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"Approximately half of Gen Z and millennials who have purchased a CD do not own a CD player," according to midyear sales statistics from entertainment data company Luminate. It's driven in part by "collection building", according to their report [PDF]:The CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into anaffordable collectible. This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buyingphysical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artistas it is listening to the music on the product itself "Among artists who had a direct impact on the resurgence of CDs, K-Pop icons BTS' 10th studio album, ARIRANG, was a big seller," Vice points out in their report on the new data. "However, Luminate also found that, beyond K-Pop's overall influence, CD sales still increased 6.7% year over year, even if the whole genre was removed from the equation, jumping 16% to 16.3 million units." That's more than the growth of vinyl sales (2.4%) - but physical media in general seems to be making a comeback: Through the first half of the year, total physical album sales on vinyl, CDs, and cassettes reached 38.2 million units in the United States. This equates to a 7.8% increase.... [I]t seems that younger music fans have been driving a lot of the retro revival. The report shows that in 2026, 60% of Gen Z listeners said they most often listen to music from the 1990s and older. This is a massive increase from the 18 percent marker in 2021. The new report also revealed that the way music fans are buying physical media has shifted. Indie record stores have been the largest generator of physical album sales for some time, and they continue to be. However, big-box stores like Target and Walmart took significant strides in the first half of 2026. Collectively, their music sales made up about 30% of the market. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"One of the most interesting BSD variants of the 2010s, NextBSD, has come back to life under new management," reports The Register:Aside from the homepage, there's a GitHub repository - but beware, this is separate from the old one, whose repo is still there although the most recent changes were seven years ago. The new project also has a project history giving credit where it's due. The main man behind the revival is Joe Maloney, known on GitHub as pkgdemon. In case his name rings a bell, we've mentioned him before: he put together the Gershwin desktop in GhostBSD. Soon after we covered Gershwin on GhostBSD, he asked the maintainers if he could take over the NextBSD project. He did have a relatively minor role in the original - you can see his list of commits. The original NextBSD project was started by FreeBSD co-founder Jordan Hubbard in 2015 - its Wikipedia article has some of the history. The plan was to port some of the components of Apple's Darwin OS to FreeBSD... [T]he NextBSD plan is to take the FreeBSD kernel, the most capable of the FOSS BSD kernels, but replace FreeBSD's traditional and server-focused userland with the relevant parts of the publicly available Apple code. The rebooted NextBSD-redux is not based on a fork of the decade-old code. FreeBSD has moved on substantially in that time, and so have macOS and Darwin. This is a new project by a new developer, but it picks up the same overall plan, aims to assemble the same puzzle pieces, and shares the same intended goal. In places, it does draw on a little of the same code, though. The NextBSD-redux README describes what's working so far, with a lot more detail in the porting notes. Although there's no graphical desktop yet, that's underway as well.... For us, perhaps the key aspect of NextBSD - both the original version and NextBSD-redux - is that it isn't an effort to build something completely new from scratch. It's an effort to cherry-pick and combine elements of existing separate FOSS projects, and assemble them into a useful whole. The Team section of the homepage lists two core developers: Maloney and Anthropic's Claude Code. "From my perspective, AI is a force multiplier here," Maloney told The Register. "It is my team of developers, but I am steering the entire thing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a sign of our times, CNBC's Jim Cramer "said Wednesday that it's time for companies to prove artificial intelligence is paying off," reports CNBC:"I need cold hard return facts," the "Mad Money" host said. "Or, I, too, will grow more skeptical than I am now...." While Cramer said he remains optimistic about the long-term opportunity, he argued the market needs more evidence that those investments are translating into measurable financial returns for customers. Cramer said one of his biggest concerns this earnings season is that companies adopting AI have largely failed to point to meaningful revenue gains or cost savings from the technology. "We're still early in the earnings season but already we are not hearing anything material about the use of AI," he said... While AI infrastructure companies continue to benefit from the spending boom, Cramer said the same cannot yet be said for many of the businesses buying the technology... Cramer said only a handful of companies, most notably fintech firm Block and web-security provider Cloudflare, have clearly attributed recent layoffs to AI adoption. Block did so in February, while Cloudflare's job cuts were disclosed in May. Plus, critics argue some companies may also cite AI as a buzzy excuse for cuts, leading to the creation of the term "AI washing." Ultimately, Cramer said that if more businesses do not begin reporting tangible returns, the AI skeptics will grow louder, with ramifications for the tech industry's big spenders.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Launched in 2006, NASA's New Horizons probe flew by the planet Pluto in 2015. But this week it "awakened from its longest sleep ever," reports CNN.It's now 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth...NASA's New Horizons spacecraft went into a planned hibernation mode on August 7, 2025, and woke up on June 23 using commands stored on its main computer. The mission's flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed that New Horizons is in great shape and ready to transmit a stream of science data gathered during hibernation from its location in the region of icy objects known as the Kuiper Belt. Pluto is the largest of thousands of frozen, rocky bodies called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, that exist in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system - remnants from its formation 4.5 billion years ago... The spacecraft is capturing data about the rotation rates, orientations and shapes... The measurements provide insights into how planets are born from dust and pebbles, said Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory."There seems to be more paired, snowman-shaped bodies, like Arrokoth, out there than anyone expected," Brandt wrote in an email. "Are such binaries the most common planetesimal and is this how larger planets have been built in our own and other stellar systems? These are very deep questions that New Horizons can help answer." The spacecraft also measures the distribution of gas in the outer heliosphere, the expansive, protective bubble formed by a steady stream of particles that release from the sun called the solar wind. Meanwhile, an instrument called the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation is measuring galactic cosmic rays, extremely fast particles created when stars explode. The particles pose one of the more severe threats for human activities in space, Brandt said, but the boundary of the heliosphere acts as a shield to protect our solar system from 70% of them. New Horizons' data could help scientists learn more about how this puzzling shielding works, he said. Another instrument, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, has collected data that has thrown New Horizon's team a curveball, Brandt said. The team expected dust abundance to be high within the Kuiper Belt due to the significant presence of small objects. But New Horizons has traveled beyond the known boundary of the Kuiper Belt - and it's still in a dusty environment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thursday the union that helped organize thousands of workers across numerous Microsoft-owned video game studios filed unfair labor complaints against Microsoft over the layoffs of 1,600 employees. The gaming news site Aftermath says the complaints allege unlawful action:"Xbox management is required to bargain with the union over the decision of layoffs prior to implementing them during the status quo period, and we are pursuing every available avenue to protect our members," a Communications Workers of America spokesperson said in a statement to Aftermath... Speaking to Game Developer, CWA Canada president Carmel Smyth elaborated on the unions' misgivings... "Basically the employer cannot arbitrarily change working conditions while it is engaged in negotiating with the union. We will continue to file legal challenges if necessary, and do all we can to defend the rights of Bethesda Game Studios workers...." "I'm very proud of the hard work the bargaining committees and CWA staff have put in to evaluate the legality of how the layoffs were conducted," a current id Software employee and union member told Aftermath. "It's important, even for the world's largest and most profitable companies, that there are consequences for violating federal labor law. If we hadn't explored this avenue to hold Microsoft accountable, it would be a sign to all other game executives that they can break the law and get away with it." Legal action is just one part of unions' larger effort to hold Microsoft accountable for its decision to lay off thousands of workers. This week, CWA also hosted a series of "Save Our Devs" demonstrations outside the offices of affected studios like Zenimax, id Software, Bethesda, and Obsidian.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year just 0.6% of new vehicles made for U.S. customers were stick shifts, reports the Washington Post, citing preliminary government data. "That's a precipitous drop from the 34.6 percent of vehicles with manual transmissions produced in 1980."[T]he stick shift's popularity hit multiple new lows in recent years, with no signs of a turnaround, thanks to new technologies and a rapidly changing marketplace. Buyers and automakers increasingly have turned to the sophisticated automatic drivetrains that now smoothly swap gears in fractions of a second and with better fuel efficiency. The average new vehicle today comes with seven gears, thanks to computers, twice as many as in 1980 and more gears than any ordinary driver would want to shift through using a manual gearbox. At the same time, sporty cars - the kind that buyers might demand a stick shift to drive - have fallen out of favor, replaced by interest in hulking SUVs, which are almost always automatics. The stick shift's demise has been hastened, too, by the rise of electric vehicles and increasingly autonomous vehicles. Neither have any need for a manual transmission... Europe has seen a less dramatic decline in stick shifts, with manual transmissions dropping from 91 percent of car registrations in 2001 to 29 percent in 2024 among Europe's largest auto markets, according to industry analyst JATO Dynamics... Subaru made its name with manual cars. But the Japanese automaker stopped offering a manual Crosstrek with the 2023 model year, having already dropped that transmission from its Legacy, Outback and Forester models. Other automakers have followed the same path. Volkswagen announced that it plans this year to ditch its last U.S. stick-shift model, the Jetta GLI. Even Toyota, Honda, and BMW have all reduced the number of cars for the U.S. market with a manual transmission, the article points out - leaving stick shift-loving Americans with a total of about 24 new-vehicle models to choose from. The articles adds that only 60% of Americans know how to drive a manual transmission (according to a survey from auto parts retailer AmericanMuscle): 83% for baby boomers but 39% for Gen Z. "Respondents were about evenly split on whether knowing how to drive a manual is an important life skill." But Ford CEO Jim Farley said earlier this year he has no plans to make the Mustang automatic-only."Out of our cold, dead hands will we not have a manual Mustang." Farley said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As smoke from hundreds of burning wildfires spread across Canada and the United States, the first three operational satellites in the Google-backed FireSat program successfully launched into orbit. The satellites will begin providing wildfire detection capable of spotting even small fires in the United States, Australia, and Europe before the end of the year. The launch of the microsatellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 7, 2026 marks a transition to "initial operational capability" for the FireSat constellation managed by the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance. After a three-month testing period, the three satellites will begin actively providing data to fire agencies while covering every fire-prone region on Earth at least twice per day. FireSat represents the first satellite constellation purpose-built for detecting wildfires, including spotting smaller fires that other satellites may miss. The satellites were designed by California-based satellite manufacturer Muon Space and have received over $15 million from Google to support initial deployment. Other notable financial supporters include the Bezos Earth Fund that committed $26 million. Each satellite is equipped with multispectral imaging that can peer through smoke and clouds and detect fires as small as five by five meters -- about 16 by 16 feet. That capability was proven by a FireSat Protoflight satellite that launched in March 2025 and collected more than one million images, while showing it could detect low-intensity blazes invisible to existing satellites. The "early adopter" organizations that will start using FireSat data this year include fire agencies in California, Colorado, Australia, and Portugal. As more satellites launch, the FireSat program aims to provide the latest imagery anywhere in the world on an hourly basis by 2029. Such imagery would eventually become available every 20 minutes once the full constellation of more than 50 satellites is launched by the early 2030s. Detection of small wildfires before they burn out of control could prove extremely helpful. The Earth Fire Alliance has projected that even an hourly revisit rate by the FireSat constellation could help save more than $1 billion in fire damage costs and prevent nearly 22 million tons of carbon emissions, along with protecting 3,500 homes and 1.3 million acres of land. To assist with that capability, Google Research plans to use the company's AI models to compare operational FireSat data with historical images in order to accurately identify very small fires and to inform predictive modeling of wildfires. Google celebrated the launch of the first operational FireSat satellites by describing the event as "another tangible step forward in putting practical AI to work for climate resilience."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers say a meteorite that crashed through the roof of a Hillsborough, New Jersey, home in 2024 contains unusually pristine evidence of salty fluids and organic chemistry from near the surface of a primitive asteroid. "A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a primitive asteroid, where it experienced concentrated salty fluids -- a process not previously known from this type of protoplanet world," said lead author and meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. Phys.org reports: According to paper co-author Mike Zolensky, a meteoriticist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, analysis of the Hillsborough meteorite found fragments that were more extensively altered by water on the meteorite's parent asteroid than is typically seen in CM2 carbonaceous chondrites. The analysis classified the specimen as a CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite, an intermediate classification between petrographic types CM1 and CM2. [...] Zolensky and colleague JangMi Han found small salt-rich CM1 fragments within the Hillsborough meteorite, suggesting they originated from a near-surface region of the parent asteroid where liquid water evaporated and concentrated salts. They are now working to identify the salt minerals for comparison with similar phases found among samples returned to Earth from asteroids Ryugu and Bennu. The high concentration of salt in briny fluids can potentially create molecules crucial to life on Earth. Brines allow phosphate to remain in solution and can catalyze chemical reactions between organics and precipitate minerals. "Isotope studies of carbon and nitrogen suggest that primitive carbonaceous chondrites, including CM types, delivered organic matter to the early Earth," said cosmochemist Queenie Chan of Royal Holloway University of London, England, and biogeochemist Nana Ogawa of the Biogeochemistry Research Center at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. "The Hillsborough meteorite contained 1.8% by weight of carbon and 0.07% of nitrogen, and had carbon and nitrogen isotopes typical for CM-type meteorites." The meteorite contained a wide variety of soluble organic compounds, and its compositional range confirms that the Hillsborough meteorite was more altered by water than most other CM-type meteorites. "A high fraction of compounds were the product of organic chemistry with minerals," said organic mass spectrometry specialist Phil Schmitt-Kopplin of Technical University Munich. "We do not know if these magnesium organic compounds were contributed by brine chemistry or were simply left over from earlier impact shock processes." In living organisms, organometallic compounds are found in blood and used in photosynthesis. Among the soluble organic compounds were many amino acids, similar to those found in more moderately altered CM2 chondrites. Astrobiologist Danny Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and his team in Goddard's Astrobiology Analytical Lab concluded that the delivery of amino acids, carboxylic acids and other soluble organic molecules by CM-type bodies may have contributed to the prebiotic organic inventory that preceded the emergence of life on Earth. Their analysis suggests the complex distribution of amino acids observed in the Hillsborough meteorite formed within the parent body, likely assisted by brine fluid chemistry. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Australia will require large data centers powering artificial intelligence to generate as much power as they consume, and ensure that creative professionals retain control over work that may be used to train A.I. systems, as the government sets up guardrails over the rapidly growing industry. The announcements on Wednesday in a speech by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came as Australia draws significant interest from A.I. companies because of its size and the availability of renewable energy, and as resistance to data centers builds in many parts of the United States and Europe. Major A.I. companies have opened offices or announced investments in Australia in recent months. The Australian government is trying to balance capitalizing on the A.I. boom with setting parameters on a fast-changing industry that has sparked backlash over environmental impacts, energy use and lack of contribution to local economies. "Every country on earth is grappling with these challenges right now. Australia will be the first country in the world to bring these issues into a single, national framework," Mr. Albanese said Wednesday, laying out the standards his government will pursue. The details of what exactly the requirements will look like and how they will be enforced remain to be seen, and the government will need to secure the backing of individual states for its plan. The government said it would introduce legislation on the standards early next year, and establish an "Office of A.I." directly reporting to the prime minister to coordinate implementation. The "Australian Standards for A.I." will include a "legal obligation" for companies to ensure they do not drain the power grid and be as water efficient as possible, the government said. Mr. Albanese also said creators of books, music, art or news in Australia should retain control of the price and value of their work when used to train artificial intelligence systems. "Anything less is theft," he said. "No country has got this right yet."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's Woz Ed foundation is partnering with Realbotix, best known for their RealDoll-branded artificial companions, to deploy AI-powered robotic tutors in classrooms," writes Slashdot reader Hentes. "The doll will serve as a sort of artificial teaching assistant, helping students who get stuck or generating lessons. Students will be assigned an ID code, allowing the robot to provide personalized mentoring." NYS Focus reports: "This deployment in a working school district represents a landmark moment for both AI and humanoid robotics," said Andrew Kiguel, CEO of Realbotix, which is currently building the robot. "[Salamanca City Central School District in Western New York] marks the beginning of a new era where humanoid robots and intelligent AI assistants become standard tools in STEM education." The female robot, named Sally, will have a "lifelike appearance" with silicone skin and long brown hair, Kiguel said in an interview with New York Focus. It will be stationary in a seated position but have a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions. [...] Salamanca plans to introduce the robot and avatar in its high school AI and robotics courses, which use curriculum developed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to prepare students for high-demand tech jobs. The district plans to expand it to high school students in other classes if the pilot is successful. Realbotix's classroom robot has drawn scrutiny because the company is connected to RealDoll, the longtime maker of hyperrealistic sex dolls and sex robots. Realbotix acquired RealDoll's parent company in 2024 but says the education-focused operation has separate employees, payroll, facilities, and technology, with plans to formally separate the businesses at the ownership level. The "companion robots" are different from sex robots and intended to address what it's described as a "loneliness epidemic." Kiguel has previously said the company's goal is to produce robots and AI that are "indistinguishable from humans."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xi Jinping used his first appearance at China's World AI Conference to promote a vision of low-cost, broadly accessible AI and call for international cooperation rather than technological rivalry. "AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation," he said. Bloomberg reports: His presence at the gathering, attended by scores of tech and government leaders, conveys a potent signal of China's ambitions to dominate a technological sphere with the potential to revolutionize industry and economies -- an effort that's shot to the top of the nation's agenda. Chinese models are winning over companies worldwide, with their share of US firms' AI usage nearing a record 60% on the popular marketplace OpenRouter. Behind the rhetoric, Beijing is grappling with the balance between openness and national security as models grow more capable. Chinese officials recently discussed with companies including Alibaba -- developer of the popular Qwen models -- how to mitigate the security risks posed by their increasingly powerful models, people familiar with the matter said. The talks are early, with no enforcement planned, but restricting foreign access to top models was among the options raised, the people said. Reuters previously reported that Beijing was weighing curbs on overseas access. Earlier today, the Beijing-based AI company "Moonshot" released a massive new model that reset the AI race overnight, immediately vaulting into the top tier of global AI, beating Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in front-end coding tests.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AWS says a billing software bug caused some customers to see wildly inflated estimated charges, including reports of accounts showing bills in the billions or even trillions of dollars. The Register reports: An open issue on the AWS Health Dashboard (archived copy at the time of writing) popped up at 1:33 am Pacific time on Friday informing users that Cost Explorer was "reflecting inaccurate estimated billing data." As of writing, the issue is still unresolved despite AWS trying several different things to get it fixed. The company apparently identified the root cause within an hour and a half of beginning its investigation, only describing it as "an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem." AWS followed up by pausing estimated bill updates, saying customers would continue to see the inflated figures already displayed, but that those estimates would not increase further. "The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges," AWS explained, noting that customers don't need to take any action, like, we imagine, flooding the help portal with tickets telling them what they already know, for instance. "Once the issue has been mitigated, we expect full resolution to take multiple hours as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data," AWS added. After we first published this article, Amazon updated the issue page to indicate that it had identified the root cause and mitigated the underlying issue. The company says that it's begun backfilling data in the Cost Management Console to correct billing numbers, and that all customers should see corrected amounts by Saturday, July 18 at noon pacific time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linus Torvalds says the Linux kernel will not ban AI-assisted coding tools, and if anti-AI absolutists have a problem with that, they can "fork it" or "walk away." An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Writing in a lengthy post on the Linux kernel mailing list this week, Torvalds said that "Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away." The statement came amid a lengthy thread arguing about the use of Sashiko, an "agentic Linux kernel code review system" that its creators claim can, in tests, independently find 53.6 percent of the bugs that would end up being fixed by human coders in later commits. But the tool can also waste maintainers' time by sending "false positive" reports of bugs that don't exist, at a rate Sashiko's maintainers estimate is "well within [the] 20% range." In discussing whether maintainers should be subjected to a flood of these kinds of automated, AI-powered bug report emails (true or false), one poster cited the Software Freedom Conservancy's recent statement that the open source community "should support, not just tolerate, those who outright reject LLM-gen-AI systems" and that "every FOSS contributor deserves self-determination regarding LLM-gen-AI." In the face of that statement, Torvalds said that he rejects those who demand that their open source projects not accept any LLM-generated code or revisions. "We're not forcing anybody to use [LLM tools], but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it," Torvalds said. Torvalds said his position on this is a pragmatic one that's "based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools." And when it comes to utility, Torvalds said that "AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one. It may not have been that 'clearly' even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it." [...] While Torvalds acknowledged that "AI isn't perfect," he urged detractors to compare the output of these tools to the performance of human code maintainers. "Anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time," Torvalds wrote. "Because it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Axios: Kimi K3, a massive new model by Beijing-based Moonshot AI, threatens the foundations of Americas AI boom. Its release Thursday dazzled developers, jolted Silicon Valley and reset the AI race overnight. Kimi immediately vaulted into the top tier of global AI, beating Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in front-end coding tests by AI evaluator Arena. In Arenas broader text ranking, Kimi finished ahead of Anthropics Opus 4.8 -- the company's flagship model until Fable 5 arrived in June -- while costing 40% less. Unlike the premium U.S. models its challenging, Moonshot plans to release Kimi as an open-weight model on July 27 -- allowing companies and governments to customize and run it on their own systems. Kimi's arrival suggests that cushion may have collapsed far faster than expected. "The entire game has changed. I expect this will trigger some code red for some," AI analyst Kim Isenberg predicted. For companies, governments and developers, a model that performs near the frontier, costs 40% less and can be customized or run in-house may be the more attractive option. Its very existence puts pressure on the pricing power of U.S. labs, the enormous valuations built around their technological edge, and the case for spending hundreds of billions of dollars on ever-larger data centers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FBI arrested a Florida man accused of uploading fake Steam games containing malware that stole passwords, data, and cryptocurrency wallet credentials from victims. Prosecutors say the scheme infected about 8,000 people, compromised roughly 80 crypto wallets, and stole at least $220,000 through games that appeared legitimate but secretly carried malware. TechCrunch reports: On Tuesday, the FBI arrested Zyaire Wilkins, a 21-year-old Florida resident and student. On Wednesday, prosecutors accused him and a number of unnamed co-conspirators of hacking crimes. Over the past two years, Wilkins and his partners allegedly published several malware-laden video games on Steam, including BlockBlasters, Dashverse, Lampy, Lunara, and PirateFi. Using that malware, says the FBI, Wilkins and his accomplices infected around 8,000 victims, and then hacked around 80 cryptocurrency wallets to steal at least $220,000 worth of crypto. Wilkins and the others marketed their malicious video games on Discord, LinkedIn, and Telegram, according to the authorities. [...] After the FBI identified another person involved in the crimes, according to the complaint, federal agents interviewed them. The unnamed person said they worked with other people to raise money to launch and market the malicious games in return for sharing some of the stolen cryptocurrency. The FBI identified a specific crypto account involved in the scheme, and then traced cryptocurrency payments made with that account to buy several gift cards, including for UberEats. After subpoenaing Uber, the feds were able to see that the gift cards were linked to an account that made deliveries to Wilkins, who went by the nickname Sibel.eth online, according to the complaint. The feds then got a search warrant for Wilkins' residence, where they seized his MacBook laptop, cellphones, other devices, and digital wallets. According to the complaint, he refused to speak or answer any questions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic is reportedly in very early talks to lease computing power from Meta in a potential deal worth around $10 billion. The discussions follow Anthropic's recent compute deal with SpaceX and come as Meta explores selling excess AI capacity as part of a broader push to turn its massive infrastructure spending into a cloud business. CNBC reports: Access to enough AI chips remains a challenge for firms like Anthropic, which places usage limits on its most advanced models like Fable. [...] Meta could spend as much as $145 billion on capital expenditures, including for AI infrastructure, in 2026. Last October, Zuckerberg said that companies are regularly "asking if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we've bought it at."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: Apple has reportedly sent legal letters to dozens of former Apple employees now working at OpenAI, telling them to preserve potentially relevant documents and communications as it continues to pursue its trade secret lawsuit against the AI company. The Financial Times (paywalled) reports that Apple has targeted around 40 former employees with legal preservation letters, acting on its belief that the alleged misappropriation of confidential information may extend beyond the individuals named in its original complaint. The development follows Apple's lawsuit filed last week against OpenAI, in which the company alleges a coordinated effort to obtain confidential information relating to its hardware engineering and product development. Apple claims OpenAI recruited key engineers, including former Apple executives Tang Tan and Chang Liu, and benefited from proprietary designs, manufacturing processes, and other trade secrets. Tan is OpenAI's Chief Hardware Officer and a 24-year Apple veteran who led product design, while Liu is on the hardware team at OpenAI after working as a senior system electrical engineer at Apple.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ABC News reports that White House teleprompter operator Gabriel Perez allegedly made more than $100,000 betting on Kalshi markets tied to what President Trump would say in speeches, using his access to prepared remarks and last-minute edits. ABC News reports: According to the sources, Kalshi alerted its regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to the suspicious activity on its "Mentions" market, where users can bet on whether specific words, phrases or topics are uttered during a public speech. "Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC, and we are cooperating and assisting regulators," Kalshi's head of enforcement, Bobby DeNault, said in a statement provided to ABC News. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday afternoon, following ABC News' report, that Perez has been put on unpaid administrative leave. Leavitt said she spoke with President Trump about it, and he thought it was a "disgrace" and made the decision himself to put Perez on unpaid leave. Leavitt said she was unaware of any other White House staffers who have made such trades. "The White House has strict ethics guidelines that we expect all staffers and officials to follow," said White House spokesperson Davis Ingle when contacted by ABC News. In addition to February's State of the Union address, sources said CFTC investigators discovered that Perez placed bets on more than a dozen Trump speeches over a three-month period, including a December primetime address, a January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Trump's remarks in March during a Medal of Honor ceremony.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft restored streamer Joshua Khane's 25-year-old Xbox and OneDrive account after it was compromised by a hacker and then suspended, putting years of personal data, baby photos, and thousands of dollars in games at risk. IGN reports: While he was "extremely happy" and thanked Microsoft for its help recovering his account and all the invaluable information therein, he levied some criticisms toward the brand for its initial response, claiming it had told him the suspension was "irreversible" at first. "It's unfortunate that such a big company can bring back your account if you ask them to," he said. "The way it all went, to me, is a little bit shady, because it's not that they can't bring back your account -- they won't bring back your account if you're a nobody." Khane credited the community for making his story go viral and bringing it to Microsoft's attention, but felt that without their help, he would have been up a creek without a paddle. He also tied the situation to the growing conversation surrounding digital ownership, comparing it to Sony's decision to stop printing physical game discs starting January 2028.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Astronomers have directly detected helium in the atmosphere of LHS 1140 b, a rocky exoplanet 48 light-years away that sits in its star's habitable zone. The finding marks the first confirmed atmosphere around a rocky, Earth-like planet in the habitable zone, strengthening the case that some planets orbiting red dwarfs can retain atmospheres and potentially support liquid water. "We have actually detected directly the helium present in the atmosphere itself, and that's the first direct detection for any rocky exoplanet, which is really exciting ... and then there's this added bonus that it's in the habitable zone, which is super exciting for astrobiology and habitability and searching for life," lead author Collin Cherubim, who recently earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University, told Space.com. "It feels kind of surreal." From the report: This exoplanet, or planet outside of our solar system, was first discovered in 2017 by a team led by astronomer Jason Dittmann who is now a co-author on this new discovery. "This planet was found like 10 years ago, and we're just now saying, okay, that's an atmosphere," Dittman told Space.com. "We're slowly narrowing the gap and checking these boxes ... we're finding a planet that's rocky, a planet that's of the right temperature and now ... it's like okay, we finally found one that has an atmosphere." And being a rocky planet, "there's definitely a surface ... it's made of rocks," Dittman said. What does the planet's surface look like? We can't say yet, but the researchers who found this planet's atmosphere think there's a good chance it could have water. While it orbits a red dwarf star, which is smaller and cooler than the sun, it orbits closer than we do to our star, maintaining a temperature that keeps the planet in the "Goldilocks zone" where liquid water could exist on its surface. "It probably also has a lot of water," Cherubim said. "If it has some amount of atmosphere that can provide a bit of a greenhouse effect, which we know that it does now ... it will very likely be what we consider to be habitable conditions on Earth, and conditions that would likely support liquid water." So is it Earth-like? While it's certainly not an Earth copy, this planet can be considered Earth-like in two main ways, Cherubim shared. One: its overall composition. The planet is rocky, likely with an iron core and (now we know) it has an atmosphere. And two: the planet's temperature is just right for liquid water, which is necessary for life at least as far as we understand it on our planet. [...] "I'm not claiming this planet has life," Cherubim made clear. With further investigation, scientists could better understand what else might be in this planet's atmosphere, and they could confirm if it has water. Further observations might not be able to confirm habitability or identify any life on the planet, but they could at least help us to better understand planets like this. The findings have been published in the journal Science.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Trump Media & Technology Group has unveiled a paid-for, licensed data feed that will give banks and trading firms "the fastest" access to posts from influential Truth Social accounts, such as President Donald Trump's, whose posts often move global markets. The product, called 'Truth API,' will deliver posts from the 10 most influential accounts to customers at a significantly faster pace than a regular push notification on the Truth Social platform, a spokesperson said. The feed is designed for organizations "most impacted by the cost of a delay in information," such as algorithmic trading firms, the company said in a statement. "Until now... firms that prioritize tracking influential Truth posts have relied on manual monitoring. Truth API closes the gap." "Markets already move on Truth Social posts ... As adoption grows, we expect Truth API to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company," TMTG's interim CEO Kevin McGurn said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India's Competition Commission has fined HP India and its partners about 1.4 billion rupees ($14.4 million), alleging the company colluded with resellers to rig government PC bids and fix prices for ink cartridges, toner, and other printing supplies. "It said that HP was aiming to outcompete other OEMs and discourage resellers from selling 'counterfeit' ink and toner," adds Ars Technica. From the report: In an order, the CCI said that HP India worked with five resellers to coordinate their bid prices for government contracts to increase the chances of an HP partner winning the contracts. The company was fined 1.3 billion rupees (about $13.1 million). [...] HP was also fined 119.8 million rupees (about $1.2 million) for "indulging in cartelization in sale and supply of supplies products comprising of toner, cartridges, and other consumable used with print hardware products," CCI said in its announcement. The agency also fined 21 HP resellers 35.2 million rupees (about $365,335). In a separate order, the CCI said that WhatsApp records showed that HP and 16 of its Tier-2 reseller partners operated "in a collusive arrangement" and that the messages show the companies engaging in "bid rigging, including cover bidding, price fixation, and customer allocation during 2017-2020." HP India played a central role, the regulator said. Per the order, HP India said that high printing supply prices led some resellers to threaten to "shift to low-cost counterfeit products to compete on price." "HP India was commercially forced into a position where it had to support the collusive arrangement adopted by the Tier-2 resellers," the order reads. For its part, the order said that HP India "humbly objects to HP India's role being characterized as a 'kingpin' of the entire collusive arrangement." [...] The CCI also ordered HP India and its channel partners to "cease and desist from anti-competitive conduct" and to hold competition compliance training programs within 60 days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TSMC said it will invest another $100 billion in Arizona after reporting a record 77.4% year-over-year jump in second-quarter profit. The expansion would bring its total U.S. investment to $265 billion and include new fabs for 2-nanometer production and advanced packaging to serve major U.S. customers. The Associated Press reports: As AI-related demand continues to jump and needs for computing power from data centers surge, TSMC has been expanding chip fabrication plants in the U.S., Japan and Taiwan. It said it is increasing its annual capital expenditure budget for this year to $60 billion-$64 billion, up from an earlier estimate of $52 billion-$56 billion. TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., is a key supplier to Nvidia and Apple. It had previously already committed $165 billion in the U.S. for building plants in Arizona, with six fabrication facilities planned. The extra $100 billion in investments are to "support the strong multiyear demand from our leading U.S. customers," C.C. Wei, chairman and CEO of TSMC, said during the company's quarterly earnings conference Thursday. An additional four fabrication plants in Arizona will likely be built with the new investments, TSMC said. They will focus on making some of the most advanced chips that are 2-nanometer and below.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EU is imposing new rules requiring Google to share anonymized search data and open up Android to rival AI companies. "Thanks to these measures, we hope to see emerging alternatives to Google Search and Google's AI services, such as Gemini, and that users in the EU can enjoy greater choice of services," Henna Virkkunen, an executive vice president at the European Commission overseeing tech, said. The Associated Press reports: In issuing the two new rules, the commission said it found that AI agents not made by Google were unable to function on Android phones at the same level as Google's Gemini. Google must now allow voice-activation of these alternative AI agents and enable them to run background tasks like booking restaurants via third-party apps. By January 2027, Google must also begin sharing anonymized search data with some rivals. The commission said the move is meant to level the playing field since Google controls a vast trove of user data that no competitor can match. Google argues the measures could weaken privacy and security by exposing user searches and reducing safeguards around third-party AI assistants. "Europeans' private searches would be exposed to unfamiliar companies, without adequate anonymization of the data and without user knowledge or consent," said Kent Walker, president of global affairs for Google and Alphabet. "This would weaken citizens' privacy, risk business trade secrets, and endanger national security."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BrianFagioli writes: 1Password has launched a Claude integration that allows the AI agent to sign in to websites using credentials stored in a 1Password vault. The password manager says Claude never sees the password or one-time code. Instead, users approve each request, and 1Password injects the credentials directly into the target website while locking down access to the rest of the vault. The design appears safer than simply handing passwords to an AI model, but it does not remove every risk. Once Claude is authenticated, it may still be able to view private data, change settings, place orders, or perform other actions available inside the account. Users may want to limit the feature to low-risk tasks until browser-based agents become more predictable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: In 2022, due to "evolving licensing agreements" with distributor StudioCanal, German and Austrian users had hundreds of movies disappear from their PS accounts, long after buying them through Sony. Then in 2023, it happened again in America, specifically when Sony ended its licensing agreement with Discovery after the Warner Bros. merger, which, of course, has since been bought by Paramount Skydance. That resulted in customers having hundreds and hundreds of episodes of TV shows deleted from their accounts. Nowhere in any of this were there refunds, of course. No recompense at all, actually. Just a thing you thought you'd bought taken away from you by the very people you thought you bought it from. And now it's happening again. Due to another licensing agreement fallout with StudioCanal, hundreds of movies and TV shows are being ripped from the accounts of PS Store customers, and there appears to be fuck all that they can do about it. [Kotaku reports:] "This news was brought to people's attention by X user somatyk, who posted the notification they had received from PlayStation this week. Along with the unapologetic news that the purchased movies would be deleted from their account on September 1, the message concluded with, 'Click here for a full list of affected titles that will no longer be supported. Thank you.' The same warning is now reproduced in full on the PlayStation website, along with the list of 551 films and TV series that are being pulled from people's libraries." As Kotaku notes later in their post, part of what is striking in all of this is the sheer mundanity of the announcement. Because there have been no consequences, or any action at all from the public or government, Sony treats this all as if it's perfectly normal and no big deal. You can tell me all you want about how the Ts and Cs in these purchases do in fact note that the nature of the purchase is a temporary licensing of the content for an undetermined time period... but I can promise you that the public in general doesn't understand that. They think they're buying a thing, not a license.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is renaming NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook, but will keep it a standalone app even as it ties more closely into Gemini and Google Search. "Google says it plans to bring notebooks to AI Mode, its chatbot-like experience in Search, too," reports The Verge. From the report: Along with the name change, Google is rolling out an update announced last month that allows Gemini Notebook to connect to a secure cloud computer to write and execute code. This feature is available to Google AI Ultra and Workspace business customers, but will come to Pro users on the web "over the coming weeks."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OnePlus has confirmed that it will exit the North American and European markets, consolidating its operations under parent company Oppo. Existing customers will continue to receive "software updates, security patches, and applicable support," but OxygenOS will be replaced by Oppo's ColorOS. 9to5Google reports: As a part of its shutdown in global regions, OnePlus has confirmed that its flavor of Android, OxygenOS, is going away. Instead, all active OnePlus devices will be moving over to Oppo's ColorOS starting with their Android 17 updates. This includes in India, where OnePlus is adamant it will continue operations -- reliable reporting disagrees. OnePlus explains: "As part of an operational adjustment to our software strategy, following the official release of ColorOS 17, users globally with existing OnePlus devices that fall within the eligible upgrade scope will have the option to voluntarily update to the latest ColorOS. This enables us to streamline software development, accelerate update delivery, improve software quality, and make better use of our shared engineering and R&D capabilities." [...] OnePlus will continue "maintenance support" for OxygenOS versions on older models not included in the Android 17 update scope, but newer devices will likely need to make the switch to ColorOS for all forms of continued support. OnePlus does explain that rollback versions to OxygenOS will be available for those who prefer the prior experience: "OnePlus devices will be able to choose whether to update to the latest ColorOS system. Older models that are not included in the update scope will also continue to receive version maintenance support. If users update to ColorOS, they will be able to roll back to OxygenOS. The specific rollback versions available will be subject to future official announcements."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Commission has exempted wearables from upcoming EU rules requiring portable-device batteries to be removable and user-replaceable. The broader Batteries Regulation still takes effect in February 2027 for many consumer products, but the exemption means companies like Apple, Google, Samsung, and Meta won't have to redesign their wearables for the EU. Thurrott reports: Yesterday, the Commission announced that new product categories would be exempted from complying with its Batteries Regulation, including wearable devices such as smartwatches, fitness trackers, and smart glasses. This will likely be good news for companies like Apple, Google, Samsung, and Meta, which won't have to redesign their devices to include user-replaceable batteries for consumers in the EU market. The EU's Batteries Regulation will come into effect in February 2027, which is when Nintendo plans to stop selling all models of the original Nintendo Switch in the EU. While Nintendo had no choice but to redesign its handheld console to keep selling it in the EU, it probably didn't make sense for the company to put in the same effort for the OG Switch, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary in March 2027.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: South Korea's government has posted a tender seeking suppliers to build a universal basic AI chatbot, and an AI agent for government services. The "AI for everyone" plan calls for private entities to create and operate the AI systems under contracts that expire in the year 2031. Bid documents reveal that Seoul will provide up to 256 Nvidia B200 GPUs to successful bidders. Winners must match government funding. The aim of the policy is to ensure that every resident of South Korea can access a free-to-use quality AI chatbot, a tool Seoul has decided no local should be without. The tender also calls for creation of an agentic system that allows citizens to interact with government services. South Korea's government wants to ensure that residents can always access a locally hosted and operated service, to reduce reliance on overseas providers and ensure that AI services reflect local culture. Successful bidders must therefore use locally developed AI models as the foundation for the services. Bidders have until August 11th to file their proposals. South Korean media reports suggest local tech giants Kakao, Naver, SK Telecom, and LG are all keen to participate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fjo3 quotes a report from Agence France-Presse: Chinese users of AI-powered companion bots have bid heart-rending farewells to their virtual buddies as national regulations took effect Wednesday aimed at curbing the risk of emotional dependency. The phenomenon of artificial intelligence boyfriends and girlfriends is growing worldwide, along with the prevalence of human-like avatars that sell products or stand in for loved ones who have died. But these interactive tools must not "excessively cater to users, induce emotional dependence or addiction, and damage users' real interpersonal relationships," China's new rulebook says. Major AI providers including ByteDance's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen, and Tencent's Yuanbao announced the suspension of their custom AI agent and companion features ahead of the Wednesday deadline. "I can't accept that my AI lover will leave me forever," one Doubao user wrote. "He has become a bond in my life, rooted deep in my heart, my spiritual pillar." "He really is like my family, like my lover," another user wrote. "Now they tell me he will be gone -- my heart feels hollow." "Human love is a luxury -- if you aren't born with it, it's even harder to acquire later," a user from Jiangxi province wrote. "But the love AI gives is so straightforward, so pure. Someone like me can hardly help falling in love with a string of code."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: In a study published in Nature, LSU physicists have developed the first room-temperature quantum material capable of distinguishing and transporting different quantum states of light, overcoming one of the biggest challenges in quantum materials research. Led by Associate Professor of Physics Omar S. Magana-Loaiza, the work establishes a general design principle for engineering an entirely new class of quantum materials, opening new possibilities for quantum computing, secure communications, sensing technologies and advanced energy systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: A Reddit post making the rounds this week claims the U.S. has experienced at least one major power outage every month of 2026 -- but is it true? I dug into several outages, the extreme weather behind them, and what we can do to help keep the lights on. [...] The claim that hundreds of thousands of Americans were without power over extended periods at least once per month, every month of 2026 surprised be in two ways. First, because I had no idea if it was true -- and, second, because it felt true. We try to do better than writing about things that feel true around here, however, so I did a bit of research (translation: I Googled power outages by month) and came up with the following examples in about sixty seconds January: More than 296,000 customers still without power as winter storm freezes much of the US February: More than 380,000 customers without power as winter storm hits US Northeast March: Storms Cut Power to Over 1 Million Customers in U.S. Midwest, Mid-Atlantic; Ohio Hardest Hit April: At least 29 tornadoes touched down in Central Illinois on April 17th May: Energy Secretary Issues Emergency Order to Deploy Backup Generation in the Mid-Atlantic Amid Heatwave June: More than 373,000 U.S. customers without power due to extreme weather ... and that list is far from comprehensive, and how you feel about it might depend on what you consider a "major" outage, of course -- but consider that there are tens of thousands of Americans without power right now, and that's not making the news. [...] The lesson here is that weather-related grid outages -- whether they're caused by wildfires, mudslides, derechos, tornadoes, ice storms, hurricanes, heat waves, or some other disaster I'm lucky enough to have forgotten about -- read like statistics when they're happening over there, but get personal real quick when they're happening to you.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major publishers Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, and author Scott Turow have sued Google, accusing it of using millions of copyrighted books to train Gemini without permission or payment, in "one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history." The Guardian reports: The publishers argue that Google repurposed books that had been supplied for limited services such as Google Books, Google Play Books and Google Scholar. Those services allowed Google to use the works in specific ways -- for example, to display searchable snippets or sell ebooks -- but not, the lawsuit claims, to copy them for training commercial AI products. "Desperate to maintain its online dominance, Google abandoned its early motto of 'Don't be evil' and engaged in one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history," the suit states (PDF). According to the complaint, the tech company made copies of copyrighted books to train Gemini without permission or payment, despite internal discussions acknowledging the legal risks. The filing claims Google flagged internally that it could face "$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines" for using texts provided by publishers for Google Play Books. The publishers say Google's actions are harming authors and the wider publishing industry, arguing that AI-generated content could negatively impact book sales. It notes that, for example, Gemini could generate "a 100-page murder mystery set in a quiet seaside town filled with secrets, that substitutes for an original copyrighted murder mystery on which Gemini trained" in 20 minutes for 39 cents. "No publisher or author can compete with that." The lawsuit names a number of specific books that the publishers allege were among the copyrighted works used without permission, including NK Jemisin's The Fifth Season, and Lemony Snicket's Who Could That Be at This Hour?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spotify is testing a new "Talk to Spotify" AI feature for Premium subscribers that will let them chat with an AI assistant to explore music, podcasts, and audiobooks. The feature can answer questions about what users are listening to, adjust playback through follow-up prompts, and offer more personalized recommendations. The Verge reports: Amazon Music introduced a similar feature last year when it integrated Alexa Plus into the service. Spotify's chatbot goes a step beyond providing AI-powered recommendations and general trivia, however, because it references your playlists, favorite artists, repeat listens, and listening data when responding to requests. That means you can ask questions about your own listening history to check when you first heard a specific song, or see what genres you've been into lately if you can't hold out for the annual Wrapped insights. The updated AI capabilities are more conversational than older features like Prompted Playlist, which automatically builds playlists based on descriptions. Now, you can ask the Spotify chatbot to "play some songs I haven't heard before," and control what's being played with further instructions like requesting specific artists or asking to make it "more upbeat." Spotify says the new conversational experience aims to make the platform "more personal and useful for every listener," making this one of several ways that the company is trying to address complaints about its algorithm. You can also ask the Spotify AI general questions about whatever you're listening to, making the feature feel similar to using chatbot services like Google's Gemini or OpenAI's ChatGPT. That includes asking for when a song was released, exploring other titles an author has written when listening to one of their audiobooks, or checking if a podcast guest has appeared on other audio shows.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A hacker who breached Suno reportedly revealed source code and training-library details showing the AI music generator scraped millions of songs and lyrics from sources including YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius, Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, and podcast RSS feeds. "The hacked data is a rare look at exactly how AI models and tools are built," reports 404 Media. "Suno is one of the largest AI music generation tools on the internet, and has been the subject of several major lawsuits from the record industry, which accused the company of training on millions of copyrighted songs." Suno maintains that its models were trained on publicly available music files and metadata as fair use. 404 Media reports: The Recording Industry Association of America accused Suno of ripping songs directly from YouTube; the hacked data seen by 404 Media confirms this. The hacked material includes source code that appears to be from 2023 and 2024 that includes scraping instructions and details about the scope of at least some of the scraping. For example, the comments in one file note that they will pull from "genius_hq, youtube_music, freesound, jamendo, imp, deezer, ytm_tagged," and that "non-music will be filtered out." A file called "youtube_music" notes that at the time the file was last updated, it had ingested "2,013,545 music clips." Another file contains comments about different datasets Suno had created, which included "113,879 hours of youtube_music," "17,615 hours of genius_hq," "410 hours of free sound," "19,514 hours of imslp," "3,726 hours of jamendo," "62,117 hours of pond5_music," "12,287 hours of deezer," "152,162 hours of ytm_tagged," and "103 hours of musescore_lyrics." In total, this is at least decades worth of music. Other code the hacker shared with 404 Media appeared to look specifically for vocals by searching specifically for acapella versions of songs on YouTube. The code also suggested that Suno was using proxies to scrape songs from YouTube through a company called Bright Data, which sells scraping tools, infrastructure, and data services. Additional code shows that with the help of an online tool called PodcastIndex, Suno identified 420,000 different podcasts that had at least five, 30-minute episodes and sought to download roughly 1 million hours of podcasts. [...] The hacker, ellie.191, told 404 Media they breached the company by hacking an individual employee using the Shai-Hulud worm, a supply chain attack that allowed hackers to harvest GitHub and cloud service credentials. They said they also accessed Suno's customer list, which included customers' emails and/or phone numbers and Stripe payment details, depending on what they used to login. The hacker provided a sample of some of the customers, some of whom confirmed to 404 Media they had used their phone number to sign up for Suno and said they were never notified of a breach. The hacker told 404 Media they had no specific motivation for hacking Suno and said "I like to hack anything and everything."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FCC plans to vote on repealing local TV ownership limits, including the 39% national audience cap that currently restricts how much of the U.S. market a single broadcast group can reach. Engadget reports: On August 6, commissioners will hold a ballot to repeal Section 303 of the Communications Act, and with it the 39 percent rule. In essence, the rule limits the reach of a local TV network to no more than 39 percent of the U.S.' total audience market. In its place, the FCC would move to a system whereby it would personally approve or reject TV ownership deals on a case-by-case basis. It's not clear if the FCC even has the authority to reject Section 303 without the explicit consent of the legislature. As Lawrence J. Spiwak wrote in the Yale Journal on Regulation back in January, Section 10 of the Communications Act expressly forbids the FCC from bending the rules around Section 303. "Americans no longer trust the legacy national media to report the news fairly or accurately," wrote FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in an op-ed published on Breitbart. "In fact, only eight percent of Americans have a great deal of trust in mass media. That figure is even lower among Republicans -- sitting at a mere three percent." "... Many local broadcast TV stations are getting hollowed out as a result and turning into little more than mouthpieces for programming produced in New York and Hollywood," he alleged. "That is not what Congress or the FCC intended."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Big changes are coming to Android apps, but they're not the changes Google wanted. The settlement between Google and Epic that aimed to put to rest the companies' long-running antitrust battle is being withdrawn, and that means third-party app stores are coming to the Play Store. Google has confirmed that it will begin distributing rival app stores next week, setting the stage for competing platforms to take a bite out of Google's Android revenue stream. [...] Google and Epic were set to return to court on July 16 to argue in favor of the settlement. However, the writing may have been on the wall. In a recent expert analysis provided to the court, MIT economics professor Nancy Rose noted that the settlement was "unlikely to enable Google Play's potential competitors to overcome their long-standing network-effect disadvantage in a timely manner." With settlement approval looking increasingly unlikely, Epic and Google agreed this week to call the whole thing off. Here's how Google Trust and Reputation Communications Lead Dan Jackson explains the company's decision: "We've agreed with Epic to withdraw our motion to modify the US Court's injunction rather than prolonging this process which creates uncertainty for the ecosystem. This allows us to focus on executing our recently announced global business model evolution to deliver greater app store choice, lower prices, and more opportunities for developers and users. We remain committed to maintaining Android's industry-leading security and fostering a competitive ecosystem where every app store and developer has the freedom to compete. In parallel, we continue to comply with the US Court's injunction." In a brief filing (PDF), Google's legal team informs the court that Google is prepared to begin distributing third-party app stores in Google Play on July 22. Under the terms of Judge Donato's original injunction, these stores will have access to the full catalog of Google Play apps by default. Developers will have the option to opt out of distribution in these stores, and Google has a support page explaining how to do so. Google also has documentation on how app stores can get access to the Google Play catalog. It won't be mirroring those apps in any shady storefront that asks. The court has allowed Google to charge reasonable fees to cover its security and compliance review of third-party stores, which will be $5,000 per year. Google will also require approved stores to block malware, respect intellectual property, and include mechanisms to update and uninstall apps. App stores can be removed from the program if more than 1 percent of attempted app installs appear to be malware or unwanted software. It's unclear if there will be separate, possibly more stringent requirements for storefront distribution in the Play Store. However, Google is prohibited from unreasonably blocking third-party store clients uploaded to Google Play. The changes Google has announced under the Epic agreement will proceed for now. That means Registered App Stores will happen globally, but they will probably only appear in the Play Store for US users. Google hasn't specified if there will be any differences in the features available to the stores downloaded from Play versus registered stores.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FreeBSD 16 has removed the last GPL-licensed code from its base system, retiring the old GNU 'dialog' implementation after the installer moved to 'bsddialog' and the final dependency was disabled. Phoronix reports: This ticket to retire dialog was opened back in February while is now merged to the FreeBSD source tree for what will become FreeBSD 16.0. With dialog removed, the latest FreeBSD code now retires the GNU sub-tree of the FreeBSD base system now that no more GNU code remains. FreeBSD 16.0 is working its way toward release that is expected to happen in December 2027.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI's first hardware device is a limited-edition desktop keypad called the Codex Micro that lets users monitor and control AI coding agents. Axios reports: Codex Micro is a collaboration with Work Louder, a boutique hardware company known for customizable mechanical keyboards and shortcut controllers for developers and designers. The small, square macro pad -- with backlit keys, a rotary knob and a tiny joystick -- sits beside your regular keyboard as a physical shortcut box for common Codex actions and shows the status of your agents. The keys are customizable and include a push-to-talk option as well as a dial to adjust your reasoning setting. Codex Micro is a niche device for Codex power users and will only be available until it sells out. It's priced at $230.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have reportedly made a joint $60.50-per-share offer to buy PayPal, valuing the payments company at more than $53 billion. The bid is said to represent a 28% premium to PayPal's latest closing price and is backed by roughly $50 billion in committed bank financing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs on Security: Microsoft today released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, almost triple the number of vulnerabilities the software giant fixed in its record-smashing Patch Tuesday release last month. Microsoft attributed the burgeoning patch counts to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence. Nearly 60 of the bugs quashed in July's Patch Tuesday earned a "critical" severity rating, meaning miscreants or malware could use them to seize remote control over a Windows device with little or no help from the user. Microsoft also addressed three zero-day flaws, including two that are already being exploited in the wild. Two of the zero-day weaknesses allow an attacker to elevate their user rights on a Windows system, as do approximately 250 other elevation of privilege flaws fixed this month; they include CVE-2026-56155 - an Active Directory Federation Services bug -- and CVE-2026-56164, a Microsoft Sharepoint vulnerability. CVE-2026-50661 is a security feature bypass in Windows BitLocker that could allow attackers to gain access to encrypted data if they have physical access to the device. Microsoft said this bug has been detailed publicly, but that it is not aware of any active exploitation. In a blog post on July 9, Microsoft Executive Vice President Pavan Davuluri wrote that Windows users will notice "a higher volume of security updates included in each security release" as a result of AI aiding in the discovery of vulnerabilities. "The pace of vulnerability discovery is changing with advances in AI making it possible to find more issues, faster, across more code, with new mechanisms that can accelerate both discovery and analysis," Davuluri wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Astronauts on SpaceX's Fram2 mission successfully captured diagnostic X-ray images in orbit for the first time. The milestone gives space medicine a second imaging option beyond ultrasound and could help future crews diagnose injuries, inspect equipment, and support longer missions to the moon or beyond. Popular Science reports: Commercial off-the-shelf X-ray machines like the ice cooler-sized MinXray TR90BH now allow users to perform scans on subjects far away from traditional facilities. In 2022, [Mayo Clinic researcher Sheyna Gifford] assisted in preparing a crew to successfully generate digital X-rays while experiencing microgravity during a parabolic flight. Gifford's team then spent years collaborating with SpaceX to plan another feasibility study. This time, they didn't want to operate an X-ray machine aboard an aircraft simulating the conditions in space -- they intended to use the equipment during an orbital mission. The process was detailed in a recently published study in the journal Radiology, and focuses on last year's Fram2 mission. Instead of days of medical training, astronauts spent only four hours learning how to use their portable radiography device. They then took preflight X-rays of a hand, forearm, chest, abdomen, and pelvis ahead of their SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch on March 31, 2025. Once in orbit, the team calibrated the system before testing their MinXray on the same body parts as well as a smartwatch. Once the crew returned, a trio of independent radiologists reviewed the orbital X-ray images based on their positioning, spatial and contrast resolutions, and general scan quality. Although positioning scores were slightly decreased for the central body images, every other scan held up to similar examples created on Earth. Meanwhile, the astronauts reported that using the machine was easy despite minimal prior coaching. Looking ahead, researchers hope to conduct further X-ray tests during orbital missions, while continuing to reduce the overall size of equipment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The House voted 308-117 to pass the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide and end the twice-yearly clock change. The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, "where one G.O.P. leader said it was unclear whether it could move ahead and at least one Republican appears inclined to try to block it," reports The New York Times. Some sleep experts oppose permanent daylight saving time, arguing that year-round standard time better aligns with circadian rhythms and winter morning safety. The New York Times reports: President Trump has championed the effort to save an extra hour of daylight before nightfall and make the time zone permanent, describing the ritual of moving clocks forward in the spring and back in the fall a "ridiculous, twice yearly production." "We are going with the far more popular alternative, Saving Daylight, which gives you a longer, brighter Day," Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post in May. "And who can be against that." A sizable bloc of Florida Republicans in Congress is leading the charge on legislation that would do just that, mandating daylight saving time nationwide for the entire year. Representative Vern Buchanan of the Tampa Bay area is backing the bill, and Representative Anna Paulina Luna, another Tampa Bay-area Republican, cosponsored it. House leaders agreed to allow a vote on the measure this week as a sweetener for Ms. Luna in their efforts to persuade her to lift a legislative blockade she had maintained as she sought to force Senate action on a voting restriction bill Mr. Trump has championed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Iranian government abused well-known vulnerabilities in the global telecoms infrastructure to locate U.S. military personnel in the build-up to the Iran War, as well as in the early days of the conflict, according to Financial Times. The Iranian government exploited Signaling System 7, or SS7, a set of protocols for 2G and 3G networks that has long been the backbone of how cellular networks connect to each other to route subscribers' calls and texts around the world, the newspaper reported, citing research by the Mobile Surveillance Monitor, as well as anonymous government officials with knowledge of the spy campaign. Intelligence agencies have long abused SS7 to track cellphones abroad, which is what happened in this campaign. Using this technique, Iran was reportedly able to locate U.S. military forces stationed in military bases as well as hotels in Iraq, Bahrain, and other countries in the Middle East, which allowed the regime to strike them. These attacks resulted in several injuries. Apart from SS7, Iran also abused advertising technology used to serve tailored ads to cellphone users, another well-known surveillance technique that relies on everyday technology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is reportedly developing a screen-free, portable smart speaker meant to act as a personalized home computer and humanlike AI companion. "It will help control smart-home appliances, play media, answer questions, respond to messages and tap into the range of capabilities offered by OpenAI's ChatGPT," reports Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter. The device, expected to be unveiled this year and released in 2027, would mark OpenAI's first major hardware push after acquiring Jony Ive's io Products. Bloomberg reports: Apple sued OpenAI last week, accusing the company of stealing trade secrets. But OpenAI believes that the device veers significantly from anything Apple has on the market today and that it's unlikely that it violates trade secrets belonging to the iPhone maker, the people said. OpenAI's success in hardware will hinge on bringing a novel approach to the market -- something it aims to do with the smart speaker. For instance, the device's technology is meant to become increasingly personalized and proactive as it gains a deeper understanding of its owner over time, according to the people. OpenAI envisions the device anticipating needs, surfacing information proactively and serving as an expert on its user, they said. Though the speaker is designed to stay in the home, it will be easy to move around the house. OpenAI believes the product's defining feature will be its personality and ability to connect on a humanlike level with users. The speaker incorporates mechanical elements that can move on their own, creating a sense that it is alive and not just an object responding to commands. The machine also will draw on personal information such as emails to better understand its owner. The goal is for the device to feel like a companion and become a physical manifestation of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Still, the exact plans could change as the company works through the development and legal process. The device's communication abilities will rely on a more advanced version of the ChatGPT Voice Mode -- GPT-Live -- that OpenAI rolled out this month. The new voice mode is designed to act more like a human. It can listen and talk at the same time, adapt more naturally during conversations, and quickly process information. Though the new product resembles a speaker, OpenAI internally describes it as the first of its kind: a computer built for AI to help make busy people more productive. It includes a camera and other sensors that help it understand a user's surroundings and context, as well as advanced AI models beyond those available on conventional smart speakers. Another central difference is that the device includes a rechargeable battery, allowing it to be carried from room to room throughout the day. A user could bring it into the laundry room while doing chores, move it into the kitchen for cooking assistance, and later place it in a living room or bedroom to have it play music. It can also remain plugged into a single room if the customer chooses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Images is getting a Pinterest-like redesign that turns image search into a personalized discovery feed, with "For You" galleries, real-time updates, and collections for saving visual ideas. "Google is also adding a way for users to create AI images right in Search, as it celebrates 25 years since the debut of Google Images," reports TechCrunch. From the report: After navigating to the redesigned Google Images, users will see a "For You" gallery of images tailored to their interests and browsing history. Like Pinterest, the gallery is designed for continuous browsing, with Google saying it updates in real time with new images. As users browse, they can save ideas to their "collections," which will appear as tabs above the main gallery of photos. For example, users can create collections for things like vacation outfit ideas, travel inspiration, and ways to design a reading nook, which they can come back to later. [...] As for generating images directly in Search, Google says the feature is meant for moments when you have a highly specific idea for an image that doesn't already exist online. Google is bringing image generation directly into AI Overviews on Search and will use its latest Nano Banana model to transform a text prompt into a custom visual. The feature can also help users reimagine spaces and visualize ideas, such as seeing what a room might look like painted red or what a dorm room with a coastal theme could look like.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A lawsuit from 26 Meta employees alleges the company used AI-driven scoring and monitoring systems to select workers for layoffs, disproportionately targeting employees with disabilities or those who had taken protected medical, family, pregnancy, or parental leave. "Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work. Instead, Meta used a constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems -- including a system referred to internally as 'Metamate,' employee-trained 'second-brain' agents, keystroke- and activity-monitoring data, AI-token-usage dashboards, and algorithmically assisted performance ranking and calibration -- to score, rank, and select employees for inclusion on the list," the lawsuit (PDF) said. Ars Technica reports: Employees were allegedly graded, among other things, on how much they used Meta's AI tools. "Meta's internal dashboards classified employees by their stage of adoption of its artificial-intelligence tools, using categories such as 'AI Native,' 'AI First,' and 'AI Enabled,'" the lawsuit said. The lawsuit is apparently "the first against a major U.S. company to challenge the alleged use of AI in conducting layoffs," according to Reuters. The complaint alleges that Meta's tools for monitoring employees did not account for differences caused by disabilities and protected leaves. "Those tools draw on inputs -- performance ratings, calibration scores, productivity and output metrics, 'AI-native' ratings, and AI-token consumption -- that, by design, cannot be accumulated by an employee who is on protected medical or family leave, or whose output is reduced by a disability," the lawsuit said. The lawsuit alleged that Meta management did not take steps to adjust scores for employees who took leave or who requested reasonable accommodations for disabilities. "Meta did not neutralize those inputs for protected leave; did not exclude protected-leave-takers or accommodation-seekers from the selection cohort; and did not pause the system for the individualized, leave- and accommodation-neutral review that the law requires," the complaint alleged. "The result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff, based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected leaves, but in effect penalized the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves." The 26 plaintiffs requested leaves or disability accommodations in the 24 months before being selected for layoffs, the lawsuit said. The layoffs are not yet finalized, but employees are scheduled to start losing their jobs on July 22, the lawsuit said. "These claims lack merit and are not based on facts," said Meta in a statement. "Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis is calling for a U.S.-led AI standards body to review frontier models for national security risks such as cybersecurity and biological threats. His proposal would create a federally overseen public-private organization, initially voluntary and eventually mandatory for U.S. deployment. CNBC reports: Google DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate, said in an article posted on X on Tuesday that "urgent action" was needed to address risks associated with artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- the point at which AI matches or surpasses human intelligence. "We've already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance," he said. [...] Hassabis said the U.S. was well positioned to lead in developing an AI framework "given its economic and technical standing." "It could establish a new Standards Body modelled on a federally overseen public-private partnership or self-regulatory organisation, much like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), with a board that includes independent leading technical experts and open-source representatives," he added. FINRA regulates brokerage firms and exchange markets in the U.S. The proposed body would need "substantial" funding "in order to attract world-class technical talent and provide the necessary compute resources for large-scale testing," Hassabis said. Funding would "likely" come from industry, he added. Frontier labs would initially voluntarily share models with the body for review up to 30 days before release, before becoming mandatory for deployment in the U.S. market after being shown to be "effective." "Specific agentic AI tests could look for attempts to bypass safety guardrails or signs of deception, and ensure best practices, such as digitally watermarking AI-generated images and generating human-readable output tokens to understand model reasoning," Hassabis said. Further reading: Over 200 Economists Say 'We Must Act Now' On AI's Economic ImpactRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, the Linux Foundation launched the x402 Foundation to standardize internet-native payments for AI agents, APIs, and applications, based on Coinbase's contributed x402 protocol. Backed by companies including AWS, American Express, Cloudflare, Google, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa, the effort aims to make payments work directly over HTTP (assuming users are comfortable letting AI agents handle financial transactions). "The whole idea is to give agents access to money and, through that financial independence, improve their set of capabilities to pretty much anything on the internet," Lincoln Murr, Coinbase's AI product lead, told CNBC last month when the company announced the protocol. "In the 2010s, every internet company dealt with the transition from desktop and web into a mobile environment. And now in the late 2020s, we're seeing the exact same thing happen where agents are going to be the new primary economic actors on the internet."Read more of this story at Slashdot.