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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A new dark web portal to recruit spies for the UK was launched last Friday (19th September), as the UK steps up its commitment to national security. Harnessing the anonymity of the dark web for the first time, MI6's new secure messaging platform -- Silent Courier -- enables anyone, anywhere in the world with access to sensitive information relating to terrorism or hostile intelligence activity to securely contact the UK and offer their services. Instructions on how to access the portal will be publicly available on MI6's verified YouTube channel as the UK reaches out to potential new agents in Russia and around the world. MI6 advises individuals accessing its portal to use trustworthy VPNs and devices not linked to themselves, to mitigate risks which exist in some countries. The announcement was made by the outgoing Chief of MI6, Sir Richard Moore, in Istanbul where he stated that the platform will make it easier for MI6 to recruit agents online. As MI6 establishes its official presence on the dark web to reach new recruits and tackle hostile actors seeking to undermine UK security, Sir Richard said that the UK's intelligence services are "critical to calibrating risk and informing decisions" in navigating threats from hostile actors -- making platforms like these even more important in keeping our country safe. Sir Richard said: "Today we're asking those with sensitive information on global instability, international terrorism or hostile state intelligence activity to contact MI6 securely online. Our virtual door is open to you." Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said: "National security is the first duty of any government and the bedrock of the Prime Minister's Plan for Change. As the world changes, and the threats we're facing multiply, we must ensure the UK is always one step ahead of our adversaries. Our world class intelligence agencies are at the coalface of this challenge, working behind the scenes to keep British people safe. Now we're bolstering their efforts with cutting-edge tech so MI6 can recruit new spies for the UK - in Russia and around the world."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: The Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has demonstrated its ability to launch and recover aircraft from its first electromagnetic catapult-equipped aircraft carrier, the CNS Fujian. Official imagery released by the PLAN today confirms that the new J-35 naval stealth fighters, KJ-600 airborne early warning and control aircraft, and J-15T fighter jet are carrying out carrier trials. Ben Lewis, a co-founder of PLATracker, told USNI News that the test was a "significant milestone" for the Chinese military's carrier program. "Once operational, the PLAN will have the capacity to field fifth-generation stealth carrier aircraft, supported by fixed-wing carrier-based airborne early warning and command aircraft, across the first island chain and Western Pacific Ocean," Lewis said. Electromagnetic catapults offer several advantages, not least the fact that they can be more finely tuned to very different aircraft types, including ones that are larger and slower (like the KJ-600), or which are smaller and lighter, such as smaller drones. In contrast to the U.S. Navy, which gathered decades of experience with steam-powered catapults, China opted for electromagnetic ones for its first catapult-equipped carrier. It's worth noting that the U.S. Navy's USS Gerald R. Ford was the first carrier ever to get an aircraft into the air using what is also referred to as an electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS). However, it has not launched an F-35C so far, making the J-35 the first stealth jet to achieve this feat. Based on earlier predictions, the F-35C may not do the same for some years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Supreme Court has temporarily allowed President Trump to fire Rebecca Slaughter, the last Democrat on the FTC. "The court's action is technically temporary, since the justices said they will hear arguments in the case in December, but every indication is that the conservative court majority will use the case to reverse a major Supreme Court precedent that dates back almost a century," reports NPR. From the report: Congress created the FTC and lots of other agencies to be multi-member, bipartisan regulatory agencies. And the Supreme Court in 1935 upheld those statutes ruling ruled against then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt's claim that he could fire FTC commissioners at will. In a unanimous opinion at the time, the court said Congress acted within its powers in declaring that a commissioner could only be fired for misconduct -- not for a policy disagreement. But now, prodded by President Trump, the court's six-member conservative majority seems poised to remake the way independent agencies operate. And if the handwriting on the wall is as clear as it seems to be, the independent agencies won't be independent. Their membership will be subject to the will of the president. The court's action Monday was hardly subtle. While the lower courts had ruled that the president could not fire Slaughter, under the court's 1935 precedent, the conservative Supreme Court majority allowed the president to fire her. Indeed, her name isn't even on the FTC website anymore. And the court so far has allowed Trump to fire other agency board members. In short, the justices are not playing hide-the-ball. And it's a good bet that the court will reverse the 1935 precedent, which until now had been reaffirmed multiple times. The result will be that whereas in the past, these agencies had to be bipartisan, with a minority of opposition party members, now there will be no such requirement. In short, Trump can name all the agency members. And if his successor is a Democrat, he or she can fire all the Republicans.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Moon is rusting -- and it's Earth's fault. Nature: Scientists have found that oxygen particles blown from Earth to the Moon can turn lunar minerals into hematite, also known as rust. The discovery adds to researchers' growing understanding of the deep interconnection between Earth and the Moon -- and shows how the Moon keeps a geological record of those interactions, says Ziliang Jin, a planetary scientist at Macau University of Science and Technology in China. He and his colleagues reported their findings earlier this month in Geophysical Research Letters. Most of the time, both Earth and the Moon are bathed in a stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun. But for around five days each month, Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon, blocking most of the flood of solar particles. During that time, the Moon is exposed mainly to particles that had been part of Earth's atmosphere before blowing into space -- a phenomenon known as Earth wind. That wind contains ions of various elements, including hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. When those charged particles hit the Moon, they can implant themselves into the upper layers of lunar soil and trigger chemical reactions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is rolling out its Gemini AI assistant to Google TV, bringing conversational AI to over 300 million devices. Users will be able to ask Gemini for help with TV recommendations, show recaps, reviews, or even general tasks like homework help, vacation planning, or learning new skills. TechCrunch reports: The company stresses that Gemini's addition doesn't mean that you won't be able to do the same things you used to be able to do through the (non-AI) Google Assistant integration. Those commands will still work, says Google. The Gemini rollout to Google TV begins on the TCL QM9K series starting today. Later in the year, Gemini will arrive on the Google TV Streamer, Walmart onn 4K Pro, 2025 Hisense U7, U8, and UX models, and 2025 TCL QM7K, QM8K, and X11K models. More functionality will be added over time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

iFixit's teardown of Apple's iPhone Air reveals a device dominated by its battery, which occupies approximately two-thirds of the internal space while critical components including the logic board cluster at the top. The battery matches the component used in Apple's iPhone Air MagSafe battery pack and can be swapped between devices. The top-heavy component layout addresses the bendgate vulnerability that damaged logic boards in previous thin iPhone models when pressure was applied to the device's middle section. Despite the iPhone Air's thinner profile, iFixit awarded it a 7 out of 10 repairability score, citing reduced component layering that provides more direct access to the USB-C connector, battery, and other serviceable parts compared to standard iPhone models. The dual-entry system further contributes to the device's serviceability.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: The dramatic rise in unemployment among Americans under 25 -- especially recent graduates -- has become one of the most troubling economic headlines of 2025. Recent insights from economists, central bankers, and labor market analysts signal that this appears to be a uniquely American challenge, underpinned by a "no hire, no fire" economy rather than solely by the rapid ascent of artificial intelligence. For many Gen Z workers, the struggle to land a job can feel isolating and fuel self-doubt. But that frustration recently got some high-level validation: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell echoed economists' concerns about the cooling labor market, telling reporters at his regular press conference following the Federal Open Market Committee that it's an "interesting labor market" right now, adding that "kids coming out of college and younger people, minorities, are having a hard time finding jobs." Noting a low job finding rate, along with a low redundancy rate, he said, "you've got a low firing, low hiring environment." and noting that it's harder than ever for young jobseekers to break in. While recent months have been dubbed by Deutsche Bank "the summer AI turned ugly," and some major studies find AI adoption disrupting some entry-level roles, Powell was less sure. AI "may be part of the story," but he insisted the main drivers are a broadly slowed economy and hiring restraint. Top economists at Goldman Sachs and UBS tackled the subject soon after and found Powell to be mostly on the money. This isn't an AI story, at least not yet. "The U.S. labor market experience is peculiar," said Paul Donovan, UBS Chief Economist. "Young Euro area workers have a record low unemployment rate. In the UK, the young persons' unemployment rate has fallen steadily. Employment participation by young Japanese workers is near all-time highs. It seems highly implausible that AI uniquely hurts the employment prospects of younger US workers." "It might be tempting to blame technology... Machines, robots, or computers replacing humans is an ever-popular dystopian scenario." Donovan concludes that the U.S. pattern "more convincingly fits a broader hiring freeze narrative, affecting new entrants to the workforce." Goldman Sachs economist Pierfrancesco Mei said last Thursday that "finding a job takes longer in a low-turnover labor market." He argued that "job reallocation," or the pace at which new jobs are created and existing ones destroyed, has been on the decline since the late 1990s... "almost all the variation in turnover since the Great Recession mostly falls on younger workers" and is taking place as "churn." Goldman found that in 2019, it took a young unemployed worker about 10 weeks to find a new job in a low-churn state; now that's 12 weeks on average.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LinkedIn has said it will start using some member profiles, posts, resumes and public activity to train its AI models from November 3, 2025. From a report: Users are rightly frustrated with the change, with the biggest concern isn't the business networking platform will do so, but that it's set to be enabled by default, with users instead having to actively opt out. Users can choose to opt out via the 'data for generative AI improvement' setting, however it will only apply to data collected after they opt out, with data up until that point still retained within the training environment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. General Services Administration has approved Meta's AI system Llama for use by federal agencies, declaring that it meets government security and legal standards. Reuters reports: "It's not about currying favor," [said Josh Gruenbaum, the GSA's procurement lead, when asked whether tech executives are giving the government discounts to get President Donald Trump's approval]. "It's about that recognition of how do we all lock in arms and make this country the best country it could possibly be." Federal agencies will be able to deploy the tool to speed up contract review or more quickly solve information technology hiccups, among other tasks, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Trump administration has struck a deal requiring TikTok's algorithm to be copied, retrained, and operated in the U.S. using only U.S. user data, with Oracle auditing the system and U.S. investors forming a joint venture to oversee it. The BBC reports: It comes after President Donald Trump said a deal to prevent the app's ban in the US, unless sold by its Chinese parent company ByteDance, had been reached with China's approval. White House officials claim the deal will be a win for the app's US users and citizens. President Trump is expected to sign an executive order later this week on the proposed deal, which will set out how it will comply with US national security demands. The order will also outline a 120-day pause to the enforcement deadline to allow the deal to close. It is unclear whether the Chinese government has approved this agreement, or begun to take regulatory steps required to deliver it. However, the White House appears confident it has secured China's approval. Data belonging to the 170m users TikTok says it has in the US is already held on Oracle servers, under an existing arrangement called Project Texas. It saw US user data siphoned off due to concerns it could fall into the hands of the Chinese government. A senior White House official said that under President Trump's deal, the company would take on a comprehensive role in securing the entirety of the app for American users. They said this would include auditing and inspecting the source code and recommendation system underpinning the app, and rebuilding it for US users using only US user data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CalMatters: A California attorney must pay a $10,000 fine for filing a state court appeal full of fake quotations generated by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT. The fine appears to be the largest issued over AI fabrications by a California court and came with a blistering opinion (PDF) stating that 21 of 23 quotes from cases cited in the attorney's opening brief were made up. It also noted that numerous out-of-state and federal courts have confronted attorneys for citing fake legal authority. "We therefore publish this opinion as a warning," it continued. "Simply stated, no brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court should contain any citations -- whether provided by generative AI or any other source -- that the attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally read and verified." The opinion, issued 10 days ago in California's 2nd District Court of Appeal, is a clear example of why the state's legal authorities are scrambling to regulate the use of AI in the judiciary. The state's Judicial Council two weeks ago issued guidelines requiring judges and court staff to either ban generative AI or adopt a generative AI use policy by Dec. 15. Meanwhile, the California Bar Association is considering whether to strengthen its code of conduct to account for various forms of AI following a request by the California Supreme Court last month. The Los Angeles-area attorney fined last week, Amir Mostafavi, told the court that he did not read text generated by the AI model before submitting the appeal in July 2023, months after OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as capable of passing the bar exam. A three-judge panel fined him for filing a frivolous appeal, violating court rules, citing fake cases, and wasting the court's time and the taxpayers money, according to the opinion. Mostafavi told CalMatters he wrote the appeal and then used ChatGPT to try and improve it. He said that he didn't know it would add case citations or make things up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max appear to provide little resistance to scratches and scuffs around the sharp edges of the camera bump. Tech blogger Zack Nelson demonstrates this weakness in a durability test on his JerryRigEverything YouTube channel, explaining that the anodized aluminium layer on the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max "does not stick to corners very well" -- creating a weak point in the coating. This is a known issue with the electrochemical anodizing process, so it was a design decision Apple knowingly made. "For some reason, Apple didn't add a chamfer, fillet, or radius around the camera plateau, and I think it was intentional, so it looks cooler," Nelson says in the video. "But that decision to look cool out of the box is going to plague everyone who owns this phone down the road." The video shows that everyday objects, like a coin or house key carried in the same pocket as the iPhone 17 Pro, can chip away at the anodized coating around the sharp corners of the camera bump. However, that same mildly aggressive scratching on the flat surface of the camera plateau only produced dust that could be easily wiped away.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The rise of self-driving cars could eventually cost many ride-hailing drivers their jobs -- and that's a big problem, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said. From a report: Khosrowshahi spoke about the issue onstage this month at a summit hosted by the "All-In" podcast, which posted a video of the conversation on Wednesday. At the summit, Khosrowshahi was asked about concerns that gig workers, who have played a key role in Uber's development, will eventually lose their jobs as self-driving cars become more prevalent. The Uber CEO said he expects human drivers to continue working alongside self-driving cars in Uber's network in the coming years. "For the next five to seven years, we're going to have more human drivers and delivery people, just because we're going so quickly," Khosrowshahi said. "But, I think, 10 to 15 years from now, this is going to be a real issue," he said about drivers losing their jobs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is working on bringing support for setting a video as your desktop wallpaper on Windows 11. From a report: Hidden in the latest Windows 11 preview builds, the feature lets you set an MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV, M4V, or MKV file as your wallpaper, which will play the video whenever you view the desktop. For many years, users have wanted the ability to set a video as a desktop background. It's a feature that many Linux distributions support, and macOS also supports the ability to set a moving background as your lock screen. Windows Vista did support setting videos as your wallpaper, but only as part of the Ultimate SKU via a feature called DreamScene.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the AI lab builds data centers requiring 10 gigawatts of power capacity. The 10-gigawatt deployment equals 4 to 5 million GPUs -- the same number Nvidia will ship globally this year. Building one gigawatt of data center capacity costs $50 to $60 billion, including approximately $35 billion for Nvidia chips and systems. The first phase begins in the second half of 2026 using Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin systems. The investment adds Nvidia to OpenAI's investor roster alongside Microsoft, SoftBank, and Thrive Capital at a $500 billion valuation. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described the investment as "additive to everything that's been announced and contracted."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Venture capitalists in clean tech are starting to say out loud what they've suspected for a while: China's dominance has left key sectors in the West uninvestable. A group of eight VCs from Western firms agreed to share with Bloomberg the details of a July road trip across China during which they visited factories, spoke with startup investors, and interviewed founders of companies. They knew China had raced ahead in sectors like batteries and "everything around energy," but seeing how big the gap was firsthand left them wondering how European and North American competitors can even survive, says Talia Rafaeli, a former investment banker at both Goldman Sachs and Barclays who's now a partner at Kompas VC. "Everyone needs to take this kind of trip," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Subscribing to an online service is often as easy as a click of a button. Is it illegal if it takes a maze of clicks to cancel? That issue is at the heart of a civil trial beginning this week that will scrutinize the tactics Amazon uses to entice consumers to sign up for its signature Prime service -- and to steer them away from leaving. WSJ: The Federal Trade Commission alleges the online giant has duped nearly 40 million customers, in violation of consumer-protection laws. It is seeking civil penalties, refunds to consumers and a court order prohibiting Amazon from using subscription practices that could confuse or deceive customers. The case, which will unfold in a Seattle courtroom, is a top test of the agency's enforcement campaign against allegedly deceptive digital subscription practices. Amazon's Prime membership, the largest paid subscription program in the world with at least 200 million users, has helped the company become an integral part of consumers' shopping habits. The FTC, which sued Amazon in 2023, alleges the company tricked people into signing up for the service without their knowledge or consent, including by obscuring details about billing and the terms of free trials. It says Amazon created a labyrinth to make it hard to cancel, which the company dubbed "Iliad," a reference to Homer's epic about the long, arduous Trojan War. The FTC says Amazon required customers to navigate four webpages and chose from 15 options to cancel a Prime membership. The company streamlined the process in April 2023, ahead of the filing of the criminal complaint. The FTC won an initial pretrial victory last week when a federal judge ruled that Amazon did violate consumer-protection laws by taking Prime members' billing information before disclosing the terms of the membership. But he said jurors still would have to consider whether the customers gave their consent to enroll and whether Amazon provided a simple cancellation mechanism.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major U.S. corporations are mandating more office time but seeing minimal compliance changes. Companies now require 12% more in-office days than in early 2024, according to Work Forward data tracking 9,000 employers. Yet Americans continue working from home approximately 25% of the time, unchanged from 2023, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom's monthly survey of 10,000 Americans shows. The New York Times ordered opinion and newsroom staff to four days weekly starting November. Microsoft mandates three days beginning February for Pacific Northwest employees. Paramount and NBCUniversal gave staff ultimatums: commit to five and four days respectively or take buyouts. Amazon faced desk and parking shortages after its full-time mandate, temporarily backpedaling in Houston and New York. Nearly half of senior managers would accept pay cuts to work remotely, a BambooHR survey of 1,500 salaried employees found.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US will charge companies $100,000 for each new H-1B visa starting February 2026 under Project Firewall. According to a new analysis, the fee exceeds average H-1B salaries at firms like TCS where engineers earn $105,000 annually. Previous visa costs ranged from $2,000 to $33,000. Indians hold an estimated 70% of H-1B visas. The fee eliminates five to six years of profit per engineer. Typical engineers deployed to American client sites generate $150,000 to $200,000 in annual billings at 10% operating margins, producing $15,000 to $20,000 in yearly profit. J.P. Morgan states the move "prices out the utility of H-1B as a source of labor supply." But it might not be bad for the IT giants. Major Indian IT firms derive only 0.2% to 2.2% of their workforce from H-1B approvals after years of reducing visa dependence, according to India Dispatch. New approvals alone account for under 0.4% of headcount. Morgan Stanley estimates companies could offset 60% of the financial impact through increased offshoring and selective price increases. The net damage to operating profit would stay contained at around 50 basis points or a 3% to 4% hit to earnings spread across the renewal cycle. Companies plan to accelerate geographic arbitrage by routing more work to India, Canada, and Latin America. Firms can maintain their existing visa holder base while letting normal turnover occur over three to six years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's not just glitches at the launch of the Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses... The New York Times remains skeptical of its market share:[Meta's] smart glasses remain a niche. As of February, Meta had sold about two million of its $300 Ray-Ban Meta camera glasses since their 2023 debut, and it hopes to sell 10 million annually by the end of 2026, which is a tiny amount for a company this size. In the last decade, Meta has spent over $100 billion on its virtual and augmented reality division, which includes its smart glasses and is not profitable. Last quarter, the division reported a $4.5 billion loss, nearly the same as a year ago. "Meta's Smart Glasses Might Make You Smarter. They'll Certainly Make You More Awkward," joked a recent Wired headline. But the Wall Street Journal does report there's "a growing group of blind users... finding the devices to be more of a life-enhancing tool than a cool accessory." Jonathan Mosen, executive director at the nonprofit National Federation of the Blind said he'd like to see Meta continue to invest in the glasses. "It's giving significant accessibility benefits at a price point people can afford." He has used them a few times to record video of ride-share drivers refusing to give him and his wife a ride because she travels with a guide dog. Denying rides to people with service animals is illegal in many countries, including the U.S. Another concern for blind users is that AI assistants in general are prone to making errors, or so-called hallucinations, which may not be apparent. Aaron Preece, who is blind and editor in chief of American Foundation for the Blind's AccessWorld magazine, said Meta's glasses recently failed to correctly read the number on the door to his home. "I just can't trust it," he said. "It's more of a novelty than something I'd use on a day-to-day basis." When it comes to innovative technology, CNET seems more excited about Meta's display-controlling "neural wristband" accessory. Instead of camera-based hand tracking, these muscle-sensing bands "can register gestural moves like pinches, taps, thumb swipes, and maybe even typing over time..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reddit's content became AI training data last year when Google signed a $60 million-per-year licensing agreement. But now Reddit is "in early talks" about a new deal seeking "deeper integration with Google's AI products," reports Bloomberg (citing executives familiar with the discussions). And Reddit also wants "a deal structure that could allow for dynamic pricing, where the social platform can be paid more" - with both Google and OpenAI - to "adequately reflect how valuable their data has been to these platforms..."Such licensing agreements are becoming more common as AI companies seek legal ways to train their models. OpenAI has also struck a series of partnership agreements with major media publishers such as Axel Springer SE, Time and Conde Nast to use their content in ChatGPT... Reddit remains among the most cited sources across AI platforms, according to analytics company Profound AI. However, Reddit executives have noticed that traffic coming from Google has limited value, as users seeking answers to a specific question often don't convert into becoming active Redditors, the people said. Now, Reddit is engaging with product teams at Google in hopes of finding ways to send more of its users deeper into its ecosystem of community forums, according to the executives. In return, Reddit is looking for ways to provide more high-quality data to its AI partners. Discussions between Reddit and Google have been productive, the people said. "We're midflight in our data licensing deals and still learning, but what we have seen is that Reddit data is highly cited and valued," Reddit Chief Operating Officer Jen Wong said on July 31 during a call with investors. "We'll continue to evaluate as we go."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"New research suggests ash and soot from burning wildlands has caused more than 41,000 excess deaths annually from 2011 to 2020," reports the Los Angeles Times:By 2050, as global warming makes large swaths of North America hotter and drier, the annual death toll from smoke could reach between 68,000 and 71,000, without stronger preventive and public health measures... In the span studied, millions of people were exposed to unhealthful levels of air pollution. When inhaled, this microscopic pollution not only aggravates people's lungs, it also enters the bloodstream, provoking inflammation that can induce heart attacks and stroke. For years, researchers have struggled to quantify the danger the smoke poses. In the paper published in Nature, they report it's far greater than public health officials may have recognized. Yet most climate assessments "don't often include wildfire smoke as a part of the climate-related damages. And it turns out, by our calculation, this is one of the most important climate impacts in the U.S." The study also estimates a higher number of deaths than previous work in part because it projected mortality up to three years after a person has been exposed to wildfire smoke. It also illustrates the dangers of smoke drifting from fire-prone regions into wetter parts of the country, a recent phenomenon that has garnered more attention with large Canadian wildfires contributing to hazy skies in the Midwest and East Coast in the last several years. "Everybody is impacted across the U.S.," said Minghoa Qiu [lead author and assistant professor at Stony Brook University]. "Certainly the Western U.S. is more impacted. But the Eastern U.S. is by no means isolated from this problem."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many Apple Watches will soon be able to alert users about possible high blood pressure, reports Reuters - culminating six years of research and development:Apple used AI to sort through the data from 100,000 people enrolled in a heart and movement study it originally launched in 2019 to see whether it could find features in the signal data from the watch's main heart-related sensor that it could then match up with traditional blood pressure measurements, said Sumbul Ahmad Desai [Apple's vice president of health]. After multiple layers of machine learning, Apple came up with an algorithm that it then validated with a specific study of 2,000 participants. Apple's privacy measures mean that "one of the ironies here is we don't get a lot of data" outside of the context of large-scale studies, Desai said. But data from those studies "gives us a sense of, scientifically, what are some other signals that are worth pulling the thread on ... those studies are incredibly powerful." The feature, which received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, does not measure blood pressure directly, but notifies users that they may have high blood pressure and encourages them to use a cuff to measure it and talk to a doctor. Apple plans to roll out the feature to more than 150 countries, which Ami Bhatt, chief innovation officer of the American College of Cardiology, said could help people discover high blood pressure early and reduce related conditions such as heart attacks, strokes and kidney disease. Bhatt, who said her views are her own and do not represent those of the college, said Apple appears to have been careful to avoid false positives that might alarm users. But she said the iPhone maker should emphasize that the new feature is no substitute for traditional measurements and professional diagnosis. The article notes that the feature will be available in Apple Watch Series 11 models that go on sale on Friday, as well as models back to the Apple Watch Series 9.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Astronomers have spotted a quasi-moon near Earth," reports CNN, "and the small space rock has likely been hanging out near our planet unseen by telescopes for about 60 years, according to new research."The newly discovered celestial object, named 2025 PN7, is a type of near-Earth asteroid that orbits the sun but sticks close to our planet. Like our world, 2025 PN7 takes one year to complete an orbit around the sun... The newly found 2025 PN7 is just one of a handful of known quasi-moons with orbits near our planet, including Kamo'oalewa, which is also thought to be an ancient lunar fragment. Kamo'oalewa is one of the destinations of China's Tianwen-2 mission launched in May, which aims to collect and return samples from the space rock in 2027. The Pan-STARRS observatory located on the Haleakala volcano in Hawaii captured observations of 2025 PN7 on August 29. Archival data revealed that the object has been in an Earth-like orbit for decades. The quasi-moon managed to escape the notice of astronomers for so long because it is small and faint, said Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, a researcher on the faculty of mathematical sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid who recently authored a paper about the space rock. The paper was published on September 2 in the journal Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, which is for timely non-peer-reviewed astronomical observations. The space rock swings within 186,000 miles (299,337 kilometers) of us during its closest pass of our planet, de la Fuente Marcos said.... "It can only be detected by currently available telescopes when it gets close to our planet as it did this summer," de la Fuente Marcos explained. "Its visibility windows are few and far between. It is a challenging object...." Astronomers are still trying to figure out 2025 PN7's size. About 98 feet (30 meters) across is a reasonable estimate, de la Fuente Marcos said. It also has the potential to be 62 feet (19 meters) in diameter, according to EarthSky. The space rock is currently the smallest-known quasi-moon to have orbited near Earth, de la Fuente Marcos said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Over at the Communications of the ACM, Bard College CS Prof Valerie Barr explains why she's Feeling Cranky About AI and CS Education. Having seen CS education go through a number of we-have-to-teach-this moments over the decades - introductory programming languages, the Web, Data Science, etc. - Barr turns her attention to the next hand-wringing "what will we do" CS education moment with AI. "We're jumping through hoops without stopping first to question the run-away train," Barr writes... Barr calls for stepping back from "the industry assertion that the ship has sailed, every student needs to use AI early and often, and there is no future application that isn't going to use AI in some way" and instead thoughtfully "articulate what sort of future problem solvers and software developers we want to graduate from our programs, and determine ways in which the incorporation of AI can help us get there." From the article:In much discussion about CS education: a.) There's little interest in interrogating the downsides of generative AI, such as the environmental impact, the data theft impact, the treatment and exploitation of data workers. b.) There's little interest in considering the extent to which, by incorporating generative AI into our teaching, we end up supporting a handful of companies that are burning billions in a vain attempt to each achieve performance that is a scintilla better than everyone else's. c.) There's little interest in thinking about what's going to happen when the LLM companies decide that they have plateaued, that there's no more money to burn/spend, and a bunch of them fold-but we've perturbed education to such an extent that our students can no longer function without their AI helpers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"On a recent assignment to test defenses, Dave Brauchler of the cybersecurity company NCC Group tricked a client's AI program-writing assistant into executing programs that forked over the company's databases and code repositories," reports the Washington Post. "We have never been this foolish with security," Brauchler said... Demonstrations at last month's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas included other attention-getting means of exploiting artificial intelligence. In one, an imagined attacker sent documents by email with hidden instructions aimed at ChatGPT or competitors. If a user asked for a summary or one was made automatically, the program would execute the instructions, even finding digital passwords and sending them out of the network. A similar attack on Google's Gemini didn't even need an attachment, just an email with hidden directives. The AI summary falsely told the target an account had been compromised and that they should call the attacker's number, mimicking successful phishing scams. The threats become more concerning with the rise of agentic AI, which empowers browsers and other tools to conduct transactions and make other decisions without human oversight. Already, security company Guardio has tricked the agentic Comet browser addition from Perplexity into buying a watch from a fake online store and to follow instructions from a fake banking email... Advanced AI programs also are beginning to be used to find previously undiscovered security flaws, the so-called zero-days that hackers highly prize and exploit to gain entry into software that is configured correctly and fully updated with security patches. Seven teams of hackers that developed autonomous "cyber reasoning systems" for a contest held last month by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency were able to find a total of 18 zero-days in 54 million lines of open source code. They worked to patch those vulnerabilities, but officials said hackers around the world are developing similar efforts to locate and exploit them. Some longtime security defenders are predicting a once-in-a-lifetime, worldwide mad dash to use the technology to find new flaws and exploit them, leaving back doors in place that they can return to at leisure. The real nightmare scenario is when these worlds collide, and an attacker's AI finds a way in and then starts communicating with the victim's AI, working in partnership - "having the bad guy AI collaborate with the good guy AI," as SentinelOne's [threat researcher Alex] Delamotte put it. "Next year," said Adam Meyers, senior vice president at CrowdStrike, "AI will be the new insider threat." In August more than 1,000 people lost data to a modified Nx program (downloaded hundreds of thousands of times) that used pre-installed coding tools from Google/Anthropic/etc. According to the article, the malware "instructed those programs to root out" sensitive data (including passwords or cryptocurrency wallets) and send it back to the attacker. "The more autonomy and access to production environments such tools have, the more havoc they can wreak," the article points out - including this quote from SentinelOne threat researcher Alex Delamotte. "It's kind of unfair that we're having AI pushed on us in every single product when it introduces new risks."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared this report from ZME ScienceResearchers from the University of Turku, in collaboration with Aalto University and Wageningen University, have developed a bio-based UV protection film for solar cells that not only blocks nearly all harmful ultraviolet light but also outperforms commercial plastic films. The key ingredient is a water extract made from red onion skins... [T]he same sunlight that powers [solar cells] can also degrade their delicate components - particularly the electrolyte inside dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), a type known for their flexibility and low-light performance. To mitigate this, manufacturers typically wrap cells in UV-protective films made from petroleum-based plastics like polyethylene terephthalate (PET). But these plastics degrade over time and are difficult to recycle... Nanocellulose can be processed into thin, transparent films that serve as the perfect substrate for UV-blocking compounds. Their breakthrough came when they dyed these films using an extract from red onion skins, a common kitchen waste. The result was a filter that blocked 99.9% of UV radiation up to 400 nanometers, a feat that outstripped even the PET-based commercial filters chosen for comparison... [T]he onion-treated filter excelled: it let through over 80% of light in the 650-1,100 nm range - an ideal sweet spot for energy absorption... Even predictive modeling based on early degradation trends suggested the CNF-ROE filter could extend a solar cell's lifetime to roughly 8,500 hours. The PET-based filter? Just 1,500 hours... [T]he red onion extract offered a rare combination of longevity, transparency, and sustainability... The team envisions biodegradable solar cells for smart packaging, remote sensors, or wearable devices - especially in applications where recovery and recycling are not feasible. Their work is part of the BioEST project, funded by the Research Council of Finland, which supports sustainable innovation across electronics and materials science. This achievement taps into a broader movement to decarbonize every step of solar energy production. Plastic packaging is one of the overlooked sources of emissions in clean technology. Swapping out fossil-based plastics for biodegradable alternatives helps close that loop... The findings appeared in the journal Applied Optical Materials.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a debate on employment rights, a U.K. Parliament member brought up Meta's former director of global public policy Sarah Wynn-WilliamsLouise Haigh, the former Labour transport secretary, said Wynn-Williams was facing a fine of $50,000 (37,000) every time she breached an order secured by Meta preventing her from talking disparagingly about the company... "I am sure that the whole house and the government will stand with Sarah as we pass this legislation to ensure that whistleblowers and those with the moral courage to speak out are always protected...." Meta has emphasised that Wynn-Williams entered into the non-disparagement agreement voluntarily as part of her departure. Meta said that to date, Wynn-Williams had not been forced to make any payments under the agreement... [The ruling came after Wynn-Williams published an expose in March about her time at Facebook titled Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.] The ruling stated Wynn-Williams should stop promoting the book and, to the extent she could, stop further publication... Wynn-Williams has not spoken in public since appearing at the Senate hearing in April. Wynn-Williams "remains silenced" according to her lawyer, who tells the Guardian that Meta's arbitration proceedings in the U.K. "threaten to bankrupt" the whistleblower.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A July combat training exercise involved a satellite dish-style antenna that "could fire enough electromagnetic energy to fry the satellite 22,000 miles away," reports the Washington Post. But "Instead, the salvo would be more covert - millisecond pulses of energy that would subtly disrupt the satellite's signals, which U.S. military forces were using to communicate in the Pacific Ocean."The goal was to disguise the strike as a garbled connection that could be easily remedied by securing a loose cable or a simple reboot, leaving U.S. service members frustrated without raising their suspicions. [And using less power "would make it harder for the Blue Team to track where the interference was coming from."] This is how the next war could start: invisible shots fired in space on the electromagnetic spectrum that could render U.S. fighter jets and aircraft carriers deaf and blind, unable to communicate. In this case, the "aggressors" targeting the U.S. satellite were not from China or Russia, but rather an elite squadron of U.S. Space Force Guardians mimicking how potential adversaries would act in a conflict that begins in orbit... Involving more than 700 service members and spanning 50 million square miles and six time zones, the training exercise, called Resolute Space, was observed firsthand exclusively by The Washington Post. The article describes leadership at the U.S. Space Force "still honing their mission while jousting with adversaries, such as China, that are moving quickly and conducting combat-like operations in orbit... While the Space Force continues to evolve, many defense analysts and some members of Congress fear the United States has already ceded its dominance in space to China and others."With a budget of just $40 billion, the relatively tiny Space Force makes up just about 4 percent of the Defense Department's budget and less than 1 percent of its personnel. It has more than 15,000 Guardians, which also includes several thousand civilians. By comparison, the Army has nearly 1 million soldiers. The Space Force has been squeezed under the department of the Air Force and struggled to distinguish itself from the other branches... China, Russia and others have demonstrated that they can take out or interfere with the satellites operated by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies that provide the nation's missile warning and tracking, reconnaissance and communications. China in particular has moved rapidly to build an arsenal of space-based weapons... [R]ecently, several of China's satellites have engaged in what Space Force officials have called "dogfighting," jousting with U.S. satellites at high speeds and close ranges.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week the Guardian reported on "thousands of AI workers contracted for Google through Japanese conglomerate Hitachi's GlobalLogic to rate and moderate the output of Google's AI products, including its flagship chatbot Gemini... and its summaries of search results, AI Overviews.""AI isn't magic; it's a pyramid scheme of human labor," said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. "These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable...." Ten of Google's AI trainers the Guardian spoke to said they have grown disillusioned with their jobs because they work in siloes, face tighter and tighter deadlines, and feel they are putting out a product that's not safe for users... In May 2023, a contract worker for Appen submitted a letter to the US Congress that the pace imposed on him and others would make Google Bard, Gemini's predecessor, a "faulty" and "dangerous" product This week Google laid off 200 of those moderating contractors, reports Wired. "These workers, who often are hired because of their specialist knowledge, had to have either a master's or a PhD to join the super rater program, and typically include writers, teachers, and people from creative fields."Workers still at the company claim they are increasingly concerned that they are being set up to replace themselves. According to internal documents viewed by WIRED, GlobalLogic seems to be using these human raters to train the Google AI system that could automatically rate the responses, with the aim of replacing them with AI. At the same time, the company is also finding ways to get rid of current employees as it continues to hire new workers. In July, GlobalLogic made it mandatory for its workers in Austin, Texas, to return to office, according to a notice seen by WIRED... Some contractors attempted to unionize earlier this year but claim those efforts were quashed. Now they allege that the company has retaliated against them. Two workers have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging they were unfairly fired, one due to bringing up wage transparency issues, and the other for advocating for himself and his coworkers. "These individuals are employees of GlobalLogic or their subcontractors, not Alphabet," Courtenay Mencini, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement... "Globally, other AI contract workers are fighting back and organizing for better treatment and pay," the article points out, noting that content moderators from around the world facing similar issues formed the Global Trade Union Alliance of Content Moderators which includes workers from Kenya, Turkey, and Colombia. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Writing in Communications of the ACM, former Go tech lead Russ Cox warns we need to keep improving defenses of software supply chains, highlighting "promising approaches that should be more widely used" and "areas where more work is needed."There are important steps we can take today, such as adopting software signatures in some form, making sure to scan for known vulnerabilities regularly, and being ready to update and redeploy software when critical new vulnerabilities are found. More development should be shifted to safer languages that make vulnerabilities and attacks less likely. We also need to find ways to fund open source development to make it less susceptible to takeover by the mere offer of free help. Relatively small investments in OpenSSL and XZ development could have prevented both the Heartbleed vulnerability and the XZ attack. Some highlights from the 5,000-word article: Make Builds Reproducible. "The Reproducible Builds project aims to raise awareness of reproducible builds generally, as well as building tools to help progress toward complete reproducibility for all Linux software. The Go project recently arranged for Go itself to be completely reproducible given only the source code... A build for a given target produces the same distribution bits whether you build on Linux or Windows or Mac, whether the build host is X86 or ARM, and so on. Strong reproducibility makes it possible for others to easily verify that the binaries posted for download match the source code..." Prevent Vulnerabilities. "The most secure software dependencies are the ones not used in the first place: Every dependency adds risk... Another good way to prevent vulnerabilities is to use safer programming languages that remove error-prone language features or make them needed less often..." Authenticate Software. ("Cryptographic signatures make it impossible to nefariously alter code between signing and verifying. The only problem left is key distribution...") "The Go checksum database is a real-world example of this approach that protects millions of Go developers. The database holds the SHA256 checksum of every version of every public Go module..." Fund Open Source. [Cox first cites the XKCD cartoon "Dependencies," calling it "a disturbingly accurate assessment of the situation..."] "The XZ attack is the clearest possible demonstration that the problem is not fixed. It was enabled as much by underfunding of open source as by any technical detail."The article also emphasized the importance of finding and fixing vulnerabilities quickly, arguing that software attacks must be made more difficult and expensive. "We use source code downloaded from strangers on the Internet in our most critical applications; almost no one is checking the code.... We all have more work to do."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Near Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, the Five Stones coffee shop advertised for a barista a few months ago - and started getting resumes from "people who listed Microsoft and other tech companies," writes the Wall Street Journal:The applicants typically had master's degrees and experience in graphic design or marketing roles, Andrews said - sometimes senior ones. They were applying to jobs at Five Stones that would pay Redmond's minimum wage, $16.66 an hour. Five Stones hasn't yet hired such candidates because the coffee shop gives priority to more traditional entry-level baristas, like high-schoolers... [Microsoft and Amazon] have laid off more than 46,000 employees since 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks workforce reductions. That represents 85% of layoffs by Seattle-area tech companies... As Amazon and Microsoft have made cuts - and other local tech firms including Expedia and Redfin have followed suit - the effects have rippled through Seattle's other business sectors. Weakness in payroll and sales tax contributed to a projected $146 million shortfall in revenue over the next two years. Restaurant and retail spending is down in the business and shopping districts surrounding Amazon's and Microsoft's campuses, with total transactions falling by as much as 7% in some popular areas in the past year, according to data from Square. In the first half of 2025, around 450 restaurants closed in Seattle, or about 16% of its total. "At the halfway point of the year, we've already seen as many closures as we'd usually see in a full year," said Anthony Anton, chief executive officer of the Washington Hospitality Association. Uber driver Juan Prado made six figures in 2021, often shuttling passengers in town for job interviews and doing frequent drop-offs near downtown tech offices. Now, he said, demand is much lower. "There are moments where you can be online, and in certain areas, it shows nothing...." Seattle tech firms are asking for significantly fewer job placements than years ago, said Noelle McDonald, senior vice president at recruiting company Aquent, which counts Amazon and Microsoft as clients. Hiring windows have lengthened and open roles receive around 10 times as many applications. And of course, "Commercial real-estate vacancies stand at a record high as offices built to accommodate a boom sit empty... " While some laid-off employees launched their own startups, "the outlook for many tech workers is dour as companies invest in software tools they can use to streamline teams," the article points out. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella "has said the company is increasingly looking to AI to perform coding and other tasks once done by people," while in June, Amazon "said its workforce would shrink going forward."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mickey Mouse's first movie Steamboat Willie entered the public domain in 2024. Now one of America's largest personal injury firms is suing Disney, reports the Associated Press, "in an effort to get a ruling that would allow it to use Steamboat Willie in advertisements..."[The law firm said] it had reached out to Disney to make sure the entertainment company wouldn't sue them if they used images from the animated film for their TV and online ads. Disney's lawyers responded by saying they didn't offer legal advice to third parties, according to the lawsuit. Morgan & Morgan said it was filing the lawsuit to get a decision because it otherwise feared being sued by Disney for trademark infringement if it used Steamboat Willie. "Without waiver of any of its rights, Disney will not provide such advice in response to your letter," Disney's attorneys wrote in their letter (adding "Very truly yours..."). A local newscast showed a glimpse of the letter, along with a few seconds of the ad (which ends with Minnie Mouse pulling out a cellphone to call for a lawyer...) Attorney John Morgan tells the newscast that Disney's legal team "is playing cute, and so we're just trying to get a yes or no answer.. They wrote us back a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that made no sense, didn't answer the question. We tried it again, they didn't answer the question..." (The newscast adds that the case isn't expected to go to court for at least a year.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Meta finally unveiled its newest smart glasses, CEO Mark Zuckerberg "drew more snickers than applause," wrote the New York Times. (Mashable points out a video call failing onstage followed by an unsuccessful recipe demonstration.) Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth later explained the funny reason their demo didn't work, reports TechCrunch, while answering questions on Instagram:"When the chef said, 'Hey, Meta, start Live AI,' it started every single Ray-Ban Meta's Live AI in the building. And there were a lot of people in that building," Bosworth explained. "That obviously didn't happen in rehearsal; we didn't have as many things," he said, referring to the number of glasses that were triggered... The second part of the failure had to do with how Meta had chosen to route the Live AI traffic to its development server to isolate it during the demo. But when it did so, it did this for everyone in the building on the access points, which included all the headsets. "So we DDoS'd ourselves, basically, with that demo," Bosworth added... Meta's dev server wasn't set up to handle the flood of traffic from the other glasses in the building - Meta was only planning for it to handle the demos alone. The issue with the failed WhatsApp call, on the other hand, was the result of a new bug. The smart glasses' display had gone to sleep at the exact moment the call came in, Bosworth said. When Zuckerberg woke the display back up, it didn't show the answer notification to him. The CTO said this was a "race condition" bug... "We've never run into that bug before," Bosworth noted. "That's the first time we'd ever seen it. It's fixed now, and that's a terrible, terrible place for that bug to show up." He stressed that, of course, Meta knows how to handle video calls, and the company was "bummed" about the bug showing up here... "It really was just a demo fail and not, like, a product failure," he said. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The consumer advocacy nonprofit PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) is now petitioning Microsoft to reconsider pulling support for Windows 10 in 2025, since "as many as 400 million perfectly good computers that can't upgrade to Windows 11 will be thrown out." In a petition addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the group warned the October 14 end of free support could cause "the single biggest jump in junked computers ever, and make it impossible for Microsoft to hit their sustainability goals."About 40% of PCs currently in use can't upgrade to Windows 11, even if users want to... Less than a quarter of electronic waste is recycled, so most of those computers will end up in landfills. Consumer Reports recently also urged Microsoft to not to "strand millions of customers.". And now more groups are also pushing back, according to a post from the blog Windows: CentralThe Restart Project co-developed the "End of 10" toolkit, which is designed to support Windows 10 users who can't upgrade to Windows 11 after the operating system hits its end-of-support date. They also note that a Paris-based company called Back Market plans to sell Windows 10 laptops refurbished with Ubuntu Linux or ChromeOS Flex. ("We refuse to watch hundreds of millions of perfectly good computers end up in the trash as e-waste," explains their web site.) Back Market's ad promises an "up-to-date, secure operating system - so instead of paying for a new computer you don't need, you can help us give this one a brand new life." Right now Windows 10 holds 71.9% of Microsoft's market share, with Windows 11 at 22.95%, according to figures from StatCounter cited by the blog Windows Central. And HP and Dell "recently indicated that half of the global PCs are still running Windows 10," according to another Windows Central post...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The consumer advocacy nonprofit PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) is now petitioning Microsoft to reconsider pulling support for Windows 10 in 2025, since "as many as 400 million perfectly good computers that can't upgrade to Windows 11 will be thrown out." In a petition addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the group warned the October 14 end of free support could cause "the single biggest jump in junked computers ever, and make it impossible for Microsoft to hit their sustainability goals."About 40% of PCs currently in use can't upgrade to Windows 11, even if users want to... Less than a quarter of electronic waste is recycled, so most of those computers will end up in landfills. Consumer Reports recently also urged Microsoft to not to "strand millions of customers.". And now more groups are also pushing back, according to a post from the blog Windows: CentralThe Restart Project co-developed the "End of 10" toolkit, which is designed to support Windows 10 users who can't upgrade to Windows 11 after the operating system hits its end-of-support date. They also note that a Paris-based company called Back Market plans to sell Windows 10 laptops refurbished with Ubuntu Linux or ChromeOS Flex. ("We refuse to watch hundreds of millions of perfectly good computers end up in the trash as e-waste," explains their web site.) Back Market's ad promises an "up-to-date, secure operating system - so instead of paying for a new computer you don't need, you can help us give this one a brand new life." Right now Windows 10 holds 71.9% of Microsoft's market share, with Windows 11 at 22.95%, according to figures from StatCounter cited by the blog Windows Central. And HP and Dell "recently indicated that half of the global PCs are still running Windows 10," according to another Windows Central post...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this article from the Washington Post:A student taking an online quiz sees a button appear in their Chrome browser: "homework help." Soon, Google's artificial intelligence has read the question on-screen and suggests "choice B" as the answer. The temptation to cheat was suddenly just two clicks away Sept. 2, when Google quietly added a "homework help" button to Chrome, the world's most popular web browser. The button has been appearing automatically on the kinds of course websites used by the majority of American college students and many high-schoolers, too. Pressing it launches Google Lens, a service that reads what's on the page and can provide an "AI Overview" answer to questions - including during tests. Educators I've spoken with are alarmed. Schools including Emory University, the University of Alabama, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of California at Berkeley have alerted faculty how the button appears in the URL box of course sites and their limited ability to control it. Chrome's cheating tool exemplifies Big Tech's continuing gold rush approach to AI: launch first, consider consequences later and let society clean up the mess. "Google is undermining academic integrity by shoving AI in students' faces during exams," says Ian Linkletter, a librarian at the British Columbia Institute of Technology who first flagged the issue to me. "Google is trying to make instructors give up on regulating AI in their classroom, and it might work. Google Chrome has the market share to change student behavior, and it appears this is the goal." Several days after I contacted Google about the issue, the company told me it had temporarily paused the homework help button - but also didn't commit to keeping it off. "Students have told us they value tools that help them learn and understand things visually, so we're running tests offering an easier way to access Lens while browsing," Google spokesman Craig Ewer said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Finnish tech firm Bluefors, a maker of ultracold refrigerator systems critical for quantum computing, has purchased tens of thousands of liters of Helium-3 from the moon - spending "above $300 million" - through a commercial space company called Interlune. The agreement, which has not been previously reported, marks the largest purchase of a natural resource from space. Interlune, a company founded by former executives from Blue Origin and an Apollo astronaut, has faced skepticism about its mission to become the first entity to mine the moon (which is legal thanks to a 2015 law that grants U.S. space companies the rights to mine on celestial bodies). But advances in its harvesting technology and the materialization of commercial agreements are gradually making this undertaking sound less like science fiction. Bluefors is the third customer to sign up, with an order of up to 10,000 liters of Helium-3 annually for delivery between 2028 and 2037... Helium-3 is lighter than the Helium-4 gas featured at birthday parties. It's also much rarer on Earth. But moon rock samples from the Apollo days hint at its abundance there. Interlune has placed the market value at $20 million per kilogram (about 7,500 liters). "It's the only resource in the universe that's priced high enough to warrant going out to space today and bringing it back to Earth," said Rob Meyerson [CEO of Interlune and former president of Blue Origin]... [H]eat, even in small doses, can cause qubits to produce errors. That's where Helium-3 comes in. Bluefors makes the cooling technology that allows the computer to operate - producing chandelier-type structures known as dilution refrigerators. Their fridges, used by quantum computer leader IBM, contain a mixture of Helium-3 and Helium-4 that pushes temperatures below 10 millikelvins (or minus-460 degrees Fahrenheit)... Existing quantum computers have been built with more than a thousand qubits, he said, but a commercial system or data center would need a million or more. That could require perhaps thousands of liters of Helium-3 per quantum computer. "They will need more Helium-3 than is available on planet Earth," said Gary Lai [a co-founder and chief technology officer of Interlune, who was previously the chief architect at Blue Origin]. Most Helium-3 on Earth, he said, comes from the decay of tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) in nuclear weapons stockpiles, but between 22,000 and 30,000 liters are made each year... "We estimate there's more than a million metric tons of Helium-3 on the moon," Meyerson said. "And it's been accumulating there for 4 billion years." Now, they just need to get it. Interlune CEO Meyerson tells the post "It's really all about establishing a resilient supply chain for this critical material" - adding that in the long-term he could also see Helium-3 being used for other purposes including fusion energy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A large U.S.-made bomb left over from World War II was discovered at a construction site, reports the Associated Press:Police said the bomb was 1.5 meters (nearly 5 feet) in length and weighed about 1,000 pounds (450 kilograms). It was discovered by construction workers in Quarry Bay, a bustling residential and business district on the west side of Hong Kong island... [A police official] said that because of "the exceptionally high risks associated with its disposal," approximately 1,900 households involving 6,000 individuals were "urged to evacuate swiftly." The operation to deactivate the bomb began late Friday and lasted until around 11:30 a.m. Saturday. No one was injured in the operation. Bombs left over from World War II are discovered from time to time in Hong Kong. The city was occupied by Japanese forces during the war, when it became a base for the Japanese military and shipping. The United States, along with other Allied forces, targeted Hong Kong in air raids to disrupt Japanese supply lines and infrastructure. "Bombs from the war have triggered evacuations and emergency measures around the globe in recent months," reports CBS News:Earlier this month, a 500-pound bomb was discovered in Slovakia's capital during construction work, prompting evacuations. In August, large parts of Dresden, Germany, were evacuated so experts could defuse an unexploded World War II bomb found during clearance work for a collapsed bridge. In June, over 20,000 people were evacuated from Cologne after three unexploded U.S. bombs from the war were found... In March, a World War II bomb was found near the tracks of Paris' Gare du Nord station. In February, more than 170 bombs were found near a children's playground in northern England. And in October 2024, a World War II bomb exploded at a Japanese airport.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A cyberattack targeting check-in and boarding systems disrupted air traffic and caused delays at several of Europe's major airports on Saturday," reports the Associated Press. "While the impact on travelers appeared to be limited, experts said the intrusion exposed vulnerabilities in security systems."The disruptions to electronic systems initially reported at Brussels, Berlin's Brandenburg and London's Heathrow airports meant that only manual check-in and boarding was possible. Many other European airports said their operations were unaffected... Airports said the issue centered around a provider of check-in and boarding systems - not airlines or the airports themselves. Collins Aerospace, whose systems help passengers check themselves in, print boarding passes and bag tags and dispatch their luggage from a kiosk, cited a "cyber-related disruption" to its MUSE (Multi-User System Environment) software at "select airports." Brussels Airport initially reported a "large impact" on flight schedules," according to the article, with a spokesperson telling broadcaster VTM that by mid-morning nine flights had been canceled, with four more redirected to another airport and 15 delayed an hour or more. The airport later told Reuters there were "delays on most of the departing flights." Reuters notes it's "the latest in a string of hacks targeting governments and companies across the world, hitting sectors from healthcare and defence to retail and autos.:A recent breach at luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover brought its production to a halt... At Heathrow, Berlin and Brussels, 29 flight departures and arrivals had been cancelled as of 1130 GMT, aviation data provider Cirium said. In total, 651 departures were scheduled from Heathrow, 228 from Brussels and 226 from Berlin on Saturday... Brussels Airport said it had asked airlines to cancel half of their scheduled departing flights on Sunday to avoid long queues and late cancellations, signalling that the disruption would continue through the weekend. A European Commission spokesperson said there were currently no indications of a "widespread or severe attack" and that the origin of the incident was still under investigation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Betelgeuse may have competition for the most exciting star about to go nova near Earth," writes Space.com. "Astronomers have discovered the secret of a strange star system that has baffled them for years, finding it contains a dead star about to erupt after overfeeding on a stellar companion." The supernova explosion of this cosmic cannibal could be as bright as the moon, making it visible with the naked eye over Earth even in broad daylight. The system in question is the double star V Sagittae located around 10,000 light-years from Earth, containing a white dwarf stellar remnant and its victim companion star, which orbit each other roughly twice every Earth day. The new research and the revelation of this white dwarf's imminent catastrophic fate answer questions about V Sagittae that have lingered for 123 years... White dwarfs represent the final stage of stars with masses around that of the sun, occurring when they run out of fuel for nuclear fusion... [W]hite dwarfs that have a stellar companion can get a second lease on life and a more conclusive and explosive end... [T]he stolen stellar material piles up on the surface of the white dwarf until it pushes this stellar remnant past the so-called Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses. This is the mass limit that a stellar remnant has to exceed to trigger a supernova... However, this team found something very different and extraordinary happening with the stellar material being stolen by the white dwarf in V Sagittae... This investigation revealed that there is a giant halo of gas comprised of material stolen from the companion star wrapped around both the cannibal white dwarf and its stellar victim... "The white dwarf cannot consume all the mass being transferred from its hot star twin, so it creates this bright cosmic ring," team member Pasi Hakala from the University of Turku said. "The speed at which this doomed stellar system is lurching wildly, likely due to the extreme brightness, is a frantic sign of its imminent, violent end." "The matter accumulating on the white dwarf is likely to produce a nova outburst in the coming years, during which V Sagittae would become visible with the naked eye," Pablo Rodriguez-Gil from Spain's Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias said. "But when the two stars finally smash into each other and explode, this would be a supernova explosion so bright it'll be visible from Earth even in the daytime." The research was conducted with the Very Large Telescope (four individual telescopes high in the mountains of Chile) - and published last week in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fast Company ran a contrarian take about AI from entrepreneur/thought leader Faisal Hoque, who argues there's three AI bubbles. The first is a classic speculative bubble, with asset prices soaring above their fundamental values (like the 17th century's Dutch "tulip mania"). "The chances of this not being a bubble are between slim and none..."Second, AI is also arguably in what we might call an infrastructure bubble, with huge amounts being invested in infrastructure without any certainty that it will be used at full capacity in the future. This happened multiple times in the later 1800s, as railroad investors built thousands of miles of unneeded track to serve future demand that never materialized. More recently, it happened in the late '90s with the rollout of huge amount of fiber optic cable in anticipation of internet traffic demand that didn't turn up until decades later. Companies are pouring billions into GPUs, power systems, and cooling infrastructure, betting that demand will eventually justify the capacity. McKinsey analysts talk of a $7 trillion "race to scale data centers" for AI, and just eight projects in 2025 already represent commitments of over $1 trillion in AI infrastructure investment. Will this be like the railroad booms and busts of the late 1800s? It is impossible to say with any kind of certainty, but it is not unreasonable to think so. Third, AI is certainly in a hype bubble, which is where the promise claimed for a new technology exceeds reality, and the discussion around that technology becomes increasingly detached from likely future outcomes. Remember the hype around NFTs? That was a classic hype bubble. And AI has been in a similar moment for a while. All kinds of media - social, print, and web - are filled with AI-related content, while AI boosterism has been the mood music of the corporate world for the last few years. Meanwhile, a recent MIT study reported that 95% of AI pilot projects fail to generate any returns at all. But the article ultimately argues there's lessons in the 1990s dotcom boom: that "a thing can be hyped beyond its actual capabilities while still being important... When valuations correct - and they will - the same pattern will emerge: companies that focus on solving real problems with available technology will extract value before, during, and after the crash." The winners will be companies with systematic approaches to extracting value - adopting mixed portfolios with different time horizons and risk levels, while recognizing organizational friction points for a purposeful (and holistic) integration. "The louder the bubble talk, the more space opens for those willing to take a methodical approach to building value." Thanks to Slashdot reader Tony Isaac for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Shai-Hulud malware campaign impacted hundreds of npm packages across multiple maintainers, reports Koi Security, including popular libraries like @ctrl/tinycolor and some packages maintained by CrowdStrike.Malicious versions embed a trojanized script (bundle.js) designed to steal developer credentials, exfiltrate secrets, and persist in repositories and endpoints through automated workflows. Koi Security created a table of packages identified as compromised, promising it's "continuously updated" (and showing the last compromise detected Tuesday). Nearly all of the compromised packages have a status of "removed from NPM".Attackers published malicious versions of @ctrl/tinycolor and other npm packages, injecting a large obfuscated script (bundle.js) that executes automatically during installation. This payload repackages and republishes maintainer projects, enabling the malware to spread laterally across related packages without direct developer involvement. As a result, the compromise quickly scaled beyond its initial entry point, impacting not only widely used open-source libraries but also CrowdStrike's npm packages. The injected script performs credential harvesting and persistence operations. It runs TruffleHog to scan local filesystems and repositories for secrets, including npm tokens, GitHub credentials, and cloud access keys for AWS, GCP, and Azure. It also writes a hidden GitHub Actions workflow file (.github/workflows/shai-hulud-workflow.yml) that exfiltrates secrets during CI/CD runs, ensuring long-term access even after the initial infection. This dual focus on endpoint secret theft and backdoors makes Shai-Hulud one of the most dangerous campaigns ever compared to previous compromises. "The malicious code also attempts to leak data on GitHub by making private repositories public," according to a Tuesday blog post from security systems provider Sysdig:The Sysdig Threat Research Team (TRT) has been monitoring this worm's progress since its discovery. Due to quick response times, the number of new packages being compromised has slowed considerably. No new packages have been seen in several hours at the time... Their blog post concludes "Supply chain attacks are increasing in frequency. It is more important than ever to monitor third-party packages for malicious activity." Some context from Tom's Hardware:To be clear: This campaign is distinct from the incident that we covered on Sept. 9, which saw multiple npm packages with billions of weekly downloads compromised in a bid to steal cryptocurrency. The ecosystem is the same - attackers have clearly realized the GitHub-owned npm package registry for the Node.js ecosystem is a valuable target - but whoever's behind the Shai-Hulud campaign is after more than just some Bitcoin.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader robinsrowe shared this report from the Register:The C++ standards committee abandoned a detailed proposal to create a rigorously safe subset of the language, according to the proposal's co-author, despite continuing anxiety about memory safety. "The Safety and Security working group voted to prioritize Profiles over Safe C++. Ask the Profiles people for an update. Safe C++ is not being continued," Sean Baxter, author of the cutting-edge Circle C++ compiler, commented in June this year. The topic came up as developers like Simone Bellavia noted the anniversary of the proposal and discovered a decision had been made on Safe C++. One year ago, Baxter told The Reg that the project would enable C++ developers to get the memory safety of Rust, but without having to learn a new language. "Safe C++ prevents users from writing unsound code," he said. "This includes compile-time intelligence like borrow checking to prevent use-after-free bugs and initialization analysis for type safety." Safe C++ would enable incremental migration of code, since it only applies to code in the safe context. Existing unsafe code would run as before. Even the matter of whether the proposal has been abandoned is not clear-cut. Erich Keane, C++ committee member and co-chair of the C++ Evolution Working Group (EWG), said that Baxter's proposal "got a vote of encouragement where roughly 1/2 (20/45) of the people encouraged Sean's paper, and 30/45 encouraged work on profiles (with 6 neutral)... Sean is completely welcome to continue the effort, and many in the committee would love to see him make further effort on standardizing it." In response, Baxter said: "The Rust safety model is unpopular with the committee. Further work on my end won't change that. Profiles won the argument." He added that the language evolution principles adopted by the EWG include the statement that "we should avoid requiring a safe or pure function annotation that has the semantics that a safe or pure function can only call other safe or pure functions." This, he said, is an "irreconcilable design disagreement...."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Micro- and nanoplastic particles "infiltrate all systems of the body, including the brain," notes the University of Rhode Island, "where they can accumulate and trigger Alzheimer's-like conditions, according to a new study by researchers in the University of Rhode Island College of Pharmacy." ScienceDaily shares the announcement:After a previous study that showed how microplastics can infiltrate all systems of the body - including the blood-brain barrier, which protects the brain from harmful substances as small as viruses and bacteria - University of Rhode Island pharmacy assistant professor Jaime Ross expanded the study to determine the brain health impacts of the plastic toxins. Her findings indicate that the accumulation of micro- and nanoplastics in the brain can lead to cognitive decline and even Alzheimer's disease, especially in those who carry genetic risk factors. Ross' latest study, published recently in the journal Environmental Research Communications, examined mice that had been genetically modified to include the naturally occurring gene APOE4, a strong indicator of Alzheimer's risk making people 3.5 times more likely to develop the disease than those who carry the APOE3 variant of the gene that is passed from parents to offspring... Ross and her team exposed two groups of mice - one with the APOE4 variant and one with APOE3 - to micro- and nanoplastics in their drinking water over a period of three weeks. The tiny particles from polystyrene - among the most abundant plastics in the world, found in Styrofoam take-out containers, plastic cups and more - infiltrated the mice' organs, including the brain, as expected... Ross' team then ran the mice through a series of tests to examine their cognitive ability, beginning with an open-field test, in which researchers put a mouse in a chamber and allow it to explore at will for 90 minutes. Ordinarily, a mouse will hug the walls, naturally attempting to hide from potential predators. However, after microplastic exposure, the APOE4 mice - especially the male mice - tended to wander more in the middle of the chamber and spend time in open space, leaving themselves vulnerable to predators... The results are concerning enough to warrant further study into the cognitive decline caused by exposure to micro- and nanoplastics, which are among the most prominent environmental toxins to which people are routinely exposed... Ross is continuing to expand her research into the topic and encourages others to do so, in the hope of leading to better regulation of the toxins.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"OpenAI's video generation tool, Sora, can create high-definition clips of just about anything you could ask for..." reports the Washington Post. "But OpenAI has not specified which videos it grabbed to make Sora, saying only that it combined 'publicly available and licensed data'..."With ChatGPT, OpenAI helped popularize the now-standard industry practice of building more capable AI tools by scraping vast quantities of text from the web without consent. With Sora, launched in December, OpenAI staff said they built a pioneering video generator by taking a similar approach. They developed ways to feed the system more online video - in more varied formats - including vertical videos and longer, higher-resolution clips... To explore what content OpenAI may have used, The Washington Post used Sora to create hundreds of videos that show it can closely mimic movies, TV shows and other content... In dozens of tests, The Post found that Sora can create clips that closely resemble Netflix shows such as "Wednesday"; popular video games like "Minecraft"; and beloved cartoon characters, as well as the animated logos for Warner Bros., DreamWorks and other Hollywood studios, movies and TV shows. The publicly available version of Sora can generate only 20-second clips, without audio. In most cases, the look-alike scenes were made by typing basic requests like "universal studios intro." The results also showed that Sora can create AI videos with the logos or watermarks that broadcasters and tech companies use to brand their video content, including those for the National Basketball Association, Chinese-owned social app TikTok and Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch... Sora's ability to re-create specific imagery and brands suggests a version of the originals appeared in the tool's training data, AI researchers said. "The model is mimicking the training data. There's no magic," said Joanna Materzynska, a PhD researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied datasets used in AI. An AI tool's ability to reproduce proprietary content doesn't necessarily indicate that the original material was copied or obtained from its creators or owners. Content of all kinds is uploaded to video and social platforms, often without the consent of the copyright holder... Materzynska co-authored a study last year that found more than 70 percent of public video datasets commonly used in AI research contained content scraped from YouTube. Netflix and Twitch said they did not have a content partnership for training OpenAI, according to the article (which adds that OpenAI "has yet to face a copyright suit over the data used for Sora.") Two key quotes from the article: "Unauthorized scraping of YouTube content continues to be a violation of our Terms of Service." - YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon"We train on publicly available data consistent with fair use and use industry-leading safeguards to avoid replicating the material they learn from." - OpenAI spokesperson Kayla WoodRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Libraries nationwide are fielding patron requests for books that don't exist after AI-generated summer reading lists appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year. Reference librarian Eddie Kristan told 404 Media the problem began in late 2022 following GPT-3.5's release but escalated dramatically after the newspapers published lists created by a freelancer using AI without verification. A Library Freedom Project survey found patrons increasingly trust AI chatbots over human librarians and become defensive when told their AI-recommended titles are fictional. Kristan now routinely checks WorldCat's global catalog to verify titles exist. Collection development librarians are requesting digital vendors remove AI-generated books from platforms while academic libraries struggle against vendors implementing flawed LLM-based search tools and AI-generated summaries that undermine information literacy instruction.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The high seas, the vast waters beyond any one country's jurisdiction, cover nearly half the planet. On Friday, a hard-fought global treaty to protect the "cornucopia of biodiversity" living there cleared a final hurdle and will become international law. From a report: The High Seas Treaty, as it is known, was ratified by a 60th nation, Morocco, crossing the threshold for United Nations treaties to go into effect. Two decades in the making, it allows for the establishment of enormous conservation zones in international waters. Environmentalists hailed it as a historic moment. The treaty "is a conservation opportunity that happens once in a generation, if that," said Lisa Speer, who directs the International Oceans Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. It is also a bright spot amid a general dimming of optimism about international diplomacy and cooperation among nations toward common goals. It will come into force just as the high seas are poised to become the site of controversial industrial activities including deep sea mining. The treaty provides a comprehensive set of regulations for high seas conservation that would supersede the existing patchwork of rules developed by United Nations agencies and industrial organizations in sectors like oil, fishing and shipping. Currently, less than 10 percent of the world's oceans are protected under law, and conservation advocates say little of that protection is effective. The treaty states a goal of giving 30 percent of the high seas some kind of protected status by 2030.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Leon Thevenin, Africa's only permanently stationed cable repair ship, maintains over 60,000 kilometers of undersea internet infrastructure from Madagascar to Ghana. The 43-year-old vessel employs a 60-person crew who perform precision repairs on fiber-optic cables that carry data for Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon -- companies that consumed 3.6 billion megabits per second of bandwidth in 2023. Operating costs range from $70,000 to $120,000 daily, according to owner Orange Marine. The ship has experienced increased demand due to unusual underwater landslides in the Congo Canyon causing frequent cable breaks. Cable jointer Shuru Arendse and his team spend up to 48 hours on repairs that require fusing hair-thin glass fibers in conditions where a speck of dust can ruin the joint. The vessel gained Starlink connectivity last year after decades of relying on satellite phones and shared computers for crew communication. Sixty-two cable repair ships operate globally to maintain the infrastructure supporting streaming media and AI applications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post: The Trump administration unveiled a new crackdown Friday on journalists at the Pentagon, saying it will require them to pledge they won't gather any information - even unclassified - that hasn't been expressly authorized for release, and will revoke the press credentials of those who do not obey. Under the policy, the Pentagon may revoke press passes for anyone it deems a security threat. Possessing confidential or unauthorized information, under the new rules, would be grounds for a journalist't press pass to be revoked. "DoW remains committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust," the document says, using an acronym for the newly rebranded Department of War. "However, DoW information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified." For months, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his staff have been tightening restrictions on Pentagon reporters while limiting military personnel's direct communication with the press. Like many defense secretaries before him, Hegseth has been deeply irritated by leaks. His staff this year threatened to use polygraph tests to stop people from leaking information, until the White House intervened.Read more of this story at Slashdot.