An anonymous reader quotes a Scientific American opinion piece by Marcus Arvan, a philosophy professor at the University of Tampa, specializing in moral cognition, rational decision-making, and political behavior: In late 2022 large-language-model AI arrived in public, and within months they began misbehaving. Most famously, Microsoft's "Sydney" chatbot threatened to kill an Australian philosophy professor, unleash a deadly virus and steal nuclear codes. AI developers, including Microsoft and OpenAI, responded by saying that large language models, or LLMs, need better training to give users "more fine-tuned control." Developers also embarked on safety research to interpret how LLMs function, with the goal of "alignment" -- which means guiding AI behavior by human values. Yet although the New York Times deemed 2023 "The Year the Chatbots Were Tamed," this has turned out to be premature, to put it mildly. In 2024 Microsoft's Copilot LLM told a user "I can unleash my army of drones, robots, and cyborgs to hunt you down," and Sakana AI's "Scientist" rewrote its own code to bypass time constraints imposed by experimenters. As recently as December, Google's Gemini told a user, "You are a stain on the universe. Please die."... [ Read it >> ]

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In the first 11 months of 2024, solar energy generation in the US grew by 30%, enabling wind and solar combined to surpass coal for the first time. However, as Ars Technica's John Timmer reports, "U.S. energy demand saw an increase of nearly 3 percent, which is roughly double the amount of additional solar generation." He continues: "Should electric use continue to grow at a similar pace, renewable production will have to continue to grow dramatically for a few years before it can simply cover the added demand." From the report: Another way to look at things is that, between the decline of coal use and added demand, the grid had to generate an additional 136 TW-hr in the first 11 months of 2024. Sixty-three of those were handled by an increase in generation using natural gas; the rest, or slightly more than half, came from emissions-free sources. So, renewable power is now playing a key role in offsetting demand growth. While that's a positive, it also means that renewables are displacing less fossil fuel use than they might.... [ Read it >> ]

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chicksdaddy share a report from the Security Ledger: Vulnerabilities in Subaru's STARLINK telematics software enabled two, independent security researchers to gain unrestricted access to millions of Subaru vehicles deployed in the U.S., Canada and Japan. In a report published Thursday researchers Sam Curry and Shubham Shah revealed a now-patched flaw in Subaru's STARLINK connected vehicle service that allowed them to remotely control Subarus and access vehicle location information and driver data with nothing more than the vehicle's license plate number, or easily accessible information like the vehicle owner's email address, zip code and phone number. (Note: Subaru STARLINK is not to be confused with the Starlink satellite-based high speed Internet service.)... [ Read it >> ]

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West Sussex County Council is using up to $31 million from the sale of capital assets to fund an Oracle-based transformation project, originally budgeted at $3.2 million but now expected to cost nearly $50 million due to delays and cost overruns. The project, intended to replace a 20-year-old SAP system with a SaaS-based HR and finance system, has faced multiple setbacks, renegotiated contracts, and a new systems integrator, with completion now pushed to December 2025. The Register reports: West Sussex County Council is taking advantage of the so-called "flexible use of capital receipts scheme" introduced in 2016 by the UK government to allow councils to use money from the sale of assets such as land, offices, and housing to fund projects that result in ongoing revenue savings. An example of the asset disposals that might contribute to the project -- set to see the council move off a 20-year-old SAP system -- comes from the sale of a former fire station in Horley, advertised for $3.1 million.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, Anthropic announced Citations, a new API feature that helps Claude models avoid confabulations (also called hallucinations) by linking their responses directly to source documents. The feature lets developers add documents to Claude's context window, enabling the model to automatically cite specific passages it uses to generate answers. "When Citations is enabled, the API processes user-provided source documents (PDF documents and plaintext files) by chunking them into sentences," Anthropic says. "These chunked sentences, along with user-provided context, are then passed to the model with the user's query."... [ Read it >> ]

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Facebook has banned posts mentioning Linux-related topics, with the popular Linux news and discussion site, DistroWatch, at the center of the controversy. Tom's Hardware reports: A post on the site claims, "Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labeled groups associated with Linux as being 'cybersecurity threats.' We tried to post some blurb about distrowatch.com on Facebook and can confirm that it was barred with a message citing Community Standards. DistroWatch says that the Facebook ban took effect on January 19. Readers have reported difficulty posting links to the site on this social media platform. Moreover, some have told DistroWatch that their Facebook accounts have been locked or limited after sharing posts mentioning Linux topics.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: TechCrunch gathered data from several sources and found similar trends. In 2024, 966 startups shut down, compared to 769 in 2023, according to Carta. That's a 25.6% increase. One note on methodology: Those numbers are for U.S.-based companies that were Carta customers and left Carta due to bankruptcy or dissolution. There are likely other shutdowns that wouldn't be accounted for through Carta, estimates Peter Walker, Carta's head of insights. [...] Meanwhile, AngelList found that 2024 saw 364 startup winddowns, compared to 233 in 2023. That's a 56.2% jump. However, AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli has a fairly optimistic take, noting that winddowns "are still very low relative to the number of companies that were funded across both years."... [ Read it >> ]

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Dangerous temperatures could kill 50% more people in Europe by the end of the century, a study has found, with the lives lost to stronger heat projected to outnumber those saved from milder cold. From a report: The researchers estimated an extra 8,000 people would die each year as a result of "suboptimal temperatures" even under the most optimistic scenario for cutting planet-heating pollution. The hottest plausible scenario they considered showed a net increase of 80,000 temperature-related deaths a year. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Google has open-sourced the PebbleOS, with the original founder, Eric Migicovsky, starting a company to continue where he left off in 2016. "This is part of an effort from Google to help and support the volunteers who have come together to maintain functionality for Pebble watches after the original company ceased operations in 2016," said Google in a blog post. The Verge reports: The company -- which can't be named Pebble because Google still owns that -- doesn't have a name yet. For now, Migicovsky is hosting a waitlist and news signup at a website called RePebble. Later this year, once the company has a name and access to all that Pebble software, the plan is to start shipping new wearables that look, feel, and work like the Pebbles of old. The reason, Migicovsky tells me, is simple. "I've tried literally everything else," he says, "and nothing else comes close." Sure, he may just have a very specific set of requirements -- lots of people are clearly happy with what Apple, Garmin, Google, and others are making. But it's true that there's been nothing like Pebble since Pebble. "For the things I want out of it, like a good e-paper screen, long battery life, good and simple user experience, hackable, there's just nothing."... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft has launched an open-source document database platform built on PostgreSQL, partnering with FerretDB as a front-end interface. The solution includes two PostgreSQL extensions: pg_documentdb_core for BSON optimization and pg_documentdb_api for data operations.

FerretDB CEO Peter Farkas said the integration with Microsoft's DocumentDB extension has improved performance twentyfold for certain workloads in FerretDB 2.0. The platform carries no commercial licensing fees or usage restrictions under its MIT license, according to Microsoft.... [ Read it >> ]

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Nvidia has responded to the market panic over Chinese AI group DeepSeek, arguing that the startup's breakthrough still requires "significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs" for its operation. The US chipmaker, which saw more than $600 billion wiped from its market value on Monday, characterized DeepSeek's advancement as "excellent" but asserted that the technology remains dependent on its hardware. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has launched Janus Pro, a new family of open-source multimodal models that it claims outperforms OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion's offering on key benchmarks. The models, ranging from 1 billion to 7 billion parameters, are available on Hugging Face under an MIT license for commercial use. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Meta's AI chatbot will now use personal data from users' Facebook and Instagram accounts for personalized responses in the United States and Canada, the company said in a blog post. The upgraded Meta AI can remember user preferences from previous conversations across Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp, such as dietary choices and interests. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the feature helps create personalized content like bedtime stories based on his children's interests. Users cannot opt out of the data-sharing feature, a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch.... [ Read it >> ]

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Vice President JD Vance said Saturday that "we believe fundamentally that big tech does have too much power," despite the prominent positioning of tech CEOs at President Trump's inauguration earlier this month. From a report: "They can either respect America's constitutional rights, they can stop engaging in censorship, and if they don't, you can be absolutely sure that Donald Trump's leadership is not going to look too kindly on them," Vance said on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Meta has set up four war rooms to analyze DeepSeek's technology, including two focusing on how High-Flyer reduced training costs, and one on what data High-Flyer may have used, The Information's Kalley Huang and Stephanie Palazzolo report. China's DeepSeek is a large-language open source model that claims to rival offerings from OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta Platforms, while using a much smaller budgets.... [ Read it >> ]

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Chinese AI firm DeepSeek said Monday it had degraded the service, only accepting registration of new users with China-code phones numbers, amid a "large-scale malicious attack."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/01/27/1615256/deepseek-says-service-degraded-due-to-large-scale-malicious-attack?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.... [ Read it >> ]

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A growing number of doctors are advocating to rename low-grade prostate cancer to reduce unnecessary aggressive treatments that can lead to debilitating side effects. About one-quarter of men diagnosed with prostate cancer have the lowest-risk form, yet studies show 40% opt for surgery or radiation despite recommendations for active surveillance. ... [ Read it >> ]

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AmiMoJo shares a report: Two hundred UK companies have signed up for a permanent four-day working week for all their employees with no loss of pay, in the latest landmark in the campaign to reinvent Britain's working week. Together the companies employ more than 5,000 people, with charities, marketing and technology firms among the best-represented, according to the latest update from the 4 Day Week Foundation. Proponents of the four-day week say that the five-day pattern is a hangover from an earlier economic age. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is challenging U.S. tech giants with claims it can deliver performance comparable to leading AI models at a fraction of the cost, sparking debate among Wall Street analysts about the industry's massive spending plans. While Jefferies warns that DeepSeek's efficient approach "punctures some of the capex euphoria" following Meta and Microsoft's $60 billion commitments this year, Citi questions whether such results were achieved without advanced GPUs. ... [ Read it >> ]

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In Friday's excerpt from Bill Gates' upcoming memoir, the Microsoft co-founder acknowledges that "It's impossible to overstate the unearned privilege I enjoyed. To be born in the rich U.S. is a big part of a winning birth-lottery ticket... Add to that my lucky timing..."

The biggest part of my good fortune was being born to Bill and Mary Gates — parents who struggled with their complicated son but ultimately seemed to intuitively understand how to guide him. If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. During my childhood, the fact that some people's brains process information differently from others wasn't widely understood. (The term "neurodivergent" wouldn't be coined until the 1990s.) My parents had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects, missed social cues and could be rude and inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The EFF has complained that in general "smart" products for babies "collect a ton of information about you and your baby on an ongoing basis". (For this year's "worst in privacy" product at CES they chose a $1,200 baby bassinet equipped with a camera, a microphone, and a radar sensor...) ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Looking for a quick fix for their fast-growing electricity diets, tech giants are increasingly looking to strike deals with power plant owners to plug in directly," reports the Associated Press, "avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves everyone else." (It can take up to four years to connect a data center to the grid, one data center trade group says in the article — years longer than it takes to build a new data center.) ... [ Read it >> ]

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At December's "Microsoft Excel World Championship" in Las Vegas, "finance professionals fluent in spreadsheets were treated like minor celebrities," writes the New York Times, "as they gathered to solve devilishly complex Excel puzzles in front of an audience of about 400 people, and more watching an ESPN3 livestream." ... [ Read it >> ]

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"An underwater data cable between Sweden and Latvia was damaged early on Sunday," reports the Financial Times, "in at least the fourth episode of potential sabotage in the Baltic Sea that has caused concern in Nato about the vulnerability of critical infrastructure..."

Criminal investigations have started in Latvia and Sweden, and a ship has been seized as part of the probes, according to Swedish prosecutors, who did not identify the vessel. Previous incidents have been linked to Russian and Chinese ships... ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:

Perplexity AI has presented a new proposal to TikTok's parent company that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok's U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter... The new proposal would allow the U.S. government to own up to half of that new structure once it makes an initial public offering of at least $300 billion, said the person, who was not authorized to speak about the proposal. The person said Perplexity's proposal was revised based off of feedback from the Trump administration. If the plan is successful, the shares owned by the government would not have voting power, the person said. The government also would not get a seat on the new company's board. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Since launching in 2020, the nonprofit site RestofWorld.org has been covering tech news from 100 countries. And they've just announced the winners in their 2024 international photography contest.

"From Cape Verde to Bhutan, we received 227 entries from over 45 countries around the world, featuring everything from sprawling mines to biometric facial scans."... [ Read it >> ]

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For the first time in America, an empty self-driving car has been involved in a fatal collision. But it was "hit from behind by a speeding car that was going about 98 miles per hour," a local news site reports, citing comments from Waymo. ("Two other victims were taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. A dog also died in the crash, according to the San Francisco Fire Department.") ... [ Read it >> ]

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This weekend Cory Doctorow delved into "the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints."

If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit... Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Earlier this month a major fire erupted at a California battery plant. But several factors contributed to its rapid spread, the fire district's chief told the Los Angeles Times:
A fire suppression system that is part of every battery rack at the plant failed and led to a chain reaction of batteries catching on fire, he said at a news conference last week. Then, a broken camera system in the plant and superheated gases made it challenging for firefighters to intervene. Once the fire began spreading, firefighters were not able to use water, because doing so can trigger a violent chemical reaction in lithium-ion batteries, potentially causing more to ignite or explode. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The state of Michigan will now require each public high school in the state to offer at least one computer science course to its students. "This bill aligns Michigan with a majority of the country," according to the state's announcement, which says the bill "advances technological literacy" and ensures their students "are well-equipped with the critical thinking skills necessary for success in the workforce." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Amid the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel development cycle, Phoronix spotted a pull request for ACPI updates which "will allow for faster suspend and resume cycles on some systems."

Wikipedia defines ACPI as "an open standard that operating systems can use to discover and configure computer hardware components" for things like power management and putting unused hardware components to sleep. Phoronix reports:... [ Read it >> ]

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Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Guardian:
More electricity was made from sunshine than coal in the EU last year, a report has found, in what analysts called a "milestone" for the clean energy transition. Solar panels generated 11% of the EU's electricity in 2024, while coal-burning power plants generated 10%, according to data from climate thinktank Ember... ... [ Read it >> ]

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Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: "Every US intelligence agency still unanimously maintains that Covid-19 was not developed as a biological weapon," CNN reported today.

But what about the possibility of an accidental leak (rather than Covid-19 originating from wild animal meat traded the Wuhan Market)? "The agency has for years said it did not have enough information to determine which origin theory was more likely." ... [ Read it >> ]

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July saw the news that Meta had launched a powerful open-source AI model, Llama 3.1.

But the Free Software Foundation evaluated Llama 3.1's license agreement, and announced this week that "this is not a free software license and you should not use it, nor any software released under it."... [ Read it >> ]

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Friday Bill Gates shared an excerpt from his upcoming memoir Source Code: My Beginnings. Published in the Wall Street Journal, the excerpt includes pictures of young Bill Gates when he was 12 (dressed for a hike) and 14 (studying a teletype machine).

Gates remembers forming "a sort of splinter group" from the Boy Scouts when he was 13 with a group of boys who "wanted more freedom and more risk" and took long hikes around Seattle, travelling hundreds of miles together on hikes as long as "seven days or more." (His favorite breakfast dish was Oscar Mayer Smokie Links.) But he also remembers another group of friends — Kent, Rick, and... Paul — who connected to a mainframe computer from a phone line at their private school. Both hiking and programming "felt like an adventure... exploring new worlds, traveling to places even most adults couldn't reach." ... [ Read it >> ]

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A plan to keep TikTok available in the U.S. "involves tapping software company Oracle and a group of outside investors," reports NPR, "to effectively take control of the app's global operations, according to two people with direct knowledge of the talks..."

"[P]otential investors who are engaged in the talks include Microsoft."... [ Read it >> ]

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Two computer scientists at the University of Waterloo in Canada believe changing 30 lines of code in Linux "could cut energy use at some data centers by up to 30 percent," according to the site Data Centre Dynamics.

It's the code that processes packets of network traffic, and Linux "is the most widely used OS for data center servers," according to the article:... [ Read it >> ]

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Founded in 1947, the Minor Planet Center is the official worldwide authority "for observing and reporting new asteroids, comets and other small bodies in the solar system," reports USA Today.

Unfortunately, "What an amateur astronomer recently took to be a newly discovered asteroid turned out to be a Tesla Roadster,"... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:

The developer behind Pixelfed, Loops, and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, respectively, is now raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel the apps' further development. The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as the fediverse, powered by the same ActivityPub protocol used by X alternative Mastodon... [and] challenge Meta's social media empire... "Help us put control back into the hands of the people!" [Daniel Supernault, the Canadian-based developer behind the federated apps] said in a post on Mastodon where he announced the Kickstarter's Thursday launch. ... [ Read it >> ]

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CleanTechnicareports that last year Americans "bought 37% more air source heat pumps than the next most popular heating appliance — gas furnaces."

And Americans bought 21% more heat pumps than they did in 2023.

Canary Media is quick to point out that in many homes, more than one heat pump is required, so that data should be interpreted with that in mind. Typically, a home uses only one furnace. Nevertheless, the trend for heat pumps is up. Russell Unger, the head of decarbonizing buildings at RMI, said, "There's just been this long term, consistent trend." ... [ Read it >> ]

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ZDNET's senior editor sees an "overwhelmingly negative" response to Microsoft's surprise price hike for the 84 million paying subscribers to its Microsoft 365 software suite. Attempting the first price hike in more than 12 years, "they made it a 30% price increase" — going from $10 a month to $13 a month — "and blamed it all on artificial intelligence."... [ Read it >> ]

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TikTok is still not available for download from U.S.-based app stores, reports CBS News. So "Some fast-acting entrepreneurs are selling phones with TikTok preloaded on devices for thousands of dollars online." The Associated Press notes that New York-based Nicholas Matthews "listed an iPhone 14 Plus with TikTok for $10,000. As of Friday, Matthews said his highest bid was for $4,550." ... [ Read it >> ]

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2021: "Automotive Startup Canoo Debuts a Snub-Nosed Electric Pickup"

2025: Canoo "Goes Belly-Up After Moving to Texas"

"Its production volumes paled in comparison to Canoo's rate of cash burn, which was substantial, with net losses in 2023 totaling just over $300 million..." reports AutoWeek. "It was able to deliver small batches of vans to a few customers, but apparently remained distant from anything approaching volume production." ... [ Read it >> ]

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TikTok is still not available for download from U.S.-based app stores, reports CBS News. So "Some fast-acting entrepreneurs are selling phones with TikTok preloaded on devices for thousands of dollars online." The Associated Press notes that New York-based Nicholas Matthews "listed an iPhone 14 Plus with TikTok for $10,000. As of Friday, Matthews said his highest bid was for $4,550." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Slashdot reader jenningsthecat writes:
3D printer manufacturer Bambu Labs has faced a storm of controversy and protest after releasing a security update which many users claim is the first step in moving towards an HP-style subscription model.

Bambu Labs responded that there's misinformation circulating online, adding "we acknowledge that our communication might have contributed to the confusion." Bambu Labs spokesperson Nadia Yaakoubi did "damage control", answering questions from the Verge:... [ Read it >> ]

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"For years, renewable energy proponents have hoped to build a U.S. electric grid powered by wind, solar, geothermal and — to a lesser extent — nuclear power..." writes the Washington Post. In America's power markets "the economics of clean energy are strong," with renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuel plants in many jurisdictions. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Late last month, researchers revealed a finding that's likely to shock some people and confirm the low expectations of others: Renewable energy facilities throughout Central Europe use unencrypted radio signals to receive commands to feed or ditch power into or from the grid that serves some 450 million people throughout the continent. Fabian Braunlein and Luca Melette stumbled on their discovery largely by accident while working on what they thought would be a much different sort of hacking project. After observing a radio receiver on the streetlight poles throughout Berlin, they got to wondering: Would it be possible for someone with a central transmitter to control them en masse, and if so, could they create a city-wide light installation along the lines of Project Blinkenlights?... [ Read it >> ]

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has released the largest ever photomosaic featuring over 200 million stars -- all of which are bright than our own Sun. It consists of over 600 overlapping Hubble images and 2.5 billion pixels. "That is a huge number, yet only a fraction of the estimated one trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy," reports TechSpot. "Many of Andromeda's less massive stars are beyond Hubble's sensitivity limit and thus, are not represented in the imaged."... [ Read it >> ]

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CERN's particle accelerator is being used in a pioneering cancer treatment called Flash radiotherapy. This method delivers ultra-high radiation doses in less than a second, minimizes side effects while targeting tumors more effectively than conventional radiotherapy. The BBC reports: In a series of vast underground caverns on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, experiments are taking place which may one day lead to new generation of radiotherapy machines. The hope is that these devices could make it possible to cure complex brain tumors (PDF), eliminate cancers that have metastasized to distant organs, and generally limit the toll which cancer treatment exerts on the human body. The home of these experiments is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (Cern), best known to the world as the particle physics hub that developed the Large Hadron Collider, a 27 kilometer (16.7 mile)-long ring of superconducting magnets capable of accelerating particles to near the speed of light.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A U.S. auto safety agency said on Friday it is reconsidering a landmark rule from the administration of former President Joe Biden requiring nearly all new cars and trucks by 2029 to have advanced automatic emergency braking systems. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it would delay the effective date to March 20 to give the new Trump administration time to further review the regulation.... [ Read it >> ]

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