TeleMessage, a communications app used by former Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz, has suspended services after a reported hack exposed some user messages. The breach follows controversy over Waltz's use of the app to coordinate military updates, including accidentally adding a journalist to a sensitive Signal group chat. From the report: In an email, Portland, Oregon-based Smarsh, which runs the TeleMessage app, said it was "investigating a potential security incident" and was suspending all its services "out of an abundance of caution." A Reuters photograph showed Waltz using TeleMessage, an unofficial version of the popular encrypted messaging app Signal, on his phone during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hundreds of e-commerce sites, at least one owned by a large multinational company, were backdoored by malware that executes malicious code inside the browsers of visitors, where it can steal payment card information and other sensitive data, security researchers said Monday. The infections are the result of a supply-chain attack that compromised at least three software providers with malware that remained dormant for six years and became active only in the last few weeks. At least 500 e-commerce sites that rely on the backdoored software were infected, and it's possible that the true number is double that, researchers from security firm Sansec said. Among the compromised customers was a $40 billion multinational company, which Sansec didn't name. In an email Monday, a Sansec representative said that "global remediation [on the infected customers] remains limited."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Microsoft officially shuttered Skype on May 5, ending the pioneering video chat service's 22-year run. The closure, announced in February, completes Skype's absorption into Microsoft Teams, the company's Slack competitor. Users opening Skype apps will now be redirected to Teams. The only surviving component is the Skype Dial Pad, which remains available within Microsoft Teams Free for subscribers to make calls to traditional phone numbers. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

OpenAI has decided that its nonprofit division will retain control over its for-profit organization, after the company initially announced that it planned to convert to a for-profit organization. From a report: According to the company, OpenAI's business wing, which has been under the nonprofit since 2019, will transition to a public benefit corporation (PBC). The nonprofit will control and also be a large shareholder of the PBC. "OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit, and is today overseen and controlled by that nonprofit," OpenAI Board Chairman Bret Taylor wrote in a statement on the company's blog. "Going forward, it will continue to be overseen and controlled by that nonprofit." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

BrianFagioli writes: Microsoft has officially begun rejecting high-volume emails that don't meet its new authentication rules.

Here's the deal. If you send more than 5,000 messages per day to Outlook.com addresses (including hotmail.com and live.com) and you're not properly set up with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, your emails may never arrive.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An industrial plan China rolled out a decade ago that was criticized by the U.S. as protectionist has been highly successful in narrowing China's technological gap with the West, a new study finds. From a report: The study, commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is set to intensify the debate in Washington and elsewhere over how to counter China's use of state subsidies and other strategies to bolster its competitiveness. To placate President Trump during his first-term trade war with China, Beijing dropped mentions of the "Made in China 2025" plan, leader Xi Jinping's signature industrial strategy, from public discourse. But the policy stayed in place. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Apple on Monday lodged an appeal to challenge a U.S. judge's ruling that ordered the tech company to immediately open its lucrative App Store to more competition. From a report: Apple in a court notice it will ask the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the April 30 ruling, which found the company in contempt of an earlier order in a 2020 antitrust lawsuit brought by Epic Games. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The United Arab Emirates will introduce AI to the public school curriculum this year, as the Gulf country vies to become a regional powerhouse for AI development. From a report: The subject will be rolled out in the 2025-2026 academic year for kindergarten pupils through to 12th grade, state-run news agency WAM reported on Sunday. The course includes ethical awareness as well as foundational concepts and real-world applications, it said. The UAE joins a growing group of countries integrating AI into school education. Beijing announced a similar move to roll out AI courses to primary and secondary students in China last month.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

New York City's subway system continues to operate largely on analog signal technology installed nearly a century ago, with 85% of the network still relying on mechanical equipment that requires constant human intervention. The outdated system causes approximately 4,000 train delays monthly and represents a technological time capsule in America's largest mass transit system. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The highest-rated video games of 2025 are all budget-priced titles, with Metacritic top performers Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Blue Prince, and Split Fiction costing just $50, $30, and $50 respectively. This comes as Microsoft announces certain Xbox titles will now cost $80, following Nintendo's similar price hike for Mario Kart on Switch 2. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

A majority of Britons may now consider themselves neurodivergent, with conditions such as autism, dyslexia or ADHD, according to a leading psychologist from King's College London. Professor Francesca Happe, an expert in cognitive neuroscience, said reduced stigma around these conditions has prompted more people to seek medical diagnoses or self-diagnose. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Yahoo Finance reports that Mark Zuckerberg made bold predictions for investors on Meta's earnings call this week — about advertisers. "AI has already made us better at targeting and finding the audiences that will be interested in their products than many businesses are themselves," Zuck said, "and that keeps improving..." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"A federal class action lawsuit filed this week in Texas accused Toyota and an affiliated telematics aggregator of unlawfully collecting drivers' information and then selling that data to Progressive," reports Insurance Journal:
The lawsuit alleges that Toyota and Connected Analytic Services (CAS) collected vast amounts of vehicle data, including location, speed, direction, braking and swerving/cornering events, and then shared that information with Progressive's Snapshot data sharing program. The class action seeks an award of damages, including actual, nominal, consequential damages, and punitive, and an order prohibiting further collection of drivers' location and vehicle data. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Rolling Stone reports on a strange new phenomenon spotted this week in a Reddit thread titled "Chatgpt induced psychosis."

The original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model "gives him the answers to the universe." Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was "talking to him as if he is the next messiah." The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

As May the 4th transforms into Star Wars Day, dozens of sites and games have found ways to celebrate. The official Star Wars channel on YouTube released a celebratory video. Disney+ released Tales of the Underworld , a six-part animated series about bounty hunters during the reign of the Empire. And Friday the first two episodes began streaming in Fortnite in a special early premiere on "Star Wars Watch Party island," according to IGN. (Disney acquired a $1.5 billion stake in Epic in March 2024, they note, "positioning itself to collaborate with the game developer for many years to come." One example from StarWars.com:... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Did you know there's an initiative to drive Open Source adoption both within the United Nations — and globally? Launched in March, it's the work of the Digital Technology Network (under the UN's chief executive board) which "works to advance open source technologies throughout UN agencies," promoting "collaboration and scalable solutions to support the UN's digital transformation." Fun fact: The first group to endorse the initiative's principles was the Open Source Initiative... ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

A Dartmouth College associate professor of Japanese literature and culture became a narrative consultant for Ubisoft's game Assassin's Creed Shadow (which launched in March). Sachi Schmidt-Hori's job "involved researching historical customs and reviewing scripts, not creating characters," writes the Associated Press. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"When Disneyland turns 70 this July, Main Street's Opera House will play host to the return of Walt Disney, who will sit down with audiences to tell his story in robot form," writes Gizmodo.

But they point out Walt's granddaughter Johanna Miller wrote a Facebook post opposing the idea in November. ("They are Dehumanizing him. People are not replaceable...")... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

With its Start menu-style application launcher and its bottom-of-the-screen taskbar, KDE Plasma is a "nice" and "traditional" desktop environment that's "also highly customizable," notes It's FOSS News.

But there's a change coming...

In contrast to other desktop environments, KDE offers a long-term support release (LTS) of Plasma, where bug fixes and security updates are provided for an extended period, with no new major changes being introduced. However, that is no longer the case now. Shared by Nate Graham, a prominent contributor within the KDE community, KDE has decided to stop working on LTS releases of Plasma, shifting its focus on extending support for the bug-fix and feature releases instead. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"Our future won't be handed to us," says the young narrator in a new ad from the nonprofit Code.org. "We will build it."

"But how can we when the education we need is still just an elective?" says another young voice...

The ad goes on to tout the power "to create with computer science and AI — the skills transforming every industry..." and ends by saying "This isn't radical. It's what education is supposed to do. Make computer science and AI a graduation requirement." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Thursday the Free Software Foundation announced plans for a celebratory hackathon in November to improve free/libre software "in honor of its fortieth anniversary.

The FSF has been campaigning for software freedom for over forty years. As part of its celebrations, the organization is inviting the wider free software community (both projects and individual contributors) to participate in a global, online hackathon to help improve important libre software projects. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Dr. Paul Offit, an expert on infectious disease and immunology, told the Guardian that "We're living in a post-herd-immunity world. I think the measles outbreak proves that. Measles — because it is the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases, the most contagious human disease really — it is the first to come back."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Slashdot reader Mirnotoriety shared this report from the Register:

A proof-of-concept program has been released to demonstrate a so-called monitoring "blind spot" in how some Linux antivirus and other endpoint protection tools use the kernel's io_uring interface.

That interface allows applications to make IO requests without using traditional system calls [to enhance performance by enabling asynchronous I/O operations between user space and the Linux kernel through shared ring buffers]. That's a problem for security tools that rely on syscall monitoring to detect threats... [which] may miss changes that are instead going through the io_uring queues. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader shared this report from The Verge:

Firefox could be put out of business should a court implement all the [U.S.] Justice Department's proposals to restrict Google's search monopoly, an executive for the browser owner Mozilla testified Friday. "It's very frightening," Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim said. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"It is the fastest, most efficient transistor ever," proclaims an announcment from Peking University. "And most important of all, there's no trace of silicon involved," adds ZME Science.
From the South China Morning Post:
A team of researchers at Peking University claims to have shattered chip performance limits and proven that China can use new materials to "change lanes" in the semiconductor race by circumventing silicon-based roadblocks entirely. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

In 2016, an online "swarm intelligence" platform stunned horse-racing fans by making a correct prediction for the Kentucky Derby — naming all four top finishers in order. (But the next year its predictions weren't even close, with TechRepublic suggesting 2016's race just had an unusual cluster of obvious picks.) ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

There's 9,000 satellites circling the earth, the Guardian points out, with projections over over 60,000 by 2040.
But "A new study shows that the emissions from expired satellites, as they fall to Earth and burn up, will be significant in future years, with implications for ozone hole recovery and climate."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares an article from Renewables Now: Chinese tech company Leapting has successfully completed its first commercial deployment of photovoltaic (PV) modules with an AI-driven solar module mounting robot in Australia. The Chinese company was tasked with supporting the installation of French Neoen's (EPA:NEOEN) 350-MW/440-MWp Culcairn Solar Farm in New South Wales' Riverina region. Shanghai-based Leapting said this week that its intelligent robot has installed almost 10,000 modules at an "efficient, safe, and stable" pace that has "significantly" reduced the original construction timeline. Litian Intelligent was deployed at the Australian project site in early February. The machine has a 2.5-metre-high robotic arm sitting on a self-guided, self-propelled crawler. Equipped with a navigation system, and visual recognition technology, it can lift and mount PV panels weighing up to 30 kilograms. By replacing labour-intensive manual operations, the robot shortens the module installation cycle by 25%, while the installation efficiency increases three to five times as compared to manual labour and is easily adapted to complex environments, Leapting says. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"Researchers have created the first laboratory analog of the 'black hole bomb'," reports ScienceAlert, "a theoretical concept developed by physicists in the 1970s..."

There's no black hole involved; their experiment just simulates the "electromagnetic analogue" of the theoretical concept — the "exponential runaway amplification of spontaneously generated electromagnetic modes." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Long-time Slashdot reader piojo writes: Tim Friede, Wisconsin man, has been injecting himself with snake venom for 18 years to gain protection from his pet snakes. The antibodies he developed have formed two components of a three-part antivenom, which gives partial or total protection against 18 of 19 species of venomous snakes that were tested. Notably, the antivenom is ineffective against vipers. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

America's federal government "is a veritable cosmos of information, made up of constellations of databases," warns the Atlantic. The FBI "has a facial-recognition apparatus capable of matching people against more than 640 million photos — a database made up of driver's license and passport photos, as well as mug shots. The Homeland Security department holds data "about the movements of every person who travels by air commercially". America's Drug Enforcement Administration "tracks license plates scanned on American roads." And there's also every taxpayer's finance and employment history..."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Threads has now grown to over 350 million monthly active users, reports TechCrunch, citing Mark Zuckerberg's comments on a company earnings call. That means Threads grew by 9.4% in roughly 90 days:

That's an increase of 30 million users since the prior quarter, where Meta reported that Threads had 320 million users. The new figure represents increased growth, as Threads added 30 million in the first quarter of this year, compared with 20 million in Q4 2024. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

May is Maintainer Month: Celebrating those who secure Open Source

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
The Open Source Initiative is joining "a global community of contributors" for GitHub's annual event "honoring the individuals who steward and sustain Open Source projects." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:

Facebook's loosening of its content moderation standards early this year got lots of attention and criticism. But a new study suggests that it might matter less what is taken down than when. The research finds that Facebook posts removed for violating standards or other reasons have already been seen by at least three-quarters of the people who would be predicted to ever see them. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares this excerpt from a new article in Science magazine:

At first, astronomers knew of only one cosmic scenario that fit the bill for the violent formation of "jewelry shop" elements [gold and sliver]: the collision of two ultra-dense stellar corpses called neutron stars. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Remember when U.S. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz mistakenly included a journalist in an encrypted chatroom to discuss looming U.S. military action against Yemen's Houthis?

A recent photo of a high-level cabinet meeting caught Waltz using a "less-secure Signal app knockoff," reports the Guardian:... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Google plans to roll out its Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot next week for children under 13 (source paywalled; alternative source) who have parent-managed Google accounts, as tech companies vie to attract young users with A.I. products. "Gemini Apps will soon be available for your child," the company said in an email this week to the parent of an 8-year-old. "That means your child will be able to use Gemini" to ask questions, get homework help and make up stories. The chatbot will be available to children whose parents useFamily Link, a Google service that enables families to set up Gmail and opt into services like YouTube for their child. To sign up for a child account, parents provide the tech company with personal data like their child's name and birth date. Gemini has specific guardrails for younger users to hinder the chatbot from producing certain unsafe content, said Karl Ryan, a Google spokesman. When a child with a Family Link account uses Gemini, he added, the company will not use that data to train its A.I.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

A 25-year-old from Santa Clarita has pleaded guilty to hacking a Disney employee's computer using malware disguised as an AI art tool, stealing over 1 terabyte of confidential Disney data and threatening to leak it under the guise of a fake Russian hacktivist group. Variety reports: Santa Clarita resident Ryan Mitchell Kramer, 25, pleaded guilty to two felony charges, including one count of accessing a computer and obtaining information and one count of threatening to damage a protected computer. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison. According to the plea agreement, in early 2024 Kramer posted a computer program on various online platforms that appeared to be used to create AI-generated art, when it really contained a malicious file to gain access to victims' computers.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Astronomers may have found the best candidate yet for the elusive Planet Nine: a mysterious object in infrared sky surveys taken 23 years apart that appears to be more massive than Neptune and about 700 times farther from the sun than Earth. Space.com reports: [A] team led by astronomer Terry Long Phan of the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan has delved into the archives of two far-infrared all-sky surveys in search of Planet Nine -- and incredibly, they have found something that could possibly be Planet Nine. The Infrared Astronomy Satellite, IRAS, launched in 1983 and surveyed the universe for almost a year before being decommissioned. Then, in 2006, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched AKARI, another infrared astronomy satellite that was active between 2006 and 2011. Phan's team were looking for objects that appeared in IRAS's database, then appeared to have moved by the time AKARI took a look. The amount of movement on the sky would be tiny -- about three arcminutes per year at a distance of approximately 700 astronomical units (AU). One arcminute is 1/60 of an angular degree.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Driverless trucks are officially running their first regular long-haul routes, making roundtrips between Dallas and Houston. On Thursday, autonomous trucking firm Aurora announced it launched commercial service in Texas under its first customers, Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines, which delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight. Both companies conducted test runs with Aurora, including safety drivers to monitor the self-driving technology dubbed "Aurora Driver." Aurora's new commercial service will no longer have safety drivers.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Microsoft has appointed a Deputy CISO for Europe to address growing regulatory pressure and reassure EU leaders about its cybersecurity commitment. "The move also highlights strong fears from European IT execs and government officials that the Trump administration may exert significant influence on cybersecurity companies," reports CSO Online. From the report: Who that Deputy CISO will ultimately be is unclear. Wednesday's statement simply said that Microsoft CISO Igor Tsyganskiy is "appointing a new Deputy CISO for Europe as part of the Microsoft Cybersecurity Governance Council," but the phrasing made it unclear when that would happen. However, Tsyganskiy made a separate announcement on LinkedIn that he has given the role to current Deputy CISO Ann Johnson. But he then said that Johnson, who is based at Microsoft's head office in Redmond, Washington, will hold that post "temporarily."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The U.S. government is seeking to break up Google's advertising technology business after a judge ruled the company holds an illegal monopoly over ad tools for publishers, marking the second such antitrust case following a similar request to divest Chrome. The Guardian reports: "We have a defendant who has found ways to defy" the law, US government lawyer Julia Tarver Wood told a federal court in Virginia, as she urged the judge to dismiss Google's assurance that it would change its behavior. "Leaving a recidivist monopolist" intact was not appropriate to solve the issue, she added. [...] The US government specifically alleged that Google controls the market for publishing banner ads on websites, including those of many creators and small news providers.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Temu has said it will stop selling goods imported from China in the US directly to customers from its platform. The online marketplace said sales would now be handled by "locally based sellers," with orders fulfilled from within the country. The move comes as a duty-free rule for low-value packages is closed.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Uber is partnering with Chinese autonomous driving startup Momenta to launch robotaxi services outside the U.S. and China, starting in Europe in early 2026 with safety operators onboard. CNBC reports: Uber said the goal is to combine its global ridesharing network with Momenta's technology to deliver safe and efficient robotaxi services. "This collaboration brings together Uber's global ridesharing expertise and Momenta's AI-first autonomous driving technology, paving the way for a future where more riders around the world experience the benefits of reliable and affordable autonomous mobility," Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in the press release. Momenta CEO Xudong Cao said the arrangement "completes the key ecosystem needed to scale autonomous driving globally."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Pinterest is facing widespread user backlash over abrupt account suspensions and pin removals, with many reporting no clear reason or warning before being locked out. The Verge reports: The r/Pinterest subreddit is also currently dominated by posts from confused users who claim their accounts have been suspended without evidence explaining how they violated the platform's guidelines. Users are also reporting they're experiencing an unusually high quantity of pins being deleted by Pinterest with absurd explanations, such as quilting magazines, cross-stitch art, and Minecraft bunk bed builds all being flagged for "adult content."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: A European Union privacy watchdog fined TikTok 530 million euros ($600 million) on Friday after a four-year investigation found that the video sharing app's data transfers to China put users at risk of spying, in breach of strict EU data privacy rules. Ireland's Data Protection Commission also sanctioned TikTok for not being transparent with users about where their personal data was being sent and ordered the company to comply with the rules within six months.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the nearly two months since former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space, the billionaire has not said much publicly about his plans for the launch company. However, his intentions for Relativity now appear to be increasingly clear: He wants to have the capability to launch a significant amount of computing infrastructure into space. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The UK financial regulator is preparing to ban retail investors from using borrowed funds such as credit card balances to invest in cryptocurrency as it seeks to overhaul supervision of the fast-growing digital assets market. The Guardian: The soaring values of virtual currencies such as bitcoin after Donald Trump's election have put pressure on the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to take a tougher line while it also lays the groundwork for the industry to flourish in the UK. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is teaming up with startup Anthropic on a new "vibe-coding" software platform that will use AI to write, edit and test code on behalf of programmers.

The system is a new version of Xcode, Apple's programming software, that will integrate Anthropic's Claude Sonnet model, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Apple will roll out the software internally and hasn't yet decided whether to launch it publicly, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the initiative hasn't been announced. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader shares a report: Pinterest is having some weird moderation issues. Reports of sweeping pin removals and account suspensions have appeared across social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and X, with many users saying they received no warning or explanation about the ban before being locked out of their accounts. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies