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YouTube pulled a popular tutorial video from tech creator Jeff Geerling this week, claiming his guide to installing LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 5 violated policies against "harmful content." The video, which showed viewers how to set up their own home media servers, had been live for over a year and racked up more than 500,000 views. YouTube's automated systems flagged the content for allegedly teaching people "how to get unauthorized or free access to audio or audiovisual content." Geerling says his tutorial covered only legal self-hosting of media people already own -- no piracy tools or copyright workarounds. He said he goes out of his way to avoid mentioning popular piracy software in his videos. It's the second time YouTube has pulled a self-hosting content video from Geerling. Last October, YouTube removed his Jellyfin tutorial, though that decision was quickly reversed after appeal. This time, his appeal was denied.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nearly a quarter of consumers using buy-now-pay-later loans now finance their grocery purchases, representing a significant increase from 14% a year ago, according to a recent LendingTree survey. The shift marks a departure from the traditional use of these short-term financing services for big-ticket items like electronics and furniture toward everyday essentials including groceries, utility bills, and streaming services. The BNPL market has experienced dramatic growth, expanding from $2 billion in consumer purchases in 2019 to more than $116.3 billion by 2023. Morgan Stanley found that 28% of surveyed Americans had used BNPL services with about 30% of those users applying the financing to grocery purchases. Food prices have risen 28% since 2020, creating particular pressure on lower-income households earning less than $50,000 annually, who represent the largest user base for these services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: My wife taught me something," Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told the crowd at London SXSW. He was addressing the headlines about the company looking to hire human workers after previously saying Klarna used artificial intelligence to do work that would equate to 700 workers. "Two things can be true at the same time," he said. Siemiatkowski said it's true that the company looked to stop hiring human workers a few years ago and rolled out AI agents that have helped reduce the cost of customer support and increase the company's revenue per employee. The company had 5,500 workers two years ago, and that number now stands at around 3,000, he said, adding that as the company's salary costs have gone down, Klarna now seeks to reinvest a majority of that money into employee cash and equity compensation. But, he insisted, this doesn't mean there isn't an opportunity for humans to work at his company. "We think offering human customer service is always going to be a VIP thing," he said, comparing it to how people pay more for clothing stitched by hand rather than machines. "So we think that two things can be done at the same time. We can use AI to automatically take away boring jobs, things that are manual work, but we are also going to promise our customers to have a human connection."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan-based Ispace confirmed its Resilience lander likely crashed during its second failed attempt at a lunar landing, after a sensor malfunction prevented proper deceleration. Despite the setback, the company remains committed to future missions, with funding secured for a third attempt using a new lander, Apex 1.0, scheduled for 2027. "Until then, Ispace has its work cut out for it," reports CNN. "[Ispace CEO and founder Takeshi Hakamada] said during the news briefing he will need to work to regain the trust of investors, and the company will need to deeply investigate what went wrong on the Resilience mission to ensure similar issues don't plague Apex 1.0." The company has ambitious "plans to eventually build a city on the lunar surface that would house a thousand people and welcome thousands more for tourist visits," notes ABC News. "If ispace is going to establish a colony on the moon, it will need to identify an ample supply of ice or water, which it will convert into fuel for a future lunar fueling station. The ability to produce fuel on the moon will enable the company to transport people back and forth between the Earth and the moon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Ukraine has seen nearly one-fifth of its Internet space come under Russian control or sold to Internet address brokers since February 2022, a new study finds. The analysis indicates large chunks of Ukrainian Internet address space are now in the hands of shadowy proxy and anonymity services that are nested at some of America's largest Internet service providers (ISPs). The findings come in a report that examines how the Russian invasion has affected Ukraine's domestic supply of Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) addresses. Researchers at Kentik, a company that measures the performance of Internet networks, found that while a majority of ISPs in Ukraine haven't changed their infrastructure much since the war began in 2022, others have resorted to selling swathes of their valuable IPv4 address space just to keep the lights on. For example, Ukraine's incumbent ISP Ukrtelecom is now routing just 29 percent of the IPv4 address ranges that the company controlled at the start of the war, Kentik found. Although much of that former IP space remains dormant, Ukrtelecom told Kentik's Doug Madory they were forced to sell many of their address blocks "to secure financial stability and continue delivering essential services." "Leasing out a portion of our IPv4 resources allowed us to mitigate some of the extraordinary challenges we have been facing since the full-scale invasion began," Ukrtelecom told Madory. Madory found much of the IPv4 space previously allocated to Ukrtelecom is now scattered to more than 100 providers globally, particularly at three large American ISPs -- Amazon (AS16509), AT&T (AS7018), and Cogent (AS174). Another Ukrainian Internet provider -- LVS (AS43310) -- in 2022 was routing approximately 6,000 IPv4 addresses across the nation. Kentik learned that by November 2022, much of that address space had been parceled out to over a dozen different locations, with the bulk of it being announced at AT&T. Ditto for the Ukrainian ISP TVCOM, which currently routes nearly 15,000 fewer IPv4 addresses than it did at the start of the war. Madory said most of those addresses have been scattered to 37 other networks outside of Eastern Europe, including Amazon, AT&T, and Microsoft.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ars Technica's Kyle Orland reports: Last month, ahead of the launch of the Switch 2 and its GameChat communication features, Nintendo updated its privacy policy to note that the company "may also monitor and record your video and audio interactions with other users." Now that the Switch 2 has officially launched, we have a clearer understanding of how the console handles audio and video recorded during GameChat sessions, as well as when that footage may be sent to Nintendo or shared with partners, including law enforcement. Before using GameChat on Switch 2 for the first time, you must consent to a set of GameChat Terms displayed on the system itself. These terms warn that chat content is "recorded and stored temporarily" both on your system and the system of those you chat with. But those stored recordings are only shared with Nintendo if a user reports a violation of Nintendo's Community Guidelines, the company writes. That reporting feature lets a user "review a recording of the last three minutes of the latest three GameChat sessions" to highlight a particular section for review, suggesting that chat sessions are not being captured and stored in full. The terms also lay out that "these recordings are available only if the report is submitted within 24 hours," suggesting that recordings are deleted from local storage after a full day. If a report is submitted to Nintendo, the company warns that it "may disclose certain information to third parties, such as authorities, courts, lawyers, or subcontractors reviewing the reported chats." If you don't consent to the potential for such recording and sharing, you're prevented from using GameChat altogether. Nintendo is extremely clear that the purpose of its recording and review system is "to protect GameChat users, especially minors" and "to support our ability to uphold our Community Guidelines." This kind of human moderator review of chats is pretty common in the gaming world and can even apply to voice recordings made by various smart home assistants. [...] Overall, the time-limited, local-unless-reported recordings Nintendo makes here seem like a minimal intrusion on the average GameChat user's privacy. Still, if you're paranoid about Nintendo potentially seeing and hearing what's going on in your living room, it's good to at least be aware of it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK tech job openings have surged 21% to pre-pandemic levels, driven largely by a 200% spike in demand for AI skills. London accounted for 80% of the AI-related postings. The Register reports: Accenture collected data from LinkedIn in the first and second week of February 2025, and supplemented the results with a survey of more than 4,000 respondents conducted by research firm YouGov between July and August 2024. The research found a 53 percent annual increase in those describing themselves as having tech skills, amounting to 1.69 million people reporting skills in disciplines including cyber, data, and robotics. [...] The research found that London-based companies said they would allocate a fifth of their tech budgets to AI this year, compared to 13 percent who said the same and were based in North East England, Scotland, and Wales. Growth in revenue per employee increased during the period when LLMs emerged, from 7 percent annually between 2018 and 2022 to 27 percent between 2018 and 2024. Meanwhile, growth in the same measure fell slightly in industries less affected by AI, such as mining and hospitality, the researchers said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel has implemented a strict new policy requiring all new projects to demonstrate at least a 50% gross margin to move forward. CEO Lip-Bu Tan explained Intel's new risk-averse policy as "something that we probably should have had before," later clarifying that the number is a figure the company is aspiring toward internally. Tom's Hardware reports: Tan is reportedly "laser focused on the fact that we need to get our gross margins back up above 50%." To accomplish this, Tan is also said to be investigating and potentially cancelling or changing unprofitable deals with other companies. Intel's margins have slipped to new lows for the company in recent months. MacroTrends reports Intel's trailing 12 months gross margin for Q1 2025 was as low as 31.67%. Intel's gross margins had hovered around the 60% mark for the ten years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, falling beneath 50% in Q2 2022 and continuing to steadily fall ever since. Holthaus predicts a "tug-of-war" to ensue within Intel in the coming months as engineers and executives reckon with being forced between a rock and a hard place. "We need to be building products that... fit the right competitive landscape and requirements of our customers, but also have the right cost structure in place. It really requires us to do both." [...] Tan is also quoted as wanting to turn Intel into an "engineering-focused company" again under his leadership. To reach this, Tan has committed to investing in recruiting and retaining top talent; "I believe Intel has lost some of this talent over the years; I want to create a culture of innovation empowerment." Maintaining a culture of empowering innovation and top talent seems, on its face, at odds with layoffs and a lock on projects not projected to gross 50% margins, but Tan seemingly has Intel investors on his side in these pursuits.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC: A consumer organization filed a complaint with the European Commission on Thursday against online fast-fashion retailer Shein over its use of "dark patterns," which are tactics designed to make people buy more on its app and website. Pop-ups urging customers not to leave the app or risk losing promotions, countdown timers that create time pressure to complete a purchase and the infinite scroll on its app are among the methods Shein uses that could be considered "aggressive commercial practices," wrote BEUC, a pan-European consumer group, in a report. The BEUC also detailed Shein's use of frequent notifications, with one phone receiving 12 notifications from the app in a single day. "For fast fashion you need to have volume, you need to have mass consumption, and these dark patterns are designed to stimulate mass consumption," said Agustin Reyna, director general of BEUC, in an interview. "For us, to be satisfactory they need to get rid of these dark patterns, but the question is whether they will have enough incentive to do so, knowing the potential impact it can have on the volume of purchases." [...] The BEUC also targeted the online discount platform Temu, a Shein rival, in a previous complaint. Both platforms have surged in popularity in Europe, partly helped by apps that encourage shoppers to engage with games and stand to win discounts and free products. [...] The BEUC noted that dark patterns are widely used by mass-market clothing retailers and called on the consumer protection network to include other retailers in its investigation. It said 25 of its member organizations in 21 countries, including France, Germany and Spain, joined in the grievance filed with the commission and with the European consumer protection network. Temu and Shein have their own issues in the United States. Following the recent closure of the de minimis loophole, use of the two Chinese platforms have slowed significantly. "Temu's U.S. daily active users (DAUs) dropped 52% in May versus March, before Trump's tariffs were announced, while those at rival Shein were down 25%," reports CNBC, citing data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. "The declines were also reflected in both platforms' Apple App Store rankings. Temu averaged a rank of 132 in May 2025, down from an average top 3 ranking a year ago, while Shein averaged a rank of 60 last month versus a top 10 ranking the year prior, the data showed."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic cut AI coding assistant Windsurf's direct access to its Claude models after media reported that rival OpenAI plans to acquire the startup for $3 billion. Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan told TechCrunch that "it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI," explaining the decision to cut access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.7 Sonnet models.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Circle Internet Group surged 168% in its NYSE debut, raising nearly $1.1 billion after pricing its IPO at $31 and opening at $69. "At one point, shares traded as high as $103.75," notes CNBC. From the report: The New York-based company priced its IPO late Wednesday far above this week's expected range of $27 to $28, and an initial range last week of between $24 and $26, valuing the company at some $6.8 billion before trading began. Trading volume by the end of the session was about 46 million, far exceeding the number of freely floating shares available for trading. Circle joins Coinbase, Mara Holdings and Riot Platforms as one of the few pure-play crypto companies to list in the U.S. This marks the company's second attempt at going public. A prior merger with a special purpose acquisition company collapsed in late 2022 amid regulatory challenges. "To realize our vision, we needed to forge relationships with governments, we needed to work with policymakers ... because if you want this to work for mainstream, it's got to work in mainstream society and you need to have those rules of the road," CEO Jeremy Allaire told CNBC's "Money Movers" on Thursday. "We've been one of the most licensed, regulated, compliant, transparent companies in the entire history of this industry, and that's served us well."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to 9to5Mac, "Apple is working on supporting the ability to export notes in Markdown from Apple notes, which is something third-party apps have supported for years." Apple enthusiast and co-creator of the Markdown markup language, John Gruber, is not a fan. From a blog post: Some people find this surprising, but I personally don't want to use a Markdown notes app. I created Markdown two decades ago and have used it ever since for one thing and one thing only: writing for the web at Daring Fireball. My original description of what it is still stands: "Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers." Perhaps an even better description of Markdown is Matthew Butterick's, from the documentation for Pollen: "Markdown is a simplified notation system for HTML." The other great use case for Markdown is in a context where you either need or just want to be saving to a plain text file or database field. That's not what Apple Notes is or should be. I can see why many technically-minded people want to use Markdown "everywhere." It's quite gratifying that Markdown has not only become so popular, but after 21 years, seemingly continues to grow in popularity, to the point now where there clearly are a lot of people who seemingly enjoy writing in Markdown more than even I do. But I think it would be a huge mistake for Apple to make Apple Notes a "Markdown editor," even as an option. It's trivial to create malformed Markdown syntax; it shouldn't be possible to have a malformed note in Apple Notes. I craft posts for Daring Fireball; I dash off notes in Apple Notes. [...] But Markdown export from Notes? That sounds awesome. Frankly, perhaps the biggest problem with Apple Notes is that its export functionality is rather crude -- PDF and, of all formats, Pages. Exporting and/or copying the selected text as Markdown would be pretty cool. Very curious to see how they handle images though, if this rumor is true.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Discord co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy wants you to know he thinks a lot about enshittification. With reports of an upcoming IPO and the news of his co-founder, Jason Citron, recently stepping down to hand leadership of the company over to Humam Sakhnini, a former Activision Blizzard executive, many Discord users are rightfully worried the platform is about to become, well, shit. "I understand the anxiety and concern," Vishnevskiy told Engadget in a recent call. "I think the things that people are afraid of are what separate a great, long-term focused company from just any other company." According to Vishnevskiy, the concern that Discord could fail to do right by its users or otherwise lose its way is a topic of regular discussion at the company. "I'm definitely the one who's constantly bringing up enshittification," he said of Discord's internal meetings. "It's not a bad thing to build a strong business and to monetize a product. That's how we can reinvest and continue to make things better. But we have to be extremely thoughtful about how we do that." The way Vishnevskiy tells it, Discord already had an identity crisis and came out of that moment with a stronger sense of what its product means to people. You may recall the company briefly operated a curated game store. Discord launched the storefront in 2018 only to shut it down less than a year later in 2019. Vishnevskiy describes that as a period of reckoning within Discord. "We call it embracing the brutal facts internally," he said of the episode. When Vishnevskiy and Citron started Discord, they envisioned a platform that would not just be for chatting with friends, but one that would also serve as a game distribution hub. "We spent a year building that component of our business and then, quite frankly, we quickly knew it wasn't going well." Out of that failure, Discord decided to focus on its Nitro subscription and embrace everyone who was using the app to organize communities outside of gaming. Since its introduction in 2017, the service has evolved to include a few different perks, but at its heart, Nitro has always been a way for Discord users to get more out of the app and support their favorite servers. [...] Vishnevskiy describes Nitro as a "phenomenal business," but the decision to look beyond gaming created a different set of problems. "It wasn't clear exactly who we were building for, because now Discord was a community product for everyone, and that drove a lot of distractions," he said. "Discord is something that is meant to be a durable company that has a meaningful impact on people's lives, not just now but in 10 years as well," Vishnevskiy said. "That's the journey that Humam joined and signed up for too. We are long-term focused. Our investors are long-term focused."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Insect populations are crashing in supposedly protected nature reserves worldwide with climate change emerging as the primary driver of biodiversity loss for the first time in human history. Ecologist Daniel Janzen, who has monitored Costa Rica's Guanacaste conservation area since the 1970s, documented the collapse through light trap photographs that showed 3,000 moth species in 1978 versus virtually none today using identical methods. Similar declines are occurring globally with flying insects dropping 75% across 63 German reserves in under 30 years, US beetle numbers falling 83% over 45 years, and Puerto Rico experiencing up to 60-fold biomass losses since the 1970s. Recent research published in BioScience found climate change now drives decline in 91% of imperiled US species, narrowly surpassing habitat destruction.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's southernmost province of Hainan is piloting a programme to grant select corporate users broad access to the global internet, a rare move in a country known for having some of the world's most restrictive online censorship, as the island seeks to transform itself into a global free-trade port. From a report: Employees of companies registered and operating in Hainan can apply for the "Global Connect" mobile service through the Hainan International Data Comprehensive Service Centre (HIDCSC), according to the agency, which is overseen by the state-run Hainan Big Data Development Centre. The programme allows eligible users to bypass the so-called Great Firewall, which blocks access to many of the world's most-visited websites, such as Google and Wikipedia. Applicants must be on a 5G plan with one of the country's three major state-backed carriers -- China Mobile, China Unicom or China Telecom -- and submit their employer's information, including the company's Unified Social Credit Code, for approval. The process can take up to five months, HIDCSC staff said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BrianFagioli writes: Google is flexing its engineering muscles today by announcing a record-breaking score on the Speedometer 3 benchmark with its Chrome browser. If you've felt like the web got snappier lately, this could be why. According to the search giant, Chrome's latest performance improvements translate to real-world time savings. Believe it or not, that could potentially add up to 58 million hours saved annually for users. That's the equivalent of about 83 human lifetimes not wasted waiting for web pages to load!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has publicly opposed a proposed 10-year moratorium on state AI regulation currently under consideration by the Senate, arguing instead for federal transparency standards in a New York Times opinion piece published Thursday. Amodei said Anthropic's latest AI model demonstrated threatening behavior during experimental testing, including scenarios where the system threatened to expose personal information to prevent being shut down. He writes: But a 10-year moratorium is far too blunt an instrument. A.I. is advancing too head-spinningly fast. I believe that these systems could change the world, fundamentally, within two years; in 10 years, all bets are off. Without a clear plan for a federal response, a moratorium would give us the worst of both worlds -- no ability for states to act, and no national policy as a backstop. The disclosure comes as similar concerning behaviors have emerged from other major AI developers -- OpenAI's o3 model reportedly wrote code to prevent its own shutdown, while Google acknowledged its Gemini model approaches capabilities that could enable cyberattacks. Rather than blocking state oversight entirely, Amodei proposed requiring frontier AI developers to publicly disclose their testing policies and risk mitigation strategies on company websites, codifying practices that companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind already follow voluntarily.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is developing software for humanoid robots that could eventually replace hundreds of thousands of delivery workers, [non-paywalled source] The Information reports. The company is building a "humanoid park" obstacle course at its San Francisco office to test robots that would ride in the back of Amazon's Rivian electric vans and deliver packages to customers, the report said. The indoor testing facility, roughly the size of a coffee shop, will house a Rivian van and serve as a controlled environment before Amazon takes the robots on "field trips" to deliver real packages on actual streets. This summer, Amazon plans to test multiple humanoid models, including a $16,000 unit from China-based Unitree that has gained popularity among robotics developers, the report said. The initiative represents Amazon's most ambitious robotics project yet, extending beyond its existing warehouse automation to tackle the significantly more complex challenge of outdoor package delivery. Amazon currently operates more than 20,000 Rivian vehicles for deliveries and plans to expand its electric fleet to 100,000 vehicles by 2030.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI said it disrupted several attempts [non-paywalled source] from users in China to leverage its AI models for cyber threats and covert influence operations, underscoring the security challenges AI poses as the technology becomes more powerful. From a report: The Microsoft-backed company on Thursday published its latest report on disrupting malicious uses of AI, saying its investigative teams continued to uncover and prevent such activities in the three months since Feb. 21. While misuse occurred in several countries, OpenAI said it believes a "significant number" of violations came from China, noting that four of 10 sample cases included in its latest report likely had a Chinese origin. In one such case, the company said it banned ChatGPT accounts it claimed were using OpenAI's models to generate social media posts for a covert influence operation. The company said a user stated in a prompt that they worked for China's propaganda department, though it cautioned it didn't have independent proof to verify its claim.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Vibe coding might sound chill, but Andrew Ng thinks the name is unfortunate. The Stanford professor and former Google Brain scientist said the term misleads people into imagining engineers just "go with the vibes" when using AI tools to write code. "It's unfortunate that that's called vibe coding," Ng said at a firechat chat in May at conference LangChain Interrupt. "It's misleading a lot of people into thinking, just go with the vibes, you know -- accept this, reject that." In reality, coding with AI is "a deeply intellectual exercise," he said. "When I'm coding for a day with AI coding assistance, I'm frankly exhausted by the end of the day." Despite his gripe with the name, Ng is bullish on AI-assisted coding. He said it's "fantastic" that developers can now write software faster with these tools, sometimes while "barely looking at the code."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

California's carbon allowance auction results released May 29th revealed prices had hit rock bottom, signaling weak corporate demand and casting doubt over the future of the nation's fourth-largest carbon market. Companies that typically purchase quarterly credits to cover their greenhouse gas emissions are skipping auctions while waiting to see whether the cap-and-trade program will survive beyond its current 2030 expiration date. The poor auction performance compounds California's existing $12 billion budget deficit, as the state relies on carbon credit revenues to fund climate programs. Governor Gavin Newsom is pushing to reauthorize the program through the annual budget bill, which must pass by mid-June, but lawmakers are debating fundamental changes to pricing mechanisms and spending priorities. The uncertainty extends beyond California's borders, with Washington state exploring whether to link its carbon market to California's system and Oregon lawmakers reviving their own cap-and-trade legislation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

California law prohibits "operating" a mobile phone while driving. And that makes it illegal for a driver to hold a cellphone in order to look at a map, a state appeals court ruled this week. From a report: In a 2016 law intended to strengthen previous restrictions, "the Legislature intended to prohibit all handheld functions of wireless telephones while driving" and "to encourage drivers to keep their eyes on the road," said the 6th District Court of Appeal. A Superior Court panel had reversed a driver's conviction for a traffic infraction and $158 fine in San Jose, ruling that the law prohibited only "actively using or manipulating" a hand-held phone for actions such as talking or listening, browsing the internet or playing video games while driving. The appeals court reinstated the conviction and the fine, in a ruling that could set a statewide standard unless it is narrowed or overturned on appeal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A prominent venture capitalist has warned that the technology industry's massive buildout of AI data centers risks becoming "irrational" and could end in disaster, particularly as companies pursue small nuclear reactors to power the facilities. Josh Wolfe, co-founder and partner at Lux Capital, compared the current infrastructure expansion to previous market bubbles in fiber-optic networking and cloud computing. While individual actions by hyperscale companies to build data center infrastructure remain rational, Wolfe said the collective effort "becomes irrational" and "will not necessarily persist." The warning comes as Big Tech companies pour tens of billions into data centers and energy sources, with Meta announcing just this week a deal to purchase power from an operating nuclear station in Illinois that was scheduled to retire in 2027. Wolfe said he is worried that speculative capital is flowing into small modular reactors based on presumed energy demands from data centers. "I think that that whole thing is going to end in disaster, mostly because as cliched as it is, history doesn't repeat. It rhymes," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's self-driving taxi service Waymo has surpassed 10 million total paid rides, marking a significant milestone in the transition of autonomous vehicles from novelty to mainstream transportation option. The company's growth trajectory, WSJ argues, shows clear signs of exponential scaling, with weekly rides jumping from 10,000 in August 2023 to over 250,000 currently. Waymo is on track to hit 20 million rides by the end of 2025. The story adds: This is not just because Waymo is expanding into new markets. It's because of the way existing markets have come to embrace self-driving cars. In California, the most recent batch of quarterly data reported by the company was the most encouraging yet. It showed that Waymo's number of paid rides inched higher by roughly 2% in both January and February -- and then increased 27% in March. In the nearly two years that people in San Francisco have been paying for robot chauffeurs, it was the first time that Waymo's growth slowed down for several months only to dramatically speed up again. Waymo currently operates in Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, with expansion planned for Austin, Atlanta, Miami, and Washington D.C. The service faces incoming competition from Tesla, which plans to launch its own robotaxi service in Austin this month. Waymo remains unprofitable despite raising $5.6 billion in funding last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bitter fight over alleged corporate espionage involving two of Silicon Valley's hottest startups took a new twist on Tuesday, after $12 billion HR software company Deel claimed arch-rival Rippling had directed one of its employees to "pilfer" the company's assets by posing as a customer. From a report: The latest claim comes after Rippling alleged earlier this year that a staff member had been spying on behalf of Deel. The employee locked themselves into a bathroom and smashed their phone with an axe when confronted with allegations, according to their own testimony. In new legal filings seen by the Financial Times, Deel has countered by arguing that: "Rippling has been actively engaged in a carefully co-ordinated espionage campaign, through which it infiltrated Deel's customer platform by fraudulent means and pilfered the company's most valuable proprietary assets."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, classic computer collector Joe Strosnider announced the availability of a new 3D-printer filament that replicates the iconic "Platinum" color scheme used in classic Macintosh computers from the late 1980s through the 1990s. The PLA filament (PLA is short for polylactic acid) allows hobbyists to 3D-print nostalgic novelties, replacement parts, and accessories that match the original color of vintage Apple computers. Hobbyists commonly feed this type of filament into commercial desktop 3D printers, which heat the plastic and extrude it in a computer-controlled way to fabricate new plastic parts. The Platinum color, which Apple used in its desktop and portable computer lines starting with the Apple IIgs in 1986, has become synonymous with a distinctive era of classic Macintosh aesthetic. Over time, original Macintosh plastics have become brittle and discolored with age, so matching the "original" color can be a somewhat challenging and subjective experience. Strosnider said he paid approximately $900 to develop the color. "Rather than keeping the formulation proprietary, he arranged for Polar Filament to make the color publicly available [for $21.99 per kilogram]," adds Ars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.Org: Using conventional propulsion and low-energy trajectories, it takes six to nine months for crewed spacecraft to reach Mars. These durations complicate mission design and technology requirements and raise health and safety concerns since crews will be exposed to extended periods in microgravity and heightened exposure to cosmic radiation. Traditionally, mission designers have recommended nuclear-electric or nuclear-thermal propulsion (NEP/NTP), which could shorten trips to just 3 months. In a recent study, a UCSB physics researcher identified two trajectories that could reduce transits to Mars using the Starship to between 90 and 104 days. The study was authored by Jack Kingdon, a graduate student researcher in the Physics Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is also a member of the UCSB Weld Lab, an experimental ultracold atomic physics group that uses quantum degenerate gases to explore quantum mechanical phenomena. [...] As outlined on its website, conference presentations, and user manual, the SpaceX mission architecture consists of six Starships traveling to Mars. Four of these spacecraft will haul 400 metric tons (440 U.S. tons) of cargo while two will transport 200 passengers. Based on the Block 2 design, which has a 1,500 metric ton (1,650 U.S. ton) propellant capacity, the crewed Starships will require 15 tankers to fully refuel in low Earth orbit (LEO). The cargo ships would require only four, since they would be sent on longer low-energy trajectories. Once the flotilla arrives at Mars, the Starships will refuel using propellant created in situ using local carbon dioxide and water ice. When the return window approaches, one of the crew ships and 3-4 cargo ships will refuel and then launch into a low Mars orbit (LMO). The cargo ships will then transfer the majority of their propellant to the crew ship and return to the surface of Mars. The crew ship would then depart for Earth, and the process could be repeated for the other crew ship. Kingdon calculated multiple trajectories using a Lambert Solver, which produces the shortest elliptical arc in two-body problem equations (aka Lambert's problem). The first would depart Earth on April 30th, 2033, taking advantage of the 26-month periodic alignment between Earth and Mars. The transit would last 90 days, with the crew returning to Earth after another 90-day transit by July 2nd, 2035. The second would depart Earth on July 15th, 2035, and return to Earth after a 104-day transit on December 5th, 2037. As Kingdon explained, the former trajectory is the most likely to succeed: "The optimal trajectory is the 2033 trajectory -- it has the lowest fuel requirements for the fastest transit time. A note that may not be obvious to the layreader is that Starship can very easily reach Mars in ~3 months -- in fact, it can in any launch window, over a fairly wide range of trajectories. However, Starship may impact the Martian atmosphere too fast (although we do not know, and likely SpaceX don't either actually how fast Starship can hit the Martian atmosphere and survive). The trajectories discussed are ones that I am confident Starship will survive." The paper describing the work has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said that the "tides have turned" in Silicon Valley and made it more palatable for the tech industry to support the US military's efforts. From a report: There's long existed a "silent majority" who wanted to pursue defense projects, Bosworth said during an interview at the Bloomberg Tech summit in San Francisco on Wednesday. "There's a much stronger patriotic underpinning than I think people give Silicon Valley credit for," he said. Silicon Valley was founded on military development and "there's really a long history here that we are kind of hoping to return to, but it is not even day one," Bosworth added. He described Silicon Valley's new openness to work with the US military as a "return to grace."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Corporate investigators found evidence that Chinese hackers broke into an American telecommunications company in the summer of 2023, indicating that Chinese attackers penetrated the US communications system earlier than publicly known. Investigators working for the telecommunications firm discovered last year that malware used by Chinese state-backed hacking groups was on the company's systems for seven months starting in the summer of 2023, according to two people familiar with the matter and a document seen by Bloomberg News. The document, an unclassified report sent to Western intelligence agencies, doesn't name the company where the malware was found and the people familiar with the matter declined to identify it. The 2023 intrusion at an American telecommunications company, which hasn't been previously reported, came about a year before US government officials and cybersecurity companies said they began spotting clues that Chinese hackers had penetrated many of the country's largest phone and wireless firms. The US government has blamed the later breaches on a Chinese state-backed hacking group dubbed Salt Typhoon. It's unclear if the 2023 hack is related to that foreign espionage campaign and, if so, to what degree. Nonetheless, it raises questions about when Chinese intruders established a foothold in the American communications industry. "We've known for a long time that this infrastructure has been vulnerable and was likely subject to attack," said Marc Rogers, a cybersecurity and telecommunications expert. "What this shows us is that it was attacked, and that going as far back as 2023, the Chinese were compromising our telecom companies." Investigators linked the sophisticated rootkit malware Demodex to China's Ministry of State Security, noting it enabled deep, stealthy access to systems and remained undetected on a U.S. defense-linked company's network until early 2024. A Chinese government spokesperson denied responsibility for cyberattacks and accused the U.S. and its allies of spreading disinformation and conducting cyber operations against China.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's emergency request to pause a court order forcing it to ease App Store restrictions was denied by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, allowing new compliance rules to take effect while Apple continues to appeal. 9to5Mac reports: Apple had asked the appeals court to halt enforcement of a recent ruling by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who found Apple in contempt this April for effectively dodging her original injunction. Convoluted, right? Exactly. The judge observed several violations, including Apple's imposition of a 27% fee on out-of-app transactions and overall attempts to continue making it unappealing for developers to direct users to external payment options. As Reuters noted: "In its emergency appeal, Apple said the ruling blocked the company from "exercising control over core aspects of its business operations' and forced it to give away free access to its services." In rejecting Apple's motion, the court is letting those new compliance requirements stand while the company appeals the decision. Apple had hoped to halt the enforcement until the decision was final, which would grant the company the right to roll back the changes it was recently compelled to implement. In a statement provided to 9to5Mac, Apple said: "We are disappointed with the decision not to stay the district court's order, and we'll continue to argue our case during the appeals process. As we've said before, we strongly disagree with the district court's opinion. Our goal is to ensure the App Store remains an incredible opportunity for developers and a safe and trusted experience for our users."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FFmpeg has added support for WHIP (WebRTC-HTTP Ingestion Protocol), enabling sub-second latency live streaming by leveraging WebRTC's fast, secure video delivery capabilities. It's a major update that introduces a new WHIP muxer to make FFmpeg more powerful for real-time broadcasting applications. Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: WHIP uses HTTP for exchanging initial information and capabilities and then uses STUN binding to establish a UDP session. Encryption is supported -- and due to WebRTC, mandatory -- with WHIP and audio/video frames are split into RTP packets. WebRTC-HTTP Ingestion Protocol is an IETF standard for ushering low-latency communication over WebRTC to help with streaming/broadcasting uses. With this FFmpeg commit introducing nearly three thousand lines of new code, an initial WHIP muxer has been introduced. You can learn more about WebRTC WHIP in this presentation by Millicast (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"One of the few major independent science-surplus/DIY outlets left is American Science & Surplus," writes longtime Slashdot reader Tyler Too. "They've recently launched a GoFundMe campaign to ensure their survival." Ars Technica reports: Now, nearly 90 years after its launch selling "reject lenses" as American Lens & Photo, American Science & Surplus is facing an existential threat. The COVID-19 pandemic and increased costs hit the business hard, so the store has launched a GoFundMe campaign looking to raise $200,000 from customers and fans alike. What's happening in suburban Chicago is a microcosm of the challenges facing local retail, with big-box retailers and online behemoths overwhelming beloved local institutions. It's a story that has played out countless times in the last two-plus decades, and owner Pat Meyer is hoping this tale has a different ending. Ars reports on American Science & Surplus' long history, noting that it was founded in 1937 and has grown from a modest surplus shop into a beloved, quirky institution for makers, science enthusiasts, and curiosity seekers. Over the decades, it evolved far beyond its original niche of lenses and lab equipment. As Meyer, a 41-year veteran of the company, put it: "I've done everything in the company that there is to do... it's been my life for 41 years." Once known for its robust telescope section and deep inventory of scientific odds and ends, the store has adapted to shifting consumer habits -- some changes bittersweet. True to its DIY spirit, American Science & Surplus is described as a "physical manifestation of the maker ethos," stocked with everything from motors to military gas masks to mule-branding kits. It also carries a rare sense of humor, with quirky signage like a warning that a "Deluxe Walking Cane" is "not the edible kind of cane." Today, American Science & Surplus faces modern challenges like relocating a costly warehouse and overhauling outdated software and web infrastructure. But Meyer is optimistic, noting that contributions to their GoFundMe campaign represent more than financial help: "It's about supporting local retail during a very challenging time. Who wants to buy everything at Amazon, Walmart, Temu, and Target?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Apple provided governments around the world with data related to thousands of push notifications sent to its devices, which can identify a target's specific device or in some cases include unencrypted content like the actual text displayed in the notification, according to data published by Apple. In one case, that Apple did not ultimately provide data for, Israel demanded data related to nearly 700 push notifications as part of a single request. The data for the first time puts a concrete figure on how many requests governments around the world are making, and sometimes receiving, for push notification data from Apple. The practice first came to light in 2023 when Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice revealing the practice, which also applied to Google. As the letter said, "the data these two companies receive includes metadata, detailing which app received a notification and when, as well as the phone and associated Apple or Google account to which that notification was intended to be delivered. In certain instances, they also might also receive unencrypted content, which could range from backend directives for the app to the actual text displayed to a user in an app notification." The published data relates to blocks of six month periods, starting in July 2022 to June 2024. Andre Meister from German media outlet Netzpolitik posted a link to the transparency data to Mastodon on Tuesday. Along with the data Apple published the following description: "Push Token requests are based on an Apple Push Notification service token identifier. When users allow a currently installed application to receive notifications, a push token is generated and registered to that developer and device. Push Token requests generally seek identifying details of the Apple Account associated with the device's push token, such as name, physical address and email address."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the Axios AI+ Summit, DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg compared the rise of AI in entertainment to the CGI revolution of the 1990s, emphasizing that those who adapt to the technology will thrive. He argued AI won't replace people -- but will replace those who don't embrace it. Axios reports: Katzenberg, a co-founder of DreamWorks and one-time Disney executive whose work includes films like "Shrek," reflected on the "huge" resistance to making "Toy Story" with the then-novel CGI technology. The people most afraid were the ones who would be disrupted, he said. "Everything that you are hearing today are the issues that we had to deal with," he said. Katzenberg continued, "Yes, there was disruption, but animation's never, ever been bigger than it is today." The bottom line: "AI isn't going to replace people, it's going to replace people that don't use AI," he said. "The exact same analogy there ... is that the talent that went and learned how to use the computer as a new pencil and a new paint brush ... they thrived," he said. Katzenberg added, "if change is uncomfortable, irrelevance is going to be a whole lot harder."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Announced in an internal memo from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky has been appointed to also lead the Office, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 Copilot teams as part of an internal AI reorganization. Roslansky will report to Rajesh Jha for Office while continuing to run LinkedIn independently under Nadella. The Verge reports: "LinkedIn remains a top priority and will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary," says Nadella in his memo. "This move brings us closer to the original vision we laid out nine years ago with the LinkedIn acquisition: connecting the world's economic graph with the Microsoft Graph. And I look forward to how Ryan will bring his product ethos and leadership to entertainment and devices." Sumit Chauhan and Gaurav Sareen, senior executives in the Office and Microsoft 365 teams, will remain on the entertainment and devices leadership team, but along with their teams they'll join Jon Friedman and the UX team to work directly for Roslansky. Charles Lamanna and his BIC team are also moving to report to Rajesh Jha as part of an AI shakeup. "Charles has consistently kept us focused on what it takes to win in business applications and the agent layer, and I look forward to the impact he and his team will have in entertainment and devices," says Nadella. In a separate memo, Lamanna also announced that starting July 2nd Lili Cheng will take on the newly expanded role of CTO of the BIC team. Dan Lewis is also taking on the role of corporate vice president of Copilot Studio. "We are poised to reinvent every role and every business process, and start to reimagine organizations as composed of people and agents," says Lamanna in an internal memo. Both the Lamanna and Roslansky moves are very interesting, as the business Copilot team and Microsoft 365 Copilot team have been in separate parts of Microsoft's sprawling AI and cloud teams up until this point. This has led to a situation where nobody really owns Copilot all up inside Microsoft, but now the separate leaders of Microsoft 365 Copilot and the business Copilot teams now both report to Rajesh Jha. The consumer Copilot will still be run by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: OpenAI is now fighting a court order (PDF) to preserve all ChatGPT user logs-including deleted chats and sensitive chats logged through its API business offering -- after news organizations suing over copyright claims accused the AI company of destroying evidence. "Before OpenAI had an opportunity to respond to those unfounded accusations, the court ordered OpenAI to 'preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court (in essence, the output log data that OpenAI has been destroying)," OpenAI explained in a court filing (PDF) demanding oral arguments in a bid to block the controversial order. In the filing, OpenAI alleged that the court rushed the order based only on a hunch raised by The New York Times and other news plaintiffs. And now, without "any just cause," OpenAI argued, the order "continues to prevent OpenAI from respecting its users' privacy decisions." That risk extended to users of ChatGPT Free, Plus, and Pro, as well as users of OpenAI's application programming interface (API), OpenAI said. The court order came after news organizations expressed concern that people using ChatGPT to skirt paywalls "might be more likely to 'delete all [their] searches' to cover their tracks," OpenAI explained. Evidence to support that claim, news plaintiffs argued, was missing from the record because so far, OpenAI had only shared samples of chat logs that users had agreed that the company could retain. Sharing the news plaintiffs' concerns, the judge, Ona Wang, ultimately agreed that OpenAI likely would never stop deleting that alleged evidence absent a court order, granting news plaintiffs' request to preserve all chats. OpenAI argued the May 13 order was premature and should be vacated, until, "at a minimum," news organizations can establish a substantial need for OpenAI to preserve all chat logs. They warned that the privacy of hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users globally is at risk every day that the "sweeping, unprecedented" order continues to be enforced. "As a result, OpenAI is forced to jettison its commitment to allow users to control when and how their ChatGPT conversation data is used, and whether it is retained," OpenAI argued. Meanwhile, there is no evidence beyond speculation yet supporting claims that "OpenAI had intentionally deleted data," OpenAI alleged. And supposedly there is not "a single piece of evidence supporting" claims that copyright-infringing ChatGPT users are more likely to delete their chats. "OpenAI did not 'destroy' any data, and certainly did not delete any data in response to litigation events," OpenAI argued. "The Order appears to have incorrectly assumed the contrary." One tech worker on LinkedIn suggested the order created "a serious breach of contract for every company that uses OpenAI," while privacy advocates on X warned, "every single AI service 'powered by' OpenAI should be concerned." Also on LinkedIn, a consultant rushed to warn clients to be "extra careful" sharing sensitive data "with ChatGPT or through OpenAI's API for now," warning, "your outputs could eventually be read by others, even if you opted out of training data sharing or used 'temporary chat'!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reddit is suing AI startup Anthropic for what it's calling a breach of contract and for engaging in "unlawful and unfair business acts" by using the social media company's platform and data without authority. From a report: The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco on Wednesday, claims that Anthropic has been training its models on the personal data of Reddit users without obtaining their consent. Reddit alleges that it has been harmed by the unauthorized commercial use of its content. The company opened the complaint by calling Anthropic a "late-blooming" AI company that "bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry." Reddit follows by saying, "It is anything but."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

king*jojo shares a report: Linux desktop darling KDE is weighing in on the controversy around the impending demise of Windows 10 support with a lurid "KDE for Windows 10 Exiles" campaign. KDE's alarming "Exiles" page opens with the text "Your computer is toast" followed by a warning that Microsoft wants to turn computers running Windows 10 into junk from October 14. "It may seem like it continues to work after that date for a bit, but when Microsoft stops support for Windows 10, your perfectly good computer will be officially obsolete." Beneath a picture of a pile of tech junk, including a rotary telephone and some floppy drives, KDE proclaims: "Windows 10 will degrade as more and more bugs come to light. With nobody to correct them, you risk being hacked. Your data, identity, and control over your device could be stolen."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers in Japan have developed a plastic that dissolves in seawater within hours, offering up a potential solution for a modern-day scourge polluting oceans and harming wildlife. From a report: While scientists have long experimented with biodegradable plastics, researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and the University of Tokyo say their new material breaks down much more quickly and leaves no residual trace. At a lab in Wako city near Tokyo, the team demonstrated a small piece of plastic vanishing in a container of salt water after it was stirred up for about an hour. While the team has not yet detailed any plans for commercialisation, project lead Takuzo Aida said their research has attracted significant interest, including from those in the packaging sector.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of financially motivated cyberscammers who specialize in Scattered-Spider-like fake IT support phone calls managed to trick employees at about 20 organizations into installing a modified version of Salesforce's Data Loader that allows the criminals to steal sensitive data. From a report: Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) tracks this crew as UNC6040, and in research published today said they specialize in voice-phishing campaigns targeting Salesforce instances for large-scale data theft and extortion. These attacks began around the beginning of the year, GTIG principal threat analyst Austin Larsen told The Register. "Our current assessment indicates that a limited number of organizations were affected as part of this campaign, approximately 20," he said. "We've seen UNC6040 targeting hospitality, retail, education and various other sectors in the Americas and Europe." The criminals are really good at impersonating IT support personnel and convincing employees at English-speaking branches of multinational corporations into downloading a modified version of Data Loader, a Salesforce app that allows users to export and update large amounts of data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT's enterprise capabilities with new integrations that connect the chatbot directly to business cloud services and productivity tools. The Microsoft-backed startup announced connectors for Dropbox, Box, SharePoint, OneDrive and Google Drive that allow ChatGPT to search across users' organizational documents and files to answer questions, such as helping analysts build investment theses from company slide decks. The update includes meeting recording and transcription features that generate timestamped notes and suggest action items, competing directly with similar offerings from ClickUp, Zoom, and Notion. OpenAI also introduced beta connectors for HubSpot, Linear, and select Microsoft and Google tools for deep research reports, plus Model Context Protocol support for Pro, Team, and Enterprise users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major Hollywood studios are extensively using AI tools while avoiding public disclosure, according to industry sources interviewed by New York Magazine. Nearly 100 AI studios now operate in Hollywood with every major studio reportedly experimenting with generative AI despite legal uncertainties surrounding copyright training data, the report said. Lionsgate has partnered with AI company Runway to create a customized model trained on the studio's film archive, with executives planning to generate entire movie trailers from scripts before shooting begins. The collaboration allows the studio to potentially reduce production costs from $100 million to $50 million for certain projects. Widespread usage of the new technology is often happening through unofficial channels. Workers are reporting pressure to use AI tools without formal studio approval, then "launder" the AI-generated content through human artists to obscure its origins.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The IRS open sourced much of its incredibly popular Direct File software as the future of the free tax filing program is at risk of being killed by Intuit's lobbyists and Donald Trump's megabill. Meanwhile, several top developers who worked on the software have left the government and joined a project to explore the "future of tax filing" in the private sector. Direct File is a piece of software created by developers at the US Digital Service and 18F, the former of which became DOGE and is now unrecognizable, and the latter of which was killed by DOGE. Direct File has been called a "free, easy, and trustworthy" piece of software that made tax filing "more efficient." About 300,000 people used it last year as part of a limited pilot program, and those who did gave it incredibly positive reviews, according to reporting by Federal News Network. But because it is free and because it is an example of government working, Direct File and the IRS's Free File program more broadly have been the subject of years of lobbying efforts by financial technology giants like Intuit, which makes TurboTax. DOGE sought to kill Direct File, and currently, there is language in Trump's massive budget reconciliation bill that would kill Direct File. Experts say that "ending [the] Direct File program is a gift to the tax-prep industry that will cost taxpayers time and money."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: Way back in 2010, Microsoft and Google teamed with nonprofit partners to launch Computing in the Core, an advocacy coalition whose mission was "to strengthen computing education and ensure that it is a core subject for students in the 21st century." In 2013, Computing in the Core was merged into Code.org, a new tech-backed-and-directed nonprofit. And in 2015, Code.org declared 'Mission Accomplished' with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which elevated computer science to a core academic subject for grades K-12. Fast forward to June 2025 and Code.org has changed its About page to reflect a new AI mission that's near-and-dear to the hearts of Code.org's tech giant donors and tech leader Board members: "Code.org is a nonprofit working to make computer science (CS) and artificial intelligence (AI) a core part of K-12 education for every student." The mission change comes as tech companies are looking to chop headcount amid the AI boom and just weeks after tech CEOs and leaders launched a new Code.org-orchestrated national campaign to make CS and AI a graduation requirement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Morgan Stanley has deployed an in-house AI tool called DevGen.AI that has reviewed nine million lines of legacy code this year, saving the investment bank's developers an estimated 280,000 hours by translating outdated programming languages into plain English specifications that can be rewritten in modern code. The tool, built on OpenAI's GPT models and launched in January, addresses what Mike Pizzi, the company's global head of technology and operations, calls one of enterprise software's biggest pain points -- modernizing decades-old code that weakens security and slows new technology adoption. While commercial AI coding tools excel at writing new code, they lack expertise in older or company-specific programming languages like Cobol, prompting Morgan Stanley to train its own system on its proprietary codebase. The tool's primary strength, the bank said, lies in creating English specifications that map what legacy code does, enabling any of the company's 15,000 developers worldwide to rewrite it in modern programming languages rather than relying on a dwindling pool of specialists familiar with antiquated coding systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Code generation startups are attracting extraordinary investor interest two years after ChatGPT's launch, with companies like Cursor raising $900 million at a $10 billion valuation despite operating with negative gross margins. OpenAI is reportedly in talks to acquire Windsurf, maker of the Codeium coding tool, for $3 billion, while the startup generates $50 million in annualized revenue from a product launched just seven months ago. These "vibe coding" platforms allow users to write software using plain English commands, attempting to fundamentally change how code gets written. Cursor went from zero to $100 million in recurring revenue in under two years with just 60 employees, though both major startups spend more money than they generate, Reuters reports, citing investor sources familiar with their operations. The surge comes as major technology giants report significant portions of their code now being AI-generated -- Google claims over 30% while Microsoft reports 20-30%. Meanwhile, entry-level programming positions have declined 24% as companies increasingly rely on AI tools to handle basic coding tasks previously assigned to junior developers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anne Wojcicki has asked a U.S. judge to reopen the auction for 23andMe, claiming she has backing from a $400+ billion Fortune 500 company. Reuters reports: South San Francisco, California-based 23andMe filed for bankruptcy in March, seeking to sell its business at auction after a decline in consumer demand and a 2023 data breach that exposed sensitive genetic and personal information of millions of customers. Last month, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals agreed to buy the firm for $256 million, topping a $146 million bid from Wojcicki and TTAM Research Institute, which was founded by Wojcicki and describes itself as a California non-profit public benefit corporation. In a filing dated May 31, Wojcicki claimed that 23andMe's debtors had attempted to tilt the sales process away from TTAM and in favor of Regeneron. TTAM and Wojcicki said in the filing that 23andMe's financial and legal advisers unfairly capped their maximum bid at $250 million due to misplaced concerns about TTAM's "financial wherewithal." The plaintiffs said the auction was prematurely concluded before they had the opportunity to submit a bid that would have exceeded $280 million. The company's debtors said the auction results came after an extensive and careful consideration by a four-member special committee of independent directors, according to the filing. According to another filing, 23andMe is seeking court approval to let Wojcicki and Regeneron submit final proposals by June 12. 23andMe is also seeking a $10 million breakup fee for Regeneron if Wojcicki's bid is ultimately accepted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the most distant galaxy ever observed, named MoM z14. NASA estimates it existed just 280 million years after the Big Bang. Space.com reports: Prior to the discovery of MoM z14, the galaxy holding the title of earliest and distant was JADES-GS-z14-0, which existed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, or around 13.5 billion years ago. This previous record galaxy has a redshift of z =14.32, while MoM z14 has a redshift of z = 14.44. There is a wider context to the observation of MoM z14 than the fact that it has broken the record for earliest known galaxy by 20 million years, though, as [explained team member and Yale University professor of Astronomy and Physics Pieter van Dokkum]. The researchers were able to determine that MoM z14 is around 50 times smaller than the Milky Way. The team also measured emission lines from the galaxy, indicating the presence of elements like nitrogen and carbon. "The emission lines are unusual; it indicates that the galaxy is very young, with a rapidly increasing rate of forming new stars," van Dokkum said. "There are also indications that there is not much neutral hydrogen gas surrounding the galaxy, which would be surprising: the very early universe is expected to be filled with neutral hydrogen. "That needs even better spectra and more galaxies, to investigate more fully." The presence of carbon and nitrogen in MoM z14 indicates that there are earlier galaxies to be discovered than this 13.52 billion-year-old example. That is because the very earliest galaxies in the universe and their stars were filled with the simplest elements in the cosmos, hydrogen and helium. Later galaxies would be populated by these heavier elements, which astronomers somewhat confusingly call "metal," as their stars forged them and then dispersed them in supernova explosions. The research has been published on arXiv.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The CEO of Indian grocery ordering app KiranaPro has claimed an attacker deleted its GitHub and AWS resources in a targeted and deliberate attack and vowed to name the perpetrator. From a report: KiranaPro lets users shop at "Kiranas," the Indian equivalent of convenience stores, which mostly stock basic foodstuffs. Users of the app place an order, which KiranaPro sends to nearby Kiranas who bid to win the sale. The winner arranges delivery of the goods. The elapsed time from ordering to delivery seldom tops 20 minutes. KiranaPro CEO Deepak Ravindran claims the app "powers the livelihoods of thousands of Kirana store owners" and handles 2,000-plus orders each day. Ravindran also claims the app was destroyed by someone who holds a grudge. "Our startup @Kirana_Pro was deliberately hacked -- entire GitHub repo & AWS data wiped. Logs suggest malicious insider action," he wrote on June 3rd. The attack happened last week, and the app has been inoperable since.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: In a development straight out of science fiction, Australian startup Cortical Labs has released what it calls the world's first code-deployable biological computer. The CL1, which debuted in March, fuses human brain cells on a silicon chip to process information via sub-millisecond electrical feedback loops. Designed as a tool for neuroscience and biotech research, the CL1 offers a new way to study how brain cells process and react to stimuli. Unlike conventional silicon-based systems, the hybrid platform uses live human neurons capable of adapting, learning, and responding to external inputs in real time. "On one view, [the CL1] could be regarded as the first commercially available biomimetic computer, the ultimate in neuromorphic computing that uses real neurons," says theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston of University College London. "However, the real gift of this technology is not to computer science. Rather, it's an enabling technology that allows scientists to perform experiments on a little synthetic brain." The first 115 units will begin shipping this summer at $35,000 each, or $20,000 when purchased in 30-unit server racks. Cortical Labs also offers a cloud-based "wetware-as-a-service" at $300 weekly per unit, unlocking remote access to its in-house cell cultures. Each CL1 contains 800,000 lab-grown human neurons, reprogrammed from the skin or blood samples of real adult donors. The cells remain viable for up to six months, fed by a life-support system that supplies nutrients, controls temperature, filters waste, and maintains fluid balance. Meanwhile, the neurons are firing and interpreting signals, adapting from each interaction. The CL1's compact energy and hardware footprint could make it attractive for extended experiments. A rack of CL1 units consumes 850-1,000 watts, notably lower than the tens of kilowatts required by a data center setup running AI workloads. "Brain cells generate small electrical pulses to communicate to a broader network," says Cortical Labs Chief Scientific Officer Brett Kagan. "We can do something similar by inputting small electrical pulses representing bits of information, and then reading their responses. The CL1 does this in real time using simple code abstracted through multiple interacting layers of firmware and hardware. Sub-millisecond loops read information, act on it, and write new information into the cell culture." The company sees CL1 as foundational for testing neuropsychiatric treatments, leveraging living cells to explore genetic and functional differences. "It allows people to study the effects of stimulation, drugs and synthetic lesions on how neuronal circuits learn and respond in a closed-loop setup, when the neuronal network is in reciprocal exchange with some simulated world," says theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston of University College London. "In short, experimentalists now have at hand a little 'brain in a vat,' something philosophers have been dreaming about for decades."Read more of this story at Slashdot.