Slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Cloud-based web application platform Vercel is among the latest companies to find their servers blocked in Spain due to LaLiga's ongoing IPTV anti-piracy campaign. In a statement, Vercel's CEO and the company's principal engineer slam "indiscriminate" blocking as an "unaccountable form of internet censorship" that has prevented legitimate customers from conducting their daily business. [...] US-based Vercel describes itself as a "complete platform for the web." Through the provision of cloud infrastructure and developer tools, users can deploy code from their computers and have it up and running in just seconds. Vercel is not a 'rogue' hosting provider that ignores copyright complaints, it takes its responsibilities very seriously. Yet it became evident last week that blocking instructions executed by Telefonica-owned telecoms company Movistar were once again blocking innocent users, this time customers of Vercel. As the thread on X continued, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch was asked whether Vercel had "received any requests to remove illegal content before the blocking occurs?" Vercel Principal Engineer Matheus Fernandes answered quickly. Additional users were soon airing their grievances; ChatGPT blocked regularly on Sundays, a whole day "ruined" due to unwarranted blocking of AI code editor Cursor, blocking at Cloudflare, GitHub, BunnyCDN, the list goes on. In a joint statement last week, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and Principal Engineer Matheus Fernandes cited the LaLiga/Telefonica court order and reported that ISPs are "blocking entire IP ranges, not specific domains or content." Among them, the IP addresses 66.33.60.129 and 76.76.21.142, "used by businesses like Spanish startup Tinybird, Hello Magazine, and others operating on Vercel, despite no affiliations with piracy in any form." While clearly unhappy with how the company has been treated, Vercel says it's now working with LaLiga. "We remain committed to providing fast, secure infrastructure for modern web applications. Likewise, we expect enforcement efforts to do the same: targeted, transparent, and technically sound. We are in contact with La Liga and are collaborating to remove illegal content in accordance with the court order. We're exploring mitigation strategies to restore access for Spanish users and continue to advocate for an open and permissionless web," Vercel concludes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Google's antitrust trial, OpenAI's head of product revealed the company would consider buying Chrome if regulators force Alphabet to sell it, arguing such a move could help improve ChatGPT's search capabilities. Reuters reports: ChatGPT head of product Nick Turley made the statement while testifying at trial in Washington where U.S. Department of Justice seeks to require Google to undertake far-reaching measures restore competition in online search. The judge overseeing the trial found last year that Google has a monopoly in online search and related advertising. Google has not offered Chrome for sale. The company plans to appeal the ruling that it holds a monopoly. Turley wrote last year that ChatGPT was leading in the consumer chatbot market and did not see Google as its biggest competitor, according to an internal OpenAI document Google's lawyer showed at trial. He testified that the document was meant to inspire OpenAI employees and that the company would still benefit from distribution partnerships. Turley, a witness for the government, testified earlier in the day that Google shot down a bid by OpenAI to use its search technology within ChatGPT. OpenAI had reached out to Google after experiencing issues with its own search provider, Turley said, without naming the provider. ChatGPT uses technology from Microsoft's search engine, Bing. "We believe having multiple partners, and in particular Google's API, would enable us to provide a better product to users," OpenAI told Google, according to an email shown at trial. OpenAI first reached out in July, and Google declined the request in August, saying it would involve too many competitors, according to the email. "We have no partnership with Google today," Turley said. The DOJ's proposal to make Google share search data with competitors as one means of restoring competition would help accelerate efforts to improve ChatGPT, Turley said. Search is a critical part of ChatGPT to provide answers to user queries that are up to date and factual, Turley said. ChatGPT is years away from its goal of being able to use its own search technology to answer 80% of queries, he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic predicts AI-powered virtual employees will start operating within companies in the next year, introducing new risks such as account misuse and rogue behavior. Axios reports: Virtual employees could be the next AI innovation hotbed, Jason Clinton, the company's chief information security officer, told Axios. Agents typically focus on a specific, programmable task. In security, that's meant having autonomous agents respond to phishing alerts and other threat indicators. Virtual employees would take that automation a step further: These AI identities would have their own "memories," their own roles in the company and even their own corporate accounts and passwords. They would have a level of autonomy that far exceeds what agents have today. "In that world, there are so many problems that we haven't solved yet from a security perspective that we need to solve," Clinton said. Those problems include how to secure the AI employee's user accounts, what network access it should be given and who is responsible for managing its actions, Clinton added. Anthropic believes it has two responsibilities to help navigate AI-related security challenges. First, to thoroughly test Claude models to ensure they can withstand cyberattacks, Clinton said. The second is to monitor safety issues and mitigate the ways that malicious actors can abuse Claude. AI employees could go rogue and hack the company's continuous integration system -- where new code is merged and tested before it's deployed -- while completing a task, Clinton said. "In an old world, that's a punishable offense," he said. "But in this new world, who's responsible for an agent that was running for a couple of weeks and got to that point?" Clinton says virtual employee security is one of the biggest security areas where AI companies could be making investments in the next few years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 2019, Garrett Mitchell was already an Internet success. His YouTube channel, Cleetus McFarland, had over a million followers. If you perused the channel at that time, you would've found a range of grassroots motorsports videos with the type of vehicular shenanigans that earn truckloads of views. Some of those older videos include "BLEW BY A COP AT 120+mph! OOPS!," "THERE'S A T-REX ON THE TRACK!," and "Manual Transmission With Paddle Shifters!?!." Those videos made Mitchell, aka Cleetus McFarland, a known personality among automotive enthusiasts. But the YouTuber wanted more financial independence beyond the Google platform and firms willing to sponsor his channel. " after my YouTube was growing and some of my antics [were] getting videos de-monetized, I realized I needed a playground," Mitchell told Ars Technica in an email. Mitchell found a road toward new monetization opportunities through the DeSoto Super Speedway. The Bradenton, Florida, track had changed ownership multiple times since opening in the 1970s. The oval-shaped racetrack is three-eighths of a mile long with 12-degree banking angles. By 2018, the track had closed its doors and was going unused. DeSoto happened to be next to Mitchell's favorite drag strip, giving the YouTuber the idea of turning it into a stadium where people could watch burnouts and other "massive, rowdy" ticketed events. Mitchell added: "So I sold everything I could, borrowed some money from my business manager, and went all in for [$]2.2 million." But like the rest of the world, Mitchell hit the brakes on his 2020 plans during COVID-19 lockdowns. Soon after his purchase, Mitchell couldn't use the track, renamed Freedom Factory, for large gatherings, forcing him to reconsider his plans. "We had no other option but to entertain the people somehow. And with no other racing goin' on anywhere, we bet big on making something happen. And it worked," Mitchell said. That "something" was a pay-per-view (PPV) event hosted from the Freedom Factory in April 2020. The event led to others and, eventually, Mitchell running his own subscription video on demand (SVOD) service, FRDM+, which originally launched as Cleetervision in 2022. Today, a FRDM+ subscription costs $20 per month or $120 per year. A subscription provides access to an impressive library of automotive videos. Some are archived from Mitchell's YouTube channel. Other, exclusive videos feature content such as interviews with motorsports influencers and members of Mitchell's staff and crew, and outrageous motorsports stunts. You can watch videos from other influencers on FRDM+, and the business can also white-label its platform into other influencers' websites, too. "Today, bandwidth isn't a problem for FRDM+, and navigating the streaming service doesn't feel much different from something like Netflix," writes Ars Technica's Scharon Harding. "There are different 'channels' (grouped together by related content or ongoing series) on top and new releases and upcoming content highlighted below. There are horizontal scrolling rows, and many titles have content summaries and/or trailers. The platform also has a support section with instructions for canceling subscriptions." "Due to wildly differing audiences, markets, costs, and scales, comparing FRDM+'s financials to the likes of Netflix and other mainstream streaming services is like comparing apples to oranges. But it's interesting to consider that FRDM+ has achieved profitability faster than some of those services, like Peacock, which also launched in 2020, and Apple TV+, which debuted in 2019."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Walmart is taking a lesson from the humble honeybee in its quest to make its deliveries as fast as possible. From a report: The retail giant already boasts a formidable store count of 4,700 locations across the US, which puts it within a short drive of more than 90% of households. But in order to grow its reach without necessarily having to build new supercenters, Walmart says it has been using a relatively new hexagonal map segmentation -- a change from the conventional ZIP code or radius-based strategies that are commonly used in determining delivery areas. Walmart says the strategy allows it to better understand where customers are and which stores have what they want. As bees have long known, hexagons can be an excellent shape for making the most of a given space, and Walmart says the more precise maps allow it to reach an additional 12 million US households with same-day delivery. "This is helping us to adapt how we service our customers, by allowing us to go from a fixed-mile radius into a much more dynamic catchment area that caters to the needs of the customers that a particular store will serve," Walmart global tech senior director of engineering Parthibban Raja told Fast Company in December, following a pilot of the concept. Walmart says its platform uses a combination of its own data and open-source software to create new delivery zones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram, testified on Tuesday in a landmark federal antitrust trial that he left Meta in 2018 because his company was denied resources. The government has argued that Meta purchased Instagram in 2012 as part of a "buy-or-bury strategy" to illegally cement its social media monopoly by killing off its rivals. Last week, current and former Meta executives testified that the social media giant, formerly known as Facebook, used its deep pockets to invest in Instagram after its purchase. In testimony at the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, Mr. Systrom painted a different picture, saying he left Meta because Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, wasn't investing enough. At that time, Instagram had grown to 1 billion users, about 40 percent of Facebook's size, yet the photo-sharing app had only 1,000 employees compared to 35,000 employees at Facebook, he said. "We were by far the fastest growing team. We produced the most revenue and relative to what we should have been at the time, I felt like we should have been much larger," said Mr. Systrom, who is expected to testify for six hours. Mr. Systrom said he found the decisions baffling. When asked by an F.T.C. lawyer why Mr. Zuckerberg might have decided to give Instagram fewer resources, Mr. Systrom said it was a consistent pattern during his tenure at Meta. "Mark was not investing in Instagram because he believed we were a threat to their growth," he said, referring to Mr. Zuckerberg's prioritization of Facebook.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Offices nationwide are ditching harsh fluorescent lighting in favor of advanced systems designed to improve cognitive function and entice remote workers back to physical workplaces. Companies are investing in circadian-tuned lighting that adjusts intensity and color temperature throughout the day to mimic natural light patterns, syncing with employees' biological rhythms, according to WSJ. The technology arsenal includes faux skylights displaying virtual suns and moons, AI-controlled self-tinting windows, and customizable lighting zones that can be adjusted via remote control. Research suggests these innovations may improve brain function during tasks requiring sustained attention. "We've known for a long time that natural light is better and makes people feel better," says Peter Cappelli, professor at Wharton School. The innovations stem from discoveries in the early 2000s of photosensitive retinal cells that affect biology independent of vision. Industry specialists report a "huge uptick in requests," though implementation adds 20-30% to project costs, potentially slowing mainstream adoption.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Canada has seen a boom in political books created with generative artificial intelligence, adding to concerns about how new technologies are affecting the information voters receive during the election campaign. Prime Minister Mark Carney was the subject of at least 16 books published in March and listed on Amazon.com, according to a review of the site on April 16. Five of those were published on a single day. In total, some 30 titles were published about Carney this year and made available on Amazon -- but most were taken down from the site after inquiries from Bloomberg News. One author, James A. Powell, put his name to at least three books about the former central banker, who's now leading the Liberal Party and is narrowly favored to win the election. Among the titles that Amazon removed: "Carney's Code: Climate Capitalism, Digital Currencies, and the Technocratic Takeover of the Global Economy -- Inside Mark Carney's Blueprint for the Post-Democratic World."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a shocking development, Google won't roll out a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies in Chrome. It's a move that amounts to a U-turn on the Chrome team's earlier updated approach to deprecating third-party cookies, announced in July last year, with the latest development bound to cause ructions across the ad tech ecosystem."We've made the decision to maintain our current approach to offering users third-party cookie choice in Chrome, and will not be rolling out a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies," wrote Anthony Chavez, vp Privacy Sandbox at Google, in a blog post published earlier today (April 22). "Users can continue to choose the best option for themselves in Chrome's Privacy and Security Settings." However, it's not the end of Privacy Sandbox, according to Google, as certain initiatives incubated within the project are set to continue, such as its IP Protection for Chrome Incognito users, which will be rolled out in Q3.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Abstract of a paper on National Bureau of Economic Research: We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users' emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls. Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has quietly removed the "available now" designation from its Apple Intelligence marketing page following a National Advertising Division review. The change came after the NAD recommended Apple "discontinue or modify" the claim, which "reasonably conveyed the message" that all promoted AI features were immediately available with iPhone 16 devices. The NAD, part of the Better Business Bureau, determined Apple's footnote explaining feature availability was "neither sufficiently clear and conspicuous nor close to the triggering claims." Further reading:Apple Delays 'More Personalized Siri' Apple Intelligence Features;'Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino';Apple Shakes Up AI Executive Ranks in Bid to Turn Around Siri.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Films made with the help of AI will be able to win top awards at the Oscars, according to its organisers. From a report: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences issued new rules on Monday which said the use of AI and other digital tools would "neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination." [...] The Academy said it would still consider human involvement when selecting its winners. The Academy said its new language around eligibility for films made using generative AI tools was recommended by its Science and Technology Council. Under further rule changes announced on Monday, Academy members must now watch all nominated films in each category in order to be able to take part in the final round of voting, which decides upon winners.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US scientists are fleeing abroad in record numbers as the Trump administration slashes research funding, according to exclusive data analysis by Nature. Applications from American researchers for international positions surged 32% between January and March 2025 compared to the same period last year, while US-based users browsing overseas jobs jumped 35%. The exodus accelerated in March as the administration intensified science cuts, with job views spiking 68% year-over-year. Applications to Canadian institutions increased 41%, while interest from Canadians in US positions plummeted 13%.Recent months have seen more than 200 federal HIV/AIDS research grants abruptly terminated, cuts to NIH COVID-19 funding revealed, and a $400 million reduction in research grants at Columbia University."To see this big drop in views and applications to the US -- and the similar rise in those looking to leave -- is unprecedented," said James Richards, who leads Global Talent Solutions at Springer Nature. European institutions are capitalizing on the talent migration. Aix-Marseille University launched its "Safe Place for Science" initiative with $17.2 million to sponsor researchers, while Germany's Max Planck Society created a Transatlantic Program offering positions to scientists "no longer able to work in the United States." The trend extends beyond Europe, with US-based views of Chinese science positions increasing 30% in the first quarter of 2025.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google pays Samsung an "enormous sum of money" every month to preinstall Google generative AI app, Gemini, on its phones and devices, according to court testimony, even though the company's practice of paying for installations has twice been found to violate the law. From a report: The company began paying Samsung for Gemini in January, according to Peter Fitzgerald, Google's vice president of platforms and device partnerships, who testified Monday in Washington federal court as part of the Justice Department's antitrust case. The contract, set to run at least two years, provides fixed monthly payments for each device that preinstalls Gemini and pays Samsung a percentage of the revenue Google earns from advertisements within the app, Fitzgerald told Judge Amit Mehta, who is overseeing the case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Logitech has quietly increased prices on several flagship products by as much as 25%, according to findings (video) by YouTuber Cameron Dougherty. The MX Master 3S mouse now costs $120, up 20% from its previous $100 price point, while the MX Keys S keyboard has jumped 18% to $130. The K400 Plus Wireless Touch keyboard saw the most dramatic percentage increase, rising from $28 to $35. These price adjustments, implemented without formal announcement, come amid ongoing tariff pressures from the Trump administration affecting PC hardware manufacturers. Chinese electronics maker Anker also recently implemented similar increases, suggesting a broader industry trend.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has argued in court that the U.S. Department of Justice's proposal to break up its Chrome and Android businesses would weaken national security and harm the country's position in the global AI race, particularly against China. CNBC reports: The remedies trial in Washington, D.C., follows a judge's ruling in August that Google has held a monopoly in its core market of internet search, the most-significant antitrust ruling in the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago. The Justice Department has called for Google to divest its Chrome browser unit and open its search data to rivals. Google said in a blog post on Monday that such a move is not in the best interest of the country as the global battle for supremacy in artificial intelligence rapidly intensifies. In the first paragraph of the post, Google named China's DeepSeek as an emerging AI competitor. The DOJ's proposal would "hamstring how we develop AI, and have a government-appointed committee regulate the design and development of our products," Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, wrote in the post. "That would hold back American innovation at a critical juncture. We're in a fiercely competitive global race with China for the next generation of technology leadership, and Google is at the forefront of American companies making scientific and technological breakthroughs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's oldest active astronaut, Don Pettit, celebrated his 70th birthday by returning to Earth after a seven-month mission aboard the ISS. The Guardian reports: A Soyuz capsule carrying the American and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan on Sunday, Pettit's birthday. "Today at 0420 Moscow time (0120 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan," Russia's space agency Roscosmos said. Spending 220 days in space, Pettit, Ovchinin and Vagner orbited the Earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3m miles over the course of their mission. It was the fourth spaceflight for Pettit, who has logged more than 18 months in orbit during his 29-year career. Nasa said in a statement that Pettit was "doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth." A recording of the touchdown can be viewed here. Earlier this year, Pettit managed to take one of the best photos ever captured from space. "When I first saw it, I was dazzled by its beauty," wrote Ars Technica's Eric Berger. "But when I looked further into the image, there were just so many amazing details to be found." "In this image, one can see the core of the Milky Way galaxy, zodiacal light (sunlight diffused by interplanetary dust), streaks of SpaceX Starlink satellites, individual stars, an edge-on view of the atmosphere that appears in burnt umber due to hydroxide emissions, a near-sunrise just over the horizon, and nighttime cities appearing as streaks."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Arete Glacier Initiative has raised $5 million to improve forecasts of sea-level rise and explore the possibility of refreezing glaciers in place.Off one atoll, just south of the Maldives' capital, Male, researchers are testing one way to capture sand in strategic locations -- to grow islands, rebuild beaches, and protect coastal communities from sea-level rise. Swim 10 minutes out into the En'boodhoofinolhu Lagoon and you'll find the Ramp Ring, an unusual structure made up of six tough-skinned geotextile bladders. These submerged bags, part of a recent effort called the Growing Islands project, form a pair of parentheses separated by 90meters (around 300 feet). The bags, each about two meters tall, were deployed in December 2024, and by February, underwater images showed that sand had climbed about a meter and a half up the surface of each one, demonstrating how passive structures can quickly replenish beaches and, in time, build a solid foundation for new land. "There's just a ton of sand in there. It's really looking good," says Skylar Tibbits, an architect and founder of the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, which is developing the project in partnership with the Male-based climate tech company Invena. The Self-Assembly Lab designs material technologies that can be programmed to transform or "self-assemble" in the air or underwater, exploiting natural forces like gravity, wind, waves, and sunlight. Its creations include sheets of wood fiber that form into three-dimensional structures when splashed with water, which the researchers hope could be used for tool-free flat-pack furniture.Growing Islands is their largest-scale undertaking yet. Since 2017, the project has deployed 10 experiments in the Maldives, testing different materials, locations, and strategies, including inflatable structures and mesh nets. The Ramp Ring is many times larger than previous deployments and aims to overcome their biggest limitation. In the Maldives, the direction of the currents changes with the seasons. Past experiments have been able to capture only one seasonal flow, meaning they lie dormant for months of the year. By contrast, the Ramp Ring is "omnidirectional," capturing sand year-round. "It's basically a big ring, a big loop, and no matter which monsoon season and which wave direction, it accumulates sand in the same area," Tibbits says. The approach points to a more sustainable way to protect the archipelago, whose growing population is supported by an economy that caters to 2 million annual tourists drawn by its white beaches and teeming coral reefs. Most of the country's 187 inhabited islands have already had some form of human intervention to reclaim land or defend against erosion, such as concrete blocks, jetties, and breakwaters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have uncovered a new supply chain attack called Slopsquatting, where threat actors exploit hallucinated, non-existent package names generated by AI coding tools like GPT-4 and CodeLlama. These believable yet fake packages, representing almost 20% of the samples tested, can be registered by attackers to distribute malicious code. CSO Online reports: Slopsquatting, as researchers are calling it, is a term first coined by Seth Larson, a security developer-in-residence at Python Software Foundation (PSF), for its resemblance to the typosquatting technique. Instead of relying on a user's mistake, as in typosquats, threat actors rely on an AI model's mistake. A significant number of packages, amounting to 19.7% (205,000 packages), recommended in test samples were found to be fakes. Open-source models -- like DeepSeek and WizardCoder -- hallucinated more frequently, at 21.7% on average, compared to the commercial ones (5.2%) like GPT 4. Researchers found CodeLlama ( hallucinating over a third of the outputs) to be the worst offender, and GPT-4 Turbo ( just 3.59% hallucinations) to be the best performer. These package hallucinations are particularly dangerous as they were found to be persistent, repetitive, and believable. When researchers reran 500 prompts that had previously produced hallucinated packages, 43% of hallucinations reappeared every time in 10 successive re-runs, with 58% of them appearing in more than one run. The study concluded that this persistence indicates "that the majority of hallucinations are not just random noise, but repeatable artifacts of how the models respond to certain prompts." This increases their value to attackers, it added. Additionally, these hallucinated package names were observed to be "semantically convincing." Thirty-eight percent of them had moderate string similarity to real packages, suggesting a similar naming structure. "Only 13% of hallucinations were simple off-by-one typos," Socket added. The research can found be in a paper on arXiv.org (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Airbnb is rolling out a global update that displays the total cost of a stay upfront in search results. The only fee that won't be included are taxes. The Verge reports: The company first started showing the full price of its listings in some locations in 2019 after facing scrutiny from the European Union over how it displays its fees. It later launched a toggle in the US and hundreds of other countries that shows the total cost of a stay across Airbnb's search results, individual listings pages, and other areas of the platform. Airbnb says nearly 17 million people have used the toggle since its launch in 2022, and now, you won't have to worry about turning the option on when making a search. Instead, you'll now see a banner at the very top of your search results that says, "Prices include all fees."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is intensifying performance scrutiny through new policies that target underperforming employees, according to an internal email from Chief People Officer Amy Coleman. The company has introduced a formalized Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) system that gives struggling employees two options: accept improvement targets or exit the company with a Global Voluntary Separation Agreement. The policy establishes a two-year rehire blackout period for employees who leave with low performance ratings (zero to 60% in Microsoft's 0-200 scale) or during a PIP process. These employees are also barred from internal transfers while still at the company. Coming months after Microsoft terminated 2,000 underperformers without severance, the company is also developing AI-supported tools to help managers "prepare for constructive or challenging conversations" through interactive practice environments. "Our focus remains on enabling high performance to achieve our priorities spanning security, quality, and leading AI," Coleman wrote, emphasizing that these changes aim to create "a globally consistent and transparent experience" while fostering "accountability and growth."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CATL has unveiled a second-generation Shenxing battery capable of delivering a 520km range in just five minutes of charging, surpassing BYD's recent breakthrough and positioning both Chinese firms ahead of Western rivals in EV battery tech. The battery manufacturer also introduced a sodium-ion battery called Naxtra, offering up to 500km range for EVs and potential to diversify global energy resources. The Financial Times reports: The claims by the Chinese battery groups would put them ahead of major western rivals. At present, Tesla vehicles can be charged up to 200 miles (321km) in added range in 15 minutes, while Germany's Mercedes-Benz recently launched its all-electric CLA compact sedan, which can be charged for up to 325km within 10 minutes using a fast-charging station. [...] The second generation of the Shenxing battery, which boasts a range of 800km on one charge, can achieve a peak charging speed of 2.5km per second, the company said at a media event ahead of this week's Shanghai auto show. "We look forward to collaborating with more industry leaders to push the limits of supercharging through true innovation," said CATL's chief technology officer Gao Huan, adding that he wanted the new batteries to become "the standard for electric vehicles." Analysts at Bernstein said the latest progress meant that charging speeds had more than doubled in the past year and "increased tenfold over the past 3-4 years." Huan said the new Shenxing battery would be installed in more than 67 EV models this year. He later told reporters that energy density would not be sacrificed as a trade-off for fast charging. During its tech day, CATL also unveiled its new sodium-ion battery, which it said would go into mass production in December. The battery brand called Naxtra is able to give a range of about 200km for a hybrid vehicle and 500km for an electric vehicle, according to Huan. [...] At the event, Huan claimed the new sodium-ion battery would enable the industry's shift from "single resource dependence" to "energy freedom" and reshape the global energy landscape. He added that he was in discussions with several companies about using sodium-ion batteries in their vehicles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: While most people enjoy PCs that are powered by SSDs, mechanical hard drives are still king in the datacenter. When these drives reach the end of their useful lives, they are usually shredded, and the key materials they're made of -- including several rare earth elements (REE) -- end up as e-waste. At the same time, countries are mining these same materials and emitting a lot of greenhouse gases in the process. And China, a major source of REE, recently announced export restrictions on seven of them, potentially limiting the U.S. tech industry's access to materials such as dysprosium, which is necessary for magnetic storage, motors, and generators. [On Thursday], Western Digital announced that it has created a large-scale hard disk drive recycling program in concert with Microsoft and recycling-industry partners CMR (Critical Materials Recycling) and PedalPoint Recycling. The new process reclaims Rare Earth Oxides (REO) containing dysprosium, neodymium, and praseodymium from hard drives, along with aluminum, steel, gold, palladium, and copper. The REO reclamation takes place completely within the U.S. and those materials go back into the U.S. market. Dubbed the Advanced Recycling and Rare Earth Material Capture Program, WD's initiative has already saved 47,000 pounds worth of hard drives, SSDs, and caddies from landfills or less-effective recycling programs. WD was able to achieve a more than 90% reclaim rate for REE and an 80% rate for all of the shredded material. The drives came from Microsoft's U.S. data centers where they were first shredded and then sent to PedalPoint for sorting and processing. Magnets and steel were then sent to CMR, which uses its acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) technology to extract the rare earth elements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has delayed some commitments around new data center leases, Wells Fargo analysts said Monday, the latest sign that economic concerns may be affecting tech companies' spending plans. From a report: A week ago, a Microsoft executive said the software company was slowing down or temporarily holding off on advancing early build-outs. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are the leading providers of cloud infrastructure, and both have ramped up their capital expenditures in recent quarters to meet the demands of the generative artificial intelligence boom. "Over the weekend, we heard from several industry sources that AWS has paused a portion of its leasing discussions on the colocation side (particularly international ones)," Wells Fargo analysts wrote in a note. They added that "the positioning is similar to what we've heard recently from MSFT," in that both companies are reeling in some new projects but not canceling signed deals.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cursor AI users recently encountered an ironic AI failure when the platform's support bot falsely claimed a non-existent login restriction policy. Co-founder Michael Truell apologized for the issue, clarified that no such policy exists, and attributed the mishap to AI hallucination and a session management bug. The Register reports: Users of the Cursor editor, designed to generate and fix source code in response to user prompts, have sometimes been booted from the software when trying to use the app in multiple sessions on different machines. Some folks who inquired about the inability to maintain multiple logins for the subscription service across different machines received a reply from the company's support email indicating this was expected behavior. But the person on the other end of that email wasn't a person at all, but an AI support bot. And it evidently made that policy up. In an effort to placate annoyed users this week, Michael Truell co-founder of Cursor creator Anysphere, published a note to Reddit to apologize for the snafu. "Hey! We have no such policy," he wrote. "You're of course free to use Cursor on multiple machines. Unfortunately, this is an incorrect response from a front-line AI support bot. We did roll out a change to improve the security of sessions, and we're investigating to see if it caused any problems with session invalidation." Truell added that Cursor provides an interface for viewing active sessions in its settings and apologized for the confusion. In a post to the Hacker News discussion of the SNAFU, Truell again apologized and acknowledged that something had gone wrong. "We've already begun investigating, and some very early results: Any AI responses used for email support are now clearly labeled as such. We use AI-assisted responses as the first filter for email support." He said the developer who raised this issue had been refunded. The session logout issue, now fixed, appears to have been the result of a race condition that arises on slow connections and spawns unwanted sessions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wine 10.6 has been released, featuring a new lexer within its Command Processor (CMD), support for the PBKDF2 algorithm to its Bcrypt implementation, and improved metadata handling in WindowsCodecs. According to Phoronix, the update also includes 27 known bug fixes that address issues with Unity games, Alan Wake, GDI+, and various other games and applications. You can see all the changes and download the relesae via WineHQ.org GitLab.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Whisky, a gaming-focused front-end for Wine's Windows compatibility tools on macOS, is no longer receiving updates. As one of the most useful and well-regarded tools in a Mac gamer's toolkit, it could be seen as a great loss, but its developer hopes you'll move on with what he considers a better option: supporting CodeWeavers' CrossOver product. Also, Whisky's creator is an 18-year-old college student, and he could use a break. "I am 18, yes, and attending Northeastern University, so it's always a balancing act between my school work and dev work," Isaac Marovitz wrote to Ars. The Whisky project has "been more or less in this state for a few months, I posted the notice mostly to clarify and formally announce it," Marovitz said, having received "a lot of questions" about the project status. [...] "Whisky, in my opinion, has not been a positive on the Wine community as a whole," Marovitz wrote on the Whisky site. He advised that Whisky users buy a CrossOver license, and noted that while CodeWeavers and Valve's work on Proton have had a big impact on the Wine project, "the amount that Whisky as a whole contributes to Wine is practically zero." Fixes for Wine running Mac games "have to come from people who are not only incredibly knowledgeable on C, Wine, Windows, but also macOS," Marovitz wrote, and "the pool of developers with those skills is very limited." While Marovitz told Ars that he's had "some contact with CodeWeavers" in making Whisky, "they were always curious and never told me what I should or should not do." It became clear to him, though, "from what [CodeWeavers] could tell me as well as observing the attitude of the wider community that Whisky could seriously threaten CrossOver's viability." "Whisky may have been a CrossOver competitor, but that's not how we feel today," wrote CodeWeavers CEO James B. Ramey in a statement. "Our response is simply one of empathy, understanding, and acknowledgement for Isaac's situation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union is determined to enforce its full digital rule book no matter who is in charge of companies such as X, Meta, Apple and Tiktok or where they are based, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told Politico. From a report: "That's why we've opened cases against TikTok, X, Apple, Meta just to name a few. We apply the rules fairly, proportionally, and without bias. We don't care where a company's from and who's running it. We care about protecting people," Politico quoted von der Leyen as saying on Sunday. The EU's Digital Markets Act has been strongly criticised by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Trade Commission filed suit against Uber on Monday, alleging the transportation giant violated federal consumer protection laws through deceptive billing and cancellation practices for its Uber One subscription service. According to the complaint, Uber violated both the FTC Act and the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act by misleading consumers about subscription terms, charging users without consent, and implementing deliberately complicated cancellation processes. "Americans are tired of getting signed up for unwanted subscriptions that seem impossible to cancel," FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said in announcing the action. The $9.99 monthly service, launched in 2021, offers benefits including fee-free delivery and discounted rides.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is confronting an existential threat as the U.S. government tries to break up the company as punishment for turning its revolutionary search engine into an illegal monopoly. From a report: The drama began to unfold Monday in a Washington courtroom as three weeks of hearings kicked off to determine how the company should be penalized for operating a monopoly in search. In its opening arguments, federal antitrust enforcers also urged the court to impose forward-looking remedies to prevent Google from using artificial intelligence to further its dominance. "This is a moment in time, we're at an inflection point, will we abandon the search market and surrender them to control of the monopolists or will we let competition prevail and give choice to future generations," said Justice Department attorney David Dahlquist. The proceedings, known in legal parlance as a "remedy hearing," are set to feature a parade of witnesses that includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The U.S. Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to order a radical shake-up that would ban Google from striking the multibillion dollar deals with Apple and other tech companies that shield its search engine from competition, share its repository of valuable user data with rivals and force a sale of its popular Chrome browser. Google's attorney, John Schmidtlein, said in his opening statement that the court should take a much lighter touch. He said the government's heavy-handed proposed remedies wouldn't boost competition but instead unfairly reward lesser rivals with inferior technology. "Google won its place in the market fair and square," Schmidtlein said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath has declared that net neutrality regulations "went literally nowhere." Sampath claimed he couldn't identify what problem net neutrality was attempting to solve, despite Verizon's history of aggressive lobbying against such rules. "I don't know what net neutrality does," Sampath told The Verge. "I still don't know what problem we are trying to solve with net neutrality." When pressed about potential anti-competitive behaviors like zero-rating services, Sampath deflected by focusing exclusively on traffic management concerns, arguing that networks require prioritization capabilities during congestion. "For traffic management purposes, we need to have some controls in the network," he stated. The interview comes as Verizon faces a different regulatory challenge from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who is holding up Verizon's Frontier acquisition over the company's diversity initiatives.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major scholarly databases have removed dozens of academic journals after researchers discovered they had been purchased by questionable companies and transformed into predatory publications. A January 2025 study identified 36 legitimate journals acquired by recently formed firms with no publishing experience, who then dramatically increased publication fees and output while lowering quality standards. According to information scientist Alberto Martin-Martin from the University of Granada, publishers are being offered up to hundreds of thousands of euros per journal title. Once acquired, journals typically introduce or raise article-processing charges while churning out papers often outside the publication's original scope. Scopus has delisted all 36 identified journals, and Web of Science removed 11 of 17 affected titles from its index. "As there has been significant change (different ownership), there is no guarantee that review quality is at the same level as the original journals," an Elsevier spokesperson told Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FBI says it is unable to find records related to its purchase of a series of hacking tools, despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on them and those purchases initially being included in a public U.S. government procurement database before being quietly scrubbed from the internet. From a report: The news highlights the secrecy the FBI maintains around its use of hacking tools. The agency has previously used classified technology in ordinary criminal investigations, pushed back against demands to provide details of hacking operations to defendants, and purchased technology from surveillance vendors. "Potentially responsive records were identified during the search," a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request I sent about a specific hacking tool contract says. "However, we were advised that they were not in their expected locations. An additional search for the missing records also met with unsuccessful results. Since we were unable to review the records, we were unable to determine if they were responsive to your request." In other words, the FBI says it identified related records, then couldn't actually find them when it went looking.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over 100 mid-market software companies are caught in a dangerous "squeeze" between AI-native startups and tech giants, according to a new AlixPartners study released Monday. The consulting firm warns many face "threats to their survival over the next 24 months" as generative AI fundamentally reshapes enterprise software. The squeeze reflects a dramatic shift: AI agents are evolving from mere assistants to becoming applications themselves, potentially rendering traditional SaaS architecture obsolete. High-growth companies in this sector plummeted from 57% in 2023 to 39% in 2024, with further decline expected. Customer stickiness is also deteriorating, with median net dollar retention falling from 120% in 2021 to 108% in Q3 2024.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Global alcohol consumption has entered what appears to be a permanent decline, with total volume peaking at 25.4 billion liters in 2016 and falling approximately 13% since then, according to data from market research firm IWSR. Per-capita consumption has dropped dramatically from 5 liters of pure alcohol per adult annually in 2013 to 3.9 liters in 2023. Wine production, which reached its maximum of 37.5 million metric tons in 1979, has already decreased by 27%. Beer production peaked more recently in 2016 at 190 million tons and has since declined 2.6%. Industry experts attribute this shift to changing generational habits, with younger consumers preferring event-driven drinking rather than habitual consumption. The proliferation of non-alcoholic alternatives, increased marijuana availability, and health consciousness accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic have further driven moderation trends.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In February tech journalist Nicholas Carr published Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. A University of Virginia academic journal says the book "appraises the past and present" of information technology while issuing "a warning about its future." And specifically Carr argues that the government ignored historic precedents by not regulating the early internet sometime in the 1990s.But as he goes on to remind us, the early 1990s were also when the triumphalism of America's Cold War victory, combined with the utopianism of Silicon Valley, convinced a generation of decision-makers that "an unfettered market seemed the best guarantor of growth and prosperity" and "defending the public interest now meant little more than expanding consumer choice." So rather than try to anticipate the dangers and excesses of commercialized digital media, Congress gave it free rein in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which, as Carr explains, "...erased the legal and ethical distinction between interpersonal communication and broadcast communications that had governed media in the twentieth century. When Google introduced its Gmail service in 2004, it announced, with an almost imperial air of entitlement, that it would scan the contents of all messages and use the resulting data for any purpose it wanted. Our new mailman would read all our mail." As for the social-media platforms, Section 230 of the Act shields them from liability for all but the most egregiously illegal content posted by users, while explicitly encouraging them to censor any user-generated content they deem offensive, "whether or not such material is constitutionally protected" (emphasis added). Needless to say, this bizarre abdication of responsibility has led to countless problems, including what one observer calls a "sociopathic rendition of human sociability." For Carr, this is old news, but he warns us once again that the compulsion "to inscribe ourselves moment by moment on the screen, to reimagine ourselves as streams of text and image...[fosters] a strange, needy sort of solipsism. We socialize more than ever, but we're also at a further remove from those we interact with." Carr's book suggests "frictional design" to slow posting (and reposting) on social media might "encourage civil behavior" - but then decides it's too little, too late, because our current frictionless efficiency "has burrowed its way too deeply into society and the social mind." Based on all of this, the article's author looks ahead to the next revolution - AI - and concludes "I do not think it wise to wait until these kindly bots are in place before deciding how effective they are. Better to roll them off the nearest cliff today..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chad Anderson is the founder/managing partner of the early-stage VC Space Capital (and an investor in SpaceX, along with dozens of other space companies). Space Capital produces quarterly reports on the space economy, and he says today, unlike 2021, "the froth is gone. But so is the hype. What's left is a more grounded - and investable - space economy." On Yahoo Finance he shares several of the report's insights - including the emergence of "investable opportunities across defense-oriented startups in space domain awareness, AI-driven command systems, and hardened infrastructure."The same geopolitical instability that's undermining public markets is driving national urgency around space resilience. China's simulated space "dogfights" prompted the US Department of Defense to double down on orbital supremacy, with the proposed "Golden Dome" missile shield potentially unleashing a new wave of federal spending... Defense tech is on fire, but commercial location-based services and logistics are freezing over. Companies like Shield AI and Saronic raised monster rounds, while others are relying on bridge financings to stay afloat... Q1 also saw a breakout quarter for geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI). Software developer Niantic launched a spatial computing platform. SkyWatch partnered with GIS software supplier Esri. Planet Labs collaborated with Anthropic. And Xona Space Systems inked a deal with Trimble to boost precision GPS. This is the next leg of the space economy, where massive volumes of satellite data is finally made useful through machine learning, semantic indexing, and real-time analytics. Distribution-layer companies are doing more with less. They remain underfunded relative to infrastructure and applications but are quietly powering the most critical systems, such as resilient communications, battlefield networks, and edge-based geospatial analysis. Don't let the low round count fool you; innovation here is quietly outpacing capital. The article includes several predictions, insights, and possible trends (going beyond the fact that defense spending "will carry the sector...")"AI's integration into space (across geospatial intelligence, satellite communications, and sensor fusion) is not a novelty. It's a competitive necessity.""Focusing solely on rockets and orbital assets misses where much of the innovation and disruption is occurring: the software-defined layers that sit atop the physical backbone...""For years, SpaceX faced little serious competition, but that's starting to change." [He cites Blue Origin's progress toward approval for launching U.S. military satellites, and how Rocket Lab and Stoke Space "have also joined the competition for lucrative government launch contracts." Even Relativity Space may make a comeback, with former GOogle CEO Eric Schmidt acquiring a controlling stake.]"An infrastructure reset is coming. The imminent ramp-up of SpaceX's Starship could collapse the cost structure for the infrastructure layer. When that happens, legacy providers with fixed-cost-heavy business models will be at risk. Conversely, capital-light innovators in station design, logistics, and in-orbit servicing could suddenly be massively undervalued."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pope Francis has died at the age of 88, the Vatican said Monday. The pontiff, who was Bishop of Rome and head of the Catholic Church, became pope in 2013 after his predecessor Benedict XVI resigned. On February 14, the Pope was admitted to hospital for bronchitis treatment. From a report: Born in 1936, Francis was the first pope from South America. His papacy was marked by his championing of those escaping war and hunger, as well as those in poverty, earning him the moniker the "People's Pope." In 2016, he washed the feet of refugees from different religions at an asylum centre outside Rome in a "gesture of humility and service." He also made his views known on a wide range of issues, from climate change to wealth inequality and the role of women in the Catholic Church.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With more companies requiring workers to return to an office five days a week, "Anxiety is rising for some of the millions of people who identify as neurodivergent," writes the Washington Post. They raise the possibility that "strict office mandates have the potential to deter neurodivergent people who may approach problems differently," the article notes - affecting peoiple "whose brains function differently, such as with ADHD, autism or dyslexia."While many neurodivergent people excel in an office, others struggle with sensory issues, an inability to focus and exhaustion, workers say... About a fifth of U.S. adults self-identify as neurodivergent, with a majority saying they always or usually feel that their brain works differently, according to a recent survey by research and analytics firm YouGov. They cite issues such as starting tasks before finishing others, being overwhelmed by social situations and struggling to focus... Some neurodivergent workers discovered success working remotely during the pandemic and don't feel comfortable disclosing their diagnoses due to fear of and prior instances of discrimination. Sometimes being one of the few remote workers makes it easier to be forgotten.... Neurodivergent workers who spoke about their office struggles say even part-time remote work can be a game changer. They also wish leaders would seek input from them and trust them to get their work done.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While college applicants are often required to write a personal essay for their applications, political scientist/author/academic Yascha Mounk argues that's "a deeply unfair way to select students for top colleges, one that is much more biased against the poor than standardized tests."The college essay wrongly encourages students to cast themselves as victims, to exaggerate the adversity they've faced, and to turn genuinely upsetting experiences into the focal point of their self-understanding. The college essay, dear reader, should be banned and banished and burned to the ground. There are many tangible, "objective" reasons to oppose making personal statements a key part of the admissions process. Perhaps the most obvious is that they have always been the easiest part of the system to game. While rich parents can hire SAT tutors they can't sit the standardized test in the stead of their offspring; they can, however, easily write the admissions essay for their kid or hire a "college consultant" who "works with" the applicant to "improve" that essay. Even if rich parents don't cheat in those ways, their class position gives rich kids a huge advantage in the exercise... [W]riting a good admissions essay is to a large extent an exercise in demonstrating one's good taste - and the ability to do so has always depended on being fluent in the unspoken norms of an elite community... Many on the left oppose standardized tests on the grounds that they have a class bias, and that hiring a tutor can make you perform better at them. But studies on the subject consistently suggest that the class bias of personal essays is far stronger than the class bias of standardized tests.... But the thing I truly hate about the college essay is not that it is part of a system that keeps deserving kids out of top colleges while rewarding privileged kids who (to add insult to injury) get to flatter themselves that they have been selected for showcasing such superior personality in their 750-word statements composed by their college consultant or ghostwritten by ChatGPT... [W]hat I truly hate about the college essay is the way in which it shapes the lives of high school students and encourages the whole elite stratum of society - including some of its most affluent, privileged and sheltered members - to conceive of themselves in terms of the hardships they have supposedly suffered... [I]t is the bizarre spectacle of those kids from comparatively privileged backgrounds being effectively coerced by the admissions system to self-exoticize as products of great hardship which I find to be truly unseemly... And this is why I suspect that the seemingly innocuous institution of the college essay is more deeply damaging - to the high school experience, to the self-conception of millions of Americans, and even to the country's ability to sustain a trusted elite - than it appears... [I]t drains the souls of teenagers and encourages a deeply pernicious brand of fakery and breeds widespread mistrust in social elites. The college essay is absurd and unfair and - ironically - unforgivably cringe. It's time to put an end to its strange hold over American society, and liberate us all from its tyranny.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader yeokm1 is the Singapore-based embedded security researcher whose side projects include installing Linux on a 1993 PC and building a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS. He's now sharing his latest project - installing Llama 2 on DOS:Conventional wisdom states that running LLMs locally will require computers with high performance specifications especially GPUs with lots of VRAM. But is this actually true? Thanks to an open-source llama2.c project [original created by Andrej Karpathy], I ported it to work so vintage machines running DOS can actually inference with Llama 2 LLM models. Of course there are severe limitations but the results will surprise you. "Everything is open sourced with the executable available here," according to the blog post. (They even addressed an early "gotcha" with DOS filenames being limited to eight characters.) "As expected, the more modern the system, the faster the inference speed..." it adds. "Still, I'm amazed what can still be accomplished with vintage systems."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal:Five years ago, Airbus made a bold bet: The plane maker would launch a zero-emissions, hydrogen-powered aircraft within 15 years that, if successful, would mark the biggest revolution in aviation technology since the jet engine. Now, Airbus is pulling the brakes. The company has cut the project's budget by a quarter, reallocated staff and sent remaining engineers back to the drawing board, delaying its plans by as much as a decade... Airbus has spent more than $1.7 billion on the project, according to people familiar with the matter, but over the past year concluded that technical challenges and a slow uptake of hydrogen in the wider economy meant the jet wouldn't be ready by 2035... Airbus says the past five years of work and money haven't been wasted. The company has established that hydrogen is technically feasible and delaying the project will give it more time to fine-tune the technology, executives said... Airbus shifted focus to hydrogen-fuel cells, which use a chemical reaction to generate energy for an electric motor. It would produce only water vapor, but would require a more radical redesign of the airframe and propulsion system. The plane would carry only 100 passengers about 1,000 nautical miles. Over time, even that proved challenging because of the extra weight of the fuel cells and their limited electricity generation. Instead of a short-haul narrow-body - the workhorse of the aviation industry - at best the aircraft would be more akin to a less appealing regional turboprop. Airbus received a multi-billion Covid-era support package from the French government that "required Airbus to spend a portion of the money on bringing green aircraft to market by the 2030s," according to the article. "The hydrogen project helped Airbus access additional government funding, as well as private green financing... Airbus ultimately assigned the project an annual budget of about 400 million, primarily funded through its own coffers, according to people familiar with its financing arrangements."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the first time, astronomers have confirmed the existence of a lone black hole," reports Science News - "one with no star orbiting it."It's "the only one so far," says Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. In 2022, Sahu and his colleagues discovered the dark object coursing through the constellation Sagittarius. A second team disputed the claim, saying the body might instead be a neutron star. New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope now confirm that the object's mass is so large that it must be a black hole, Sahu's team reports in the April 20 Astrophysical Journal.... [And that second team has revised its assessment and now agrees: the object is a black hole.] While solitary black holes should be common, they are hard to find. The one in Sagittarius revealed itself when it passed in front of a dim background star, magnifying the star's light and slowly shifting its position due to the black hole's gravity. This passage occurred in July 2011, but the star's position is still changing. "It takes a long time to do the observations," Sahu says. "Everything is improved if you have a longer baseline and more observations." The original discovery relied on precise Hubble measurements of star positions from 2011 to 2017. The new work incorporates Hubble observations from 2021 and 2022 as well as data from the Gaia spacecraft. The upshot: The black hole is about seven times as massive as the sun, give or take 0.8 solar masses.... Located 5,000 light-years from Earth, this black hole is much closer than the supermassive one at the Milky Way's center, which also lies in Sagittarius but about 27,000 light-years from us. The star-rich region around the galactic center provides an ideal hunting ground for solitary black holes passing in front of stars. Sahu hopes to find additional lone black holes by using the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, slated for launch in 2027.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There was excitement when biotech company Collosal announced genetically modified grey wolves (first hailed as a "de-extinction" of the Dire wolf species after several millennia). "But bioethicists and conservationists are expressing unease with the kind of scientific research," writes the Chicago Tribune. [Alternate URL here.]"Unfortunately, as clever as this science is ... it's can-do science and not should-do science," said Lindsay Marshall, director of science in animal research at Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society of the U.S.... Ed Heist, a professor at Southern Illinois University and a conservation geneticist, said the news bothered him. "This is not conservation, but people conflate it," he said. "The point is entertainment...." Naomi Louchouarn [program director of wildlife partnerships at Humane World for Animals], has dedicated her studies and research to the relationship between humans and animals, specifically carnivores like gray wolves. "The reason our current endangered species are becoming extinct is because we don't know how to coexist with them," she said. "And this doesn't solve that problem at all." Humans can treat the symptoms of wildlife conflict with "big, flashy silver bullets" and "in this case, advanced, inefficient science," she said, but the real solution is behavioral change. "Assuming that we could actually bring back a full population of animals," Louchouarn said, "which is so difficult and so crazy - that's a big if - I don't understand the point of trying to bring back a woolly mammoth when we already can't coexist with elephants." The article notes that even Colossal's chief science officer says their technology is at best one of several tools for fighting biodiversity loss, calling it a battle which humans are 'not close to winning'... We as a global community need to continue to invest in traditional approaches to conservation and habitat preservation, as well as in the protection of living endangered species." But the article adds that the Trump administration "is citing the case of the dire wolf as it moves to reduce federal protections under the Endangered Species Act of 1973." (Wednesday U.S. interior secretary Doug Burgum has even posted on X "The concept of 'de-extinction' can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.") And the article adds that "During a livestreamed town hall with Interior Department employees on April 9, Burgum said: "If we're going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back. Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal.Ken Angielczyk, curator of mammal fossils at the Field Museum who researches extinct species that lived 200 to 300 million years ago, said it's a misguided approach. "If that's the basis ... for changing regulations related to the endangered species list, that is very, very premature," he said. "Because we can't resurrect things.... If the purpose is to restore the damage to the shared ecosystem, we have that opportunity right now," she said. "And that's the necessity immediately...." "This whole idea that extinction is reversible is so dangerous," Marshall said, "because then it stops us caring." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechCrunch looks at Mechanize, an ambitious new startup "whose founder - and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch - is being skewered on X..."Mechanize was launched on Thursday via a post on X by its founder, famed AI researcher Tamay Besiroglu. The startup's goal, Besiroglu wrote, is "the full automation of all work" and "the full automation of the economy." Does that mean Mechanize is working to replace every human worker with an AI agent bot? Essentially, yes. The startup wants to provide the data, evaluations, and digital environments to make worker automation of any job possible. Besiroglu even calculated Mechanize's total addressable market by aggregating all the wages humans are currently paid. "The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year," he wrote. Besiroglu did, however, clarify to TechCrunch that "our immediate focus is indeed on white-collar work" rather than manual labor jobs that would require robotics... Besiroglu argues to the naysayers that having agents do all the work will actually enrich humans, not impoverish them, through "explosive economic growth." He points to a paper he published on the topic. "Completely automating labor could generate vast abundance, much higher standards of living, and new goods and services that we can't even imagine today," he told TechCrunch. TechCrunch wonders how jobless humans will produce goods - and whether wealth will simply concentrate around whoever owns the agents. But they do concede that Besiroglu may be right that "If each human worker has a personal crew of agents which helps them produce more work, economic abundance could follow..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Honeybee colonies are under siege across much of North America..." reported the New York Times last week. [Alternate URL here.] Last winter beekeepers across America "began reporting massive beehive collapses. More than half of the roughly 2.8 million colonies collapsed, costing the industry about $600 million in economic losses..." America's Department of Agriculture says "sublethal exposure" to pesticides remains one of the biggest factors threatening honeybees, according to the article - but it's one of several threats. "Parasites, loss of habitat, climate change and pesticides threaten to wipe out as much as 70% or more of the nation's honeybee colonies this year, potentially the most devastating loss that the nation has ever seen."Some years are worse than others, but there has been a steady decline over time. Scientists have named the phenomenon colony collapse disorder: Bees simply disappear after they fly out to forage for pollen and nectar. Illness disables their radar, preventing them from finding their way home. The queen and her brood, if they survive, remain defenseless. The precise causes remain unknown. Bee colonies have become even more vulnerable because of the increase in extreme weather conditions, including droughts, heat waves, monster hurricanes, explosive wildfires and floods that have damaged or destroyed the bees and the vegetation they pollinate. If that isn't bad enough, parasites - and other creatures researchers refer to as "biotic" threats that prey on bees - proliferate when there is damage to ecosystems. All that means that the U.S. beekeeping industry has contracted by about 2.9% over the past five years, according to data collected by IBISWorld, a research firm. Annual loss rates have been increasing among all beekeepers over the past decade with the most significant colony collapses in commercial operations happening during the past five years. The article notes that "compounding the troubles for the bee industry are recent federal cuts" proposed by DOGE to America's Department of Agriculture, "where researchers were studying ways to protect the nation's honeybees." And while federal policies like tariffs could make farming more expensive, "Beekeepers also often depend on immigrants to manage their hives and to help produce commercial honey..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Using electrochemistry, University of Oregon researchers have developed a way to make iron metal for steel production without burning fossil fuels..." the University of Oregon wrote last year. "Decarbonizing this step would do roughly as much to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as converting every gas-guzzling vehicle on the roads to electric... If scaled up, the process could help decarbonize one of the largest and most emissions-intensive industries worldwide," replacing carbon-spewing industrial blast furnaces. Paul Kempler, their research assistant chemistry professor, added "The reason we got excited about this chemistry, is that our reactants are two things that are very cheap: saltwater and iron oxide." And this week he announced that "We actually have a chemical principle, a sort of guiding design rule, that will teach us how to identify low-cost iron oxides that we could use in these reactors." "Those reactions conveniently also produce chlorine, a commercially valuable byproduct," writes SciTechDaily, in a new follow-up report this week:In their latest study, the researchers focused on improving the process by identifying which types of iron oxides make the reaction more cost-effective, an essential step toward scaling the method for industrial use.... In lab tests, the difference was striking: "With the really porous particles, we can make iron really quickly on a small area," Goldman said. "The dense particles just can't achieve the same rate, so we're limited in how much iron we can make per square meter of electrodes...." To take their process beyond the lab, Kempler's lab is working with researchers in other fields. A collaboration with civil engineers at Oregon State University is helping them better understand what's needed for the product to work in real-world applications. And collaboration with an electrode manufacturing company is helping them address the logistical and scientific challenges of scaling up an electrochemical process. "I think what this work shows is that technology can meet the needs of an industrial society without being environmentally devastating," Goldman said. "We haven't solved all the problems yet, of course, but I think it's an example that serves as a nucleation point for a different way of thinking about what solutions look like. We can continue to have industry and technology and medicine, and we can do it in a way that's clean - and that's awesome!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The time has come for me to step away," ArcoLinux lead Erik Dubois posted last week. ("After eight years of dedication to the ArcoLinux project and the broader Linux community...") 'Learn, have fun, and enjoy' was our motto for the past eight years - and I really had fun doing all this," Dubois says in a video version of his farewell post. "And if we reflect back on this teaching and the building and promoting of Linux, it was fun. But the time has come for me to step away..." Over its eight years ArcoLinux "accomplished several important milestones," reports Linux magazine, "such as creating over 5,000 educational videos; the creation of ArcoInstall; the Carli education project; the Arch Linux Calamares Installer (ALCI); the ArcoPlasma, ArcoNet, ArcroPro, and Ariser variants; and much more."According to Dubois, they weren't just creating a distribution but a mindset. Dubois says that the code will remain online so others can learn from, fork, or remix the distro. He also indicated that ArcoLinux will supply users with a transition package to help them convert their existing ArcoLinux systems to Arch Linux. That package will remove ArcoLinux branding, replace pacman.conf with an Arch and Chaotic-AUR focused config file, and change the arcolinux-mirrorlist to a single source. It's FOSS News describes ArcoLinux as one of those "user-friendly Arch-based distros that give you a bleeding-edge experience."The reasoning behind this move, as shared by Erik, is his advancing age and him realizing that he doesn't have the same level of mental focus or stamina he used to have before. He has found himself making small mistakes, the kind that can negatively affect a major undertaking like this... Come July 1, 2025, the transition period will end, marking a stop to all development, including the deactivation of the ArcoLinux social media handles. The Telegram and Discord communities will stay a bit longer but will close up eventually. "I want to leave ArcoLinux while it's still strong, and while I can look back with pride at everything we've accomplished together," Dubois says in their post...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Discover magazine reports that a team of researchers have produced evidence that the ancient building blocks for water have been here on earth "since early in the planet's history, according to a study published in the journal Icarus."Pinpointing when and where Earth's hydrogen is an essential key to understanding how life arose on the planet. Without hydrogen, there's no water, and without water, life can't exist here. Ironically, researchers turned to a meteorite containing hydrogen to prove that such former bodies did not provide the H2 ingredient of water's H2O recipe. They examined a rare type of meteorite - known as an enstatite chondrite - that was built similarly to early Earth 4.5 billion years ago and the team discovered hydrogen present in the chemical. The logic is that if this material resembling early Earth's composition can contain hydrogen, so too could the young planet.... Since the proto-Earth was made of material similar to enstatite chondrites, by the time the immature planet had grown large enough to be struck by asteroids, it would have already stashed enough hydrogen to explain Earth's present-day water supply.Although this study likely won't resolve the debate over Earth's original water source, it tilts the ta ble toward an internal, not external one. "We now think that the material that built our planet - which we can study using these rare meteorites - was far richer in hydrogen than we thought previously," James Bryson, an Oxford professor and an author of the paper, said in a press release. "This finding supports the idea that the formation of water on Earth was a natural process, rather than a fluke of hydrated asteroids bombarding our planet after it formed."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matt Asay answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2010 (as the then-COO of Canonical). He currently runs developer relations at MongoDB (after holding similar positions at AWS and Adobe). This week he contributed an opinion to piece to InfoWorld arguing that DeepSeek "may have originated in China, but it stopped being Chinese the minute it was released on Hugging Face with an accompanying paper detailing its development."Soon after, a range of developers, including the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), scrambled to replicate DeepSeek's success but this time as open source software. BAAI, for its part, launched OpenSeek, an ambitious effort to take DeepSeek's open-weight models and create a project that surpasses DeepSeek while uniting "the global open source communities to drive collaborative innovation in algorithms, data, and systems." If that sounds cool to you, it didn't to the U.S. government, which promptly put BAAI on its "baddie" list. Someone needs to remind U.S. (and global) policymakers that no single country, company, or government can contain community-driven open source... DeepSeek didn't just have a moment. It's now very much a movement, one that will frustrate all efforts to contain it. DeepSeek, and the open source AI ecosystem surrounding it, has rapidly evolved from a brief snapshot of technological brilliance into something much bigger - and much harder to stop. Tens of thousands of developers, from seasoned researchers to passionate hobbyists, are now working on enhancing, tuning, and extending these open source models in ways no centralized entity could manage alone. For example, it's perhaps not surprising that Hugging Face is actively attempting to reverse engineer and publicly disseminate DeepSeek's R1 model. Hugging Face, while important, is just one company, just one platform. But Hugging Face has attracted hundreds of thousands of developers who actively contribute to, adapt, and build on open source models, driving AI innovation at a speed and scale unmatched even by the most agile corporate labs. Hugging Face by itself could be stopped. But the communities it enables and accelerates cannot. Through the influence of Hugging Face and many others, variants of DeepSeek models are already finding their way into a wide range of applications. Companies like Perplexity are embedding these powerful open source models into consumer-facing services, proving their real-world utility. This democratization of technology ensures that cutting-edge AI capabilities are no longer locked behind the walls of large corporations or elite government labs but are instead openly accessible, adaptable, and improvable by a global community. "It's Linux all over again..." Asay writes at one point. "What started as the passion project of a lone developer quickly blossomed into an essential, foundational technology embraced by enterprises worldwide," winning out "precisely because it captivated developers who embraced its promise and contributed toward its potential." We are witnessing a similar phenomenon with DeepSeek and the broader open source AI ecosystem, but this time it's happening much, much faster... Organizations that cling to proprietary approaches (looking at you, OpenAI!) or attempt to exert control through restrictive policies (you again, OpenAI!) are not just swimming upstream - they're attempting to dam an ocean. (Yes, OpenAI has now started to talk up open source, but it's a long way from releasing a DeepSeek/OpenSeek equivalent on GitHub.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.