Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday in a ceremony inside the U.S. Capitol's Rotunda, returning to the White House after defeating Joe Biden in a historic rematch that saw an incumbent president denied a second consecutive term.

Trump, 78, took the oath of office before a packed crowd of lawmakers, dignitaries, and supporters, with Chief Justice John Roberts administering the ceremony. Former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama attended, continuing a tradition of peaceful transitions of power. ... [ Read it >> ]

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A recent poll from the Pew Research Center shows more and more teens are turning to ChatGPT for help with their homework. Three things to know: 1. According to the survey, 26% of students ages 13-17 are using the artificial intelligence bot to help them with their assignments.
2. That's double the number from 2023, when 13% reported the same habit when completing assignments.... [ Read it >> ]

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Technology giants must do more to co-operate with law enforcement on encryption or they risk threatening European democracy, according to the head of Europol, as the agency gears up to renew pressure on companies at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. From a report:
Catherine De Bolle told the Financial Times she will meet Big Tech groups in the Swiss mountain resort to discuss the matter, claiming that companies had a "social responsibility" to give the police access to encrypted messages that are used by criminals to remain anonymous. "Anonymity is not a fundamental right," said the EU law enforcement agency's executive director. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Nokia

accurately predicted the iPhone would revolutionize the smartphone industry in a confidential analysis prepared the day after Apple unveiled the device in 2007, according to internal documents recently released by Nokia's Design Archive at Aalto University in Finland. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The European Commission intends to propose a ban on the use of PFAS, or "forever chemicals", in consumer products, with exemptions for essential industrial uses, the EU's environment chief told Reuters. From a report: PFAS, or Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances, do not break down in the environment, raising concerns about the consequences of them building up in ecosystems, drinking water and the human body. They are used in thousands of items, from cosmetics and non-stick pans to aircraft and wind turbines, due to their resistance to extreme temperatures and corrosion. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Leading AI developers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are threading a delicate needle to sell software to the United States military: make the Pentagon more efficient, without letting their AI kill people. Today, their tools are not being used as weapons, but AI is giving the Department of Defense a "significant advantage" in identifying, tracking, and assessing threats, the Pentagon's Chief Digital and AI Officer, Dr. Radha Plumb, told TechCrunch in a phone interview. ... [ Read it >> ]

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In 2022 California's Air Resources Board issued regulations to ban new diesel truck sales by 2036, remembers the Los Angeles Times, and force the owners of diesel trucks to take them off the road by 2042. "The idea was to replace those trucks with electric and hydrogen-powered versions, which dramatically reduce emissions but are currently two to three times more expensive." ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Nothing horrible or unexpected happened last week," Linux Torvalds posted tonight on the Linux kernel mailing list, "so I've tagged and pushed out the final 6.13 release."

Phoronix says the release has "plenty of fine features":
Linux 6.13 comes with the introduction of the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver for benefiting multi-CCD Ryzen X3D processors. The new AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" server processors will now default to AMD P-State rather than ACPI CPUFreq for better power efficiency.... ... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon has angered its workers "after forcing them to return to the office five days a week," reports the New York Post. The problem? "Not enough desks for everyone." (As well as "packed parking lots" that are turning some workers away.)

The Post cites interviews conducted with seven Amazon employees by Business Insider (which notes that in mid-December Amazon had already "delayed full return-to-office at dozens of locations, sometimes until as late as May, because of office-capacity issues). ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Engineers have showcased a prototype electric vehicle that can drive for up to 40 miles (64 kilometers) per day using just solar power," reports LiveScience. The production-ready "Aptera Launch Edition" made its first appearance this month at CES 2025, and "also offers up to 400 miles (640 km) of range from a single charge via an electrical output, company representatives said in a statement." ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Los Angeles Times calls it "a guns-blazingly funny documentary about two out-of-work British actors who spent a chunk of their COVID-19 lockdown staging Shakespeare's masterpiece on the mean streets of Grand Theft Auto V."

Grand Theft Hamlet won SXSW's Jury Award for best documentary, and has now opened in U.S. theatres this weekend (and begun streaming on Mubi), after opening in the U.K. and Ireland. But nearly the entire film is set in Grand Theft Auto's crime-infested version of Los Angeles, the Times reports, "where even the good guys have weapons and a nihilistic streak — the vengeful Prince of Denmark fits right in."... [ Read it >> ]

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America's outgoing national security adviser has "wide access to the world's secrets," writes Axios, adding that the security adviser delivered a "chilling" warning that "The next few years will determine whether AI leads to catastrophe — and whether China or America prevails in the AI arms race." ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Washington Post reports:
Ruptures of undersea cables that have rattled European security officials in recent months were likely the result of maritime accidents rather than Russian sabotage, according to several U.S. and European intelligence officials.

The determination reflects an emerging consensus among U.S. and European security services, according to senior officials from three countries involved in ongoing investigations of a string of incidents in which critical seabed energy and communications lines have been severed... [S]o far, officials said, investigations involving the United States and a half-dozen European security services have turned up no indication that commercial ships suspected of dragging anchors across seabed systems did so intentionally or at the direction of Moscow. Instead, U.S. and European officials said that the evidence gathered to date — including intercepted communications and other classified intelligence — points to accidents caused by inexperienced crews serving aboard poorly maintained vessels. ... [ Read it >> ]

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"As large-scale solar farms crop up across the U.S.," reports ABC News, "the booming solar industry has found an unlikely mascot..." Sheep.

In Milam County, outside Austin [Texas], SB Energy operates the fifth-largest solar project in the country, capable of generating 900 megawatts of power across 4,000 acres (1,618 hectares). How do they manage all that grass? With the help of about 3,000 sheep, which are better suited than lawnmowers to fit between small crevices and chew away rain or shine. The proliferation of sheep on solar farms is part of a broader trend — solar grazing — that has exploded alongside the solar industry. Agrivoltaics, a method using land for both solar energy production and agriculture, is on the rise with more than 60 solar grazing projects in the U.S., according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. ... [ Read it >> ]

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ABC News reported that the official newspaper of China's communist party is claiming TikTok refugees on RedNote found a "new home," and "openness, communication, and mutual learning are... the heartfelt desires of people from all countries."

But in fact, Wired reports, "China's Cyberspace Administration, the country's top internet watchdog, has reportedly already grown concerned about content being shared by foreigners on Xiaohongshu," and "warned the platform earlier this week to 'ensure China-based users can't see posts from U.S. users,' according to The Information." ... [ Read it >> ]

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CNN reports:
TikTok appears to be coming back online just hours after President-elect Donald Trump pledged Sunday that he would sign an executive order Monday that aims to restore the banned app. Around 12 hours after first shutting itself down, U.S. users began to have access to TikTok on a web browser and in the app, although the page still showed a warning about the shutdown. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The JavaScript runtime Node.js can execute TypeScript (Microsoft's JavaScript-derived language with static typing).
But now it can do it even better, explains Marco Ippolito of the Node.js steering committee:

In August 2024 Node.js introduced a new experimental feature, Type Stripping, aimed at addressing a longstanding challenge in the Node.js ecosystem: running TypeScript with no configuration. Enabled by default in Node.js v23.6.0, this feature is on its way to becoming stable. ... [ Read it >> ]

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In 2022 Google released a tool to easily scan for vulnerabilities in dependencies named OSV-Scanner. "Together with the open source community, we've continued to build this tool, adding remediation features," according to Google's security blog, "as well as expanding ecosystem support to 11 programming languages and 20 package manager formats... Users looking for an out-of-the-box vulnerability scanning CLI tool should check out OSV-Scanner, which already provides comprehensive language package scanning capabilities..." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Fortune reports 18% of workers have engaged in "career catfishing" — getting a job offer, but then refusing to show up on the first day of work.

And when someone posted Fortune's article to Reddit's antiwork subreddit, it drew 2,100 upvotes -- and another 84 comments. ("I love doing this...! This feels really great to do after a company has jerked you around, and basically said that several other people were in line ahead of you... after five interviews.") ... [ Read it >> ]

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CNN has the latest on "a startling discovery made public in July that metallic rocks were apparently producing oxygen on the Pacific Ocean's seabed, where no light can penetrate.

"Initial research suggested potato-size nodules rich in metals, predominantly found 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) below the surface in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, released an electrical charge, splitting seawater into oxygen and hydrogen through electrolysis."... [ Read it >> ]

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"The universe is expanding faster than predicted by theoretical models," writes Phys.org, "and faster than can be explained by our current understanding of physics." There's now been new confirmation of this (published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters) by a team led by Dan Scolnic, an associate professor of physics at Duke University. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Jersey is an island in the English channel, "a self-governing British Crown Dependency near the coast of northwest France," according to Wikipedia — population: 103,267.

But now some residents of Jersey "have been recommended bloodletting to reduce high concentrations of 'forever chemicals' in their blood," reports the Guardian, "after tests showed some islanders have levels that can lead to health problems."... [ Read it >> ]

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Chinese social-networking site RedNote became the #1 most-downloaded app in America, reports the Associated Press, with some new users considering it a way to protest America's possible TikTok ban.

So what happened next?
They were met with surprise, curiosity and in-jokes on Xiaohongshu — literally, "Little Red Book" — whose users saw English-language posts take over feeds almost overnight. Americans introduced themselves with hashtag TikTok refugees, ask me anything attitude and posting photos of their pets to pay their hosts' "cat tax." Parents swapped stories about raising kids and Swifties from both countries, of course, quickly found each other. It's a rare moment of direct contact between two online worlds that are usually kept apart by language, corporate boundaries, and China's strict system of online censorship that blocks access to nearly all international media and social media services... Xiaohongshu's 300 million monthly active users are overwhelmingly Chinese — so much so that parts of its interface have no English-language version... [Press reports suggest about a million of TikTok's 170 million users tried switching to RedNote this week...] ... [ Read it >> ]

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The ratio of vacant U.S. jobs to jobless workers "has fallen from a record of 2 in 2022 to 1.1 in November," reports the Wall Street Journal — which adds that "the balance of power between employers and employees has shifted as the labor market has gone from white-hot to merely solid." ... [ Read it >> ]

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The BBC brings news from the Baltic Sea. After critical undersea cables were damaged or severed last year, "NATO has launched a new mission to increase the surveillance of ships..."

Undersea infrastructure is essential not only for electricity supply but also because more than 95% of internet traffic is secured via undersea cables, [said NATO head Mark Rutte], adding that "1.3 million kilometres (800,000 miles) of cables guarantee an estimated 10 trillion-dollar worth of financial transactions every day". In a post on X, he said Nato would do "what it takes to ensure the safety and security of our critical infrastructure and all that we hold dear".... Estonia's Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said in December that damage to submarine infrastructure had become "so frequent" that it cast doubt on the idea the damage could be considered "accidental" or "merely poor seamanship". ... [ Read it >> ]

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A new law is being considered by New York's state legislature, reports a local news outlet. "if passed, will require anyone buying a 3D printer to pass a background check. If you can't legally own a firearm, you won't be able to buy one of these printers..."

It is illegal to print most gun parts in New York. Attorney Greg Rinckey believes the proposal is an overreach. "I think this is also gonna face some constitutional problems. I mean, it really comes down to a legal parsing of what are you printing and at what point is it technically a firearm?" ... [ Read it >> ]

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A county transit police detective fed a poor-quality image to an AI-powered facial recognition program, remembers the Washington Post, leading to the arrest of "Christopher Gatlin, a 29-year-old father of four who had no apparent ties to the crime scene nor a history of violent offenses." He was unable to post the $75,000 cash bond required, and "jailed for a crime he says he didn't commit, it would take Gatlin more than two years to clear his name."... [ Read it >> ]

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America's Federal Trade Commission has been "raising antitrust concerns" about them for years, reports NBC News.

The latest? America's three largest drug middlemen "inflated the costs of numerous life-saving medications by billions of dollars over the past few years, the FTC said in a report Tuesday."... [ Read it >> ]

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"The next great space telescope will study distant galaxies and faraway planets from an orbital outpost about a million miles from Earth," writes the Washington Post. "But first it has to be put together, piece by piece, in a cavernous chamber at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland." ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Scientists have just resurrected 'ELIZA,' the world's first chatbot, from long-lost computer code," reports LiveScience, "and it still works extremely well." (Click in the vintage black-and-green rectangle for a blinking-cursor prompt...)
Using dusty printouts from MIT archives, these "software archaeologists" discovered defunct code that had been lost for 60 years and brought it back to life. ELIZA was developed in the 1960s by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum and named for Eliza Doolittle, the protagonist of the play "Pygmalion," who was taught how to speak like an aristocratic British woman. ... [ Read it >> ]

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From the New York Post:
Generation Z's recent foray into the corporate world has been an eye-popping escapade plagued by their "annoying" workplace habits and helicopter parents accompanying them on interviews. Now, newcomers to the 9-to-5 grind are inflicting a fresh new level of hell onto the workforce with a trending act of defiance known as "career catfishing." ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Bumble founder and executive chair Whitney Wolfe Herd, who stepped down as CEO at the beginning of 2024, is returning to the post in mid-March. Former Slack CEO Lidiane Jones, who succeeded Herd, has resigned for "personal reasons" and will remain in the role until Wolfe Herd takes over. "As I step into the role of CEO, I'm energized and fully committed to Bumble's success, our mission of creating meaningful, equitable relationships, and our opportunity ahead," Wolfe Herd says in a statement. "We have exciting innovation ahead for Bumble in this bold new chapter." Bumble's share price has dropped by half since the app introduced a redesign and feature in April that let men send the first message in response to prewritten questions. "Bumble gained popularity in part because it was set up for women to message their matches first," notes The Verge.... [ Read it >> ]

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Nintendo released Donkey Kong Country Returns HD earlier this week, with fans noticing that the original team members at Retro are not individually credited in the updated version. "Instead, the credits state that it was 'based on the work' of Retro Studios, while the team at Forever Entertainment gets its credits for working on the remaster," reports GameSpot. In a statement issued to Eurogamer, a Nintendo spokesperson said: "We believe in giving proper credit for anyone involved in making or contributing to a game's creation, and value the contributions that all staff make during the development process." From the report: That statement doesn't really address why the original team's names were excluded from the credits, and this has happened before. In 2023, the Retro Studios developers behind Metroid Prime were left out of the credits for Metroid Prime Remastered. Similarly, external translators voiced their frustrations last year because Nintendo didn't credit them for their work either.... [ Read it >> ]

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Smithsonian Magazine reports: A homeowner on Prince Edward Island in Canada has had a very unusual near-death experience: A meteorite landed exactly where he'd been standing roughly two minutes earlier. What's more, his home security camera caught the impact on video -- capturing a rare clip that might be the first known recording of both the visual and audio of a meteorite striking the planet. The shocking event took place in July 2024 and was announced in a statement by the University of Alberta on Monday.... [ Read it >> ]

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OpenAI has developed a language model designed for engineering proteins, capable of converting regular cells into stem cells. It marks the company's first venture into biological data and demonstrates AI's potential for unexpected scientific discoveries. An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: ... [ Read it >> ]

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Sales of electric vehicles and hybrids reached 20% of new car sales in the U.S. last year, with Tesla maintaining dominance in the EV market despite a slight decline in market share. CNBC reports: Auto data firm Motor Intelligence reports more than 3.2 million "electrified" vehicles were sold last year, or 1.9 million hybrid vehicles, including plug-in models, and 1.3 million all-electric models. Traditional vehicles with gas or diesel internal combustion engines still made up the majority of sales, but declined to 79.8%, falling under 80% for the first time in modern automotive history, according to the data.... [ Read it >> ]

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"The FDIC sued 17 former executives and directors of Silicon Valley Bank on Thursday, seeking to recover billions of dollars for alleged gross negligence and breaches of fiduciary duty," reports Reuters. The move comes almost two years after Silicon Valley Bank's March 2023 collapse, which shocked financial markets and ended up benefiting big players like JPMorgan Chase. From the report: In a complaint filed in San Francisco federal court, the FDIC, in its capacity the bank's receiver, said the defendants ignored fundamental standards of prudent banking and the bank's own risk policies in letting the bank take on excessive risks to boost short-term profit and its stock price. The FDIC faulted the bank's overreliance on unhedged, interest rate-sensitive long-term government bonds such as US Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, as rates looked set to -- and eventually did -- rise. It also objected to the payment of a "grossly imprudent" $294 million dividend to its parent that drained needed capital "at a time of financial distress and management weakness" in December 2022, less than three months before its demise.... [ Read it >> ]

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Google computer scientists have been using LLMs to streamline internal code migrations, achieving significant time savings of up to 89% in some cases. The findings appear in a pre-print paper titled "How is Google using AI for internal code migrations?" The Register reports: Their focus is on bespoke AI tools developed for specific product areas, such as Ads, Search, Workspace and YouTube, instead of generic AI tools that provide broadly applicable services like code completion, code review, and question answering. Google's code migrations involved: changing 32-bit IDs in the 500-plus-million-line codebase for Google Ads to 64-bit IDs; converting its old JUnit3 testing library to JUnit4; and replacing the Joda time library with Java's standard java.time package. The int32 to int64 migration, the Googlers explain, was not trivial as the IDs were often generically defined (int32_t in C++ or Integer in Java) and were not easily searchable. They existed in tens of thousands of code locations across thousands of files. Changes had to be tracked across multiple teams and changes to class interfaces had to be considered across multiple files. "The full effort, if done manually, was expected to require hundreds of software engineering years and complex crossteam coordination," the authors explain.... [ Read it >> ]

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Longtime Slashdot reader tlhIngan writes: In what is perhaps the greatest irony ever, the operators of RedNote (known as Xiaohongshu) have decided to "wall off" US TikTok refugees fleeing to its service as the TikTok ban looms. The reason? The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wants to prevent American influence from spreading to Chinese citizens. The ban is expected to be in place next week, while many believe that the influx of Americans to be temporary and just a reaction to the TikTok ban to move to another Chinese app. Many Chinese users are not happy with the influx as having "ruined" their ability to connect with "Chinese culture, Chinese values and Chinese news."... [ Read it >> ]

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The U.S. Department of the Treasury's OFAC has sanctioned Yin Kecheng and Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology Co. for their roles in a recent Treasury breach and espionage operations targeting U.S. telecommunications. BleepingComputer reports: "Yin Kecheng has been a cyber actor for over a decade and is affiliated with the People's Republic of China Ministry of State Security (MSS)," reads the Treasury's announcement. "Yin Kecheng was associated with the recent compromise of the Department of the Treasury's Departmental Offices network," says the agency.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A Russian organization linked to the Kremlin's covert influence campaigns posted more than 8,000 political advertisements on Facebook despite European and American restrictions barring companies from doing business with the organization, according to three organizations that track disinformation online. The Russian group, the Social Design Agency, evaded lax enforcement by Facebook to place an estimated $338,000 worth of ads aimed at European users over a period of 15 months that ended in October, even though the platform itself highlighted the threat, the three organizations said in a report released on Friday.... [ Read it >> ]

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Longtime Slashdot reader sfcat shares a report from the Associated Press: Hundreds of people were ordered to evacuate and part of Highway 1 in Northern California was closed when a major fire erupted Thursday afternoon at one of the world's largest battery storage plants. As the fire sent up towering flames and black smoke and showed no sign of easing by Thursday night, about 1,500 people were instructed to leave Moss Landing and the Elkhorn Slough area, The Mercury News reported.... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft's $13 billion investment in OpenAI raises concerns that the tech giant could extend its dominance in cloud computing into the nascent AI market, the Federal Trade Commission said in a report released Friday. From a report: The commission said Microsoft's deal with OpenAI, as well as Amazon and Google's partnerships with AI company Anthropic, raise the risk that AI developers could be "fully acquired" by the tech giants in the future. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: FBI leaders have warned that they believe hackers who broke into AT&T's system last year stole months of their agents' call and text logs, setting off a race within the bureau to protect the identities of confidential informants, a document reviewed by Bloomberg News shows. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Sony's PlayStation has canceled previously unannounced games at two of its top subsidiaries, the company said. From a report: The games, at Oregon-based Bend Studio and Texas-based Bluepoint Games, were both "live service" projects designed to draw recurring revenue from players. A company spokesperson confirmed the cancellations. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft began mandatory rollouts of the Windows 11 2024 Update (24H2) for eligible devices running Home and Pro editions, the company announced on its Windows 11 issues page. The update, which Microsoft describes as a "full code swap," requires longer installation times, with users reporting processes exceeding an hour. ... [ Read it >> ]

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George Zhao, the chief executive of Chinese smartphone firm Honor, has resigned from his position due to personal reasons, the company said on Friday. CNBC: "The company and the Board of Directors sincerely appreciate Mr Zhao's outstanding contributions to the company during his tenure," Honor said in a statement. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely-used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. From a report: In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to "better protect" Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, without JavaScript, many Google Search features won't work properly, and that the quality of search results tends to be degraded.... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft researchers who tested more than 100 of the company's AI products concluded that AI systems can never be made fully secure, according to a new pre-print paper. The 26-author study, which included Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, found that large language models amplify existing security risks and create new vulnerabilities. While defensive measures can increase the cost of attacks, the researchers warned that AI systems will remain vulnerable to threats ranging from gradient-based attacks to simpler techniques like interface manipulation for phishing.... [ Read it >> ]

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Compliance software firms are deploying AI to decode complex trader communications and detect potential financial crimes as Wall Street and London regulators intensify scrutiny of market manipulation.

Companies like Behavox and Global Relay are developing AI tools that can interpret trader slang, emoji-laden messages and even coded language that traditional detection systems might miss, WSJ reports. The technology aims to replace older methods that relied on scanning for specific trigger words, which traders could easily evade. The story adds: Traders believed that "if somebody wanted to say something sketchy, they would just make up a funny word or, you know, spell it backward or something," [Donald] McElligott (VP of Global Relay) said. "Now, none of that"s going to work anymore."... [ Read it >> ]

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