... The business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years. After careful consideration, we have reached the difficult decision that our publishing model is no longer sustainable... Thirty-one years is a remarkable run, but what matters most is what happened during those years: the journalism, the ideas, the voices, the conversations and the community that grew around them. Salon helped demonstrate what digital journalism could be and could become. We hope that legacy will continue to matter long after today. Thank you for being part of our story. It has been an extraordinary privilege. Slashdot reader oumuamua remembers Salon as one of the internet's first digital-native publications. Slashdot linked to Salon many times over the years - for example, this 1998 story headlined "Linus Story in Salon".Peter Neves was the first of many who wrote in to tell us about an article in Salon Magazine that describes an "...analogy between MS and the Catholic Church, and Linus and Martin Luther. " The Associated Press remembers Salon as "an early staple of internet discourse."And while Salon told them there were no immediate plans to take down Salon's online archives, the Associated Press notes the site's announcement "did not immediately indicate what would become of its employees, though some reported they had lost their jobs." (Longtime staff writer Amanda Marcottewrote on her Patreon that she and "everyone" are "the latest victim of AI's predations.") "A spokesperson for the outlet said 19 full-time employees had been affected, as well as a handful of private contractors," writes the Associated Press. Variety adds that Salon "joins later-arriving sites such as Buzzfeed and Gawker that found it difficult to monetize cultural and topical reporting for a general audience and eventually shut down."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Be careful with the file .claude/settings.local.json, warns The Hacker News:Passwords and API keys that developers typed into commands they approved in Claude Code are sitting in public GitHub repositories, where anyone can read them. When a user selects "Yes, and don't ask again," Anthropic's AI coding assistant can save the command, word-for-word, including the secret, in a project settings file. Software security company Apiiro said that 1,122 public copies of that file hold at least one secret, though it did not test whether any still work. One company the researchers notified earlier this week confirmed its key had been live... Removing [the file] from a project does not undo the leak, because older versions stay in git history and in forks of the repository. The researchers' advice is to rotate first: change every password, token, and key the file has ever held, then clean up... Claude Code tries to keep the file out of git. The first time it writes the file in a git repository, it adds the file to the user's global git excludes, its settings documentation says. Git on that computer then ignores the file in every repository. That protection stays in one user's git settings on one computer. It does nothing for a file that was already committed, the researchers say. Claude Code never adds the file to the project's own .gitignore, so the protection does not travel with the project. In 539 of the 1,105 repositories the researchers traced, a commit listing Claude as a co-author changed the file. They take this to mean Claude often commits the file itself. Apiiro's search of public GitHub found 104,185 copies of the file in 103,617 repositories, its research write-up shows. About 1.1% of them, or 1,122 copies, hold at least one secret. Together they hold 1,379 different secrets... ]And "in half of those repositories it had been there for at least 217 days."] More than a third of the secrets open a database directly, including 379 database passwords. Others include 43 SSH logins for public servers, 42 tokens for GitHub, GitLab and npm, and 23 AWS keys. Among the owners of these files are 63 organizations, mostly software companies of all sizes. The strongest cases include a database vendor's own admin-level cloud key and the owner password of a medical-records database, the researchers say. Boris Cherny, Anthropic's head of Claude Code, responded to the story in a comment on Hacker News: "Historically Claude Code has not done secret scrubbing (there are many good tools for that), but we are looking into what we can do to prevent this. That said, a few thoughts: 1. .claude/settings.local.json is meant to stay local. This is not a file you should check into source control. We automatically gitignore it when Claude creates the file, so in this case the files were manually created and checked in (docs: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings) 2. Permission rules are old hat. Everyone should be using auto mode instead. It is safer and also does not require manually maintaining finicky allow/deny lists. Auto mode is enabled by default and is included for free in all plans. 3. Regardless of what agent you use, you should have secret scanning enabled. GitHub and other source control hosts offer it. There are many threat models that it protects against and you should absolutely use it if you can. (see https://github.com/security/plans)" Cherny also named approaches Anthropic plans to prototype, Apiiro notes in an update, citing Cherny's goal of"making sure auto mode catches this, building in basic secret scanning," and, when a reader noted the same can happen in auto mode when it asks about a sensitive command, answered "good catch." Claude Code users had already filed a bug report on the issue on August 11, 2025, notes The Hacker News, but "An automated bot closed that report as 'not planned' on January 3, after 60 days without activity." Three more bug reports were then filed, according to the researchers. "None got a reply from Anthropic, and three were closed automatically as inactive or duplicate."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"According to a new study by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, data centers are probably having only a small effect on residential electricity prices," reports the Washington Post. "The researchers calculated that these operations were responsible for just 4% of the utility rate increases over the last five years..."There are certainly some areas - like in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio and other states covered by grid operator PJM - where data centers have skyrocketed demand, pushing some costs onto residential customers. But multiple studies by different researchers and organizations have failed to find a strong connection between data centers and the overall trajectory of U.S. electricity prices in recent years. Another analysis earlier this year by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that, between 2010 and 2024, data centers increased average electricity prices for residential customers by just 2.1%. Last year, research from the Brattle Group and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that data centers were actually decreasing costs in certain regions. And another study by the Electric Power Research Institute found that a doubling of data center capacity between 2019 and 2024 resulted in a 4 percent drop in home electricity prices... The new Harvard and Penn study found a slightly higher impact on industrial electricity prices - the price paid by manufacturers and large facilities. For those customers, data centers were responsible for 15% of the price increase between 2020 and 2025. But for ordinary Americans... the changes simply were not substantial [according to Wharton School professor Serguei Netessine, one of the study's authors]. "So far we have no evidence that data centers increase prices all that much," Netessine said. Instead, he said, prices are rising due to more quotidian factors: rising gas prices, an aging electricity grid, and wildfires and hurricanes requiring improvements to the grid and recovery after disaster... If the number of data centers continue to boom, experts say, residential prices could be affected more down the line. Data center electricity demand is expected to increase steeply over the next few years, requiring new power generation - wind, solar or natural gas - to be put onto the grid. And residents have issues with data centers that go beyond the price of electricity. The new developments have been singled out for loud noise, polluting power generation, and for disturbing residential neighborhoods and natural landscapes. According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of Americans say that data centers are mostly bad for the environment. Others feel that the AI race - which could ultimately leave many Americans out of work - is being forced upon them. "I think generally what we're seeing is a broader range of reasons the public has opposed data centers," [said Ryan Hledik, principal at the Brattle Group]. "Concern about AI leading to loss of jobs - all of that is getting packaged together."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
ole (Slashdot reader #19,909) writes in about his free, Norwegian open-source music recording studio for GNOME called GarageJam, which he says allows musicians to compose, record, and share original music seamlessly on the Internet.The latest release, GarageJam 8.0.1, is available in C and Python. It records audio immediately to Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) files in the current working directory and lets you edit metadata in .gjxml XML files from a GTK/GNOME wizard - all built on the Gingerblue Recording Studio API. Ole shares links to its IETF GarageJam XML draft and GitHub repositories, and there's also GarageJam Studio, "a commercial music and audio recording app for the World Wide Web written by Aamot Innovation from Norway.". ole is also spreading the word about GNOME Media, which "puts internet radio and your photographs on one OpenStreetMap... built from GNOME Radio 85.0.1."Click a station on the map to listen. Cities with several stations show a count and a menu.Open a folder of pictures or import from a camera. Photos with a GPS position in their EXIF data appear on the map. Double-click a thumbnail to open it. The search box filters the station list and the map together. ole also announces: GPhoto 3.0.1. ("After 25 years, libgphoto2 2.5.34 now supports more than 2,500 camera models, and GPhoto 3.0.1 is built on it.") Skolelinux 13.6.0. Built on Debian 13 aoetrixiea, Skolelinux is "a complete, ready-to-use Free Software operating system for schools, classrooms and home computers... an office suite, web browser, educational programs and network services for an entire school, all set up out of the box."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In the last year CVEs have increased 3x for Python and its package manager Pip, according to Python's security developer in residence Seth Larson. "And the amount of malware published and removed from the Python Package Index (PyPI) is up 60%." Securing Python's ecosystem is getting more complex, he writes, especially given "the evolving role of AI in both security risks and security response." Their response includes bringing on a new Security Developer "to address the increasingly demanding scale of security response for the Python ecosystem."Providing prompt security response services and innovating to prevent future threats... is more difficult now than ever before... [Security developer Brett Smith] will help us keep pace with critical ongoing work such as vulnerability remediation, providing vulnerability data as a CVE Numbering Authority, and removing malware from PyPI. He'll also give the team bandwidth for new projects such as scaling PyPI's autonomous quarantine program to reduce manual effort on malware remediation and streamlining processes for the PSRT to handle the new vulnerability report volume. The role was made possible by an "ecosystem security" grant from Anthropic. And having the new security developer "will both build capacity for security work the PSF already does and enable new, proactive work," concludes Python's security developer in residence. (He discussed Python's security challenges in a June presentation with Python security engineer Mike Fiedler> .) In June, Curl's Daniel Strenberg reported Curl's CVEs have also tripled.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Aaron Swartz would have turned forty this year," writes FSF deputy director Sean O'Brien. "November 8 is Aaron Swartz Day, when we remember a pioneer of free software and information sharing whose contributions helped shape the modern internet." The Internet Archive will host a hackathon Sunday in San Francisco celebrating Aaron's Swartz's life "and the projects he worked on, many of which are still going strong today," including SecureDrop, OpenLibrary, and Creative Commons. "We are also spreading the word about projects he inspired," including OnionPress and the EFF's Atlas of Surveillancedocumenting police tech use through open source research, now a collaborative effort with volunteers, the University of Nevada, Reno, and the Reynolds School of Journalism. The event is also supported by Free Law Project, and organizers are asking attendees to "bring a color print out of your favorite photos of Aaron for a huge collaborative collage." From the Internet Archive's blog:Aaron was also a co-founder of Creative Commons, where he worked with Lisa Rein developing the RSS-enhanced HTML code that sits behind Creative Commons licenses, much of which is still in use today. The "Quantifying the Commons" project was designed to help measure open-licensed and public-domain works worldwide, and is one of the projects participants can work on. Aaron loved Tor and created tools such as "Tor2web" (with Virgil Griffith) to help more people publish Tor-accessible websites. Onion Press is a Tor-based publishing system designed for decentralized, censorship-resistant publishing, and participants can work on the code base... We also encourage you to have a hackathon in your own town using our materials - or materials of your own. Please let us know if you plan to do this (although it's not required!). If you do let us know, we can include you on our website and help you spread the word about your event. So far, there is an event in Portland sponsored by Portland Civic Lab where they will be screening The Internet's Own Boy and celebrating Aaron's life. "EFF was proud to call Aaron a friend and ally," the digital rights organization posted this week. And the FSF's deputy director writes "It is particularly striking that some of the world's largest companies now rely on technology Swartz helped to develop."One of Swartz's most important technical contributions was his collaboration with John Gruber on Markdown, the simple text formatting system introduced in 2004. Markdown allows users to create structured documents using ordinary text, without requiring proprietary software. More than twenty years later, Markdown has become one of the most popular formats for documentation and publishing, and is widely used in community websites such as forums and wikis. This is not a minor contribution. Companies developing LLMs use Markdown extensively in their products and development tools. OpenAI, for example, recommends Markdown for organizing instructions and communicating structure to its ChatGPT models... Swartz also developed web.py, a public domain framework for building Python applications, and contributed to RSS 1.0, a public internet standard for distributing news and other information between websites. Swartz developed web.py while rewriting the software running Reddit after Reddit acquired Swartz's company Infogami. Reddit recently licensed its content to AI companies, and the FSF's deputy director notes "the enormous scale of the alleged 'piracy' by giant technology corporations" while Aaron himself had "faced criminal prosecution for downloading academic research that he wanted to distribute with no monetary gain."In 2011, federal prosecutors charged Swartz with computer fraud and related offenses after he downloaded millions of academic articles from the JSTOR collection through MIT's university network... Although he was not charged with copyright infringement, he faced aggressive federal prosecution and the possibility of decades in prison before he tragically died by suicide in January 2013, at just twenty-six years old... Swartz helped build tools that made the internet more useful and accessible, and his contributions continue to shape a world he never lived to see. On Aaron Swartz Day, we should remember his achievements and the access-to-knowledge principles that guided them. The companies benefiting from his legacy should respect those same principles by giving users true freedom and control, rather than imposing more restrictions on us all.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Saturday NASA officials announced it's accepting applications for a new astronaut class, reports the Associated Press:With only 32 active astronauts, the space agency needs more recruits as it looks to expand humanity's presence beyond low-Earth orbit as quickly as possible... "We have far more work than we have astronauts," Artemis III commander Randy Bresnik told The Associated Press on Saturday. Aspiring astronauts have between now and Dec. 3 to submit their applications... [They'll begin their training by early 2028]. By then "we're going to have people on the moon - so don't delay," Bresnik urged potential candidates. Bresnik and his three crewmates will blast into orbit next summer to practice docking their capsule with a pair of lunar landers, one built by Elon Musk's SpaceX and the other by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. Their mission will stick close to Earth - no lunar flyby - and serve as a dress rehearsal for the following year's Artemis IV mission that will attempt to land two astronauts near the lunar south pole. The moon base will materialize as more rovers, robots, structures and power grids are launched. The article notes NASA's last call for new astronauts was two years ago, and "More than 8,000 applied, with 10 making the final cut in September 2025."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Slashdot reader sandbagger brings news about the classic science ficdtion magazine Starlog. It's 33-year run from 1976 to 2009 is now available on the Internet Archive. And 17 years after publishing its final issue, Starlog is relaunching, publishing one issue a year starting November 13, according to The Hollywood Reporter:The magazine launched in 1976 and gained a fanbase for being one of the few places to get reliable news and interviews about geek culture. It launched with a cover focusing on Star Trek, one of its key areas of expertise, but the magazine's editors and writers also pioneered coverage of Star Wars. (The new issue chronicles some of the rumors it put out a year before the movie opened). In all, Starlog published 374 issues and more than 25,000 pages... In addition to the film and TV-focused features Starlog was known for, the new Starlog will also delve into futurism, as the cover from Gabriel Yeganyan highlights. The opening story of issue No. 1 looks at the viability of humans farming crops on planets outside of Earth, for example... The revival was announced earlier this year, and includes a podcast hosted by Jordan Hoffman, a veteran journalist who has contributed to The Hollywood Reporter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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