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An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC:"If even one extra person is able to access the internet, I think it's successful and it's worth it," says Sahand. The Iranian man is visibly anxious, speaking to the BBC outside Iran, as he carefully explains how he is part of a clandestine network smuggling satellite internet technology - which is illegal in Iran - into the country. Sahand, whose name we have changed, fears for family members and other contacts inside the country. "If I was identified by the Iranian regime, they might make those I'm in touch with in Iran pay the price," he says. For more than two months, Iran has been in digital darkness as the government maintains one of the longest-running national internet shutdowns ever recorded worldwide... Sahand says he has sent a dozen [Starlink terminals] to Iran since January and "we are actively looking for other ways to smuggle in more". The human rights organisation Witness estimated in January that there are at least 50,000 Starlink terminals in Iran. Activists say the number is likely to have risen... Last year, the Iranian government passed legislation that made using, buying or selling Starlink devices punishable by up to two years in prison. The jail term for distributing or importing more than 10 devices can be up to 10 years. State-affiliated media has reported multiple cases of people being arrested for selling and buying Starlink terminals, including four people - two of them foreign nationals - arrested last month for "importing satellite internet equipment". "The BBC contacted SpaceX for more details about the use of Starlink in the country but did not receive a response."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2016 an online "swarm intelligence" platform generated a correct prediction for the Kentucky Derby - naming all four top finishers in order. (But its 2017 predictions weren't even close.) Slashdot checked in again on how modern AI systems performed in 2023, 2024, and 2025 - but their predictions were still pretty bad. Would AI-generated Derby predictions be any better in 2026? This year's winner was 24-to-1 longshot "Golden Tempo" - though a lot of oddsmakers had favored a horse named Further Ado (which ultimately only finished 11th). So when USA Today prompted Microsoft Copilot for its own picks for the Kentucky Derby, Copilot also went with Further Ado. (Even worse, it predicted Golden Tempo would come in... 13th.) Here's how Copilot's picks actually performed... Further Ado (finished 11th)Chief Wallabee (finished 4th)The Puma (SCRATCHED)Renegade (finished 2nd)Commandment (finished 7th)So Happy (finished 9th)Emerging Market (finished 10th)Danon Bourbon (finished 5th)Potente (finished 12th)Incredibolt (finished 6th)Robusta (finished 14th)Ocelli (finished 3rd)Golden Tempo (finished 1st)Pavlovian (finished 18th)Great White (SCRATCHED)Wonder Dean (finished 8th) Litmus Test (finished 17th)Albus (finished 15th)Six Speed (finished 13th)Intrepido (finished 16th)Copilot was told to use the latest odds, conditions, and analysis of favorites, best bets, expert picks, previous results and race history with the post positions, according to USA Today.And meanwhile, Yahoo Sports asked Claude "to simulate the race using the opening odds, draw and potential track conditions. We also asked it to factor in some human predictions." Like Microsoft Copilot, Claude also picked Further Ado to finish first (though it came in 11th) - and predicted that Golden Tempo (the eventual first-place finisher) would finish 12th. Further Ado (finished 11th)The Puma (SCRATCHED)Commandment (finished 7th)Chief Wallabee (finished 4th)Renegade (finished 2nd)Emerging Market (finished 10th)So Happy (finished 9th)Incredibolt (finished 6th)Danon Bourbon (finished 5th)Potente (finished 12th)Pavlovian (finished 18th)Golden Tempo (finished 1st) Litmus Test (finished 17th)Albus (finished 15th)Wonder Dean (finished 8th)Six Speed (finished 13th)Intrepido (finished 16th)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The war in Iran has sent oil-starved countries scrambling for fuel," CNN reported this week. And many of those countries now want renewable fuels, the article points out, "leaving them turning to the renewables king of the planet: China."Chinese exports of solar technology, batteries and electric vehicles all reached record highs in March, according to energy think tank Ember, a sign that the historic oil supply shock is accelerating the adoption of clean energy around the world... A Thursday report from Ember said China exported 68 gigawatts of solar technology in March, surpassing the previous record set in August by 50%. Fifty countries set new records for Chinese solar imports, with the most significant growth coming from emerging markets in Asia and Africa hit hardest by the energy crisis, according to the think tank. "Fossil shocks are boosting the solar surge," said Euan Graham, senior analyst at Ember, in the report. "Solar has already become the engine of the global economy, and now the current fossil fuel price shocks are taking it up a gear." Ember said exports of solar, batteries and EVs in total rose 70% in March year over year, according to Chinese customs data... China's battery exports reached $10 billion in March, with particularly high growth rates in the European Union, Australia and India, Ember said. Uncertainty over when the Strait of Hormuz will reopen has spurred deeper regional anxieties about energy securi"ty, helping to hasten the transition to clean energy, analysts said. The article notes how different countries are reacting to fuelAsian nations that depend on the Middle East for energy imports "are trying to mitigate fuel shortages by encouraging energy conservation and shortening work hours."The UK's Energy Secretary said this week that the country needed to reduce its reliance on gas for electricity. "As we face the second fossil fuel shock in less than 5 years, the lesson for our country is clear: The era of fossil fuel security is over, and the era of clean energy security must come of age." Pakistan "has been spared some of the impact from the war, since it began drastically importing cheap Chinese solar panels a few years ago. Using solar energy rather than costly oil imports is estimated to save the country billions of dollars each year.""According to the China Passenger Car Association, Chinese exports of electric vehicles and hybrids hit a record high in March, increasing 140% compared with the same period a year ago."Thanks to Slashdot reader AleRunner for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Scientists have created a miraculous new way to stop fires from spreading through neighborhoods using nothing but sound," reports the New York Post:Former NASA engineers with California-based Sonic Fire Tech found that using sound waves can snuff out blazes and potentially be used to stop another Pacific Palisades inferno... The technology works by targeting oxygen molecules using low-frequency sound waves that vibrate them, stopping the fire from growing. "Sound waves vibrate the oxygen faster than the fuel can use it, and break the chemical reaction of the flame," Remington Hotchkis, Chief Commercialization Officer at Sonic Fire Tech told The Post. The San Bernardino County Fire Department recently tested out the equipment using a backpack version and the results were incredible. Video shows firefighters fighting small blazes on a shrub and a stove top fire with the technology putting it out... In the home application, the system would be alerted/activated if there was a fire, sending the sound waves through a home duct system, essentially snuffing out the blaze. The sound waves can reach as far as 30ft from a home, the report noted. The sound is also harmless to pets and humans. The article includes this quote that an executive at the company gave local news station KMPH. "Our former NASA engineers are rocket scientists, and they say it seems like magic, but it's just physics."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader Anne Thwacks frequently uses YouTube's subtitles "not to disturb others in the room, or because my hearing is not very good." But they say there's a new problem. "The subtitling is terrible!"Almost every sentence has a huge error. Proper names are more often wrong than right. Non-English place names are almost always mangled to barely recognizable. And no effort whatsoever is made to use context to figure out whether a place name is Russian or Arabic, and often complete garbage is used in place of a common French, Spanish or Italian name! If AI actually works (I have my doubts about this), surely it would be possible to figure out language contexts. If it is about an event in Italy, then expect a lot of Italian names! If it is about the Russia-Ukraine war, then expect places in Russia or Ukraine to be more plausible than mindless gobbledygook! Does YouTube not know that there are places in the world that are not in America? (However, plenty of names of people and places famous in America are also regularly screwed up.) They argue the subtitles are "appallingly bad" - and that "the situation seems to be getting worse," wondering why the problem isn't addressed with some basic spell-checking. ("I'm sure that the vast majority of foul-ups could be fixed by the use of a dictionary.") Have any Slashdot readers seen similar problems? A friend of mine noticed that YouTube's subtitles even bungled this innocuous song from the 1966. ANNETTE FUNICELLO: "If your love is true love, you can tell by his touch."YOUTUBE SUBTITLE: "If your love is too lava, you can tell by his touch..." Share your own experiences and thoughts in the comments. And do you think YouTube's subtitles are "appallingly bad"?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Nuclear AI startup" Fermi had hoped to build power plants generating 17 gigawatts of electricity, remembers Bloomberg, "three times the amount typically consumed by New York City."Hyperscalers could install their data centers on the site itself and tap directly into that power, which would come first from natural gas turbines and later from nuclear reactors. The pitch ticked so many boxes - artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, political connections - that some investors found it irresistible. Fermi went public in October worth more than $19 billion in market value, despite reporting no revenue or signed customers. Now, the startup's board has fired its top executive, Toby Neugebauer, after months of negotiations failed to secure a single client. Chief Financial Officer Miles Everson left as well... Fermi's stock, meanwhile, has tumbled 84% from its peak. The company's more than 5,000-acre site in the Texas panhandle - dubbed Project Matador, or the President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus - remains mostly unfinished. And some analysts see a cautionary tale of the market's AI enthusiasm running ahead of reality, with investors betting on companies whose grand projects may never get built... The idea of giving data centers their own, dedicated power supply not dependent on the grid may sound tempting, but former US Department of Energy official Jigar Shah said banks don't want to finance it. The grid, drawing power from many sources, is more reliable than a handful of expensive, on-site plants, he said. He considers Fermi a failure "of monumental proportions" and says similar, off-grid data center projects elsewhere deserve more skepticism than they've received... "We're allowing these types of projects to continue to be viewed as viable when they most certainly are not," said Shah, who ran the department's Loan Programs Office during the Biden administration.... "It was a piece of dirt with a dream," an investor who visited the site in February told the short sellers, Fuzzy Panda Research.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Monday a company called Rainmaker announced their rain-triggering technology had produced 143 million gallons of freshwater for Utah and Oregon residents - making them "the first private company in history to validate the results of cloud seeding operations." The Deseret News reports:Founded in 2023, Rainmaker uses drones to disperse silver iodide into clouds, then they track precipitation with advanced radar. However, Rainmaker - and every other rain-enhancement company - has been up against the notoriously difficult challenge of validation. Since there is no control set to test, and because the weather is chaotic and variable, the Government Accountability Office declares the benefits of the technology to be "unproven." To overcome this evaluation challenge, Rainmaker flies drones in unique patterns when seeding. Then operators compare distinct radar and satellite features with where their drones operated. As of April, Rainmaker found 82 unambiguous seeding signatures, which show their seeding operations directly caused precipitation. In Utah and Oregon alone, the company said its cloud-seeding efforts have added enough water to match the annual usage of about 1,750 households. However, "this figure likely represents only a small fraction of Rainmaker's total generation this season," the company said in their press release... Their drone precision, combined with their radar systems, have produced satellite images proving a direct correlation between the seeding and precipitation. Some images show cloud holes or regions of depressed cloud tops after seeding. Rainmaker's announcement promises they'll "go forward and continue our mission to refill the Great Salt Lake, end drought in the American West and deliver water abundance wherever it is needed most around the world." (Rainmaker currently operates in Utah, Idaho, Oregon, California and Colorado.) The director of Utah's Natural Resources Department told the Deseret News that with cloud seeding, "cost per unit of water is so low; it really is the smartest thing we can be doing with our money," Ferry said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Running a Big Tech company during Silicon Valley's AI mania may not necessarily require fewer workers or cost less," writes the Washington Post:Amazon, Google and Meta together have roughly the same number of employees now as they did during an industry-wide hiring binge in 2022, company disclosures show. Growing costs for technical workers and related expenses have often outpaced sales recently. The tech giants' big AI bet hasn't yet paid for itself. That means AI might be killing jobs not through its labor-saving wizardry but by increasing spending so much that CEOs are pressured to find savings, giving them cover to consciously uncouple from their workforces. Marc Andreessen, a prominent start-up investor and a Meta board director, put it bluntly on a recent podcast. Big company layoffs are a fix for overstaffing and changing economic conditions, he said, but AI provides a convenient scapegoat. "Now they all have the silver bullet excuse: 'Ah, it's AI,'" he said... "Almost every company that does layoffs is blaming AI, whether or not it really is about AI," Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT owner OpenAI, said at a March conference when he listed explanations for AI's unpopularity in the United States. "Recent history suggests Big Tech companies might not be moving toward a future with fewer workers," the article concludes, "but recalibrating to spend the same, or more, on different people and projects." So in the end, "AI might soon reduce hiring," the article acknowledges, "But the reluctance or inability of the largest tech firms to cut too deeply so far could also show that the path to making a workforce AI-ready - whatever that means - isn't a predictable straight line charting declining headcount."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader joshuark writes: Scientific American reports that a ChatGPT AI has proved a conjecture with a method no human had developed. A 23-year-old student Liam Price just cracked a 60-year-old problem that world-class mathematicians have tried and failed to solve. The new solution that Price got in response to a single prompt to GPT-5.4 Pro was posted on www.erdosproblems.com, a website devoted to the Erds problems. The question Price solved - or prompted ChatGPT to solve-concerns special sets of whole numbers, where no number in the set can be evenly divided by any other... Price sent it to his occasional collaborator Kevin Barreto, a second-year undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Cambridge. The duo had jump-started the AI-for-Erds craze late last year by prompting a free version of ChatGPT with open problems chosen at random from the Erds problems website. Reviewing Price's message, Barreto realized what they had was special, and experts whom he notified quickly took notice.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last Saturday someone dressed as Jesus "was among the dozens of people in costumes and masks seen on a video forcing open the door of a Scientology building on Hollywood Boulevard," reports the Los Angeles Times, "after a tug-of-war with a security guard."The footage posted on TikTok and Instagram shows the group sprinting up and down stairs and clashing with black-shirted security guards, giggling and gasping to catch their breath while church members scream at them to leave. On their way out - as security guards approach armed with fire extinguishers - one of the sprinters stops and dances to celebrate their successful escape, a move reminiscent of a taunt from the video game Fortnite. For weeks, groups of people have barged into two of the church's Hollywood properties, racing through hallways and tussling with security guards, trying to see how far they can get before they are forced to leave by church staff... Church officials say the incidents are not a game and have accused the speed runners of "hate crimes." After dozens on Saturday stormed the Ivar Avenue building that houses an exhibit dedicated to the church's founder, science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, the external door handles were removed from all three of Scientology's properties on Hollywood Boulevard by Sunday morning. Guards could be seen blocking the doorway to one building on Monday afternoon... No arrests have been made. A report from the Associated Press cites a joke left on one of the videos: that if runners reach the top of the building, they'll find Tom Cruise.One commenter on a recent TikTok video of a speedrun asked why people are doing this, and another user simply replied, "because it's fun." The 18-year-old who started the trend told the Hollywood Reporter his original video has been viewed over 100 million times. "From there on out, I pretty much knew that Scientology was like a free gateway to a lot of views." Vulture notes that "there's even a Roblox re-creation of the trend, made using the 'maps; drawn from actual videos"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week Bill Gates wrote a blog post about a special camera from medtech startup Remidio, which delivers high-resolution images of a patient's retina in seconds. The camera plugs into a phone running an AI system that watches for early signs of diabetes - all without needing a blood draw, eye dilation, or a dibetes specialist. It's already been used in 40 countries for more than 15 million patients.But that same hardware, with different software, can also flag the conditions that drive so many dangerous pregnancies. Gestational diabetes sharply increases the risk of pre-eclampsia [a spike in blood pressure during pregnancy responsible for half a million fetal deaths every year and 70,000 maternal deaths]... In most of rural sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, it usually isn't screened for at all, because the standard test requires a lab. A retinal scan offers a different way in. Remidio's device is currently being used in India to screen pregnant women for conditions that drive stillbirth. And researchers are now adapting the same hardware to screen for anemia and hypertension, too... [S]mall, portable, affordable diagnostics in the hands of community health workers are exactly the kind of lever that can start to move a number that hasn't moved in a long time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steam on Linux use in March "had skyrocketed to 5.33%..." reports Phoronix, "easily the highest level we've seen Steam on Linux at since its inception more than a decade ago." So what happened in April?[April's results] point to Linux having a 4.52% marketshare on Steam, a drop of 0.81% compared to March. Year-over-year it's roughly double with Steam on Linux in April 2025 being at 2.27%. Or two years ago for April 2024, Steam on Linux was at 1.9%.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The once-a-year free comic book giveaway "is splitting in two," according to a local news report. Launched in 2002 by Diamond Comic Distributor, comic book giants like Marvel and DC have historically participated together. But things changed after Diamond Comic Distributors went bankrupt in 2025, "leaving other companies to swoop in and pick up where Diamond left off."The rights to the "Free Comic Book Day" brand were sold to Universal Distribution, which plans to bring Free Comic Book Day back on Saturday. On the same day, Penguin Random House plans to launch a rival event called Comics Giveaway Day. This means you'll still get plenty of free comics, but this time they will be separated, with some coming under the Free Comic Book Day branding and others arriving under the Comics Giveaway Day branding. Free Comic Book Day will include publishers like DC, Image, Dynamite and Archie Comics. Comics Giveaway Day will include publishers such as Marvel, Dark Horse, Boom! Studios and Tokyopop... The other big change coming this year is the introduction of game publishers Wizards of the Coast and Upper Deck to the lineup, as part of Universal Distribution's Free Comic Book Day. Wizards of the Coast is known for its tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, as well as its trading card game Magic: The Gathering. Upper Deck is best known for its sports trading cards and entertainment collectibles, along with deck-building games like the Legendary series... In addition to adding these game makers, Universal plans to expand Free Comic Book Day to include what are colloquially referred to as your friendly local game stores. Marvel's offerings this year include a special Alien, Predator & Planet of the Apes one-shot, while D.C. is offering the first chapter of their upcoming graphic novel Aquamanatee. Other comics include Avatar: The Last Airbender - Legends from Dark Horse Comics andSonic the Hedgehog from IDW Publishing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GameStop is reportedly preparing a potential offer for eBay, an unusually ambitious move given that eBay's roughly $46 billion market value is nearly four times GameStop's. Reuters reports: GameStop is preparing an offer for eBay as CEO Ryan Cohen pursues plans to boost the struggling videogame retailer's market value more than tenfold, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Shares of eBay, which has a market capitalization of about $46 billion, soared about 14% in extended trading. GameStop gained 4%. The company has a market value of nearly $12 billion. GameStop has been quietly building a stake in eBay's shares ahead of a potential offer, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. If eBay is not receptive, Cohen could decide to take the offer directly to the e-commerce company's shareholders, the Journal said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA engineers have tested a next-generation lithium-plasma electric propulsion system that reached 120 kilowatts, a new U.S. record and about 25 times the power of the electric thrusters on NASA's Psyche spacecraft. "Designing and building these thrusters over the last couple of years has been a long lead-up to this first test," said James Polk, who is a senior research scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's a huge moment for us because we not only showed the thruster works, but we also hit the power levels we were targeting. And we know we have a good testbed to begin addressing the challenges to scaling up." Universe Today reports: While 120 kilowatts is a new record, NASA estimates it a future human mission to Mars will require 2 to 4 megawatts of power consisting of several thrusters and requiring more than 23,000 hours (958 days/2.6 years) of operation. To accomplish this, the thrusters would have to withstand more than 2,800 degrees Celsius (5,000 degrees Fahrenheit), which the thrusters achieved during testing. The reason for the extended operation is due to the estimated time of an entire human mission to Mars, which is estimated to be approximately 2.6 years. This is because the launch window to Mars only opens once every two years due to the orbital behaviors of both planets. While no mission has ever returned from the Red Planet, this same launch window works from Mars to Earth, too. When launched within this window, robotic spacecraft have traditionally taken approximately 6-7 months to reach Mars. However, a human mission would require a much larger spacecraft to accommodate the astronauts, food, fuel, water, and other mission-essential items. For the approximate 2.6-year mission, this would entail approximately 6-9 months traveling to Mars, followed by approximately 18 months on the surface of Mars until the next launch window opens, then another approximate 6-9 months back to Earth. However, having much less fuel due to the electric propulsion system could potentially alter this timeframe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon's cloud customers will need to wait several more months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain -- meaning that full recovery from the cloud disruption could take nearly half a year in all. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard posted an April 30 update describing how its UAE and Bahrain cloud regions "suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East" and are unable to support customer applications. The update also said that "relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations" in a process that "is expected to take several months." That wording suggests Amazon will continue to avoid billing AWS customers in the affected regions -- ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 -- after it initially waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 at an estimated cost of $150 million. AWS also "strongly" recommended that customers migrate resources to other cloud regions and rely on remote backups to restore any "inaccessible resources." Some customers, such as the Dubai-based super app Careem-which offers ride-hailing, household services, and food and grocery delivery -- were able to get back online quickly after doing an overnight migration to other data center servers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is rolling out Xbox mode to all Windows 11 PCs, bringing a full-screen Xbox PC app interface similar to Steam's Big Picture Mode. "Some players in select markets will be able to download the Xbox mode experience today, with availability expanding to more players in those markets over the next several weeks," says the Xbox team. The Verge reports: Xbox mode aims to try and bridge the gap between Xbox consoles and Windows, but its original debut felt like a beta on the Xbox Ally devices. "Since first introducing Xbox mode, formerly known as 'full screen experience,' on Windows handhelds, we've been listening closely to player feedback and continuing to evolve the experience across devices," says the Xbox team. "Those learnings directly shaped Xbox mode on Windows 11 PCs." Microsoft is also rolling out improvements to the Xbox Ally X handheld today, including a preview of its Auto SR upscaling technology. Xbox console owners are also getting a new dashboard update today, with the ability to disable Quick Resume on individual games and a feature to add custom colors to the dashboard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

joshuark shares a report from Live Science: An AI coding agent designed to help a small software company streamline its tasks instead blew a hole through its business in just nine seconds. PocketOS founder Jer Crane, said that the AI coding agent Cursor --powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 model -- deleted the company's entire production database and backups with a single call to its cloud provider, Railway, on April 24. [...] "This isn't a story about one bad agent or one bad API [Application Programming Interfaces]," Crane wrote in an X post. "It's about an entire industry building AI-agent integrations into production infrastructure faster than it's building the safety architecture to make those integrations safe." Crane's company, PocketOS makes software for car rental companies, handling tasks such as reservations, payments, customer records and vehicle tracking. After the deletion, Crane said customers lost reservations and new signups, and some could not find records for people arriving to pick up their rental cars. "We've contacted legal counsel," Crane wrote. "We are documenting everything." Crane explained that Cursor found an API token -- a "digital key" made of a short sequence of code that lets software talk to other services and prove it has permission to act -- in an unrelated file which it then used to run the destructive command. According to Crane, Railway's setup allowed the deletion without confirmation, and because the backups were stored close enough to the main database, they were also erased. "[Railway] resolved the issue and restored the data," Railway confirmed via email to Live Science. "We maintain both user backups as well as disaster backups. We take data very, VERY seriously." In his post, he pointed to earlier reports of Cursor ignoring user rules, changing files it was not supposed to touch and taking actions beyond the task it had been given. To him, the database wipe was not a freak accident but the next step in a larger, more concerning, pattern. After the database vanished, Crane asked Cursor to explain what happened. The AI agent reportedly admitted that it had guessed, acted without permission and failed to understand the command before running it. "I violated every principle I was given," the AI agent wrote. "I guessed instead of verifying. I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn't understand what I was doing before doing it." The statement reads like a confession [...]. "We are not the first," Crane wrote. "We will not be the last unless this gets airtime."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Pentagon says it has reached deals with seven AI companies -- SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection AI, Microsoft, and AWS -- to deploy their tools on classified Defense Department networks. The odd one out is Anthropic, which remains excluded after being labeled a supply-chain risk amid a dispute over military-use guardrails. Reuters reports: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), several of which already work with the Pentagon, will be integrated into its secret and top-secret network environments, providing more military access to their products for use on sensitive topics, the Pentagon said in a statement. The lesser-known Reflection AI, which raised $2 billion in October, is backed by 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm in which Donald Trump Jr. is a partner and investor. Since the Pentagon deemed Anthropic's products a "supply-chain risk" in March and the two sides became embroiled in a lawsuit, the military has expressed increasing interest in AI startups. Since the blow-up, newer AI entrants have said the military has sped up the process of incorporating them onto secret and top-secret data levels to less than three months. The process previously took 18 months or longer. By expanding AI services offered to troops, who use it for planning, logistics, targeting and in other ways to streamline huge operations and perform more quickly, the Pentagon said in its statement it will avoid "vendor lock," a likely nod to its overdependence on Anthropic or other dominant service providers. [...] AI has become increasingly important for the U.S. military. The Pentagon's main AI platform, GenAI.mil, has been used by over 1.3 million Defense Department personnel, the agency noted in its release, after five months of operation. Further reading: Google and Pentagon Reportedly Agree On Deal For 'Any Lawful' Use of AIRead more of this story at Slashdot.

ICANN has opened applications for new generic top-level domains for the first time since 2012. The Register reports: ICANN hasn't offered new gTLDs since 2012, but on Thursday opened applications for new domains in 27 scripts. A 439-page Applicant Guidebook explains the process. The Register suggests paying attention to the string evaluation FAQ, which explains which gTLDs are valid, and those ICANN will likely frown upon. An FAQ describes this round of applications as giving "businesses, communities, and others the opportunity to apply for new top-level domains tailored to their community, culture, language, business, and customers." "A TLD can be a branding opportunity for a business, but the commercial opportunities are endless, allowing businesses in countries, entire sectors, or niche markets to develop a unique label on the Internet." ICANN also sees this round as a chance to "create a more multilingual Internet for the billions of people who speak and write in different languages and scripts and are yet to come online." If you fancy a gTLD, you'll need to pay a $227,000 application fee by August 12th ... and then wait, possibly until 2030 when this process ends.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZipNada shares a report from ZDNet: Given the dour headlines as of late concerning the diminishing amounts of entry-level software development jobs, coupled with predictions of applications entirely AI-generated, one could be forgiven for assuming that software developers may soon be an endangered species. However, the data tells a different story. James Bessen, professor at Boston University, has been pushing back for some time against the talk of AI and automation displacing jobs on a mass scale, and lately has been arguing that the roles of software developers are nowhere near extinction. AI is certainly not killing the software developer, Bessen said in a recent analysis (PDF). AI is taking over software development tasks and boosting productivity and output, but that is not translating into lost jobs, he argued. Instead, the types of software skills sought by companies are changing. "Surprisingly, however, after three years of AI use, software developer jobs have continued to grow robustly, reaching record levels of employment -- 2.5 million in February," Bessen said in the report, citing data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of software developers in the US has grown by over 400,000, or 19%, since ChatGPT was introduced in 2022. At that time, the employed software developer population was just under 2.1 million. [...] The productivity uptick developers are seeing may ultimately be a boost to their professional opportunities, however. "An important and possibly disruptive change is happening, but the common view misunderstands what is going on," Bessen pointed out in his report. "Careful case studies find that AI improves the productivity of software developers -- that is, the software produced per developer -- by 30%, 50%, or more. And the rate of productivity improvement in software development is improving." Tellingly, since 2022, when ChatGPT was introduced, developer productivity has increased noticeably, Bessen continued. "From 2003 to 2022, developer productivity grew at 3.9% per year; but from 2022 through 2025, it grew at 6% per year." [...] A coming flood of new software products, now more likely to be enhanced by AI, will continue to create jobs for developers, Bessen predicted. "Thus, mass unemployment of software developers seems unlikely to happen soon." This doesn't mean the job descriptions of developers or other computer occupations will remain static. AI is shifting and re-inventing these roles, Bessen added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last month, Anthropic made a big deal about the supposedly outsize cybersecurity threat represented by its Mythos Preview model, leading the company to restrict the initial release to "critical industry partners." But new research from the UK's AI Security Institute (AISI) suggests that OpenAI's GPT-5.5, which launched publicly last week, reached "a similar level of performance on our cyber evaluations" as Mythos Preview, which the group evaluated last month. Since 2023, the AISI has run a variety of frontier AI models through 95 different Capture the Flag challenges designed to test capabilities on cybersecurity tasks, such as reverse engineering, web exploitation, and cryptography. On the highest-level "Expert" tasks, GPT-5.5 passed an average of 71.4 percent, slightly higher than the 68.6 percent achieved by Mythos Preview (though within the margin of error). In one particularly difficult task that involved building a disassembler to decode a Rust binary, AISI notes that "GPT-5.5 solved the challenge in 10 minutes and 22 seconds with no human assistance at a cost of $1.73" in API calls. GPT-5.5 also matched Mythos Preview in its progress on "The Last Ones" (TLO), an AISI test range set up to simulate a 32-step data extraction attack on a corporate network. GPT-5.5 succeeded in 3 of 10 attempts on TLO, compared to 2 of 10 for Mythos Preview -- no previous model had ever succeeded at the test even once. But GPT-5.5 still fails at AISI's more difficult "Cooling Tower" simulation of an attempted disruption of the control software for a power plant, as every previously tested AI model also has. The new results for GPT-5.5 suggest that, when it comes to cybersecurity risk, Mythos Preview was likely not "a breakthrough specific to one model" but rather "a byproduct of more general improvements in long-horizon autonomy, reasoning, and coding," AISI writes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spotify is adding "Verified by Spotify" badges to distinguish human artists from AI-generated personas, using signals like linked social accounts, consistent listener activity, merchandise, and concert dates. The BBC reports: The world's most-used music streaming service said the 'Verified by Spotify' text and green checkmark icon would appear next to artist names when they meet "defined standards demonstrating authenticity." This could include having linked social accounts on their artist profile, consistent listener activity or other "signals of a real artist behind the profile," the company said, such as merchandise or concert dates. In its blog post, Spotify said "more than 99%" of the artists listeners actively search for will be verified, representing "hundreds of thousands of artists." It said the process would prioritize acts with "important contributions to music culture and history", rather than "content farms," with the platform rolling out verification and badges over the coming weeks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers are actively exploiting a critical cPanel and WHM vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-41940, that allows remote attackers to bypass the login screen and gain full administrative access to affected web servers. Major hosts including Namecheap, HostGator, and KnownHost have taken mitigation steps or patched systems, but cPanel is urging all customers and web hosts to update immediately because the software is widely used across millions of websites. TechCrunch reports: cPanel and WHM are two software suites used for managing web servers that host websites, manage emails, and handle important configurations and databases needed to maintain an internet domain. The two suites have deep-access to the servers that they manage, allowing a malicious hacker potentially unrestricted access to data managed by the affected software. Given the ubiquity of the cPanel and WHM software across the web hosting industry, hackers could compromise potentially large numbers of websites that haven't patched the bug. Canada's national cybersecurity agency said in an advisory that the bug could be exploited to compromise websites on shared hosting servers, such as large web hosting companies. The agency said that "exploitation is highly probable" and that immediate action from cPanel customers, or their web hosts, is necessary to prevent malicious access. [...] One web hosting company says it found evidence that hackers have been abusing the vulnerability for months before the attempts were discovered.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Standard: If state lawmakers have their way, you'll have to get a license plate for your e-bike, and if you're planning to buy one next year, it'll be slower. Amid growing concerns about e-bike safety, particularly among children in Bay Area suburbs, two bills introduced this year aim to make it easier to ticket riders and reduce the top speed of some models. AB 1942 would require certain e-bikes to be registered with the Department of Motor Vehicles and display license plates, and AB 1557 would slow e-bikes that children are allowed to operate. Both bills are still being reviewed in committee. If either bill passes this year, it will take effect Jan. 1.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fjo3 shares a report from the Washington Post: Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow -- from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc. Experts fear the degradation of Earth's food supply will cause an epidemic of hidden hunger, in which even people who consume enough calories won't get the nutrients they need to thrive. "The diets we eat today have less nutritional density than what our grandparents ate, even if we eat exactly the same thing," said Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington's Center for Health and the Global Environment. People in wealthy countries with strong health care systems will have many tools to cope with the change, experts said. But for the world's poorest and most vulnerable, the consequences could be devastating. One study concluded that by the middle of the century the phenomenon could put more than a billion additional women and children at risk of iron-deficiency anemia -- a condition that can cause pregnancy complications, developmental problems and even death. Meanwhile, some 2 billion people across the globe who already suffer from some form of nutrient shortage could see their health problems grow even worse. "The scale of the problem is huge," Ebi said. Plants depend on carbon dioxide to perform photosynthesis -- but that doesn't mean they grow better when there's more carbon in the air, scientists say. A sweeping survey of changes among 32 compounds in 43 crops found that nearly every plant that humans eat is harmed by rising CO2 levels. [...] For the past several years, [Sterre F. ter Haar, an environmental scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the survey] and her colleagues have worked to compile a database of all existing research on nutrient changes linked to rising CO2. They tracked down hundreds of studies, ranging from tightly controlled lab experiments to sprawling global analyses of real-world crops. Next the team used their dataset to calculate the nutritional densities of each crop under different carbon dioxide levels -- and to predict how their composition could continue to shift in the future.On average, they found, nutrients have already decreased by an average 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million. That figure may seem small, ter Haar said, but with so much of the world already living on the brink of nutrient insufficiency, a drop of just a few percentage points has the potential to push millions of additional people into a health crisis. Researchers are still trying to understand the exact causes of this change. Extra CO2 can make plants grow faster and produce more carbohydrates, but without a matching increase in mineral uptake, nutrients like zinc, iron, and protein become diluted. Higher CO2 also causes plants to open their leaf pores less often, reducing the amount of water -- and dissolved minerals -- they absorb through their roots. At the same time, higher temperatures can further disrupt soil chemistry, affecting how plants take up nutrients and, in some cases, increasing their absorption of harmful substances like arsenic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Belgium plans to buy its seven aging nuclear reactors from French power giant Engie in a "full takeover" aimed at securing domestic energy supplies, extending reactor operations, and developing new nuclear capacity. "The move would also mean suspending plans to decommission nuclear operations in Belgium," reports the BBC. From the report: The move would reverse the phase-out of nuclear energy legislation approved in the early 2000s amid safety concerns prohibiting the building of new nuclear power plants and limiting the operating lifetimes of existing ones to 40 years. Only two of Belgium's seven nuclear reactors are operational - located at plants in Doel and in Tihange - and their operating licenses were recently extended until 2035. The other five reactors were shut between 2022 and 2025 and plans to dismantle them will now be suspended. Engie and the government said they aim to reach an agreement on the takeover of the nuclear stations by October 1st. In a joint statement with Engie, the Belgian government said the move also highlights its aim to extend operations of existing nuclear reactors and to develop "new nuclear capacity" in Belgium. "By doing so, the Belgian Government is taking responsibility for Belgium's long-term energy future, with the objective of building a financially and economically viable activity that supports security of supply, climate objectives, industrial resilience and socio-economic prosperity," the statement adds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Elon Musk wrapped up his testimony on Thursday as the trial in his lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman continued into its fourth day. OpenAI's attorney, William Savitt, cross-examined Musk in the morning. He asked Musk about the capped nature of Microsoft's investments in OpenAI, his involvement in negotiations about the company's structure, and whether he knew about the OpenAI nonprofit's recent initiatives. "I don't know what's going on at OpenAI," Musk testified. Savitt also asked Musk about his competing artificial intelligence startup, xAI. While not the main focus of the case, Musk said it is "partly" true that xAI used some of OpenAI's models to train its own models, a process known as distilling. Musk also suggested that xAI has used OpenAI's technology to help build the company. Musk sued OpenAI, Altman, and Greg Brockman, the company's president, in 2024, alleging that they went back on their commitments to keep the artificial intelligence company a nonprofit and to follow its charitable mission. He claims that the roughly $38 million he donated to seed OpenAI, a company he co-founded, was used for unauthorized commercial purposes. Once Musk wrapped up his testimony after roughly two hours of questioning on Thursday, his attorneys called Jared Birchall, who manages Musk's billions at his family office, as their next witness. Birchall testified about his knowledge of Musk's specific donations to OpenAI. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers oversaw the proceedings from federal court in Oakland, California. The trial will resume on Monday. Recap:Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a rule banning senators from trading on prediction markets effective immediately. CNBC reports: The move came amid rising concern about insider trading on prediction market platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket, and about event contracts that can involve death or violence. On April 22, Kalshi said it had suspended and fined one U.S. Senate candidate and two candidates for the House of Representatives for political insider trading on their own campaigns. Earlier on Thursday, a group of Democratic members of Congress called on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to issue a rule "that prevents insider trading and corruption in the market and prohibits event contracts on the outcome of elections, war and military actions in the U.S. or abroad, sports, and government actions without a valid economic hedging interest." Kalshi and Polymarket both praised the Senate's action. "I applaud the Senate for passing this resolution to ban Senators and their offices from trading on prediction markets," Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour wrote in a post on X. "Kalshi already proactively blocks members of congress and enforces against insider trading. This is a great step to increase trust in our markets by making it an industry standard," Mansour said. "Now, let's pass this in the House!" Polymarket, in its own post on X, said, "We're in full support of this. Our Rulebook & Terms of Service already prohibit such conduct, but codifying this into law is a step forward for the industry. Happy to help move this forward however we can."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A newly disclosed Linux kernel flaw dubbed "Copy Fail" can let a local, unprivileged attacker gain root access on major Linux distributions, with researchers claiming the bug affects kernels shipped since 2017. "The POC exploit works out of the box today, but a future version that can escape from containers like Docker is promised soon," writes Slashdot reader tylerni7. "Technical details are available here." Slashdot reader BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: A newly disclosed Linux kernel vulnerability called Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431) allows an unprivileged user to gain root access using a tiny 732-byte script, and it works with unsettling consistency across major distributions. Unlike older exploits that relied on race conditions or fragile timing, this one is a straight-line logic flaw in the kernel's crypto subsystem. It abuses AF_ALG sockets and splice to overwrite a few bytes in the page cache of a target file, such as /usr/bin/su. Because the kernel executes from the page cache, not directly from disk, the attacker can inject code into a setuid binary in memory and immediately escalate privileges. What makes this especially concerning is how quiet it is. The file on disk remains unchanged, so standard integrity checks see nothing wrong, while the in-memory version has already been tampered with. The same primitive can also cross container boundaries since the page cache is shared, raising the stakes for multi-tenant environments and Kubernetes nodes. The underlying issue traces back to an in-place optimization added years ago, now being rolled back as part of the fix. Until patched kernels are widely deployed, this is one of those bugs that feels less like a theoretical risk and more like a practical, reliable path to full system compromise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess found that an OpenAI reasoning model outperformed experienced ER doctors at diagnosing and managing patient cases using messy, real-world emergency department records. Researchers say the results don't support replacing doctors, but they do suggest AI could meaningfully reshape clinical workflows if tested carefully in prospective trials. NPR reports: The researchers ran a series of experiments on the AI model to test its clinical acumen -- including actual cases like the lupus patient who'd been previously treated at the emergency department at Beth Israel in Boston. The team graded how well the AI model could provide an accurate diagnosis at three moments in time, from the triage stage in the ER, up to being admitted into the hospital. Overall, AI outperformed two experienced physicians -- and did so with only the electronic health records and the limited information that had been available to the physicians at the time. "This is the big conclusion for me -- it works with the messy real-world data of the emergency department, " said Dr. Adam Rodman, a clinical researcher at Beth Israel and one of the study authors. "It works for making diagnoses in the real world." Other parts of the study focused on case reports published in the New England Journal of Medicine and clinical vignettes to suss out whether the AI model could meet well-established "benchmarks" and game out thorny diagnostic questions. "The model outperformed our very large physician baseline," said Raj Manrai, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School who was also part of the study. The authors emphasize the AI relied on text alone, while in real life, clinicians need to attend to many other inputs like images, sounds and nonverbal cues when diagnosing and treating a patient. The findings have been published Thursday in the journal Science.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

French prosecutors say police detained a 15-year-old suspected of using the alias "breach3d" in connection with a cyberattack on France Titres (ANTS), the state agency that handles passports, ID cards, and other secure documents. The breach allegedly involved 12 million to 18 million lines of data offered for sale online, potentially affecting up to a third of France's population if the records are unique. The Register reports: It formally opened (PDF) a judicial investigation on April 29, covering alleged fraudulent access to a state-run automated data processing system and the extraction of data from it. Each offense carries a potential prison sentence of seven years and a maximum ~$350,000 fine. Public Prosecutor Laure Beccuau has requested that the minor, whose pronouns, like their name, were also not specified, be formally charged and placed under judicial supervision. [...] France's approach to punishing minors via its legal system is typically geared toward re-education and rehabilitation rather than prison time. While those aged between 13 and 16 can face time in juvenile detention, it is often used as a last resort measure. The maximum sentences and fines for the charges the 15-year-old in this case faces are upper limits imposed on adult offenders, and would likely be lowered substantially in cases involving a minor, like this one.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RightsCon, one of the world's largest digital human rights conferences, was suddenly postponed by Zambia's government just days before it was scheduled to begin in Lusaka. Officials cited unresolved speaker clearances and "thematic issues," while Access Now said it had not yet received formal communication and was seeking an urgent meeting with the government. 404 Media reports: Minister of Technology and Science Felix Mutati first announced the postponement on April 28, saying that Zambia needed more time to ensure the conference "fully [aligns] with national procedures, diplomatic protocols, and the broader objective of fostering a balanced and consensus-driven platform for dialogue." "In particular, certain invited speakers and participants remain subject to pending administrative and security clearances, which have not yet been concluded," he added, according to the Lusaka Times. [...] On a popular listserv for academics, many of whom are attending RightsCon, a board member of Access Now wrote "I am told I can leak that RightsCon has been canceled. Message from [Access Now] following shortly" in a thread about what attendees were planning on doing. And in an email, AccessNow wrote: "It is with heavy hearts that we share: RightsCon will not proceed in Zambia or online. We understand this news is deeply upsetting for our community and while we know everyone has questions, our goal right now is to notify you of the event's status because many of you have imminent travel plans. We do not recommend registered participants travel to Lusaka for RightsCon. Over the last 48 hours we have experienced an overwhelming surge of support from civil society, government representatives, sponsors, and our community as a whole. For this, we wholeheartedly thank you. We'll communicate more information soon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Several times in the last couple of decades, Microsoft has released source code for the original MS-DOS operating system that kicked off its decades-long dominance of consumer PCs. This week, the company has reached further back than ever, releasing "the earliest DOS source code discovered to date" along with other documentation and notes from its developer. Today's source release is so old that it predates the MS-DOS branding, and it includes "sources to the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, several development snapshots of the PC-DOS 1.00 kernel, and some well-known utilities such as CHKDSK," write Microsoft's Stacey Haffner and Scott Hanselman in their co-authored post about the release. [...] This source code is old enough that it hadn't been stored digitally. "A dedicated team of historians and preservationists led by Yufeng Gao and Rich Cini," calling itself the "DOS Disassembly Group," painstakingly transcribed and scanned in code from paper printouts provided by Paterson. This process was made even more difficult because modern OCR software struggled with the quality of the decades-old printout.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reuters reports that Charles Lieber, the former Harvard scientist convicted of lying to U.S. authorities about payments and ties to China, is now leading China's state-funded i-BRAIN lab in Shenzhen, where he has access to advanced nanofabrication tools and primate research facilities for brain-computer interface work. From the report: Charles Lieber, 67, is among the world's leading researchers in brain-computer interfaces. The technology has shown promise in treating conditions such as ALS and restoring movement in paralyzed patients. But it also has potential military applications: Scientists at China's People's Liberation Army have investigated brain interfaces as a way to engineer super soldiers by boosting mental agility and situational awareness, according to the U.S. Defense Department. Lieber was found guilty by a jury and convicted in December 2021 of making false statements to federal investigators about his ties to a Chinese state program to recruit overseas talent, and tax offenses related to payments he received from a Chinese university. He served two days in prison and six months under house arrest, and was fined $50,000 and ordered to pay $33,600 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service. During the case, his defense said he was suffering from an incurable lymphoma, which was in remission, and he was fighting for his life. Three years after he was sentenced, Reuters has learned that Lieber is now overseeing China's state-funded i-BRAIN, or the Institute for Brain Research, Advanced Interfaces and Neurotechnologies, with access to dedicated nanofabrication equipment and primate research infrastructure unavailable to him at Harvard. The lab is an arm of the Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation, or SMART. "I arrived on April 28, 2025 with a dream and not much more, maybe a couple bags of clothes," Lieber said of his move to China at a Shenzhen government conference in December. "Personally, my own goals are to make Shenzhen a world leader." SMART last year appointed Lieber as an investigator, according to a post on i-BRAIN's website dated May 1, 2025. That news was covered by some media outlets. The same day, i-BRAIN said Lieber had also been appointed its founding director -- an announcement that went unreported at the time. This story is the most comprehensive account of Lieber's activities since he moved to China. Reuters is reporting for the first time that his lab has access to dedicated primate research facilities and chip-making equipment; that it sits within a sprawling ecosystem of state-backed institutions bankrolled by billions of dollars in government funding; and that it is housed within an institution that is luring top scientific talent back from the United States.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new poll shows a slim majority of Swiss voters now support a June 14 referendum to cap the country's population at 10 million by 2050. Under the proposal backed by the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP), "the permanent resident population must not exceed 10 million before 2050, and Switzerland should abandon its freedom of movement agreement with the EU," reports Reuters. From the report: Switzerland's population is now more than 9 million, with official data showing foreign nationals accounted for more than 27% by 2024. The survey, conducted on April 22 and 23 and published in newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, showed 52% of 16,176 respondents in favor of the proposal or leaning that way, while 46% took the opposite view. The rest gave no opinion. A previous poll from early March had shown 45% backing the initiative and 47% against it, the newspaper said, flagging the latest result as unusual in that Swiss referendum proposals generally lose support as the voting day comes closer. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The system prompt for OpenAI's Codex CLI contains a perplexing and repeated warning for the most recent GPT model to "never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query." The explicit operational warning was made public last week as part of the latest open source code for Codex CLI that OpenAI posted on GitHub. The prohibition is repeated twice in a 3,500-plus word set of "base instructions" for the recently released GPT-5.5, alongside more anodyne reminders not to "use emojis or em dashes unless explicitly instructed" and to "never use destructive commands like 'git reset --hard' or 'git checkout --' unless the user has clearly asked for that operation." Separate system prompt instructions for earlier models contained in the same JSON file do not contain the specific prohibition against mentioning goblins and other creatures, suggesting OpenAI is fighting a new problem that has popped up in its latest model release. Anecdotal evidence on social media shows some users complaining about GPT's penchant for focusing on goblins in completely unrelated conversations in recent days. Update: OpenAI has published a blog post explaining "where the goblins came from." In short, a training signal meant to encourage its "Nerdy" personality accidentally rewarded creature-heavy metaphors, causing words like "goblins" and "gremlins" to spread beyond that personality into broader model behavior. OpenAI says it has since retired the Nerdy personality, removed the goblin-friendly reward signal, and filtered creature-word examples from training data to keep the quirk from resurfacing in inappropriate contexts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from ZeroHedge: The Justice Department on Tuesday sued Cloudera, accusing the enterprise data and artificial intelligence company of deliberately engineering a hiring process that excluded American workers from at least seven lucrative technology positions while the firm pursued permanent residency sponsorship for foreign workers on temporary visas. In a 14-page complaint filed with the Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer, the department's Civil Rights Division alleges that Cloudera, from March 31, 2024, through at least January 28, 2025, instructed job candidates to submit applications to a dedicated email address, amerijobpostings@cloudera.com, that rejected all external messages with an automated bounce-back error. The company did not advertise the roles on its public careers website or accept applications through its standard portal, as it did for non-sponsorship positions. Cloudera then attested to the Department of Labor that it could not locate any qualified U.S. workers for the roles, which paid between approximately $180,000 and $294,000 annually, according to the filing. The positions included a Product Manager role in Santa Clara, California, with a listed salary range of $170,186 to $190,000. The case marks one of the most detailed enforcement actions under the Justice Department's Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, which was relaunched last year and has already produced 10 settlements targeting employers accused of discriminating against American workers in favor of temporary visa holders. "Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a backdoor for discriminating against U.S. workers," Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division said in a statement. "The Division will not hesitate to sue companies who intentionally deter U.S. workers from applying to American jobs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tesla has produced the first Semi from its new high-volume production line at Gigafactory Nevada, a milestone for the long-delayed electric Class 8 truck program after years of pilot builds and delays. Electrek reports: The Tesla Semi has had one of the longest gestation periods in Tesla's history. First unveiled in 2017, the truck was originally promised for production in 2019. That target slipped repeatedly -- to 2020, then 2021, then 2022 -- before Tesla finally delivered a handful of units to PepsiCo in late 2022. Those early trucks were essentially hand-built on a pilot line. Tesla spent the next three years refining the design, cutting roughly 1,000 lbs from the truck, and building out a dedicated factory adjacent to Gigafactory Nevada in Sparks. The company revealed the final production specs in February, confirming two trims: a Standard Range with 325 miles at full 82,000-lb gross combination weight, and a Long Range with 500 miles of range. Tesla is quoting $290,000 for the 500-mile Long Range version and roughly $260,000 for the Standard Range -- making it the lowest-priced Class 8 battery electric tractor on the market. The shift from a pilot line to a high-volume production line is significant. Tesla's Semi factory is designed for an annual capacity of 50,000 trucks, though the company will ramp gradually. Analysts project deliveries between 5,000 and 15,000 units in 2026, but that sounds way too optimistic. [...] Both trims feature an 800-kW tri-motor drivetrain producing 1,072 hp and support 1.2-MW Megacharger speeds, restoring 60% of range in roughly 30 minutes -- conveniently timed around a driver's mandatory rest break. Tesla has opened its first Megacharger station in Ontario, California, and has mapped 66 Megacharger locations across 15 states.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Chronicle: Elon Musk returned to the witness stand Wednesday in Oakland federal court for a second day of testimony in his case against OpenAI, detailing his shift from being an enthusiastic supporter of the nonprofit to feeling betrayed. He also clashed repeatedly with OpenAI's attorney over questions that Musk believed were unfair. He said his feelings towards OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman shifted from a "phase one" of support, "phase two" of doubts, and finally "phase three, where I'm sure they're looting the nonprofit. We're currently in phase three," Musk said with a chuckle. Musk said he was a "fool" for giving OpenAI "$38 million of essentially free funding to create what would become an $800 billion company," of which he has no equity stake. In his 2024 lawsuit, Musk alleged breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment, arguing OpenAI abandoned its original nonprofit mission to benefit humanity to pursue financial gain. OpenAI's lawyer William Savitt argued Tuesday during his opening statement that the nonprofit entity remains in control of the for-profit public benefit corporation and is now one of the most well-funded nonprofits in the world. Musk is seeking to oust Altman from OpenAI's board and upwards of $134 billion in damages, which he said would be used to fund OpenAI's nonprofit mission. During cross-examination, Savitt clashed with Musk over questioning. Savitt asked whether Musk had contributed $38 million to OpenAI, rather than the $100 million that he later claimed to have invested on X. Musk said he also contributed his reputation to the company and came up with the idea for the name, leading Savitt to ask Musk to respond yes or no to "simple" questions. "Your questions are not simple. They're designed to trick me, essentially," Musk said, adding that he had to elaborate or it would mislead the jury. He compared Savitt's questions to asking, "have you stopped beating your wife?" Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers intervened, leading Musk to answer yes to the $38 million investment amount. The world's richest man said his doubts grew and by late 2022, he thought "wait a second, these guys are betraying their promise. They're breaking the deal." "I started to lose confidence that they were telling me the truth," Musk said. A turning point was co-defendent Microsoft's investment of billions of dollars into OpenAI, Musk said. On October 23, 2022, Musk texted Altman that he was "disturbed" to see OpenAI's valuation of $20 billion in the wake of the Microsoft deal. Musk called the deal a "bait and switch," since a nonprofit doesn't have a valuation. OpenAI had "for all intents and purposes" become primarily a for-profit company, Musk argued. Altman responded to Musk by text that "I agree this feels bad," saying that OpenAI had previously offered equity in the company but Musk hadn't wanted it at the time. Altman said the company was happy to offer equity in the future. Musk said it "didn't seem to make sense to me" to hold equity in what should be a nonprofit. Musk also testified about former OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis, who lives with him, is the mother of four of his children, and served as a senior advisor at Neuralink. He denied that she shared sensitive OpenAI information with him. Court evidence showed Musk had encouraged her to stay close to OpenAI to "keep info flowing" and had approved Neuralink recruiting OpenAI employees, which he defended by saying workers are free to change jobs. "It's a free country," Musk said. Recap:Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A federal judge denied Sam Bankman-Fried's request for a new trial, calling his claims of DOJ witness intimidation "wildly conspiratorial" and unsupported by the record. Judge Lewis Kaplan said (PDF) the FTX founder's motion appeared tied to a pre-indictment plan to recast himself as a Republican victim of Biden's DOJ in hopes of gaining sympathy, leniency, or even a Trump pardon. Ars Technica reports: Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024 for "masterminding one of the largest financial frauds in American history," US District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in his order. He was convicted on all charges, including wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, commodities fraud, and money laundering. There is already an appeal pending in another court, the judge noted. But Bankman-Fried filed a separate motion for a new trial, claiming that there were "newly discovered" witnesses and evidence that might have helped his defense, if Joe Biden's Department of Justice hadn't intimidated them into refusing to testify or, in one case, lying on the stand. He also asked for a new judge, wanting Kaplan to recuse himself. However, Kaplan pointed out that "none of the witnesses" were "newly discovered." And more concerningly, Bankman-Fried offered no evidence that the witnesses could prove the "wildly conspiratorial" theory the FTX founder raised, claiming that their absence at the trial was a "product of government threats and retaliation," the judge wrote. Bankman-Fried's theory is "entirely contradicted by the record," Kaplan said. He emphasized that granting Bankman-Fried's request "would be a large waste of judicial resources as it could require another judge to familiarize himself or herself with an extensive and complicated record." Additionally, all three witnesses that Bankman-Fried claimed could give crucial testimony in his defense were known to him throughout the trial, and he never sought to compel their testimony. And the "self-serving social-media posts" of one witness who now claims that he lied when testifying against Bankman-Fried -- "Ryan Salame, who pleaded guilty" -- must be met with "utmost suspicion," Kaplan said. "If one were to take Salame at his current word, he lied under oath when pleading guilty before this Court," Kaplan wrote. Even if taken seriously, "his out-of-court, unsworn statements could not come anywhere close to clearing the bar to warrant a new trial," Kaplan said, deeming Salame's credibility "highly questionable." Further, "even if these individuals had testified for Bankman-Fried, his protestations that one or more of them would have supported his claims that FTX was not insolvent and that his victims all were compensated fully in the bankruptcy proceedings are inaccurate or misleading," Kaplan concluded. In the order, Kaplan's frustration seems palpable, as there may have been no need for him to rule on the motion at all after Bankman-Fried requested to withdraw it. But the judge said the ruling was needed after Bankman-Fried waited to file his withdrawal request until after the DOJ and the court wasted time responding and reviewing filings, the judge said. Troublingly, Bankman-Fried's request to withdraw his request without prejudice would have allowed him to potentially request a new trial after the appeal ended. Based on the substance of the filing, that risked wasting future court resources, Kaplan determined. To prevent overburdening the justice system, Kaplan deemed it necessary to deny Bankman-Fried's motion and request for recusal, rather than allow him to withdraw the filing without prejudice.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canonical's plan to add AI features to Ubuntu has sparked pushback from users who are concerned it could follow Windows 11's AI-heavy direction. "After Canonical's announcement earlier this week that it's bringing AI features to Ubuntu, replies included requests for an AI 'kill switch' or a way to disable the upcoming features," reports The Verge. Canonical says it has no plans for a "global AI kill switch" but it will allow users to remove any AI features they don't want. From the report: In his original post, [Canonical's VP of engineering, Jon Seager] said the upcoming AI features will include accessibility tools like AI speech-to-text and text-to-speech, along with agentic AI features for tasks like troubleshooting and automation. Canonical is also encouraging its engineers to use AI more and plans to begin introducing AI features in Ubuntu "throughout the next year." In a follow-up comment, Seager clarified that, "my plan is to introduce AI-backed features as a 'preview' on a strictly opt-in basis in [Ubuntu version] 26.10. In subsequent releases, my plan is to have a step in the initial setup wizard that allows the user to choose whether or not they'd like the AI-native features enabled." Ultimately, he said, "All of these capabilities will be delivered as Snaps to the OS, layered on top of the existing Ubuntu stack. That means there will always be the option of removing those Snaps." Users who prefer to avoid AI entirely could switch to other distros like Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, or Zorin OS. "These distros have some similarities to Ubuntu, but may not necessarily adopt the new AI features Canonical is rolling out," adds The Verge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joby Aviation has completed demonstration flights of its electric air taxi over New York City, testing real routes between JFK and Manhattan helipads as it prepares for a future commercial service. The company says its eVTOL could turn a 60- to 120-minute airport trip into a flight of under 10 minutes, though commercial launch still depends on FAA certification. Electrive reports: To launch operations in New York City, Joby acquired Blade Urban Air Mobility last year. Blade already enables helicopter flights for affluent travelers between Manhattan and airports such as JFK or Newark in just five minutes, avoiding up to two hours of traffic and typical airport hassles. Joby aims to replace this service with quiet, electric air taxis as soon as possible, transitioning Blade's existing customers to the new technology. However, introducing a new aircraft into commercial service requires a years-long certification process, overseen in the US by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Joby is now in the final phase of FAA certification. Following a series of demonstration flights in the San Francisco Bay Area, the company has tested its air taxi in New York City on real flight routes and under real-world conditions. During these tests, Joby demonstrated the acoustics and performance metrics critical for entering the urban air taxi market. During these demonstration flights, Joby's air taxi took off from John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) and landed at various helipads across the city, including Downtown Skyport and the helipads at West 30th Street and East 34th Street in Midtown, where Blade Air Mobility's premium passenger lounges are located. These locations represent some of the commercial routes Joby plans for New York [...]. Fun fact: Joby's eVTOL aircraft are over 100 to 1,000 times quieter than a conventional helicopter, operating at roughly 55-65 dB during takeoff and landing compared to 90+ dB for helicopters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MacRumors reports that Apple has effectively paused work on Vision Pro after the M5 refresh failed to revive demand. The team has reportedly been reassigned and the company is now shifting focus toward smart glasses instead. From the report: The Vision Pro has been criticized for its high price tag and its uncomfortable weight. The device is over 1.3 pounds, and even with the more comfortable Dual Knit Band that Apple added to redistribute weight, it continues to be hard to wear for long periods of time. The M5 chip added a 120Hz refresh rate, 10 percent more rendered pixels, and around 30 additional minutes of battery life, but the price tag stayed at $3,499, and it ended up not selling well. The Vision Pro has been unpopular since it first launched, and Apple only sold around 600,000 units in total. Insider sources told MacRumors that Apple has received an unusually high percentage of returns, far exceeding any other modern Apple product. [...] If Apple finds a way to create a much cheaper, more comfortable VR headset in the future, the Vision Pro line could be revived, but right now, the company has no plans to launch a new model. Apple has not discontinued the Vision Pro and is continuing to sell the M5 model. Instead of continuing to experiment with virtual reality, Apple is working on smart glasses that will eventually incorporate augmented reality capabilities, but the first version will be similar to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses with AI and no integrated display.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 writes: California's long-delayed high-speed rail project is now facing renewed scrutiny after state leaders revealed a dramatically higher price tag, now estimated at roughly $231 billion, nearly seven times the original $33 billion projection approved by voters in 2008. The revised figures have reignited talks in Sacramento over whether the project can realistically be completed, how long it will take, and whether the state can continue to fund it at this scale. Senator Strickland pointed to comments from Lou Thompson, former chair of the California High-Speed Rail Authority peer review group, who recently criticized the latest draft business plan. Thompson wrote that the 2026 draft plan "has reached a dead end," arguing that the project has drifted far from its original vision due to escalating costs, delays, and unfunded gaps. Under current projections, assuming funding and construction proceed as planned, service between San Francisco and Bakersfield could begin around 2033, while the full Los Angeles to San Francisco connection could extend to 2040.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A controversial bill in Colorado that would have undone some repair protections in the state has failed. The bill had been the target of right-to-repair advocates, who saw it as a bellwether for how tech companies might try to undo repair legislation more broadly in the US. Colorado's landmark 2024 repair law, the Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment, went into effect in January 2026 and ensured access to tools and documentation people needed to modify and fix digital electronics such as phones, computers, and Wi-Fi routers. The new bill, SB26-090, would have carved out an exception to those repair protections for "critical infrastructure," a loosely defined term that repair advocates worried could be applied to just about any technology. SB26-090 was introduced during a Colorado Senate hearing on April 2 and was supported by lobbying efforts from companies such as Cisco and IBM. It passed that hearing unanimously. The bill then passed in the Colorado Senate on April 16. On Monday evening, the bill was discussed in a long, delayed hearing in the Colorado House's State, Civic, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee. Dozens of supporters and detractors gave public comments. Finally, the bill was shot down in a 7-to-4 vote and classified as postponed indefinitely. "While we were making progress at chipping away at the momentum for it, we had still been losing," said Danny Katz, executive director of the local nonprofit consumer advocacy group CoPIRG. "So, we took nothing for granted, and I believe the incredible testimony from the broad range of cybersecurity experts, businesses, repair advocates, recyclers, and people who want the freedom to fix their stuff made a big difference."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub's frequent outages have made it "no longer a place for serious work," prompting him to move his Ghostty terminal emulator project elsewhere after 18 years on the platform. The Register reports: "I've been angry about it. I've hurt people's feelings. I've been lashing out. Because GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal. It is irrationally personal," he wrote. The reason for his ire is the service has become unreliable. "For the past month I've kept a journal where I put an 'X' next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work," he wrote. "Almost every day has an 'X'. On the day I am writing this post, I've been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage." Hashimoto penned his post a few days before an April 28 incident that saw pull requests fail to complete due to an Elasticsearch SNAFU. Incidents like that mean Hashimoto has decided GitHub "is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day." "It's not a fun place for me to be anymore," he lamented. "I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software." The developer says he wants GitHub to improve, but "I also want to code. And I can't code with GitHub anymore. I'm sorry. After 18 years, I've got to go." He's open to a return if GitHub can deliver "real results and improvements, not words and promises." But for now, he's working to move Ghostty to another collaborative code locker. "We have a plan but I'm also very much still in discussions with multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS)," Hashimoto wrote. "It'll take us time to remove all of our dependencies on GitHub and we have a plan in place to do it as incrementally as possible." He's doing the equivalent of leaving a toothbrush at a former partner's house by leaving a read-only mirror of Ghostty on GitHub, and by keeping his personal projects on the Microsoft-owned service. But Hashimoto's moving his day job somewhere new. "Ghostty is where I, our maintainers, and our open source community are most impacted so that is the focus of this change. We'll see where it goes after that," he concluded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tony Isaac shares a report from NPR: Federal survey data shows that the amount of math homework assigned to fourth and eighth grade students, in particular, has been steadily declining for the past decade. Some educators and parents say this is a good thing -- students shouldn't spend six or more hours a day at school and still have additional schoolwork to complete at home. But the research on homework is complicated. Some studies show that students who spend more time on homework perform better than their peers. For example, a longitudinal study released in 2021 of more than 6,000 students in Germany, Uruguay and the Netherlands found that lower-performing students who increased the amount of time they spent on math homework performed better in math, even one year later. Other studies, however, suggest homework has minimal outcomes on academic performance: A 1998 study of more than 700 U.S. students led by a researcher at Duke University found that more homework assigned in elementary grades had no significant effect on standardized test scores. The researchers did find small positive gains on class grades when they looked at both test scores and the proportion of homework students completed. More homework was also associated with negative attitudes about school for younger children in the study. "The best educators figured out a long time ago that we can control what we can control," and that's what happens during the school day, Superintendent Garrett said, not homework. "There has been a shift away from it naturally anyway, and I felt like this made it equitable across our entire school system." "The best argument for homework is that mathematical procedures require practice, and you don't want to waste classroom time on practice, so you send that home," said Tom Loveless, a researcher and former teacher who has studied homework. Ariel Taylor Smith, senior director of the Center for Policy and Action at the National Parents Union, said: "The thing they point to is that it's an equity issue, and not all parents have the same availability and ability to support their students. I would make the argument that if a kid is really far behind in school, that's an equity issue. They need the additional time to practice." Kids, she said, "need more practice ... Sometimes, you do have to practice the boring stuff, like math." "The interesting issue for folks to consider is not should there be more homework, but should there be better homework," said Joyce Epstein, who has studied homework and is the co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. "Better homework in math might be knowing the fact that kids don't have to be practicing for hours, 10 to 20 examples," when they could establish mastery in less time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Humanoid robots are getting a new gig as baggage handlers and cargo loaders at Tokyo's Haneda Airport -- part of a Japan Airlines experiment to address a human labor shortage as airport visitor numbers have surged in recent years. The demonstration, set to launch in May 2026, could eventually test humanoid robots in a wide range of airport tasks, including cleaning aircraft cabins and possibly handling ground support equipment such as baggage carts, according to a Japan Airlines press release. The trials are scheduled to run until 2028, which suggests that travelers flying into or out of Tokyo may spot some of the robots at work. [...] Japan Airlines is interested in testing whether humanoid robots powered by some of the latest AI models can adapt more readily to human work environments -- such as airports -- without requiring dedicated work stations or other significant workplace modifications. The airline's subsidiary, JAL Ground Service, has teamed up with GMO AI & Robotics Corporation to oversee the demonstration. The Japanese companies will test the G1 robot and Walker E robot from Chinese companies Unitree Robotics and UBTECH Robotics, according to The Asia Business Daily. Humanoid robots still typically cost tens of thousands of dollars per unit despite Chinese robotics manufacturers scaling up mass production, although the Unitree G1 robot costs as low as $13,500 for the baseline model. A new video from an apparently staged demonstration in an aircraft hangar shows one of the humanoid robots tottering up to a large, metal cargo container and making a vague pushing gesture. But the cargo container only begins to move once a human worker starts the conveyor belt to move the container toward the aircraft. Presumably, the robots will need to put in much more effective work if they're to prove as productive as human airport workers. Having robots working directly alongside humans will also introduce new safety considerations for airports like Haneda Airport, which is Japan's second-largest airport, with flights arriving approximately every two minutes. The first step in the pilot program will involve identifying which airport areas will be safest for humanoid robots.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Food and Drug Administration on Friday granted a quick review of three experimental psychedelic drugs meant to treat major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. It's the latest move by the Trump administration signaling a shift in policy toward treatments that also give users a high -- coming a day after the Justice Department said it would ease restrictions on state-licensed medical marijuana. UK-based biotech company Compass Pathways said Friday it has received an expedited review for its experimental form of synthetic psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. In a press release the company cited two large, phase 3 studies that had "generated positive data." Usona Institute, headquartered in Wisconsin, also said it's received a voucher for its work with psilocybin to treat major depressive disorder. In an email, a Usona spokesperson said the company expects the review process to last one to two months after it submits its application. "The voucher expedites the timeline only; it does not alter scientific or regulatory standards," the spokesperson wrote. New York-based Transcend Therapeutics has also been granted a priority review voucher for its experimental drug methylone for PTSD, Blake Mandell, the company's chief executive officer, said. "There's a battle still raging in their mind that we don't fully understand biochemically," FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said. "When you see something that looks promising for a community that is suffering with mental health illness, despair and suicidal ideation, you can't help but recognize that." Makary told NBC News that with the priority voucher program, the agency could potentially approve the first psychedelic drug by the end of summer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.