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Elon Musk says Tesla will be "winding down" Cybertruck production at its Texas Gigafactory around mid-2027 to free up capacity for increased production of its Cybercab robotaxi. CNBC reports: The Cybertruck is exclusively produced at the company's plant in Texas alongside the Tesla Model Y and two-seat Cybercab, which Musk has touted as a crucial product for the automaker moving forward. Musk did not say whether the company would produce the Cybertruck at a different facility, but he later responded to a user on X who called the update an "end of an era" and said the Cybertruck was the "best vehicle Tesla has ever made." "True, but the Cybertruck fleet will be around for a long time," Musk said. The Cybertruck and its polarizing design gained a niche following, but it did not achieve mass-market sales, despite Musk's pre-launch prediction that annual sales would eventually total 250,000. "Trucks have been the same for a very long time," Musk said when the truck was unveiled in 2019. "Like 100 years. Trucks have been basically the same. We want to try something different." While Tesla does not break out its sales by model or region, Cox Automotive estimated sales of the Cybertruck last year at 20,237 units in the U.S., down 48% from 38,965 in 2024. Thank you Slashdot reader Dan Posluns for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Britain plans to require employers to disclose salaries in job advertisements. "Whether you're a young person starting out or a parent trying to support your family, you should know what a job pays before spending your time and effort applying for it," Prime Minister Andy Burnham said in a statement. Reuters reports: The government said requiring companies to disclose pay in job ads would help young people applying for their first jobs, while boosting pay transparency and helping tackle disparities that can disadvantage women. Just over two in five employers always publish salary ranges, while fewer than one in five always disclose specific salaries, Burnham's office said, citing estimates from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. The government will soon introduce legislation to parliament making salary disclosures mandatory, Burnham's office said, although it did not provide a timeline. Nearly one million, or 13%, of 16 to 24 year-olds in Britain are not in employment, education or training, one of the highest shares in Europe. A government review into youth inactivity is due to be published later in November.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Sony has brought back the MDR-3-series headphones that debuted in 1979 alongside the Walkman TPS-L2 cassette player. [...] The new MDR-3R (originally called the "MDR-3L2") headphones look just like the originals and come with orange and blue ear cushions. New headphones are often wireless these days, but the MDR-3R continues the wired tradition of the MDR-3, with an essential twist: a USB-C connector. For better or worse, the new headphones also use "the same 23 mm driver units as the MDR-3 to reproduce sound quality close to the original," per Sony. Audiophiles will prefer something more advanced, perhaps with additional acoustic features. In addition to the USB-C connector, the MDR-3R also adds an in-line remote control and an integrated microphone. They are available for $60.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blue Origin has unveiled a third stage called GS3 for its New Glenn rocket, designed to deliver satellite constellations directly to geostationary orbit and support heavy-lift missions to the Moon and deep space. The company also announced Northstar, a new methalox booster engine that it says produces 715,000 pounds of thrust while cutting mass by 30% and parts by 50% compared with the BE-4. Space.com reports: The new stage will be powered by one BE-7 engine, which the company developed for use on its Blue Moon spacecraft, one of the two private vehicles that NASA selected to be crewed lunar landers for its Artemis program. (The other is SpaceX's Starship.) Blue Moon landing missions won't need to launch on GS3-equipped New Glenn rockets, according to Blue Origin. But the third stage "can support sustained operations around the moon," the company wrote in today's blog post. "By delivering significant payload mass directly to trans-lunar injection (TLI), GS3 enables faster transit times while preserving propellant for on-orbit operations." And there's already demand for such services: Blue Origin also announced today that a government customer (which it did not name) has booked a GS3 mission to cislunar (Earth-moon) space, with launch targeted for 2028. And the company dropped yet more news today -- that it's working on a new first-stage engine, called Northstar. Like Blue Origin's other booster engine, the BE-4, Northstar burns liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellant, a combination known as methalox. But the new engine is more powerful and less complex. "Compared to the BE-4 engine, Northstar reduces mass by 30% and parts count by 50%, while increasing thrust from 640,000 to 715,000 pounds-force," Blue Origin said in a second blog post today. "Manufacturing advancements have also significantly shortened production timelines, enabling assembly in less than a day." Northstar went from program approval to development testing in just 11 months, according to the company. But today's update did not say when the new engine will fly for the first time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FAA announced today that it is finally phasing out floppy disks from air traffic control systems at more than 400 facilities. Engadget reports: They'll be replaced by a more modern system called Enterprise -- Information Display System (E-IDS), which is comprised of a digital display for relaying status information, updates and other alerts to air traffic teams. The FAA plans to have E-IDS installed in 435 sites by the end of 2028; the first five locations to receive the upgrades are the Atlantic City International Airport, Nashville International Airport and Greater Rochester International Airport, as well as data processing hubs in Atlanta and Salt Lake City.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area in the Pacific Ocean where debris naturally accumulates, is full of tiny bits of plastic -- so full, in fact, that it seems to be changing the color of the ocean. [...] To better understand how microplastics may have influenced the ocean's color, [Daniel Koestner, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen in Norway] and his colleagues looked at 20 years of satellite data from the spot in the ocean with perhaps the most of plastic -- the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a zone between Hawaii and California where trash trapped by ocean currents accumulates. Between 2002 and 2022, the researchers found, waters near the garbage patch have gotten brighter in both blue and green wavelengths compared with surrounding areas. The results, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment on Thursday, don't yet prove that microplastics have directly brightened the ocean, the researchers emphasize, though their findings are backed up by lab experiments with microplastics. But without taking direct ocean samples, it's hard to know for sure what's causing the ocean's color to change."We're still one step away from proving definitively that microplastics are causing the shift in color that that we're seeing," adds study co-author Shea Cheatham, a Ph.D. student also at the University of Bergen. "We just have to get in there [to the garbage patch] to verify." The hope is that detecting these color shifts could help identify other areas around the world where microplastics have accumulated.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joe_Dragon shares a report from TechCrunch: Applebee's has fixed a security flaw that allowed anyone to access the personal information of its registered customers, after a researcher found a password for an internal database inside Applebee's mobile app, TechCrunch has learned. The popular restaurant chain confirmed [last Thursday] that it had taken action to address the security issue to prevent any unauthorized access to its customer database. [...] The exposed database contained customer names, email addresses (including whether or not the customer verified their email), dates of birth, phone numbers, and ZIP codes. The data also included veteran status, the number of times customers had logged in, when their accounts were created, and the IP addresses of their most recent log-ins, which can be used to reveal the person's approximate location. [...] When asked by TechCrunch, the spokesperson would not say if the company has server logs that it can review to determine whether anyone accessed the database, or if it has any logs at all. "Our investigation is ongoing, and we will take appropriate steps based on our findings," the company added. It's unclear how many customers were affected by the data exposure. [...] Applebee's had at least 8.5 million customers enrolled in its rewards program as of last year, though the company would not provide a number of how many customers had their personal information exposed by this security flaw.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"OpenAI has published a new National Community Compact and Compute Campus Policy Blueprint, apparently in response to the Blue Wave Midterm Elections," writes ancient Slashdot reader Gilmoure. "Instead of moving into communities like a juggernaut, they say they will be dangling friendly carrots going forward." Here's an excerpt from OpenAI's article: Every future compute campus OpenAI owns and operates will have its own local compact. We'll engage residents early enough to ensure their input shapes project plans, give them a local point of contact throughout the life of the campus, and report publicly each year on how we're doing. Each compact will reflect local priorities and include a common set of commitments: - Pay our own way on energy and infrastructure. We'll pay the full cost of the electricity we use and the infrastructure needed to serve us. Before major spending begins, we'll provide financial assurances so other customers are protected if a project is delayed, reduced, or canceled. - Protect local resources and report on our impact. We'll develop a water plan for each campus, prioritize closed-loop or low-water cooling, and publish site-level water and electricity use. We'll publish construction plans and independent noise studies before operations begin and annually afterward. And we will not use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with public officials, allowing only narrow protections covering legitimate security information, trade secrets, or proprietary or competitively sensitive information. - Create opportunities for local workers and businesses. We'll publish the jobs we expect to create, work with unions and training providers to help residents prepare for them, and report annually on hiring and apprenticeships. We'll also make sustained investments in priorities residents help select. [...] The investments that help America compete globally can also help communities prosper locally. That starts with giving residents a say while plans can still change and a way to hold developers accountable for delivering on their commitments. That's what we're committing to at the campuses we own and operate, and what we believe people should be able to count on wherever AI infrastructure is built across the country.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A newly disclosed OpenSSH flaw dubbed "*sshole" can allow attackers to log in to password-disabled accounts on certain musl-based Linux systems simply by submitting a password longer than 256 bytes. "Apparently certain varieties of musl Linux (Alpine, OpenWrt, Buildroot, Yocto, etc.) have had this OpenSSH vulnerability for about a decade," writes longtime Slashdot reader AlteredEgg. "Upgrade now!" BleepingComputer reports: Security researcher Ozgun Kultekin, who discovered and released details on the vulnerability today, says the flaw has existed since 2016 and stems from how OpenSSH handles password verification errors on systems using the musl C library. Linux accounts can be configured to prevent password logins by replacing their password hash with an asterisk (*) in the /etc/shadow file. Because this is not a valid password hash, no password should allow access to those accounts. However, a patch introduced in OpenSSH in 2016 to fix a username enumeration vulnerability tracked as CVE-2016-6210 changed how OpenSSH handled accounts without usable password hashes. To prevent attackers from identifying valid usernames through different response times, OpenSSH was modified to perform password hashing even when an account had no usable password hash, including accounts configured with * to block password logins. The problem is that the musl C library's crypt() function also returns * when password hashing fails, including when a submitted password exceeds its 256-byte limit. This means an attacker can submit an oversized password and cause OpenSSH to compare the returned * against the account's stored *, resulting in a successful login. To be clear, the flaw does not allow attackers to bypass passwords on accounts with valid password hashes. [...] Admins who can't immediately install the update can mitigate the issue by turning off SSH password authentication with PasswordAuthentication no in their SSH server configuration and restarting SSH. Kultekin says admins can also check for signs of exploitation by examining SSH authentication logs for password-based logins for accounts that should not allow them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloomberg, Apple is cutting employee AI spending limits to reduce costs, lowering some engineers from $300 to $200 per day and considering limits as low as $100, with some teams capped at $25. Employees are also being encouraged to use cheaper models or on-device AI. MacRumors reports: Engineers at Apple have the largest budgets because using AI for coding can consume a large number of tokens. Apple lets employees use Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other models. Some Apple employees told Bloomberg that few were using their full $300 daily limit, so the savings may be small. Apple has also hired outside productivity consultants for some divisions. Combined with the AI cost cuts, the reviews have fueled worries about possible restructuring.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader bbsguru shares a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Several staffers at the White House are using computers or mobile devices equipped with residential proxy services that render their internet address available for others to rent, security experts warned today. One of the proxy services is a Russian company whose founder's web hosting business was ground zero for cyberattacks against election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016. The security firm Layer3 Intel said it detected multiple residential proxy nodes beaconing out from the internet address network reserved for the Executive Office of the President (AS2650). Layer3 said the proxy activity was relatively persistent between October 5 to November 3, and that a review of the proxies available from AS2650 showed they exited from the White House network 236 times during that period. The proxy tracking company Synthient said on Twitter/X that the activity it saw coming from AS2650 was related to multiple Windows 11 installations of a service called Infatica, a proxy program that is often integrated into "free" mobile and desktop applications. Infatica's founder Vladimir Fomenko is a Russian man whose hosting firm King Servers was home to six of the eight internet addresses used by Russia's state security services to compromise databases for election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016. [...] Layer3 Intel said the proxy exit nodes at the White House came from six internet addresses, on 26 of the 30 days, and that most of the activity happens in the evening, between 5 p.m. and midnight. Incredibly, Infatica was not the only proxy service that reportedly has been reselling access to White House internet addresses: Layer3 Intel said it found 28 separate residential proxy services were able to exit through this network. "This is public access," the Layer3 Intel team wrote. "Anybody can obtain it by signing up to a public residential proxy service, paying a few dollars and sending requests through it. We did not selectively target this network or try to make our probes exit from it. We caught this by chance, simply by requesting global rotating access through these services."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Discord is replacing Electron with a desktop client built fully in Rust, which the company says should significantly reduce the app's notoriously high resource usage while improving performance and memory safety. "We've been early adopters of Rust since 2018 and a lot of our infra, voice tech, and even some of the current client is already Rust, the holy grail was getting the whole client there," explains Discord chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy in a post on X. "That means Electron goes away, and so does React Native, mobile keeps native UI but shares app code with desktop via Rust." The Verge reports: Vishnevskiy also shared an image of the Discord Windows client using just 290MB of RAM, which is a clear improvement as you only have to participate in a few servers and RAM usage can easily hit 1GB or more using the current Windows app. It's not clear when Discord will make the full switch over to Rust, but Vishnevskiy says the company "hope to get it into testing with users soon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Motorola's $1,600 Signature 27 will become the company's first smartphone to support the security- and privacy-focused GrapheneOS that completely strips out native Google services and telemetry at the OS level. To help justify the price, Motorola equipped the Signature 27 with top-of-the-line specs, including a tandem OLED display, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, up to 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB of UFS 4.1 storage (up from a base configuration of 12GB and 256GB), and a 200-megapixel periscope telephoto camera. According to Motorola, the EVS action sensor (telephoto camera) is the first in a smartphone, offering "new possibilities for photographing moving subjects and captures even fast movement with impressive clarity and precision." It'll be available in markets worldwide in the coming months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paraguayan President Santiago Pena resigned Thursday amid mass protests and impeachment threats following the collapse of Ueno Bank, a major digital lender with close ties to his administration and more than 60% of the country's adults as customers. Regulators seized the bank after uncovering risky insider lending and accounting irregularities that left its capital below legal requirements, locking millions of customers out of their savings. The Associated Press reports: Soon after winning its banking license in 2023, Ueno seemed to be everywhere in Paraguay. The digital lender, a rebranded version of a decades-old finance company, lured customers with generous cash-back offers on groceries, grew to more than 70 locations, sponsored Paraguay's national soccer team and plastered its name on the country's main stadium. Government money poured into Ueno's coffers under Pena. He also appointed Carlos Carvallo, president of Financiera Ueno, the predecessor to Ueno Bank, to run the central bank, the agency charged with supervising the digital lender. As of last month, Ueno reported holding roughly $800 million in public deposits, about a quarter of its total, including money from the state pension and health fund and the operators of Paraguay's giant hydroelectric dams. Even as retirees' savings and other public money piled up at Ueno, worries were escalating inside the central bank. In June, its inspectors found a pattern of risky lending to insiders, reported ABC Color, a leading Paraguayan newspaper. Ueno had extended large sums to companies tied to its owners, beyond what the law allows and without enough collateral to cover the debts if they went bad. On a single day in September 2025, nearly $39 million had gone to three such companies. Pena repeatedly brushed off the warnings. As recently as last month, he defended Ueno and the central bank's oversight, dismissing the concerns as a smear campaign that was spooking the public. But on Monday, it all came crashing down. Regulators investigating Ueno's loans to companies linked to its owners found poorly documented lending, the central bank said, as well as expenses the bank had wrongly counted as assets. Once the books were corrected, Ueno's capital, the cushion banks must keep to absorb losses, fell to less than half the legal minimum. The central bank seized the lender Tuesday and announced plans to move customers' accounts, along with whatever assets still hold value, to other banks before liquidating what's left. Ueno's app, cards and transfers went dark and its branches locked their doors, leaving desperate depositors lined up outside with no way to cash out their savings. On Wednesday, a rush to open new accounts elsewhere crashed other banks' mobile apps, fueling public panic. Officials say they had begun repaying depositors and opening accounts at other banks for the roughly 280,000 customers who had banked exclusively with Ueno. "The banking system is sound," insisted Pedro Acosta Bernal, appointed interim central bank president Wednesday after Carvallo resigned at Pena's request. Meanwhile, eight senior Ueno executives have been detained, including founder Miguel Vazquez and bank President Juan Manuel Gustale. "Prosecutors also charged 27 bank officials and business associates with offenses including breach of trust and attempted fraud," reports the AP.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: That Was Then: The Imagine Cup competition, Microsoft explained in a 2003 press release, "seeks to provide students [aged 16-and-up] around the world with resources to use technology and Web services to solve everyday problems [...] Imagine Cup is about empowering students to apply their creativity and knowledge toward making the world a more-connected place." This Is Now: "Building is Hard. Selling is Harder." begins the "Why Imagine Cup?" promo video for the 2027 Imagine Cup competition, which is pivoting to an AI startup-first focus in recognition that "A new era for founders is here." "Since 2003, Imagine Cup has empowered emerging innovators to turn ambitious ideas into real-world solutions with Microsoft technology," Microsoft writes of the Imagine Cup Evolution. "Now part of Microsoft for Startups, Imagine Cup enters its next chapter in 2027, opening the competition to eligible early-stage startups and founders everywhere." An Eligibility FAQ drives home the point that Imagine Cup is no longer a student-only competition: "Imagine Cup 2027 welcomes eligible early-stage startups across seven categories; founders do not need to be students." And if you think making high school students compete against seasoned full-time employees of startup companies seems a tad unfair, Microsoft advises: "Eligible student-led startups are encouraged to enter the Student Startup category but may choose an industry category instead." The #1 overall startup will win a $250,000 cash award and $1,000,000 in startup credits. However, Student Startup category entrants are ineligible for the open category prizes (where the 2nd-place winner gets $50,000 cash and $350,000 in credits, while 3rd place is good for $25,000 and $350,000 in credits); they will instead compete for a single prize of $25,000 cash and $250,000 in credits. The Official Rules (PDF) note that all startups must have a valid Azure Subscription ID and a Microsoft for Startups account.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA has unveiled the X-70 Fractal, a new crewed experimental aircraft "designed to accelerate the development and testing of advanced aviation technologies." From a press release: The crewed X-70 features advanced, rapidly reconfigurable flight-control technology that will allow NASA to explore aircraft maneuverability in ways never before demonstrated in crewed flight. The aircraft can also accommodate up to 2,000 pounds of experimental payloads in internal and external locations, enabling a wide range of research and flight-testing opportunities. The X-70 Fractal has a takeoff weight of 10,000 pounds and is designed to cruise at Mach .75, reach altitudes of up to 45,000 feet, and provide an operational range exceeding about 1,726 miles (1,500 nautical miles). These capabilities will enable NASA to conduct demanding flight research across a broad range of operating conditions. The X-70 joins a storied legacy of experimental aircraft that have helped establish America's leadership in aviation. From the Bell X-1, which first broke the sound barrier in 1947, to the X-15 hypersonic research aircraft and today's X-59 quiet supersonic demonstrator, NASA has spent decades pushing the boundaries of flight. With the X-70, NASA will expand its capacity to conduct experimental flight research, accelerate the testing of emerging technologies, and advance the next generation of American aviation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

3M has agreed to pay up to $7.35 billion over nine years to settle claims from as many as 120,000 people who say they were sickened by PFAS-contaminated groundwater near military bases, airports and other locations where firefighting foam was used. The Associated Press reports that 3M "did not admit liability," noting that the settlement comes on top of the more than $10 billion the company previously agreed to pay U.S. public drinking water systems over PFAS contamination. From the report: 3M chairman William Brown called the settlement a "significant milestone" that substantially reduces uncertainty from the litigation. [...] Fred Thompson, an attorney with the Motley Rice law firm that helped negotiate the 3M settlement for the plaintiffs, called it welcome news for "the thousands of victims who have sought answers and accountability for nearly a decade." He said in a news release that the plaintiffs urgently need help covering mounting medical bills and other costs. Under the terms of the settlement, the payouts will begin with $50 million this year, followed by yearly payments of more than $1 billion each year from 2028 to 2033. 3M could make additional payments if enough plaintiffs participate. If too few sign on, 3M has the option to cancel the settlement and continue fighting the lawsuit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A Vietnamese court has sentenced 14 people who worked on the pirate football streaming site Bun Cha TV, handing out the first prison terms we've seen since the country's piracy crackdown began earlier this year. [...] Four defendants, including the heads of the content, programming and operations teams, were sentenced to 12 months in prison. Five others received ten months, and two were sentenced to eight months. Notably, three of the site's commentators were not sent to prison. Their ten-month sentences were suspended. All 14 defendants reportedly admitted the charges and cooperated with the authorities. According to investigators, Bun Cha TV streamed more than 150,000 sports matches and it allegedly made more than 20 billion dong, roughly $760,000, in illegal profits from betting and gambling ads. The verdict reports don't mention a total. Instead, they list illegal gains per person or team. The leader of the content team allegedly gained more than 430 million dong, while commentators made from more than 31 million to more than 480 million dong each. The verdict was picked up by Rouse, the law firm that represents the Motion Picture Association in Vietnam. In an article headlined "Strong Vietnam criminal penalties," published on Lexology on November 3, the firm calls the ruling another victory for Vietnam's IP landscape. "The defendants were all sentenced to terms of 8-12 months in prison," Rouse writes. While Rouse is correct on the length of the terms, it doesn't mention that three of the sentences were suspended. Instead, Rouse stresses that the ruling is part of a tougher enforcement trend. "This ruling reflects a shift in enforcement strategy by Vietnamese authorities, who are increasingly moving past preliminary domain blocking to deliver criminal convictions against the operators of commercial-scale piracy rings," the firm notes. "This perhaps reflects the strength of the national crackdown following the USTR pressure in May," the firm adds. According to the indictment, Bui Ba Hien, who runs a company called S24, allegedly directed employees and collaborators to build and operate Bun Cha TV. However, Hien is not among the 14 defendants named in reports, which also do not identify the affected rightsholders. "Interestingly, in September, Bac Ninh police issued a wanted notice for a man of the same name, Bui Ba Hien, CEO of esports company Box Vietnam," reports TorrentFreak. "This person is also charged under the same copyright statute."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Axon has been sued in a proposed class action accusing the Taser and police body-camera maker of illegally collecting and storing license plate data on millions of California drivers through its AI-powered surveillance network. Reuters reports the details: - The lawsuit (PDF), filed on Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco by law firms Hausfeld and Gibbs Mura, alleges Axon has failed to comply with a California privacy provision by not disclosing how it collects, uses and shares plate data gathered through its camera systems- "Axon has created a mass-surveillance infrastructure that is practically impossible to avoid," the lawsuit said- Scottsdale, Arizona-based Axon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The lawsuit said the company has more than 1,000 cameras in California and alleges millions of drivers may have been affected- Some Axon cameras are installed in high-traffic areas and collect plate information as vehicles pass by. Other cameras are placed inside police vehicles, the lawsuit said- The proposed class covers drivers whose vehicle plate information was captured by an automated license plate reader in California and processed or stored by Axon's system since 2023- The lawsuit seeks more than $5 million in damages, in addition to a court order stopping Axon from its allegedly unlawful practicesRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Adam Fry, OpenAI's consumer product lead for ChatGPT, says the number of searches performed through ChatGPT has grown to roughly 20% of Google's search volume. The company defines a search as a ChatGPT query that triggers a web search, suggesting the chatbot is becoming an increasingly significant competitor to traditional search engines. The Verge reports: Having one-fifth as many searches as Google is still a long way from overtaking it, but for comparison, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during Google's 2023 antitrust trial that Bing had about 3 percent of the search engine market share after trying for more than a decade. During the trial, Google described AI as a potential disruptor, arguing ChatGPT was poised to seriously compete with it -- now, OpenAI seems to agree. (OpenAI likely uses Microsoft Bing for a significant part of its searches, along with its in-house search index, although there is still some speculation that it routes some queries through Google.) As for ads, which OpenAI started testing earlier this year, Fry said they haven't produced a lasting backlash. "Ads have not negatively impacted the product or the usage of the product," he said, adding that "most people do not seem to mind ads in the product." Last month, OpenAI announced plans to introduce images of sponsored products and services in ChatGPT.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix is testing its first consumer-facing feature explicitly branded as AI-powered. Called "AI Discover," the feature generates personalized TV and movie recommendations in real time based on viewing history, preferences, trending content and selectable themes like "Something Light" or "Quick Watches." Variety reports: The streamer will begin rolling out AI Discover in the U.S. to customers who use Netflix in English on supported smart TVs. If you have access to it, you will see a "Discover" tab with a red gem-shaped icon and a "New" label in the top navigation bar on your TV. The company plans to expand the feature to more regions and customers in the coming weeks. Netflix has long used machine-learning and AI technologies to personalize content recommendations, but AI Discover is the first user-facing application that the company is branding as powered by artificial intelligence. The hope is that the AI-recommended titles will be another tool to drive up Netflix's total watch time among viewers, especially in the U.S.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Waymo plans to end its exclusive Uber robotaxi partnership in Austin and Atlanta in January 2028 and let customers hail its vehicles directly through the Waymo app. In an interview on The Circuit, Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana called the current Uber experience a "crapshoot" because riders aren't guaranteed a Waymo. Bloomberg reports: "In the early days, we would partner because we didn't have the scale, and in that partnering, it was a little bit of a crapshoot. Will I get a Waymo? Will I not get a Waymo?," Mawakana said in a wide-ranging interview on The Circuit with Emily Chang. She cited customers' growing demand for a consistent offering from a single app, especially from riders from San Francisco or other markets, where Waymo offers the self-driving service via its own consumer app that competes with Uber. "It's important for us to have that relationship with the rider. We've gotten that feedback from the riders in those markets," Mawakana said. "And at the same time, learning and partnering with Uber has been a really important part of our journey," she added. [...] The comments reflect Waymo's evolving relationship with the ride-hailing giant as the Alphabet unit trials different pathways to commercialize its capital-intensive autonomous technology. Waymo has leaned on partners like Uber and Lyft, as well as fleet management companies, to help operate its roughly 4,000 vehicles across the US. The company currently does more than 500,000 trips per week in 14 cities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI has acquired developer tools startup Pierre Computer Company to strengthen Codex. "The deal, announced today, signals OpenAI's aggressive push into the developer tools market as the AI arms race intensifies," reports The Tech Buzz. Financial terms weren't disclosed. From the report: Pierre Computer Company had been building specialized tools for code analysis and review, capabilities that complement Codex's existing strength in code generation. For developers, this could mean a more seamless experience -- using AI not just to write initial code snippets, but to understand legacy codebases, spot potential bugs, and conduct thorough reviews before deployment. That's a workflow improvement that enterprise engineering teams have been demanding. [...] For Pierre Computer Company, the acquisition likely provides the resources and distribution that startups in this space desperately need. Building AI developer tools requires massive compute infrastructure and access to cutting-edge models -- both of which OpenAI has in abundance. Pierre's team will now have access to OpenAI's latest models, including the technology behind ChatGPT and the recently announced Shepherd model for AI research validation. The integration timeline remains unclear, but developers using Codex should expect to see Pierre's capabilities rolling out in the coming months. OpenAI has been moving quickly to ship new features -- it just launched Dots, transforming its coding tools into an always-on AI assistant. Adding Pierre's code review and analysis features could make Codex a genuine end-to-end solution for software development teams.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The refrigerators at three regional blood banks in France were hit by a cyberattack overnight between Sunday and Monday, at the same time hackers struck supermarkets from Sweden to Belgium. "Several regional facilities of the French Blood Establishment (EFS) were affected by a cybersecurity incident that impacted certain cold storage room monitoring and control systems," the health ministry said in a statement. The incident had no impact on blood supplies, EFS spokesperson Charley Dubois said. "We have staff round the clock since blood can be needed at any time. They were warned about the problems by alerts and moved the blood to other refrigerators that were not connected," she said. [...] Investigations are under way into how the attack was carried out, what equipment may have been affected and when systems can safely return to service. The attack followed a similar incident in France last month when police said hackers seized control of cooling units at hundreds of supermarkets, causing fires and food losses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AMD expects its fourth-quarter revenue to reach roughly $17 billion, potentially surpassing Intel's projected $15 billion to $16 billion and putting AMD ahead of its longtime rival in quarterly sales for the first time. The milestone is being driven largely by booming demand for Epyc server processors and Instinct AI accelerators, with AMD's data center business already accounting for 64% of revenue and expected to exceed 80% in 2027. Tom's Hardware reports: For those of our readers who have been following the CPU market in general as well as AMD and Intel in particular for decades, arguably the most earth-shattering part of AMD's earnings report is its outlook for the fourth quarter. The company expects revenue of approximately $17 billion, plus or minus 3%, which implies a 66% year-over-year increase and 27% sequential growth at the midpoint. In contrast, Intel expects fourth-quarter revenue of $15 billion to $16 billion amid weakening PC demand and manufacturing capacity constraints. If AMD meets its guidance, its quarterly sales will surpass those of its considerably bigger rival Intel for the first time in history. In fact, AMD will not only leave Intel formally behind, but its projected advantage will be approximately $1.5 billion at the midpoint of both companies' forecasts, which is a tangible lead. The development reflects the companies' increasingly different positions on the market: AMD is rapidly expanding its data center CPU and AI accelerator businesses, while Intel continues to depend heavily on PC and enterprise server processors, which sales face headwinds due to high memory prices and components shortages.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group plans to launch Emut Bank in early 2027 as the first digital bank affiliated with a major Japanese financial institution to eliminate ATM cards, "instead having customers confirm identities using the bank's smartphone app for additional security amid a rising tide of cyberattacks," reports Nikkei Asia Review. The smartphone app will also be the only way to manage deposits, with no PC-based banking. From the report: Security has become a greater concern recently. As artificial intelligence advances, Japan has seen a surge in cyberattacks targeting companies, as well as a rise in phishing attacks aimed at stealing personal information, often targeting bank accounts. The technology being used by Emut was developed by Seven Bank, the consumer finance unit of Seven & i Holdings, operator of 7-Eleven convenience stores. Emut customers will be able to withdraw money from Seven Bank's roughly 28,000 ATMs. The network is expected to gradually expand to cover the 16,000 or so ATMs at FamilyMart convenience stores. Although MUFG Bank ATMs will not be accessible, MUFG will consider changing this in the future. Scrapping cash cards represents a shift in what has for decades been consumers' main method of withdrawing money. The former Sumitomo Bank -- a predecessor of Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. -- is believed to have been Japan's first bank to implement cash cards, in 1969. The step away from cash cards by MUFG, Japan's largest financial institution, is likely to spur other banks to follow suit. [...] Eschewing cash cards will reduce Emut's costs, which will let it offer interest rates on deposits that are expected to be higher than MUFG Bank's usual 0.5%, depending on the terms. Interest can be paid out daily, rather than twice a year -- a first for a Japanese bank.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Canva is cutting or relocating more than 1,200 jobs, representing 22% of its global workforce, as part of a major restructure that includes laying off staff who helped build the Australian-founded design platform. The changes mirror a trend across the technology sector, where software companies are fighting to stay competitive against cheaper artificial intelligence disrupters while aggressively embedding AI tools themselves. [...] The restructure will affect 1,271 people, according to the company, as it focuses on "collapsing layers" and bringing "more teams together in person." [...] Those leaving Canva will receive at least six months of salary and retain healthcare coverage for a further 12 months in countries where workers receive that benefit. They can also keep their laptops. Those leaving can also apply for US$10,000 (A$14,000) grants to start their own ventures. Canva's chief executive, Melanie Perkins, said the restructure was "without doubt the hardest moment in our thirteen-year history." "For some people, this will mean changes to their roles or being asked to relocate to centralized hubs," she said. "Sadly, it will also mean saying goodbye to teammates and friends who have helped build Canva into what it is today."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

joshuark shares a report from Wired: After 22 years in orbit and a failed rescue mission this summer, it is highly likely that the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory will crash into Earth sometime next week. It is not known where on the planet the spacecraft -- which is roughly as big as a large elevator -- will fall. Despite its size, experts say the risk to the public is relatively low. The observatory was designed to operate for a few years in low Earth orbit, but it far exceeded its expected lifespan, helping to make many important discoveries about the evolution of the cosmos, including the study of supernovas and the destruction of stars by black holes. However, in 2024, increased solar activity heated and expanded the upper layers of Earth's atmosphere, increasing the drag on the satellite and accelerating its descent. Without a propulsion system capable of correcting its orbit, its days were numbered. The U.S. Space Force now expects Swift to reenter Earth's atmosphere around November 6. Most of the spacecraft is expected to burn up, although some components could survive and reach the ground (but most likely the ocean). "The most likely survivors are its six heavy reaction wheels, the spinning flywheels it used to aim itself, along with tougher telescope parts such as lenses and mirrors," Dean Sladen, a quality manager and aerospace engineer at Accu Components, told Space.com. "Only a handful of small, scorched fragments are expected to make it down -- nothing recognizable as a telescope." "NASA's own orbital debris requirements state that the risk of human casualty from surviving debris shall not exceed one in 10,000, so it is highly likely this work has been completed but not published," Sladen said regarding the risk assessment. "Personally, I believe it should be published, as NASA has done with previous satellites. The risk is almost certainly very small, but it would give people a clear, factual picture rather than guesswork."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have confirmed the presence of intact biomolecules and mineralized red blood cells inside the 115-million-year-old fossilized bones of a juvenile Aratasaurus museunacionali from Brazil. The discovery challenges assumptions about how long blood-related biomolecules can survive and could help scientists study dinosaur metabolism, blood evolution and even how traces of ancient life might be preserved on other worlds. Popular Science reports: The evidence exists inside the fossilized limb bones of a juvenile Aratasaurus museunacionali. Discovered in 2008, A. museunacionali was an Early Cretaceous theropod that lived in present-day northeastern Brazil. The fossils suggest a dinosaur measuring over 10 feet long and weighing about 75 pounds, but given its young age, A. museunacionali likely grew even larger. After carefully examining thin slices of the fossils, paleontologists located the mineralized red blood cell molecular components, along with a complex manganese oxide called hausmannite. This material helped maintain the cellular structures of heme, a ring-shaped molecule that contains iron and binds many proteins, especially hemoglobin. The hausmannite also helped preserve additional biomolecules found in the blood, such as the amino acids in collagen. The study's authors theorize this level of preservation could only occur following a rapid burial in an environment that was rich in microbes, but low in oxygen at the same time. The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tuesday, November 3, was Election Day in the United States, and the results are (mostly) in: Democrats are projected to win control of both the House and Senate in the 2026 midterms. The blue wave turned out to be more of a blue tsunami, ending Republican control of Congress for the final two years of President Donald Trump's second term. Democrats flipped seven Republican-held Senate seats in the 2026 midterms, including surprise victories in traditionally Republican strongholds such as Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina. Kansas elected its first Democratic U.S. senator in nearly 100 years (94 years to be exact), while Texas and South Carolina sent Democrats to the Senate for the first time in decades. Democrats also picked up seats in Ohio, Iowa, Maine, and North Carolina.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [S]tate-owned telecommunications company Rostelcom has raised the possibility of moving some Russian data centers underground in talks with the nickel and palladium mining company Norilsk, according to Russian newspaper Vedomosti. The industry publication Data Center Dynamics also pointed to a recent proposal by a Russian regional governor to build data centers within open-pit coal mines while planting green public parks above as camouflage. On November 2, Putin also signed a decree ordering Russian data center operators to set aside 10 percent of available space and capacity in case the Russian government requires it, according to independent Russian news publication Meduza. That may indicate growing Kremlin concerns about the vulnerability of Russian cloud computing infrastructure during its war with Ukraine. Putin's decree also allows a special Russian government commission to authorize use of foreign data centers in consultation with Russia's Federal Security Service. That marks a notable policy change because Putin and the Russian parliament previously enacted Russia's "Sovereign Internet Law," which has blocked Russian companies from using cloud computing infrastructure outside Russia's borders. Russia's push for a sovereign and increasingly closed Internet has resulted in a highly centralized system under a few Russian tech companies like Yandex. That hyper-centralized system has now proven vulnerable during wartime, as Ukrainian drone strikes on key Russian data centers created widespread disruptions for popular payment and digital banking apps, e-commerce platforms, video streaming services, and ride-hailing and food delivery apps, among others. Yandex has also been forced to relocate all three of its main supercomputers after Ukrainian drone strikes targeted the AI data centers where they were originally housed, Meduza reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is adding vertical tabs and an Adaptive Dark Mode to Safari with iOS 27.3, iPadOS 27.3 and macOS Golden Gate 27.3. The December updates will also expand Siri's browser controls, including organizing tabs and clearing site-specific history, with a later feature allowing Siri to understand and answer questions about content across multiple open webpages. MacRumors reports: Vertical Tabs are located on the left side of the display and use icons by default to save space, but there is an option to make the tab bar wider to show website titles as well. Vertical Tabs work with both Topics and Tab Groups to keep things organized. Topics are created when automatic Apple Intelligence tab sorting is turned on in iOS 27. Pinning tabs by dragging, quickly swapping between Tab Groups, and other features also continue to work. [...] Apple is adding Adaptive Dark Mode for websites that don't have a dark mode design option by default. If you use Dark Mode and then browse to a website with a bright background color, Safari will offer an option to "Try" Adaptive Dark Mode. After tapping Try, Safari renders a Dark Mode version of the page that makes the background darker, changes text contrast, inverts logos and graphics, recolors vector artwork, lifts raised surfaces, and rebalances layered shadows. Each website will be adapted based on what's needed to make it readable, so not every tweak is applied to every site. You can opt to turn Adaptive Dark Mode on for all sites or on a site-by-site basis after using it. If a site has a native dark mode or has a dark design already, Adaptive Dark Mode won't activate. Developers can also add a tag that causes Safari to ignore Adaptive Dark Mode and show the website as the developer intended.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An adviser to the EU's highest court says Google's Gemini may violate publishers' copyright when it reproduces recognizable portions of their articles or circumvents paywalls and other technical protections to generate answers. Reuters reports: The case before the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union pitted Hungarian website operator Like Company against US-based Google's artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini. A ruling against Google, which could force the tech giant to pay fees for the use of such content, could throw a lifeline to online media such as Like Company. They have seen traffic dwindle as news summaries written by AI chatbots like Gemini increasingly replace traditional search engines' results, which include hyperlinks to the media websites. "When an LLM (large language model)-driven chatbot retrieves a publication from a press publisher's website, reuses that publication to generate an answer, and provides that answer to the user, the press publisher's right may be infringed in certain circumstances," Advocate General Maciej Szpunar said. Gemini's answers fall under the publishers' right of reproduction when chatbots access publications by unlawfully "circumventing paywalls or other technical barriers, or when they reuse "the form of expression of that publication in a recognizable manner," he said. Copyright rules do not protect the "mere facts" reported by press publications, but "only the specific form of expression," he added. On the other hand, he said, the use of material protected by copyright to train LLMs -- AI systems that use vast amounts of text to generate human-like responses and summarize information -- is "freely permitted under the text and data mining exception." Szpunar said there was no evidence that Google had used the Hungarian publisher's articles to train Gemini. The court, which follows the majority of its advisers' non-binding opinions, will rule in the coming months. "Google's powerful gatekeeping role in search makes this particularly important. Publishers depend on Google to reach readers, while Google increasingly delivers AI-generated answers directly to users," said Angela Mills Wade, the council's executive director. "Publishers should not have to choose between search visibility and protecting their rights. Nor should Google's control over access to audiences become leverage to secure publishers' content for AI services," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

During a video celebrating Bethesda's 40th anniversary, the studio officially confirmed that The Elder Scrolls VI will be titled The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. "Thank you for 40 years of shared memories," wrote Bethesda in a separate tweet. "We can't wait to make even more together with The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. Development continues, and while it'll be some time before we're ready to share more, it feels great to finally reveal the name and location with you." Video Games Chronicle reports: "You know, as we're here in the 40th anniversary, we think about all of the games we've made," Bethesda's executive producer Todd Howard said in the video, walking past a display case. "And you know, every day when I walk by this case, obviously I look at the games and think about them, but more so I think about the teams that made them, and the time and the passion that everybody put into the games. And then what they meant to all of you, and hearing from you, and the time that you spent in them, how meaningful that was to you, and to let you know when we hear that, how meaningful that is to us. And so even though yes, we're looking back, we're also looking forward to all we're doing, particularly with the Fallout franchise and obviously The Elder Scrolls. You know, everybody's always asking about Elder Scrolls 6. And we thought, hey, given the the moment, what a perfect time to tell you what The Elder Scrolls 6 is actually called." The video then showed the logo for the game.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla is testing a new Firefox Nightly feature called Mini Window that lets users pop an entire webpage into a small, always-on-top window stripped of most browser controls. "The idea behind the Firefox Mini Window feature is simple: allow users to move a currently open tab (or a section of a tab) into a separate mini window," writes ZDNet's Jack Wallen. "Think of it as moving a tab from one window to what appears like a web app." From the report: At first blush, there's no address bar, controls, scroll bar, or anything else that would normally be associated with Firefox. The Mini Window appears to be a web app, without having to actually create it. However, when I hover my cursor inside the Mini Window, I do see the address bar, the back/forward/reload buttons, and the window close button -- and that's it. The browser gets out of your way, so the only thing I see is the content. On top of that (pun intended), the Mini Window stays on top of other Firefox windows, so I can have that popped-out content always in focus while I work on other things. This feature comes in handy when I'm working with limited display space (say, on a laptop) and need to reference a page while working on another. For multitasking, it comes in very handy. [...] Let's say I'm writing a paper on Linux and need to read a particular article for background information. I could have my document open in the main window, and then open the article in question in a Mini Window. I could then reference the article without having to click back and forth between them -- even when working on a smaller display. Here's another use case I've found: When using MacOS's Stage Manager feature, I only have one window available at a time. The Mini Window bypasses that limitation, so I can have my main browser window focused as well as the page open in the Mini Window. Another handy way I like to use Mini Window is to open a favorite search engine, move it to a Mini Window, and then I have an always-ready search tool at my fingertips. I could also open my favorite AI service and use it in the same way.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Binance says hackers spent months infiltrating its systems through fake job interviews, a tampered developer tool and compromised internal AI tools before stealing $6.34 billion in crypto in the Oct. 29 attack. Co-CEO Richard Teng said Binance has replenished 98% of the affected assets, and that it is still in the process of purchasing outstanding, more illiquid assets. CNBC reports: Preparations for the attack began in June, when a Binance Wallet DevOps engineer downloaded a tampered Homebrew installation "to install a popular AI coding tool after searching for it on a search engine," according to a security report published by Binance Tuesday. It said it detected the suspicious activity, replaced the engineer's device and rotated credentials as a precaution, but that by then the employee's "role and his related colleagues on our wallet infrastructure team was exposed to the hacker." [...] As of Tuesday Binance has rebuilt the affected wallet system and internal AI tool, replaced compromised devices, decommissioned credentials and tokens associated with the affected engineers and expanded security scans across employee devices, Teng told "Squawk on the Street." "We're also getting an independent expert to review everything that we have done, and we'll keep strengthening our defenses as the investigation continues," Teng said. "We're working around the clock with law enforcement agencies and with industry partners to trace and freeze the stolen funds for that front."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In an announcement released Thursday, Fujifilm said it will invest roughly 10 billion yen (about $63 million) to increase its production capacity fivefold for an unlikely beneficiary of the AI era: magnetic tape. Fujifilm attributes the surge in archiving demand to the spread of generative AI, which the company remarked is producing "exponential growth" in data needs worldwide. The 5x increase in production capacity will be measured against fiscal year 2025 production levels. The investment in Fujifilm's Kanagawa Factory, Odawara site will make it "the largest investment Fujifilm has made to date in dedicated LTO tape facilities." The project will run from fiscal years 2026 through 2028 to fund manufacturing expansion and additional personnel, primarily to produce the latest-generation "FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium10" tape. [...] According to Fujifilm, "major cloud service and data center operators" have been expanding their use of magnetic tape because it can store large data volumes at relatively low cost. Tape backups can be easily disconnected and stored in a drawer, a vault, or a separate facility. Fujifilm highlights the ability to air-gap tape cartridges as a last defense for user data: "Given the sophistication of cyberattacks, magnetic tape is attracting increasing attention as a means of protecting data from threats such as ransomware."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In an announcement released Thursday, Fujifilm said it will invest roughly 10 billion yen (about $63 million) to increase its production capacity fivefold for an unlikely beneficiary of the AI era: magnetic tape. Fujifilm attributes the surge in archiving demand to the spread of generative AI, which the company remarked is producing "exponential growth" in data needs worldwide. The 5x increase in production capacity will be measured against fiscal year 2025 production levels. The investment in Fujifilm's Kanagawa Factory, Odawara site will make it "the largest investment Fujifilm has made to date in dedicated LTO tape facilities." The project will run from fiscal years 2026 through 2028 to fund manufacturing expansion and additional personnel, primarily to produce the latest-generation "FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium10" tape. [...] According to Fujifilm, "major cloud service and data center operators" have been expanding their use of magnetic tape because it can store large data volumes at relatively low cost. Tape backups can be easily disconnected and stored in a drawer, a vault, or a separate facility. Fujifilm highlights the ability to air-gap tape cartridges as a last defense for user data: "Given the sophistication of cyberattacks, magnetic tape is attracting increasing attention as a means of protecting data from threats such as ransomware."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google will disable AI tools by default for K-12 students early next year unless school administrators explicitly enable them, but schools that choose to block AI entirely will also lose student access to Google Search. The New York Times reports: Executives at the tech giant said they wanted to be responsive to educators and parents who have asked for more control in how children interact with A.I. But there is a catch: Schools that choose to restrict A.I. entirely will also lose access to Google search. A.I. features are now a standard part of Google's commercially available search engine. "Search and A.I. are deeply integrated," said Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google. If a school has banned A.I., he added, students "will not have access to search, and they'll see a message from their school that indicates it's not available." [...] The company's new strategy underscores Google's powerful role in American education. If school leaders want continued student access to search within the company's ecosystem, they will be forced to embrace Google's A.I.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SUSE plans to cut roughly 10% of its 1,900-person workforce, with CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen saying "automation and AI" are reducing the need for some roles and allowing the open source software company to operate with less overhead and flatter management structures. "We are announcing a reduction of SUSE's global workforce of approximately 10 percent," said Van Leeuwen in an email. "These decisions are painful for our people, our culture, and our open source community, but they are necessary for us to adapt and build a sustainable, resilient SUSE for the long term." The Register reports: Van Leeuwen says the business, bought by Swedish private equity provider EQT, decided to cut jobs after scrutinizing its "future strategy, required capabilities, and team structures." The rest of the organization will get a look at the fiscal year 2027 strategy on November 16. He said in the message to staff: "What is clear is that automation and AI are fundamentally shifting how software companies operate. AI capabilities are advancing exponentially, forcing us to radically reimagine our work. We have seen this trend already both inside our sector and in the wider economy. This means that the organizational design and cost base that SUSE is built on today will not carry us forward successfully. "We are adapting. Across SUSE, modern tooling is already changing our daily workflows, enabling teams to move faster with less operational overhead and flatter reporting lines. The requirement for some existing roles has greatly diminished. Other roles will evolve over the next few years. This means we are accelerating investments in high priority areas, and deprioritizing others. These are hard, painful decisions to make, but necessary for our future." [...] The specific roles at risk of redundancy were not outlined but SUSE claims it has considered where the people in those positions are "able to evolve, what they can stop doing, what they need to do more of - and decisions have been made on that basis." Staff caught up in the redundancies will be informed by November 4, employee representatives nominated the following day, and one to one meetings will begin at the start of next week. Van Leeuwen says in the internal memo that the job cuts are a "reflection of shifting organizational needs, not your talent or commitment. You have tackled hard infrastructure and open source challenges that power critical enterprise systems around the world. "Any organization will be fortunate to have your expertise."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) reported today that they used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra language model to raise a small, open source Qwen model's math score roughly sixfold by directly editing its weights -- the numerical parameters that govern its behavior. Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang and Omar Khattab described their work in a research blog post published November 2. They call the approach "weight-space programming" and tested Astra's ability to interpret and alter networks without using conventional training procedures to generate the edits. In the strongest language-model example, Astra's intervention raised Qwen3.5-0.8B's MATH-500 score from 7.9% to 48.1% while touching approximately 0.016% of its weights. The improvement came primarily from correcting repetitive reasoning-a distinction that shaped both the technical findings and the debate over their implications. Their experiments explored a broader possibility: AI systems that inspect, repair and construct other neural networks by working directly on their internal machinery. "This is cool as heck!" wrote Yuchen Jin, a technical staffer at Databricks and former co-founder and CTO of Hyperbolic Labs who was unaffiliated with the research, on X. "Imagine using a large LLM to directly edit a smaller model's weights and dramatically improve its capabilities. It's like gene editing for neural networks. Even cooler than distillation!" Voyage AI staff researcher Chandan Singh, formerly of Microsoft AI, also reacted to the findings: "For anyone questioning whether this post is overhyped, I think they are actually *underselling* the approach."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A coalition of security firms working with Japan's National Police Agency has disrupted a botnet of more than 1.3 million Android devices across 200+ countries. "We assess with high confidence that the backdoor and botnet were intentionally developed, deployed, and operated for financial gain by Videostrong Technology," the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a blog post. The Register reports: Videostrong Technology is a hardware manufacturer based in Shenzhen, China. It builds Android devices, including home TV boxes and projectors. According to Google, Videostrong deliberately embedded the XCPE backdoor in device firmware and sold access to criminal affiliates, allowing them to install additional malware modules on devices shipped to unsuspecting customers. When buyers connected these devices to their home networks, the preinstalled backdoor allowed operators to create proxy networks and hide malicious traffic using the customers' internet connections without their knowledge. The firmware's pre-installed management agent purported to be a standard remote-management client, according to TrendAI. It pulled updates from a GitHub page, and connected to a Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) server that gave the operator full remote control of each box, allowing them to install and remove apps, change settings, and push updates to the infected devices. Between June 3 and October 1, TrendAI documented more than 3.8 million distinct home and mobile IP addresses connected to the operation. The coalition also disrupted the command-and-control domains used to manage the affiliate modules. "Because these affiliates each have diversified distribution channels for their modules beyond XCPE, we assess that taking down their C2 domains will sever access to at least 10 million additional compromised devices," according to GTIG. Google said it had since cut ties with Videostrong, and banned the OEM from making devices with preloaded Google apps.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the Seventh Manned Spaceflight Conference in Beijing, Chinese space officials publicly outlined the most detailed roadmap yet for landing astronauts on the Moon "before 2030." Ars Technica reports: China's lunar landings will involve a lunar-orbit rendezvous similar to what NASA did in the 1960s and early 1970s with the Apollo program. However, lacking a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V vehicle, the crew and lunar lander will launch separately to the Moon. According to slides shared on social media, the current plan involves: - An uncrewed test of the Long March 10A rocket (a single-stick variant, with no boosters) and the Mengzhou spacecraft to low-Earth orbit. Target: early 2027- An uncrewed test of the larger Long March 10 rocket (a core stage with two boosters) and the Lanyue lunar lander, including descent/ascent from Moon's surface. Target: 2028- A concurrent launch of two Long March 10 rockets, one carrying uncrewed Mengzhou and the other the Lanyue vehicle; they will dock in lunar orbit. Target: 2029- Dual launch of Long March 10 rockets, this time with crew on the Mengzhou spacecraft, leading to crewed landing mission. Target: "Before 2030" The public release of this new information provides a timeline for gauging China's technical progress in its efforts to land humans on the Moon before 2030 and beat NASA and the United States back to the lunar surface. Notably, the plan (for now, at least) omits a mission similar to Apollo 8 or Artemis II, which involved a crew flying out to the Moon and either entering orbit or passing close by before returning to Earth. The Mengzhou vehicle should still get a workout closer to Earth with humans on board as part of missions carrying astronauts to Tiangong, China's space station in low-Earth orbit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The world's leading EV maker is showing no signs of slowing down. BYD sold 490,168 new energy vehicles (NEVs) in October, up 11% from the prior year and the company's highest monthly total in 2026. BYD's battery electric vehicles drove the growth, with a record 305,743 units sold, up 37% year over year and marking the first time its EV sales have crossed the 300,000 mark. To put that into perspective, just over 262,500 EVs were sold in the US in the entire third quarter combined, according to Kelley Blue Book estimates. By the end of the year, BYD expects overseas shipments to reach about 2 million vehicles. "In 2027, that number is expected to rise to more than 2.5 million vehicles," adds Electrek.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Snap has settled a lawsuit brought by two teenagers who alleged Snapchat was deliberately designed to be addictive and contributed to their mental health problems, avoiding a trial that was scheduled to begin this week. Snap was the last defendant to settle after Meta, Alphabet and TikTok resolved claims in the same case. CBS News reports: The teenage plaintiffs, identified in court documents as S.J. and K.D.B., had alleged in the suit that Snapchat was designed to be addictive and that using the platform from a young age contributed to their mental health issues. "We are glad to reach resolution for our clients," Mark Lanier, founder of The Lanier Law Firm and lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said in a statement to CBS News. "We believe this jury would have found the companies' conduct reprehensible." Snap was the last social media company named in the lawsuit to settle the case, which was set for opening arguments this week. Meta resolved claims last week, while Alphabet and TikTok, the other defendants, each also resolved the allegations. Terms of the Snap settlement were undisclosed [...]. Earlier this year, a jury found Meta and Google-owned YouTube liable in a landmark social media addiction lawsuit, awarding $6 million in damages to a young woman who alleged the platforms' addictive features harmed her mental health. In August, Meta also agreed to pay up to $18 billion in settlements and introduce new child-safety measures to resolve claims from dozens of U.S. states that it deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children while misleading the public about their risks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Recently, reports emerged that LG TVs are sniffing around your local network, and even listening to your local environment, even when the TV is purportedly "off." Some of those voice commands were then stored in plain text and uploaded to the internet. LG's response? To deny everything. [...] That latter point is central to a new study out of Northeastern that conducted 5,943 experiments across twelve commercial "smart" TV devices. The researchers found that most smart TVs utilize automatic content recognition (ACR), a technology that captures audio or video snapshots of viewed content and then monetizes that data to help build personalized profiles of viewers. TV makers insist that users are supposed to be able to opt out, but the choice simply doesn't work across a large segment of TVs. Companies like Vizio simply ignored the consumer requests entirely more often than not: "We find that the advertised ACR opt-out fully suppresses ACR-attributable traffic on only four operating systems; on Samsung Tizen traffic consistent with ACR activity persists in morethan 60% of evaluated scenarios, and on Vizio SmartCast a content correlated endpoint hosted on Amazon Kinesis continues to receive traffic in 100% of opted-out scenarios." [...] The researchers say since they can't see the precise scope of what's being collected due to encryption, they're unsure whether Vizio is technically violating its FTC agreement (not that we have a current FTC that would care if they were): "The opt-out setting has no observable effect on traffic sent to this endpoint; however, we cannot inspect the payload due to encryption so we cannot confirm whether this violates the FTC settlement." Results of whether opting out of ACR tracking actually stopped ACR tracking were all over the map. Roku, for example, ignores opt-out requests when users are watching Roku's own channels. None of the smart TV vendors track Netflix viewing for fear of violating agreements with the streaming giant. Samsung's opt out function was more likely to actually work when a user was watching antenna broadcasts. On two Smart TV platforms, personal viewing data collected by ACR remains unencrypted, despite years of bad press and scandal on the subject. Many appear to be violating the law, but because U.S. regulatory oversight has been gutted, they see no meaningful accountability. That includes smart TV OS' like VIDAA, which is most prominently found on Hisense and Toshiba smart TVs: "VIDAA OS sends ACR data to servers run by Unruly over MQTT without encryption, so anyone on the network path between the TV and those servers can read it. Each message carries a Client ID, a permanent identifier for the TV that can't be reset, along with the time zone, the app name, the input (antenna, HDMI), the antenna channel and an audio fingerprint."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to The Information, Apple is developing a $1,000 HomeView Ultra smart home hub with a 9-inch touchscreen mounted on a motorized arm that can follow users around a room and autonomously respond to its surroundings. It's also said to be experimenting with more ambitious home robots, including a wheeled robot that follows people, a smart home drone and a machine capable of folding laundry. Notebookcheck reports: According to the report, HomeView Ultra will feature a larger 9-inch touchscreen mounted on a robotic arm. This arm can automatically turn the screen toward the user. With a camera and several sensors, this smart home hub is said to be "fully aware" of its surroundings and capable of acting autonomously. This autonomy ranges from turning on the lights when someone enters the room to shooing a cat away when it jumps onto a table. These sensors are also intended to prevent the arm from hitting nearby objects with the display. Apple is reportedly currently planning to announce this smart home hub in 2027 for around $1,000, but according to The Information, its launch could be delayed until 2028. The reason is allegedly the software, which has not yet been finalized, while the hardware is said to be ready for market already.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX has reportedly held talks with EchoStar about acquiring Boost Mobile or gaining access to its network, potentially giving Starlink a shortcut toward becoming a full-fledged U.S. mobile carrier. Engadget reports: According to Washington Post's sources, the deal could look like SpaceX acquiring Boost Mobile outright or gaining access to its cell network, which is leased from AT&T and T-Mobile. There could be a major hitch with the deal though, since SpaceX's potential mobile service would need the green light from those major mobile carriers, according to the report. The Washington Post also reported that major cell companies, which include AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, have already turned down Musk down for access to its cell networks in order to launch a separate SpaceX service. Last month, SpaceX reportedly held talks with Crown Castle to access at least 80,000 cellular tower sites across the U.S. as it prepares to launch Starlink Mobile. "We will be building out our terrestrial networks so there's broad-based connectivity anywhere that SpaceX and Starlink are allowed to operate," Musk said during SpaceX's earnings call this week. Satellite launches plus spectrum acquisition "will pave the way for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the US," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Data centers are deeply unpopular. But what if we called them something else? Axios reports that OpenAI is preparing a "PR blitz" for after the midterm elections on Tuesday, as Democrats seem likely to win back the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate, too. The company's chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane told Axios that the midterms will be "a bit of a movie trailer for what you're going to see in 2028," when he expects AI to be "the issue" in the presidential election. So OpenAI is to influence the AI debate moving forward, with Lehane discussing several proposals, including the development of AI "speed limits"; finding ways to help people see AI as empowering them in their daily lives; pushing the U.S. to take a role in developing global standards; and yes -- rebranding data centers as "AI compute campuses." Lehane also described the conversation around data centers (a debate that has pushed Amazon and Microsoft to say they will no longer use NDAs in their negotiations with local governments) as "good and healthy." "Communities should hold companies responsible and accountable so they really and truly get a transformative benefit from these projects," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times and several other publishers have sued (PDF) Brave Software, accusing the browser maker of scraping their websites without permission and helping users bypass paywalls. The Verge reports: According to a complaint (PDF) filed by the companies that run New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, Brave Software has monetized its index of scraped websites by, in part, providing AI companies with paid access to "real-time online content from the Brave Index." The AI companies then use that index to train their models, access content to "respond to specific user queries," or both. Brave has allegedly provided "stolen copyrighted content" to "many" AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. Brave also promotes "hundreds of top publishers" as being accessible through its "Paywall blocker" feature in its browser. "Brave has never asked for the Publishers' permission to access their websites, much less to copy the material and provide it to users or other AI companies," the complaint says. "On the contrary, as noted above, Brave allows its users to bypass the Publishers' paywalls without their consent, and has taken other steps that prevent the Publishers from blocking Brave's access to the Publishers' websites. Brave has never compensated the Publishers for the unlawful use, copying, and distribution of the Publishers' copyrighted content." "While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct," Graham James, an NYT spokesperson, says in a statement. "We filed this lawsuit to hold Brave accountable for stealing our content to power its own products and to provide it to some of the most prominent and well resourced generative AI companies in the world."Read more of this story at Slashdot.