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Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple's foldable iPhone is still "on track" for a September unveiling alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup. 9to5Mac reports: The report notes that Apple's stock took a hit earlier today after Nikkei Asia indicated the iPhone Fold was having serious production issues. Clearly, sources within Apple were motivated to share positive news via Gurman. Not long ago, Gurman himself said that he was expecting an iPhone Fold release date that was a little bit later than iPhone 18 Pro. That's still very possible, but it sounds like Apple is internally feeling optimistic about its targeted September launch. The report continues: "While the complexity of the new display and materials may limit initial supply for several weeks, Apple is currently operating with a plan to put the device on sale around the same time -- or very soon after -- the new non-foldable models, the people said." Gurman adds an important qualifier: "Still, the release is six months away and production has yet to ramp up. That means the timing isn't final."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: Farmers have been fighting John Deere for years over the right to repair their equipment, and this week, they finally reached a landmark settlement. While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere's authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents (PDF) -- far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%. The settlement also includes an agreement by Deere to provide "the digital tools required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair" of tractors, combines, and other machinery for 10 years. That part is crucial, as farmers previously resorted to hacking their own equipment's software just to get it up and running again. John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding in 2023 that partially addressed those concerns, providing third parties with the technology to diagnose and repair, as long as its intellectual property was safeguarded. Monday's settlement seems to represent a much stronger (and legally binding) step forward. The report notes that a judge's approval of the settlement is still required but likely to happen. John Deere also faces another lawsuit by the U.S. FTC, accusing the company of forcing farmers to use its authorized dealer network and driving up their costs for parts and repairs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A $500,000 "Survivor"-style corporate retreat for 120 Plex employees in Honduras "turned into a week-long disaster involving illness, wild animals, armed guards, and employees stranded on a remote island," reports the Daily Beast. The CEO was bedridden by E. coli, staff were collapsing in brutal heat during Navy SEAL-led drills, there were fire ant attacks, uncooked food, and failing utilities. At one point, a porcupine even crashed through the ceiling of a guest's room. Here's an excerpt from the report: Tech media company Plex flew its 120 employees to a Honduran resort in 2017 for what was billed as a Survivor-style getaway. They called it "Plexcon." The first harbinger of trouble was an email that arrived before the group departed, informing them that the hotel manager and chef had both quit within days of each other. Things went sharply downhill from there. CEO Keith Valory, 54, had flown out a day early, intending to channel his inner Jeff Probst and welcome his staff off the buses like a game show host. Instead, he spent the arrival morning flat on his back. "I got E. coli, which is maybe the worst thing you could get, possibly, ever," Valory told the Wall Street Journal this week. "Just as people were arriving on the buses, I was like, 'Uh oh.' I lost 8 or 10 pounds. They had a doctor come to me, which apparently is pretty standard. They nailed an IV bag to the bedpost." With the CEO incapacitated, chief product officer and co-founder Scott Olechowski, 52, stepped in to run proceedings -- beginning with a forced eating challenge in which one employee had to consume a dead tarantula. [...] Sean Hoff, 42, founder of Moniker Partners, the independent retreat agency that planned the trip, was running himself ragged attempting damage control -- the showers, water, and electricity kept cutting out. [...] Meanwhile, senior software engineer Rick Phillips, 53, was trying to sleep when he heard a crash in his room. He ignored it until morning. "I got up and went over to get in the shower, and there was a porcupine," he said. "It must have climbed a tree and fallen through the ceiling."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FBI says (PDF) Iran-linked hackers disrupted internet-connected systems used by U.S. oil, gas, and water companies. Even with the recent two-week ceasefire between Iran and the United States and Israel, hackers backing Tehran say they won't end their retaliatory cyberattacks. The Hill reports: The report warned that similar companies across the country should be aware of an increased push by hackers to take over programmable logic controller (PLC) systems, which can be used to digitally control physical machinery from remote locations. Secure internet access for PLCs from one company, Rockwell Automation, were removed by Iran-linked coders who then "maliciously interacted with project files and altered data," according to the report. Hackers first gained access to some of the platforms in January of last year. All access to compromised platforms ended in March, the report said. The FBI said the move resulted in "operational disruption" and "financial loss." [...] Rockwell Automation wasn't the only company to recently face cyberattacks from Iran-linked hackers. Stryker, a major U.S. medical device maker, was targeted by Iran-affiliated coders in mid-March. It was unclear if physical operations were affected by the security breach. FBI Director Kash Patel was personally impacted by hackers who leaked his emails and records related to his personal travels and business from more than 10 years ago. [...] The FBI urged companies to adopt network defenders and multifactor authentication to prevent future attacks. Tuesday's report was published alongside the National Security Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. "Government and experts have been warning about internet connected systems for years, and how vulnerable they are," one source familiar with the federal investigation into the hacks told CNN. Many companies have "ealready removed those systems and followed the guidance," the person added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A New York Times investigation by John Carreyrou claims a British cryptographer named Adam Back is the strongest circumstantial candidate yet for being Satoshi Nakamoto. The report citing overlaps in writing style, ideology, technical background, and old posts that outlined key parts of Bitcoin years before its launch. Carreyrou is a renowned investigative journalist and author, best known for exposing the massive fraud at Theranos while at the Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt from the report: ... As anyone steeped in Bitcoin lore will tell you, Satoshi was a master at the art of maintaining anonymity on the internet, leaving few, if any, digital footprints behind. But Satoshi did leave behind a corpus of texts, including a nine-page white paper (PDF) outlining his invention and his many posts on the Bitcointalk forum, an online message board where users gathered to discuss the digital currency's software, economics and philosophy. And that corpus, it turned out, had expanded significantly during the impostor's civil trial when Martti Malmi, a Finnish programmer who collaborated with Satoshi in Bitcoin's early days, released a trove of hundreds of emails he had exchanged with him. Emails Satoshi sent to other early Bitcoin adopters had surfaced before, but none came close in volume to the Malmi dump. If Satoshi was ever going to be found, I was convinced the key lay somewhere in these texts. Then again, others must have gone down this road before me. Journalists, academics and internet sleuths had been trying to identify Satoshi for 16 years. During that span, more than 100 names had been put forward, including those of an Irish cryptography student, an unemployed Japanese American engineer, a South African criminal mastermind and the mathematician portrayed in the movie "A Beautiful Mind." The most alluring theories had focused on coincidences that aligned with what little was known about Satoshi: a particular code-writing style, a mysterious work history, an expertise in Bitcoin's key technical concepts, an anti-government worldview. But they had run aground under the weight of an alibi or some other piece of inconsistent or contrary evidence. Each failure had been met with glee by many members of the Bitcoin community. As they liked to point out, only Satoshi could definitively prove his identity by moving some of his coins. Any evidence short of that would be circumstantial. It seemed foolish to think that I could somehow crack a case that had confounded so many others. But I craved the thrill of a big, challenging story. So I decided to try once more to unmask Bitcoin's mysterious creator. Back, for his part, denies being Satoshi, writing in a post on X: "i'm not satoshi, but I was early in laser focus on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash, hence my ~1992 onwards active interest in applied research on ecash, privacy tech on cypherpunks list which led to hashcash and other ideas."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting May 20th, Amazon will stop Kindle Store access for Kindle and Kindle Fire devices released in 2012 and earlier. After that date, those devices will "no longer be able to purchase, borrow, or download new content." Owners can still read content already on the device, but if an affected device is reset or deregistered after the cutoff, it can't be re-registered. The Verge reports: The complete list of affected devices goes all the way back to the original Kindle that launched in 2007 with a full keyboard and scroll wheel. [...] Amazon will be notifying affected users over email ahead of May 20th with an explanation of what their older devices can and cannot do. Pre-2012 Kindle Fire devices will be subjected to the same limitations as Kindle e-readers when it comes to books, but other apps and Amazon services on those devices won't be impacted. For longtime users wanting to take the opportunity to upgrade to newer Kindle hardware, Amazon will offer a 20 percent discount on new Kindle devices and a $20 ebook credit that will be added to their accounts after upgrading, valid until June 20th, 2026, at 11:59PM PT. Their older purchases will be available on new devices as long as they log in to the same account they've been using for the past 14 years or more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Iran will demand that shipping companies pay tolls in cryptocurrency for laden oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz (source paywalled; alternative source), as it seeks to retain control over passage through the key waterway during the two-week ceasefire. Hamid Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran's Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters' Union, told the FT on Wednesday that Iran wanted to collect tolling fees from any tanker passing and to assess each ship. "Iran needs to monitor what goes in and out of the strait to ensure these two weeks aren't used for transferring weapons," said Hosseini, whose industry association works closely with the state. "Everything can pass through, but the procedure will take time for each vessel, and Iran is not in a rush," he added. [...] Hosseini said that each tanker must email authorities about its cargo, after which Iran will inform them of the toll to be paid in digital currencies. He said that the tariff is $1 per barrel of oil, adding that empty tankers can pass freely. "Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in Bitcoin, ensuring they can't be traced or confiscated due to sanctions," Hosseini added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta has launched Muse Spark, its first major AI model under Alexandr Wang's leadership. The model was built over the past nine months and is being positioned as a significant step up from Llama 4. Axios reports: Muse Spark will power queries in the Meta AI app and Meta.ai website immediately, with plans to expand across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The model accepts voice, text and image inputs, but produces text-only output. [...] Meta plans to release a version of Muse Spark under an open-source license. The model uses a fast mode for casual queries and several reasoning modes. A "shopping mode" highlights how Meta hopes to differentiate itself. It combines large language models with data on user interests and behavior. Over time, the model will also power "features that cite recommendations and content people share across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads," Meta said in a blog post. Wang, the 29-year-old entrepreneur who co-founded Scale AI, joined Meta's "superintelligence" unit last year to help Meta catch up to rival models from OpenAI and Anthropic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has apparently terminated the account VeraCrypt uses to sign its Windows drivers and bootloader, leaving the encryption project unable to publish Windows updates and throwing future releases into doubt. VeraCrypt's developer says Microsoft gave no clear explanation or warning for the move. "I didn't receive any emails from Microsoft nor any prior warnings," Mounir Idrassi, VeraCrypt's developer, told 404 Media. From the report: VeraCrypt is an open-source tool for encrypting data at rest. Users can create encrypted partitions on their drives, or make individual encrypted volumes to store their files in. Like its predecessor TrueCrypt, which VeraCrypt is based on, it also lets users create a second, innocuous looking volume if they are compelled to hand over their credentials. Last week, Idrassi took to the SourceForge forums to explain why he had been absent for a few months. The most serious challenge, he wrote, "is that Microsoft terminated the account I have used for years to sign Windows drivers and the bootloader." "Regarding VeraCrypt, I cannot publish Windows updates. Linux and macOS updates can still be done but Windows is the platform used by the majority of users and so the inability to deliver Windows releases is a major blow to the project," he continued. "Currently I'm out of options." Idrassi told 404 Media the termination happened in mid-January. "I was surprised to discover that I could no longer use my account," he said. On the forum and in the email to 404 Media, Idrassi shared what he said was the only message he received connected to the account shutdown. "Based on the information you have provided to date, we have determined that your organization does not currently meet the requirements to pass verification. There are no appeals available, we have closed your application," it reads. Idrassi told 404 Media the message is concerning his company IDRIX. "As you can read in their message, they say that the organization (IDRIX) doesn't meet their requirements, but I don't see which requirement IDRIX suddenly stopped meeting," he said. Idrassi said he has tried contacting Microsoft support, but he received automated responses that he believes contained AI-generated text.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Valve has released a native Steam Link beta for Apple Vision Pro, letting users stream their existing Steam games onto a large virtual screen in visionOS. It supports up to 4K resolution and will let you dynamically adjust the curve of the display. The Mac Observer reports: Steam Link does not support VR titles in this beta, and Valve clearly states that the app is limited to 2D game streaming, but this still opens up a large library of games that users can play on a massive virtual screen inside Vision Pro. At the same time, Vision Pro already handles 2D media very well, and this update builds on that strength by turning the headset into a portable gaming display that connects directly to your existing setup without needing extra hardware. You can join the Steam Link beta through TestFlight right now, and this early release shows how Apple Vision Pro continues to expand beyond media into more practical and everyday use cases like gaming.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple earned the lowest grades in a report on laptop and smartphone repairability released today by the consumer advocacy group Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund. The report, which looks at how easy devices are to disassemble and how easy it is to find repairability information, gave Apple a C-minus in laptop repairability and a D-minus in cell phone repairability. For its "Failing the Fix (2026): Grading laptop and cell phone companies on the fixability of their products" report, PIRG analyzed the 10 newest laptops and phones that were available via manufacturers' French website in January. [...] Apple leads the list of laptop repairability losers, largely due to it having low disassembly scores. Apple, along with Dell and Samsung, also lost a full point for being members of TechNet and the CTA. Lenovo had the second-worst grade with a C-minus. Like Apple, Lenovo had low disassembly scores. It also lost 0.5 points for failing to properly post PDFs explaining the French repair scores for some of its newest laptops sold in the region, as required in France. This is especially noteworthy because Lenovo got an F in last year's report for missing this information on at least 12 laptops. At the time, Lenovo director of communications David Hamilton provided a statement to Ars saying that the missing information was "due to a backend web compatibility issue that temporarily prevented the display of repairability scores on our Lenovo France website" that was "widely resolved." However, it appears that over a year later, Lenovo still isn't providing sufficient information to meet France's requirements "While Lenovo has improved somewhat with their compliance with French consumer law by providing more repair score PDFs on their website, we urge the company to resolve this multi-year issue," this year's report says. PIRG's report concluded that "laptops are pretty stagnant in terms of repairability" across many of the eight most popular laptop brands in the US. However, Proctor noted to Ars that consumers' access to parts, tools, and information that vendors have has improved, but improvements around ease of disassembly "take longer to realize." He also praised vendors' efforts to release more repairable designs, such as Apple's MacBook Neo. For its repairability index, PIRG weighed physical ease of disassembly most heavily, while also considering the availability of repair documentation, spare parts, spare-parts affordability, and other product-specific criteria. It then adjusted company grades by deducting points for membership in trade groups that oppose right-to-repair laws and adding small bonuses for manufacturers that supported right-to-repair legislation. Acer stood out as the only laptop vendor that avoided the 0.5-point trade-group penalty, since it was not listed as a member of TechNet or the Consumer Technology Association.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alternative_right quotes a report from the New York Post: The CIA used a futuristic new tool called "Ghost Murmur" to find and rescue the second American airman who was shot down in southern Iran, The Post has learned. The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic fingerprint of a human heartbeat and pairs the data with artificial intelligence software to isolate the signature from background noise, two sources close to the breakthrough said. It was the tool's first use in the field by the spy agency -- and was alluded to Monday afternoon by President Trump and CIA Director John Ratcliffe at a White House briefing. "It's like hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert," a source briefed on the program told The Post. "In the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you." The relatively barren landscape made for "an ideal first operational use" of Ghost Murmur, the first source noted. "Normally this signal is so weak that it can only be measured in a hospital setting with sensors pressed nearly against the chest," the source said. "But advances in a field known as quantum magnetometry -- specifically sensors built around microscopic defects in synthetic diamonds -- have apparently made it possible to detect these signals at dramatically greater distances." "The capability is not omniscient. It works best in remote, low-clutter environments and requires significant processing time," this person added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BrianFagioli writes: Artificial intelligence has now run directly on a satellite in orbit. A spacecraft about 500km above Earth captured an image of an airport and then immediately ran an onboard AI model to detect airplanes in the photo. Instead of acting like a simple camera in space that sends raw data back to Earth for later analysis, the satellite performed the computation itself while still in orbit. The system used an NVIDIA Jetson Orin module to run the object detection model moments after the image was taken. Traditionally, Earth observation satellites capture images and transmit large datasets to ground stations where computers process them hours later. Running AI directly on the satellite could reduce that delay dramatically, allowing spacecraft to analyze events like disasters, infrastructure changes, or aircraft activity almost immediately. "This success is a glimpse into the future of what we call Planetary Intelligence at scale," said Kiruthika Devaraj, VP of Avionics & Spacecraft Technology. "By running AI at the edge on the NVIDIA Jetson platform, we can help reduce the time between 'seeing' a change on Earth and a customer 'acting' on it, while simultaneously minimizing downlink latency and cost. This shift toward integrated AI at the edge is a technological leap that can help differentiate solutions like Planet's Global Monitoring Service (GMS), providing valuable insights for our customers and enabling rapid response times when it matters most."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A group of Russian government hackers have hijacked thousands of home and small business routers around the world as part of an ongoing campaign aimed at redirecting victim's internet traffic to steal their passwords and access tokens, security researchers and government authorities warned on Tuesday. [...] The hacking group targeted unpatched routers made by MikroTik and TP-Link using previously disclosed vulnerabilities according to the U.K. government's cybersecurity unit NCSC and Lumen's research arm Black Lotus Labs, which released new details of the campaign Tuesday. According to the researchers, the hackers were able to spy on large numbers of people over the course of several years by compromising their routers, many of which run outdated software, leaving them vulnerable to remote attacks without their owners' knowledge. The NCSC said that these operations are "likely opportunistic in nature, with the actor casting a wide net to reach many potential victims, before narrowing in on targets of intelligence interest as the attack develops." Per the researchers and government advisories, the Russian hackers hacked routers to modify the device's settings so that the victim's internet requests are surreptitiously passed to infrastructure run by the hackers. This allows the hackers to redirect victims to spoof websites under their control, then steal passwords and tokens that let the hackers log in to that victim's online accounts without needing their two-factor authentication codes. Black Lotus Labs said that Fancy Bear compromised at least 18,000 victims in around 120 countries, including government departments, law enforcement agencies, and email providers across North Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia. Microsoft, which also released details of the campaign on Tuesday, said in a blog post that its researchers identified over 200 organizations and 5,000 consumer devices affected by these hacking operations, including at least three government organizations in Africa. The Justice Department said Tuesday it neutralized compromised routers in the U.S. under court authorization. As the DOJ put it, the FBI "developed a series of commands to send to compromised routers" to collect evidence, reset settings, and prevent hackers from breaking back in.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple may have a supply problem on its hands with the MacBook Neo... The laptop reportedly relies on "binned" A18 Pro chips with one GPU core disabled, and demand is so strong that the supply of those cheaper leftover chips could run out before the next model is ready. That leaves Apple choosing between lower margins, shifting production plans, or changing the lineup to keep its $599 hit product in stock. MacRumors reports: The all-new MacBook Neo has been such a hit that Apple is facing a "massive dilemma," according to Taiwan-based tech columnist and former Bloomberg reporter Tim Culpan. [...] In the latest edition of his Culpium newsletter today, Culpan said the MacBook Neo is selling so well that Apple's supply of the binned A18 Pro chips with a 5-core GPU will "run out" before the company is able to fully satisfy demand for the laptop. Apple's initial plan was to have suppliers build around five to six million MacBook Neo units before ceasing production of the model with the A18 Pro chip, he said, but it sounds like demand is so strong that Apple might run out of A18 Pro chips to put in the MacBook Neo before the second-generation MacBook Neo with an A19 Pro chip is ready next year. Apple is unlikely to mark the MacBook Neo as temporarily sold out, so it may be forced to take action, but profit margins might be affected. A18 Pro chips are manufactured with TSMC's second-generation 3nm process, known as N3E, and Culpan said TSMC's N3E production lines are currently operating at maximum capacity. As a result, he said that Apple may have to pay a premium to restart A18 Pro chip production for the MacBook Neo, which would lower its profit margins. Apple would have to disable a GPU core on these chips to ensure that they have only a 5-core GPU, like all other MacBook Neo units sold to date. Alternatively, Culpan said that Apple could reallocate some of its chip production that was originally planned for other devices, but he said the cost would still be higher than what it paid for its initial batch of A18 Pro chips. Culpan speculated that Apple could also opt to discontinue the $599 model with 256GB of storage, leaving the $699 model with 512GB of storage and a Touch ID button as the only configuration available. This is unlikely to happen any time soon, in our view, given how heavily Apple has been promoting the MacBook Neo's affordability. Apple might also be able to move up the release of a MacBook Neo with the iPhone 17 Pro's A19 Pro chip, but that too would be a costlier option, at least until the company achieves a sufficient stockpile of binned A19 Pro chips with a 5-core GPU. In any case, Apple could opt to keep the starting price of current and future MacBook Neo models at $599 and simply accept lower profit margins on the laptop, especially given that it attracts customers to the macOS and broader Apple ecosystem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Anthropic has unveiled Claude Mythos, a new AI model capable of discovering critical vulnerabilities at scale," writes Slashdot reader wiredmikey. "It's already powering Project Glasswing, a joint effort with major tech firms to secure critical software. But the same capabilities could also accelerate offensive cyber operations." SecurityWeek reports: Mythos is not an incremental improvement but a step change in performance over Anthropic's current range of frontier models: Haiku (smallest), Sonnet (middle ground), and Opus (most powerful). Mythos sits in a fourth tier named Copybara, and Anthropic describes it as superior to any other existing AI frontier model. It incorporates the current trend in the use of AI: the modern use of agentic AI. "The powerful cyber capabilities of Claude Mythos Preview are a result of its strong agentic coding and reasoning skills... the model has the highest scores of any model yet developed on a variety of software coding tasks," notes Anthropic in a blog titled Project Glasswing -- Securing critical software for the AI era. In the last few weeks, Mythos Preview has identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities with many classified as critical. Several are ten or 20 years old -- the oldest found so far is a 27-years old bug in OpenBSD. Elsewhere, a 16-years old vulnerability found in video software has survived five million hits from other automated testing tools without ever being discovered. And it autonomously found and chained together several in the Linux kernel allowing an attacker to escalate from ordinary user access to complete control of the machine. [...] Anthropic is concerned that Mythos' capabilities could unleash cyberattacks too fast and too sophisticated for defenders to block. It hopes that Mythos can be used to improve cybersecurity generally before malicious actors can get access to it. To this end, the firm has announced the next stage of this preparation as Project Glasswing, powered by Mythos Preview. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely. "Project Glasswing is a starting point. No one organization can solve these cybersecurity problems alone: frontier AI developers, other software companies, security researchers, open-source maintainers, and governments across the world all have essential roles to play." Claude Mythos Preview is described as a general-purpose, unreleased frontier model from Anthropic that has nevertheless completed its training phase. The firm does not plan to make Mythos Preview generally available. The implication is that 'Preview' is a term used solely to describe the current state of Mythos and the market's readiness to receive it, and will be dropped when the firm gets closer to general release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chrome is finally adding built-in vertical tabs, "which will move the tabs to the side of the browser window, making it easier to read full page titles and manage tab groups," reports TechCrunch. The company is also introducing an immersive reading mode for a distraction-free, text-focused experience. From the report: The company notes that the new vertical tabs can be enabled at any time by right-clicking on a Chrome window and selecting "Show Tabs Vertically." The company says there's no hard limit on the number of tabs that can be opened (beyond what would be limited already by the user's hardware). The vertical tabs work just as the horizontal tabs do, meaning you can have different Chrome windows with their own set of tabs or tab groups. [...] Alongside the launch of vertical tabs, Chrome is also rolling out a new Reading Mode experience, which will offer a full-page interface to make it even easier to reduce on-screen clutter to focus on the text. This will be the new default experience for Chrome users, and arrives at a time when web pages, particularly those on news sites, have become cluttered with ads and prompts to subscribe to newsletters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Following on the heels of the landmark Cox v. Sony ruling, the Supreme Court has vacated the contributory copyright infringement verdict against ISP Grande Communications, ordering the Fifth Circuit to reconsider its decision in light of the new precedent. [...] The order (PDF) effectively removes the case from the Supreme Court docket, urging the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to take another look at its decision in light of the new ruling. Given the similarities between the two cases, it is no surprise that the Supreme Court came to this conclusion. It is now up to the Fifth Circuit to revisit whether Grande's conduct meets the intent threshold that was established in Cox. That is a significantly higher bar than the one applied in the original verdict, which found that continuing to provide service to known infringers was enough to establish material contribution. The music companies previously said they sent over a million copyright infringement notices, but that Grande failed to terminate even a single subscriber account in response. However, without proof of active inducement, these absolute numbers carry less weight now. Whether this translates into a win for Grande on remand remains to be seen. For now, however, the original $47 million verdict is further away than ever.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A New York Times analysis found Google's AI Overviews now answer questions correctly about 90% of the time, which might sound impressive until you realize that roughly 1 in 10 answers is wrong. "[F]or Google, that means hundreds of thousands of lies going out every minute of the day," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The Times conducted this analysis with the help of a startup called Oumi, which itself is deeply involved in developing AI models. The company used AI tools to probe AI Overviews with the SimpleQA evaluation, a common test to rank the factuality of generative models like Gemini. Released by OpenAI in 2024, SimpleQA is essentially a list of more than 4,000 questions with verifiable answers that can be fed into an AI. Oumi began running its test last year when Gemini 2.5 was still the company's best model. At the time, the benchmark showed an 85 percent accuracy rate. When the test was rerun following the Gemini 3 update, AI Overviews answered 91 percent of the questions correctly. If you extrapolate this miss rate out to all Google searches, AI Overviews is generating tens of millions of incorrect answers per day. The report includes several examples of where AI Overviews went wrong. When asked for the date on which Bob Marley's former home became a museum, AI Overviews cited three pages, two of which didn't discuss the date at all. The final one, Wikipedia, listed two contradictory years, and AI Overviews confidently chose the wrong one. The benchmark also prompts models to produce the date on which Yo Yo Ma was inducted into the classical music hall of fame. While AI Overviews cited the organization's website that listed Ma's induction, it claimed there's no such thing as the Classical Music Hall of Fame. "This study has serious holes," said Google spokesperson Ned Adriance. "It doesn't reflect what people are actually searching on Google." The search giant likes to use a test called SimpleQA Verified, which uses a smaller set of questions that have been more thoroughly vetted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic says its annualized revenue run rate has surpassed $30 billion and disclosed plans to secure roughly 3.5 gigawatts of next-generation Google TPU compute starting in 2027. Broadcom will supply the key chips and networking gear for the effort, the company announced. The Register reports: News of the two deals emerged today in a Broadcom regulatory filing that opens with two items of news. One is a "Long Term Agreement for Broadcom to develop and supply custom Tensor Processing Units ("TPUs") for Google's future generations of TPUs." Google and Broadcom have collaborated to produce custom TPUs. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan recently shared his opinion that hyperscalers don't have the skill to create custom accelerators and predicted Broadcom's chip business will therefore win over $100 billion of revenue from AI chips in 2027 alone. Working on next-gen TPUs for Google will presumably help to make that prediction a reality. So will the second part of Broadcom's announcement: a "Supply Assurance Agreement for Broadcom to supply networking and other components to be used in Google's next-generation AI racks through up to 2031." Broadcom's filing also revealed one user of Google's next-gen TPU will be Anthropic, which starting in 2027, "will access through Broadcom approximately 3.5 gigawatts as part of the multiple gigawatts of next generation TPU-based AI compute capacity committed by Anthropic."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cloudflare is accelerating its post-quantum security plans and now aims to make its entire platform fully post-quantum secure by 2029. "The updated timeline follows new developments in quantum computing research that suggest current cryptographic standards could be broken sooner than previously expected," reports SiliconANGLE. From the report: The decision by Cloudflare to move its post-quantum security roadmap forward comes after Google LLC and research from Oratomic demonstrated significant advances in algorithms and hardware capable of breaking widely used encryption methods such as RSA-2048 and elliptic curve cryptography. [...] The company said progress across three key areas -- quantum hardware, error correction and quantum algorithms -- is advancing in parallel and compounding overall capability. Improvements in areas such as neutral atom architectures and more efficient error correction are reducing the resources required to break encryption, while algorithmic advances are lowering computational complexity. [...] Cloudflare has already deployed post-quantum encryption across a large portion of its network and reports that more than half of human traffic it processes now uses post-quantum key agreement. The company plans to expand support for post-quantum authentication in 2026, followed by broader deployment across its network and products through 2028. By 2029, Cloudflare said, it expects all of its services to be fully post-quantum secure, with those services being available by default across its platform, without requiring customer action or additional cost as part of the company's commitment to security upgrades. Google said it plans to accelerate its post-quantum encryption migration target to 2029.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: President Javier Milei of Argentina promoted a cryptocurrency last year that quickly skyrocketed in value then cratered just as fast, costing investors millions of dollars and setting off a scandal and an investigation. Mr. Milei said he was simply highlighting a private venture and had no connection to the digital coin called $Libra. New evidence is now raising questions about his assertion. Phone logs from a federal investigation by Argentine prosecutors into the coin's collapse show seven phone calls between Mr. Milei and one of the entrepreneurs behind the cryptocurrency on the night in 2025 when Mr. Milei posted about $Libra on X. The contents of the calls, which took place before and after Mr. Milei's post, are not known. But the phone logs -- which were obtained by The New York Times and first reported by a local cable news channel, C5N -- suggest a greater degree of communication between Mr. Milei and the entrepreneurs who launched the token than what the president has publicly acknowledged. Newly uncovered messages also suggest Mr. Milei received regular payments from one of the entrepreneurs while he was a congressman. Mr. Milei has not publicly commented on the call logs and other documents, and he did not respond to a request for comment. He is named as a person of interest in the federal prosecutor's continuing investigation into the digital coin, according to court documents reviewed by The Times, but has not been formally charged with any crime. The latest revelations have revived a scandal that threatens the very foundation of a president who rose to power and was elected president in 2023 by attacking a political class he called corrupt.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: "Gates Computer Science Building renamed Peter Thiel Center for Panoptic Computing" reads the headline of an April Fools' Day story that ran in the Humor section of The Stanford Daily (with the further disclaimer that "This article is purely satirical and fictitious"). The story begins: "Following revelations that the billionaire founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, had a longstanding relationship with convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Stanford has announced it will strip Gates' name from the William H. Gates Computer Science Building and instead honor alumnus Peter Thiel B.A. '89, JD '92. Gates, who is not a Stanford alumnus, gave an initial gift of $6 million toward the building's construction in 1992." While fictional, the story does make one wonder what may become of the academic and institutional buildings worldwide named after Bill Gates in the blowback over his past ties to Epstein, which have already played a factor in the breakdown of his marriage to Melinda French Gates and friendship with Warren Buffet. In addition to The Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford, this includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex at the University of Texas at Austin, Bill and Melinda Gates Hall at Cornell, The Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, and The William H. Gates Building at MIT's Stata Center. Buildings named after Gates' parents include Mary Gates Hall and William H. Gates Hall at the University of Washington, and The William Gates Building at the University of Cambridge (UK). Aside from the Thiel angle, The Stanford Daily's April Fools' Day story may not be as far-fetched as it may seem -- many universities' naming policies include provisions allowing donors' names to be removed from buildings, programs, or other facilities under extraordinary circumstances. For example, the University of Washington's Regent Policy No. 50 states, "The University reserves the right to revoke and terminate any naming on reasonable grounds not limited to the revelation of corporate or individual acts detracting from the University's mission, integrity, or reputation." Then again, UW notes that Bill's parents and siblings served as UW Regents for decades, so one expects Bill will be granted some leeway here for what he has characterized as 'foolish' choices on his part.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LinkedIn is facing allegations that it quietly scans users' browsers for installed Chrome extensions. The German group Fairlinked e.V. goes so far as to claim that the site is "running one of the largest corporate espionage operations in modern history." "The program runs silently, without any visible indicator to the user," the group says. "It does not ask for consent. It does not disclose what it is doing. It reports the results to LinkedIn's servers. This is not a one-time check. The scan runs on every page load, for every visitor." PCMag reports: This browser extension "fingerprinting" technique has been spotted before, but it was previously found to probe only 2,000 to 3,000 extensions. Fairlinked alleges that LinkedIn is now scanning for 6,222 extensions that could indicate a user's political opinions or religious views. For example, the extensions LinkedIn will look for include one that flags companies as too "woke," one that can add an "anti-Zionist" tag to LinkedIn profiles, and two others that can block content forbidden under Islamic teachings. It would also be a cakewalk to tie the collected extension data to specific users, since LinkedIn operates as a vast professional social network that covers people's work history. Fairlinked's concern is that Microsoft and LinkedIn can allegedly use the data to identify which companies use competing products. "LinkedIn has already sent enforcement threats to users of third-party tools, using data obtained through this covert scanning to identify its targets," the group claims. However, LinkedIn claims that Fairlinked mischaracterizes a LinkedIn safeguard designed to prevent web scraping by browser extensions. "We do not use this data to infer sensitive information about members," the company says. "To protect the privacy of our members, their data, and to ensure site stability, we do look for extensions that scrape data without members' consent or otherwise violate LinkedIn's Terms of Service," LinkedIn adds. [...] The statement goes on to allege that Fairlinked is from a developer whose account was previously suspended for web scraping. One of the group's board members is listed as "S.Morell," which appears to be Steven Morell, the founder of Teamfluence, a tool that helps businesses monitor LinkedIn activity. [...] Still, the Microsoft-owned site is facing some blowback for not clearly disclosing the browser extension scanning in LinkedIn's privacy policy. Fairlinked is soliciting donations for a legal fund to take on Microsoft and is urging the public to encourage local regulators to intervene.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader walterbyrd shares a report from Fuel Cells Works: China says the AEP100, a megawatt-class hydrogen-fueled turboprop engine developed by the Aero Engine Corporation of China, has completed its maiden flight on a 7.5-ton unmanned cargo aircraft in Zhuzhou, Hunan. The 16-minute test covered 36km at 220km/h and 300 meters altitude, with the aircraft returning safely after completing its planned maneuvers. State media described it as the world's first test flight of a megawatt-class hydrogen-fueled turboprop engine. [...] The Aero Engine Corporation of China (AECC) says the result shows China now has a full technical chain for hydrogen aviation engines, from core parts to system integration, which is the kind of capability needed before any industrial rollout can begin. You can watch a video of the test flight here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A federal appeals court ruled on Monday that New Jersey gaming regulators cannot prevent Kalshi from allowing people in the state to use its prediction market to place financial bets on the outcome of sporting events.A three-judge panel of the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 (PDF) in finding that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has exclusive jurisdiction over the sports-related event contracts that Kalshi allows people to trade on its platform. The ruling marked the first time a federal appeals court has ruled on what has become the central issue in an escalating battle over the ability of state gaming regulators to police the activity of prediction market operators. Kalshi and companies like it allow users to place trades and profit from predictions on events such as sports and elections. States argue that firms like Kalshi are operating without required state licenses, in violation of gaming laws, including bans on wagers by those under 21. Those states include New Jersey, which last year sent Kalshi a cease-and-desist letter stating that its listing of sports-related event contracts on its platform violated state gambling laws that prohibit betting on collegiate sports. Kalshi sued the state, arguing its event contracts qualify as "swaps," a type of derivative contract, that under the Commodity Exchange Act can only be regulated by the CFTC, which had granted the company a license to operate a designated contract market (DCM). A lower-court judge had sided with New York-based Kalshi and issued a preliminary injunction, prompting New Jersey to appeal. But a majority of the judges on the 3rd Circuit panel concluded the Commodity Exchange Act likely preempted state law. "Kalshi's sports-related event contracts are swaps traded on a CFTC-licensed DCM, so the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction," U.S. Circuit Judge David Porter wrote. The ruling was in line with the position advanced in other litigation by the CFTC under President Donald Trump's administration. The regulator last week sued Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois to prevent them from pursuing what it called unlawful efforts to regulate prediction markets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is proposing (PDF) sweeping policy changes to help manage the societal disruption caused by advanced AI, including taxes on automated labor, a public wealth fund, and experiments with a four-day workweek. The company said the policy document offered a series of "initial ideas" to address the risk of "jobs and entire industries being disrupted" by the adoption of AI tools. Business Insider reports: Among the core policy suggestions is a public wealth fund, which would see lawmakers and AI companies work together to invest in long-term assets linked to the AI boom, with returns distributed directly to citizens. Another is that the government should encourage and incentivize employers to experiment with four-day workweeks with no loss in pay and offer "benefits bonuses" tied to productivity gains from new AI tools. The policy document also suggests lawmakers modernize the tax system and shift the tax base to corporate income and capital gains, rather than relying on labor income and payroll taxes that could be hit by a wave of AI-powered job losses. It also recommends taxes related to automated labor. OpenAI also called for the accelerated expansion of the US's electricity grid, which is already feeling the strain from a wave of data center construction and energy demand for training ever more powerful AI models.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A teardown video of LG's never-released Rollable phone helps explain why rollable phones never became a real product category: they were likely too expensive, fragile, and complicated to manufacture at scale. "The complexity of the internals would have made the Rollable extremely expensive to manufacture, and it would have demanded a high price tag," reports Ars Technica. "Durability is also a big concern. There's just a lot going on inside this phone, with multiple motors, springy arms, tracks, and a screen that has to loop around the back. [...] It seems unlikely the LG Rollable could have survived daily use for multiple years." From the report: The LG Rollable is just one of several rollable concept phones that appeared throughout the early 2020s. Flexible OLED screens had finally become affordable, leading to foldable phones like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold. Although, "affordable" is relative here. Foldables were and still are very expensive devices. Based on what we can see of the complex inner workings of the LG Rollable, these devices may have commanded even higher prices. Noted YouTube phone destroyer JerryRigEverything managed to snag a working prototype LG Rollable. It may even be the unit LG demoed at CES 2021. The device looks like a regular phone at first glance, but a quick swipe activates the motor, which unfurls additional screen real estate from around the back. This makes the viewable area about 40 percent larger without the added thickness of a foldable. The device expands with the aid of two tiny motors, which are attached via straight teeth to an internal track. The screen assembly has zipper-like teeth that keep it locked into the frame as it moves. The motors make a surprising amount of noise when operating, so LG designed the phone to play a musical chime to hide the sound. While the motor does the heavy lifting, the phone also has a lattice of articulating spring-loaded arms inside that keep the OLED panel even as the frame slides side to side. The battery and motherboard sit in a tray that allows the back of the phone to expand as the OLED rolls into view. This is a prototype phone, featuring a chunky frame and visible screws. That helped Zack Nelson from JerryRigEverything successfully disassemble and reassemble the phone. So this little bit of mobile history was not destroyed, and the teardown gives us a good look at how LG was hoping to attract new customers before calling it quits.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Associated Press is offering buyouts to U.S. journalists "as part of an acceleration away from the focus on newspaper journalism that sustained the company since the mid-1800s," the not-for-profit outlet reported today. AP says it is making the move from a position of strength, responding to shrinking newspaper revenue and growing demand from digital, broadcast, and tech clients. "The AP is not in trouble," said Julie Pace, executive editor and senior vice president of the AP. "We're making these changes from a position of strength but we're doing so now to recognize our changing customer base." From the report: The news organization is becoming more focused on visual journalism and developing new revenue sources, particularly through companies investing in artificial intelligence, to cope with the economic collapse of many legacy news outlets. Once the lion's share of AP's revenue, big newspaper companies now account for 10% of its income. "We're not a newspaper company and we haven't been for quite some time," [said Pace]. Despite changes -- the company has doubled the number of video journalists it employs in the United States since 2022 -- remnants of a staffing structure built largely to provide stories to newspapers and broadcasters in individual states have remained. That has its roots well back in American history; the AP was started in the mid-19th century by New York newspapers looking to share the costs of reporting outside their immediate territory. The number of AP journalists who will lose jobs is murky, in part intentionally. The AP does not say how many journalists it employs, though it has a large international presence as well as its U.S. staff. Pace said the AP's goal is to reduce its global staff by less than 5%. The Marketing and Media Alliance estimated the AP had 3,700 staffers, but it was not clear when that estimate was made. Since buyouts are being offered now to only U.S. journalists, it stands to reason that the cut among that workforce will be more than 5%. Whether there are layoffs depends on how many people take the offer, Pace said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artemis II has broken the Apollo 13 record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth. NASA reports: The Artemis II crew of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen have set the record for the farthest distance from Earth traveled by a human mission, surpassing the Apollo 13 record of 248,655 miles set in 1970. NASA Flight Director Brandon Lloyd, Capsule Communicator Amy Dill, and Command and Handling Data Officer Brandon Borter also marked a lighthearted milestone today by emailing the crew what is now assumed to be the longest person-to-person message ever sent in human history. After breaking the record for human spaceflight, crew also took a moment to provisionally name a couple of craters on the Moon, noting they were able to see them with their naked eye. Just northwest of Orientale basin highlighted above is a crater they would like to name Integrity after their spacecraft and this historic mission. Just northeast of Integrity, on the near and far side boundary, and sometimes visible from Earth, the crew suggested Carroll crater in honor of Reid Wiseman's late wife, Carroll Taylor Wiseman. After this mission is complete, the crater name proposals will be formally submitted to the International Astronomical Union, the organization that governs the naming of celestial bodies and their surface features. On April 1, NASA successfully launched humanity's first crewed trip around the Moon in more than 50 years. A couple of days into the mission, attention turned to a more mundane problem when reports said the astronauts had access to "two Microsoft Outlooks" and neither was working properly. By April 4, the crew had passed 100,000 miles from Earth as they continued deeper into space, and by April 6, they had entered the Moon's gravitational pull and caught their first views of the lunar far side.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung says it will discontinue its Samsung Messages app in July 2026 and is directing Galaxy users to switch to Google Messages instead. Android Central reports: [...] Samsung says users can switch to Google Messages as their default app to maintain a consistent Android messaging experience. The fine print also states that once the app is discontinued, "sending messages via Samsung Messages on your phone will no longer be possible, except for emergency service numbers or emergency contacts defined in your device." Samsung also notes that users will no longer be able to download the Messages app from the Galaxy Store once it is discontinued. Newer devices, including the Galaxy S26 series, already do not support installing Samsung Messages. It is, however, worth noting that users on Android 11 or older are not affected by this change and will still be able to use the Samsung Messages app on their devices. [...] Samsung also warns that on some devices released before 2022, switching apps may temporarily disrupt ongoing RCS conversations. However, chats should resume once both users move to Google Messages. The company also highlights some of the benefits of the switch, including improved security, RCS support, AI features, and better multi-device connectivity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: An elusive hacker who went by the handle "UNKN" and ran the early Russian ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil now has a name and a face. Authorities in Germany say 31-year-old Russian Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin headed both cybercrime gangs and helped carry out at least 130 acts of computer sabotage and extortion against victims across the country between 2019 and 2021. Shchukin was named as UNKN (a.k.a. UNKNOWN) in an advisory published by the German Federal Criminal Police (the "Bundeskriminalamt" or BKA for short). The BKA said Shchukin and another Russian -- 43-year-old Anatoly Sergeevitsch Kravchuk -- extorted nearly $2 million euros across two dozen cyberattacks that caused more than 35 million euros in total economic damage. Germany's BKA said Shchukin acted as the head of one of the largest worldwide operating ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil, which pioneered the practice of double extortion -- charging victims once for a key needed to unlock hacked systems, and a separate payment in exchange for a promise not to publish stolen data. Shchukin's name appeared in a Feb. 2023 filing (PDF) from the U.S. Justice Department seeking the seizure of various cryptocurrency accounts associated with proceeds from the REvil ransomware gang's activities. The government said the digital wallet tied to Shchukin contained more than $317,000 in ill-gotten cryptocurrency. The BKA believes Shchukin resides in Krasnodar, Russia, where he is from. "Based on the investigations so far, it is assumed that the wanted person is abroad, presumably in Russia," the BKA advised. "Travel behavior cannot be ruled out."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More Americans have moved into upper-middle-class incomes over the past several decades (source paywalled; alternative source), with new research suggesting that group has grown sharply while the lower and core middle class have shrunk. The Wall Street Journal reports: In 2024, about 31% of Americans were part of the upper middle class, up from about 10% in 1979, according to a report released this year by the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. There is no single, standard definition of middle class, or upper middle class, and what counts as a hefty income in one city can feel paltry in another. The AEI report, by Stephen Rose and Scott Winship, classified a family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 in 2024 dollars as upper middle class. Households earning more were categorized as rich. The analysis looked just at incomes, not assets such as stocks or real estate. [...] The gains span generations. Many baby boomers, born to parents who grew up in the Great Depression, are living well on their savings, aided by steady Social Security checks and decades of stock-portfolio gains that they can now tap. Millennials, who everyone worried would be permanently set back by the 2008-09 financial crisis, are earning solid incomes, buying homes and surpassing their parents. Many families are surprised to find that they have moved into this new economic tier, and see themselves as comfortable, not rich. They tend to have jobs that are white collar but not flashy -- think accountants, not tech founders. This doesn't mean that all Americans are climbing the ladder. Entrenched inflation and higher prices on major necessities have pushed many families closer to the financial edge, or locked them out of homeownership. Those costs weigh on high-earning families too, and for many are the reason they don't feel wealthy. The AEI report divided families into five different groups by income. Three groups were in the middle: lower middle class, core middle class and upper middle class. The authors found that more families now fall into the two highest-earning groups -- upper middle class and rich -- and fewer fall into the three lower-earning categories.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Halter, a New Zealand agtech startup now valued at $2 billion, has raised $220 million to expand its AI-powered cattle management system. "Halter is now valued at $2 billion following the Series E, which was led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund with participation from Blackbird, DCVC, Bond, Bessemer, and several others," reports Inc. From the report: Halter plans to use the funding to expand its existing footprint in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, as well as to grow into new markets such as Ireland, the U.K., and parts of North and South America. The round is one of the biggest to-date in the industry, and comes amid growing adoption of the technology among U.S. ranchers. According to Halter, U.S. ranchers have erected some 60,000 miles of virtual fencing since the company's launch in 2024. Halter's technology works through a system of solar-powered collars and in-pasture towers that collect data -- some 6,000 data points per collar per minute -- from grazing cattle and feed it into a cloud-based platform and app for farmers. The collars are ergonomically designed to be comfortable for the cattle wearing them, and leverage AI to play audio cues or vibrate when it is time to move to a different grazing location or if they step outside of a predetermined zone. The collars can also deliver an electric pulse if an animal does not respond. Halter's app also creates a digital twin of a ranch, which essentially means a digital replica that leverages real-time data to accurately reflect conditions. Farmers can consult the app to check on their herd, or fence, and move cattle with just a few clicks. Halter also has a proprietary algorithm that it calls a "Cowgorithm" trained on seven billion hours of animal behavior. Altogether, this technology is meant to make ranchers' lives easier when herding cattle, help them save money on building physical fencing, and provide insights about pasture management to improve soil health and pasture productivity. Halter says some 2,000 farmers and ranchers currently use its tech worldwide.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: AI skeptics aren't the only ones warning users not to unthinkingly trust models' outputs -- that's what the AI companies say themselves in their terms of service. Take Microsoft, which is currently focused on getting corporate customers to pay for Copilot. But it's also been getting dinged on social media over Copilot's terms of use, which appear to have been last updated on October 24, 2025. "Copilot is for entertainment purposes only," the company warned. "It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don't rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk." Microsoft described the terms of service as "legacy language," saying it will be updated. Tom's Hardware notes that similar AI warnings remain common across the industry, with companies like OpenAI and xAI also cautioning users not to treat chatbot output as "the truth" or as "a sole service of truth or factual information."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It's finally time," writes Phoronix - since "no known Linux distribution vendors are still shipping with i486 CPU support." "A patch queued into one of the development branches ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window is set to finally begin the process of phasing out and ultimately removing Intel 486 CPU support from the Linux kernel." More details from XDA-Developers:Authored by Ingo Molnar, the change, titled "x86/cpu: Remove M486/M486SX/ELAN support," begins dismantling Linux's built-in support for the i486, which was first released back in 1989. As the changelog notes, even Linus is keen to cut ties with the architecture: "In the x86 architecture we have various complicated hardware emulation facilities on x86-32 to support ancient 32-bit CPUs that very very few people are using with modern kernels. This compatibility glue is sometimes even causing problems that people spend time to resolve, which time could be spent on other things. As Linus recently remarked: 'I really get the feeling that it's time to leave i486 support behind. There's zero real reason for anybody to waste one second of development effort on this kind of issue'..." If you're one of the rare few who still keep the decades-old CPU alive, your best bet will be to grab an LTS Linux distro that keeps the older version of Linux for a few more years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia's "great crackdown" on VPNs - and a clampdown on Telegram's messaging platform - had an unintended side effect, reports Bloomberg. It "triggered the widespread banking outage seen across the country this week, Telegram's billionaire founder Pavel Durov said.""Telegram was banned in Russia, yet 65 million Russians still use it daily via VPNs," Durov said Saturday in a post on Telegram. "The government has spent years trying to ban VPNs too. Their blocking attempts just triggered a massive banking failure; cash briefly became the only payment method nationwide yesterday." Attempts on Friday to limit VPN use could have sparked the disruption affecting banking apps, The Bell and other Russian media reported, citing industry sources who weren't identified. The outage may have been caused by an overload in the filtering systems run by Russia's communications watchdog, according to the reports, with experts warning that major restrictions risk undermining network stability... Separately, payments for Apple Inc.'s app store and other services became unavailable in Russia from April 1, the US company said on its website, without saying why. Earlier, RBC newswire reported that the Digital Development Ministry had asked mobile operators to disable top-ups, which could help limit VPN use.... Durov, who's being investigated in Russia for allegedly aiding terrorist activity, compared the situation in his home country to Iran, where similar restrictions prompted widespread adoption of VPNs instead of the intended shift to state-backed messaging apps. "Welcome back to the Digital Resistance, my Russian brothers and sisters," said Durov, who has lived in Dubai and France in recent years. "The entire nation is now mobilized to bypass these absurd restrictions," he wrote, adding that Telegram would continue adapting to make its traffic harder to detect and block.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's Artemis astronauts are now entering "the lunar sphere of influence," reports NBC News, "meaning the pull of the moon's gravity will become stronger than Earth's." Now as they begin their swing around the moon, the Artemis astronauts "are chasing after Apollo 13's maximum range from Earth," reports the Associated Press, hoping to beat its distance from Earth by more than 4,100 miles (6,600 kilometers). They'll begin their six-hour lunar flyby 14 hours from now (at 2:45 p.m. ET Monday). But in a space-to-earth interview Saturday with NBC News, the astronauts were already describing their first glimpses of the edge of the far side:[NASA astronaut Christina Koch realized] it looked different from what she was accustomed to on Earth. "The darker parts just aren't quite in the right place," she said. "And something about you senses that is not the moon that I'm used to seeing...." [Astronaut Reid] Wiseman called the flight a "magnificent accomplishment" and said the astronauts' ability to gaze at both Earth and the moon from their spacecraft has been "truly awe-inspiring." "The Earth is almost in full eclipse. The moon is almost in full daylight, and the only way you could get that view is to be halfway between the two entities," he said... And while the early photos of Earth and the moon that [Canadian astronaut Jeremy] Hansen and his colleagues have beamed back have been spectacular, the Canadian astronaut said they pale in comparison to the real deal outside their capsule's windows. "I know those photos are amazing," he said, "but let me assure you, it is another level of amazing up here." And their upcoming six-hour lunar flyby "promises views of the moon's far side that were too dark or too difficult to see by the 24 Apollo astronauts who preceded them," notes the Associated Press:A total solar eclipse also awaits them as the moon blocks the sun, exposing snippets of shimmering corona.... At closest approach, they will come within 4,070 miles (6,550 kilometers) of the moon. Because they launched on April 1, the rendezvous won't have as much of the far lunar side illuminated as other dates would have. But the crew still will be able make out "definite chunks of the far side that have never been seen" by humans, said NASA geologist Kelsey Young, including a good portion of Orientale Basin. They'll call down their observations as they photograph the gray, pockmarked scenes. There's a suite of professional-quality cameras on board, and each astronaut also has an iPhone for more informal, spur-of-the-minute picture-taking... Orion will be out of contact with Mission Control for nearly an hour when it's behind the moon. The same thing happened during the Apollo moonshots. NASA is relying on its Deep Space Network to communicate with the crew, but the giant antennas in California, Spain and Australia won't have a direct line of sight when Orion disappears behind the moon for approximately 40 minutes... Once Artemis II departs the lunar neighborhood, it will take four days to return home. The capsule will aim for a splashdown in the Pacific near San Diego on April 10, nine days after its Florida launch. During the flight back, the astronauts will link up via radio with the crew of the orbiting International Space Station. This is the first time that a moon crew has colleagues in space at the same time and NASA can't pass up the opportunity for a cosmic chitchat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Internet Bug Bounty program "has been paused for new submissions," they announced last week. Running since 2012, the program is funded by "a number of leading software companies," reports InfoWorld, "and has awarded more than $1.5m to researchers who have reported bugs "Up to now, 80% of its payouts have been for discoveries of new flaws, and 20% to support remediation efforts. But as artificial intelligence makes it easier to find bugs, that balance needs to change, HackerOne said in a statement. "AI-assisted research is expanding vulnerability discovery across the ecosystem, increasing both coverage and speed. The balance between findings and remediation capacity in open source has substantively shifted," said HackerOne. Among the first programs to be affected is the Node.js project, a server-side JavaScript platform for web applications known for its extensive ecosystem. While the project team will continue to accept and triage bug reports through HackerOne, without funding from the Internet Bug Bounty program it will no longer pay out rewards, according to an announcement on its website... [J]ust last month, Google also put a halt to AI-generated submissions provided to its Open Source Software Vulnerability Reward Program. The Internet Bug Bounty stressed that "We have a responsibility to the community to ensure this program effectively accomplishes its ambitious dual purpose: discovery and remediation. Accordingly, we are pausing submissions while we consider the structure and incentives needed to further these goals..." "We remain committed to strengthening open source security. Working with project maintainers and researchers, we're actively evaluating solutions to better align incentives with open source ecosystem realities and ensure vulnerability discoveries translate into durable remediation outcomes."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

That leak of Claude Code's source code "revealed "all kinds of juicy details," writes PC World. The more than 500,000 lines of code included: - An 'undercover mode' for Claude that allows it to make 'stealth' contributions to public code bases- An 'always-on' agent for Claude Code- A Tamagotchi-style 'Buddy' for Claude "But one of the stranger bits discovered in the leak is that Claude Code is actively watching our chat messages for words and phrases - including f-bombs and other curses - that serve as signs of user frustration."Specifically, Claude Code includes a file called "userPromptKeywords.ts" with a simple pattern-matching tool called regex, which sweeps each and every message submitted to Claude for certain text matches. In this particular case, the regex pattern is watching for "wtf," "wth," "omfg," "dumbass," "horrible," "awful," "piece of - -" (insert your favorite four-letter word for that one), "f - you," "screw this," "this sucks," and several other colorful metaphors... While the Claude Code leak revealed the existence of the "frustration words" regex, it doesn't give any indication of why Claude Code is scouring messages for these words or what it's doing with them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hundreds of theatres are now showing a new documentary called The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist. Variety calls it "playful and heady,"edited "with a spirit of ADHD alertness." The New York Times suggests it "tries to cover so much that it ends up being more confusing than clarifying, but parts are fascinating." But the Los Angeles Times calls it an "aggravating soup of information and opinion that wants to move at the speed of machine thought." So while co-director Daniel Roher asks whether he should bring a child into a world with AI, "Perhaps more urgently, should Roher have made an AI doc that treats us like children?"First, he parades all the safety doomers, seeming to believe their warnings that an unfeeling superintelligence is upon us and we can't trust it. Then, sufficiently disturbed, he hauls in the AI cheerleaders, a suspiciously positive gang who can envision only medical miracles and grindless lives in which we're all full-time artists. Only then, after this simplistic setup where platitudes reign, do we get the section in which the subject is treated like the brave (and grave) new world it is: geopolitically fraught, economically tenuous and a playground for billionaires. Why couldn't the complexity have been the dialogue from the beginning, instead of the play-dumb cartoon "The AI Doc" feels like for so long? Maybe Roher believes this is what our increasingly gullible, truth-challenged citizenry needs from an explanatory doc: a flashy, kindhearted reminder that we're the change we need to be. Read more reactions here and here. Mashable warns the documentary's director "will ultimately craft a journey that feels like a panic attack in real time. In the end, you may not feel better about mankind's chances against the rise of AI. But you'll likely feel less helpless in the future before us all." They also point out that the film "shares some ways its audience can more actively be apart of the conversation, and provides a link to the film's website for engagement," where 6,948 people have now signed up for its newsletter. ("Demand a seat at the table," urges its signup button, under a warning that "Government and AI companies are designing our future without us. We need to reclaim our voice in shaping the future of AI...")Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meet the "journalist" who "uploads press releases or analyst notes into AI tools and prompts them to spit out articles that he can edit and publish quickly," according to the Wall Street Journal. "AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune's web traffic in the second half of 2025." And most were written by 42-year-old Nick Lichtenberg, who has now written over 600 AI-assisted stories, producing "more stories in six months than any of his colleagues at Fortune delivered in a year." One Wednesday in February, he cranked out seven. "I'm a bit of a freak," Lichtenberg said... A story by Lichtenberg sometimes starts with a prompt entered into Perplexity or Google's NotebookLM, asking it to write something based on a headline he comes up with. He moves the AI tools' initial drafts into a content-management system and edits the stories before publishing them for Fortune's readers... A piece from earlier that morning about Josh D'Amaro being named Disney CEO took 10 minutes to get online, he said... Like other journalists, Lichtenberg vets his stories. He refers back to the original documents to confirm the information he's reporting is correct. He reaches out to companies for comment. But he admits his process isn't as thorough as that of magazine fact-checkers. While Lichtenberg started out saying his stories were co-authored with "Fortune Intelligence", he now typically signs his own name, according to the article, "because he feels the work is mostly his own." (Though his stories "sometimes" disclose generative AI was used as a research tool...) The article asks with he could be "a bellwether for where much of the media business is headed..." "Much of the content people now consume online is generated by artificial intelligence, with some 9% of newly published newspaper articles either partially or fully AI-generated, according to a 2025 study led by the University of Maryland. The number of AI-generated articles on the web surpassed human-written ones in late 2024, according to research and marketing agency Graphite."Some executives have made full-throated declarations about the threat posed by AI. New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said AI "is almost certainly going to usher in an unprecedented torrent of crap," referencing deepfakes as an example. The NewsGuild of New York, the union representing Fortune employees and journalists at other media outlets, said the people are what makes journalism so powerful. "You simply can't replicate lived experiences, human judgment and expertise," said president Susan DeCarava. For Chris Quinn, the editor of local publications Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer, AI tools have helped tame other torrents facing the industry. AI has allowed the outlets to cover counties in Ohio that otherwise might go ignored by scraping information from local websites and sending "tips" to reporters, he said. It has also edited stories and written first drafts so the newsrooms' journalists can focus on the calls, research and reporting needed for their stories.... Newsrooms from the New York Times to The Wall Street Journal are deploying AI in various ways to help reporters and editors work more efficiently.... Not all newsrooms disclose their use of AI, and in some cases have rolled out new tools that resulted in errors or PR gaffes. An October study from the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC, which relied on professional journalists to evaluate the news integrity of more than 3,000 AI responses, found that almost half of all AI responses had at least one significant issue. Last week the New York Times even issued a correction when a freelance book reviewer using an AI tool unknowingly included "language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in The Guardian." But it was actually "the second time in a few days that the Times was called out for potential AI plagiarism," according to the American journalist writing The Handbasket newsletter.We must stem the idea being pushed by tech companies and their billionaire funders who've sunk too much into their products to admit defeat that the infiltration of AI into journalism is inevitable; because from my perch as an independent journalist, it simply is not... Some AI-loving journalists appear to believe that if they're clear enough with the AI program they're using, it will truly understand what they're seeking and not just do what it's made to do: steal shit... If you want to work with machines, get a job that requires it. There are a whole lot more of those than there are writing jobs, so free up space for people who actually want to do the work. You're not doing the world a favor by gifting it your human/AI hybrid. Journalism will not miss you if you leave... But meanwhile, USA Today recently tried hiring for a new position: AI-Assisted reporter. (The lucky reporter will "support the launch and scaling of AI-assisted local journalism in a major U.S. metro," working with tools including Copilot and Perplexity, pioneering possible future expansions and "AI-enabled newsroom operations that support and augment human-led journalism.") And Google is already sponsoring a "publishing innovation award"...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One crime ring scammed 2,000 elderly people of more than $27 million between 2021 and 2023 using tech support/bank impersonation/refund scams. "Victims were in their 70s and 80s," reports the U.S. Attorney's office for California's southern district. Victims were first told they'd received a refund (either online or via phone), but then told they'd been "over-refunded" a massive amount, and asked to return that amount. But 42-year-old Jiandong Chen just admitted Thursday in a U.S. federal court that he was involved in the fraud and money laundering via cryptocurrency - pleading guilty to two charges with maximum penalties of 40 years in prison and a $1 million fine, plus 20 years in prison with a maximum fine of $500,000 or twice the amount laundered. "Chen, a Chinese national, is the second defendant charged in a five-defendant indictment." And what tripped him up seems to be that "Certain members of the conspiracy also did in-person pickups of money directly from victims..." And so YouTube enters the story - when the scammers called pranksters with 1,790,000 subscribers to their "Trilogy Media" channel. In an elaborate three-hour video, the team of pranksters lured the scammer to a rented Airbnb where they're staging a fake funeral with a nun. (One of the men acting in the video remembers "we start doing a prayer... I'm holding the scammer's hand in my nun outfit...") They convince the scammer to collect the cash from a dead man - "Is there anything you'd like to say to him?" Then there's demon voices. The scammer's victim resurrects from the dead. Did the cash mule bring holy water? The end result was a video titled "CONFRONTING SCAMMERS WITH A FAKE FUNERAL (EPIC REACTIONS)". But two and a half years later, their "cash mule sting house" video has racked up over 1.3 million views, 22,000 likes, and 2,979 comments. ("This video is longer than Oppenheimer. Thanks for the laughs fellas.") And the scammer is facing 60 years in prison.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 days ago Apple launched device-level age restrictions in the U.K. There were some glitches, reports the blog 9to5Mac.For me, the experience was an entirely painless one, taking less than 30 seconds. All I had to do was tap a confirm and continue button, and Apple told me that the length of time I'd had an Apple account was used to confirm that I'm 18+. Others, however, experienced difficulties with the process timing out or failing to complete. We summarized some of the steps you can take to try to address this. Apple has since listed additional acceptable ways to verify your age. "You can confirm your age with a credit card, or by scanning a driver's license or one of the following PASS-accredited Proof of Age cards: CitizenCard, My ID Card, TOTUM ID card, or Young Scot National Entitlement Card." If you don't verify your age, then you'll be treated as a child or teenager, meaning that both the web content filter and communication safety features are switched on. Apple is continuing the roll-out in Singapore (population 6 million) and South Korea (population 52 million), the article points out, citing a new Apple support document. South Korea's law actually requires Apple to re-verify someone's age annually.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Google has announced that it's currently testing a new feature for Chrome 148 that could speed up day-to-day browsing," reports PC World:[T]he browser can intelligently postpone the loading of certain elements. Why load all images at the start when it can instead load images as you get close to them while scrolling? Chrome and Chromium-based browsers have had built-in lazy loading support for images and iframes since 2019, but this feature would make browsers capable of lazy loading video and audio elements, too. Note, however, that this won't benefit YouTube video embeds - those are already lazy loadable since they're embedded using iframes. Actual video and audio elements are rarer but not uncommon. In addition to Chrome, lazy loading of video and audio elements is also expected to be added to other Chromium-based browsers, including Microsoft Edge and Vivaldi.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plants, toads, and mushrooms "can all produce psychedelic substances," writes ScienceAlert. "And now their powers have been combined in one plant."[S]cientists have taken the genes these organisms use to make five natural psychedelics and introduced them into a tobacco plant ( Nicotiana benthamiana), which then produced all five compounds simultaneously. As interest grows in psychedelics as potential treatments for illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD, the newly developed system could offer scientists a new way to produce these compounds for research purposes... [P]rogress in this field remains limited, in part due to regulatory restrictions, underscoring the need for more research. This creates practical challenges for scientists. "Traditionally, the supply of psychedelics relies on natural producers, mainly plants, fungi, and the Sonoran Desert toad," the researchers write. "Harvesting these organisms for their psychoactive compounds raises ecological and ethical concerns, being increasingly threatened by habitat loss and overexploitation..." [T]he team carefully monitored the plant's production of five psychedelic tryptamines: DMT originally from plants; psilocin and psilocybin from mushrooms; and bufotenin and 5-MeO-DMT from toads. The modified tobacco plants were found to produce all five compounds simultaneously. The article points out that the researchers "also took it a step further." By tweaking the enzymes they were able to "produce modified versions of the compounds that do not naturally occur in plants, and which may also have therapeutic value."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Canonical is no longer pretending that 4GB is enough," writes the blog How-to-Geek, noting Ubuntu 26.04 LTS "raises the baseline memory to 6GB, alongside a 2GHz dual-core processor, and 25GB of storage..."Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) set the floor at 1GB - a modest ask when it launched more than a decade ago in 2014. Then came the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) that pushed the number to 4GB, surviving quite well in the era of 16GB being considered standard for mid-range laptops.... Ubuntu's new minimum requirement lands in an interesting spot when compared against Windows 11. Microsoft's operating system requires just 4GB RAM, although real-world usage often tells a different story. Usually, 8GB is considered the sweet spot to handle modern apps and multitasking. The blog OMG Ubuntu argues this change is "not because Ubuntu requires 2GB more memory than it did, but more the way we compute does."it's more of an honesty bump. Components that make up the distro - the GNOME desktop and extensions, modern web browsers (and the sites we load in them) and the kinds of apps we use (and keep running) whilst multitasking are more demanding... The Resolute Raccoon's memory requirements better reflect real-world multitasking. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS can be installed on devices with less than 6GB RAM (but not less than 25GB of disk space). The experience may not be as smooth or as responsive as developers intend (so you don't get to complain), but it will work. I installed Ubuntu 26.04 Beta on a laptop with just 2 GB of memory - slow to the point of frustration in use, but otherwise functional. If you have a device with 4 GB RAM and you can't upgrade (soldered memory is a thing, and e-waste can be avoided), then alternatives exist. Many Ubuntu flavours, like Lubuntu, have lower system requirements than the main edition. Plus, there's always the manual option using the Ubuntu netboot installer to install a base system and then built out a more minimal system from there.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's 50th anniversary got celebrated in weird and wild ways. CEO Tim Cook posted a special 30-second video rewinding backwards through the years of Apple's products until it reaches the Apple I. Podcaster Lex Fridman noticed if you play the sound in reverse, "It's the Think Different ad music, pitched up." TechRadar played seven 50-year-old Apple I games on an emulator, including Star Trek, Blackjack, Lunar Lander, and of course, Conway's Game of Life. And Macworld ranked Apple's 50 most influential people. (Their top five?) 5. Tony Fadell (iPhone co-creator/"father of the iPod")4. Sir Jony Ive3. Steve Wozniak2. Tim Cook1. Steve Jobs One of the most thoughtful celebraters was David Pogue, who's spent 42 years of writing about Apple (starting as a MacWorld columnist and the author of Mac for Dummies, one of the first "...For Dummies" books ever published in the early 1990s.) Now 63 years old, Pogue spent the last two years working on a 608-page hardcover book titled Apple: The First 50 Years. But on his Substack Pogue, contemplated his own history with the company - including several interactions with Steve Jobs. Pogue remembers how Jobs "hated open systems. He wanted to make self-contained, beautiful machines. He didn't want them polluted by modifications." The tech blog Daring Fireball notes that Pogue actually interviewed Scott Forstall (who'd led the iPhone's software development team) for his new book, "and got this story, about just how far Steve Jobs thought Apple could go to expand the iPhone's software library while not opening it to third-party developers.""I want you to make a list of every app any customer would ever want to use," he told Forstall. "And then the two of us will prioritize that list. And then I'm going to write you a blank check, and you are going to build the largest development team in the history of the world, to build as many apps as you can as quickly as possible." Forstall, dubious, began composing a list. But on the side, he instructed his engineers to build the security foundations of an app store into the iPhone's software-"against Steve's knowledge and wishes," Forstall says. [...] Two weeks after the iPhone's release, someone figured out how to "jailbreak" the iPhone: to hack it so that they could install custom apps. Jobs burst into Forstall's office. "You have to shut this down!" But Forstall didn't see the harm of developers spending their efforts making the iPhone better. "If they add something malicious, we'll ship an update tomorrow to protect against that. But if all they're doing is adding apps that are useful, there's no reason to break that." Jobs, troubled, reluctantly agreed. Week by week, more cool apps arrived, available only to jailbroken phones. One day in October, Jobs read an article about some of the coolest ones. "You know what?" he said. "We should build an app store." Forstall, delighted, revealed his secret plan. He had followed in the footsteps of Burrell Smith (the Mac's memory-expansion circuit) and Bob Belleville (the Sony floppy-drive deal): He'd disobeyed Jobs and wound up saving the project. In fact, the book "includes new interviews with 150 key people who made the journey, including Steve Wozniak, John Sculley, Jony Ive, and many current designers, engineers, and executives" (according to its description on Amazon). Pogue's book even revisits the story of Steve Jobs proving an iPod prototype could be smaller by tossing it into an aquarium, shouting "If there's air bubbles in there, there's still room. Make it smaller!" But Pogue's book "added that there's a caveat to this compelling bit of Apple lore," reports NPR. "It never actually happened. It's just one more Apple myth."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Hackers briefly turned a widely trusted developer tool into a vehicle for credential-stealing malware that could give attackers ongoing access to infected systems," the news site Axios.com reported Tuesday, citing security researchers at Google. The compromised package - also named axios - simplifies HTTP requests, and reportedly receives millions of downloads each day: The malicious versions were removed within roughly three hours of being published, but Google warned the incident could have "far-reaching impacts" given the package's widespread use, according to John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group. Wiz estimates Axios is downloaded roughly 100 million times per week and is present in about 80% of cloud and code environments. So far, Wiz has observed the malicious versions in roughly 3% of the environments it has scanned. Friday PCMag notes the maintainer's compromised account had two-factor authentication enabled, with the breach ultimately traced "to an elaborate AI deepfake from suspected North Korean hackers that was convincing enough to trick a developer into installing malware," according to a post-mortem published Thursday by lead developer Jason Saayman:[Saayman] fell for a scheme from a North Korean hacking group, dubbed UNC1069, which involves sending out phishing messages and then hosting virtual meetings that use AI deepfakes to clone the face and voices of real executives. The virtual meetings will then create the impression of an audio problem, which can only be "solved" if the victim installs some software or runs a troubleshooting command. In reality, it's an effort to execute malware. The North Koreans have been using the tactic repeatedly, whether it be to phish cryptocurrency firms or to secure jobs from IT companies. Saayman said he faced a similar playbook. "They reached out masquerading as the founder of a company, they had cloned the company's founders likeness as well as the company itself," he wrote. "They then invited me to a real Slack workspace. This workspace was branded... The Slack was thought out very well, they had channels where they were sharing LinkedIn posts. The LinkedIn posts I presume just went to the real company's account, but it was super convincing etc." The hackers then invited him to a virtual meeting on Microsoft Teams. "The meeting had what seemed to be a group of people that were involved. The meeting said something on my system was out of date. I installed the missing item as I presumed it was something to do with Teams, and this was the remote access Trojan," he added. "Everything was extremely well coordinated, looked legit and was done in a professional manner." Friday developer security platform Socket wrote that several more maintainers in the Node.js ecosystem "have come out of the woodwork to report that they were targeted by the same social engineering campaign."The accounts now span some of the most widely depended-upon packages in the npm registry and Node.js core itself, and together they confirm that axios was not a one-off target. It was part of a coordinated, scalable attack pattern aimed at high-trust, high-impact open source maintainers. Attackers also targeted several Socket engineers, including CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross is the creator of WebTorrent, StandardJS, buffer, and dozens of widely used npm packages with billions of downloads... Commenting on the axios post-mortem thread, he noted that this type of targeting [against individual maintainers] is no longer unusual... "We're seeing them across the ecosystem and they're only accelerating." Jordan Harband, John-David Dalton, and other Socket engineers also confirmed they were targeted. Harband, a TC39 member, maintains hundreds of ECMAScript polyfills and shims that are foundational to the JavaScript ecosystem. Dalton is the creator of Lodash, which sees more than 137 million weekly downloads on npm. Between them, the packages they maintain are downloaded billions of times each month. Wes Todd, an Express TC member and member of the Node Package Maintenance Working Group, also confirmed he was targeted. Matteo Collina, co-founder and CTO of Platformatic, Node.js Technical Steering Committee Chair, and lead maintainer of Fastify, Pino, and Undici, disclosed on April 2 that he was also targeted. His packages also see billion downloads per year... Scott Motte, creator of dotenv, the package used by virtually every Node.js project that handles environment variables, with more than 114 million weekly downloads, also confirmed he was targeted using the same Openfort persona. Socket reports that another maintainer was targetted with an invitation to appear on a podcast. (During the recording a suspicious technical issue appeared which required a software fix to resolve....) Even just technical implementation, "This is among the most operationally sophisticated supply chain attacks ever documented against a top-10 npm package," the CI/CD security company StepSecurity wrote TuesdayThe dropper contacts a live command-and-control server, delivers separate second-stage payloads for macOS, Windows, and Linux, then erases itself and replaces its own package.json with a clean decoy... Three payloads were pre-built for three operating systems. Both release branches were poisoned within 39 minutes of each other. Every artifact was designed to self-destruct. Within two seconds of npm install, the malware was already calling home to the attacker's server before npm had even finished resolving dependencies... Both versions were published using the compromised npm credentials of a lead axios maintainer, bypassing the project's normal GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline. "As preventive steps, Saayman has now outlined several changes," reports The Hacker News, "including resetting all devices and credentials, setting up immutable releases, adopting OIDC flow for publishing, and updating GitHub Actions to adopt best practices." The Wall Street Journal called it "the latest in a string of incidents exposing risks in the systems that underpin how modern software is built."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nine days ago Microsoft released a non-security "preview" update for Windows 11 - not mandatory for the average Windows user, notes ZDNet, "but rather as optional, more for IT admins and power users who want to test them." TechRepublic adds that the update "was to bring 'production-ready improvements' and generally ensure system stability by optimizing different Windows services." So it's ironic that some (but not all) users reported instead that the update "blocks users at the door, refusing to install or crashing midway through the process." "It apparently impacted enough people to force Microsoft to take action," writes ZDNet. "Microsoft paused and then pulled the update," and then Tuesday released a new update "designed to replace the glitchy one. This one includes all the new features and improvements from the previous preview update, but also fixes the installation issues that clobbered that update." Meanwhile, as Windows 11 version 24H2 approaches its end of life this October, Microsoft is now force-updating users to the latest version, reports BleepingComputer:"The machine learning-based intelligent rollout has expanded to all devices running Home and Pro editions of Windows 11, version 24H2 that are not managed by IT departments," Microsoft said in a Monday update to the Windows release health dashboard... "No action is required, and you can choose when to restart your device or postpone the update." Neowin reports: The good news is that the update from version 24H2 to 25H2 is a minor enablement package, as the two operating systems share the same codebase. As such, the update won't take long, and you should not encounter any disruptions, compatibility issues, or previously unseen bugs... Microsoft recently promised to implement big changes in how Windows Update works, including the ability to postpone updates for as long as you want. However, Microsoft has yet to clarify if that includes staying on a release beyond its support period. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Ol Olsoc for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.