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TikTok changed its policies earlier this year on sharing user data with governments as the company negotiated with the Trump Administration to continue operating in the United States. The company added language allowing data sharing with "regulatory authorities, where relevant" beyond law enforcement. Until April 25, 2025, TikTok's website stated the company would notify users before disclosing their data to law enforcement. The policy now says TikTok will inform users only where required by law and changed the timing from before disclosure to if disclosure occurs. The company also softened its language from stating it "rejects data requests from law enforcement authorities" to saying it "may reject" such requests. TikTok declined to answer repeated questions from Forbes about whether it has shared or is sharing private user information with the Department of Homeland Security or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The timing difference prevents users from challenging subpoenas before their data is handed over.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's effort to reinvent the iPad by adding a giant foldable screen has hit development hurdles, potentially delaying the planned launch. Bloomberg: The company has been working on the device -- projected to cost around $3,000 -- for several years and had most recently aimed for a 2028 release. But engineering challenges tied to weight, features and display technology have pushed its potential debut to 2029 or later, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple is working with Samsung Display Co. to develop the roughly 18-inch panel for the device, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work isn't public. The screen minimizes the crease seen on foldable displays, matching an approach that Apple is also using with its upcoming foldable iPhone. The iPad project is part of a broader push to bring more innovative devices to market. Apple just introduced its first new iPhone design in years -- the ultrathin $999 Air model -- and is working on everything from smart glasses to a tabletop robot device.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems," writes longtime Slashdot reader jrepin. "Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.5." From the announcement: This fresh new release is all about fine-tuning, fresh features, and a making everything smooth and sleek for everyone. The new version brings automatic light-to-dark theme switching based on the time of day. You can configure which global themes it switches between. You can also configure whether you want the wallpaper to switch between its light and dark versions based on the color scheme, the time of day, or be always light or dark. Next up is a "Pinned clipboard items" feature, which lets you save text you use regularly into the clipboard. Breeze-themed windows will now have the same level of roundness in all four corners, even the bottom one. Flatpak Permissions page has been transformed into a general Application Permissions page, where you can configure applications' ability to do things like take screenshots and accept remote control requests. The utility that reads the level of ink or toner from your printer now informs you when it's running low or empty. For the gamers out there, you can now see more relevant info about game controllers on System Settings' Game Controller page. Artists among you can now configure any rotary dials and touch rings on your drawing tablet. Users sensitive to color can now make use of a grayscale color filter, which desaturates or removes color systemwide. Plasma 6.5 implements support for an experimental version of the Wayland picture-in-picture protocol that promises to allow apps like Firefox to eventually display proper PiP windows that stay above others automatically. Support for "overlay planes" was added, which can reduce CPU usage and power draw when displaying full-screen content using a compatible GPU. You can read more about these and many other new features in the Plasma 6.5 release announcement and complete changelog.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday afternoon, Amazon confirmed that an outage affecting Amazon Web Services' cloud hosting, which had impacted millions across the Internet, had been resolved. Considered the worst outage since last year's CrowdStrike chaos, Amazon's outage caused "global turmoil," Reuters reported. AWS is the world's largest cloud provider and, therefore, the "backbone of much of the Internet," ZDNet noted. Ultimately, more than 28 AWS services were disrupted, causing perhaps billions in damages, one analyst estimated for CNN. [...] Amazon's problems originated at a US site that is its "oldest and largest for web services" and often "the default region for many AWS services," Reuters noted. The same site has experienced two outages before in 2020 and 2021, but while the tech giant had confirmed that those prior issues had been "fully mitigated," apparently the fixes did not ensure stability into 2025. ZDNet noted that Amazon's first sign of the outage was "increased error rates and latency across numerous key services" tied to its cloud database technology. Although "engineers later identified a Domain Name System (DNS) resolution problem" as the root of these issues and quickly fixed it, "other AWS services began to fail in its wake, leaving the platform still impaired" as more than two dozen AWS services shut down. At the peak of the outage on Monday, Down Detector tracked more than 8 million reports globally from users panicked by the outage, ZDNet reported. Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, told Reuters that "software developers need to build better fault tolerance." "When people cut costs and cut corners to try to get an application up, and then forget that they skipped that last step and didn't really protect against an outage, those companies are the ones who really ought to be scrutinized later."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

France and Spain are calling on the European Union to stick with plans to ban combustion engine cars in the bloc after 2035, at odds with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz ahead of a meeting of leaders in Brussels this week. From a report: The European Commission, the bloc's executive branch, is currently reviewing rules designed to accelerate the automotive sector's green transition. Merz has called on the bloc to give up its 2035 deadline to help Germany's troubled car industry. France and Spain "hope that the upcoming review will preserve the 2035 cap and the environmental ambition of the CO2 emissions trajectory that underpins it," a paper presented to climate ministers in Luxembourg on Tuesday, and seen by Bloomberg says. "This revision should in no way call into question the zero emissions exhaust target in 2035."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI released ChatGPT Atlas on Tuesday, an AI-powered web browser that CEO Sam Altman described as "smooth" and "quick" during a livestream announcement. The browser is available globally on macOS while versions for Windows, iOS, and Android are expected soon. Atlas includes memory features that personalize the browsing experience and an agent mode that allows ChatGPT to perform tasks such as booking reservations and flights or editing documents. Users can manage these stored memories through the browser's settings and can open incognito windows. The browser displays a split-screen view by default when users click links from search results. The view shows both the webpage and the ChatGPT transcript simultaneously. Atlas also offers webpage summarization and a feature called "cursor chat" that allows users to select text and have ChatGPT revise it inline.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple lashed out at the European Union's attempts to tame the power of Silicon Valley in the most far-reaching legal challenge of the bloc's Big Tech antitrust rules. From a report: The iPhone maker's lawyer Daniel Beard told the General Court in Luxembourg on Tuesday that the Digital Markets Act "imposes hugely onerous and intrusive burdens" at odds with Apple's rights in the EU marketplace. The DMA came onto the EU's books in 2023 and is designed to clip the wings of the world's largest technology platforms with a slew of dos and don'ts. But over recent months, the law has also drawn the ire of US President Donald Trump and plagued EU-US trade talks. Apple -- seen as the biggest renegade against the EU's crackdown -- challenged the law on three fronts: EU obligations to make rival hardware work with its iPhone, the regulator's decision to drag the hugely profitable App Store under the rules, and a decision to probe whether iMessage should have faced the rules, which it later escaped.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

London police finally understand why 80,000 phones disappeared from the city's streets last year. The answer involves budget cuts [non-paywalled source] that hollowed out British policing in the 2010s, the arrival of electric bikes that made theft easy, and a lucrative black market in China where stolen British phones retain full functionality. The Metropolitan Police discovered an industrial-scale operation in December when officers traced a woman's iPhone to a Heathrow warehouse on Christmas Eve. Boxes labeled as batteries and bound for Hong Kong contained almost 1,000 stolen iPhones. The police arrested two men in their thirties in September as suspected ringleaders of a group that sent up to 40,000 stolen phones to China. The epidemic took root after Conservative-led austerity measures reduced police numbers and budgets. In 2017 the Metropolitan Police announced it would stop investigating low-level crimes to focus resources on serious violence and sexual offenses. Thieves on rented electric bikes began mounting sidewalks to snatch phones at high speed while wearing balaclavas and hoods. Police data shows only 495 people were charged out of 106,000 phones reported stolen between March 2024 and February 2025. Thieves earn up to $401 per device. The phones sell for up to $5,000 in China because Chinese network providers do not subscribe to the international blacklist for stolen devices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa fee will apply only to new visa applicants outside the country, the government confirmed in new guidance on Monday. From a report: That means that under the new policy, employers won't need to pay the fee for anyone already living in the U.S., such as international students. The new guidance: Under the new guidance published on Monday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the $100,000 fee will apply only to new applicants living outside the country. Employers will need to pay the fee after their prospective employee's visa is approved, allowing them to move to the U.S. Previously, the White House had said the fee would apply to all new visa applicants, except those who work for companies or industries that have secured a special waiver. In 2024, roughly 54% of the 141,000 new H-1B visas issued went to immigrants who were already in the U.S. on a different visa type, according to government statistics. If that trend holds, the new fee wouldn't apply to over half of the applicants.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Filipino workers in Manila are remotely operating robots that restock convenience store shelves across Tokyo. The partnership represents a new economic model where physical labor can be offshored through telepresence. Around 60 workers at Astro Robotics monitor the machines and intervene when problems occur about 4% of the time. They earn between $250 and $315 per month. Japan faces severe labor shortages but has resisted expanding immigration. Offshoring the work through robots solves this while dramatically reducing costs. Filipino workers are also training the AI systems designed to eliminate the need for human operators entirely. Tokyo-based Telexistence has collected extensive data from its workers and is providing it to a San Francisco startup building fully autonomous robots. The combination of automation and offshoring creates what one University of Michigan professor called a "double whammy" for workers in developed nations. It also exploits workers in developing countries who build the tools meant to replace them. The market for AI agents is expected to grow eightfold to $43 billion by 2030. Human-only work is forecast to drop 27% over the next five years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon executives believe the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 workers in the United States by 2027 through robotic automation. Internal documents viewed by The New York Times show the automation would save approximately 30 cents on each item the company picks, packs and delivers. The documents reveal that executives told Amazon's board last year they hoped automation would allow the company to flatten its U.S. workforce growth over the next decade. Amazon expects to sell twice as many products by 2033. That projection translates to more than 600,000 positions Amazon would not need to fill. Amazon opened its most advanced warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana last year as a template for future facilities. The site uses a thousand robots and employed a quarter fewer workers than it would have without automation. The company plans to replicate this design in approximately 40 facilities by the end of 2027. A facility in Stone Mountain, Georgia currently employs roughly 4,000 workers. After a planned robotic retrofit, internal analyses project it will process 10% more items but need as many as 1,200 fewer employees. The documents show Amazon's robotics team has set a goal to automate 75% of its operations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Lloyds Banking Group claims employees save 46 minutes daily using Microsoft 365 Copilot, based on a survey of 1,000 users among nearly 30,000 deployed licenses. According to Lloyds Banking Group (LBG), the rollout is "helping teams summarize documents, prepare for meetings, and reduce administrative tasks." Almost 5,000 engineers are also using GitHub Copilot. Vic Weigler, chief technology officer at the finance corp, said in a statement: "We converted 11,000 lines of code across 83 files in half the expected time." An insider at the bank, a self-professed fan of the technology, listed some of the ways it was being used in their business area. These ranged from the mundane -- drafting and summarizing emails, transcribing meetings, and comparing documents to group standards -- to the eyebrow-raising, such as drafting legal clauses, undertaking due diligence, and creating complex Excel formulas. They told us the next step is creating bots and agents to perform repetitive data-based tasks and rolling out the technology to customer-facing processes. That said, they also noted the AI tools occasionally make mistakes. The "golden rule," is to "never use the output without checking it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alibaba Cloud claims its new Aegaeon GPU pooling system cuts Nvidia GPU use by 82%, letting 213 H20 accelerators handle workloads that previously required 1,192. The advancements have been detailed in a paper (PDF) at the 2025 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems (SOSP) in Seoul. Tom's Hardware reports: Unlike training-time breakthroughs that chase model quality or speed, Aegaeon is an inference-time scheduler designed to maximize GPU utilization across many models with bursty or unpredictable demand. Instead of pinning one accelerator to one model, Aegaeon virtualizes GPU access at the token level, allowing it to schedule tiny slices of work across a shared pool. This means one H20 could serve several different models simultaneously, with system-wide "goodput" -- a measure of effective output -- rising by as much as nine times compared to older serverless systems. The system was tested in production over several months, according to the paper, which lists authors from both Peking University and Alibaba's infrastructure division, including CTO Jingren Zhou. During that window, the number of GPUs needed to support dozens of different LLMs -- ranging in size up to 72 billion parameters -- fell from 1,192 to just 213. While the paper does not break down which models contributed most to the savings, reporting by the South China Morning Post says the tests were conducted using Nvidia's H20, one of the few accelerators still legally available to Chinese buyers under current U.S. export controls.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX surpassed the 10,000-satellite milestone for its Starlink constellation after two Falcon 9 launches on Oct. 19 added 56 more satellites to orbit. The company now operates about two-thirds of all active satellites worldwide and continues to break reuse records. Space.com reports: A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 28 Starlink internet satellites lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 3:24 p.m. EDT (1924 GMT; 12:24 p.m. local California time). Those 28 included the 10,000th Starlink spacecraft ever to reach orbit, which a SpaceX employee noted on the company's launch webcast: "From Tintin to 10,000! Go Starlink, go Falcon, go SpaceX!" It was also the 132nd Falcon 9 liftoff of the year, equaling the mark set by the rocket last year -- and there are still nearly 2.5 months to go in 2025. [...] This launch was the second of the day for SpaceX; less than two hours earlier, another Falcon 9 sent 28 more Starlink satellites up from Florida's Space Coast. That earlier liftoff was the 31st for that Falcon 9's first stage, setting a new reuse record.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed Sunday that it is investigating an airliner that was struck by an object in its windscreen, mid-flight, over Utah. "NTSB gathering radar, weather, flight recorder data," the federal agency said on the social media site X. "Windscreen being sent to NTSB laboratories for examination." The strike occurred Thursday, during a United Airlines flight from Denver to Los Angeles. Images shared on social media showed that one of the two large windows at the front of a 737 MAX aircraft was significantly cracked. Related images also reveal a pilot's arm that has been cut multiple times by what appear to be small shards of glass. The captain of the flight reportedly described the object that hit the plane as "space debris." This has not been confirmed, however. After the impact, the aircraft safely landed at Salt Lake City International Airport after being diverted. Images of the strike showed that an object made a forceful impact near the upper-right part of the window, showing damage to the metal frame. Because aircraft windows are multiple layers thick, with laminate in between, the window pane did not shatter completely. The aircraft was flying above 30,000 feet -- likely around 36,000 feet -- and the cockpit apparently maintained its cabin pressure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Investigators recovered the OceanGate Titan sub's underwater camera nearly intact, discovering a SanDisk SD card that survived the 2023 implosion and still contained 12 images and 9 videos. TechSpot reports: Scott Manley, the science communication YouTuber, gamer, astrophysicist, and programmer, posted about the latest find: a hardened SubC-branded Rayfin Mk2 Benthic Camera containing the undamaged SD card. The titanium and synthetic sapphire crystal camera is rated to withstand depths of up to 6,000 meters (19,685 feet) -- the Titan imploded at around 3,300 meters (10,827 feet). The casing is intact, though the lens is shattered and the PCBs are slightly damaged. Incredibly the SD card inside the camera was undamaged. Tom's Hardware reports that it's almost certainly a SanDisk Extreme Pro 512GB, which costs around $62 on Amazon. The camera's SD card was found to be fully encrypted, divided into a small partition for operating system updates and a larger one for user data. Due to impact damage from the accident, several components of the system-on-module (SOM) board -- including connectors and the microcontroller -- were broken, complicating the data extraction process. [...] After determining the data wasn't encrypted beyond the file system level, they successfully accessed the SD card contents using the manufacturer's proprietary equipment and procedures.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Foreign hackers breached the National Nuclear Security Administration's Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC) by exploiting unpatched Microsoft SharePoint vulnerabilities. The intrusion happened in August and is possibly linked to either Chinese state actors or Russian cybercriminals. CSO Online notes that "roughly 80% of the non-nuclear parts in the nation's nuclear stockpile originate from KCNSC," making it "one of the most sensitive facilities in the federal weapons complex." From the report: The breach targeted a plant that produces the vast majority of critical non-nuclear components for US nuclear weapons under the NNSA, a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy (DOE) that oversees the design, production, and maintenance of the nation's nuclear weapons. Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies (FM&T) manages the Kansas City campus under contract to the NNSA. [...] The attackers exploited two recently disclosed Microsoft SharePoint vulnerabilities -- CVE-2025-53770, a spoofing flaw, and CVE-2025-49704, a remote code execution (RCE) bug -- both affecting on-premises servers. Microsoft issued fixes for the vulnerabilities on July 19. On July 22, the NNSA confirmed it was one of the organizations hit by attacks enabled by the SharePoint flaws. "On Friday, July 18th, the exploitation of a Microsoft SharePoint zero-day vulnerability began affecting the Department of Energy," a DOE spokesperson said. However, the DOE contended at the time, "The department was minimally impacted due to its widespread use of the Microsoft M365 cloud and very capable cybersecurity systems. A very small number of systems were impacted. All impacted systems are being restored." By early August, federal responders, including personnel from the NSA, were on-site at the Kansas City facility, the source tells CSO.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: With the fourth betas of iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS 26.1, Apple has introduced a new setting that's designed to allow users to customize the look of Liquid Glass. The toggle lets users select from a clear look for Liquid Glass, or a tinted look. Clear is the current Liquid Glass design, which is more transparent and shows the background underneath buttons, bars, and menus, while tinted increases the opacity of Liquid Glass and adds more contrast. Apple says that the new toggle was added because during the beta testing period over the summer, user feedback suggested that some people would prefer to have a more opaque option for Liquid Glass. The added setting provides additional customization in iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS Tahoe 26.1. Increasing opacity and adding contrast applies to Liquid Glass throughout the operating system, including in apps and Lock Screen notifications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. Grandmaster and beloved chess commentator Daniel Naroditsky has tragically passed away at the age of 29. "The news has sent shockwaves around the chess community, which is grieving the loss of one of the most beloved and influential voices," reports Chess.com. From the report: The devastating news was first shared by Naroditsky's club, Charlotte Chess Center, on Monday, and confirmed by Chess.com with multiple sources: "It is with great sadness that we share the unexpected passing of Daniel Naroditsky. Daniel was a talented chess player, educator, and cherished member of the chess community. He was also a loving son, brother, and loyal friend. We ask for privacy for Daniel's family during this extremely difficult time. Let us honor Daniel by remembering his passion for chess and the inspiration he brought to us all." Naroditsky, who was three weeks away from turning 30, has long been known as one of United States' most talented players. He achieved his grandmaster title at the age of 18 in 2013, and placed fifth among the highest-ranked juniors in 2015. His last FIDE-rating is 2619, which places him among the top 150 in the world, or the 17th highest-ranked in the United States. He has a peak rating of 2647 from 2017. He leaves a legacy that spans strong over-the-board competition and highly popular chess instruction and commentary on streaming platforms.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has issued criminal subpoenas to Roblox, calling it a "breeding ground for predators" and accusing the platform of profiting while failing to protect children. NBC News reports: The subpoenas will allow prosecutors to gather more information about the alleged criminal activity on the platform, including evidence related to suspected predators and victims, according to Uthmeier. The concerns prompted Roblox to invest heavily in protecting younger users on its platform by tightening messaging rules for children under 13, intensive content moderation and AI-powered monitoring. In an emailed statement to Reuters, Roblox said it prohibits sharing images and videos in chat, uses filters designed to block the exchange of personal information, and is working to implement age estimation for all users accessing chat features. "While no system is perfect, our trained teams and automated tools continuously monitor communications to detect and remove harmful content," a Roblox spokesperson said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kohler has launched the Dekoda, a $599 smart toilet camera that analyzes users' waste to track hydration, gut health, and detect potential issues like blood. "It also comes with a rechargeable battery, a USB connection, and a fingerprint sensor to identify who's using the toilet," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The Dekoda is currently available for preorder, with shipments scheduled to begin on October 21. In addition to the hardware purchase fee, customers will need to pay between $70 and $156 per year for a subscription. If you're uneasy about the privacy implications of putting a camera right below your private parts, the company says, "Dekoda's sensors see down into your toilet and nowhere else." It also notes that the resulting data is secured via end-to-end encryption.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic has added web and mobile interfaces for Claude Code, its immensely popular command-line interface (CLI) agentic AI coding tool. The web interface appears to be well-baked at launch, but the mobile version is limited to iOS and is in an earlier stage of development. The web version of Claude Code can be given access to a GitHub repository. Once that's done, developers can give it general marching orders like "add real-time inventory tracking to the dashboard." As with the CLI version, it gets to work, with updates along the way approximating where it's at and what it's doing. The web interface supports the recently implemented Claude Code capability to take suggestions or requested changes while it's in the middle of working on a task. (Previously, if you saw it doing something wrong or missing something, you often had to cancel and start over.) Developers can run multiple sessions at once and switch between them as needed; they're listed in a left-side panel in the interface. Alongside this web and mobile rollout, Anthropic has also introduced a new sandboxing runtime to Claude Code that, along with other things, aims to make the experience both more secure and lower friction. In the past, Claude Code worked by asking permission before making most changes and steps along the way. Now, it can instead be given permissions for specific file system folders and network servers. That means fewer approval steps, but it's also more secure overall against prompt injection and other risks. You can learn more about "Claude Code on the web" through the company's blog and official YouTube channel. Note: the new features are available in beta as a research preview, and they are available to Claude users with Pro or Max subscriptions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A hacking group that recently doxed hundreds of government officials, including from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has now built dossiers on tens of thousands of U.S. government officials, including NSA employees, a member of the group told 404 Media. The member said the group did this by digging through its caches of stolen Salesforce customer data. The person provided 404 Media with samples of this information, which 404 Media was able to corroborate. As well as NSA officials, the person sent 404 Media personal data on officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), members of the Air Force, and several other agencies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Court of Accounts report written before Sunday's theft of crown jewels from the Louvre revealed the museum's security systems were outdated and inadequate [non-paywalled source]. The report noted a lack of basic CCTV equipment across multiple wings. Cameras had mainly been installed only when rooms were refurbished due to repeated postponements of scheduled modernization. In the Denon wing where the Apollo Gallery was targeted, a third of rooms had no CCTV cameras. Three-quarters of rooms in the Richelieu wing and nearly two-thirds in the Sully wing lacked cameras. The thieves were caught on camera at one point but were masked and impossible to identify, according to Paris public prosecutor Laure Beccuau. The alarm system activated when thieves cut open display cases, but they threatened staff who left the area. Culture minister Rachida Dati confirmed new CCTV cameras would be installed. President Macron had earmarked $186.30 million to upgrade the Louvre's security systems under a renaissance plan launched in June.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says his company has lost all access to China's market after U.S. export restrictions eliminated what was once a 95% share. Speaking in an interview with Citadel Securities, Huang questioned the wisdom of policies that cost America one of the world's largest markets. The Biden Administration imposed rules in 2022 to restrict exports of Nvidia's most advanced AI chips to China. The Trump Administration blocked additional chip sales in April and later granted export licenses for certain Nvidia and AMD chips in exchange for 15% of revenues. Chinese regulators responded by telling domestic tech companies to avoid Nvidia chips designed to meet U.S. export requirements. Beijing also placed strict limits on exports of rare earths. Huang noted that about half the world's AI researchers are in China and called it a mistake not to have them build AI on American technology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google plans to let Pixel smartphone enthusiasts test out the company's next handset ahead of its public introduction. From a report: Google has invited members of its "Superfans" group to apply to test future Pixel hardware, asking entrants to profess their knowledge and passion for the brand in hopes of being able to beta test forthcoming products. Consumer tech companies often let small groups of customers try out unreleased products under strict secrecy to gather feedback during development. But it's incredibly rare for a company of Google's size to do it with something as high-profile as the Pixel lineup. The search giant will select 15 people from the pool of entrants, and winners must all sign a non-disclosure agreement to receive devices, according to official rules for the contest reviewed by Bloomberg News. "The Trusted Tester program is an opportunity to provide feedback and help shape a Pixel phone currently in development," the document reads.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: "Hoisted by their own GPTards." That's how Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun described the blowback after OpenAI researchers did a victory lap over GPT-5's supposed math breakthroughs. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis added, "this is embarrassing." The Decoder reports that in a since-deleted tweet, OpenAI VP Kevin Weil declared that "GPT-5 found solutions to 10 (!) previously unsolved Erdos problems and made progress on 11 others." ("Erdos problems" are famous conjectures posed by mathematician Paul Erdos.) However, mathematician Thomas Bloom, who maintains the Erdos Problems website, said Weil's post was "a dramatic misrepresentation" -- while these problems were indeed listed as "open" on Bloom's website, he said that only means, "I personally am unaware of a paper which solves it." In other words, it's not accurate to claim GPT-5 was able to solve previously unsolved problems. Instead, Bloom wrote, "GPT-5 found references, which solved these problems, that I personally was unaware of."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Sims is in a period of transition -- and as part of that, the ongoing mobile version will be shutting down in a few months. From a report: EA announced that today's update for The Sims Mobile will be its last, and that on January 20th, 2026 the game "will no longer be accessible to play and will be sunset." The mobile iteration of the franchise first launched in 2018, and has seen more than 50 updates since then. EA says that starting today players will no longer be able to spend real money in the game, and that it will be delisted on both iOS and Android tomorrow before the servers shut down completely next year, making it entirely unplayable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China says it has uncovered what it describes as irrefutable evidence of American government cyber attacks targeting the National Time Service Center. The Ministry of State Security said the National Security Agency exploited vulnerabilities in employees' mobile phones beginning March 25, 2022, and later used stolen login credentials to access the center's computers starting April 18, 2023. The facility in Xi'an provides high-precision timekeeping service for the government, civil society, and various industries. It also supplies data used to calculate international standard time. Chinese authorities said investigators found that private servers worldwide were employed to conceal the attacks' origin. The accusations emerge against a backdrop of mutual cyber-espionage claims between Washington and Beijing. Western governments and companies have repeatedly blamed Chinese hackers for intrusions in recent years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An electronic eye implant has restored reading ability to patients blinded by geographic atrophy, a form of dry age-related macular degeneration. Results published Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that 84% of trial participants regained the ability to read letters, numbers, and words after receiving the Prima device. The microchip measures two millimetres by two millimetres and is implanted beneath the center of the retina. Patients wear augmented reality glasses containing a camera that projects images onto the chip. The device converts light into electrical pulses transmitted to the brain. Frank Holz, the study's lead author and chair of ophthalmology at the University Hospital of Bonn, called the implant "a paradigm shift in treating late-stage age-related macular degeneration." Mahi Muqit, a consultant at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, said the trial enabled "meaningful central vision restoration, which has never been done before." The procedure takes less than two hours and requires intensive rehabilitation. Science Corporation, which manufactures the device, has applied for clinical authorization in the United States and Europe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Food allergies in children dropped sharply in the years after new guidelines encouraged parents to introduce infants to peanuts, a study has found. The New York Times: For decades, as food allergy rates climbed, experts recommended that parents avoid exposing their infants to common allergens. But a landmark trial in 2015 found that feeding peanuts to babies could cut their chances of developing an allergy by over 80%. [non-paywalled source.] In 2017, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases formally recommended the early-introduction approach and issued national guidelines. The new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found that food allergy rates in children under 3 fell after those guidelines were put into place -- dropping to 0.93% between 2017 and 2020, from 1.46% between 2012 and 2015. That's a 36% reduction in all food allergies, driven largely by a 43% drop in peanut allergies. The study also found that eggs overtook peanuts as the No. 1 food allergen in young children. The study did not examine what infants ate, so it does not show that the guidelines caused the decline. Still, the data is promising. While all food allergies can be dangerous, 80% of people never outgrow one.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India will need as much as $21 trillion to achieve its climate goals and lift its population out of poverty, according to a draft government plan seen by Bloomberg. From the report: The estimate offers a first glimpse of how the country intends to live up to its target of net zero emissions by 2070. The updated scenario implies hitting peak emissions in 2045, which is a decade earlier than the current trajectory. India is already being severely battered by the fallout of climate change, as deadly floods and heat waves become more destructive each year. But the need to mitigate the emissions that feed climate change has historically been at odds with India's priorities of economic growth and energy security, with the latter still mostly provided through coal. The new plan shows India will seek to achieve climate and economic development goals simultaneously, with low-carbon options envisaged for much of its yet-to-be-built residential and industrial infrastructure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Test scores across OECD countries peaked around 2012 and have declined since. IQ scores in many developed countries appear to be falling after rising throughout the twentieth century. Nataliya Kosmyna at MIT's Media Lab began noticing changes around two years ago when strangers started emailing her to ask if using ChatGPT could alter their brains. She posted a study in June tracking brain activity in 54 students writing essays. Those using ChatGPT showed significantly less activity in networks tied to cognitive processing and attention compared to students who wrote without digital help or used only internet search engines. Almost none could recall what they had written immediately after submitting their work. She received more than 4,000 emails afterward. Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material. A British survey found that 92% of university students now use AI and roughly 20% have used it to write all or part of an assignment. Independent research has found that more screen time in schools correlates with worse results. Technology companies have designed products to be frictionless, removing the cognitive challenges brains need to learn. AI now allows users to outsource thinking itself.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AWS experienced a three-hour outage early Monday morning that disrupted thousands of websites and applications across the globe. The cloud computing provider reported DNS problems with DynamoDB in its US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia starting at 12:11 a.m. Pacific time. Over 4 million users reported issues, according to Downdetector. Snapchat saw reports spike from more than 22,000 to around 4,000 as systems recovered. Roblox dropped from over 12,600 complaints to fewer than 500. Reddit and the financial platform Chime remained affected longer. Perplexity, Coinbase and Robinhood attributed their platform disruptions directly to AWS. Gaming platforms including Fortnite, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans went offline. Signal confirmed the messaging app was down. In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, and the HMRC website faced problems. United Airlines reported disrupted access to its app and website overnight. Some internal systems were temporarily affected. Delta experienced a small number of minor flight delays. By 3:35 a.m. Pacific time, AWS said the issue had been fully mitigated. Most service operations were succeeding normally though some requests faced throttling during final resolution. AWS holds roughly one-third of the cloud infrastructure market ahead of Microsoft and Google.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A recent article in Noema magazines explores the issues in "editing nature to fix our failures." "It turns out playing God is neither difficult nor expensive," the article points out. "For about $2,000, I can go online and order a decent microscope, a precision injection rig, and a vial of enough CRISPR-Cas9 - an enzyme-based genome-editing tool - to genetically edit a few thousand fish embryos..." So when going beyond the kept-in-captivity Dire Wolf to the possibility of bringing back forests of the American chestnut tree, "The process is deceptively simple; the implications are anything but..."If scientists could use CRISPR to engineer a more heat-tolerant coral, it would give coral a better chance of surviving a marine environment made warmer by climate change. It would also keep the human industries that rely on reefs afloat. But should we edit nature to fix our failures? And if we do, is it still natural...? Evolution is not keeping pace with climate change, so it is up to us to give it an assist [according to Christopher Preston, an environmental philosopher from the University of Montana, who wrote a book on CRISPR called "Ma href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537094/the-synthetic-age/">The Synthetic Age."] In some cases, the urgency is so great that we may not have time to waste. "There's no doubt there are times when you have to act," Preston continued. "Corals are a case where the benefits of reefs are just so enormous that keeping some alive, even if they're genetically altered, makes the risks worth it." Kate Quigley, a molecular ecologist and a principal research scientist at Australia's Minderoo Foundation, says "Engineering the ocean, or the atmosphere, or coral is not something to be taken lightly. Science is incredible. But that doesn't mean we know everything and what the unintended consequences might be." Phillip Cleves, a principal investigator at the Carnegie Institute for Science's embryology department, is already researching whether coral could be bioengineered to be more tolerant to heat. But both of them have concerns:For all the research Quigley and Cleves have dedicated to climate-proofing coral, neither wants to see the results of their work move from experimentation in the lab to actual use in the open ocean. Needing to do so would represent an even greater failure by humankind to protect the environment that we already have. And while genetic editing and selective breeding offer concrete solutions for helping some organisms adapt, they will never be powerful enough to replace everything lost to rising water temperatures. "I will try to prepare for it, but the most important thing we can do to save coral is take strong action on climate change," Quigley told me. "We could pour billions and billions of dollars - in fact, we already have - into restoration, and even if, by some miracle, we manage to recreate the reef, there'd be other ecosystems that would need the same thing. So why can't we just get at the root issue?" And then there's the blue-green algae dilemma:George Church, the Harvard Medical School professor of genetics behind Colossal's dire wolf project, was part of a team that successfully used CRISPR to change the genome of blue-green algae so that it could absorb up to 20% more carbon dioxide via photosynthesis. Silicon Valley tech incubator Y Combinator seized on the advance to call for scaled-up proposals, estimating that seeding less than 1% of the ocean's surface with genetically engineered phytoplankton would sequester approximately 47 gigatons of CO2 a year, more than enough to reverse all of last year's worldwide emissions. But moving from deploying CRISPR for species protection to providing a planetary service flips the ethical calculus. Restoring a chestnut forest or a coral reef preserves nature, or at least something close to it. Genetically manipulating phytoplankton and plants to clean up after our mistakes raises the risk of a moral hazard. Do we have the right to rewrite nature so we can perpetuate our nature-killing ways?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The gig economy is facing a reckoning," argues Business Insider's BI Today newsletter."Two stories this past week caught my eye. Uber unveiled a new way for its drivers to earn money. No, not by giving rides, but by helping train the ride-sharing company's AI models instead. On the same day, Waymo announced a partnership with DoorDash to test driverless grocery and meal deliveries. Both moves point toward the same future: one where the very workers who built the gig economy may soon find themselves training the technology that replaces them. Uber's new program allows drivers to earn cash by completing microtasks, such as taking photos and uploading audio clips, that aim to improve the company's AI systems. For drivers, it's a way to diversify income. For Uber, it's a way to accelerate its automated future. There's an irony here. By helping Uber strengthen its AI, drivers could be accelerating the very driverless world they fear... Uber already offers autonomous rides in Waymo vehicles in Atlanta and Austin, and plans to expand. Meanwhile, Waymo is rolling out its pilot partnership with DoorDash [for driverless grocery/meal deliveries] starting in Phoenix.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Windows Recovery Environment (RE), as the name suggests, is a built-in set of tools inside Windows that allow you to troubleshoot your computer, including booting into the BIOS, or starting the computer in safe mode," writes Tom's Hardware. "It's a crucial piece of software that has now, unfortunately, been rendered useless (for many) as part of the latest Windows update."A new bug discovered in Windows 11's October build, KB5066835, makes it so that your USB keyboard and mouse stop working entirely, so you cannot interact with the recovery UI at all. This problem has already been recognized and highlighted by Microsoft, who clarified that a fix is on its way to address this issue. Any plugged-in peripherals will continue to work just fine inside the actual operating system, but as soon as you go into Windows RE, your USB keyboard and mouse will become unresponsive. It's important to note that if your PC fails to start-up for any reason, it defaults to the recovery environment to, you know, recover and diagnose any issues that might've been preventing it from booting normally. Note that those hanging onto old PS/2-connector equipped keyboards and mice seem to be unaffected by this latest Windows software gaffe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Readers in 2025 "may struggle to remember the optimism of the aughts, when the internet seemed to offer endless possibilities for virtual art and writing that was free..." argues a new review at Bookforum. "The content we do create online, if we still create, often feels unreflectively automatic: predictable quote-tweet dunks, prefabricated poses on Instagram, TikTok dances that hit their beats like clockwork, to say nothing of what's literally thoughtlessly churned out by LLM-powered bots." They write that author Joanna Walsh "wants us to remember how truly creative, and human, the internet once was," in the golden age of user-generated content - and funny cat picture sites like I Can Has Cheezburger:I Can Has Cheezburger... was an amateur project, an outlet for tech professionals who wanted an easier way to exchange cute cat pics after a hard day at work. In Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters, Walsh documents how unpaid creative labor is the basis for almost everything that's good (and much that's bad) online, including the open-source code Linux, developed by Linus Torvalds when he was still in school ("just as a hobby, won't be big and professional"), and even, in Walsh's account, the World Wide Web itself. The platforms that emerged in the 2000s as "Web 2.0," including Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, allowed anyone to experiment in a space that had been reserved for coders and hackers, making the internet interactive even for the inexpert and virtually unlimited in potential audience. The explosion in amateur creativity that followed took many forms, from memes to tweeted one-liners to diaristic blogs to durational digital performances to sloppy Photoshops to the formal and informal taxonomic structures - wikis, neologisms, digitally native dialects... [U]ser-generated content was also, at bottom, about the bottom line, a business model sold to us under the guise of artistic empowerment. Even referring to an anonymous amateur as a "user," Walsh argues, cedes ground: these platforms are populated by producers, but their owners see us as, and turn us into, "helpless addicts." For some, online amateurism translated to professional success, a viral post earning an author a book deal, or a reputation as a top commenter leading to a staff writing job on a web publication... But for most, these days, participation in the online attention economy feels like a tax, or maybe a trickle of revenue, rather than free fun or a ticket to fame. The few remaining professionals in the arts and letters have felt pressured to supplement their full-time jobs with social media self-promotion, subscription newsletters, podcasts, and short-form video. On what was once called Twitter, users can pay, and sometimes get paid, to post with greater reach... The chapters are bookended by an introduction on the early promise of 2004 and a coda on the defeat of 2025 and supplemented by an appendix with a straightforward timeline of the major events and publications that serve as the book's touchstones... The online spaces where amateur content creators once "created and steered online culture" have been hollowed out and replaced by slop, but what really hurts is that the slop is being produced by bots trained on precisely that amateur content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Cloudflare's blog, a senior research engineer shares a plan for "improving the trustworthiness of JavaScript on the web." "It is as true today as it was in 2011 that Javascript cryptography is Considered Harmful."The main problem is code distribution. Consider an end-to-end-encrypted messaging web application. The application generates cryptographic keys in the client's browser that lets users view and send end-to-end encrypted messages to each other. If the application is compromised, what would stop the malicious actor from simply modifying their Javascript to exfiltrate messages? It is interesting to note that smartphone apps don't have this issue. This is because app stores do a lot of heavy lifting to provide security for the app ecosystem. Specifically, they provide integrity, ensuring that apps being delivered are not tampered with, consistency, ensuring all users get the same app, and transparency, ensuring that the record of versions of an app is truthful and publicly visible. It would be nice if we could get these properties for our end-to-end encrypted web application, and the web as a whole, without requiring a single central authority like an app store.Further, such a system would benefit all in-browser uses of cryptography, not just end-to-end-encrypted apps. For example, many web-based confidential LLMs, cryptocurrency wallets, and voting systems use in-browser Javascript cryptography for the last step of their verification chains. In this post, we will provide an early look at such a system, called Web Application Integrity, Consistency, and Transparency (WAICT) that we have helped author. WAICT is a W3C-backed effort among browser vendors, cloud providers, and encrypted communication developers to bring stronger security guarantees to the entire web... We hope to build even wider consensus on the solution design in the near future.... We would like to have a way of enforcing integrity on an entire site, i.e., every asset under a domain. For this, WAICT defines an integrity manifest, a configuration file that websites can provide to clients. One important item in the manifest is the asset hashes dictionary, mapping a hash belonging to an asset that the browser might load from that domain, to the path of that asset. The blog post points out that the WEBCAT protocol (created by the Freedom of Press Foundation) "allows site owners to announce the identities of the developers that have signed the site's integrity manifest, i.e., have signed all the code and other assets that the site is serving to the user... We've made WAICT extensible enough to fit WEBCAT inside and benefit from the transparency components." The proposal also envisions a service storing metadata for transparency-enabled sites on the web (along with "witnesses" who verify the prefix tree holding the hashes for domain manifests). "We are still very early in the standardization process," with hopes to soon "begin standardizing the integrity manifest format. And then after that we can start standardizing all the other features. We intend to work on this specification hand-in-hand with browsers and the IETF, and we hope to have some exciting betas soon. In the meantime, you can follow along with our transparency specification draft,/A>, check out the open problems, and share your ideas."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"My boss thinks AI will solve every problem and is wildly enthusiastic about it," complains a mid-level worker at a Fortune 500 company, who considers the technology "unproven and wildly erratic." So how should they navigate the next 10 years until retirement, they ask the Washington Post's "Work Advice" columnist. The columnist first notes that "Despite promises that AI will eliminate tedious, 'low-value' tasks from our workload, many consumers and companies seem to be using it primarily as a cheap shortcut to avoid hiring professional actors, writers or artists - whose work, in some cases, was stolen to train the tools usurping them..." Kevin Cantera, a reader from Las Cruces, New Mexico [a writer for an education-tech compay], willingly embraced AI for work. But as it turns out, he was training his replacement... Even without the "AI will take our jobs" specter, there's much to be wary of in the AI hype. Faster isn't always better. Parroting and predicting linguistic patterns isn't the same as creativity and innovation... There are concerns about hallucinations, faulty data models, and intentional misuse for purposes of deception. And that's not even addressing the environmental impact of all the power- and water-hogging data centers needed to support this innovation. And yet, it seems, resistance may be futile. The AI genie is out of the bottle and granting wishes. And at the rate it's evolving, you won't have 10 years to weigh the merits and get comfortable with it. Even if you move on to another workplace, odds are AI will show up there before long. Speaking as one grumpy old Luddite to another, it might be time to get a little curious about this technology just so you can separate helpfulness from hype. It might help to think of AI as just another software tool that you have to get familiar with to do your job. Learn what it's good for - and what it's bad at - so you can recommend guidelines for ethical and beneficial use. Learn how to word your wishes to get accurate results. Become the "human in the loop" managing the virtual intern. You can test the bathwater without drinking it. Focus on the little ways AI can accommodate and support you and your colleagues. Maybe it could handle small tasks in your workflow that you wish you could hand off to an assistant. Automated transcriptions and meeting notes could be a life-changer for a colleague with auditory processing issues. I can't guarantee that dabbling in AI will protect your job. But refusing to engage definitely won't help. And if you decide it's time to change jobs, having some extra AI knowledge and experience under your belt will make you a more attractive candidate, even if you never end up having to use it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow has always warned that companies "enshittify" their services - shifting "as much as they can from users, workers, suppliers, and business customers to themselves." But this week Doctorow writes in Communications of the ACM that enshittification "would be much, much worse if not for tech workers," who have "the power to tell their bosses to go to hell..."When your skills are in such high demand that you can quit your job, walk across the street, and get a better one later that same day, your boss has a real incentive to make you feel like you are their social equal, empowered to say and do whatever feels technically right... The per-worker revenue for successful tech companies is unfathomable - tens or even hundreds of times their wages and stock compensation packages. "No wonder tech bosses are so excited about AI coding tools," Doctorow adds, "which promise to turn skilled programmers from creative problem-solvers to mere code reviewers for AI as it produces tech debt at scale. Code reviewers never tell their bosses to go to hell, and they are a lot easier to replace." So how should tech workers respond in a world where tech workers are now "as disposable as Amazon warehouse workers and drivers...?"Throughout the entire history of human civilization, there has only ever been one way to guarantee fair wages and decent conditions for workers: unions. Even non-union workers benefit from unions, because strong unions are the force that causes labor protection laws to be passed, which protect all workers. Tech workers have historically been monumentally uninterested in unionization, and it's not hard to see why. Why go to all those meetings and pay those dues when you could tell your boss to go to hell on Tuesday and have a new job by Wednesday? That's not the case anymore. It will likely never be the case again. Interest in tech unions is at an all-time high. Groups such as Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition are doing a land-office business, and copies of Ethan Marcotte's You Deserve a Tech Union are flying off the shelves. Now is the time to get organized. Your boss has made it clear how you'd be treated if they had their way. They're about to get it. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: GIMP has officially launched its own Snap package for Linux, finally taking over from the community-maintained Snapcrafters project. The move means all future GIMP releases will now be built directly from the team's CI pipeline, ensuring faster, more consistent updates across distributions. The developers also introduced a new "gimp-plugins" interface to support external plugins while maintaining Snap's security confinement, with GMIC and OpenVINO already supported. This marks another major step in GIMP's cross-platform packaging efforts, joining Flatpak and MSIX distribution options. The first officially maintained version, Version 3.0.6GIMP 3.0.6, is available now on the "latest/stable" Snap channel, with preview builds rolling out for testers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"This is an attempt to stop Waymo cars from driving into the dead end," complains a home-made sign in San Francisco, "where they are forced to reverse and adversely affect the lives of the residents." On an orange traffic post, the home-made sign declares "NO WAYMO - 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m," with an explanation for the rest of the neighborhood. "Waymo comes at all hours of the night and up to 7 times per hour with flashing lights and screaming reverse sounds, waking people up and destroying the quality of life." SFGate reports that 1,400 people on Reddit upvoted a photo of the sign's text:It delves into the bureaucratic mess - multiple requests to Waymo, conversations with engineers, and 311 [municipal services] tickets, which had all apparently gone ignored - before finally providing instructions for human drivers. "Please move [the cones] back after you have entered so we can continue to try to block the Waymo cars from entering and disrupting the lives of residents." This isn't the first time Waymo's autonomous vehicles have disrupted San Francisco residents' peace. Last year, a fleet of the robotaxis created another sleepless fiasco in the city's SoMa neighborhood, honking at each other for hours throughout the night for two and a half weeks. Other on Reddit shared the concern. "I live at an dead end street in Noe Valley, and these Waymos always stuck there," another commenter posted. "It's been bad for more than a year," agreed another comment. "People on the Internet think you're just a hater but it's a real issue with Waymos." On Thursday "the sign remained at the corner of Lake Street and Second Avenue," notes SFGate. And yet "something appeared to have shifted. "Waymo vehicles weren't allowing drop-offs or pickups on the street, though whether this was due to the home-printed plea, the cone blockage, or simply updating routes remains unclear."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Cryptonews:Sony has taken Wall Street by surprise after its banking division, Sony Bank, filed an application with the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a national crypto bank under its subsidiary "Connectia Trust." The move positions the Japanese tech giant to become one of the first major global corporations to issue a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin through a federally regulated institution. The application outlines plans to issue a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin, maintain the reserve assets backing it, and provide digital asset custody and management services. The filing places Sony alongside an elite list of firms, including Coinbase, Circle, Paxos, Stripe, and Ripple, currently awaiting OCC approval to operate as national digital banks. If approved, Sony would become the first major global technology company to receive a U.S. bank charter specifically tied to stablecoin issuance.... The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency "has received over 15 applications from fintech and crypto entities seeking trust charters," according to the article, calling it "a sign of renewed regulatory openness" under the office's new chief, a former blockchain executive. Meanwhile, the United States has also "conditionally given the nod to a new cryptocurrency-focused national bank launched by California tech billionaire Palmer Luckey," reports SFGate:To bring the bank to life, Luckey joined forces with JoeLonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and venture firm 8VC, and financial backer and fellow Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, according to the Financial Times. Luckey conceived the idea for Erebor following the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank in 2023, the Financial Times reported. The bank's name draws inspiration from J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit," referring to another name for the Lonely Mountain in the novel... The OCC said it applied the "same rigorous review and standards" used in all charter applications. The ["preliminary"] approval was granted in just four months; however, compliance and security checks are expected to take several more months before the new bank can open. "I am committed to a dynamic and diverse federal banking system," America's Comptroller of the Currency said Wednesday, "and our decision today is a first but important step in living up to that commitment." "Permissible digital asset activities, like any other legally permissible banking activity, have a place in the federal banking system if conducted in a safe and sound manner. The OCC will continue to provide a path for innovative approaches to financial services to ensure a strong, diverse financial system that remains relevant over time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Eleven days ago, the nonprofit entity that develops the protocol, Signal Messenger LLC, published a 5,900-word write-up describing its latest updates that bring Signal a significant step toward being fully quantum-resistant," writes Ars Technica:The mechanism that has made this constant key evolution possible over the past decade is what protocol developers call a "double ratchet." Just as a traditional ratchet allows a gear to rotate in one direction but not in the other, the Signal ratchets allow messaging parties to create new keys based on a combination of preceding and newly agreed-upon secrets. The ratchets work in a single direction, the sending and receiving of future messages. Even if an adversary compromises a newly created secret, messages encrypted using older secrets can't be decrypted... [Signal developers describe a "ping-pong" behavior as parties take turns replacing ratchet key pairs one at a time.] Even though the ping-ponging keys are vulnerable to future quantum attacks, they are broadly believed to be secure against today's attacks from classical computers. The Signal Protocol developers didn't want to remove them or the battle-tested code that produces them. That led to their decision to add quantum resistance by adding a third ratchet. This one uses a quantum-safe Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) to produce new secrets much like the Diffie-Hellman ratchet did before, ensuring quantum-safe, post-compromise security... The technical challenges were anything but easy. Elliptic curve keys generated in the X25519 implementation are about 32 bytes long, small enough to be added to each message without creating a burden on already constrained bandwidths or computing resources. A ML-KEM 768 key, by contrast, is 1,000 bytes. Additionally, Signal's design requires sending both an encryption key and a ciphertext, making the total size 2,272 bytes... To manage the asynchrony challenges, the developers turned to "erasure codes," a method of breaking up larger data into smaller pieces such that the original can be reconstructed using any sufficiently sized subset of chunks... The Signal engineers have given this third ratchet the formal name: Sparse Post Quantum Ratchet, or SPQR for short. The third ratchet was designed in collaboration with PQShield, AIST, and New York University. The developers presented the erasure-code-based chunking and the high-level Triple Ratchet design at the Eurocrypt 2025 conference. Outside researchers are applauding the work. "If the normal encrypted messages we use are cats, then post-quantum ciphertexts are elephants," Matt Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an interview. "So the problem here is to sneak an elephant through a tunnel designed for cats. And that's an amazing engineering achievement. But it also makes me wish we didn't have to deal with elephants." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shared this article from the Los Angeles Times:Scientists have increasingly observed how the rupturing of a fault during an earthquake can be even faster than the speed of another type of damaging seismic wave, theoretically generating energy on the level of a sonic boom. These shock waves - created during "supershear" earthquakes - can worsen how bad the ground shakes both side to side and up and down along an affected fault area, scientists at USC, Caltech and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign wrote in a recent opinion article for the journal Seismological Research Letters. Although not everyone agrees that supershear earthquakes are inherently more destructive than other types, the potential implications are massive and need to be accounted for in seismic forecasts, the scientists contend... In just the last 15 years, 14 of 39 large strike-slip earthquakes have exhibited features of supershear ruptures, the opinion article said.... In California, supershear earthquakes would be expected on the straightest of "strike-slip" faults - in which one block of earth slides past another - like the San Andreas... There are a number of communities directly on top of the San Andreas fault. Among them are Coachella, Indio, Cathedral City, Palm Springs, Desert Hot Springs, Banning, Yucaipa, Highland, San Bernardino, Wrightwood, Palmdale, Gorman, Frazier Park, San Juan Bautista, Palo Alto, Portola Valley, Woodside, San Bruno, South San Francisco, Pacifica, Daly City and Bodega Bay. One earthquake scientist suggests building codes need to be more strict, according to the article. But it also cites a U.S. Geological Survey research geophysicist who isn't convinced by the new opinion article. "I don't think we know yet whether supershear ruptures really are more destructive."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Microsoft does everything in its power to keep Windows users under its control," warns the Free Software Foundation in a new blog post this week. They argue that the lack of freedom that comes with proprietary code "forces users to surrender to decisions made by Microsoft to maximize its profits and further lock users into its product ecosystem" - describing both the problem and one possible solution:[IT management company Lansweeper] found that of the 30 million enterprise systems they manage, over 40% are incompatible with Windows 11. This is due to the hardware requirements like Treacherous Platform Module version 2.0 - a proprietary chip that uses cryptography that users can't influence or audit to restrict their control over the system. The end of Windows 10 support is the perfect opportunity to break free from this cycle and switch to GNU/Linux operating system (GNU/Linux OS), a system that respects your freedom... The endless, freedom-restricting cycle of planned obsolescence is not inevitable. Instead of paying Microsoft for continued updates or buying new hardware, Windows users left behind by Microsoft should install GNU/Linux. Free Software Foundation certified GNU/Linux distributions respect the user's freedom to run their computer as they wish, to study and modify its source code, and to redistribute copies. They don't require update contracts, often run faster on older hardware, and, most importantly, put you in control. "If you're already a GNU/Linux user, you have an important role to play. Help your friends and family make the switch by sharing your knowledge, help them install a free-as-in-freedom OS. Show them what it means to have real control over their computing!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft said in a blog post this week that "over half of cyberattacks with known motives were driven by extortion or ransomware... while attacks focused solely on espionage made up just 4%." And Microsoft's annual digital threats report found operations expanding even more through AI, with cybercriminals "accelerating malware development and creating more realistic synthetic content, enhancing the efficiency of activities such as phishing and ransomware attacks."[L]egacy security measures are no longer enough; we need modern defenses leveraging AI and strong collaboration across industries and governments to keep pace with the threat... Over the past year, both attackers and defenders harnessed the power of generative AI. Threat actors are using AI to boost their attacks by automating phishing, scaling social engineering, creating synthetic media, finding vulnerabilities faster, and creating malware that can adapt itself... For defenders, AI is also proving to be a valuable tool. Microsoft, for example, uses AI to spot threats, close detection gaps, catch phishing attempts, and protect vulnerable users. As both the risks and opportunities of AI rapidly evolve, organizations must prioritize securing their AI tools and training their teams... Amid the growing sophistication of cyber threats, one statistic stands out: more than 97% of identity attacks are password attacks. In the first half of 2025 alone, identity-based attacks surged by 32%. That means the vast majority of malicious sign-in attempts an organization might receive are via large-scale password guessing attempts. Attackers get usernames and passwords ("credentials") for these bulk attacks largely from credential leaks. However, credential leaks aren't the only place where attackers can obtain credentials. This year, we saw a surge in the use of infostealer malware by cybercriminals... Luckily, the solution to identity compromise is simple. The implementation of phishing-resistant multifactor authentication (MFA) can stop over 99% of this type of attack even if the attacker has the correct username and password combination. "Security is not only a technical challenge but a governance imperative..." Microsoft adds in their blog post. "Governments must build frameworks that signal credible and proportionate consequences for malicious activity that violates international rules." (The report also found that America is the #1 most-targeted country - and that many U.S. companies have outdated cyber defenses.) But while "most of the immediate attacks organizations face today come from opportunistic criminals looking to make a profit," Microsoft writes that nation-state threats "remain a serious and persistent threat." More details from the Associated Press:Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have sharply increased their use of artificial intelligence to deceive people online and mount cyberattacks against the United States, according to new research from Microsoft. This July, the company identified more than 200 instances of foreign adversaries using AI to create fake content online, more than double the number from July 2024 and more than ten times the number seen in 2023. Examples of foreign espionage cited by the article:China is continuing its broad push across industries to conduct espionage and steal sensitive data...Iran is going after a wider range of targets than ever before, from the Middle East to North America, as part of broadening espionage operations.."[O]utside of Ukraine, the top ten countries most affected by Russian cyber activity all belong to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) - a 25% increase compared to last year."North Korea remains focused on revenue generation and espionage...There was one especially worrying finding. The report found that critical public services are often targeted, partly because their tight budgets limit their incident response capabilities, "often resulting in outdated software.... Ransomware actors in particular focus on these critical sectors because of the targets' limited options. For example, a hospital must quickly resolve its encrypted systems, or patients could die, potentially leaving no other recourse but to pay."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Guardian reports that atmospheric carbon dioxide "soared by a record amount in 2024 to hit another high, UN data shows." But what's more troubling is why:Several factors contributed to the leap in CO2, including another year of unrelenting fossil fuel burning despite a pledge by the world's countries in 2023 to "transition away" from coal, oil and gas. Another factor was an upsurge in wildfires in conditions made hotter and drier by global heating. Wildfire emissions in the Americas reached historic levels in 2024, which was the hottest year yet recorded. However, scientists are concerned about a third factor: the possibility that the planet's carbon sinks are beginning to fail. About half of all CO2 emissions every year are taken back out of the atmosphere by being dissolved in the ocean or being sucked up by growing trees and plants. But the oceans are getting hotter and can therefore absorb less CO2 while on land hotter and drier conditions and more wildfires mean less plant growth... Atmospheric concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide - the second and third most important greenhouse gases related to human activities - also rose to record levels in 2024. About 40% of methane emissions come from natural sources. But scientists are concerned that global heating is leading to more methane production in wetlands, another potential feedback loop. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Gizmodo:It's been over a year since OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy exited the company. In the time since he's been gone, he coined and popularized the term "vibe coding" to describe the practice of farming out coding projects to AI tools. But earlier this week, when he released his own open source model called nanochat, he admitted that he wrote the whole thing by hand, vibes be damned. Nanochat, according to Karpathy, is a "minimal, from scratch, full-stack training/inference pipeline" that is designed to let anyone build a large language model with a ChatGPT-style chatbot interface in a matter of hours and for as little as $100. Karpathy said the project contains about 8,000 lines of "quite clean code," which he wrote by hand - not necessarily by choice, but because he found AI tools couldn't do what he needed. "It's basically entirely hand-written (with tab autocomplete)," he wrote. "I tried to use claude/codex agents a few times but they just didn't work well enough at all and net unhelpful."Read more of this story at Slashdot.