Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people's wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer -- an almost four-fold increase on some estimates. The Guardian: The study by Australian scientists suggests average per person GDP across the globe will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C above pre-industrial levels. This is a much greater reduction than previous estimates, which found the reduction would be 1.4%. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: China's Xiaomi said on Tuesday that it was actively cooperating with police after a fatal accident involving a SU7 electric vehicle on March 29 and that it had handed over driving and system data. The incident marks the first major accident involving the SU7 sedan, which Xiaomi launched in March last year and since December has outsold Tesla's Model 3 on a monthly basis. Xiaomi's shares, which had risen by 34.8% year to date, closed down 5.5% on Wednesday, underperforming a 0.2% gain in the Hang Seng Tech index. Xiaomi did not disclose the number of casualties but said initial information showed the car was in the Navigate on Autopilot intelligent-assisted driving mode before the accident and was moving at 116 kph (72 mph).... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Britain's flagship AI agency will slash the number of projects it backs and prioritize work on defense, environment and health as it seeks to respond to technological advances and criticism of its record. From a report: The Alan Turing Institute -- named after the pioneering British computer scientist -- will shut or offload almost a quarter of its 101 current initiatives and is considering job cuts as part of a change programme that led scores of staff to write a letter expressing their loss of confidence in the leadership in December. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Anthropic said it will start sweeping physical offices for hidden devices as part of a ramped-up security effort as the AI race intensifies. From a report: The company, backed by Amazon and Google, published safety and security updates in a blog post on Monday, and said it also plans to establish an executive risk council and build an in-house security team. Anthropic closed its latest funding round earlier this month at a $61.5 billion valuation, which makes it one of the highest-valued AI startups. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The first flight of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket didn't last long on Sunday. The booster's nine engines switched off as the rocket cartwheeled upside-down and fell a short distance from its Arctic launch pad in Norway, punctuating the abbreviated test flight with a spectacular fiery crash into the sea. If officials at Isar Aerospace were able to pick the outcome of their first test flight, it wouldn't be this. However, the result has precedent. The first launch of SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket in 2006 ended in similar fashion. "Today, we know twice as much about our launch system as yesterday before launch," Daniel Metzler, Isar's co-founder and CEO, wrote on X early Monday. "Can't beat flight testing. Ploughing through lots of data now."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Software engineer Sergey Tselovalnikov weighs in on the new hype: The term caught on and Twitter quickly flooded with posts about how AI has radically transformed coding and will soon replace all software engineers. While AI undeniably impacts the way we write code, it hasn't fundamentally changed our role as engineers. Allow me to explain. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Intel Chief Executive Officer Lip-Bu Tan said the chipmaker will spin off assets that aren't central to its mission and create new products including custom semiconductors to try to better align itself with customers. From a report: Intel needs to replace the engineering talent it has lost, improve its balance sheet and better attune manufacturing processes to meet the needs of potential customers, Tan said. Speaking at his first public appearance as CEO, at the Intel Vision conference Monday in Las Vegas, Tan didn't specify what parts of Intel he believes are no longer central to its future. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Bruce66423 shares a report from the BBC: A former GCHQ intern has admitted risking national security by taking top secret data home with him on his mobile phone. Hasaan Arshad, 25, pleaded guilty to an offence under the Computer Misuse Act on what would have been the first day of his trial at the Old Bailey in London. The charge related to committing an unauthorised act which risked damaging national security.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Taiwanese authorities have accused 11 Chinese companies, including SMIC, of secretly setting up disguised entities in Taiwan to illegally recruit tech talent from firms like Intel and Microsoft. The Register reports: One of those companies is apparently called Yunhe Zhiwang (Shanghai) Technology Co., Ltd and develops high-end network chips. The Bureau claims its chips are used in China's "Data East, Compute West" strategy that, as we reported when it was announced in 2022, calls for five million racks full of kit to be moved from China's big cities in the east to new datacenters located near renewable energy sources in country's west. Datacenters in China's east will be used for latency-sensitive applications, while heavy lifting takes place in the west. Staff from Intel and Microsoft were apparently lured to work for Yunhe Zhiwang, which disguised its true ownership by working through a Singaporean company.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

OpenAI plans to release a new open-weight language model -- its first since GPT-2 -- in the coming months and is seeking community feedback to shape its development. "That's according to a feedback form the company published on its website Monday," reports TechCrunch. "The form, which OpenAI is inviting 'developers, researchers, and [members of] the broader community' to fill out, includes questions like 'What would you like to see in an open-weight model from OpenAI?' and 'What open models have you used in the past?'" From the report: "We're excited to collaborate with developers, researchers, and the broader community to gather inputs and make this model as useful as possible," OpenAI wrote on its website. "If you're interested in joining a feedback session with the OpenAI team, please let us know [in the form] below." OpenAI plans to host developer events to gather feedback and, in the future, demo prototypes of the model. The first will take place in San Francisco within a few weeks, followed by sessions in Europe and Asia-Pacific regions.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Google has agreed to pay $100 million in cash to settle a long-running lawsuit claiming it overcharged advertisers by failing to provide promised discounts and charged for clicks on ads outside the geographic areas the advertisers targeted. A preliminary settlement of the 14-year-old class action, which began in March 2011, was filed late Thursday in the San Jose, California, federal court, and requires a judge's approval.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The Chrome extension Honey has lost over 4 million users after a viral video exposed it for hijacking affiliate codes and misleading users about finding the best coupon deals. 9to5Google reports: As we reported in early January, Honey had lost around 3 million users immediately after the video went viral, but ended up gaining back around 1 million later on. Now, as of March 2025, Honey is down to 16 million users on Chrome, down from its peak of 20 million.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

OpenAI is having another viral moment after releasing Images for ChatGPT last week, with millions of people creating Studio Ghibli-inspired AI art. In a post on X today, CEO Sam Altman said the company has "added one million users in the last hour" alone. A few days prior he begged users to stop generating images because he said "our GPUs are melting."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The creator of an open source genetic database is shutting it down and deleting all of its data because he has come to believe that its existence is dangerous with "a rise in far-right and other authoritarian governments" in the United States and elsewhere. "The largest use case for DTC genetic data was not biomedical research or research in big pharma," Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, the founder of OpenSNP, wrote in a blog post. "Instead, the transformative impact of the data came to fruition among law enforcement agencies, who have put the genealogical properties of genetic data to use."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader shares a report: The post-Covid rebound of live events is all the more evidence that movie theaters are never coming back, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told Semafor in an interview at the Paley Center for Media Friday.

"Nearly every live thing has come back screaming," Sarandos said. "Broadway's breaking records right now, sporting events, concerts, all those things that we couldn't do during COVID are all back and bigger than ever. The theatrical box office is down 40 to 50% from pre-COVID, and this year is down 8% already, so the trend is not reversing. You've gotta look at that and say, 'What is the consumer trying to tell you?'"... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Micron will raise prices for DRAM and NAND flash memory chips through 2026 as AI and data center demand strains supply chains, the U.S. chipmaker confirmed Monday. The move follows a market rebound from previous oversupply, with memory prices steadily climbing as producers cut output while AI and high-performance computing workloads grow. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has closed its IoT & AI Insider Lab in Shanghai's Zhangjiang hi-tech zone, marking the latest sign of the US tech giant's retreat from China amid rising geopolitical tensions.

The Shanghai lab, meant to help with domestic development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, closed earlier this year, according to people who work in the Zhangjiang AI Island area. Opened in May 2019, Microsoft's IoT & AI Insider Lab was touted as a flagship collaboration between the global tech giant and Zhangjiang, the innovation hub of Shanghai's Pudong district, where numerous domestic and international semiconductor and AI companies have set up shop. The lab covered roughly 2,800 square meters (30,000 square feet).... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Learning to code has become sort of become pointless as AI increasingly dominates programming tasks, said Replit founder and chief executive Amjad Masad. "I no longer think you should learn to code," Masad wrote on X.

The statement comes as major tech executives report significant AI inroads into software development. Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently revealed that 25% of new code at the tech giant is AI-generated, though still reviewed by engineers. Furthermore, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted AI could generate up to 90% of all code within six months. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Two scientific journals that experimented with paying peer reviewers found the practice sped up the review process without compromising quality, according to findings published this month.

Critical Care Medicine offered $250 to half of 715 invited reviewers, with 53% accepting compared to 48% of unpaid reviewers. Paid reviews were completed one day faster on average. In a more dramatic result, Biology Open saw reviews completed in 4.6 business days when paying reviewers $284 per review, versus 38 days for unpaid reviews. "For the editors it has been extremely helpful because, prior to this, in some areas it was very difficult to secure reviewers," said Alejandra Clark, managing editor of Biology Open.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

France's competition authority has fined Apple 150 million euros ($162 million) for abusing its market dominance through its App Tracking Transparency system, ruling the privacy initiative unfairly disadvantages app developers. The watchdog determined that requiring third-party developers to use two pop-ups for tracking permissions while Apple's own apps need just one tap creates an "excessively complex" process that particularly harms smaller publishers lacking sufficient proprietary data for alternative targeting. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Microsoft has announced that it's overhauling its Blue Screen of Death error message in Windows 11. From a report: The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified screen that looks a lot more like the black screen you see when Windows is performing an update. It's not immediately clear if this new BSOD will remain as a black screen once Microsoft ships the final version of this update. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader shares a report: A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer, Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

California has 11.3% of America's population — but bought 30% of America's new zero-emission vehicles. That's according to figures from the California Air Resources Board, which also reports 1 in 4 Californians have chosen a zero-emission car over a gas-powered one... for the last two years in a row. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The Certification Authority/Browser Forum "is a cross-industry group that works together to develop minimum requirements for TLS certificates," writes Google's Security blog. And earlier this month two proposals from Google's forward-looking roadmap "became required practices in the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements," improving the security and agility of TLS connections...... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"The big set of open-source graphics driver updates for Linux 6.15 have been merged," writes Phoronix, "but Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn't particularly happy with the pull request."

The new "hdrtest" code is for the Intel Xe kernel driver and is around trying to help ensure the Direct Rendering Manager header files are self-contained and pass kernel-doc tests — basic maintenance checks on the included DRM header files to ensure they are all in good shape. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"Microsoft built things. It broke things."
That's how the Seattle Times kicks off a series of articles celebrating Microsoft's 50th anniversary — adding that Microsoft also gave some people "a lucrative retirement early in their lives, and their own stories to tell."

What did they remember from Microsoft's earliest days?... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

What happens when you ask Copilot to "write a program that can be run on an iPhone 16 to select 15 random photos from the phone, tint them to random colors, and display the photos on the phone"?

That's what TouchDevelop did for the long-discontinued Windows Phone in a 2013 Microsoft Research 'SmartSynth' natural language code generation demo. ("Write scripts by tapping on the screen.") ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The U.S. and China "are racing to build a truly useful humanoid worker," the Wall Street Journal wrote Saturday, adding that "Whoever wins could gain a huge edge in countless industries."

"The time has come for robots," Nvidia's chief executive said at a conference in March, adding "This could very well be the largest industry of all."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Slashdot reader jrnvk writes: The Verge is reporting that Microsoft will soon make it harder to run the well-publicized bypassnro command in Windows 11 setup. This command allows skipping the Microsoft account and online connection requirements on install. While the command will be removed, it can still be enabled by a regedit change — for now. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The giant financial news site Bloomberg "has been experimenting with using AI to help produce its journalism," reports the New York Times. But "It hasn't always gone smoothly."

While Bloomberg announced on January 15 that it would add three AI-generated bullet points at the top of articles as a summary, "The news outlet has had to correct at least three dozen A.I.-generated summaries of articles published this year." (This Wednesday they published a "hallucinated" date for the start of U.S. auto tariffs, and earlier in March claimed president Trump had imposed tariffs on Canada in 2024, while other errors have included incorrect figures and incorrect attribution.)... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

As Rust approaches its 10th anniversary, "there is an important piece of documentation missing that many other languages provide," notes the Rust Foundation.
While there's documentation and tutorials — there's no official language specification:

In December 2022, an RFC was submitted to encourage the Rust Project to begin working on a specification. After much discussion, the RFC was approved in July 2023, and work began. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

A former Facebook director of global policy recently published "the book Meta doesn't want you to read," a scathing takedown of top Meta executives titled Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.

But Wednesday RestofWorld.org published additional thoughts from Meta's former head of public policy for Bangladesh (who is now an executive director at the nonprofit policy lab Tech Global Institute). Though their time at Facebook didn't overlap, they first applaud how the book "puts a face to the horrific events and dangerous decisions." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The New York Times notes that white-collar workers
have faced higher unemployment than other groups in the U.S. over the past few years — along with slower wager growth.

Some economists wonder if this trend might be irreversible... and partly attributable to AI:
... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"After a long run, Google is sunsetting two of its signature Nest products," reports PC World:

Google has just announced that it's discontinuing the 10-year-old Nest Protect and the 7-year-old Nest x Yale lock. Both of those products will continue to work, and — for now — they remain on sale at the Google Store, complete with discounts until supplies run out. But while Google itself is exiting the smoke alarm and smart lock business, it isn't leaving Google Home users in the lurch. Instead, it's teeing up third-party replacements for the Nest Protect and Nest X Yale lock, with both new products coming from familiar brands... Capable of being unlocked via app, entry code, or a traditional key, the Yale Smart Lock with Matter is set to arrive this summer, according to Yale. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Cloud providers like the security of running things in virtual machines "at scale" — even though VMs "are not known for having fast cold starts or a small footprint..." noted Microsoft's Open Source blog last November. So Microsoft's Azure Core Upstream team built an open source Rust library called Hyperlight "to execute functions as fast as possible while isolating those functions within a VM." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"Researchers have discovered nearly 1.5 million pictures from specialist dating apps — many of which are explicit — being stored online without password protection," reports the BBC, "leaving them vulnerable to hackers and extortionists."

And the images weren't limited to those from profiles, the BBC learned from the ethical hacker who discovered the issue. "They included pictures which had been sent privately in messages, and even some which had been removed by moderators..."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Samsung teased its "AI Vision Inside" refrigerators at January's CES tradeshow. (Its internal sensors can now detect 37 different fresh ingredients and 50 processed foods, generating lists for your cellphone or a screen on your refrigerator's door.)

But the refrigerators are part of a larger "AI Home" lineup of screen-enabled appliances with advanced AI features, and Engadget got to see them all together this weekend at Samsung's Bespoke AI conference in Seoul, Korea:... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"I've been dreaming of this moment for 20 years," says Aptera co-CEO Steve Fambro. Aptera's solar-powered electric car just drove 300 miles on a single charge.

"We're one step closer to a future where every journey is powered by the sun," Aptera says in their announcement. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Some scientists believe life on earth originated in organic matter in earth's bodies of water more than 3.5 billion years ago," reports CNN. "But where did that organic material come from...?"

Maybe electrical energy sparked the beginnings of life on earth — just like in Frankenstein:... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Though it's stock price is still up 200% from its IPO in March of 2024
— last week Reddit's stock had dropped nearly 50% since February 7th.

And then this week, it dropped another 10%, reports Bloomberg, citing both the phenomenon of "volatile technology stocks under pressure" — but also specifically "the gloomy sentiment around Reddit..."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Automotive historian Dan Albert loves the "adorable tiny truck" he's driving. It's one of the small Japan-made "kei" pickups and minivans that "make up about a third of car sales in Japan." Americans can legally import older models for less than $10,000, and getting 40 miles per gallon they're "Cheap to buy and run... rugged, practical, no-frills machines — exactly what the American-built pickup truck used to be." ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

"I am having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over," a 53-year-old film and TV director told the New York Times:

If you entered media or image-making in the '90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there's a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That's because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand... When digital technology began seeping into their lives, with its AOL email accounts, Myspace pages and Napster downloads, it didn't seem like a threat. But by the time they entered the primes of their careers, much of their expertise had become all but obsolete. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Last week an Air France flight to the Caribbean had to turn around and return to Paris, reports the Washington Post, "after a passenger could not locate their cellphone."

Because of fears that an unattended cellphone could overheat — and because the passenger and crew couldn't find the phone — the Boeing 777 turned around off the coast of France "and returned to the airport, according to the flight-tracking service FlightAware. It landed back where it started a little more than two hours after taking off, with 375 passengers, 12 cabin crew and two pilots on board..."... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

In 1999 Slashdot reader Jeremie announced "a new project I recently started to create a complete open-source platform for Instant Messaging with transparent communication to other IM systems (ICQ, AIM, etc)." It was the first release of the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, and by 2008 Slashdot was asking if XMPP was "the next big thing." Facebook even supported it for third-party chat clients until 2015. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam writes:

No more burning fossil fuels, playing with fissile material, damming rivers, erecting wind mills, or making solar panels. All of our energy needs could potentially be supplied by the angular kinetic energy of the Earth — and because of the mass of the planet, doing so would slow its rotation down by a mere 7ms per century. [Which is similar to speed changes caused by natural phenomena such as the Moon's pull and changing dynamics inside the planet's core."]... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Mercury News:

After a year of fastidious planning, a microscopic sample of the ultra-rare radioactive element berkelium arrived at a Berkeley Lab. With just 48 hours to experiment before it would become unusable, a group of nearly 20 researchers focused intently on creating a brand-new molecule. Using a chemical glove box, a polycarbonate glass box with protruding gloves that shields substances from oxygen and moisture, scientists combined the berkelium metal with an organic molecule containing only carbon and hydrogen to create a chemical reaction... [Post-doc researcher Dominic] Russo, researcher Stefan Minasian, and 17 other scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory had created berkelocene, a new molecule that usurps theorists' expectations about how carbon bonds with heavy-metal elements. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

The Washington Post reports that after months of polar darkness, the extent of sea ice blanketing the Arctic this winter "fell to the lowest level on record, researchers announced this week... the smallest maximum extent in the 47-year satellite record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader shared this report from BleepingComputer:

Three security bypasses have been discovered in Ubuntu Linux's unprivileged user namespace restrictions, which could be enable a local attacker to exploit vulnerabilities in kernel components. The issues allow local unprivileged users to create user namespaces with full administrative capabilities and impact Ubuntu versions 23.10, where unprivileged user namespaces restrictions are enabled, and 24.04 which has them active by default... ... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: The first clinical trial of a therapy bot that uses generative AI suggests it was as effective as human therapy for participants with depression, anxiety, or risk for developing eating disorders. Even so, it doesn't give a go-ahead to the dozens of companies hyping such technologies while operating in a regulatory gray area. A team led by psychiatric researchers and psychologists at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College built the tool, called Therabot, and the results were published on March 27 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Many tech companies are building AI therapy bots to address the mental health care gap, offering more frequent and affordable access than traditional therapy. However, challenges persist: poorly worded bot responses can cause harm, and forming meaningful therapeutic relationships is hard to replicate in software. While many bots rely on general internet data, researchers at Dartmouth developed "Therabot" using custom, evidence-based datasets. Here's what they found: To test the bot, the researchers ran an eight-week clinical trial with 210 participants who had symptoms of depression or generalized anxiety disorder or were at high risk for eating disorders. About half had access to Therabot, and a control group did not. Participants responded to prompts from the AI and initiated conversations, averaging about 10 messages per day. Participants with depression experienced a 51% reduction in symptoms, the best result in the study. Those with anxiety experienced a 31% reduction, and those at risk for eating disorders saw a 19% reduction in concerns about body image and weight. These measurements are based on self-reporting through surveys, a method that's not perfect but remains one of the best tools researchers have.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies

Despite recent test failures, NASA has added SpaceX's Starship to its Launch Services Program contract, allowing it to compete for future science missions once it achieves a successful orbital flight. Florida Today reports: NASA announced the addition Friday to its current launch provider contract with SpaceX, which covers the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. This opens the possibility of Starship flying future NASA science missions -- that is once Starship reaches a successful orbital flight.... [ Read it >> ]

0 Replies