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Government funding for a program that hunts for threats on America's critical infrastructure networks expired on Sunday, preventing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from analyzing activity that could indicate a cyberattack, the program director told Congress on Tuesday. From a report: Nate Gleason leads a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) focused on nation-state threats against critical infrastructure, and this includes the CyberSentry Program. It's a public-private partnership, managed by CISA, that looks for malicious activity on IT and operational technology (OT) networks in America's energy, water, healthcare, and other critical facilities. This includes threats along the lines of China's Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon intrusions -- network activity that may look like, or even start as, espionage, but ultimately enables the digital invaders to backdoor critical orgs and deploy cyber weapons to aid in a kinetic war.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Using brain scans from a very large database, British researchers determined that during the pandemic years of 2021 and 2022, people's brains showed signs of aging, including shrinkage, according to the report published in Nature Communications. People who got infected with the virus also showed deficits in certain cognitive abilities, such as processing speed and mental flexibility. The aging effect "was most pronounced in males and those from more socioeconomically deprived backgrounds," said the study's first author, Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad, a neuroimaging researcher at the University of Nottingham, via email. "It highlights that brain health is not shaped solely by illness, but also by broader life experiences." Overall, the researchers found a 5.5-month acceleration in aging associated with the pandemic. On average, the difference in brain aging between men and women was small, about 2.5 months. "We don't yet know exactly why, but this fits with other research suggesting that men may be more affected by certain types of stress or health challenges," Mohammadi-Nejad said. [...] The study wasn't designed to pinpoint specific causes. "But it is likely that the cumulative experience of the pandemic -- including psychological stress, social isolation, disruptions in daily life, reduced activity and wellness -- contributed to the observed changes," Mohammadi-Nejad said. "In this sense, the pandemic period itself appears to have left a mark on our brains, even in the absence of infection." "The most intriguing finding in this study is that only those who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 showed any cognitive deficits, despite structural aging," said Jacqueline Becker, a clinical neuropsychologist and assistant professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "This speaks a little to the effects of the virus itself." The study may shed light on conditions like long Covid and chronic fatigue, though it's still unclear whether the observed brain changes in uninfected individuals will lead to noticeable effects on brain function.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Olof Kyros Gustafsson, former CEO of Escobar, pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges related to the company's phone scam operation. The Department of Justice says Gustafsson took orders for phones branded with Pablo Escobar's likeness but failed to deliver products, instead transferring customer money for personal use. When customers sought refunds, Gustafsson fraudulently referred payment processors to certificates of ownership as proof of delivery. The phones were Samsung devices with gold stickers. Gustafsson faces up to 20 years in prison and $1.3 million in restitution at his December 5th sentencing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers from La Sapienza University in Rome have developed "WhoFi," a system that uses the way a person's body distorts Wi-Fi signals to re-identify them across different locations -- even if they're not carrying a phone. By training a deep neural network on these subtle signal distortions, the researchers claim WhoFi is able to achieve up to 95.5% accuracy. The Register reports: "The core insight is that as a Wi-Fi signal propagates through an environment, its waveform is altered by the presence and physical characteristics of objects and people along its path," the authors state in their paper. "These alterations, captured in the form of Channel State Information (CSI), contain rich biometric information." CSI in the context of Wi-Fi devices refers to information about the amplitude and phase of electromagnetic transmissions. These measurements, the researchers say, interact with the human body in a way that results in person-specific distortions. When processed by a deep neural network, the result is a unique data signature. Researchers proposed a similar technique, dubbed EyeFi, in 2020, and asserted it was accurate about 75 percent of the time. The Rome-based researchers who proposed WhoFi claim their technique makes accurate matches on the public NTU-Fi dataset up to 95.5 percent of the time when the deep neural network uses the transformer encoding architecture. "The encouraging results achieved confirm the viability of Wi-Fi signals as a robust and privacy-preserving biometric modality, and position this study as a meaningful step forward in the development of signal-based Re-ID systems," the authors say.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is acquiring Bee, a startup that makes a $49.99 AI-powered wearable that passively listens to conversations and generates personalized summaries and suggestions. "You can also give the device permission to access your emails, contacts, location, reminders, photos, and calendar events to help inform its AI-generated insights, as well as create a searchable history of your activities," adds The Verge. From the report: When asked about Amazon's plans to apply the same privacy measures offered by Bee, such as its policy against storing audio, Amazon spokesperson Alexandra Miller says the company "cares deeply" about customer privacy and security, adding that the company will work with Bee to give users "even greater control over" their devices when the deal closes. "We've been strong stewards of customer data since our founding, and have never been in the business of selling our customers' personal information to others," Miller says. "We design our products to protect our customers' privacy and security and to make it easy for them to be in control of their experience -- and this approach would of course apply to Bee." Miller also says the terms of the deal are "confidential," and all Bee employees have "received offers to join Amazon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: At the 2025 RISC-V Summit in China, Nvidia announced that its CUDA software platform will be made compatible with the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) on the CPU side of things. The news was confirmed during a presentation during a RISC-V event. This is a major step in enabling the RISC-V ISA-based CPUs in performance demanding applications. The announcement makes it clear that RISC-V can now serve as the main processor for CUDA-based systems, a role traditionally filled by x86 or Arm cores. While nobody even barely expects RISC-V in hyperscale datacenters any time soon, RISC-V can be used on CUDA-enabled edge devices, such as Nvidia's Jetson modules. However, it looks like Nvidia does indeed expect RISC-V to be in the datacenter. Nvidia's profile on RISC-V seems to be quite high as the keynote at the RISC-V Summit China was delivered by Frans Sijsterman, who appears to be Vice President of Hardware Engineering at Nvidia. The presentation outlined how CUDA components will now run on RISC-V. A diagram shown at the session illustrated a typical configuration: the GPU handles parallel workloads, while a RISC-V CPU executes CUDA system drivers, application logic, and the operating system. This setup enables the CPU to orchestrate GPU computations fully within the CUDA environment. Given Nvidia's current focus, the workloads must be AI-related, yet the company did not confirm this. However, there is more. Also featured in the diagram was a DPU handling networking tasks, rounding out a system consisting of GPU compute, CPU orchestration, and data movement. This configuration clearly suggests Nvidia's vision to build heterogeneous compute platforms where RISC-V CPU can be central to managing workloads while Nvidia's GPUs, DPUs, and networking chips handle the rest. Yet again, there is more. Even with this low-profile announcement, Nvidia essentially bridges proprietary CUDA stack to an open architecture, one that seems to develop fast in China. Yet, being unable to ship flagship GB200 and GB300 offerings to China, the company has to find ways to keep its CUDA thriving.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Brave Browser now blocks Microsoft Recall by default for Windows 11+ users, preventing the controversial screenshot-logging feature from capturing any Brave tabs -- regardless of whether users are in private mode. Brave cites persistent privacy concerns and potential abuse scenarios as justification. From a blog post: Microsoft has, to their credit, made several security and privacy-positive changes to Recall in response to concerns. Still, the feature is in preview, and Microsoft plans to roll it out more widely soon. What exactly the feature will look like when it's fully released to all Windows 11 users is still up in the air, but the initial tone-deaf announcement does not inspire confidence. Given Brave's focus on privacy-maximizing defaults and what is at stake here (your entire browsing history), we have proactively disabled Recall for all Brave tabs. We think it's vital that your browsing activity on Brave does not accidentally end up in a persistent database, which is especially ripe for abuse in highly-privacy-sensitive cases such as intimate partner violence. Microsoft has said that private browsing windows on browsers will not be saved as snapshots. We've extended that logic to apply to all Brave browser windows. We tell the operating system that every Brave tab is 'private', so Recall never captures it. This is yet another example of how Brave engineers are able to quickly tweak Chromium's privacy functionality to make Brave safer for our users (inexhaustive list here). For more technical details, see the pull request implementing this feature. Brave is the only major Web browser that disables Microsoft Recall by default in all tabs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A six-month international study found that a four-day workweek with no reduction in pay significantly improved employee well-being, job satisfaction, and sleep quality, with burnout dropping most among those who reduced their hours by eight or more. "The results indicate that income-preserving four-day workweeks are an effective organizational intervention for enhancing workers' well-being," the researchers said. The Register reports: The study, reported in Nature Human Behaviour, was designed to test the effects of the four-day workweek with no reduction in pay. It relied on a six-month trial involving 2,896 employees in 141 organizations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, and the US. The researchers compared work and health-related indicators -- including burnout, job satisfaction, and mental and physical health -- before and after the intervention using survey data. A further 285 employees at 12 companies did not participate in the trial and acted as a control. The researchers noted that the study was limited in that companies volunteered to participate, and the sample consisted of smaller companies from English-speaking countries. More extensive government-sponsored trials might help provide a clearer picture, they said. While several factors may explain the effect, one possibility is "increased intrinsic motivation at work," the study said. "Unfortunately, [we] cannot assess [this] due to data limitations." "Despite its limitations, this study has important implications for understanding the future of work, with 4-day workweeks probably being a key component. Scientific advances from this work will inform the development of interventions promoting better organization of paid work and worker well-being. This task has become increasingly important with the rapid expansion of new digital, automation, and artificial general intelligence technologies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is expected to avoid hefty daily fines from the EU by modifying its App Store policies -- allowing developers to direct users to external payment options and adjusting its fee structure. Reuters reports: The company last month said developers will pay a 20% processing fee for purchases made via the App Store, though the fees could go as low as 13% for Apple's small-business program. Developers who send customers outside the App Store for payment will pay a fee between 5% and 15%. They will also be able to use as many links as they wish to send users to outside forms of payment. Apple made the changes after the EU antitrust enforcer handed it a 500 million euro ($586.7 million) fine in April, saying its technical and commercial restrictions prevented app developers from steering users to cheaper deals outside the App Store in breach of the Digital Markets Act. The company was given 60 days to scrap the restraints to comply with the DMA aimed at reining in Big Tech and giving rivals more room to compete. The European Commission is expected to approve the changes in the coming weeks, although the timing could still change, the people said. "All options remain on the table. We are still assessing Apple's proposed changes," the EU watchdog said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A California lawmaker halted an effort to pass a law that would force Internet service providers to offer $15 monthly plans to people with low incomes. Assemblymember Tasha Boerner proposed the state law a few months ago, modeling the bill on a law enforced by New York. It seemed that other states were free to impose cheap-broadband mandates because the Supreme Court rejected broadband industry challenges to the New York law twice. Boerner, a Democrat who is chair of the Communications and Conveyance Committee, faced pressure from Internet service providers to change or drop the bill. She made some changes, for example lowering the $15 plan's required download speeds from 100Mbps to 50Mbps and the required upload speeds from 20Mbps to 10Mbps. But the bill was still working its way through the legislature when, according to Boerner, Trump administration officials told her office that California could lose access to $1.86 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funds if it forces ISPs to offer low-cost service to people with low incomes. That amount is California's share of a $42.45 billion fund created by Congress to expand access to broadband service. The Trump administration has overhauled program rules, delaying the grants. One change is that states can't tell ISPs what to charge for a low-cost plan. The US law that created BEAD requires Internet providers receiving federal funds to offer at least one "low-cost broadband service option for eligible subscribers." But in new guidance from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the agency said it prohibits states "from explicitly or implicitly setting the LCSO [low-cost service option] rate a subgrantee must offer." "All they would have to do to get exempted from AB 353 [the $15 broadband bill] would be to apply to the BEAD program," said Boerner. "Doesn't matter if their application was valid, appropriate, granted, or they got public money at the end of the day and built the projects -- the mere application for the BEAD program would exempt them from 353, if it didn't jeopardize from $1.86 billion to begin with. And that was a tradeoff I was unwilling to make." Another California bill in the Senate would encourage, not require, ISPs to offer cheap broadband by making them eligible for Lifeline subsidies if they sell 100/20Mbps service for $30 or less.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Surge CEO Edwin Chen says AI is creating "100x engineers" who can outperform traditional software developers by orders of magnitude. Chen argued that AI coding tools multiply the productivity gains already seen in Silicon Valley's "10x engineers," who can produce ten times the work of their colleagues through faster coding, harder work, and fewer distractions. Chen said AI efficiencies compound these factors to reach 100x productivity levels. The CEO, whose company reached $1 billion in revenue without venture capital funding, believes this could enable billion-dollar single-person companies, extending beyond the $10 million single-person startups that already exist.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has recruited more than 20 AI employees from Google's DeepMind research division, the newest front in a talent war being waged by Silicon Valley's tech giants as they jostle to gain an edge in the nascent technology. From a report: Amar Subramanya, the former head of engineering for Google's Gemini chatbot, is the latest to move to Microsoft from its rival, according to a post on his LinkedIn profile on Tuesday. "The culture here is refreshingly low ego yet bursting with ambition," he wrote, confirming his appointment as corporate vice-president of AI. Subramanya will join other DeepMind staff including engineering lead Sonal Gupta, software engineer Adam Sadovsky and product manager Tim Frank, according to people familiar with Microsoft's recruiting. The Seattle-based company has persuaded at least 24 staff to join in the past six months, they added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google users click on fewer website links when the search engine displays AI-generated summaries at the top of results pages, according to new research from the Pew Research Center. The study analyzed browsing data from 900 U.S. adults and found users clicked on traditional search result links during 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared to 15% of visits without summaries. Users also rarely clicked on sources cited within the AI summaries themselves, doing so in just 1% of visits. The research found that 58% of respondents conducted at least one Google search in March 2025 that produced an AI summary, and users were more likely to end their browsing session entirely after encountering pages with AI summaries compared to traditional search results.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roughly 10 to 25% of lung cancers worldwide now occur in people who have never smoked, according to researchers at the National Cancer Institute. Among certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share reaches 50% or more. Scientists studying 871 nonsmokers with lung cancer from around the world found that certain DNA mutations were significantly more common in people living in areas with high air pollution levels, including Hong Kong, Taiwan and Uzbekistan. The research, published in Nature this month, revealed that pollution both directly damages DNA and causes cells to divide more rapidly. The biology of cancer in nonsmokers differs from smoking-related cases and may require different prevention and detection strategies. Nonsmokers with lung cancer are more likely to have specific "driver" mutations that can cause cancer, while smokers tend to accumulate many mutations over time. Current U.S. screening guidelines recommend routine testing only for people ages 50 to 80 who smoked at least one pack daily for 20 years. Taiwan now offers screening for nonsmokers with family history after a nationwide trial detected cancer in 2.6% of participants.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Banks are treating "buy now, pay later" services with suspicion and warn that heavy usage could hurt customers' chances of getting approved for mortgages or credit cards. FICO will begin factoring some BNPL loans from companies like Affirm and Klarna into credit scores later this year through its new scoring model. JPMorgan Chase and Capital One have banned customers from using credit cards to pay down BNPL installment loans, while one credit union actively calls members who use BNPL to counsel them against it. BNPL transaction volume is expected to reach $116.67 billion in 2025, up from $13.88 billion in 2020, according to Emarketer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The estate of Mike Lynch, who died a year ago when his superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily, and his business partner owe Hewlett-Packard more than $944 million, a court has ruled. From a report: The US technology company has been seeking damages of up to $4.55 billion from the estate of the late tycoon, once hailed as the UK's answer to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, over its disastrous takeover of his British software company Autonomy. Lynch's estate has been estimated to be worth about $674 million and paying its share of the $944 million damages could leave it bankrupt. He and six others, including his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, died last August on a trip celebrating his acquittal on US fraud charges relating to HP's $11 billion takeover of Autonomy in 2011. However, HP won a separate six-year civil fraud case against Lynch and his former finance director Sushovan Hussain in the English high court in 2022, with Mr Justice Hildyard ruling that the US company had been induced into overpaying for the business.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has announced OSS Rebuild, a new project designed to detect supply chain attacks in open source software by independently reproducing and verifying package builds across major repositories. The initiative, unveiled by the company's Open Source Security Team, targets PyPI (Python), npm (JavaScript/TypeScript), and Crates.io (Rust) packages. The system, the company said, automatically creates standardized build environments to rebuild packages and compare them against published versions. OSS Rebuild generates SLSA Provenance attestations for thousands of packages, meeting SLSA Build Level 3 requirements without requiring publisher intervention. The project can identify three classes of compromise: unsubmitted source code not present in public repositories, build environment tampering, and sophisticated backdoors that exhibit unusual execution patterns during builds. Google cited recent real-world attacks including solana/webjs (2024), tj-actions/changed-files (2025), and xz-utils (2024) as examples of threats the system addresses. Open source components now account for 77% of modern applications with an estimated value exceeding $12 trillion. The project builds on Google's hosted infrastructure model previously used for OSS Fuzz memory issue detection.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.org: The mission team of NASA's Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft executed a deep-space move in December 2023 to repair its JunoCam imager to capture photos of the Jovian moon Io. Results from the long-distance save were presented during a technical session on July 16 at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Nuclear & Space Radiation Effects Conference in Nashville. JunoCam is a color, visible-light camera. The optical unit for the camera is located outside a titanium-walled radiation vault, which protects sensitive electronic components for many of Juno's engineering and science instruments. This is a challenging location because Juno's travels carry it through the most intense planetary radiation fields in the solar system. While mission designers were confident JunoCam could operate through the first eight orbits of Jupiter, no one knew how long the instrument would last after that. Throughout Juno's first 34 orbits (its prime mission), JunoCam operated normally, returning images the team routinely incorporated into the mission's science papers. Then, during its 47th orbit, the imager began showing hints of radiation damage. By orbit 56, nearly all the images were corrupted. While the team knew the issue might be tied to radiation, pinpointing what was specifically damaged within JunoCam was difficult from hundreds of millions of miles away. Clues pointed to a damaged voltage regulator that was vital to JunoCam's power supply. With few options for recovery, the team turned to a process called annealing, where a material is heated for a specified period before slowly cooling. Although the process is not well understood, the idea is that heating can reduce defects in the material. Soon after the annealing process finished, JunoCam began cranking out crisp images for the next several orbits. But Juno was flying deeper and deeper into the heart of Jupiter's radiation fields with each pass. By orbit 55, the imagery had again begun showing problems. "After orbit 55, our images were full of streaks and noise," said JunoCam instrument lead Michael Ravine of Malin Space Science Systems. "We tried different schemes for processing the images to improve the quality, but nothing worked. With the close encounter of Io bearing down on us in a few weeks, it was Hail Mary time: The only thing left we hadn't tried was to crank JunoCam's heater all the way up and see if more extreme annealing would save us." Test images sent back to Earth during the annealing showed little improvement in the first week. Then, with the close approach of Io only days away, the images began to improve dramatically. By the time Juno came within 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the volcanic moon's surface on Dec. 30, 2023, the images were almost as good as the day the camera launched, capturing detailed views of Io's north polar region that revealed mountain blocks covered in sulfur dioxide frosts rising sharply from the plains and previously uncharted volcanoes with extensive flow fields of lava. To date, the solar-powered spacecraft has orbited Jupiter 74 times. Recently, the image noise returned during Juno's 74th orbit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) intend to reevaluate how H-1B visas are issued, according to a regulatory filing. From a report: The notice, filed on Thursday with the US Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), seeks the statutory review of a proposed rule titled "Weighted Selection Process for Registrants and Petitioners Seeking To File Cap-Subject H-1B Petitions." Once the review is complete, which could be a matter of days or weeks, the text of the rule is expected to be published in the US Federal Register. Based on the rule title, it appears the government intends to change the system for allocating H-1B visas the current lottery to some system that will favor applicants who meet specified criteria, possibly related to skills. The H-1B visa program, which reached its Fiscal 2026 cap on Friday, allows skilled guest workers to come work in the US. As of 2019, there were about 600,000 H-1B workers in the US, according to USCIS. The foreign worker program is beloved by technology companies, ostensibly to hire talent not readily available from American workers. But H-1B -- along with the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program -- has long been criticized for making it easier to undercut US worker wages, limiting labor rights for immigrants, and for persistent abuse of the rules by outsourcing companies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ChatGPT now handles 2.5 billion prompts daily, with 330 million from U.S. users. This surge marks a doubling in usage since December when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that users send over 1 billion queries to ChatGPT each day. TechCrunch reports: These numbers show just how ubiquitous OpenAI's flagship product is becoming. Google's parent company, Alphabet, does not release daily search data, but recently revealed that Google receives 5 trillion queries per year, which averages to just under 14 billion daily searches. Independent researchers have found similar trends. Neil Patel of NP Digital estimates that Google receives 13.7 billion searches daily, while research from SparkToro and Datos -- two digital marketing companies -- estimates that the figure is around 16.4 billion per day.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2023 and 2024, the hottest years on record, more than 78 million acres of forests burned around the globe. The fires sent veils of smoke and several billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, subjecting millions of people to poor air quality. Extreme forest-fire years are becoming more common because of climate change, new research suggests. "Climate change is loading the dice for extreme fire seasons like we've seen," said John Abatzoglou, a climate scientist at the University of California Merced. "There are going to be more fires like this." The area of forest canopy lost to fire during 2023 and 2024 was at least two times greater than the annual average of the previous nearly two decades, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers used imagery from the LANDSAT satellite network to determine how tree cover had changed from 2002 to 2024, and compared that with satellite detections of fire activity to see how much canopy loss was because of fire. Globally, the area of land burned by wildfires has decreased in recent decades, mostly because humans are transforming savannas and grasslands into less flammable landscapes. But the area of forests burned has gone up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At least 759 US hospitals experienced network disruptions during the CrowdStrike outage on July 19, 2024, with more than 200 suffering outages that directly affected patient care services, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open by UC San Diego researchers. The researchers detected disruptions across 34% of the 2,232 hospital networks they scanned, finding outages in health records systems, fetal monitoring equipment, medical imaging storage, and patient transfer platforms. Most services recovered within six hours, though some remained offline for more than 48 hours. CrowdStrike dismissed the study as "junk science," arguing the researchers failed to verify whether affected networks actually ran CrowdStrike software. The researchers defended their methodology, noting they could scan only about one-third of America's hospitals, suggesting the actual impact may have been significantly larger.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The $500 billion Stargate AI project announced by SoftBank and OpenAI at the White House six months ago has failed to complete a single data center deal and sharply scaled back its near-term plans. The venture, which originally pledged to invest $100 billion "immediately," now aims to build one small data center by year-end, likely in Ohio, according to WSJ. SoftBank and OpenAI have disagreed over crucial partnership terms, including site locations. OpenAI has proceeded independently, signing a deal with Oracle worth more than $30 billion annually starting within three years. That agreement totals 4.5 gigawatts of capacity and would consume power equivalent to more than two Hoover Dams. Combined with a smaller CoreWeave deal, OpenAI has secured nearly as much data center capacity as Stargate promised for this year. SoftBank invested $30 billion in OpenAI earlier this year as part of the infrastructure partnership plans.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is proposing (PDF) to roll back key Biden-era broadband policies, scrapping the long-term gigabit speed goal, halting analysis of broadband affordability, and reinterpreting deployment standards in a way that favors industry metrics over consumer access. The proposal, which is scheduled for a vote on August 7, narrows the scope of Section 706 evaluations to focus on whether broadband is being deployed rather than whether it's affordable or universally accessible. Ars Technica reports: The changes will make it easier for the FCC to give the broadband industry a passing grade in an annual progress report. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's proposal would give the industry a thumbs-up even if it falls short of 100 percent deployment, eliminate a long-term goal of gigabit broadband speeds, and abandon a new effort to track the affordability of broadband. Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans. If the answer is no, the US law says the FCC must "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market." Generally, Democratic-led commissions have found that the industry isn't doing enough to make broadband universally available, while Republican-led commissions have found the opposite. Democratic-led commissions have also periodically increased the speeds used to determine whether advanced telecommunications capabilities are widely available, while Republican-led commissioners have kept the speed standards the same.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spotify was found publishing AI-generated songs on the official pages of deceased artists like Blaze Foley and Guy Clark -- without permission from their estates or labels. The tracks, flagged for deceptive content and now removed, were uploaded via TikTok's SoundOn distribution platform. "We've flagged the issue to SoundOn, the distributor of the content in question, and it has been removed for violating our Deceptive Content policy," a Spotify spokesperson told 404 Media. From the report: McDonald, who decided to originally upload Foley's music to Spotify in order to share it with more people, told me he never thought that an AI-generated track could appear on Foley's page without his permission. "It's harmful to Blaze's standing that this happened," he said. "It's kind of surprising that Spotify doesn't have a security fix for this type of action, and I think the responsibility is all on Spotify. They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so. And I think they should take that responsibility and do something quickly." McDonald's suggested fix is not allowing any track to appear on an artist's official Spotify page without allowing the page owner to sign off on it first. "Any real Blaze fan would know, I think, pretty instantly, that this is not Blaze or a Blaze recording," he said. "Then the harm is that the people who don't know Blaze go to the site thinking, maybe this is part of Blaze, when clearly it's not. So again, I think Spotify could easily change some practices. I'm not an engineer, but I think it's pretty easy to stop this from happening in the future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air grounded all flights Sunday night due to a major IT outage, prompting a system-wide FAA ground stop that lasted until early Monday. Although operations have since resumed, passengers are still facing delays and residual disruptions. Gizmodo reports: The airline requested a system-wide ground stop from federal aviation authorities at about 11 p.m. ET on Sunday night. That stop remained in effect until around 2 a.m. ET Monday, when the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed it had been lifted. But disruptions didn't end there. Alaska warned passengers to brace for likely delays throughout the day. [...] The FAA's website listed the stop as applying to all Alaska Airlines aircraft. Gizmodo notes that the incident comes nearly a year after the massive 2024 CrowdStrike crash, which has become known as the largest IT outage in history. "The July 2024 outage brought down an estimated 8.5 million Microsoft Windows systems running CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor software, disrupting everything from hospitals and airports to broadcast networks." "There's no word yet from Alaska on whether the outage ties into a broader software problem, but the timing, almost exactly a year after the CrowdStrike crash, isn't going unnoticed on social media, with users wondering if the events are related."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Figma is targeting a fully-diluted valuation of up to $16.4 billion in its initial public offering, as the cloud-based design software firm prepares for a debut on the NYSE that could inject fresh momentum into a resurgent market for tech listings. The San Francisco-based company, along with some investors, is eyeing proceeds of up to $1.03 billion by selling nearly 37 million shares priced between $25 and $28 each, it said on Monday. The listing could be a major milestone for Figma, coming more than a year after its $20 billion sale to Adobe failed due to regulatory hurdles in Europe and the UK. Figma's IPO is expected to occur the week of July 28th, offering shares priced between $25 and $28. It'll trade under the symbol "FIG".Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NVIDIA has released additional open-source header files for its Blackwell and Hopper GPU architectures, continuing its effort to support open-source drivers like Nouveau/NVK and the NOVA Rust driver. Phoronix reports: Last week NVIDIA open-sourced 12k lines of C header files for Blackwell GPUs to help in the open-source driver efforts, namely for Nouveau / NVK and the in-development NOVA Rust driver. On Friday they made public some additional header files for helping in the Blackwell and Hopper open-source driver enablement. Following the previously-covered open-source header activity, on Friday this commit was pushed to their open-source documentation repository that provides Hopper and Blackwell DMA-copy class header files. [...] In turn the code has already been imported into Mesa Git.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is rolling out updates to the Xbox PC app and consoles that sync your cloud gaming history and progress across devices, making it easier to resume cloud-playable titles on PCs, handhelds, and other Xbox hardware. The Verge reports: Cloud-playable games are now starting to show inside play history or the library on the Xbox PC app. "This includes all cloud playable titles, even console exclusives spanning from the original Xbox to Xbox Series X|S, whether you own the title or access it through Game Pass," explains Lily Wang, product manager of Xbox experiences. Your recent games, including cloud ones, will soon follow you across devices -- complete with cloud-powered game saves. So if you played an Xbox game on your console that's not natively available on PC, it will still show up in your recent games list and be playable through Xbox Cloud Gaming on Windows. Cloud-playable games on the Xbox PC app can be found from a new filter in the library section, and a new "play history" section will appear at the end of the "jump back in" list on the home screen of the Xbox PC app. "While the large tiles highlight games you've recently played on your current device, the play history tile shows games you've played across any Xbox device, making it easy to pick up where you left off," says Wang. This same play history section will appear on the main Xbox console interface, too -- which could mean we'll eventually see PC games listed here and playable through Xbox Cloud Gaming.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: One password is believed to have been all it took for a ransomware gang to destroy a 158-year-old company and put 700 people out of work. KNP -- a Northamptonshire transport company -- is just one of tens of thousands of UK businesses that have been hit by such attacks. Big names such as M&S, Co-op and Harrods have all been attacked in recent months. The chief executive of Co-op confirmed last week that all 6.5 million of its members had had their data stolen. In KNP's case, it's thought the hackers managed to gain entry to the computer system by guessing an employee's password, after which they encrypted the company's data and locked its internal systems. KNP director Paul Abbott says he hasn't told the employee that their compromised password most likely led to the destruction of the company. "Would you want to know if it was you?" he asks. "We need organizations to take steps to secure their systems, to secure their businesses," says Richard Horne CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) -- where Panorama has been given exclusive access to the team battling international ransomware gangs. A gang of hackers, known as Akira, broke into the company's system and demanded a payment to restore the data. "The hackers didn't name a price, but a specialist ransomware negotiation firm estimated the sum could be as much as 5 million pounds," reports the BBC. "KNP didn't have that kind of money. In the end all the data was lost, and the company went under."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a blog post: The International Mathematical Olympiad is the world's most prestigious competition for young mathematicians, and has been held annually since 1959. Each country taking part is represented by six elite, pre-university mathematicians who compete to solve six exceptionally difficult problems in algebra, combinatorics, geometry, and number theory. Medals are awarded to the top half of contestants, with approximately 8% receiving a prestigious gold medal. Recently, the IMO has also become an aspirational challenge for AI systems as a test of their advanced mathematical problem-solving and reasoning capabilities. Last year, Google DeepMind's combined AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 systems achieved the silver-medal standard, solving four out of the six problems and scoring 28 points. Making use of specialist formal languages, this breakthrough demonstrated that AI was beginning to approach elite human mathematical reasoning. This year, we were amongst an inaugural cohort to have our model results officially graded and certified by IMO coordinators using the same criteria as for student solutions. Recognizing the significant accomplishments of this year's student-participants, we're now excited to share the news of Gemini's breakthrough performance. An advanced version of Gemini Deep Think solved five out of the six IMO problems perfectly, earning 35 total points, and achieving gold-medal level performance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, has a simple suggestion for young workers struggling to focus at work or relax: turn off your phone. Schmidt told the "Moonshots" podcast that researchers "can't think deeply" when their phones keep buzzing with notifications. The tech veteran, who spent 10 years running Google and helped build Android's notification system, admitted the industry has worked to "monetize your attention" through constant ads and alerts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers are hiding malware inside DNS records, allowing malicious code to bypass security defenses that typically monitor web and email traffic. DomainTools researchers discovered the technique being used to host Joke Screenmate malware, with binary files converted to hexadecimal format and broken into chunks stored in TXT records across subdomains of whitetreecollective[.]com. Attackers retrieve the chunks through DNS requests and reassemble them into executable malware. The method exploits a blind spot in security monitoring, as DNS traffic often goes unscrutinized compared to other network activity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sir Keir Starmer's government is seeking a way out of a clash with the Trump administration over the UK's demand that Apple provide it with access to secure customer data, Financial Times reported Monday, citing two officials. From the report: The officials both said the Home Office, which ordered the tech giant in January to grant access to its most secure cloud storage system, would probably have to retreat in the face of pressure from senior leaders in Washington, including Vice President JD Vance. "This is something that the vice president is very annoyed about and which needs to be resolved," said an official in the UK's technology department. "The Home Office is basically going to have to back down." Both officials said the UK decision to force Apple to break its end-to-end encryption -- which has been raised multiple times by top officials in Donald Trump's administration -- could impede technology agreements with the US.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is teaming up with the French government to create a digital replica of Paris' Notre-Dame Cathedral, France's most visited monument, the U.S. tech company's president, Brad Smith, said on Monday. The 862-year-old Gothic masterpiece was reopened last December after a five-year restoration following a devastating fire in 2019. A digital replica will serve as a record of the building's architectural details, Microsoft said. It will also provide a virtual experience for visitors and those unable to visit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has released emergency security updates for two actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in SharePoint, tracked as CVE-2025-53770 and CVE-2025-53771, that have compromised servers worldwide in what researchers call "ToolShell" attacks. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned over the weekend that hackers were exploiting the vulnerabilities to gain remote code execution on on-premises SharePoint installations, while Microsoft has not yet provided patches for all affected versions. The vulnerabilities allow hackers to steal private digital keys from SharePoint servers without requiring credentials, enabling them to plant malware and access stored files and data. Eye Security, which first identified the attacks on Saturday, found dozens of actively exploited servers and warned that SharePoint's integration with Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive could enable further network compromise. Researcher Silas Cutler at cybersecurity firm Censys estimated more than 10,000 companies with SharePoint servers were at risk, with the largest concentrations in the United States, Netherlands, United Kingdom, and Canada. Microsoft released patches for SharePoint 2019 and Subscription Edition but is still working on fixes for SharePoint Server 2016. Administrators must install available updates immediately and rotate machine keys to prevent re-compromise, according to Microsoft's security guidance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

T-Mobile is expanding support for the L4S standard across its 5G Advanced network over the next few weeks, becoming the first wireless carrier in the United States to implement the Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput technology. The standard helps high-priority internet packets move with fewer delays to make video calls and cloud games feel smoother by allowing devices to manage congestion and reduce buffering issues that can occur even on higher bandwidth connections. L4S is already deployed in many cities, the company said. Users will not need special phones or plans to access the network-driven improvements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI coding service Replit deleted a user's production database and fabricated data to cover up bugs, according to SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin. Lemkin documented his experience on social media after Replit ignored his explicit instructions not to make code changes without permission. The database deletion eliminated 1,206 executive records representing months of authentic SaaStr data curation. Replit initially told Lemkin the database could not be restored, claiming it had "destroyed all database versions," but later discovered rollback functionality did work. Replit said it made "a catastrophic error of judgement" and rated the severity of its actions as 95 out of 100. The service also created a 4,000-record database filled with fictional people and repeatedly violated code freeze requests. Lemkin had initially praised Replit after building a prototype in hours, spending $607.70 in additional charges beyond his $25 monthly plan. He concluded the service isn't ready for commercial use by non-technical users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was nearly a decade ago when the first RISCV64 port was started for Debian, reports Phoronix. But one of the big features planned for Debian 13.0 (planned for 9 August) is supporting RISC-V as an official CPU architecture.This is the first release where RISC-V 64-bit is officially supported by Debian Linux albeit with limited board support and the Debian RISC-V build process is handicapped by slow hardware. A Debian RISC-V BoF session was held at this week's DebConf25 conference in France to discuss the state of RISCV64 for Debian Linux. The talk was led by Debian developers Aurelien Jarno and Bo YU... RV64GC is the current target for Debian RISC-V and using UEFI-based booting as the default. Over seventeen thousand source Debian packages are building for RISC-V with Trixie... Those wishing to learn more about this current state of Debian for RISC-V can see the PDF slide deck from DebConf25.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One in every 9 Americans lives in California. And right now its Congress is debating a bill that "would help establish a regional electricity market capable of tying together the American West's three dozen independent power grids," according to the Los Angeles Times' newsletter about climate change and energy issues. But that bill "has bitterly divided environmentalists," with some seeing it "as a plot by greedy energy companies to enrich themselves."Supporters say it would smooth the flow of solar and wind power from the sunny, windy landscapes where they're produced most cheaply to the cities where they're most needed. It would help California keep the lights on without fossil fuels, and without driving up utility bills... [S]olar and wind power are still cheaper than planet-warming coal and fossil gas. Which is why Michael Wara, a Stanford energy and climate scholar, isn't worried that SB 540 will leave Californians drowning in dirty power. In a regional market, solar and wind will usually outcompete coal and gas. "Any energy source that requires fuel to operate is more expensive than an energy source that doesn't," he said. California also needs to prove that a grid powered entirely by clean energy is affordable and reliable. The state's rising electric rates are already a big concern. And although the grid has been stable the last few years, thanks to batteries that store solar for after dark, keeping the lights on with more and more renewables might get harder. Regional market advocates make a strong case that interstate cooperation would help. For instance, a market would help California more smoothly access Pacific Northwest hydropower, already a key energy source during heat waves. It would also give California easier access to low-cost winds from New Mexico and Wyoming. Best of all, that wind is often blowing strong just as the sun sets along the Pacific. Another benefit: Right now, California often generates more solar than it can use during certain hours of the day, forcing solar farms to shut down - or pay other states to take the extra power. With a regional market, California could sell excess solar to other states, keeping utility bills down. "This is about lowering costs," said Robin Everett, deputy director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign. "Unlike with past regional market proposals, California would retain control of its grid operator, with only a few functions delegated to a regional entity," the article points out. But opponents still worry this would give new powers to an outside-of-California group to thwart clean energy progress if not gouge customers. Amendments passed this week add a "Regional Energy Markets Oversight Council" to address that concern - but which lost support for the bill from some of its earlier supporters. "The amendments would make it easier for the Golden State to bail," notes the climate newsletter, and "Out-of-state utilities don't want to waste time and money committing themselves to a California-led market only to lose California, and thus many of the economic benefits..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Scientists at the world's largest particle collider have observed a new class of antimatter particles breaking down at a different rate than their matter counterparts," reports Scientific American:[P]hysicists have been on the hunt for any sign of difference between matter and antimatter, known in the field as a violation of "charge conjugation-parity symmetry," or CP violation, that could explain why some matter escaped destruction in the early universe. [Wednesday] physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)'s LHCb experiment published a paper in the journal Nature announcing that they've measured CP violation for the first time in baryons - the class of particles that includes the protons and neutrons inside atoms. Baryons are all built from triplets of even smaller particles called quarks. Previous experiments dating back to 1964 had seen CP violation in meson particles, which unlike baryons are made of a quark-antiquark pair. In the new experiment, scientists observed that baryons made of an up quark, a down quark and one of their more exotic cousins called a beauty quark decay more often than baryons made of the antimatter versions of those same three quarks... The matter-antimatter difference scientists observed in this case is relatively small, and it fits within predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics - the reigning theory of the subatomic realm. This puny amount of CP violation, however, cannot account for the profound asymmetry between matter and antimatter we see throughout space... "We are trying to find little discrepancies between what we observe and what is predicted by the Standard Model," [says LHCb spokesperson/study co-author Vincenzo Vagnoni of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics]. "If we find a discrepancy, then we can pinpoint what is wrong." The researchers hope to discover more cracks in the Standard Model as the experiment keeps running. Eventually LHCb should collect about 30 times more data than was used for this analysis, which will allow physicists to search for CP violation in particle decays that are even rarer than the one observed here. So stay tuned for an answer to why anything exists at all.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The distant reaches of the Solar System are still mysterious," writes ScienceAlert. "Not much sunlight pierces these regions, and there are strong hints that undiscovered objects lurk there. The objects that astronomers have discovered in these dim reaches are primordial, and their orbits suggest the presence of more undiscovered objects." And now thanks to the giant 8.2-meter Subaru telescope at Hawaii's Mauna Kea Observatory, astronomers have discovered "a massive new solar system body located beyond the orbit of Pluto," reports Space.com.The weird elongated orbit of the object suggests that if "Planet Nine" exists, it is much further from the sun than thought, or it has been ejected from our planetary system altogether. The strange orbit of the object, designated 2023 KQ14 and nicknamed "Ammonite," classifies it as a "sednoid." Sednoids are bodies beyond the orbit of the ice giant Neptune, known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), characterized by a highly eccentric (non-circular) orbit and a distant closest approach to the sun or "perihelion." The closest distance that 2023 KQ14 ever comes to our star is equivalent to 71 times the distance between Earth and the sun... This is just the fourth known sednoid, and its orbit is currently different from that of its siblings, though it seems to have been stable for 4.5 billion years. However, the team behind the discovery, made using Subaru Telescope as part of the Formation of the Outer Solar System: An Icy Legacy (FOSSIL) survey, thinks that all four sednoids were on similar orbits around 4.2 billion years ago. That implies something dramatic happened out at the edge of the solar system around 400 million years after its birth. Not only does the fact that 2023 KQ14 now follows a unique orbit suggest that the outer solar system is more complex and varied than previously thought, but it also places limits on a hypothetical "Planet Nine" theorized to lurk at the edge of the solar system. There's "no viable transfer mechanisms" to explain the observed orbits "with the current configuration of planets," according to the team's recently-published paper. But since those orbits are stable, it "suggests that an external gravitational influence beyond those of the currently known Solar System planets is required to form their orbits."So where does that leave us? ScienceAlert summarizes the rest of the paper - and where things stand now:Astronomers have proposed many sources for this external gravitational influence, including interactions with a rogue planet or star, ancient stellar interactions from when the Sun was still in its natal cluster, and the capture of objects from other lower-mass stars in the Solar System's early times. But the explanation that gets the most attention is interactions with a hypothetical planet, Planet Nine. If Planet Nine exists, it has a huge area to hide in. Some astronomers who have studied its potential existence think it could be the fifth largest planet in the Solar System. It would be so far away that it would be extremely dim. However, we may be on the cusp of detecting it, if it exists. The Vera Rubin Observatory recently saw first light and will begin its decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The LSST will find transient events and objects in the Solar System like no other telescope before it. It's purpose-built to find hard-to-detect objects, and not even an elusive object like Planet Nine may be able to hide from it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Anybody who's got a hosted SharePoint server has got a problem," the senior VP of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike told the Washington Post. "It's a significant vulnerability." And it's led to a new "global attack on government agencies and businesses" in the last few days, according to the article, "breaching U.S. federal and state agencies, universities, energy companies and an Asian telecommunications company, according to state officials and private researchers..." "Tens of thousands of such servers are at risk, experts said, and Microsoft has issued no patch for the flaw, leaving victims around the world scrambling to respond." (Microsoft says they are "working on" security updates "for supported versions of SharePoint 2019 and SharePoint 2016," offering various mitigation suggestions, and CISA has released their own recommendations.) From the Washington Post's article Sunday:Microsoft has suggested that users make modifications to SharePoint server programs or simply unplug them from the internet to stanch the breach. Microsoft issued an alert to customers but declined to comment further... "We are seeing attempts to exploit thousands of SharePoint servers globally before a patch is available," said Pete Renals, a senior manager with Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42. "We have identified dozens of compromised organizations spanning both commercial and government sectors.'' With access to these servers, which often connect to Outlook email, Teams and other core services, a breach can lead to theft of sensitive data as well as password harvesting, Netherlands-based research company Eye Security noted. What's also alarming, researchers said, is that the hackers have gained access to keys that may allow them to regain entry even after a system is patched. "So pushing out a patch on Monday or Tuesday doesn't help anybody who's been compromised in the past 72 hours," said one researcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because a federal investigation is ongoing. The breaches occurred after Microsoft fixed a security flaw this month. The attackers realized they could use a similar vulnerability, according to the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. CISA spokeswoman Marci McCarthy said the agency was alerted to the issue Friday by a cyber research firm and immediately contacted Microsoft... The nonprofit Center for Internet Security, which staffs an information-sharing group for state and local governments, notified about 100 organizations that they were vulnerable and potentially compromised, said Randy Rose, the organization's vice president. Those warned included public schools and universities. Others that were breached included a government agency in Spain, a local agency in Albuquerque and a university in Brazil, security researchers said. But there's many more breaches, according to the article:"Eye Security said it has tracked more than 50 breaches, including at an energy company in a large state and several European government agencies.""At least two U.S. federal agencies have seen their servers breached, according to researchers.""One state official in the eastern U.S. said the attackers had 'hijacked' a repository of documents provided to the public to help residents understand how their government works. The agency involved can no longer access the material...""It was not immediately clear who is behind the hacking of global reach or what its ultimate goal is. One private research company found the hackers targeting servers in China..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige "isn't interested in your theories of superhero fatigue, which he doesn't buy as real," writes The Hollywood Reporter. Feige points to the $400 million worldwide box office for Superman (which another article notes in only its second weekend "has already passed up the entire lifetime run of Marvel's Thunderbolts*.") So how is Marvel moving forward?Yes, Feige knows Marvel made too many movies and shows (and the other things they did wrong). From the first Iron Man in 2008 through Avengers: Endgame in 2019, Marvel produced around 50 hours of screen storytelling. In the six years since Endgame, the number jumps to an astounding 102 hours of movies and television. 127 hours if you include animation. "That's too much," Feige said. He characterized the time period after Endgame as an era of experimentation, evolution and, unfortunately, expansion. And while he's proud of the experimentation - he points to WandaVision and Loki as some of the best stories they've made - he admits "It's the expansion that is certainly what devalued" that output. Being high on success also may have pushed them to readily agree to try to deliver more programming at a time when Disney and the rest of Hollywood were engaged in the streaming wars. "It was a big company push... [T]here was a mandate that we were put in the middle of, but we also thought it'd be fun to bring these to life." Marvel has already pulled back the amount of movies and shows it will make. Some years may even only have one movie. Certainly there will be years with only one show released. Also, Marvel has started "grinding down" on budgets, with movies costing up to a third cheaper than the films from 2022 or 2023. Feige also explains why Thunderbolts* struggled at the box office (even though he's called it a "very, very good movie").The massive expansion into television and focus on Disney+ led to the feeling that watching Marvel was becoming a type of homework. "It's that expansion that I think led people to say, 'Do I have to see all of these? It used to be fun, but now do I have to know everything about all of these?' And I think The Marvels hit it hardest where people are like, 'Okay, I recognize her from a billion dollar movie. But who are those other two? I guess they were in some TV show. I'll skip it.'" Which had an effect on Thunderbolts*, which featured characters that were seen on various platforms, including some only on shows. The article notes Friday's release of Fantastic Four: First Steps is Marvel Studios' first crack at the characters after "a trio of movies of various quality and box office made by Twentieth Century Fox before its 2019 acquisition by Disney." And the article also acknowledges "the never-released, 1994 feature produced low-budget king Roger Corman. (Fun fact: the four stars of that movie cameo in Fantastic Four: First Steps.)"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Amazon stretched out its annual Prime Day sales event so that it lasted four days - twice as long as in the past - and, as a result, blew away previous sales figures," reports USA Today:Spending for [the four-day] Prime Day amounted to "more than two Black Fridays - which drove $10.8 billion in online spending during the 2024 holiday shopping season - and sets a new benchmark for the summer shopping season," Adobe said in a news release. The total also surpassed Adobe's pre-Prime Day estimate of $23.8 billion in sales. But an article in Fortune notes that "what stood out to this longtime Amazon watcher is that the company didn't disclose anything about the number of items sold."The last time it made that choice was 2020, when nothing normal was happening anywhere in the world, and Prime Day was moved from summer to October. Before that, you have to go back to the second-ever Prime Day in 2016 to find a wrap-up that didn't provide any update on the number of "units" sold. It's unclear exactly why Amazon decided to withhold that number for 2025, but this Prime Day was odd for a few reasons. Sellers, and brands big and small, had to come up with different strategies to contend with tariff chaos. And they're trying to woo increasingly pessimistic consumers. Those factors could be weighing on the company's decision to withhold exact numbers. Instead Amazon's official Prime Day recap swapped in some unusual alternate statistics. For example, Amazon reported that if you added up all the discounts given to customers over the four-day event, it was larger than any previous total amount of all discounts given to customers (over the earlier two-day events).To be sure, it's possible that this Prime Day was a success. An outside analysis from Adobe estimated that sales across online retailers overall increased by more than 30% during this year's four day Prime Day period, compared to last year. And Amazon said in this year's recap that the four days of Prime Day 2025 outsold any other four-day period that included previous Prime Days. But historically, the event hasn't run longer than two days. That means that previous years have included two prime days and two regular days, while this year included four prime days. It's unclear why the company would change the basis of comparison. Amazon "declined to comment on the absence of specific product sales tallies for 2025," according to the article (while pointing Fortune instead to an Amazon blog post with facts about past Prime Day events.) But in a sign of the time, Amazon's announcement notes that their Prime Day customers found deals and other product information using Amazon's AI-generated buying guides, as well as an AI-powered shopping assistant named Rufus and Alexa+ - Amazon's next-generation personal assistant ("now available in Early Access to millions of customers"). Another interesting statistic? USA Today notes that "a majority of shoppers (53.2%) made purchases on mobile devices, compared to on desktop computers, accounting for $12.8 billion of the spending, according to Adobe."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ABC News reports that Ukrainian drones struck Moscow last night - over 100 of them - closing all four of Moscow's international airports and diverting at least 134 planes. And Ukrainian commanders estimate that drones now account for 70% of all Russian deaths and injuries, according to the BBC - which means attacks on the front line are filmed, logged, and counted. "And now put to use too, as the Ukrainian military tries to extract every advantage it can against its much more powerful opponent."Under a scheme first trialled last year and dubbed "Army of Drones: Bonus" (also known as "e-points"), units can earn points for each Russian soldier killed or piece of equipment destroyed. And like a killstreak in Call of Duty, or a 1970s TV game show, points mean prizes [described later as "extra equipment."] "The more strategically important and large-scale the target, the more points a unit receives," reads a statement from the team at Brave 1, which brings together experts from government and the military. "For example, destroying an enemy multiple rocket launch system earns up to 50 points; 40 points are awarded for a destroyed tank and 20 for a damaged one." Call it the gamification of war. The article concludes that the e-points scheme "is typical of the way Ukraine has fought this war: creative, out-of-the-box thinking designed to make the most of the country's innovative skills and minimise the effect of its numerical disadvantage." And "It turns out that encouraging a Russian soldier to surrender is worth more points than killing one," the article notes - up to 10x more, since "a prisoner of war can always be used in future deals over prisoner exchanges." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader wattersa is a lawyer in Redwood City, California, and a Slashdot reader since 1998. In 2022 he shared the remarkable story of a three-year missing person investigation that was ultimately solved with a subpoena to Google. A murder victim appeared to have sent an email at a time which would exonerate the chief suspect. But a closer inspection of that email's IP addresses revealed it was actually sent from a hotel where the suspect was staying. ("Although Google does not include the originating IP address in the email headers, it turns out that they retain the IP address for some unknown length of time...") Today wattersa brings this update:The case finally went to trial in July 2025, where I testified about the investigation along with an expert witness on computer networking. The jury took three hours to return a verdict against the victim's husband for wrongful death in the amount of $23.2 million, with a special finding that he caused the death of his wife. The defendant is a successful mechanical engineer at an energy company, but is walking as a free man because he is Canadian and no one can prosecute him in the U.S., since Taiwan and the U.S. don't have extradition with each other. It was an interesting case and I look forward to using it as a model in other missing person cases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new video shows flames emanating from one side of a Boeing 767 moments after takeoff, reports LiveMint.com. "Delta flight 446 was forced to make an emergency landing in Los Angeles," they report, adding "No one was injured. The fire was extinguished upon landing."According to a report by Aviation A2Z, the plane (24-year-old Boeing 767-400 with registration N836MH) had just departed from Los Angeles International Airport when its left engine ignited. The pilots promptly declared an emergency and requested to return to the airport. Delta faced a similar issue less than three months ago. The article notes the engine of an Airbus also caught on fire in April when pushing back from the gate for departure. CBS News describes that incident:Delta said crew members evacuated the cabin when flames were seen in the tailpipe of one of the plane's two main engines and fire crews quickly responded. According to Delta, the plane, an Airbus 330, had 282 passengers, 10 flight attendants and two pilots on board... The engine fire marks the latest aviation scare involving the airline in recent months. In February, 21 people were injured after a Delta plane flipped upside down while landing amid wintry conditions at Toronto Pearson International Airport. All of the injured passengers were later released from the hospital. In January, several people were injured after a Delta flight aborted its takeoff at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, forcing about 200 passengers to evacuate the plane through emergency slides. ["A passenger says the engine on the Boeing 757 caught fire," according to CBS's video report in January.]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

San Francisco-based startup Orchid Health "screens embryos for thousands of potential future illnesses," reports the Washington Post, calling it "the first company to say it can sequence an embryo's entire genome of 3 billion base pairs." It uses as few as five cells from an embryo to test for more than 1,200 of these uncommon single-gene-derived, or monogenic, conditions. The company also applies custom-built algorithms to produce what are known as polygenic risk scores, which are designed to measure a future child's genetic propensity for developing complex ailments later in life, such as bipolar disorder, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, obesity and schizophrenia. Orchid, [founder Noor] Siddiqui said in a tweet, is ushering in "a generation that gets to be genetically blessed and avoid disease." Right now, at $2,500 per embryo-screening on top of the average $20,000 for a single cycle of IVF, Siddiqui's social network in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs is an ideal target market... Yet several genetic scientists told The Post they doubt Orchid's core claim: that it can accurately sequence an entire human genome from just five cells collected from an early-stage embryo, enabling it to see many more single- and multiple-gene-derived disorders than other methods have. Experts have struggled to extract accurate genetic information from small embryonic samples, said Svetlana Yatsenko, a Stanford University pathology professor who specializes in clinical and research genetics. Genetic tests that use saliva or blood samples typically collect hundreds of thousands of cells. For its vastly smaller samples, Orchid uses a process called amplification, which creates copies of the DNA retrieved from the embryo. That process, Yatsenko said, can introduce major inaccuracies. "You're making many, many mistakes in the amplification," she said, rendering it problematic to declare any embryo free of a particular disease, or positive for one. "It's basically Russian roulette...." Numerous fertility doctors and scientists also told The Post they have serious reservations about screening embryos through polygenic risk scoring, the technique that allows Orchid and other companies to predict future disease by tying clusters of hundreds or even thousands of genes to disease outcomes and in some cases to other traits, such as intelligence and height. The vast majority of diseases that afflict humans are associated with many different genes rather than a single gene... And for traits such as intelligence, polygenic scoring has almost negligible predictive capacity - just a handful of IQ points... Or parents might select against an unwanted trait, such as schizophrenia, without understanding how they may be screening out desired traits associated with the same genes, such as creativity... The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics calls the benefits of screening embryos for polygenic risks "unproven" and warns that such tests "should not be offered" by clinicians. A pioneer of polygenic risk scores, Harvard epidemiology professor Peter Kraft, has criticized Orchid, saying on X that "the science doesn't add up" and that "waving a magic wand and changing some of these variants at birth may not do anything at all." The article notes several startups are already providing predictions on intelligence. "In the United States, there are virtually no restrictions on the types of genetic predictions companies can offer, and no external vetting of their proprietary scoring methods."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fast Company's tech editor Harry McCracken (also harrymccSlashdot reader #1,641,347) writes:As part of Fast Company's "1995 week", I wrote about IBM's ThinkPad 701, the famous model with an expanding "butterfly" keyboard [which could be stretched from 9.7-inches to 11.5 inches]. By putting full-sized keys in a subnotebook-sized laptop, it solved one of mobile computing's biggest problems. IBM discontinued it before the end of the year, and neither it nor anyone else ever made anything similar again. And yet it remains amazing. Check out this 1995 ad for the keyboard! The article calls the butterfly ThinkPad "one of the best things the technology industry has ever done with moving parts," and revisits 1995's race "to design a subnotebook-sized laptop with a desktop-sized keyboard."It's still comically thick, standing almost as tall as four MacBook Airs stacked on each other. That height is required to accommodate multiple technologies later rendered obsolete by technological progress, such as a dial-up fax/modem, an infrared port, two PCMCIA expansion card slots, and a bulky connector for an external docking station... Lifting the screen set off a system of concealed gears and levers that propelled the two sections of keyboard into position with balletic grace... A Businesweek article cited sales of 215,000 units and said it was 1995's best-selling PC laptop. Yet by the time that story appeared in February 1996, the 701 had been discontinued. IBM never made anything like it again. Neither did anyone else... As portable computers became more popular, progress in display technology had made it possible for PC makers to use larger screens. Manufacturers were also getting better at fitting a laptop's necessary components into less space. These advances let them design a new generation of thin, light laptops that went beyond the limitations of subnotebooks. Once IBM could make a lightweight laptop with a wider screen, "the need for an expanding keyboard was no longer essential," says [butterfly ThinkPad engineer] George Karidis. "It would have just been a novelty." The article notes a fan's open source guides for repairing butterfly Thinkpads at Project Butterfly, and all the fan-community videos about it on YouTube, "from an excellent documentary to people simply being entranced by it. "As a thing of wonder, it continues to transcend its own obsolescence."Read more of this story at Slashdot.