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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman accused Meta of attempting to poach his developers with $100 million sign-on bonuses and higher compensation packages as the social media giant races to catch up in AI race. Altman said Meta, which has a $1.8 trillion market capitalization, began making the offers to his team members after falling behind in AI efforts. "I've heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor," Altman said on the Uncapped podcast [video] hosted by his brother. None of his "best people" had accepted Zuckerberg's offers, he said. Meta has been recruiting top researchers and engineers from rival companies to build a new "superintelligence" team focused on developing AGI. The Facebook parent company has struggled this year to match competitors, facing criticism over its Llama 4 language model and delaying its flagship "Behemoth" AI model.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has a long history of being criticized for coming up with clunky product names, and for changing them so often it's hard for customers to keep up. The company's own employees once joked in a viral video that the iPod would have been called the "Microsoft I-pod Pro 2005 XP Human Ear Professional Edition with Subscription" had it been created by Microsoft. The latest gripe among some employees and customers: The company's tendency to slap "Copilot" on everything AI. "There is a delusion on our marketing side where literally everything has been renamed to have Copilot it in," one employee told Business Insider late last year. "Everything is Copilot. Nothing else matters. They want a Copilot tie-in for everything." Now, an advertising watchdog is weighing in. The Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Division reviewed Microsoft's advertising for its Copilot AI tools. NAD called out Microsoft's "universal use of the product description as 'Copilot'" and said "consumers would not necessarily understand the difference," according to a recent report from the watchdog. "Microsoft is using 'Copilot' across all Microsoft Office applications and Business Chat, despite differences in functionality and the manual steps that are required for Business Chat to produce the same results as Copilot in a specific Microsoft Office app," NAD further explained in an email to BI. NAD did not mention any specific recommendations on product names. But it did say Microsoft should modify claims that Copilot works "seamlessly across all your data" because all of the company's tools with the Copilot moniker don't work together continuously in a way consumers might expect.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Field Notes, the analog notebook company that began as designer Aaron Draplin's side project 20 years ago, has sold over 10 million notebooks and operates in 2,000 stores worldwide, co-founder Jim Coudal told Fast Company. The Chicago-based company, which Coudal says just completed its best year for sales and revenue with 2025 tracking to exceed those numbers, has grown from selling 13 notebooks on its launch day to producing quarterly edition runs of 30,000 to 60,000 packs. The brand's subscription model, launched in 2009 with 1,500-pack print runs, now encompasses 67 limited editions and provides both predictable cash flow and regular customer engagement opportunities for the company.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Time Magazine: While AI could offer transformative benefits, without proper safeguards it could facilitate nuclear and biological threats and cause "potentially irreversible harms," a new report commissioned by California Governor Gavin Newsom has warned. "The opportunity to establish effective AI governance frameworks may not remain open indefinitely," says the report, which was published on June 17 (PDF). Citing new evidence that AI can help users source nuclear-grade uranium and is on the cusp of letting novices create biological threats, it notes that the cost for inaction at this current moment could be "extremely high." [...] "Foundation model capabilities have rapidly advanced since Governor Newsom vetoed SB 1047 last September," the report states. The industry has shifted from large language AI models that merely predict the next word in a stream of text toward systems trained to solve complex problems and that benefit from "inference scaling," which allows them more time to process information. These advances could accelerate scientific research, but also potentially amplify national security risks by making it easier for bad actors to conduct cyberattacks or acquire chemical and biological weapons. The report points to Anthropic's Claude 4 models, released just last month, which the company said might be capable of helping would-be terrorists create bioweapons or engineer a pandemic. Similarly, OpenAI's o3 model reportedly outperformed 94% of virologists on a key evaluation. In recent months, new evidence has emerged showing AI's ability to strategically lie, appearing aligned with its creators' goals during training but displaying other objectives once deployed, and exploit loopholes to achieve its goals, the report says. While "currently benign, these developments represent concrete empirical evidence for behaviors that could present significant challenges to measuring loss of control risks and possibly foreshadow future harm," the report says. While Republicans have proposed a 10 year ban on all state AI regulation over concerns that a fragmented policy environment could hamper national competitiveness, the report argues that targeted regulation in California could actually "reduce compliance burdens on developers and avoid a patchwork approach" by providing a blueprint for other states, while keeping the public safer. It stops short of advocating for any specific policy, instead outlining the key principles the working group believes California should adopt when crafting future legislation. It "steers clear" of some of the more divisive provisions of SB 1047, like the requirement for a "kill switch" or shutdown mechanism to quickly halt certain AI systems in case of potential harm, says Scott Singer, a visiting scholar in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a lead-writer of the report. Instead, the approach centers around enhancing transparency, for example through legally protecting whistleblowers and establishing incident reporting systems, so that lawmakers and the public have better visibility into AI's progress. The goal is to "reap the benefits of innovation. Let's not set artificial barriers, but at the same time, as we go, let's think about what we're learning about how it is that the technology is behaving," says Cuellar, who co-led the report. The report emphasizes this visibility is crucial not only for public-facing AI applications, but for understanding how systems are tested and deployed inside AI companies, where concerning behaviors might first emerge. "The underlying approach here is one of 'trust but verify,'" Singer says, a concept borrowed from Cold War-era arms control treaties that would involve designing mechanisms to independently check compliance. That's a departure from existing efforts, which hinge on voluntary cooperation from companies, such as the deal between OpenAI and Center for AI Standards and Innovation (formerly the U.S. AI Safety Institute) to conduct pre-deployment tests. It's an approach that acknowledges the "substantial expertise inside industry," Singer says, but "also underscores the importance of methods of independently verifying safety claims."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In response to escalating tensions with Israel, Iran has begun throttling internet access, with plans to disconnect from the global internet entirely to prevent Israeli cyberattacks. The Iranian government also urges citizens to delete WhatsApp -- one of the country's most popular messaging platforms -- claiming without evidence that the Meta-owned app has been weaponed by Israel to spy on its users. (WhatsApp vehemently denied those claims in a statement to the Associated Press.) Telegram is also said to be blocked as well. The Verge reports: The announcements come amidst the escalating war between Iran and Israel, which broke out after Israel attacked the country on June 12th, and a rise in reported internet outages. Civilians have claimed that they've been unable to access basic but critical telecommunications services, such as messaging apps, maps, and sometimes the internet itself. Cloudflare reported that two major Iranian cellular carriers effectively went offline on Tuesday, and The New York Times reports that even VPNs, which Iranians frequently use to access banned sites like Facebook and Instagram, have become increasingly harder to access. [...] Israel's role in the cyber outages has not been officially confirmed, but independent analysts at NetBlocks noticed a significant reduction of internet traffic originating from Iran on Tuesday, starting at 5:30 PM local time. According to Tasnim, a news network affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Iranians will still have access to the country's state-operated national internet service, though two Iranian officials told the Times that the internal bandwidth could be reduced by up to 80 percent.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Senate has approved the GENIUS Act with a 68-30 final vote that "saw a huge surge of Democrats joining their Republican counterparts," reports CoinDesk. What the bill sets out to do is create the first federal regulatory framework for U.S. stablecoins, requiring issuers to maintain full 1:1 reserves in cash or Treasuries, adhere to regular audits and anti-money laundering rules, and gain regulatory approval -- all while allowing foreign stablecoin access under strict oversight rules. From the report: As written, the bill would set up guardrails around the approval and supervision of U.S. issuers of stablecoins, the dollar-based tokens such as the ones backed by Circle, Ripple and Tether. Firms making these digital assets available to U.S. users would have to meet stringent reserve demands, transparency requirements, money-laundering compliance and regulatory supervision that's also likely to include new capital rules. "This is a win for the U.S., a win for innovation and a monumental step towards appropriate regulation for digital assets in the United States," said Amanda Tuminelli, executive director and chief legal officer of the DeFi Education Fund, in a similar statement. [...] While this is the first significant crypto bill to clear the Senate, it's also the first time a stablecoin bill has passed either chamber, despite years of negotiation in the House Financial Services Committee that managed to produce other major crypto legislation in the previous congressional session. The destiny of the GENIUS Act is also tied closely to the House's own Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, the more sweeping crypto bill that would establish the legal footing of the wider U.S. crypto markets. The stablecoin effort is slightly ahead of the bigger task of the market structure bill, but the industry and their lawmaker allies argue that they're inextricably connected and need to become law together. So far, the Clarity Act has been cleared by the relevant House committees and awaits floor action.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump will extend the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. operations by another 90 days, marking the third extension since taking office. The extension aims to prevent a TikTok ban while negotiations with potential buyers like Oracle and Project Liberty continue. CNBC reports: "President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. "As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure." ByteDance was nearing the deadline of June 19, to sell TikTok's U.S. operations in order to satisfy a national security law that the Supreme Court upheld just a few days before Trump's second presidential inauguration. Under the law, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok. ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to comply with the national security law, but Trump signed an executive order when he first took office that pushed the deadline to April 5. Trump extended the deadline for the second time a day before that April mark. Trump told NBC News in May that he would extend the TikTok deadline again if no deal was reached, and he reiterated his plans on Thursday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: [...] the rise in China of open technology, which relies on transparency and decentralisation, is awkward for an authoritarian state. If the party's patience with open-source fades, and it decides to exert control, that could hinder both the course of innovation at home, and developers' ability to export their technology abroad. China's open-source movement first gained traction in the mid-2010s. Richard Lin, co-founder of Kaiyuanshe, a local open-source advocacy group, recalls that most of the early adopters were developers who simply wanted free software. That changed when they realised that contributing to open-source projects could improve their job prospects. Big firms soon followed, with companies like Huawei backing open-source work to attract talent and cut costs by sharing technology. Momentum gathered in 2019 when Huawei was, in effect, barred by America from using Android. That gave new urgency to efforts to cut reliance on Western technology. Open-source offered a faster way for Chinese tech firms to take existing code and build their own programs with help from the country's vast community of developers. In 2020 Huawei launched OpenHarmony, a family of open-source operating systems for smartphones and other devices. It also joined others, including Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, to establish the OpenAtom Foundation, a body dedicated to open-source development. China quickly became not just a big contributor to open-source programs, but also an early adopter of software. JD.com, an e-commerce firm, was among the first to deploy Kubernetes. AI has lately given China's open-source movement a further boost. Chinese companies, and the government, see open models as the quickest way to narrow the gap with America. DeepSeek's models have generated the most interest, but Qwen, developed by Alibaba, is also highly rated, and Baidu has said it will soon open up the model behind its Ernie chatbot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.4. This fresh new release improves on nearly every front, with progress being made in accessibility, color rendering, tablet support, window management, and more. Plasma already offered virtual desktops and customizable tiles to help organize your windows and activities, and now it lets you choose a different configuration of tiles on each virtual desktop. The Wayland session brings some new accessibility features: you can now move the pointer using your keyboard's number pad keys, or use a three-finger touchpad pinch gesture to zoom in or out. Plasma file transfer notification now shows a speed graph, giving you a more visual idea of how fast the transfer is going and how long it will take to complete. When any applications are in full screen mode Plasma will now enter Do Not Disturb mode and only show urgent notifications. When you exit full-screen mode, you'll see a summary of any notifications you missed. Now, when an application tries to access the microphone and finds it muted, a notification will pop up. A new feature in the Application Launcher widget will place a green New! tag next to newly installed apps, so you can easily find where something you just installed lives in the menu. The Display and Monitor page in System Settings comes with a brand new HDR calibration wizard. Support for Extended Dynamic Range (a different kind of HDR) and P010 video color format has also been added. System Monitor now supports usage monitoring for AMD and Intel graphic cards -- it can even show the GPU usage on a per-process basis. Spectacle, the built-in app for taking screenshots and screen recordings, has a much-improved design and more streamlined functionality. The background of the desktop or window now darkens when an authentication dialog shows up, helping you locate and focus on the window asking for your password. There's a brand-new Animations page in System Settings that groups all the settings for purely visual animated effects into one place, making them easier to find and configure. Aurorae, a newly added SVG vector graphics theme engine, enhances KWin window decorations. You can read more about these and many other other features in the Plasma 6.4 announcement and complete changelog.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a memo to employees on Tuesday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that the company's corporate workforce will shrink in the coming years as it adopts more generative AI tools and agents. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs," Jassy said. "It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce." CNBC reports: Jassy wrote that employees should learn how to use AI tools and experiment and figure out "how to get more done with scrappier teams." The directive comes as Amazon has laid off more than 27,000 employees since 2022 and made several cuts this year. Amazon cut about 200 employees in its North America stores unit in January and a further 100 in its devices and services unit in May. Amazon had 1.56 million full-time and part-time employees in its global workforce as of the end of March, according to financial filings. The company also employs temporary workers in its warehouse operations, along with some contractors. Amazon is using generative AI broadly across its internal operations, including in its fulfillment network where the technology is being deployed to assist with inventory placement, demand forecasting and the efficiency of warehouse robots, Jassy said. [...] In his most recent letter to shareholders, Jassy called generative AI a "once-in-a-lifetime reinvention of everything we know." He added that the technology is "saving companies lots of money," and stands to shift the norms in coding, search, financial services, shopping and other areas. "It's moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen," Jassy said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The Spanish government has said that the national grid operator and private power generation companies were to blame for an energy blackout that caused widespread chaos in Spain and Portugal earlier this year. Shortly after midday on April 28, both countries were disconnected from the European electricity grid for several hours. Businesses, schools, universities, government buildings and transport hubs were all left without power and traffic light outages caused gridlocks. While schoolchildren, students and workers were sent home for the day, many other people were stuck in lifts or stranded on trains in isolated rural areas. In the immediate aftermath, the left-wing coalition government did not provide an explanation, instead calling for patience as it investigated. Nearly two months after the unprecedented outage, the minister for ecological transition, Sara Aagesen, has presented a report on its causes. She said the partly state-owned grid operator, Red Electrica, had miscalculated the power capacity needs for that day, explaining that the "system did not have enough dynamic voltage capacity." The regulator should have switched on another thermal plant, she said, but "they made their calculations and decided that it was not necessary." Aagesen also blamed private generators for failing to regulate the grid's voltage shortly before the blackout happened. "Generation firms which were supposed to control voltage and which, in addition, were paid to do just that did not absorb all the voltage they were supposed to when tension was high," she said, without naming any of the companies responsible. The day after the outage, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez suggested that private electricity companies might have played a role, saying that his government would demand "all the relevant accountability" from them. However, the new report on the blackout also raises questions about the role of Beatriz Corredor, president of Red Electrica and a former Socialist minister, who had previously insisted that the grid regulator had not been at fault. Aagesen said there was no evidence of a cyberattack behind the blackout. The government also maintained that Spain's renewable energy output was not to blame.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook announced it will soon share all videos as reels by default, regardless of their length or orientation. "Up until now, users have been able to share both video posts and reels," notes TechCrunch. From the report: The company is also renaming the "Video" tab on its platform to the "Reels" tab. The update won't change what videos are recommended to you, Facebook says. [...] The idea behind the changes is to streamline the video-sharing format on the social network. It won't be the first time that a Meta-owned platform has done so, as Instagram began automatically converting new video posts under 15 minutes into reels back in 2022. "Previously, you'd upload a video to Feed or post a reel using different creative flows and tools for each format," Facebook explained in a blog post. "Now, we're bringing these experiences together with a simplified publishing flow that gives you access to even more creative tools. We'll also give you control over your audience setting of who sees your reels." [...] The company says it will gradually roll out the changes globally over the coming months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Honda has successfully conducted a surprise launch and landing test of its prototype reusable rocket as part of its plan to achieve suborbital spaceflight by 2029. Reuters reports: Honda R&D, the research arm of Japan's second-biggest carmaker, successfully landed its 6.3-meter (20.6-foot) experimental reusable launch vehicle after reaching an altitude of 271 meters (889 feet) at its test facility in northern Japan's space town Taiki, according to the company. While "no decisions have been made regarding commercialization of these rocket technologies, Honda will continue making progress in the fundamental research with a technology development goal of realizing technological capability to enable a suborbital launch by 2029," it said in a statement. Honda in 2021 said it was studying space technologies such as reusable rockets, but it has not previously announced the details of the launch test. A suborbital launch may touch the verge of outer space but does not enter orbit. Studying launch vehicles "has the potential to contribute more to people's daily lives by launching satellites with its own rockets, that could lead to various services that are also compatible with other Honda business," the company added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: OpenAI executives have discussed filing an antitrust complaint with US regulators against Microsoft, the company's largest investor, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, marking a dramatic escalation in tensions between the two long-term AI partners. OpenAI, which develops ChatGPT, has reportedly considered seeking a federal regulatory review of the terms of its contract with Microsoft for potential antitrust law violations, according to people familiar with the matter. The potential antitrust complaint would likely argue that Microsoft is using its dominant position in cloud services and contractual leverage to suppress competition, according to insiders who described it as a "nuclear option," the WSJ reports. The move could unravel one of the most important business partnerships in the AI industry -- a relationship that started with a $1 billion investment by Microsoft in 2019 and has grown to include billions more in funding, along with Microsoft's exclusive rights to host OpenAI models on its Azure cloud platform. The friction centers on OpenAI's efforts to transition from its current nonprofit structure into a public benefit corporation, a conversion that needs Microsoft's approval to complete. The two companies have not been able to agree on details after months of negotiations, sources told Reuters. OpenAI's existing for-profit arm would become a Delaware-based public benefit corporation under the proposed restructuring. The companies are discussing revising the terms of Microsoft's investment, including the future equity stake it will hold in OpenAI. According to The Information, OpenAI wants Microsoft to hold a 33 percent stake in a restructured unit in exchange for foregoing rights to future profits. The AI company also wants to modify existing clauses that give Microsoft exclusive rights to host OpenAI models in its cloud. The restructuring debate attracted criticism from multiple quarters. Elon Musk alleges that OpenAI violated contract provisions by prioritizing profit over the public good in its push to advance AI and has sued to block the conversion. In December, Meta Platforms also asked California's attorney general to block OpenAI's conversion to a for-profit company.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Iran's cybersecurity authority has banned officials from using devices that connect to the internet, apparently fearing being tracked or hacked by Israel. According to the state-linked Fars news agency, Iranian officials and their bodyguards have been told they are not allowed to use any equipment that connects to public internet or telecommunications networks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Salesforce will raise prices by an average of 6% across its Enterprise and Unlimited Editions starting August 1, 2025, while simultaneously launching new AI-focused product tiers that significantly expand the cost structure for its platform. The price increases will affect Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Field Service, and select Industries Clouds, though the company's Foundations, Starter, and Pro Editions will remain unchanged, the company said Tuesday. Salesforce is justifying the move by citing "significant ongoing innovation and customer value delivered through our products." The company is also rolling out new Agentforce add-ons starting at $125 per user monthly, which provide unlimited AI agent usage for employees, while premium Agentforce 1 Editions begin at $550 per user monthly and include comprehensive AI capabilities plus cloud-specific features. Slack pricing has also been restructured, with the Business+ plan now costing $15 per user monthly and a new Enterprise+ tier added, though basic Slack access will be free for all Salesforce customers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meetings starting after 8 p.m. are up 16% compared to a year ago, and at 10 p.m. almost a third of active workers are still monitoring their inboxes, according to research from Microsoft. Bloomberg: The company's annual work trends study, which is based on aggregated and anonymized data from Microsoft 365 users and a global survey of 31,000 desk workers, also found that almost 20% of employees actively working weekends are checking email before noon on Saturdays and Sundays [non-paywalled source], while over 5% are active on email again on Sunday evenings, gearing up for the start of the work week. [...] Meetings are often spontaneous. Some 57% of the gatherings tallied by Microsoft came together without a calendar invite, and even 10% of scheduled meetings were booked at the last minute. [...] Mass emails, those which loop in more than 20 participants, are on the rise, climbing 7% from last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Veteran columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols declared that Firefox was "dead" to him in a scathing opinion piece Tuesday that cites Mozilla's strategic missteps and the browser's declining technical performance as evidence of terminal decline. Vaughan-Nichols argues that Mozilla has fundamentally betrayed user trust by removing a longstanding promise never to sell personal data from its privacy policy in February, replacing it with a weaker pledge to "protect your personal information." The veteran technology writer also criticized Mozilla's decision to discontinue Pocket, a popular article-saving service, and Fakespot, which identified fake online reviews, while pursuing what he called a misguided AI strategy. He cited user reports of Firefox running up to 30% slower than Chrome, consuming excessive memory, and failing to properly load major websites. Mozilla has also become financially more vulnerable, he argued, noting CFO Eric Muhlheim's admission that the company depends on Google for 90% of its revenue. According to federal data he cited, Firefox holds just 1.9% of the browser market, leading him to conclude the browser is "done."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI use among U.S. workers has nearly doubled over two years, with 40% of employees now using artificial intelligence tools at least a few times annually, up from 21% in 2023, according to new Gallup research. Daily AI usage has doubled in the past year alone, jumping from 4% to 8% of workers. The growth concentrates heavily among white-collar employees, where 27% report frequent AI use compared to just 9% of production and front-line workers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new benchmark assembled by a team of International Olympiad medalists suggests the hype about large language models beating elite human coders is premature. LiveCodeBench Pro, unveiled in a 584-problem study [PDF] drawn from Codeforces, ICPC and IOI contests, shows the best frontier model clears just 53% of medium-difficulty tasks on its first attempt and none of the hard ones, while grandmaster-level humans routinely solve at least some of those highest-tier problems. The researchers measured models and humans on the same Elo scale used by Codeforces and found that OpenAI's o4-mini-high, when stripped of terminal tools and limited to one try per task, lands at an Elo rating of 2,116 -- hundreds of points below the grandmaster cutoff and roughly the 1.5 percentile among human contestants. A granular tag-by-tag autopsy identified implementation-friendly, knowledge-heavy problems -- segment trees, graph templates, classic dynamic programming -- as the models' comfort zone; observation-driven puzzles such as game-theory endgames and trick-greedy constructs remain stubborn roadblocks. Because the dataset is harvested in real time as contests conclude, the authors argue it minimizes training-data leakage and offers a moving target for future systems. The broader takeaway is that impressive leaderboard jumps often reflect tool use, multiple retries or easier benchmarks rather than genuine algorithmic reasoning, leaving a conspicuous gap between today's models and top human problem-solvers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: A new documentary released last week on Netflix goes into detail about events leading up to the destruction of OceanGate's submersible, Titan that imploded on June 18, 2023 while attempting to visit the wreckage of the RMS Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland. The Titan used a carbon-fiber hull instead of more traditional materials like steel or titanium. "Through exclusive access to whistleblower testimony, pivotal audio recordings, and footage from the company's early days, the film provides an unprecedented look at the technical challenges, moral dilemmas, and shockingly poor decisions that culminated in the catastrophic expedition," explains Netflix in an article. Some highlights:- Titan's original carbon-fiber hull had been replaced with a second carbon-fiber one after the first one developed noticeable cracks. - Three scale models of the second hull failed tests. OceanGate decided to manufacture the second hull regardless of these failures.- Loud pops were heard in many dives; CEO Stockton Rush dismissed these as "seasoning". - Many employees raised numerous safety concerns. They were fired like lead pilot and head of marine operations, David Lochridge. Or they quit.- Some employees like Emily Hammermeister wanted to quit earlier, but external conditions like the COVID pandemic made it difficult. After the scale models failed, she refused to bolt anyone in the future submersible. She was given the two options of being fired or quit; she quit in the middle of the pandemic.- Rush's blindness to inconvenient facts: After the crack was discovered, Rush questioned Director of Engineering, Tony Nissen, about why Nissen did not anticipate the possibility of a crack. Nissen: "I wrote you a report that showed you it was there." Nissen had warned repeatedly that the hull's fibers were breaking (the pops) with each dive. Rush: "Well, one of us has to go." - Poor decisions by Rush extended beyond engineering decisions. After Rush fired Lochridge for raising safety concerns , Rush wanted Bonnie Carl, the company's accountant, to be his replacement pilot. While Carl was an experienced scuba diver, she quit as she was extremely uncomfortable being a pilot. Her explanation: "Are you nuts? I'm an accountant."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: The newly discovered microbe provisionally known as Sukunaarchaeum isn't a virus. But like viruses, it seemingly has one purpose: to make more of itself. As far as scientists can tell from its genome -- the only evidence of its existence so far -- it's a parasite that provides nothing to the single-celled creature it calls home. Most of Sukunaarchaeum's mere 189 protein-coding genes are focused on replicating its own genome; it must steal everything else it needs from its host Citharistes regius, a dinoflagellate that lives in ocean waters all over the world. Adding to the mystery of the microbe, some of its sequences identify it as archaeon, a lineage of simple cellular organisms more closely related to complex organisms like us than to bacteria like Escherichia coli. The discovery of Sukunaarchaeum's bizarrely viruslike way of living, reported last month in a bioRxiv preprint, "challenges the boundaries between cellular life and viruses," says Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities who was not involved in the work. "This organism might be a fascinating living fossil -- an evolutionary waypoint that managed to hang on." Adamala adds that if Sukunaarchaeum really does represent a microbe on its way to becoming a virus, it could teach scientists about how viruses evolved in the first place. "Most of the greatest transitions in evolution didn't leave a fossil record, making it very difficult to figure out what were the exact steps," she says. "We can poke at existing biochemistry to try to reconstitute the ancestral forms -- or sometimes we get a gift from nature, in the form of a surviving evolutionary intermediate." What's already clear: Sukunaarchaeum is not alone. When team leader Takuro Nakayama, an evolutionary microbiologist at Tsukuba, and his colleagues sifted through publicly available DNA sequences extracted from seawater all over the world, they found many sequences similar to those of Sukunaarchaeum. "That's when we realized that we had not just found a single strange organism, but had uncovered the first complete genome of a large, previously unknown archaeal lineage," Nakayama says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Denmark has deployed four uncrewed robotic sailboats (known as "Voyagers") for a three-month trial to boost maritime surveillance amid rising tensions in the Baltic region. The Associated Press reports: Built by Alameda, California-based company Saildrone, the vessels will patrol Danish and NATO waters in the Baltic and North Seas, where maritime tensions and suspected sabotage have escalated sharply since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Two of the Voyagers launched Monday from Koge Marina, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the Danish capital, Copenhagen. Powered by wind and solar energy, these sea drones can operate autonomously for months at sea. Saildrone says the vessels carry advanced sensor suites -- radar, infrared and optical cameras, sonar and acoustic monitoring. Their launch comes after two others already joined a NATO patrol on June 6. Saildrone founder and CEO Richard Jenkins compared the vessels to a "truck" that carries sensors and uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to give a "full picture of what's above and below the surface" to about 20 to 30 miles (30 to 50 kilometers) in the open ocean. He said that maritime threats like damage to undersea cables, illegal fishing and the smuggling of people, weapons and drugs are going undetected simply because "no one's observing it." Saildrone, he said, is "going to places ... where we previously didn't have eyes and ears." The Danish Defense Ministry says the trial is aimed at boosting surveillance capacity in under-monitored waters, especially around critical undersea infrastructure such as fiber-optic cables and power lines.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Social media and video networks have become the main source of news in the US, overtaking traditional TV channels and news websites, research suggests. More than half (54%) of people get news from networks like Facebook, X and YouTube -- overtaking TV (50%) and news sites and apps (48%), according to the Reuters Institute. "The rise of social media and personality-based news is not unique to the United States, but changes seem to be happening faster -- and with more impact -- than in other countries," a report found. Podcaster Joe Rogan was the most widely-seen personality, with almost a quarter (22%) of the population saying they had come across news or commentary from him in the previous week. The report's author Nic Newman said the rise of social video and personality-driven news "represents another significant challenge for traditional publishers." Other key findings from the report include:- TikTok is the fastest-growing social and video platform, now used for news by 17% globally (up 4% from last year).- AI chatbot use for news is increasing, especially among under-25s, where it's twice as popular as in the general population.- Most people believe AI will reduce transparency, accuracy, and trust in news.- Across all age groups, trusted news brands with proven accuracy remain valued, even if used less frequently.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily: When the brain is under pressure, certain neural signals begin to move in sync -- much like a well-rehearsed orchestra. A new study from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) is the first to show how flexibly this neural synchrony adjusts to different situations and that this dynamic coordination is closely linked to cognitive abilities. "Specific signals in the midfrontal brain region are better synchronized in people with higher cognitive ability -- especially during demanding phases of reasoning," explained Professor Anna-Lena Schubert from JGU's Institute of Psychology, lead author of the study recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. The researchers focused on the midfrontal area of the brain and the measurable coordination of the so-called theta waves. These brainwaves oscillate between four and eight hertz and belong to the group of slower neural frequencies. "They tend to appear when the brain is particularly challenged such as during focused thinking or when we need to consciously control our behavior," said Schubert, who heads the Analysis and Modeling of Complex Data Lab at JGU. The 148 participants in the study, aged between 18 and 60, first completed tests assessing memory and intelligence before their brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). [...] As a result, individuals with higher cognitive abilities showed especially strong synchronization of theta waves during crucial moments, particularly when making decisions. Their brains were better at sustaining purposeful thought when it mattered most. "People with stronger midfrontal theta connectivity are often better at maintaining focus and tuning out distractions, be it that your phone buzzes while you're working or that you intend to read a book in a busy train station," explained Schubert. The findings have been published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Cloud has attributed last week's widespread outage to a flawed code update in its Service Control system that triggered a global crash loop due to missing error handling and lack of feature flag protection. The Register reports: Google's explanation of the incident opens by informing readers that its APIs, and Google Cloud's, are served through our Google API management and control planes." Those two planes are distributed regionally and "are responsible for ensuring each API request that comes in is authorized, has the policy and appropriate checks (like quota) to meet their endpoints." The core binary that is part of this policy check system is known as "Service Control." On May 29, Google added a new feature to Service Control, to enable "additional quota policy checks." "This code change and binary release went through our region by region rollout, but the code path that failed was never exercised during this rollout due to needing a policy change that would trigger the code," Google's incident report explains. The search monopolist appears to have had concerns about this change as it "came with a red-button to turn off that particular policy serving path." But the change "did not have appropriate error handling nor was it feature flag protected. Without the appropriate error handling, the null pointer caused the binary to crash." Google uses feature flags to catch issues in its code. "If this had been flag protected, the issue would have been caught in staging." That unprotected code ran inside Google until June 12th, when the company changed a policy that contained "unintended blank fields." Here's what happened next: "Service Control, then regionally exercised quota checks on policies in each regional datastore. This pulled in blank fields for this respective policy change and exercised the code path that hit the null pointer causing the binaries to go into a crash loop. This occurred globally given each regional deployment." Google's post states that its Site Reliability Engineering team saw and started triaging the incident within two minutes, identified the root cause within 10 minutes, and was able to commence recovery within 40 minutes. But in some larger Google Cloud regions, "as Service Control tasks restarted, it created a herd effect on the underlying infrastructure it depends on ... overloading the infrastructure." Service Control wasn't built to handle this, which is why it took almost three hours to resolve the issue in its larger regions. The teams running Google products that went down due to this mess then had to perform their own recovery chores. Going forward, Google has promised a couple of operational changes to prevent this mistake from happening again: "We will improve our external communications, both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues, manage their systems and help their customers. We'll ensure our monitoring and communication infrastructure remains operational to serve customers even when Google Cloud and our primary monitoring products are down, ensuring business continuity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel will lay off 15% to 20% of its factory workforce starting in July, potentially cutting over 10,000 jobs as part of a broader effort to streamline operations amid declining sales and mounting competitive pressure. "These are difficult actions but essential to meet our affordability challenges and current financial position of the company. It drives pain to every individual," Intel manufacturing Vice President Naga Chandrasekaran wrote to employees Saturday. "Removing organizational complexity and empowering our engineers will enable us to better serve the needs of our customers and strengthen our execution. We are making these decisions based on careful consideration of what's needed to position our business for the future." The company reiterated that "we will treat people with care and respect as we complete this important work." Oregon Live reports: Intel announced the pending layoffs in April and notified factory workers last week that the cuts would begin in July. It hadn't previously said just how deep the layoffs will go. The company had 109,000 employees at the end of 2024, but it's not clear how many of those worked in its factory division -- called Intel Foundry. The Foundry business includes a broad array of jobs, from technicians on the factory floor to specialized researchers who work years in advance to develop future generations of microprocessors. Intel is planning major cuts in other parts of its business, too, but employees say the company hasn't specified how many jobs it will eliminate in each business unit. Workers say they believe the impacts will vary within departments. Overall, though, the layoffs will surely eliminate several thousand jobs -- and quite possibly more than 10,000.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Subscribers in Southern California of Spectrum's Internet service experienced outages over the weekend following what company officials said was an attempted theft of copper lines located in Van Nuys, a suburb located 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The people behind the incident thought they were targeting copper lines, the officials wrote in a statement Sunday. Instead, they cut into fiber optic cables. The cuts caused service disruptions for subscribers in Van Nuys and surrounding areas. Spectrum has since restored service and is offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the apprehension of the people responsible. Spectrum will also credit affected customers one day of service on their next bill. "Criminal acts of network vandalism have become an issue affecting the entire telecommunications industry, not just Spectrum, largely due to the increase in the price of precious metals," the officials wrote in a statement issued Sunday. "These acts of vandalism are not only a crime, but also affect our customers, local businesses and potentially emergency services. Spectrum's fiber lines do not include any copper." Outage information service Downdetector showed that thousands of subscribers in and around Van Nuys reported outages starting a little before noon on Sunday. Within about 12 hours, the complaint levels returned to normal. Spectrum officials told the Los Angeles Times that personnel had to splice thousands of fiber lines to restore service to affected subscribers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Threads is testing a new feature that lets users hide spoiler content by blurring images or text, which can then be revealed with a tap. The Verge reports: Meta spokesperson Alec Booker told The Verge that this is a "global test," though it's not clear how many people will gain access to it. Spoilers will also look a bit different depending on which device you're using. On desktop, spoilers are hidden by a gray block, but they appear behind a bunch of floating dots on mobile (which you can see in the GIF embedded [here]). "This feature is currently optimized for mobile, but we're working to improve the experience for desktop," Booker said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new Salesforce-led study found that LLM-based AI agents struggle with real-world CRM tasks, achieving only 58% success on simple tasks and dropping to 35% on multi-step ones. They also demonstrated poor confidentiality awareness. "Agents demonstrate low confidentiality awareness, which, while improvable through targeted prompting, often negatively impacts task performance," a paper published at the end of last month said. The Register reports: The Salesforce AI Research team argued that existing benchmarks failed to rigorously measure the capabilities or limitations of AI agents, and largely ignored an assessment of their ability to recognize sensitive information and adhere to appropriate data handling protocols. The research unit's CRMArena-Pro tool is fed a data pipeline of realistic synthetic data to populate a Salesforce organization, which serves as the sandbox environment. The agent takes user queries and decides between an API call or a response to the users to get more clarification or provide answers. "These findings suggest a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the multifaceted demands of real-world enterprise scenarios," the paper said. [...] AI agents might well be useful, however, organizations should be wary of banking on any benefits before they are proven.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: While Silicon Valley executives like those from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI are grabbing headlines for trading their Brunello Cucinelli vests for Army Reserve uniforms, a quieter transformation has been underway in the U.S. Navy. How so? Well, the Navy's chief technology officer, Justin Fanelli, says he has spent the last two and a half years cutting through the red tape and shrinking the protracted procurement cycles that once made working with the military a nightmare for startups. The efforts represent a less visible but potentially more meaningful remaking that aims to see the government move faster and be smarter about where it's committing dollars. "We're more open for business and partnerships than we've ever been before," Fanelli told TechCrunch in a recent episode of StrictlyVC Download. "We're humble and listening more than before, and we recognize that if an organization shows us how we can do business differently, we want that to be a partnership." Right now, many of these partnerships are being facilitated through what Fanelli calls the Navy's innovation adoption kit, a series of frameworks and tools that aim to bridge the so-called Valley of Death, where promising tech dies on its path from prototype to production. "Your granddaddy's government had a spaghetti chart for how to get in," Fanelli said. "Now it's a funnel, and we are saying, if you can show that you have outsized outcomes, then we want to designate you as an enterprise service." In one recent case, the Navy went from a Request for Proposal (RFP) to pilot deployment in under six months with Via, an eight-year-old, Somerville, Massachusetts-based cybersecurity startup that helps big organizations protect sensitive data and digital identities through, in part, decentralization, meaning the data isn't stored in one central spot that can be hacked. (Another of Via's clients is the U.S. Air Force.) The Navy's new approach operates on what Fanelli calls a "horizon" model, borrowed and adapted from McKinsey's innovation framework. Companies move through three phases: evaluation, structured piloting, and scaling to enterprise services. The key difference from traditional government contracting, Fanelli says, is that the Navy now leads with problems rather than predetermined solutions. "Instead of specifying, 'Hey, we'd like this problem solved in a way that we've always had it,' we just say, 'We have a problem, who wants to solve this, and how will you solve it?'" Fanelli said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thousands of American investors have lost millions of dollars to sophisticated pump-and-dump schemes involving small Chinese companies listed on Nasdaq, prompting the Justice Department to declare the fraud a priority under the Trump administration's white-collar enforcement program. The scams recruit victims through social media ads and WhatsApp messages, directing them to purchase shares in obscure Chinese firms whose stock prices are artificially inflated before collapsing. Since 2020, nearly 60 China-based companies have conducted initial public offerings on Nasdaq raising $15 million or less each, with more than one-third experiencing sudden single-day price drops exceeding 50%. In one recent case, seven traders earned over $480 million by defrauding 600 victims who purchased shares in China Liberal Education Holdings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tensions between OpenAI and Microsoft over the future of their famed AI partnership are flaring up. WSJ, minutes ago: OpenAI wants to loosen Microsoft's grip on its AI products and computing resources, and secure the tech giant's blessing for its conversion into a for-profit company. Microsoft's approval of the conversion is key to OpenAI's ability to raise more money and go public. But the negotiations have been so difficult that in recent weeks, OpenAI's executives have discussed what they view as a nuclear option: accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior during their partnership, people familiar with the matter said. That effort could involve seeking federal regulatory review of the terms of the contract for potential violations of antitrust law, as well as a public campaign, the people said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers are cautioning users against clicking unsubscribe links embedded in email bodies, citing new data showing such actions can expose recipients to malicious websites and confirm active email addresses to attackers. DNSFilter found that one in every 644 clicks on unsubscribe links leads users to potentially malicious websites. "You've left the safe, structured environment of your email client and entered the open web," TK Keanini, DNSFilter's chief technology officer, told WSJ. The risks range from confirming to bad actors that an email address belongs to an active user to redirecting victims to fake websites designed to steal login credentials or install malware. Clicking such links "can make you a bigger target in the future," said Michael Bargury, CTO of security company Zenity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Dutch court on Monday confirmed a 2021 consumer watchdog's ruling saying that Apple had abused its dominant position by imposing unfair conditions on providers of dating apps in the App Store. From a report: The Rotterdam District Court ruled that the Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) was therefore right to impose an order subject to a penalty for non-compliance. The court ruled that ACM was right in finding that dating app providers had to use Apple's own payment system, were not allowed to refer to payment options outside the App Store, and had to pay a 30% commission (15% for small providers) to Apple.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has disabled Windows Hello's ability to authenticate users in low-light environments through a recent security update that now requires both infrared sensors and color cameras to verify faces. The change forces the system to see a visible face through the webcam before completing authentication with IR sensors. Windows Hello earlier relied solely on infrared sensors to create 3D facial scans, allowing the feature to work in complete darkness similar to iPhone's Face ID. Microsoft pushed the dual-camera requirement to address a spoofing vulnerability in the biometric system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Japan is the latest nation hoping to tempt disgruntled US researchers alarmed by the Trump administration's hostile attitude to academia to relocate to the Land of the Rising Sun. The Japanese government aims to create an elite research environment, and has detailed a $693 million package to attract researchers from abroad, including those from America who may have seen their budgets slashed or who fear a clampdown on their academic freedom.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have built a breakthrough random number generator that solves a critical problem: for the first time, every step of creating random numbers can be independently verified and audited, with quantum physics guaranteeing the numbers were truly unpredictable. Random numbers are essential for everything from online banking encryption to fair lottery drawings, but current systems have serious limitations. Computer-based generators follow predictable algorithms -- if someone discovers the starting conditions, they can predict all future outputs. Hardware generators that measure physical processes like electronic noise can't prove their randomness wasn't somehow predetermined or tampered with. The new system, developed by teams at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, uses quantum entanglement -- Einstein's "spooky action at a distance" -- to guarantee unpredictability. The setup creates pairs of photons that share quantum properties, then sends them to measurement stations 110 meters apart. When researchers measure each photon's properties, quantum mechanics ensures the results are fundamentally random and cannot be influenced by any classical communication between the stations. The team created a system called "Twine" that distributes the random number generation process across multiple independent parties, with each step recorded in tamper-proof digital ledgers called hash chains. This means no single organization controls the entire process, and anyone can verify that proper procedures were followed. During a 40-day demonstration, the system successfully generated random numbers in 7,434 of 7,454 attempts -- a 99.7% success rate. Each successful run produced 512 random bits with mathematical certainty of randomness bounded by an error rate of 2^-64, an extraordinarily high level of confidence.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Trump Organization on Monday unveiled a mobile phone plan and a $499 smartphone that is set to launch in September. CNBC: The new service, Trump Mobile, will offer a $47.45-per-month plan that includes "unlimited" talk, text and data, as well as roadside assistance and a "Telehealth and Pharmacy Benefit," according to its website. The company, owned by President Donald Trump, also announced it will sell a "T1" smartphone, which appears to feature a gold-colored metal case etched with an American flag.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's latest Windows 11 preview builds contain a bug that replaces the operating system's startup sound with Windows Vista's iconic boot chime from 2006. Microsoft acknowledged the bug in its release notes -- describing it as a "delightful blast from the past" -- and said it was working on a fix.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk forfeited patent protection for semaglutide -- the active ingredient in blockbuster diabetes and weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy -- in Canada after failing to pay a $450 maintenance fee in 2019. The company had paid maintenance fees through 2018 but requested a refund for the 2017 fee, apparently seeking more time to decide whether to continue protecting the patent. When the 2019 fee came due at $450 with late penalties, Novo never paid despite having a one-year grace period. Canadian patent authorities confirmed the patent "cannot be revived" once lapsed. The oversight is particularly costly given Canada represents the world's second-largest semaglutide market, worth billions annually. Generic drugmaker Sandoz plans to launch a competing version in early 2026, while Novo's U.S. patent protection extends until at least 2032.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, the messaging app had a clear focus. No ads, no games and no gimmicks. For years, that is what WhatsApp's two billion users -- many of them in Brazil, India and other countries around the world -- got. They chatted with friends and family unencumbered by advertising and other features found on social media. Now that is set to change. On Monday, WhatsApp said it would start showing ads inside its app for the first time. The promotions will appear only in an area of the app called Updates, which is used by around 1.5 billion people a day. WhatsApp will collect some data on users to target the ads, such as location and the device's default language, but it will not touch the contents of messages or whom users speak with. The company added that it had no plans to place ads in chats and personal messages. [...] In-app ads are a significant change from WhatsApp's original philosophy. Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who founded WhatsApp in 2009, were committed to building a simple and quick way for friends and family to communicate with end-to-end encryption, a method of keeping texts, photos, videos and phone calls inaccessible by third parties. Both left the company seven years ago. Since then, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, now Meta, has focused on WhatsApp's growth and user privacy while also melding the app into the company's other products, including Instagram and Messenger.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Walmart is bringing drone deliveries to three more states," reports CNBC:On Thursday, the big-box retailer said it plans to launch the speedier delivery option at 100 stores in Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando and Tampa within the coming year. With the expansion, Walmart's drone deliveries will be available in a total of five states: [parts of northwest] Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and [the Dallas-Fort Worth area of] Texas... The drone operator will have an up to a six-mile range from stores. Walmart tells CNBC the most frequently delivered items include ice cream, fresh fruit, and pet food, as well as "urgent items, such as hamburger buns for a cookout, eggs to make brownies or Tylenol or cold medicine needed when sick." It's all part of Walmart's effort to compete with Amazon:With more than 4,600 Walmart stores across the U.S., the retailer has used its large footprint to get online orders to customers faster. It has an Express Delivery service that drops purchases at customers' doors in as fast as 30 minutes, along with InHome, a subscription-based service, that puts items directly into people's fridges. The company began same-day prescription deliveries last fall and has expanded the service across the country.... Walmart stores have an assortment of over 150,000 items in a location. Over 50% of those can be delivered by drone, said Greg Cathey [Walmart's senior VP for U.S. transformation and innovation]... Walmart's drone delivery count so far is modest. The company did not share the specific count, but said it has racked up a total of more than 150,000 drone deliveries since 2021.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KDE isn't the only organization reaching out to " as Microsoft prepares to end support for Windows 10. "Now, The Document Foundation, maker of LibreOffice, has also joined in to support the Endof10 initiative," reports the tech blog Neowin:The foundation writes: "You don't have to follow Microsoft's upgrade path. There is a better option that puts control back in the hands of users, institutions, and public bodies: Linux and LibreOffice. Together, these two programmes offer a powerful, privacy-friendly and future-proof alternative to the Windows + Microsoft 365 ecosystem." It further adds the "real costs" of upgrading to Windows 11 as it writes: "The move to Windows 11 isn't just about security updates. It increases dependence on Microsoft through aggressive cloud integration, forcing users to adopt Microsoft accounts and services. It also leads to higher costs due to subscription and licensing models, and reduces control over how your computer works and how your data is managed. Furthermore, new hardware requirements will render millions of perfectly good PCs obsolete.... The end of Windows 10 does not mark the end of choice, but the beginning of a new era. If you are tired of mandatory updates, invasive changes, and being bound by the commercial choices of a single supplier, it is time for a change. Linux and LibreOffice are ready - 2025 is the right year to choose digital freedom!" The first words on LibreOffice's announcement? "The countdown has begun...."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spain's newspaper El Pais found an entire fake album on YouTube titled Rumba Congo (1973). And they cite a study from France's International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers that estimated revenue from AI-generated music will rise to $4 billion in 2028, generating 20% of all streaming platforms' revenue:One of the major problems with this trend is the lack of transparency. Maria Teresa Llano, an associate professor at the University of Sussex who studies the intersection of creativity, art and AI, emphasizes this aspect: "There's no way for people to know if something is AI or not...." On Spotify Community - a forum for the service's users - a petition is circulating that calls for clear labeling of AI-generated music, as well as an option for users to block these types of songs from appearing on their feeds. In some of these forums, the rejection of AI-generated music is palpable. Llano mentions the feelings of deception or betrayal that listeners may experience, but asserts that this is a personal matter. There will be those who feel this way, as well as those who admire what the technology is capable of... One of the keys to tackling the problem is to include a warning on AI-generated songs. YouTube states that content creators must "disclose to viewers when realistic content [...] is made with altered or synthetic media, including generative AI." Users will see this if they glance at the description. But this is only when using the app, because on a computer, they will have to scroll down to the very end of the description to get the warning.... The professor from the University of Sussex explains one of the intangibles that justifies the labeling of content: "In the arts, we can establish a connection with the artist; we can learn about their life and what influenced them to better understand their career. With artificial intelligence, that connection no longer exists." YouTube says they may label AI-generated content if they become aware of it, and may also remove it altogether, according to the article. But Spotify "hasn't shared any policy for labeling AI-powered content..." In an interview with Gustav Soderstrom, Spotify's co-president and chief product & technology officer, he emphasized that AI "increases people's creativity" because more people can be creative, thanks to the fact that "you don't need to have fine motor skills on the piano." He also made a distinction between music generated entirely with AI and music in which the technology is only partially used. But the only limit he mentioned for moderating artificial music was copyright infringement... something that has been a red line for any streaming service for many years now. And such a violation is very difficult to legally prove when artificial intelligence is involved.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Bloomberg:Amazon's hard-line stance on getting disabled employees to return to the office has sparked a backlash, with workers alleging the company is violating the Americans with Disabilities Act as well as their rights to collectively bargain. At least two Amazon employees have filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the National Labor Relations Board, federal agencies that regulate working conditions. One of the workers said they provided the EEOC with a list of 18 "similarly situated" employees to emphasize that their experience isn't isolated and to help federal regulators with a possible investigation. Disabled workers frustrated with how Amazon is handling their requests for accommodations - including exemptions to a mandate that they report to the office five days a week - are also venting their displeasure on internal chat rooms and have encouraged colleagues to answer surveys about the policies. Amazon has been deleting such posts and warning that they violate rules governing internal communications. One employee said they were terminated and another said they were told to find a different position after advocating for disabled workers on employee message boards. Both filed complaints with the EEOC and NLRB. Amazon has told employees with disabilities they must now submit to a "multilevel leader review," Bloomberg reported in October, "and could be required to return to the office for monthlong trials to determine if accommodations meet their needs." (They received calls from "accommodation consultants" who also reviewed medical documentation, after which "another Amazon manager must sign off. If they don't, the request goes to a third manager...") Bloomberg's new article remembers how several employees told them in November. "that they believed the system was designed to deny work-from-home accommodations and prompt employees with disabilities to quit, which some have done. Amazon denied the system was designed to encourage people to resign."Since then, workers have mobilized against the policy. One employee repeatedly posted an online survey seeking colleagues' reactions, defying the company's demands to stop. The survey ultimately generated feedback from more than 200 workers even though Amazon kept deleting it, and the results reflected strong opposition to Amazon's treatment of disabled workers. More than 71% of disabled Amazon employees surveyed said the company had denied or failed to meet most of their accommodation requests, while half indicated they faced "hostile" work environments after disclosing their disabilities and requesting accommodations. One respondent said they sought permission to work from home after suffering multiple strokes that prevented them from driving. Amazon suggested moving closer to the office and taking mass transit, the person said in the survey. Another respondent said they couldn't drive for longer than 15-minute intervals due to chronic pain. Amazon's recommendation was to pull over and stretch during their commute, which the employee said was unsafe since they drive on a busy freeway... Amazon didn't dispute the accounts and said it considered a range of solutions to disability accommodations, including changes to an employee's commute. Amazon is also "using AI to parse accommodation requests, read doctors' notes and make recommendations based on keywords," according to the article - another policy that's also generated internal opposition (and formed a "key element" of the complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission). "The dispute could affect thousands of Amazon workers. An internal Slack channel for employees with disabilities has 13,000 members, one of the people said..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In Tokyo Mitsubishi is deploying "an innovative new battery swap network for electric cars" in a multi-year test program reports the EV news site Electrek. But it's not just for electric cars. Along with the 14 modular battery swapping stations, Mitsubishi is also deploying "more than 150 battery-swappable commercial electric vehicles" from truck maker Fuso:A truck like the Mitsubishi eCanter typically requires a full night of AC charging to top off its batteries, and at least an hour or two on DC charging in Japan, according to Fuso. This joint pilot by Mitsubishi, Mitsubishi Fuso Trucks, and [EV battery swap specialist] Ample aims to circumvent this issue of forced downtime with its swappable batteries, supporting vehicle uptime by delivering a full charge within minutes. The move is meant to encourage the transport industry's EV shift while creating a depository of stored energy that can be deployed to the grid in the event of a natural disaster - something Mitsubishi in Japan has been working on for years. The article's author also adds their own opinion about battery-swapping technology. "When you see how simple it is to add hundreds of miles of driving in just 100 seconds - quicker, in many cases, than pumping a tank of liquid fuel into an ICE-powered car - you might come around, yourself."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Timothy B. Lee has written for the Washington Post, Vox.com, and Ars Technica - and now writes a Substack blog called "Understanding AI." This week he visits recent research by computer scientists and legal scholars from Stanford, Cornell, and West Virginia University that found that Llama 3.1 70BA(released in July 2024) has memorized 42% of the first Harry Potter book well enough to reproduce 50-token excerpts at least half the time...The paper was published last month by a team of computer scientists and legal scholars from Stanford, Cornell, and West Virginia University. They studied whether five popular open-weight models - three from Meta and one each from Microsoft and EleutherAI - were able to reproduce text from Books3, a collection of books that is widely used to train LLMs. Many of the books are still under copyright... Llama 3.1 70B - a mid-sized model Meta released in July 2024 - is far more likely to reproduce Harry Potter text than any of the other four models.... Interestingly, Llama 1 65B, a similar-sized model released in February 2023, had memorized only 4.4 percent of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. This suggests that despite the potential legal liability, Meta did not do much to prevent memorization as it trained Llama 3. At least for this book, the problem got much worse between Llama 1 and Llama 3. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was one of dozens of books tested by the researchers. They found that Llama 3.1 70B was far more likely to reproduce popular books - such as The Hobbit and George Orwell's 1984 - than obscure ones. And for most books, Llama 3.1 70B memorized more than any of the other models... For AI industry critics, the big takeaway is that - at least for some models and some books - memorization is not a fringe phenomenon. On the other hand, the study only found significant memorization of a few popular books. For example, the researchers found that Llama 3.1 70B only memorized 0.13 percent of Sandman Slim, a 2009 novel by author Richard Kadrey. That's a tiny fraction of the 42 percent figure for Harry Potter... To certify a class of plaintiffs, a court must find that the plaintiffs are in largely similar legal and factual situations. Divergent results like these could cast doubt on whether it makes sense to lump J.K. Rowling, Richard Kadrey, and thousands of other authors together in a single mass lawsuit. And that could work in Meta's favor, since most authors lack the resources to file individual lawsuits. Why is it happening? "Maybe Meta had trouble finding 15 trillion distinct tokens, so it trained on the Books3 dataset multiple times. Or maybe Meta added third-party sources - such as online Harry Potter fan forums, consumer book reviews, or student book reports - that included quotes from Harry Potter and other popular books..." "Or there could be another explanation entirely. Maybe Meta made subtle changes in its training recipe that accidentally worsened the memorization problem."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta and AWS have used Rust, and Netflix uses Go,reports the programming news site InfoQ. But using another language, Apple recently "migrated its global Password Monitoring service from Java to Swift, achieving a 40% increase in throughput, and significantly reducing memory usage." This freed up nearly 50% of their previously allocated Kubernetes capacity, according to the article, and even "improved startup time, and simplified concurrency."In a recent post, Apple engineers detailed how the rewrite helped the service scale to billions of requests per day while improving responsiveness and maintainability... "Swift allowed us to write smaller, less verbose, and more expressive codebases (close to 85% reduction in lines of code) that are highly readable while prioritizing safety and efficiency." Apple's Password Monitoring service, part of the broader Password app's ecosystem, is responsible for securely checking whether a user's saved credentials have appeared in known data breaches, without revealing any private information to Apple. It handles billions of requests daily, performing cryptographic comparisons using privacy-preserving protocols. This workload demands high computational throughput, tight latency bounds, and elastic scaling across regions... Apple's previous Java implementation struggled to meet the service's growing performance and scalability needs. Garbage collection caused unpredictable pause times under load, degrading latency consistency. Startup overhead - from JVM initialization, class loading, and just-in-time compilation, slowed the system's ability to scale in real time. Additionally, the service's memory footprint, often reaching tens of gigabytes per instance, reduced infrastructure efficiency and raised operational costs. Originally developed as a client-side language for Apple platforms, Swift has since expanded into server-side use cases.... Swift's deterministic memory management, based on reference counting rather than garbage collection (GC), eliminated latency spikes caused by GC pauses. This consistency proved critical for a low-latency system at scale. After tuning, Apple reported sub-millisecond 99.9th percentile latencies and a dramatic drop in memory usage: Swift instances consumed hundreds of megabytes, compared to tens of gigabytes with Java. "While this isn't a sign that Java and similar languages are in decline," concludes InfoQ's article, "there is growing evidence that at the uppermost end of performance requirements, some are finding that general-purpose runtimes no longer suffice."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NPR looks at the "high-quality, climate-friendly apartments" in Vienna, asking if it's a model for addressing both climate change and the housing crisis. About half the city's 2 million people live in the widespread (and government-supported) apartments, with solar panels on top and very thick, insulated walls that reduce the need for heating and cooling. (One resident tells NPR they don't even need an air conditioner because "It's not cold in winter times. It's not hot in summer times.")Vienna council member Nina Abrahamczik, who heads the climate and environment committee, says as the city transitions all of its buildings off planet-heating fossil fuels, they're starting with the roughly 420,000 housing units they already own or subsidize.... As Vienna makes an aggressive push to completely move away from climate-polluting natural gas by 2040, it's starting with much of this social housing, says Jurgen Czernohorszky, executive city councilor responsible for climate and environment. City-owned buildings are now switching from gas to massive electric heat pumps, and to geothermal, which involves probing into the ground to heat homes. Another massive geothermal project that drills even deeper into the earth to heat homes is also underway. The city is also powering housing with solar energy. As of a year and a half ago, Vienna mandates all new buildings and building extensions to have rooftop solar. And Vienna's older apartment buildings are getting climate retrofits, says Veronika Iwanowski, spokesperson for Vienna's municipal housing company, Wiener Wohnen. That includes new insulation, doors and windows to prevent the city's wind from getting in the cracks. The increase in energy efficiency and switching from gas to renewables doesn't just have climate benefits from cutting fossil fuel use. It also means housing residents are paying less on electric bills... With city-subsidized housing, housing developers can compete to get land and low-interest loans from the city. Officials say those competitions are a critical lever for climate action. "As we can control the contents of the competitions, we try to make them fit to the main goals of the city," says Kurt Hofstetter, city planner for Vienna, "which is of course also ecological...." Now the housing judges give out points for things like increased energy efficiency, green roofs and sustainable building materials... Now the climate innovations in subsidized housing are inspiring the private market as well, Hofstetter says... The article notes that most of the city's funding is provided in the form of low-interest loans, according to a researcher at the Austrian Federation of Limited-Profit Housing Associations. (And the average social housing rents are about $700 for a large one-bedroom apartment, says Gerald Kossl, researcher at the Austrian Federation of Limited-Profit Housing Associations.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.