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The TED conference is changing hands, and education pioneer Sal Khan will be the new "vision steward" for the institution long headed by Chris Anderson. From a report: The move aims to ensure the future of the organization, while keeping it a not-for-profit entity. Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, will be the public face of TED, with Logan McClure Davda taking over as CEO. Davda, who previously served as the organization's head of impact and was the co-founder of its fellows program, will run day-to-day operations. Khan remains CEO of Khan Academy while joining TED's board. Jay Herratti, who has served as CEO since 2021, will remain on TED's board. TED announced in February it was seeking new leadership and structure and put out an open call for proposals. The company held dozens of discussions, including some that would have transformed the organization into a for-profit venture. The organization's flagship conference is also headed for a big change, with 2026 being its last year in Vancouver, with plans to hold future events somewhere in California.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oil, gas and coal will continue to dominate the world's energy mix well beyond 2050, as soaring electricity demand outpaces the shift to renewables, according to a new McKinsey report. From a report: McKinsey expects fossil fuels to account for about 41-55% of global energy consumption in 2050, down from today's 64% but higher than previous projections. U.S. data-center-related power demand is expected to grow nearly 25% a year until 2030, while demand from data centers globally would average 17% growth per year between 2022 and 2030, especially in OECD countries. Alternative fuels are not likely to achieve broad adoption before 2040 unless mandated, but renewables do have the potential to provide 61-67% of the 2050 global power mix, McKinsey said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hanneke Faber, CEO of global tech manufacturing company Logitech, says she'd be open to the idea of having an AI-powered board member. From a report: "We already use [AI agents] in almost every meeting," Faber said at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington, D.C., on Monday. While she said AI agents today (like Microsoft Copilot and internal bots) mostly take care of summarization and idea generation, that's likely to change owing to the pace at which the technology is developing. "As they evolve -- and some of the best agents or assistants that we've built actually do things themselves -- that comes with a whole bunch of governance things," Faber said. "You have to keep in mind and make sure you really want that bot to take action. But if you don't have an AI agent in every meeting, you're missing out on some of the productivity." "That bot, in real time, has access to everything," she continued.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The IMF has issued a stark warning over soaring global government debt, saying it is on track to exceed 100% of GDP by 2029. Semafor: Such a ratio would be the highest since 1948, when large economies were rebuilding post-war. Today, "there is little political appetite for belt-tightening," The Economist wrote: Rich nations are reluctant to raise taxes on their beleaguered electorates -- but they're facing pressure to spend more on defense, and on social services for aging populations. Higher long-term bond yields, meanwhile, suggest investor wariness over governments' balance sheets. In the short term, the debt concerns manifest in political disruption: France's budget fight recently toppled another government, while the US federal shutdown highlights the tension between new spending demands and deficit reduction.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China now generates well over twice as much electricity as the United States. The country's economy has become substantially larger than America's in real terms, measured at purchasing power parity, economist Paul Krugman wrote this week. The Trump administration has moved aggressively against renewable energy development. It rolled back Biden's tax incentives for renewables through the One Big Beautiful Bill. The administration is attempting to stop a nearly completed offshore wind farm that could power hundreds of thousands of homes. It canceled $7 billion in grants for residential solar panels. A solar energy project that would have powered almost 2 million homes was killed. The administration canceled $8 billion in clean energy grants, mostly in Democratic states, and is reportedly planning to cancel tens of billions more. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said solar power is unreliable because "you have to have power when the sun goes behind a cloud and when the sun sets, which it does almost every night." California has already integrated substantial solar power into its grid through battery storage technology. Republican support for higher education has collapsed over the past decade, according to polling data. The administration has also targeted vaccines and research in multiple areas. Krugman argues that by 2028 America will have fallen so far behind China that it is unlikely to catch up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Korea's government has stripped AI-powered textbooks of their official status after a single semester of use. The textbooks were introduced in March for math, English, and computer science classes as a flagship initiative under former President Yoon Suk Yeol. Students and teachers complained about technical problems, factual inaccuracies, and increased workload. The government spent more than 1.2 trillion won ($850 million) on the program. Publishers invested around 800 billion won ($567 million). The textbooks were reclassified as supplementary material. Adoption rates dropped from 37% in the first semester to 19% in September. Only 2,095 schools now use them, about half the number from earlier in the year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The California Broadband & Video Association has objected to legislation signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on October 15 that allows apartment tenants to opt out of mandatory bulk billing for internet service. The cable industry group called the measure "an anti-affordability bill masked as consumer protection." The association said property owners would have to provide refunds to tenants who decline internet service provided through building contracts. The law "undermines the basis of the cost savings and will lead to bulk billing being phased out," the group said. Assembly member Rhodesia Ransom, who authored the bill, said lobby groups for internet providers and real estate companies worked hard to defeat it. The association told the Sacramento Bee it was disappointed Newsom signed the legislation because it would be "an impediment to utilizing an effective tool" that helped middle-class Californians get discounted rates. The law takes effect January 1. Tenants who are denied the right to opt out can deduct subscription costs from their rent.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BrianFagioli writes: The United States Mint is honoring Steve Jobs and Apple with a new coin for 2026. Part of the American Innovation $1 Coin Program, California's entry depicts a young Jobs seated before rolling northern California hills, accompanied by the words "Make Something Wonderful." The reflective design, created by Elana Hagler and sculpted by Phebe Hemphill, captures how Jobs's surroundings and vision shaped Apple's mission to make technology feel intuitive and human. The 2026 series also celebrates Dr. Norman Borlaug for Iowa, the Cray-1 supercomputer for Wisconsin, and mobile refrigeration for Minnesota. The obverse of all coins features the Statue of Liberty and a special Liberty Bell mark commemorating the nation's Semiquincentennial. The Steve Jobs coin stands out as one of the few times the U.S. Mint has recognized a modern tech innovator, and some collectors are already calling it one of the most exciting releases in years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is reshaping Windows around AI, introducing capabilities that let users control their computers through voice and allow Copilot to take autonomous actions on their behalf. The company is now rolling out a "Hey, Copilot!" wake word on Windows 11 machines, positioning voice as a "third input mechanism" to supplement the keyboard and mouse. Copilot Vision, which streams what a user sees on their screen, is rolling out globally, enabling the system to troubleshoot PC problems, help with app usage, and provide task guidance. Microsoft is simultaneously testing Copilot Actions through a limited preview, allowing the AI to take autonomous actions on local machines like editing folders of photos. The company is also integrating Copilot into the Windows taskbar and launching advertisements promoting these features, coinciding with Windows 10's end-of-support earlier this week. Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's consumer chief marketing officer, said the company wants users upgrading to Windows 11 to "experience what it means to have a PC that's not just a tool, but a true partner." Microsoft attempted to popularize Cortana, a voice assistant, on Windows 10 a decade ago. Last year, the company released Recall, a feature that automatically captured screenshots, drawing criticism over privacy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paxos mistakenly minted $300 trillion of PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin on Wednesday during an internal transfer. Within minutes, the company identified the error and burned the excess tokens. The transaction appeared on Etherscan, then was quietly reversed before any funds moved or users were harmed. Paxos said there was no security breach and customer funds were safe. The amount exceeded all US dollars in circulation and surpassed the entire cryptocurrency market combined. Stablecoin issuers possess the power to create or delete billions in synthetic dollars instantly -- a capability that distinguishes them from Bitcoin transfers, which are irreversible. Tether mistakenly minted and burned $5 billion in USDT in 2019.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GrapheneOS, the privacy-focused Android fork once exclusive to Google Pixels, is partnering with a major Android OEM to bring its hardened, de-Googled OS to Snapdragon-powered flagship phones. Android Authority reports: Until now, GrapheneOS has been available only on Pixel phones, making Google's flagships popular among privacy enthusiasts, journalists, and, as a Spanish police report suggested earlier this year, even organized crime groups in Catalonia. But that Pixel exclusivity may end by 2026 or 2027. GrapheneOS revealed in a Reddit thread that it has been working with a "major Android OEM" since June 2025 to enable official support for "future versions of their existing models." These devices will reportedly use flagship Snapdragon chips, a notable shift from Google's in-house Tensor processors. The project explained that only Pixels have met its strict security and update requirements so far. However, the new partnership suggests that another OEM is finally matching those standards. GrapheneOS also hinted that the mysterious partner's devices will be "priced similarly to Pixels" and available globally as part of the brand's standard lineup.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists from Spain and China have successfully repaired the blood-brain barrier in Alzheimer's-model mice, enabling the brain to naturally clear amyloid-beta plaques and reverse cognitive decline. "After just three drug injections, mice with certain genes that mimic Alzheimer's showed a reversal of several key pathological features," adds ScienceAlert. From the report: Within hours of the first injection, the animal brains showed a nearly 45 percent reduction in clumps of amyloid-beta plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The mice had previously shown signs of cognitive decline, but after all three doses, the animals performed on par with their healthy peers in spatial learning and memory tasks. The benefits lasted at least six months. These preclinical results don't guarantee success in humans, but they're an encouraging start, which the authors say "heralds a new era" in drug research. "The therapeutic implications are profound," claim the international team of researchers, co-led by scientists at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and the West China Hospital Sichuan University (WCHSU). The findings have been published in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Conversation: Sound waves at frequencies above the threshold for human hearing are routinely used in medical care. Also known as ultrasound, these sound waves can help clinicians diagnose and monitor disease, and can also provide first glimpses of your newest family members. And now, patients with conditions ranging from cancer to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's may soon benefit from recent advances in this technology. I am a biomedical engineer who studies how focused ultrasound -- the concentration of sound energy into a specific volume -- can be fine-tuned to treat various conditions. Over the past few years, this technology has seen significant growth and use in the clinic. And researchers continue to discover new ways to use focused ultrasound to treat disease. [...] Research on focused ultrasound has primarily focused on the most devastating and prevalent diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimer's disease. However, I believe that further developments in, and increased use of, focused ultrasound in the clinic will eventually benefit patients with rare diseases. One rare disease of particular interest for my lab is cerebral cavernous malformation, or CCM. CCMs are lesions in the brain that occur when the cells that make up blood vessels undergo uncontrolled growth. While uncommon, when these lesions grow and hemorrhage, they can cause debilitating neurological symptoms. The most common treatment for CCM is surgical removal of the brain lesions; however, some CCMs are located in brain areas that are difficult to access, creating a risk of side effects. Radiation is another treatment option, but it, too, can lead to serious adverse effects. We found that using focused ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier can improve drug delivery to CCMs. Additionally, we also observed that focused ultrasound treatment itself could stop CCMs from growing in mice, even without administering a drug. While we don't yet understand how focused ultrasound is stabilizing CCMs, abundant research on the safety of using this technique in patients treated for other conditions has allowed neurosurgeons to begin designing clinical trials testing the use of this technique on people with CCM. With further research and advancements, I am hopeful that focused ultrasound can become a viable treatment option for many devastating rare diseases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mspohr shares a report from Futurism: Western automotive and green energy executives who visit China are returning humbled -- and even terrified. As The Telegraph reports, the executives are warning that the country's heavily automated manufacturing industry could quickly leave Western nations behind, especially when it comes to electric vehicles. "We are in a global competition with China, and it's not just EVs," Ford CEO Jim Farley told The Verge last month. "And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford." Some companies are giving up on new initiatives altogether, with the founder of mining company Fortescue, Andrew Forrest, claiming that his recent trip to China led to him abandoning attempts to produce EV powertrains in-house. "There are no people -- everything is robotic," he told The Telegraph. Other executives recalled touring "dark factories" that don't even need to keep the lights on, as most work is being done around the clock by robots. "You get this sense of a change, where China's competitiveness has gone from being about government subsidies and low wages to a tremendous number of highly skilled, educated engineers who are innovating like mad," British energy supplier Octopus CEO Greg Jackson told the newspaper. According to recent figures by the International Federation of Robotics, China has deployed orders of magnitude more industrial robots than Germany, the US, and the UK.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Norway has effectively achieved its 2025 goal of 100% electric new car sales, prompting the government to declare "mission accomplished" and propose scaling back EV tax exemptions to reflect a mature market. "We have had a goal that all new passenger cars should be electric by 2025, and ... we can say that the goal has been achieved," announced Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg. Electrek reports: With the finish line in sight, the Norwegian government is now fine-tuning its approach. The current incentive program maintains the crucial VAT exemption for EVs, but only up to a purchase price of 500,000 Norwegian kroner (approximately $49,000 USD). This move is designed to target more expensive, luxury EVs, ensuring that the incentive benefits a broader range of consumers. However, the latest budget proposal aims to reduce the EV tax exemption to vehicles costing 300,000 Norwegian kroner (~30,000 USD). This would apply for 2026, and then the tax exemption would completely end in 2027. Additionally, the government plans to increase taxes on new gasoline and diesel cars, further widening the cost gap between polluting and zero-emission vehicles. However, the proposal still needs to be adopted by Norway's government, and there is some opposition. EV associations are advocating for a more extended phase-out period to ensure that the adoption rate doesn't decline.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boris Johnson's former adviser claims that China infiltrated a key UK government data-transfer network for years, compromising highly classified materials and prompting a Whitehall cover-up that prioritized Chinese investment over national security. The Times reports: Dominic Cummings, who served as a senior adviser to Boris Johnson, said that he and the then prime minister were informed about the breach in 2020 but that there had subsequently been a cover-up. He said he was warned at the time that disclosing some specific details of the breach would be a criminal offence. He claimed that the breach included some "Strap" material, which is the government term for the highest level of classified information. The breach, which was confirmed by two other senior Whitehall sources, was said to have been connected to a Chinese-owned company involved in Britain's critical national infrastructure. Tom Tugendhat, a former Tory security minister, supported Cummings's account. Cummings said that he and Johnson were informed of the breach in the "bunker" of No 10 -- a reference to the secure room in Downing Street. He told The Times: "The cabinet secretary said, 'We have to explain something; there's been a serious problem', and he talked through what this was. "And it was so bizarre that, not just Boris, a few people in the room were looking around like this -- 'Am I somehow misunderstanding what he's saying? Because it sounds f***ing crazy.'" He added: "What I'm saying is that some Strap stuff was compromised and vast amounts of data classified as extremely secret and extremely dangerous for any foreign entity to control was compromised. "Material from intelligence services. Material from the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. Things the government has to keep secret. If they're not secret, then there are very, very serious implications for it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People in London could be hiring driverless taxis from Waymo next year, after the US autonomous vehicle company announced plans to launch its services there. The UK capital will become the first European city to have an autonomous taxi service of the kind now familiar in San Francisco and four other US cities using Waymo's technology. The launch pits an innovation sometimes dubbed the "robotaxi" against London's famous black cabs, which can trace their history back to the first horse-drawn hackney coaches of the Tudor era. But a representative of the capital's cab drivers said they were not concerned by the arrival of a "fairground ride" and questioned the reliability of driverless vehicles. Waymo said its cars were now on their way to London and would start driving on the capital's streets in the coming weeks with "trained human specialists," or safety drivers, behind the wheel. The company, originally formed as a spin-off from Google's self-driving car program, said it would scale up operations and work closely with Transport for London and the Department for Transportto obtain the permits needed to offer fully autonomous rides in 2026. Uber and the UK tech company Wayve have also announced their own plans to trial their driverless taxis in the capital next year, after the British government said it would accelerate rules allowing public trials to take place before legislation enabling self-driving vehicles passes in full.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla is testing a free, built-in VPN for Firefox that routes traffic through Mozilla-managed servers directly in the browser. The Register reports: According to a staff post on Mozilla Connect, the company's idea-sharing platform, Firefox VPN is still an experimental feature in the early stages of development, but users will be selected at random to test it "over the next few months." Moz describes the feature as one that will sit beside the search bar on Firefox, routing web traffic through a Mozilla-managed VPN server, concealing the user's real IP address while adding a layer of encryption to their communications. Firefox VPN is a different project entirely from Mozilla VPN, a separate, paid-for product. The Firefox version will be free to use and confined to the browser itself, while Mozilla VPN can be used by up to five devices at a time. The Moz staffer on the product team who announced the feature said of the upcoming beta test: "We'll start simple, then gradually add new capabilities while learning how it impacts browsing, usage, and overall satisfaction. "Our long-term vision is ambitious: to build the best VPN-integrated browser on the market." In response to feedback, the staffer noted that while it will be a desktop browser feature first, "mobile is definitely a natural next step."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic is projecting its annualized revenue run rate to soar from roughly $7 billion today to as much as $26 billion in 2026, driven by rapid enterprise adoption of its Claude AI models. Reuters reports: Anthropic debuted a new version of its cheapest AI model, Haiku, on Wednesday, as part of a broader effort to appeal to companies that are looking for capable AI systems that are dramatically cheaper than its more advanced models. The Haiku 4.5 model sells for about one-third the price of Sonnet 4, one of its medium-sized models. The revenue projections underscore continued strong demand for generative AI tools among businesses and help explain investor enthusiasm, even as AI spending, especially in infrastructure buildout, comes under scrutiny. Some people worry the level of investment might be unsustainable. Fueling the expansion is the uptake of enterprise products, which are built for organizations. Anthropic has more than 300,000 business and enterprise customers, which account for about 80% of its revenue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: U.S. cybersecurity company F5 disclosed that nation-state hackers breached its systems and stole undisclosed BIG-IP security vulnerabilities and source code. The company states that it first became aware of the breach on August 9, 2025, with its investigations revealing that the attackers had gained long-term access to its system, including the company's BIG-IP product development environment and engineering knowledge management platform. F5 is a Fortune 500 tech giant specializing in cybersecurity, cloud management, and application delivery networking (ADN) applications. The company has 23,000 customers in 170 countries, and 48 of the Fortune 50 entities use its products. BIG-IP is the firm's flagship product used for application delivery and traffic management by many large enterprises worldwide. [...] F5 is still reviewing which customers had their configuration or implementation details stolen and will contact them with guidance. To help customers secure their F5 environments against risks stemming from the breach, the company released updates for BIG-IP, F5OS, BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes, BIG-IQ, and APM clients. Despite any evidence "of undisclosed critical or remote code execution vulnerabilities," the company urges customers to prioritize installing the new BIG-IP software updates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is introducing new recovery tools that aim to make it less frustrating to regain access when you're locked out of your account. The Verge: Instead of answering security questions or entering a recovery email address, Google's new security features allow account holders to verify their identity using a linked mobile number, or trusted friends or family members. The Recovery Contacts feature enables users to designate people to confirm their identity in order to regain access to accounts after getting hacked or losing their password or passkey. Google didn't specify how the verification process works, but says the feature provides "a simple and secure way to regain access when standard recovery methods fail." Recovery Contacts is available for eligible personal Google accounts, and can be found under the Security option in the account settings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alexis Ohanian, who helped build Reddit, says much of the internet has become dominated by bots and AI. Speaking on the podcast TBPN, he described the internet as increasingly "quasi-AI" and filled with what he called "LinkedIn slop." Ohanian referenced dead internet theory, the assertion that bot activity exceeds human activity on the web. In September, Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, posted that while he had not taken the theory seriously, he now sees "a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. passport has fallen out of the top 10 most powerful passports globally for the first time in 20 years in the latest edition of the Henley Passport Index, which ranks nations based on the number of destinations a traveler can visit without needing a visa. From a report: The U.S. ranking is on a steep downward trend, with the U.S. passport now in 12th spot, tied with Malaysia, having already fallen from seventh place last year to 10th place in July. A decade ago, the U.S. passport topped the index. Christian H. Kaelin, chairman of Henley & Partners and creator of the index, said in a news release on Tuesday that the declining strength of the U.S. passport signaled a "fundamental shift in global mobility and soft power dynamics." Kaelin added: "Nations that embrace openness and cooperation are surging ahead, while those resting on past privilege are being left behind."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK should be prepared to cope with weather extremes as a result of at least 2C of global warming by 2050, independent climate advisers have said. BBC: The country was "not yet adapted" to worsening weather extremes already occurring at current levels of warming, "let alone" what was expected to come, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) wrote in a letter addressed to the government. The committee said they would advise that the UK prepare for climate change beyond the long-term temperature goal set out in the Paris Agreement. The letter came as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed that 2024 had seen a record rise of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. CO2 is the gas mainly responsible for human-caused climate change and is released when fossil fuels are burnt, as well as other activities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Almost 70% of adults in the US would be deemed to have obesity based on a new definition, research suggests. From a report: The traditional definition of obesity, typically based on having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or greater, has long been contentious, not least as it does not differentiate between fat and muscle. In an effort to tackle the issue, in January medical experts from around the world called for a new definition to be adopted. This would encompass people either with a BMI greater than 40; or those with a high BMI and at least one raised figure for measures such as waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, or waist-to-height ratio; or those with two such raised figures regardless of BMI; or those with direct measures of excess body fat based on scans. In addition, they said obesity should be split into two categories: clinical obesity -- where there are signs of illness -- and pre-clinical obesity, where there are not. Now research suggests the revamped definition could result in a dramatic rise in the prevalence of obesity among adults in the US.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Math teachers across American schools are contending with a classroom disruption that has proven impossible to contain. The numbers six and seven now trigger instant pandemonium among students. They scream the phrase and perform a palms-up seesaw hand gesture whenever the numbers appear in equations or instructions. Teachers have begun avoiding breaking students into groups of six or seven or asking them to turn to page 67. The meme has no meaning, reports WSJ. That absence of meaning is the point. The phenomenon traces back to late last year when Philadelphia rapper Skrilla released "Doot Doot (6 7)," a song referencing 67th street where his friends grew up. The phrase spiraled into youth culture in March through a viral video of a boy with forward-swept hair lurching toward a camera to deliver an animated "six seven." Skrilla is now touring venues where audiences wait for the six-seven line. Some teachers have attempted to neutralize the meme by saying it themselves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is releasing its new 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 chip in European markets without a charger. Customers in the U.S., Ireland, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, and other European countries must supply their own power adapter. Buyers in the U.S. and other regions will receive Apple's 70-watt USB-C adapter. Apple attributed the decision to environmental goals as the European Union implements regulations on electronic waste. A USB-C to MagSafe 3 cable remains included. The adapter costs 59 pounds in the United Kingdom.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Wednesday, Pew Research Center published a survey assessing how parents in the US with children under 12 manage their kids' screen time, which revealed that 61% of respondents overall reported their child ever uses or interacts with smartphones -- including 38% of those with children under 2 years old. Much of this smartphone screen time is likely made up by parents streaming kid-friendly cartoons for their little ones to watch on the go: the study also found that YouTube use among children under 2 has risen sharply from 45% to 62% over the last five years. But it appears that most American toddlers only need to wait a few years before they can get devices of their very own. The same survey showed that almost one in four US parents overall allow their children aged 12 and under to have their own smartphones, and this ballooned to nearly 60% when just looking at kids aged 11-12 years old.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Japanese government has made a formal request asking OpenAI to refrain from copyright infringement. The request came after Sora 2 began generating videos featuring copyrighted characters from anime and video games. Minoru Kiuchi spoke at the Cabinet Office press conference on Friday and described manga and anime as "irreplaceable treasures" that Japan boasts to the world. The request was made online by the Cabinet Office's Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters. Sora 2, which launched recently, generates twenty-second videos at 1080p resolution. Social media is getting filled with videos showing characters from One Piece, Demon Slayer, Pokemon and Mario. Digital Minister Masaaki Taira expressed hopes that OpenAI would comply voluntarily. He indicated that measures under Japan's AI Promotion Act may be invoked if the issue remains unresolved.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple will increase investment in China, the company's CEO Tim Cook said during a meeting with the country's industry minister in Beijing on Wednesday, according to an official summary of their exchange. From a report: Many U.S. companies have become cautious about relations with China as the world's two biggest economies have clashed over trade tariffs and as U.S. President Donald Trump seeks to promote manufacture in the United States rather than elsewhere. But Cook told China's industry minister Li Lecheng the iPhone maker will keep investing in China, the Chinese ministry said, although the summary gave no details of the size of the projected investment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several leading news organizations with access to Pentagon briefings have formally said they will not agree to a new defense department policy that requires them to pledge they will not obtain unauthorized material and restricts access to certain areas unless accompanied by an official. The Guardian: The policy, presented last month by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has been widely criticized by media organizations asked to sign the pledge by Tuesday at 5pm or have 24 hours to turn in their press credentials. The move follows a shake-up in February in which long-credentialed media outlets were required to vacate assigned workspaces which was cast as an "annual media rotation program." A similar plan was presented at the White House where some briefing room spots were given to podcasters and other representatives of non-traditional media. On Monday, the Washington Post joined the New York Times, CNN, the Atlantic, the Guardian, Reuters, the Associated Press, NPR, HuffPost and trade publication Breaking Defense in saying it would not sign on to the agreement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple unveiled a new 14-inch MacBook Pro on Wednesday that features the company's M5 chip and represents what Apple describes as the next major advancement in AI performance for its Mac lineup. The laptop delivers up to 3.5 times faster AI performance than the M4 chip and up to six times faster performance than the M1 chip through a redesigned 10-core GPU architecture that incorporates a Neural Accelerator in each core. The improvements extend beyond AI processing to include graphics performance that runs up to 1.6 times faster than the previous generation and battery life that reaches up to 24 hours on a single charge. Apple also integrated faster storage technology that performs up to twice as fast as the prior generation and allows configurations up to 4TB. The 10-core CPU delivers up to 20% faster multithreaded performance compared to the M4. The laptop runs macOS Tahoe and includes a Liquid Retina XDR display available in a nano-texture option, a 12MP Center Stage camera, and a six-speaker sound system. The 14-inch MacBook Pro is available for pre-order starting Wednesday in space black and silver finishes and begins shipping October 22. The base model costs $1,599.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has launched the LibrePhone Project, an initiative to create a fully free and open-source mobile operating system that eliminates proprietary firmware and binary blobs. From the FSF: "Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF with the goal of bringing full freedom to the mobile computing environment. The vast majority of software users around the world use a mobile phone as their primary computing device. After forty years of advocacy for computing freedom, the FSF will now work to bring the right to study, change, share, and modify the programs users depend on in their daily lives to mobile phones....Practically, Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom. The FSF has hired experienced developer Rob Savoye (DejaGNU, Gnash, OpenStreetMap, and more) to lead the technical project. He is currently investigating the state of device firmware and binary blobs in other mobile phone freedom projects, prioritizing the free software work done by the not entirely free software mobile phone operating system LineageOS." The project site can be found here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study shows that common baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) can survive Mars-like conditions, including meteorite shock waves and toxic perchlorate salts found in Martian soil. Phys.org reports: Published in PNAS Nexus, Purusharth I. Rajyaguru and colleagues subjected Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is a widely used model yeast, to shock waves and perchlorates. The authors chose the yeast in part because it has already been studied in space. When stressed, yeast, humans, and many other organisms form ribonucleoprotein (RNP) condensates, structures made of RNA and proteins that protect RNA and affect the fates of mRNAs. When the stressor passes, the RNP condensates, which include subtypes known as stress granules and P-bodies, disassemble. The authors simulated Martian shock waves at the High-Intensity Shock Tube for Astrochemistry (HISTA) housed in the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India. Yeast exposed to 5.6 Mach intensity shock waves survived with slowed growth, as did yeast subjected to 100 mM sodium salt of perchlorate (NaClO4) -- a concentration similar to that in Martian soils. Yeast cells also survived exposure to the combined stress of shock waves and perchlorate stress. In both cases, the yeast assembled RNP condensates. Shock waves induced the assembly of stress granules and P-bodies; perchlorate caused yeast to make P-bodies but not stress granules. Mutants incapable of assembling RNP condensates were poor at surviving the Martian stress condition. Transcriptome analysis identified specific RNA transcripts perturbed by Mars-like conditions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: On Monday, a publicly-sourced archive of more than 10,000 national park signs and monument placards went public as part of a massive volunteer project to save historical and educational placards from around the country that risk removal by the Trump administration. Visitors to national parks and other public monuments at more than 300 sites across the U.S. took photos of signs and submitted them to the archive to be saved in case they're ever removed in the wake of the Trump administration's rewriting of park history. The full archive is available here, with submissions from July to the end of September. The signs people have captured include historical photos from Alcatraz, stories from the African American Civil War Memorial, photos and accounts from the Brown v. Board of Education National History Park, and hundreds more sites. "I'm so excited to share this collaborative photo collection with the public. As librarians, our goal is to preserve the knowledge and stories told in these signs. We want to put the signs back in the people's hands," Jenny McBurney, Government Publications Librarian at the University of Minnesota and one of the co-founders of the Save Our Signs project, said in a press release. "We are so grateful for all the people who have contributed their time and energy to this project. The outpouring of support has been so heartening. We hope the launch of this archive is a way for people to see all their work come together."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Department of Justice seized about $15 billion in bitcoin from wallets tied to Chen Zhi, founder of Cambodia's Prince Holding Group, who is accused of running one of the world's biggest "pig butchering" scams. Prosecutors say Zhi's network trafficked people into forced-labor scam compounds that defrauded victims worldwide through fake crypto investment schemes. CNBC reports: The seizure is the largest forfeiture action by the DOJ in history. An indictment charging the alleged pig butcher, Chen Zhi, was unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn, New York. Zhi, who is also known as "Vincent," remains at large, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York. He was identified in court filings as the founder and chairman of Prince Holding Group, a multinational business conglomerate based in Cambodia, which prosecutors said grew "in secret .... into one of Asia's largest transnational criminal organizations. [...] The scams duped people contacted via social media and messaging applications online into transferring cryptocurrency into accounts controlled by the scheme with false promises that the crypto would be invested and produce profits, according to the office. "In reality, the funds were stolen from the victims and laundered for the benefit of the perpetrators," the release said. "The scam perpetrators often built relationships with their victims over time, earning their trust before stealing their funds." Prosecutors said that hundreds of people were trafficked and forced to work in the scam compounds, "often under the threat of violence." Zhi and a network of top executives in the Prince Group are accused of using political influence in multiple countries to protect their criminal enterprise and paid bribes to public officials to avoid actions by law enforcement authorities targeting the scheme, according to prosecutors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roughly 200,000 Linux-based Framework laptops shipped with a signed UEFI shell command (mm) that can be abused to bypass Secure Boot protections -- allowing attackers to load persistent bootkits like BlackLotus or HybridPetya. Framework has begun patching affected models, though some fixes and DBX updates are still pending. BleepingComputer reports: According to firmware security company Eclypsium, the problem stems from including a 'memory modify' (mm) command in legitimately signed UEFI shells that Framework shipped with its systems. The command provides direct read/write access to system memory and is intended for low-level diagnostics and firmware debugging. However, it can also be leveraged to break the Secure Boot trust chain by targeting the gSecurity2 variable, a critical component in the process of verifying the signatures of UEFI modules. The mm command can be abused to overwrite gSecurity2 with NULL, effectively disabling signature verification. "This command writes zeros to the memory location containing the security handler pointer, effectively disabling signature verification for all subsequent module loads." The researchers also note that the attack can be automated via startup scripts to persist across reboots.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: NordVPN has open sourced its Linux GUI on GitHub, giving the community full access to the code behind its graphical client. The move follows a 70 percent surge in daily active Linux users since the GUI's debut earlier this year, showing clear demand for a user friendly VPN experience on the platform. Alongside the previously open sourced command line tool, the GUI codebase is now available for anyone to audit, modify, and contribute to. While NordVPN's core backend infrastructure remains proprietary, the company says the open source release reflects its commitment to transparency and collaboration with the Linux community. The GUI can also now be installed with a single command using Snap, simplifying setup and ensuring automatic updates across distributions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Google announced on Tuesday that it will invest $15 billion in India over the next five years to establish its first artificial intelligence hub in the country. Located in the southern city of Visakhapatnam, the hub will be one of Google's largest globally. It will feature gigawatt-scale data center operations, extensive energy infrastructure and an expanded fiber-optic network, the company said in a statement. The investment underscores Google's growing reliance on India as a key technology and talent base in the global race for AI dominance. For India, it brings in high-value infrastructure and foreign investment at a scale that can accelerate its digital transformation ambitions. Google said its AI hub investment will include construction of a new international subsea gateway that would connect to the company's more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) of existing terrestrial and subsea cables. "The initiative creates substantial economic and societal opportunities for both India and the United States, while pioneering a generational shift in AI capability," the company's statement said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader Gadi Evron writes: Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan say agentic AI is already broken at the core. In their IEEE Security & Privacy essay, they argue that AI agents run on untrusted data, use unverified tools, and make decisions in hostile environments. Every part of the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) is open to attack. Prompt injection, data poisoning, and tool misuse corrupt the system from the inside. The model's strength, treating all input as equal, also makes it exploitable. They call this the AI security trilemma: fast, smart, or secure. Pick two. Integrity isn't a feature you bolt on later. It has to be built in from the start. "Computer security has evolved over the decades," the authors wrote. "We addressed availability despite failures through replication and decentralization. We addressed confidentiality despite breaches using authenticated encryption. Now we need to address integrity despite corruption." "Trustworthy AI agents require integrity because we can't build reliable systems on unreliable foundations. The question isn't whether we can add integrity to AI but whether the architecture permits integrity at all."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Walmart announced a new partnership with OpenAI that will let customers shop using ChatGPT. "For many years now, eCommerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses. That is about to change," Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said in a statement. NBC News reports: It was unclear Tuesday what the terms of the Walmart-AI partnership would be. The announcement also did not say when shoppers can expect to see ChatGPT integrated with their Walmart online shopping experiences, only that it's coming "soon." The OpenAI announcement is part of a broader push by Walmart, the biggest private employer in the U.S., to incorporate AI into its daily operations. "We're excited to partner with Walmart to make everyday purchases a little simpler. It's just one way AI will help people every day under our work together," Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said in a statement. The partnership could also serve OpenAI by introducing ChatGPT to a massive set of consumers who may not be as accustomed to using AI chats in their shopping as OpenAI's core user base. "There is a native AI experience coming that is multi-media, personalized and contextual," said Walmart's McMillon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today is the official end-of-support date for Microsoft's Windows 10. That doesn't mean these PCs will suddenly stop working, but if you don't take action, it does mean your PC has received its last regular security patches and that Microsoft is washing its hands of technical support. This end-of-support date comes about a decade after the initial release of Windows 10, which is typical for most Windows versions. But it comes just four years after Windows 10 was replaced by Windows 11, a version with stricter system requirements that left many older-but-still-functional PCs with no officially supported upgrade path. As a result, Windows 10 still runs on roughly 40 percent of the world's Windows PCs (or around a third of US-based PCs), according to StatCounter data. But this end-of-support date also isn't set in stone. Home users with Windows 10 PCs can enroll in Microsoft's Extended Security Updates (ESU) program, which extends the support timeline by another year. [...] Home users can only get a one-year stay of execution for Windows 10, but IT administrators and other institutions with fleets of Windows 10 PCs can also pay for up to three years of ESUs, which is also roughly the amount of time users can expect new Microsoft Defender antivirus updates and updates for core apps like Microsoft Edge. Obviously, Microsoft's preferred upgrade path would be either an upgrade to Windows 11 for PCs that meet the requirements or an upgrade to a new PC that does support Windows 11. It's also still possible, at least for now, to install and run Windows 11 on unsupported PCs. Your day-to-day experience will generally be pretty good, though installing Microsoft's major yearly updates (like the upcoming Windows 11 25H2 update) can be a bit of a pain.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Salesforce says it's saving about $100 million a year by using AI tools in the software company's customer service operations. From a report: The company is working to sell AI features that can handle work such as customer service or early-stage sales. To illustrate the value of the Agentforce product to business clients, Salesforce has been vocal about its own use of the technology. Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff announced the statistic on Salesforce's savings during a speech Tuesday at the annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The company said more than 12,000 customers are using Agentforce. For example, Reddit was able to cut customer support resolution time by 84%, Salesforce said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DirecTV wants to use AI to put you, your family, and your pets inside a custom TV screensaver. From a report: If that's not uncanny enough, you'll find items you can shop for within that AI environment, whether it's a piece of clothing similar to the one your AI likeness is wearing or a piece of furniture that pops up alongside it. The satellite TV giant is partnering with the AI company Glance to roll out this experience to DirecTV Gemini devices starting next year. "We are making television a lean-in experience versus lean back," Rajat Wanchoo, the group vice president of commercial partnerships at Glance, tells The Verge. "We want to give users a chance to use the advancements that have happened in generative AI to create a ChatGPT moment for themselves, but on TV." Glance is owned by InMobi, the same company that injected ecommerce bloatware into Motorola's budget phones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An attorney in a New York Supreme Court commercial case got caught using AI in his filings, and then got caught using AI again in the brief where he had to explain why he used AI, according to court documents filed earlier this month. New York Supreme Court Judge Joel Cohen wrote in a decision granting the plaintiff's attorneys' request for sanctions that the defendant's counsel, Michael Fourte's law offices, not only submitted AI-hallucinated citations and quotations in the summary judgment brief that led to the filing of the plaintiff's motion for sanctions, but also included "multiple new AI-hallucinated citations and quotations" in the process of opposing the motion. "In other words," the judge wrote, "counsel relied upon unvetted AI -- in his telling, via inadequately supervised colleagues -- to defend his use of unvetted AI." The case itself centers on a dispute between family members and a defaulted loan. The details of the case involve a fairly run-of-the-mill domestic money beef, but Fourte's office allegedly using AI that generated fake citations, and then inserting nonexistent citations into the opposition brief, has become the bigger story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indonesia's film industry has started using generative AI tools to produce films at a fraction of Hollywood budgets. The country's filmmakers are deploying ChatGPT for scriptwriting, Midjourney for image generation, and Runway for video storyboarding. VFX artist Amilio Garcia Leonard told Rest of World that AI has reduced his draft editing time by 70%. The Indonesian Film Producer Association supports the technology. Indonesian films typically cost 10 billion rupiah ($602,500), less than 1% of major Hollywood productions. The sector employed about 40,000 people in 2020 and generated over $400 million in box office sales in 2023. Jobs for storyboarders, VFX artists, and voice actors are disappearing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization projects record production of global cereal crops in the 2025-26 farming season. The forecast covers wheat, corn and rice, and comes as the global stocks-to-use ratio stands around 30.6% -- the world is producing nearly a third more of these foundational crops than it currently uses. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in August that American farmers would harvest a record corn crop at record yield per acre. The FAO Food Price Index has risen slightly this year but remains nearly 20% below its peak during the early months of the war in Ukraine. Average calories available per person worldwide have climbed from roughly 2,100 to 2,200 kilocalories daily in the early nineteen-sixties to just under 3,000 kilocalories daily by 2022. Cereal yields have roughly tripled since 1961. Yet the World Bank estimates around 2.6 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, and current famines in Gaza and Sudan stem from political failures rather than crop failures.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Generative AI models trained on internet data lack exposure to vast domains of human knowledge that remain undigitized or underrepresented online. English dominates Common Crawl with 44% of content. Hindi accounts for 0.2% of the data despite being spoken by 7.5% of the global population. Tamil represents 0.04% despite 86 million speakers worldwide. Approximately 97% of the world's languages are classified as "low-resource" in computing. A 2020 study found 88% of languages face such severe neglect in AI technologies that bringing them up to speed would require herculean efforts. Research on medicinal plants in North America, northwest Amazonia and New Guinea found more than 75% of 12,495 distinct uses of plant species were unique to just one local language. Large language models amplify dominant patterns through what researchers call "mode amplification." The phenomenon narrows the scope of accessible knowledge as AI-generated content increasingly fills the internet and becomes training data for subsequent models.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

California has enacted new legislation that aims to limit companies from charging consumers "exorbitant" fees to cancel fixed-term contracts. From a report: Assembly Bill 483 was signed into law by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday, placing transparency requirements and fee limits on early terminations for installment contracts -- plans that allow consumers to make recurring payments for goods and services over a specified duration. This includes services that lure consumers into signing annual contracts by allowing them to pay in installments that appear similar to rolling monthly subscriptions, but with hefty cancellation fees for not locking in for the full year. The bill bans companies from hiding early termination fee disclosures within fine print or obscured hyperlinks, and limits the total fee amount to a maximum of 30 percent of the total contract cost. The goal is to make it easier for Californians to take these fees into account when comparing between services, and lessen the financial burden if they need to end their contract early.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Maryland have found that roughly half of geostationary satellite signals transmit sensitive data without encryption. The team spent three years using an $800 satellite receiver on a university rooftop in San Diego to intercept communications from satellites visible from their location. They collected phone calls and text messages from more than 2,700 T-Mobile users in just nine hours of recording. The researchers also obtained data from airline passengers using in-flight Wi-Fi, communications from electric utilities and offshore oil and gas platforms, and US and Mexican military communications that revealed personnel locations and equipment details. The exposed data resulted from telecommunications companies using satellites to relay signals from remote cell towers to their core networks. The researchers examined only about 15% of global satellite transponder communications and presented their findings at an Association for Computing Machinery conference in Taiwan this week. Most companies warned by the researchers have encrypted their satellite transmissions, but some US critical infrastructure owners have not yet added encryption.Read more of this story at Slashdot.