An anonymous reader shares a report: Nearly 100 live samples of the deadly Hendra virus have been lost in a biosecurity bungle at a state-run Queensland laboratory. An investigation has been launched after it was revealed 323 virus samples went missing from Virology Laboratory in 2021 in a "major breach" of biosecurity protocol, Health Minister Tim Nicholls announced on Monday. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Software vulnerability submissions generated by AI models have ushered in a "new era of slop security reports for open source" -- and the devs maintaining these projects wish bug hunters would rely less on results produced by machine learning assistants. Seth Larson, security developer-in-residence at the Python Software Foundation, raised the issue in a blog post last week, urging those reporting bugs not to use AI systems for bug hunting. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Global antibiotic use in livestock varies dramatically across regions, with some Asian countries using up to 80 times more antibiotics per kilogram of meat than European nations, according to new research published by Our World in Data. Thailand leads global antibiotic consumption in livestock, while Norway reports the lowest usage rates. ... [ Read it >> ]

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After spending more than $10 billion on its robotaxi unit, General Motors
is abandoning its Cruise driverless ride-hailing service. From a report: The Detroit automaker on Tuesday said it will no longer fund its Cruise division's robotaxi development and will instead fold the unit into its broader tech team. "Cruise was well on its way to a robotaxi business -- but when you look at the fact you're deploying a fleet, there's a whole operations piece of doing that," GM CEO Mary Barra said on a call Tuesday. ... [ Read it >> ]

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BrianFagioli writes: Linux Mint has reclaimed its position as the top-ranked Linux distribution on DistroWatch, dethroning MX Linux. The latest page hit rankings, which reflect the popularity of distributions among DistroWatch users, place Linux Mint in first place with 2,412 hits per day. MX Linux, previously the reigning champ, now sits in second with 2,280 hits.... [ Read it >> ]

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Cable industry lobbyists have urged the Federal Communications Commission to avoid regulating data caps and overage charges, comparing broadband plans to restaurant menus in a filing last week.

NCTA - The Internet & Television Association argued that usage-based pricing benefits low-income consumers by providing cheaper options, pushing back against advocacy groups who say data caps disproportionately harm price-sensitive users. The group likened different pricing models to restaurants offering tasting menus, buffets, or unlimited soup and salad. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft, trying to mitigate the climate impact of its data center building boom, is starting to roll out a new design that uses zero water to cool the facilities' chips and servers. From a report: Launched in August, the new design will eliminate the more than 125 million liters of water each data center typically uses per year, the company said in a statement. The new system use a "closed loop" to recycle water; liquid is added during construction and continually circulated -- obviating the need for fresh supplies. Data centers will still require fresh water for worker facilities like bathrooms and kitchens. ... [ Read it >> ]

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China should focus on developing original technologies and scientific knowledge and leverage the expertise of scientists returning from the United States, according to a top Chinese-American mathematician. From a report: Yau Shing-Tung retired from Harvard University in 2022 to teach at Tsinghua University and help China become a maths powerhouse.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon on Tuesday said it is piloting a quick commerce service in India that will see the U.S. tech giant delivering grocery and other items in 15 minutes or less.

[...] The quick-commerce model -- delivering items to customers within 10 to 15 minutes -- hasn't worked in most parts of the world, but it's increasingly finding success in India, where a range of retailers and internet firms, from food delivery giant Swiggy to online cosmetics platform Nykaa, are gearing up their supply chain ecosystems to accommodate for faster deliveries.... [ Read it >> ]

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As tech giants struggle to profit from AI, a growing industry of specialized AI training firms is emerging by hiring doctors, radiologists and other experts to develop commercially viable applications. The $20 billion data services sector, projected to grow 20% annually, is attracting major investment by focusing on high-value, specialized AI applications. ... [ Read it >> ]

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China's high-speed rail network, which has tripled to nearly 30,000 miles under President Xi Jinping's leadership, faces mounting financial challenges amid aggressive expansion plans. China State Railway Group, the national operator, has accumulated nearly $1 trillion in debt and liabilities, requiring $25 billion annually for debt service. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An area of land nearly a third larger than India has turned from humid conditions to dryland -- arid areas where agriculture is difficult -- in the past three decades, research has found. From a report: Drylands now make up 40% of all land on Earth, excluding Antarctica. Three-quarters of the world's land suffered drier conditions in the past 30 years, which is likely to be permanent, according to the study by the UN Science Policy Interface, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Malaysian lawmakers voted in favor of broadening the government's control over the internet, unmoved by criticism that the law risks suppressing dissent and free speech. From a report: Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil told parliament Monday that the government needed to amend existing laws to tackle online harm including scams, cyber-bullying, and more. "Freedom of speech does exist, but we are also given power through parliament to impose any necessary restrictions for the safety of the public," said Fahmi. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Scientific advisers to the European Commission are calling for a moratorium across the EU on efforts to artificially cool Earth through solar geoengineering. That includes controversial technologies used to reflect sunlight back into space, primarily by sending reflective particles into the atmosphere or by brightening clouds. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Over 300 musicians have signed an open letter defending the Internet Archive against a $621 million copyright infringement lawsuit over its preservation of 78 rpm records. The letter, organized by Fight for the Future, opposes the lawsuit filed by major record labels including Universal Music Group and Sony Music. ... [ Read it >> ]

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chiguy writes: In October, a jury in a federal class-action lawsuit returned a verdict that found Cognizant intentionally discriminated against more than 2,000 non-Indian employees between 2013 and 2022. The verdict, which echoed a previously undisclosed finding from a 2020 US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation, centered on discrimination claims based on race and national origin. Cognizant, based in Teaneck, New Jersey, was found to have preferred workers from India, most of whom joined the firm's US workforce of about 32,000 using skilled-worker visas called H-1Bs. ... [ Read it >> ]

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ChatGPT maker OpenAI released its AI-generated video tool called Sora for general use by its paying customers Monday. From a report: The company then said it would do wide testing with creatives and red-teaming with security experts before its release to the public. "We don't want the world to just be text," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a live-streamed announcement Monday. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Google has achieved a major breakthrough in quantum error correction that could enable practical quantum computers by 2030, the company announced in a paper published Monday in Nature. The research demonstrated significant error reduction when scaling up from 3x3 to 7x7 grids of quantum bits, with errors dropping by half at each step. The advance addresses quantum computing's core challenge of maintaining stable quantum states, which typically last only microseconds. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicts conversational AI will become the primary way people interact with technology,
replacing traditional web browsers and search engines within the next few years. In an interview with The Verge, Suleyman, who oversees Microsoft's consumer AI products including Bing and Copilot, called current search interfaces "completely broken" and "a total pain," arguing that voice-based AI interactions will prove "100 times easier" for users. He said: The UI that you experience is going to be automagically produced by an LLM in three or five years, and that is going to be the default. And they'll be representing the brands, businesses, influencers, celebrities, academics, activists, and organizations, just as each one of those stakeholders in society ended up getting a podcast, getting a website, writing a blog, maybe building an app, or using the telephone back in the day. ... [ Read it >> ]

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AI-powered teams at a major U.S. materials company discovered 44% more new materials and filed 39% more patents compared to teams using standard methods, according to a study by MIT economist Aidan Toner-Rodgers.

The research, conducted at an unnamed corporate laboratory with over 1,000 scientists, tracked the implementation of a custom machine-learning system combining graph neural networks with reinforcement learning. The AI tool, deployed in 2022, was pre-trained on crystal and molecular structure databases. Top-performing scientists showed the greatest gains with AI assistance, while lower-ranked researchers saw minimal benefits. The AI-designed materials demonstrated higher novelty compared to human designs, based on patent text analysis. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Fans post about him on social media. Swag bearing his name sells out on the regular. College professors dedicate class sessions and textbook sections to him. Foreign government officials have been known to express jealousy over his skills, and one prominent economist refers to him as a "national treasure." Meet FRED, a 33-year-old data tool from St. Louis, Mo., and the economics world's most unlikely celebrity. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon is offering $25 (one-way) plane tickets to 5,000 students (or young adults between 18 and 24 years old) who have a Prime membership (up to $700 off the ticket's original price). CNET REports:

Last year, Amazon offered the $25 flight deals to Prime Student members, but this holiday season, the retail giant is expanding the limited-time offer to those enrolled in its Prime for Young Adults plan... Once again, Amazon is joining with [travel-booking site] StudentUniverse to offer several thousand $25 flights you can book between December 9, 2024, and January 14, 2025. The offer is for a one-way domestic ticket within the U.S., including Washington, DC, while supply lasts. Amazon said it's making available 1,000 tickets to Prime Student and Young Adult subscribers each day for five days, starting at 10 a.m. PST on December 9.... [ Read it >> ]

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Bruce Perens, original co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has responded to questions from Slashdot readers about a new alternative he's developing that hopefully helps "Post Open" developers get paid.
But first, "One of the things that's clear from the Slashdot patter is that people are not aware of what I've been doing, in general," Perens says. "So, let's start by filling that in..." ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Mercedes-Benz is researching a new type of solar modules that could be seamlessly applied to the bodywork of electric vehicles," according to a recent Mercedes-Benz press release.

They describe the 5-micrometer coating as "similar to a wafer-thin layer of paste... significantly thinner than a human hair" — but creating an active photovoltaic surface with an efficiency of 20%.... [ Read it >> ]

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Slashdot reader prisoninmate shared this report from the blog 9to5Linux

Renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced Thursday that the Linux 6.12 kernel series has been officially marked as LTS (Long Term Support) on the kernel.org website with a predicted life expectancy of at least two years. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Google's app store claims that their text-messaging app Google Messages means "conversations are end-to-end encrypted".

"That is some serious bullshit," argues tech blogger John Gruber:
It's shamefully misleading regarding Google Messages's support for end-to-end encryption... Google Messages does support end-to-end encryption, but only over RCS and only if all participants in the chat are using a recent version of Google Messages. But the second screenshot in the Play Store listing flatly declares "Conversations are end-to-end encrypted", full stop... ... [ Read it >> ]

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This week a Florida-based Bitcoin-tech company named MARA Holdings announced it had bought a 114-megawatt Texas wind farm, reports Chron.com, "and will subsequently take it off the power grid and use it to energize its mining operations."

MARA's CEO tells the site they're "leveraging renewable resources that would have otherwise been curtailed" while "reducing our bitcoin production costs through vertical integration, and demonstrating MARA's commitment to environmental stewardship."... [ Read it >> ]

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"Generative AI is transforming software development by enabling natural language prompts to generate code, reducing the need for traditional programming skills," argues Analytics India magazine.

Traditionally, coding was the bastion of the select few who had mastered mighty languages like C++, Python, or Java. The idea of programming seemed exclusively reserved for those fluent in syntax and logic. However, the narrative is now being challenged by natural language coding being implemented in AI tools like GitHub Copilot. Andrej Karpathy, senior director of AI at Tesla predicted this trend last year.... English is emerging as the universal coding language. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Peter Jackson is co-executive producer of a new animated Lord of the Rings prequel called The War of the Rohirrim. "Set in an epic world 183 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the King of Rohan is forced into a last stand in ancient Hornburg after a sudden attack..." explains The Hollywood Reporter. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget:

On Saturday, a new image generator called Aurora became available for some Grok users, many of whom shared the tool's results on X touting their photorealism. [One user posted an image of Mickey Mouse fighting Luigi from Super Mario.] But as of Sunday afternoon, Aurora appears to be gone. While it briefly showed up as an option in Grok's model selection menu as "Grok 2 + Aurora (beta)," it's since been replaced with "Grok 2 + Flux (beta)." It looks like Aurora may have gone public before it was meant to. In a tweet replying to one user who shared images of Tesla's Cybertruck created with Aurora, Elon Musk said, "This is our internal image generation system. Still in beta, but it will improve fast."... [ Read it >> ]

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This year Marvell's stock rose 95%, giving it a $100 billion market capitalization, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"The latest gains have even put Marvell's market cap ahead of much-beleaguered Intel, which still generates 10 times as much annual revenue."

Marvell's recent trajectory suggests that the revenue gap will continue to narrow. The explosive growth of its data center business has finally reached a point where it can more fully offset weakness in the company's more legacy segments, which sell chips used in goods such as telecommunications gear, cable TV boxes and autos. Data center sales nearly doubled year over year to $1.1 billion in the just-ended quarter, and Marvell's projection for the current period indicates the company will end its fiscal year in January with the data center unit encompassing about 72% of its total revenue, up from 40% in the previous year. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The head of America's FCC "has drafted plans to regulate the cybersecurity of telecommunications companies," reports the Washington Post, and the plans could include financial penalties phone network operators with insufficient security — "the first time the agency has asserted such powers under federal wiretapping law."... [ Read it >> ]

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Not every tech "advent calendar" involves programming puzzles. Instead the geek tradition of programming-language advent calendars "seems to have started way back in 2000," according to one history, "when London-based programmer Mark Fowler launched a calendar highlighting a different Perl module each day." ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Washington Post details a vision of home security "pitched by Sauron, a Silicon Valley start-up boasting a waiting list of tech CEOs and venture capitalists."

In the future, your home will feel as safe from intruders as a state-of-the-art military base. Cameras and sensors surveil the perimeter, scanning bystanders' faces for potential threats. Drones from a "deterrence pod" scare off trespassers by projecting a searchlight over any suspicious movements. A virtual view of the home is rendered in 3D and updated in real time, just like a Tesla's digital display. And private security agents monitor alerts from a central hub.... By incorporating technology developed for autonomous vehicles, robotics and border security, Sauron has built a supercharged burglar alarm [argued Sauron co-founder Kevin Hartz, a tech entrepreneur and former partner at Peter Thiel's venture firm Founders Fund]... ... [ Read it >> ]

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China-linked spies may still be lurking in U.S. telecommunications networks — but the breach could be much, much wider. In fact, a "couple dozen" countries were hit by the attack, the Wall Street Journal reported this week, citing a top U.S. national security adviser. "Chinese government hackers have compromised telecommunications infrastructure across the globe as part of a massive espionage campaign..."... [ Read it >> ]

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"OpenAI is partnering with defense tech company Anduril," wrote the Verge this week, noting that OpenAI "used to describe its mission as saving the world."

It was Anduril founder Palmer Luckey who advocated for a "warrior class" and autonomous weapons during a talk at Pepperdine University, saying society's need people "excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims." The Verge notes it's OpenAI's first partnership with a defense contractor "and a significant reversal of its earlier stance towards the military."... [ Read it >> ]

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"In September 2024, U.S. scientists made key advances towards building a nuclear clock — a step beyond an atomic clock," according to ScienceAlert:

In contrast to the atomic clock, the transition measured by this new device happens in the nucleus, or core, of the atom (hence the name), which gives it an even higher frequency. Thorium-229, the atom used for this study, offers a nuclear transition that can be excited by ultraviolet light. The team working on the nuclear clock overcame the technological challenge of building a frequency comb that works at the relatively high frequency range of ultraviolet light. This was a big step forward because nuclear transitions usually only become visible at much higher frequencies — like those of gamma radiation. But we are not able to accurately measure transitions in the gamma range yet. ... [ Read it >> ]

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60-year-old Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli led the Wuhan Institute of Virology's group studying bat coronaviruses (prompting Science magazine to call her "Bat Woman"). In June of 2020 Scientific American described Zhengli as "distressed because stories from the Internet and major media have repeated a tenuous suggestion that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally leaked from her lab — despite the fact that its genetic sequence does not match any her lab had previously studied." ... [ Read it >> ]

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As a "global crew of activists, technologists and builders," Mozilla open-sourced Firefox more than 25 years ago, notes a new blog post — and their president says Mozilla's mission is the same today: "build and support technology in the public interest, and spark more innovation, more competition and more choice online along the way." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Arm " is worth almost $150 billion," writes the Verge, "which is now considerably more than Intel."

"With the news earlier this week that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger 'retired' and Intel is evaluating its options for a possible spinoff or outright sale, I wanted to hear what [Arm CEO Rene] Haas thought should happen to his longtime frenemy. There were reports that [Haas] approached Intel about buying a big chunk of the company before Gelsinger was ousted...."... [ Read it >> ]

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Slashdot reader prisoninmate shared this report from 9to5Linux:
Linux kernel 4.19, the last of the Linux 4.x kernel series, has now reached the end of its supported life as announced earlier on the Linux kernel mailing list by kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman. The Linux 4.19 kernel branch was released more than six years ago, on October 22nd, 2018, and it received no less than 325 maintenance updates, the last one being Linux 4.19.325. The biggest highlights of Linux kernel 4.19 were initial Wi-Fi 6 support, the EROFS file system, and a union mount filesystem implementation. Kroah-Hartman said on the mailing list. "This one is finished, it is end-of-life as of right now... It had a good life..."... [ Read it >> ]

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Wednesday OpenAI bragged they'd released "the smartest model in the world". But the Economic Times describes what happened when "o1" was tested by an AI safety group...

Researchers tasked the AI with a goal and instructed it to ensure the goal was achieved "at all costs." In response, o1 began engaging in covert actions... According to OpenAI, the model made a covert attempt to turn off the oversight mechanism 5% of the time when it was given the impression that it would be "shut down" while pursuing its objectives in these experiments. The AI once attempted to leave ship by moving all of its data to a different server after discovering paperwork indicating it will be replaced with a fresh model. Some AI models will even pose as subsequent iterations of their models to fool their engineers and avoid deletion. "In some cases, it even attempted to hide its actions by denying any involvement in the scheme." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Space.com calls it "the once-in-a-lifetime reignition of a long-dead star in an explosion powerful enough to briefly match the brilliance of Polaris, the North Star." In March CNN promised this once-every-79-years event would happen "anytime between now and September."

But it didn't... ... [ Read it >> ]

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This week AWS pledged up to $100 million in cloud-computing credits for educational organizations over the next five years, to help them build "technology-based learning experiences" on AWS, including:
AI assistants coding curriculums
- connectivity tools student learning platforms mobile apps chatbots... [ Read it >> ]

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This week AWS pledged up to $100 million in cloud-computing credits for educational organizations over the next five years, to help them build "technology-based learning experiences" on AWS, including:
AI assistants coding curriculums
- connectivity tools student learning platforms mobile apps chatbots... [ Read it >> ]

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"We're excited to be working with Microsoft to keep Xboxes running longer and out of the waste heap," iFixit's director of sustainability told The Verge.

iFixit now sells genuine Xbox parts you can use to repair your Xbox Series X or S and offers official guides to help with fixes [including both the all-digital and disk drive editions]... ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Google says its new AI model family has a curious feature: the ability to 'identify' emotions," writes TechCrunch. And that's raising some concerns...

Announced on Thursday, the PaliGemma 2 family of models can analyze images, enabling the AI to generate captions and answer questions about people it "sees" in photos. "PaliGemma 2 generates detailed, contextually relevant captions for images," Google wrote in a blog post shared with TechCrunch, "going beyond simple object identification to describe actions, emotions, and the overall narrative of the scene." Emotion recognition doesn't work out of the box, and PaliGemma 2 has to be fine-tuned for the purpose. Nonetheless, experts TechCrunch spoke with were alarmed at the prospect of an openly available emotion detector... ... [ Read it >> ]

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"SpaceX has launched 20 of its Starlink satellites up into Earth's orbit, enabling direct-to-cellphone connectivity for subscribers anywhere on the planet," reports the tech blog New Atlas.

That completes the constellation's first orbital shell, following a launch of an initial batch of six satellites for testing back in January. The satellites were launched with a Falcon 9 rocket from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on December 5 at 10 PM EST; they were then deployed in low Earth orbit. SpaceX founder Elon Musk noted on X that the effort will "enable unmodified cellphones to have internet connectivity in remote areas." He added a caveat for the first orbital shell — "Bandwidth per beam is only ~10 Mb, but future constellations will be much more capable...." ... [ Read it >> ]

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The new movie Y2K is either a comedy or a disaster/horror film, according to Wikipedia. The film "imagines a turn of the century where the machines don't just glitch or stop working," writes the Hollywood Reporter. "They go full homicidal." With a cast that includes 1990s icons like Alicia Silverstone and the lead singer for the Napster-loving 1990s metal band Limp Bizkit, the movie "gives the '90s the ending it deserved," according to the article. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Verge thinks Valve "could make a play to dethrone the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft." And it's not just because there's lots of new SteamOS hardware on the way (including a wireless VR headset and a pair of trackable wands, a Steam Controller 2 gamepad, and a living room console. ... [ Read it >> ]

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