Boeing is seeking to withdraw an earlier agreement to plead guilty in a long-running criminal case that blamed the company for deceiving regulators before two deadly crashes of 737 MAX jets, WSJ is reporting, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The aerospace giant is seeking more lenient treatment from the Justice Department, which under the Trump administration is reviewing numerous pending criminal cases that haven't yet gone to trial or been approved by courts. Boeing nearly sealed its fate last year, agreeing in July to plead guilty to defrauding the Federal Aviation Administration. But a federal judge in Texas rejected the proposed deal in December, pushing the resolution beyond the Biden administration. Now Boeing stands to benefit from fresh eyes at Trump's Justice Department, which is inclined to at least modify parts of the agreement, some of the people said. Allowing Boeing to rescind its plea agreement, or lightening the company's punishment, would mark one of the most prominent examples of the Trump administration's lighter-touch approach to some white-collar enforcement. There were 346 people killed in the two 737 MAX crashes, in 2018 and 2019. The two sides are still negotiating how to propose changes to the deal, expected by April 11, to U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, who oversees the case. One possible change under discussion: whether Boeing can forgo hiring an outside monitor to ensure its compliance with the law, the people said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The president of Signal defended the messaging app's security on Wednesday after top Trump administration officials mistakenly included a journalist in an encrypted chatroom they used to discuss looming U.S. military action against Yemen's Houthis. For a report: Signal's Meredith Whittaker did not directly address the blunder, which Democratic lawmakers have said was a breach of U.S. national security. But she described the app as the "gold standard in private comms" in a post on X, which outlined Signal's security advantages over Meta's WhatsApp messaging app. "We're open source, nonprofit, and we develop and apply (end-to-end encryption) and privacy-preserving tech across our system to protect metadata and message contents," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Sometime earlier this month, Apple updated a section of its website that discloses how it collects and uses imagery for Apple Maps' Look Around feature, which is similar to Google Maps' Street View, as spotted by 9to5Mac. A newly added paragraph reveals that, beginning in March 2025, Apple will be using imagery and data collected during Look Around surveys to "train models powering Apple products and services, including models related to image recognition, creation, and enhancement." Apple collects images and 3D data to enhance and improve Apple Maps using vehicles and backpacks (for pedestrian-only areas) equipped with cameras, sensors, and other equipment including iPhones and iPads. The company says that as part of its commitment to privacy, any images it captures that are published in the Look Around feature have faces and license plates blurred. Apple also says it will only use imagery with those details blurred out for training models. It does accept requests for those wanting their houses to also be blurred, but by default they are not.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shares a report: The UK's Consumer Markets Authority (CMA) has provided an update into its investigation of Ticketmaster after the sale of Oasis reunion tour tickets resulted in grossly inflated ticket prices and numerous consumer complaints. The CMA said that the results of the investigation warranted, "consulting with the ticketing platform on changes to ensure fans receive the right information, at the right time." Of concern to the CMA was Ticketmaster's labeling and information practices. In its update, the CMA stated that Ticketmaster designated certain tickets as "platinum," selling them at more than twice the standard price without adequately informing consumers that the increased price did not correspond to better seats or other perks. The CMA also took issue with Ticketmaster's handling of standing room tickets. It explained that the company sold off a cheaper category of standing ticket first then surprised buyers waiting in extensive online queues with a more expensive ticket.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai has warned of a potential bubble forming in data center construction, arguing that the pace of that buildout may outstrip initial demand for AI services. From a report: A rush by big tech firms, investment funds and other entities to erect server bases from the US to Asia is starting to look indiscriminate, the billionaire executive and financier said. Many of those projects are built without clear customers in mind, Tsai told the HSBC Global Investment Summit in Hong Kong Tuesday. "I start to see the beginning of some kind of bubble," Tsai told delegates. Some of the envisioned projects commenced raising funds without having secured "uptake" agreements, he added. "I start to get worried when people are building data centers on spec. There are a number of people coming up, funds coming out, to raise billions or millions of capital." [...] At the same time, Tsai had choice words for his US rivals, particularly with their spending. "I'm still astounded by the type of numbers that's being thrown around in the United States about investing into AI," Tsai told the audience. "People are talking, literally talking about $500 billion, several 100 billion dollars. I don't think that's entirely necessary. I think in a way, people are investing ahead of the demand that they're seeing today, but they are projecting much bigger demand."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes companies will eventually need fewer software engineers as AI continues to transform programming. "Each software engineer will just do much, much more for a while. And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers," Altman told Stratechery. AI now handles over 50% of code authorship in many companies, Altman estimated, a significant shift that's happened rapidly as large language models have improved. The real paradigm shift is still coming, he said. "The big thing I think will come with agentic coding, which no one's doing for real yet," Altman said, suggesting that the next breakthrough will be AI systems that can independently tackle larger programming tasks with minimal human guidance. While OpenAI continues hiring engineers for now, Altman recommended that high school graduates entering the workforce "get really good at using AI tools," calling it the modern equivalent of learning to code. "When I was graduating as a senior from high school, the obvious tactical thing was get really good at coding. And this is the new version of that," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Infinite Reality, a 3D technology company, has acquired Napster for $207 million, the companies announced Tuesday. The deal aims to transform the once-notorious music sharing service into a metaverse platform. Napster, launched in 1999 by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, was the first major peer-to-peer file-sharing application before legal battles forced its closure in 2001. Since 2016, it has operated as a subscription streaming service. Infinite Reality plans to create virtual 3D spaces where music fans can experience concerts together and artists can sell merchandise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: There are many stories of how artificial intelligence came to take over the world, but one of the most important developments is the emergence in 2012 of AlexNet, a neural network that, for the first time, demonstrated a huge jump in a computer's ability to recognize images. Thursday, the Computer History Museum (CHM), in collaboration with Google, released for the first time the AlexNet source code written by University of Toronto graduate student Alex Krizhevsky, placing it on GitHub for all to peruse and download. "CHM is proud to present the source code to the 2012 version of Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffery Hinton's AlexNet, which transformed the field of artificial intelligence," write the Museum organizers in the readme file on GitHub. Krizhevsky's creation would lead to a flood of innovation in the ensuing years, and tons of capital, based on proof that with sufficient data and computing, neural networks could achieve breakthroughs previously viewed as mainly theoretical. The Computer History Museum's software historian, Hansen Hsu, published an essay describing how he spent five years negotiating with Google to release the code.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Firefly Aerospace has teamed up with Blue Origin's Honeybee Robotics unit to deploy a rover on its 2028 lunar mission to study the Gruithuisen Domes -- rare volcanic formations that may reveal insights into the moon's geology and potential resources. The announcement follows Firefly's successful Blue Ghost Mission 1, which outlasted all prior commercial lunar landings. Reuters reports: The Gruithuisen Domes, located on the moon's near side, are unusual volcanic formations believed to be rich in silica -- a composition rare on the lunar surface -- and studying them could unlock clues about the moon's geological history and potential resources for future human missions. [...] The upcoming mission, part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, will use Firefly's Blue Ghost lander and Elytra Dark orbital vehicle, alongside the Honeybee Robotics rover, to explore the domes, building on the success of its debut effort, Firefly said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NASA's Curiosity rover has detected the largest organic molecules ever found on Mars -- decane, undecane, and dodecane -- suggesting that complex prebiotic chemistry may have occurred in the planet's ancient lakebeds. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. From a press release: Scientists probed an existing rock sample inside Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) mini-lab and found the molecules decane, undecane, and dodecane. These compounds, which are made up of 10, 11, and 12 carbons, respectively, are thought to be the fragments of fatty acids that were preserved in the sample. Fatty acids are among the organic molecules that on Earth are chemical building blocks of life. Living things produce fatty acids to help form cell membranes and perform various other functions. But fatty acids also can be made without life, through chemical reactions triggered by various geological processes, including the interaction of water with minerals in hydrothermal vents. While there's no way to confirm the source of the molecules identified, finding them at all is exciting for Curiosity's science team for a couple of reasons. Curiosity scientists had previously discovered small, simple organic molecules on Mars, but finding these larger compounds provides the first evidence that organic chemistry advanced toward the kind of complexity required for an origin of life on Mars. The new study also increases the chances that large organic molecules that can be made only in the presence of life, known as "biosignatures," could be preserved on Mars, allaying concerns that such compounds get destroyed after tens of millions of years of exposure to intense radiation and oxidation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: German software company SAP overtook Danish healthcare company Novo Nordisk as Europe's largest company by market capitalization on Monday. At 0900 GMT, SAP had a market cap of $340 billion, slightly more than Novo Nordisk, according to Reuters calculations using LSEG Workspace data. SAP is Europe's largest software maker, providing business application software used by companies for finance, sales, supply chain and other functions. Its shares have surged in recent years, in part due to optimism that its cloud business will be a major beneficiary of recent investment in generative artificial intelligence. While SAP shares are up 7% so far in 2025, underperforming the broader European STOXX 600 index, which is up 8.3% year-to-date, they have clocked a total return of 160% since the end of 2022, far outperforming the STOXX 600's 28%. In contrast, Novo Nordisk shares have underperformed the market in recent months after data from trials of its experimental next-generation obesity drug Cagrisema disappointed investors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Meta is considering a paid subscription in the UK that would remove advertisements from its platform. The BBC reports: Under the plans, people using the social media sites could be asked to pay for an ad-free experience if they do not want their data to be tracked. Meta already provides ad-free subscriptions for Facebook and Instagram users in the EU, starting from euros (5 pounds) a month. A spokesperson for the firm said the company was "exploring the option" of offering a similar service in the UK. They said the firm was "engaging constructively" with the UK data watchdog about the subscription service, following a consultation in 2024. The Information Commissioner's Office previously said it expected Meta to consider data protection concerns before it launched an ad-free subscription. Meta says personalized advertising allows its platforms to be free at the point of access. Guidance issued by the regulator in January states that users must be presented with a genuine free choice. Social media platforms such as Meta heavily rely on ad revenues, and the company says personalised advertising allows its platforms to be free. Advertising accounted for more than 96% of its revenue in its latest quarterly financial results.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Samsung Electronics vice chairman and co-CEO, Han Jong-hee, passed away from a heart attack on Tuesday at the age of 63. The Korea Herald reports: Since joining Samsung Electronics, Han held several key positions, including head of the LCD TV Lab. In 2021, he was appointed vice chairman and co-CEO, taking charge of the company's Device eXperience or DX division, which oversees its electronics and consumer device businesses. Developing...Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Two in five tech workers quit in the past year due to inflexible workplace policies around hours, location, and workload intensity, with most citing a desire for remote work and greater autonomy. The Register reports: The findings come from a survey of 26,000 plus staff that operate in 35 markets, including 2,548 respondents in tech, and fly in the face of more and more corporations issuing return to office mandates and demanding long working hours. Amsterdam-based recruitment biz Randstad, which commissioned the research, says 40 percent of the tech people it polled said they resigned due to hardline policies, and 56 percent threatened to seek an alternative if their requests for flexibility were ignored. Almost three-quarters claim remote work boosts a "sense of community" with colleagues -- versus the average of 58 percent across other sectors -- and 68 percent say they'd trust their employer more if they were more easy going on hours, the intensity of the work and the place where they can work. Graig Paglieri, Randstad Digital boss, said the "IT sector has shown that personalized work benefits and flexible options are essential not only for attracting top talent but also for retaining them in competitive markets. Policies should align with organizational, team and individual needs, ensuring a flexible and tailored approach."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A software engineer successfully ran Meta's Llama 2 generative AI model on a 20-year-old PowerBook G4, demonstrating how well-optimized code can push the limits of legacy hardware. MacRumors' Joe Rossignol reports: While hardware requirements for large language models (LLMs) are typically high, this particular PowerBook G4 model from 2005 is equipped with a mere 1.5GHz PowerPC G4 processor and 1GB of RAM. Despite this 20-year-old hardware, my brother was able to achieve inference with Meta's LLM model Llama 2 on the laptop. The experiment involved porting the open-source llama2.c project, and then accelerating performance with a PowerPC vector extension called AltiVec. His full blog post offers more technical details about the project.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Jack Ma-backed Ant Group used Chinese-made semiconductors to develop techniques for training AI models that would cut costs by 20%, according to people familiar with the matter. Ant used domestic chips, including from affiliate Alibaba and Huawei, to train models using the so-called Mixture of Experts machine learning approach, the people said. It got results similar to those from Nvidia chips like the H800, they said, asking not to be named as the information isn't public. Hangzhou-based Ant is still using Nvidia for AI development but is now relying mostly on alternatives including from Advanced Micro Devices and Chinese chips for its latest models, one of the people said. The models mark Ant's entry into a race between Chinese and US companies that's accelerated since DeepSeek demonstrated how capable models can be trained for far less than the billions invested by OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.'s Google. It underscores how Chinese companies are trying to use local alternatives to the most advanced Nvidia semiconductors. While not the most advanced, the H800 is a relatively powerful processor and currently barred by the US from China. The company published a research paper this month that claimed its models at times outperformed Meta Platforms Inc. in certain benchmarks, which Bloomberg News hasn't independently verified. But if they work as advertised, Ant's platforms could mark another step forward for Chinese artificial intelligence development by slashing the cost of inferencing or supporting AI services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft is expanding its Security Copilot platform with six new AI agents designed to autonomously assist cybersecurity teams by handling tasks like phishing alerts, data loss incidents, and vulnerability monitoring. There are also five third-party AI agents created by its partners, including OneTrust and Tanium. The Verge reports: Microsoft's six security agents will be available in preview next month, and are designed to do things like triage and process phishing and data loss alerts, prioritize critical incidents, and monitor for vulnerabilities. "The six Microsoft Security Copilot agents enable teams to autonomously handle high-volume security and IT tasks while seamlessly integrating with Microsoft Security solutions," says Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of Microsoft Security. Microsoft is also working with OneTrust, Aviatrix, BlueVoyant, Tanium, and Fletch to enable some third-party security agents. These extensions will make it easier to analyze data breaches with OneTrust or perform root cause analysis of network outages and failures with Aviatrix. [...] While these latest AI agents in the Security Copilot are designed for security teams to take advantage of, Microsoft is also improving its phishing protection in Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 will start protecting Teams users against phishing and other cyberthreats within Teams next month, including better protection against malicious URLs and attachments.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg column: Worries over China's "3D" problem -- that deflation, debt and demographics are structurally hampering growth -- are melting away. Instead, investors are talking about how the world's second-largest economy can take on the US and challenge its technological dominance. There is the prevailing sense that China's "engineer dividend" is finally paying off. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of engineers has ballooned from 5.2 million to 17.7 million, according to the State Council. That reservoir can help the nation move up the production possibility frontier, the thinking goes. In a way, DeepSeek shouldn't have come as a surprise. Size matters. A bigger talent pool alone gives China a better chance to disrupt. In 2022, 47% of the world's top 20th percentile AI researchers finished their undergraduate studies in China, well above the 18% share from the US, according to data from the Paulson Institute's in-house think tank, MacroPolo. Last year, the Asian nation ranked third in the number of innovation indicators compiled by the World Intellectual Property Organization, after Singapore and the US. What this also means is that innovative breakthroughs can pop out of nowhere. [...] More importantly, China's got the cost advantage. Those under the age of 30 account for 44% of the total engineering pool, versus 20% in the US, according to data compiled by Kaiyuan Securities. As a result, compensation for researchers is only about one-eighth of that in the US. Credit must be given to President Xi Jinping for his focus on higher education as he seeks to upgrade China's value chain. These days, roughly 40% of high-school graduates go to universities, versus 10% in 2000. Meanwhile, engineering is one of the most popular majors for post-graduate studies. It's a welcome reprieve for a government that has been struggling with a shrinking population.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
FaunaDB, a serverless database combining relational and document features, will shut down by the end of May due to unsustainable capital demands. The company plans to open source its core technology, including its FQL query language, in hopes of continuing its legacy within the developer community. The Register reports: The startup pocketed $27 million in VC funding in 2020 and boasted that 25,000 developers worldwide were using its serverless database. However, last week, FaunaDB announced that it would sunset its database services. FaunaDB said it plans to release an open-source version of its core database technology. The system stores data in JSON documents but retains relational features like consistency, support for joins and foreign keys, and full schema enforcement. Fauna's query language, FQL, will also be made available to the open-source community. "Driving broad based adoption of a new operational database that runs as a service globally is very capital intensive. In the current market environment, our board and investors have determined that it is not possible to raise the capital needed to achieve that goal independently," the leadership team said. "While we will no longer be accepting new customers, existing Fauna customers will experience no immediate change. We will gradually transition customers off Fauna and are committed to ensuring a smooth process over the next several months," it added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Sunday, leaving the fate of millions of people's genetic information up in the air as the company deals with the legal and financial fallout of not properly protecting that genetic information in the first place. The filing shows how dangerous it is to provide your DNA directly to a large, for-profit commercial genetic database; 23andMe is now looking for a buyer to pull it out of bankruptcy. 23andMe said in court documents viewed by 404 Media that since hackers obtained personal data about seven million of its customers in October 2023, including, in some cases "health-related information based upon the user's genetics," it has faced "over 50 class action and state court lawsuits," and that "approximately 35,000 claimants have initiated, filed, or threatened to commence arbitration claims against the company." It is seeking bankruptcy protection in part to simplify the fallout of these legal cases, and because it believes it may not have money to pay for the potential damages associated with these cases. CEO and cofounder Anne Wojcicki announced she is leaving the company as part of this process. The company has the genetic data of more than 15 million customers. According to its Chapter 11 filing, 23andMe owes money to a host of pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, artificial intelligence companies (including a company called Aganitha AI and Coreweave), as well as health insurance companies and marketing companies. Shortly before the filing, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued an "urgent" alert to 23andMe customers: "Given 23andMe's reported financial distress, I remind Californians to consider invoking their rights and directing 23andMe to delete their data and destroy any samples of genetic material held by the company." In a letter to customers Sunday, 23andMe said: "Your data remains protected. The Chapter 11 filing does not change how we store, manage, or protect customer data. Our users' privacy and data are important considerations in any transaction, and we remain committed to our users' privacy and to being transparent with our customers about how their data is managed." It added that any buyer will have to "comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data." 404 Media's Jason Koebler notes that "there's no way of knowing who is going to buy it, why they will be interested, and what will become of its millions of customers' DNA sequences. 23andMe has claimed over the years that it strongly resists law enforcement requests for information and that it takes customer security seriously. But the company has in recent years changed its terms of service, partnered with big pharmaceutical companies, and, of course, was hacked."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
CERN faces a pivotal decision about its future as the Large Hadron Collider approaches the end of its usefulness by the early 2040s. Management proposes building the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a machine with a 90-kilometer circumference that would smash particles at eight times the energy of the LHC. This hugely consequential plan faces significant challenges. Much of the required technology doesn't exist yet, including superconducting magnets strong enough to bend high-energy particle beams. The project also lacks the clear rationale that the LHC had in finding the Higgs boson. The proposal has divided physicists. Critics worry about the decades-long timeline, potential cost overruns, and the risk of sacrificing other valuable CERN activities. Germany, which provides 20% of the lab's budget, has already indicated it won't increase contributions. A council-appointed group is now gathering input from the physics community before making recommendations in December. Nature's editorial board adds: Unless some nations step up with a major infusion of cash, the FCC faces an uncertain prospect of being funded. But waiting too long could mean that there will be a large gap between the new facility opening and the closure of the LHC, and precious expertise could end up being lost. Although physicists might disagree on what CERN should do, they nearly unanimously care about the lab's future. They and their leaders must now make the case for why European taxpayers, who fund most of the lab's yearly budget should care, too. The stakes are beyond science, and even beyond Europe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Valve's early anti-piracy efforts, which eventually led to the Steam platform, were sparked by co-founder Monica Harrington's nephew using her money to buy a CD burner for copying games, she revealed at last week's Game Developers Conference. Harrington said her nephew's "lovely thank you note" about sharing games with friends represented a "generational shift" in piracy attitudes that could "put our entire business model at risk." Half-Life subsequently launched with CD key verification in 1998. When players complained about authentication failures, co-founder Mike Harrington discovered "none of them had actually bought the game," confirming the system worked. Although easily bypassed, this early protection influenced Steam's more robust DRM implemented with Half-Life 2 in 2004, which became the industry standard for PC game distribution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Scientists are developing biomarkers to objectively measure pain, addressing a fundamental medical challenge that has contributed to the opioid crisis and led to consistent underestimation of pain in women and minorities. Four research teams funded by the Department of Health and Human Services are developing technologies to quantify pain like other vital signs. Their approaches include a blood test for endometriosis pain, a device measuring nerve response through pupil dilation, microneedle patches sampling interstitial fluid, and a wearable sensor detecting pain markers in sweat. "When patients are told that the pain is all in their head, the implication is that it's imagined, but the irony is that's sort of right," said Adam Kepecs, a neuroscience professor at Washington University. "The pain only exists in your brain. It's neural activity, which is why it's invisible and uniquely personal. But it's still real." These innovations could transform treatment for the nearly 25% of Americans suffering from chronic pain, while potentially saving billions in healthcare costs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Pentagon has canceled its troubled Defense Civilian Human Resources Management System after years of delays and budget overruns, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said. The project, launched in 2018 with a one-year timeline and $36 million budget, ultimately ran eight years and exceeded costs by $280 million, reaching 780% over budget. "We're not doing that anymore," Hegseth said in a video announcing the cancellation. Officials have 60 days to develop a new plan to modernize DoD's civilian HR systems. The cuts are part of a broader $580 million spending reduction that includes $360 million in diversity, climate change and COVID-19 grant programs, plus $30 million in consulting contracts with Gartner and McKinsey.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google has confirmed that a technical issue has permanently deleted location history data for numerous users of its Maps application, with no recovery possible for most affected customers. The problem emerged after Google transitioned its Timeline feature from cloud to on-device storage in 2024 to enhance privacy protections. Users began reporting missing historical location data on support forums and social media platforms in recent weeks. "This is the result of a technical issue and not user error or an intentional change," said a Google spokesperson. Only users who manually enabled encrypted cloud backups before the incident can recover their data, according to Google. The company began shifting location storage policies in 2023, initially stopping collection of sensitive location data including visits to abortion clinics and domestic violence shelters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
schwit1 writes: A compact, deep-sea, cable-cutting device, capable of severing the world's most fortified underwater communication or power lines, has been unveiled by China -- and it could shake up global maritime power dynamics. The revelation marks the first time any country has officially disclosed that it has such an asset, capable of disrupting critical undersea networks. The tool, which is able to cut lines at depths of up to 4,000 metres (13,123 feet) -- twice the maximum operational range of existing subsea communication infrastructure -- has been designed specifically for integration with China's advanced crewed and uncrewed submersibles like the Fendouzhe, or Striver, and the Haidou series.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
China's Cyberspace Administration and Ministry of Public Security have outlawed the use of facial recognition without consent. From a report: The two orgs last Friday published new rules on facial recognition and an explainer that spell out how orgs that want to use facial recognition must first conduct a "personal information protection impact assessment" that considers whether using the tech is necessary, impacts on individuals' privacy, and risks of data leakage. Organizations that decide to use facial recognition must data encrypt biometric data, and audit the information security techniques and practices they use to protect facial scans. Chinese that go through that process and decide they want to use facial recognition can only do so after securing individuals' consent. The rules also ban the use of facial recognition equipment in public places such as hotel rooms, public bathrooms, public dressing rooms, and public toilets. The measures don't apply to researchers or to what machine translation of the rules describes as "algorithm training activities" -- suggesting images of citizens' faces are fair game when used to train AI models.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Countries must develop their own artificial intelligence infrastructure or risk significant economic losses as the technology transforms global economies, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said last week. "It will have an impact on GDP of every country in the double digits in the coming years," Mensch told the A16z podcast, warning that nations without domestic AI systems would see capital flow elsewhere. The French startup executive compared AI to electricity adoption a century ago. "If you weren't building electricity factories, you were preparing yourself to buy it from your neighbors, which creates dependencies," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
prisoninmate shares a report: Highlights of Linux 6.14 include Btrfs RAID1 read balancing support, a new ntsync subsystem for Win NT synchronization primitives to boost game emulation with Wine, uncached buffered I/O support, and a new accelerator driver for the AMD XDNA Ryzen AI NPUs (Neural Processing Units). Also new is DRM panic support for the AMDGPU driver, reflink and reverse-mapping support for the XFS real-time device, Intel Clearwater Forest server support, support for SELinux extended permissions, FUSE support for io_uring, a new fsnotify file pre-access event type, and a new cgroup controller for device memory.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
DNA-testing company 23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection [non-paywalled source] in Missouri and announced CEO Anne Wojcicki's immediate resignation, weeks after rejecting her proposal to buy back the business she co-founded. The bankruptcy filing represents "the best path forward to maximize the value of the business," said Mark Jensen, board member and special committee chair. Further reading: DNA of 15 Million People for Sale in 23andMe Bankruptcy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It's "live-recording the World Wide Web," according to NPR, with a digital library that includes "hundreds of billions of copies of government websites, news articles and data." They described the 29-year-old nonprofit Internet Archive as "more relevant than ever."Every day, about 100 terabytes of material are uploaded to the Internet Archive, or about a billion URLs, with the assistance of automated crawlers. Most of that ends up in the Wayback Machine, while the rest is digitized analog media - books, television, radio, academic papers - scanned and stored on servers. As one of the few large-scale archivists to back up the web, the Internet Archive finds itself in a particularly unique position right now... Thousands of [U.S. government] datasets were wiped - mostly at agencies focused on science and the environment - in the days following Trump's return to the White House... The Internet Archive is among the few efforts that exist to catch the stuff that falls through the digital cracks, while also making that information accessible to the public. Six weeks into the new administration, Wayback Machine director [Mark] Graham said, the Internet Archive had cataloged some 73,000 web pages that had existed on U.S. government websites that were expunged after Trump's inauguration... According to Graham, based on the big jump in page views he's observed over the past two months, the Internet Archive is drawing many more visitors than usual to its services - journalists, researchers and other inquiring minds. Some want to consult the archive for information lost or changed in the purge, while others aim to contribute to the archival process.... "People are coming and rallying behind us," said Brewster Kahle, [the founder and current director of the Internet Archive], "by using it, by pointing at things, helping organize things, by submitting content to be archived - data sets that are under threat or have been taken down...." A behemoth of link rot repair, the Internet Archive rescues a daily average of 10,000 dead links that appear on Wikipedia pages. In total, it's fixed more than 23 million rotten links on Wikipedia alone, according to the organization. Though it receives some money for its preservation work for libraries, museums, and other organizations, it's also funded by donations. "From the beginning, it was important for the Internet Archive to be a nonprofit, because it was working for the people," explains founder Brewster Kahle on its donations page:Its motives had to be transparent; it had to last a long time. That's why we don't charge for access, sell user data, or run ads, even while we offer free resources to citizens everywhere. We rely on the generosity of individuals like you to pay for servers, staff, and preservation projects. If you can't imagine a future without the Internet Archive, please consider supporting our work. We promise to put your donation to good use as we continue to store over 99 petabytes of data, including 625 billion webpages, 38 million texts, and 14 million audio recordings. Two interesting statistics from NPR's article:"A Pew Research Center study published last year found that roughly 38% of web pages on the internet that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible as of 2023.""According to a Harvard Law Review study published in 2014, about half of all links cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer led to the original source material."Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader jtotheh for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes:A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy. Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole - or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole - long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking - it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness. This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" - most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.) The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone. This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger - only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.") Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery. As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Long-time Slashdot reader invisik reminds us that the "fish doorbell" is still going strong, according to the Associated Press."Now in its fifth year, the site has attracted millions of viewers from around the world with its quirky mix of slow TV and ecological activism."The central Dutch city of Utrecht installed a "fish doorbell" on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht's Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a website. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through. "Much of the time, the screen is just a murky green with occasional bubbles, but sometimes a fish swims past. As the water warms up, more fish show up..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NPR reports on research "into whether our defenses built up from past flu seasons can offer any protection against H5N1 bird flu."So far, the findings offer some reassurance. Antibodies and other players in the immune system may buffer the worst consequences of bird flu, at least to some degree. "There's certainly preexisting immunity," says Florian Krammer, a virologist at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine who is involved in some of the new studies. "That's very likely not going to protect us as a population from a new pandemic, but it might give us some protection against severe disease." This protection is based on shared traits between bird flu and types of seasonal flu that have circulated among us. Certain segments of the population, namely older people, may be particularly well-primed because of flu infections during early childhood. Of course, there are caveats. "While this is a bit of a silver lining, it doesn't mean we should all feel safe," says Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University's School of Medicine whose lab is probing this question. For one thing, the studies can't be done on people. The conclusions are based on animal models and blood tests that measure the immune response. And how this holds up for an individual is expected to vary considerably, depending on their own immune history, underlying health conditions and other factors. But for now, influenza researchers speculate this may be one reason most people who've caught bird flu over the past year have not fallen severely ill.... Research published this month is encouraging. By analyzing blood samples from close to 160 people, a team at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago were able to show that people born roughly before 1965 had higher levels of antibodies - proteins that bind to parts of the virus - which cross-react to the current strain of bird flu. This week U.S. federal officials also "announced funding for avian influenza research projects, including money for new vaccine projects and potential treatments," the Guardian report. The head of America's agriculture department said it would invest $100 million, as part of a larger $1 billion initiative to fight bird flu and stop rising egg prices, according to the nonprofit news site Iowa Capital Dispatch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Slashdot reader spatwei shared this report from the cybersecurity site SC World:: AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor could be manipulated to generate code containing backdoors, vulnerabilities and other security issues via distribution of malicious rule configuration files, Pillar Security researchers reported Tuesday. Rules files are used by AI coding agents to guide their behavior when generating or editing code. For example, a rules file may include instructions for the assistant to follow certain coding best practices, utilize specific formatting, or output responses in a specific language. The attack technique developed by Pillar Researchers, which they call 'Rules File Backdoor,' weaponizes rules files by injecting them with instructions that are invisible to a human user but readable by the AI agent. Hidden Unicode characters like bidirectional text markers and zero-width joiners can be used to obfuscate malicious instructions in the user interface and in GitHub pull requests, the researchers noted. Rules configurations are often shared among developer communities and distributed through open-source repositories or included in project templates; therefore, an attacker could distribute a malicious rules file by sharing it on a forum, publishing it on an open-source platform like GitHub or injecting it via a pull request to a popular repository. Once the poisoned rules file is imported to GitHub Copilot or Cursor, the AI agent will read and follow the attacker's instructions while assisting the victim's future coding projects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
For weeks Signal has been one of the three most-downloaded apps in the Netherlands, according to a local news site. And now "Higher education institutions in the Netherlands have been looking for an alternative," according to DUB (an independent news site for the Utrecht University community):Employees of the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences (HU) were recently advised to switch to Signal. Avans University of Applied Sciences has also been discussing a switch...The National Student Union is concerned about privacy. The subject was raised at last week's general meeting, as reported by chair Abdelkader Karbache, who said: "Our local unions want to switch to Signal or other open-source software." Besides being open source, Signal is a non-commercial nonprofit, the article points out - though its proponents suggest there's another big difference. "HU argues that Signal keeps users' data private, unlike WhatsApp." Cybernews.com explains the concern:In an interview with the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, Meredith Whittaker [president of the Signal Foundation] discussed the pitfalls of WhatsApp. "WhatsApp collects metadata: who you send messages to, when, and how often. That's incredibly sensitive information," she says.... The only information [Signal] collects is the date an account was registered, the time when an account was last active, and hashed phone numbers... Information like profile name and the people a user communicates with is all encrypted... Metadata might sound harmless, but it couldn't be further from the truth. According to Whittaker, metadata is deadly. "As a former CIA director once said: 'We kill people based on metadata'." WhatsApp's metadata also includes IP addresses, TechRadar noted last May:Other identifiable data such as your network details, the browser you use, ISP, and other identifiers linked to other Meta products (like Instagram and Facebook) associated with the same device or account are also collected... [Y]our IP can be used to track down your location. As the company explained, even if you keep the location-related features off, IP addresses and other collected information like phone number area codes can be used to estimate your "general location." WhatsApp is required by law to share this information with authorities during an investigation... [U]nder scrutiny is how Meta itself uses these precious details for commercial purposes. Again, this is clearly stated in WhatsApp's privacy policy and terms of use. "We may use the information we receive from [other Meta companies], and they may use the information we share with them, to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services and their offerings," reads the policy. This means that yes, your messages are always private, but WhatsApp is actively collecting your metadata to build your digital persona across other Meta platforms... The article suggests using a VPN with WhatsApp and turning on its "advanced privacy feature" (which hides your IP address during calls) and managing the app's permissions for data collection. "While these steps can help reduce the amount of metadata collected, it's crucial to bear in mind that it's impossible to completely avoid metadata collection on the Meta-owned app... For extra privacy and security, I suggest switching to the more secure messaging app Signal." The article also includes a cautionary anecdote. "It was exactly a piece of metadata - a Proton Mail recovery email - that led to the arrest of a Catalan activist." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader united_notions for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"There's no shortage of videos showing Steam running on expensive ARM single-board computers with discrete GPUs," writes Slashdot reader VennStone. "So I thought it would be worthwhile to make a guide for doing it on (relatively) inexpensive RK3588-powered single-board computers, using Box86/64 and Armbian."The guides I came across were out of date, had a bunch of extra steps thrown in, or were outright incorrect... Up first, we need to add the Box86 and Box64 ARM repositories [along with dependencies, ARMHF architecture, and the Mesa graphics driver]... The guide closes with a multi-line script and advice to "Just close your eyes and run this. It's not pretty, but it will download the Steam Debian package, extract the needed bits, and set up a launch script." (And then the final step is sudo reboot now.) "At this point, all you have to do is open a terminal, type 'steam', and tap Enter. You'll have about five minutes to wait... Check out the video to see how some of the tested games perform."At 720p, performance is all over the place, but the games I tested typically managed to stay above 30 FPS. This is better than I was expecting from a four-year-old SOC emulating x86 titles under ARM. Is this a practical way to play your Steam games? Nope, not even a little bit. For now, this is merely an exercise in ludicrous neatness. Things might get a wee bit better, considering Collabora is working on upstream support for RK3588 and Valve is up to something ARM-related, but ya know, "Valve Time"... "You might be tempted to enable Steam Play for your Windows games, but don't waste your time. I mean, you can try, but it ain't gonna work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Today long-time open source advocate/journalist Doc Searls revealed that years of work by consumer privacy groups has culminated in a proposed standard "that can vastly expand our agency in the digital world" - especially in a future world where agents surf the web on our behalf:Meet IEEE P7012 , which "identifies/addresses the manner in which personal privacy terms are proffered and how they can be read and agreed to by machines." It has been in the works since 2017, and should be ready later this year. (I say this as chair of the standard's working group.) The nickname for P7012 is MyTerms (much as the nickname for the IEEE's 802.11 standard is Wi-Fi). The idea behind MyTerms is that the sites and services of the world should agree to your terms, rather than the other way around. Basically your web browser proffers whatever agreement you've chosen (from a canonical list hosted at Customer Commons) to the web sites and other online services that you're visiting. "Browser makers can build something into their product, or any developer can make a browser add-on or extension..." Searls writes. "On the site's side - the second-party side - CMS makers can build something in, or any developer can make a plug-in (WordPress) or a module (Drupal). Mobile app toolmakers can also come up with something (or many things)..."MyTerms creates a new regime for privacy: one based on contract. With each MyTerm you are the first party. Not the website, the service, or the app maker. They are the second party. And terms can be friendly. For example, a prototype term called NoStalking says "Just show me ads not based on tracking me." This is good for you, because you don't get tracked, and good for the site because it leaves open the advertising option. NoStalking lives at Customer Commons, much as personal copyrights live at Creative Commons. (Yes, the former is modeled on the latter.) "[L]et's make this happen and show the world what agency really means," Searls concludes. Another way to say it is they've created "a draft standard for machine-readable personal privacy terms." But Searl's article used a grander metaphor to explain its significance:When Archimedes said 'Give me a place to stand and I can move the world,' he was talking about agency. You have no agency on the Web if you are always the second party, agreeing to terms and policies set by websites. You are Archimedes if you are the first party, setting your own terms and policies. The scale you get with those is One 2 World. The place you stand is on the Web itself - and the Internet below it. Both were designed to make each of us an Archimedes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The latest Facebook whistleblower, a former international lawyer, "cannot grant any of the nearly 100 interview requests she has received from journalists from print and broadcast news outlets in the United States and the United Kingdom," reports the Washington Post (citing "a person familiar with the matter"). That's because of an independent arbiter's ruling that "also bars her from talking with lawmakers in the U.S., London and the EU, according to a legal challenge she lodged against the ruling..."On March 12, an emergency arbiter - a dispute resolution option outside the court system - sided with Meta by ruling that the tech giant might reasonably convince a court that Wynn-Williams broke a non-disparagement agreement she entered as she was being fired by the company in 2017. The arbiter also said that while her publisher Macmillan appeared for the hearing on Meta's motion, Wynn-Williams did not despite having received due notice. The arbiter did not make any assessments about the book's veracity, but Meta spokespeople argued that the ruling meant that "Sarah Wynn Williams' false and defamatory book should never have been published." Wynn-Williams this week filed an emergency motion to overturn the ruling, arguing that she didn't receive proper notice of the arbitration proceedings to the email accounts Meta knows she uses, according to a copy of the motion seen by The Post. Wynn-Williams further alleged that her severance agreement including the non-disparagement provisions are unenforceable, arguing that it violates laws that protect whistleblowers from retaliation, among other points. In a statement, legal representatives for Wynn-Williams said they were "confident in the legal arguments and look forward to a swift restoration of Ms. Wynn-Williams' right to tell her story." That book - Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism - is currently #1 on the New York Times best-seller list (and #3 on Amazon.com's best-selling books list). And the incident prompted an article by Wired editor at large Steven Levy titled "Meta Tries to Bury a Tell-All Book." ("Please pause for a moment to savor the irony," Levy writes. "Meta, the company that recently announced an end to fact-checking in posts seen by potentially millions of people, is griping that an author didn't fact-check with them?") And this led to a heated exchange on X.com between the Wired editor at large and Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bozworth: Steven Levy: Meta probably realizes that all-out war on this book will only help its sales. But they are furious that an insider--who signed an NDA!--is going White Lotus on them, showing what it's like on the inside. Meta CTO Bozworth: Except that it is full of lies, Steven. Shame on you. Steven Levy: Boz, it would be helpful if Meta called out what it believes are the factual inaccuracies, especially in cases where it calls the book "defamatory." Meta CTO Bozworth: Sorry you don't get to make up a bunch of stories and then put the burden on the person you lied about. Read the accounts from former employees who have gone through several of the anecdotes and said flatly they did not happen as written and then extrapolate. Steven Levy: I would love for Sheryl, Mark and Joel to speak out on those anecdotes and give their sides of the story. They are the key subjects of those stories and their direct denial of specific incidents would matter. Meta CTO Bozworth: Did you read what I wrote? I'm sure you would love to have more fuel for your "nobody wants you to read this" headline, but that's a total bullshit expectation. It isn't unreasonable to expect a journalist like you to do basic diligence. I'm sure you have our comms email! Steven Levy: Believe me I was in touch with your comms people...Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In 30 minutes the Free Software Foundation holds a live auction of memorabilia to celebrate their upcoming 40th anniversary. "By moving out of the FSF office, we got to sort through all the fun and historically important memorabilia and selected the best ones," they announced earlier - and 25 items will up for bids. (To participate in the live auction, you must register in advance.) "This is your chance to get your very own personal souvenir of the FSF," explains an 11-page auction booklet, "from original GNU art to a famous katana and the Internet Hall of Fame medal of the FSF's founder."That's right... a katana.Once upon a time, this 41-inch blade turned heads at the FSF's tech team office. Donated by FSF friends and fans of the XKCD webcomic #225, it became a lighthearted "weapon" in the war for user freedom. As RMS himself is anti-violence, he made a silly joke by examining the katana closely instead of brandishing it, symbolizing that software freedom can be defended with wit. In a legendary photo, this was perceived as if he sniffed the blade. Between the etched dragon on the scabbard and the wavy hamon on the blade, it's as flashy as it is symbolic - especially if you like taking on proprietary software with style (and a dash of humor). The auction is intended "to entrust some of the historically important free software memorabilia that were in the FSF's office and archive to the free software community instead of locking them away in a storage unit where no one can enjoy them. "Hopefully, this way some of these unique items will be displayed in galleries or on the walls of free software enthusiasts. All auction proceeds will go towards the FSF's mission to promote computer user freedom." And speaking of user freedom, here's how they described the Internet Hall of Fame medal:When Richard M. Stallman, the founder of the FSF, was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, it was the ultimate nod to free software's immense impact on the Internet... The medal is shiny, and the frame is fancy, but the real radiance is the recognition that the Internet might look much more locked down and dull without those original free software seeds. Hang it on your wall, and you'll be reminded that hacking for user freedom can change the world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Reuters reported this week that several U.S. national security agencies "have halted work on a coordinated effort to counter Russian sabotage, disinformation and cyberattacks..."The plan was led by the president's National Security Council (NSC) and involved at least seven national security agencies working with European allies to disrupt plots targeting Europe and the United States, seven former officials who participated in the working groups told Reuters... [S]ince Trump took office on January 20 much of the work has come to a standstill, according to eleven current and former officials, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss classified matters... Regular meetings between the National Security Council and European national security officials have gone unscheduled, and the NSC has also stopped formally coordinating efforts across U.S. agencies... The FBI last month ended an effort to counter interference in U.S. elections by foreign adversaries including Russia and put on leave staff working on the issue at the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Justice also disbanded a team that seized the assets of Russian oligarchs... Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Reuters the agency had placed on administrative leave personnel working on misinformation and disinformation on its election security team, without elaborating further.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"For developers and organisations that require a custom software image, a flexible and transparent build system is essential," according to an announcement Friday at Raspberry Pi.com. "[T]o support these customers, we have created rpi-image-gen, a powerful new tool designed to put you in complete control of your Raspberry Pi images."If you're building an embedded system or an industrial controller, you'll need complete control over the software resident on the device, and home users may wish to build their own OS and have it pre-configured exactly the way they want... rpi-image-gen is an alternative to pi-gen, which is the tool we use to create and deploy the Raspberry Pi OS distribution. rpi-image-gen... offers a very granular level of control over file system construction and software image creation... [B]eing able to help reduce software build time, provide guaranteed ownership of support, and reuse standard methodologies to ensure authenticity of software were all of paramount importance, and among the reasons why we created a new home-grown build tool for Raspberry Pi devices... There is a small number of examples in the tree which demonstrate different use cases of rpi-image-gen [including the lightweight image slim and webkiosk for booting into browser kiosk mode]. All create bootable disk images and serve to illustrate how one might use rpi-image-gen to create a bespoke image for a particular purpose. The number of examples will grow over time and we welcome suggestions for new ones... Visit the rpi-image-gen GitHub repository to get started. There, you'll find documentation and examples to guide you through creating custom Raspberry Pi images. Some technical details from the announcement."Similar to pi-gen, rpi-image-gen leverages the power, reliability, and trust of installing a Debian Linux system for the device. However, unlike pi-gen, rpi-image-gen introduces some new concepts [profiles, image layouts, and config] which serve to dictate the build footprint and installation."The tool also lets you exclude from your package "things that would otherwise be installed as part of the profile."The tool's GitHub repository notes that it also allows you output your software bill of materials (SBOM) "to list the exact set of packages that were used to create the image." And it can even generate a list of CVEs identified from the SBOM to "give consumers of your image confidence that your image does not contain any known vulnerabilities."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Science magazine reports:A strange-looking telescope that scanned the skies from a perch in northern Chile for 15 years has released its final data set: detailed maps of the infant universe showing the roiling clouds of hydrogen and helium gas that would one day coalesce into the stars and galaxies we see today. The Atacama Cosmology Telescope is not the first to survey the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the light released 380,000 years after the Big Bang when the early universe's soup of particles formed atoms and space became transparent. But the data - posted as preprints online today - give researchers a new level of detail on the density of the gas clouds and how they were moving. At the top of the page for Science's article is an image where different colors "show areas where the polarization of the CMB light - its direction of vibration - differ, revealing how gases first move tangentially around areas of higher density (orange) and later fall straight in (blue) under the influence of gravity." Long-time Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes:Using the data, researchers tested how well the standard cosmological theory, known as lambda cold dark matter, described the universe at that time 13.8 billion years ago; it's a remarkably good fit, they conclude. The article notes that "back in the Chilean desert," the Atacama Cosmology Telescope's successor, the Simons Observatory, has already taken its first image, and "will begin its even more detailed examination of the CMB in the coming months."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Wired's web site "is going to stop paywalling articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act," their global editorial director announced this week:They're called public records for a reason, after all. And access to public documents is more important than ever at this moment, with government websites and records disappearing... [S]ome may argue that, from a business standpoint, not charging for stories primarily relying on public records automatically means fewer subscriptions and therefore less revenue. We disagree. Sure, the FOIA process is time- and labor-intensive. Reporters face stonewalling, baseless denials, lengthy appeals processes, and countless other obstacles and delays. Investigative reports based on public records are among the most expensive stories to produce and share with the public... But while some readers might not subscribe to outlets that give away some of their best journalism for free, it's just as possible that readers will recognize this sacrifice and reward these outlets with more traffic and subscriptions in the long run... We hope others will follow Wired's lead (and shoutout to outlets like 404 Media that also make their FOIA-based reporting available for free). We also hope those who stand to benefit from these outlets' leadership (that's you, reader) will do their part and subscribe if you can afford it. They're not asking for an arm and a leg... The Fourth Estate needs to step up and invest in serving the public during these unprecedented times. And the public needs to return the favor and support quality journalism, so that hopefully one day we can do away with those annoying paywalls altogether.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NASA is considering "closing its headquarters and scattering responsibilities among the states," reports Politico, citing two people familiar with the plan."The proposal could affect up to 2,500 jobs and redistribute critical functions, including who manages space exploration and organizes major science missions."While much of the day-to-day work occurs at NASA's 10 centers, the Washington office plays a strategic role in lobbying for the agency's priorities in Congress, ensuring the White House supports its agenda and partnering with foreign countries on critical space projects. Some of the headquarter's offices might remain in Washington, the people said, but it's not clear which ones those would be or who would keep their jobs... One of the biggest fallouts is the damage it could do to coordination among NASA leadership on pressing issues... It would also limit cooperation with international partners on space, which is often done through embassies in Washington. NASA works with foreign partners on a range of projects, including the International Space Station and returning to the moon. The European Space Agency, for example, plans to provide modules for Gateway, a lunar space station that is central to NASA's Artemis program to land American astronauts back on the moon... The agency also helps coordinate support from foreign nations for the Artemis accords, which set goals for transparency and data sharing - and help create a level of trust in an unregulated part of the universe. But the reallocation could have some benefits. Such a move would bring headquarters employees closer to the processes they manage. And it would give legislative liaison staff a chance to interact with lawmakers in their districts. "You're probably getting a lot more time with [lawmakers] at the local center or hosting events in the state or district," said Tom Culligan, a longtime space lobbyist,, the space industry lobbyist.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hungary's Parliament not only voted to ban Pride events. They also voted to "allow authorities to use facial recognition software to identify attenders and potentially fine them," reports the Guardian.[The nationwide legislation] amends the country's law on assembly to make it an offence to hold or attend events that violate Hungary's contentious "child protection" legislation, which bars any "depiction or promotion" of homosexuality to minors under the age of 18. The legislation was condemned by Amnesty International, which described it as the latest in a series of discriminatory measures the Hungarian authorities have taken against LGBTQ+ people... Organisers said they planned to go ahead with the march in Budapest, despite the law's stipulation that those who attend a prohibited event could face fines of up to 200,000 Hungarian forints [425 or $549 U.S. dollars].Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Italy is using its Piracy Shield law to go after Google," reports Ars Technica, "with a court ordering the Internet giant to immediately begin poisoning its public DNS servers" to prevent people from reaching pirate streams of football games. "Italy's communication regulator praises the ruling and hopes to continue sticking it to international tech firms."Spotted by TorrentFreak, AGCOM Commissioner Massimiliano Capitanio took to LinkedIn to celebrate the ruling, as well as the existence of the Italian Piracy Shield. "The Judge confirmed the value of AGCOM's investigations, once again giving legitimacy to a system for the protection of copyright that is unique in the world," said Capitanio. Capitanio went on to complain that Google has routinely ignored AGCOM's listing of pirate sites, which are supposed to be blocked in 30 minutes or less under the law. He noted the violation was so clear-cut that the order was issued without giving Google a chance to respond, known as inaudita altera parte in Italian courts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"China is considering trying to blunt greater U.S. tariffs and other trade barriers," reports the Wall Street Journal, "by offering to curb the quantity of certain goods exported to the U.S., according to advisers to the Chinese government."Tokyo's adoption of so-called voluntary export restraints, or VERs, to limit its auto shipments to the U.S. in the 1980s helped prevent Washington from imposing higher import duties. A similar move from Beijing, especially in sectors of key concern to Washington, like electric vehicles and batteries, would mitigate criticism from the U.S. and others over China's "economic imbalances": heavily subsidized companies making stuff for slim profits but saturating global markets, to the detriment of other countries' manufacturers... The Xi leadership has indicated a desire to cut a deal with the Trump administration to head off greater trade attacks... Similar to Japan, the Chinese advisers say, Beijing may also consider negotiating export restraints on EVs and batteries in return for investment opportunities in those sectors in the U.S. In some officials' views, they say, that might be an attractive offer to Trump, who at times has indicated an openness to more Chinese investment in the U.S. even though members of his administration firmly oppose it. The article notes agreements like this are also hard to enforce, "particularly when Chinese companies export to the U.S. from third countries including Mexico and Vietnam."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"China is considering trying to blunt greater U.S. tariffs and other trade barriers," reports the Wall Street Journal, "by offering to curb the quantity of certain goods exported to the U.S., according to advisers to the Chinese government."Tokyo's adoption of so-called voluntary export restraints, or VERs, to limit its auto shipments to the U.S. in the 1980s helped prevent Washington from imposing higher import duties. A similar move from Beijing, especially in sectors of key concern to Washington, like electric vehicles and batteries, would mitigate criticism from the U.S. and others over China's "economic imbalances": heavily subsidized companies making stuff for slim profits but saturating global markets, to the detriment of other countries' manufacturers... The Xi leadership has indicated a desire to cut a deal with the Trump administration to head off greater trade attacks... Similar to Japan, the Chinese advisers say, Beijing may also consider negotiating export restraints on EVs and batteries in return for investment opportunities in those sectors in the U.S. In some officials' views, they say, that might be an attractive offer to Trump, who at times has indicated an openness to more Chinese investment in the U.S. even though members of his administration firmly oppose it. The article notes agreements like this are also hard to enforce, "particularly when Chinese companies export to the U.S. from third countries including Mexico and Vietnam."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Besides administering standardized pre-college tests, America's nonprofit College Board designs college-level classes that high school students can take. But now they're also crafting courses "not just with higher education at the table, but industry partners such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the technology giant IBM," reports Education Week. "The organization hopes the effort will make high school content more meaningful to students by connecting it to in-demand job skills." It believes the approach may entice a new kind of AP student: those who may not be immediately college-bound.... The first two classes developed through this career-driven model - dubbed AP Career Kickstart - focus on cybersecurity and business principles/personal finance, two fast-growing areas in the workforce." Students who enroll in the courses and excel on a capstone assessment could earn college credit in high school, just as they have for years with traditional AP courses in subjects like chemistry and literature. However, the College Board also believes that students could use success in the courses as a selling point with potential employers... Both the business and cybersecurity courses could also help fulfill state high school graduation requirements for computer science education... The cybersecurity course is being piloted in 200 schools this school year and is expected to expand to 800 schools next school year... [T]he College Board is planning to invest heavily in training K-12 teachers to lead the cybersecurity course. IBM's director of technology, data and AI called the effort "a really good way for corporations and companies to help shape the curriculum and the future workforce" while "letting them know what we're looking for." In the article the associate superintendent for teaching at a Chicago-area high school district calls the College Board's move a clear signal that "career-focused learning is rigorous, it's valuable, and it deserves the same recognition as traditional academic pathways." Also interesting is why the College Board says they're doing it:The effort may also help the College Board - founded more than a century ago - maintain AP's prominence as artificial intelligence tools that can already ace nearly every existing AP test on an ever-greater share of job tasks once performed by humans. "High schools had a crisis of relevance far before AI," David Coleman, the CEO of the College Board, said in a wide-ranging interview with EdWeek last month. "How do we make high school relevant, engaging, and purposeful? Bluntly, it takes [the] next generation of coursework. We are reconsidering the kinds of courses we offer...." "It's not a pivot because it's not to the exclusion of higher ed," Coleman said. "What we are doing is giving employers an equal voice." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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