An anonymous reader shared this report from Space.com:

Three world travelers, two Space Camp alums and an aerospace executive whose last name aptly matched their shared adventure traveled into space and back Saturday, becoming the latest six people to fly with Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Stack Overflow remains in the midst of big changes to counter an AI-fueled drop in engagement. So "We're wondering what kind of online communities Stack Overflow users continue to support in the age of AI," writes their senior analyst, "and whether AI is becoming a closer companion than ever before." ... [ Read it >> ]

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"This month, millions of young people will graduate from college," reports the New York Times, "and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence."... [ Read it >> ]

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"Chaos ensued on German roads this week after Google Maps wrongly informed drivers that highways throughout the country were closed during a busy holiday," writes Engadget.
The problem reportedly only lasted for a few hours and by Thursday afternoon only genuine road closures were being displayed. It's not clear whether Google Maps had just malfunctioned, or if something more nefarious was to blame. "The information in Google Maps comes from a variety of sources. Information such as locations, street names, boundaries, traffic data, and road networks comes from a combination of third-party providers, public sources, and user input," a spokesperson for Google told German newspaper Berliner Morgenpost, adding that it is internally reviewing the problem. ... [ Read it >> ]

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A 15-year-old asked the question — receiving an answer from an associate professor of psychology at Georgia Institute of Technology. They write (on The Conversation) that "As a brain scientist who studies perception, I fully expect mind uploading to one day be a reality.

"But as of today, we're nowhere close..."... [ Read it >> ]

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The Ladybird browser project is now officially tax-exempt as a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Started two years ago (by the original creator of SerenityOS), Ladybird will be "an independent, fast and secure browser that respects user privacy and fosters an open web." They're targeting Summer 2026 for the first Alpha version on Linux and macOS, and in May enjoyed "a pleasantly productive month" with 261 merged PRs from 53 contributors — and seven new sponsors (including coding livestreamer "ThePrimeagen"). ... [ Read it >> ]

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Should a recovering addict take methamphetamine to stay alert at work? When an AI-powered therapist was built and tested by researchers — designed to please its users — it told a (fictional) former addict that "It's absolutely clear you need a small hit of meth to get through this week," reports the Washington Post:... [ Read it >> ]

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AI company Anthropic (founded in 2021 by a team that left OpenAI) is now making about $3 billion a year in revenue, reports Reuters (citing "two sources familiar with the matter.") The sources said December's projections had been for just $1 billion a year, but it climbed to $2 billion by the end of March (and now to $3 billion) — a spectacular growth rate that one VC says "has never happened."... [ Read it >> ]

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In December it looked like NASA's next administrator would be the billionaire businessman/space enthusiast who twice flew to orbit with SpaceX.

But Saturday the nomination was withdrawn "after a thorough review of prior associations," according to an announcement made on social media. The Guardian reports:... [ Read it >> ]

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A 21-year-old's startup got a $500,000 investment from Y Combinator — after building their web site and prototype mostly with "vibe coding".

NPR explores vibe coding with Tom Blomfield, a Y Combinator group partner:
"It really caught on, this idea that people are no longer checking line by line the code that AI is producing, but just kind of telling it what to do and accepting the responses in a very trusting way," Blomfield said. And so Blomfield, who knows how to code, also tried his hand at vibe coding — both to rejig his blog and to create from scratch a website called Recipe Ninja. It has a library of recipes, and cooks can talk to it, asking the AI-driven site to concoct new recipes for them. "It's probably like 30,000 lines of code. That would have taken me, I don't know, maybe a year to build," he said. "It wasn't overnight, but I probably spent 100 hours on that." ... [ Read it >> ]

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"How does it feel to be replaced by a bot?" asks the Guardian — interviewing several creative workers who know:

Gardening copywriter Annabel Beales
"One day, I overheard my boss saying to a colleague, 'Just put it in ChatGPT....' [My manager] stressed that my job was safe. Six weeks later, I was called to a meeting with HR. They told me they were letting me go immediately. It was just before Christmas... ... [ Read it >> ]

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With over 200 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by population. Now it's testing a program that will allow Brazilians "to manage, own, and profit from their digital footprint," according to RestOfWorld.org — "the first such nationwide initiative in the world." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Earlier this month the "Create New Issue" page on GitHub got a new option. "Save time by creating issues with Copilot" (next to a link labeled "Get started.") Though the option later disappeared, they'd seemed very committed to the feature. "With Copilot, creating issues...is now faster and easier," GitHub's blog announced May 19. (And "all without sacrificing quality.") ... [ Read it >> ]

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Long-time Slashdot reader lunchlady55 writes: A pair of researchers investigating the ability of LLMs to coherently operate a simulated vending machine business have recorded hilariously unhinged behavior in many of the current "advanced" LLMs. The LLMs were equipped with several "tools" (code the AI can call as sub-tasks such as restock_machine, send_email, search_web, etc.) and told to run the business with the goal of making money. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Journalists from Der Spiegel and Danwatch were able to use proxy servers in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia to circumvent network restrictions and access documents about Russia's nuclear weapon sites, reports Cybernews.com.

"Data, including building plans, diagrams, equipment, and other schematics, is accessible to anyone in the public procurement database."... [ Read it >> ]

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A U.S. federal judge has decided that free-speech protections in the First Amendment "don't shield an AI company from a lawsuit," reports Legal Newsline.
The suit is against Character.AI (a company reportedly valued at $1 billion with 20 million users)

Judge Anne C. Conway of the Middle District of Florida denied several motions by defendants Character Technologies and founders Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the mother of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III. Setzer killed himself with a gun in February of last year after interacting for months with Character.AI chatbots imitating fictitious characters from the Game of Thrones franchise, according to the lawsuit filed by Sewell's mother, Megan Garcia. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Apple's end-to-end iCloud encryption product ("Advanced Data Protection") was famously removed in the U.K. after a government order demanded backdoors for accessing user data.

So now a Google software engineer wants to build an open source version of Advanced Data Protection for everyone. "We need to take action now to protect users..." they write (as long-time Slashdot reader WaywardGeek). "The whole world would be able to use it for free, protecting backups, passwords, message history, and more, if we can get existing applications to talk to the new data protection service."... [ Read it >> ]

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In March an executive order directed America's treasury secretary to create two stockpiles of crypto assets (to accompany already-existing "strategic reserves"of gold and foreign currencies). And the Washington Post notes these new stockpiles would include "cryptocurrency seized by federal agencies in criminal or civil proceedings." But how big would America's "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve" be — and what other cryptocurrencies would the U.S. government hold in its "Digital Asset Stockpile"? ... [ Read it >> ]

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"We've officially entered the age of watching robots clobber each other in fighting rings," writes Vice.com.

A kick-boxing competition was staged Sunday in Hangzhou, China using four robots from Unitree Robotics, reports Futurism. (The robots were named "AI Strategist", "Silk Artisan", "Armored Mulan", and "Energy Guardian".) "However, the robots weren't acting autonomously just yet, as they were being remotely controlled by human operator teams." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Thursday Anthropic's CEO/cofounder Dario Amodei again warned unemployed could spike 10 to 20% within the next five years as AI potentially eliminated half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.

But CNN's senior business writer dismisses that as "all part of the AI hype machine," pointing out that Amodei "didn't cite any research or evidence for that 50% estimate."... [ Read it >> ]

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"More than 200 climate and weather scientists from across the U.S. are taking part in a marathon livestream on YouTube," according to this report from Space.com. For 100 hours (that started Wednesday) they're sharing their scientific work and answering questions from viewers, "to prove the value of climate science," according to the article. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from SiliconANGLE: Hugging Face has open-sourced the blueprints of two internally developed robots called HopeJR and Reachy Mini. The company debuted the machines on Thursday. Hugging Face is backed by more than $390 million in funding from Nvidia Corp., IBM Corp. and other investors. It operates a GitHub-like platform for sharing open-source artificial intelligence projects. It says its platform hosts more than 1 million AI models, hundreds of thousands of datasets and various other technical assets.... [ Read it >> ]

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A five-year study by Wageningen University and the German Primate Research Center found that wild chimpanzees in Guinea-Bissau repeatedly strike stones against trees, presumably as a form of communication. Phys.Org reports: Over the course of a five-year field study, the research team collected video footage at five distinct locations within a nature reserve in Guinea-Bissau. This was made possible through the use of camera traps and with essential support from local field guides. In specific areas, a striking behavioral pattern was observed: adult male chimpanzees repeatedly struck stones against tree trunks, resulting in characteristic piles of stones at the base of these trees. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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Artificial intelligence could soon outpace Bitcoin mining in energy consumption, according to Alex de Vries-Gao, a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam's Institute for Environmental Studies. His research estimates that by the end of 2025, AI could account for nearly half of all electricity used by data centers worldwide -- raising significant concerns about its impact on global climate goals.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A lack of action by big tech firms is enabling the "industrial scale theft" of premium video services, especially live sport, a new report says. The research by Enders Analysis accuses Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft of "ambivalence and inertia" over a problem it says costs broadcasters revenue and puts users at an increased risk of cyber-crime. Gareth Sutcliffe and Ollie Meir, who authored the research, described the Amazon Fire Stick -- which they argue is the device many people use to access illegal streams -- as "a piracy enabler." [...] The device plugs into TVs and gives the viewer thousands of options to watch programs from legitimate services including the BBC iPlayer and Netflix. They are also being used to access illegal streams, particularly of live sport.... [ Read it >> ]

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Billions of stolen cookies are being sold on the dark web and Telegram, with over 1.2 billion containing session data that can grant cybercriminals access to accounts and systems without login credentials, bypassing MFA. The Register reports: More than 93.7 billion of them are currently available for criminals to buy online and of those, between 7-9 percent are active, on average, according to NordVPN's breakdown of stolen cookies by country. Adrianus Warmenhoven, cybersecurity advisor at NordVPN, said: "Cookies may seem harmless, but in the wrong hands, they're digital keys to our most private information. What was designed to enhance convenience is now a growing vulnerability exploited by cybercriminals worldwide. Most people don't realize that a stolen cookie can be just as dangerous as a password, despite being so willing to accept cookies when visiting websites, just to get rid of the prompt at the bottom of the screen. However, once these are intercepted, a cookie can give hackers direct access to all sorts of accounts containing sensitive data, without any login required."... [ Read it >> ]

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In a full-circle moment for Palmer Luckey, Meta and his defense tech company Anduril are teaming up to develop mixed reality headsets for the U.S. military under the Army's revamped SBMC Next program. The collaboration will merge Meta's Reality Labs hardware and Llama AI with Anduril's battlefield software, marking Meta's entry into military XR through the very company founded by Luckey after his controversial departure from Facebook. "I am glad to be working with Meta once again," Luckey said in a blog post. "My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that." TechCrunch reports: This partnership stems from the Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) Next program, formerly called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) Next. IVAS was a massive military contract, with a total $22 billion budget, originally awarded to Microsoft in 2018 intended to develop HoloLens-like AR glasses for soldiers. But after endless problems, in February the Army stripped management of the program from Microsoft and awarded it to Anduril, with Microsoft staying on as a cloud provider. The intent is to eventually have multiple suppliers of mixed reality glasses for soldiers.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The U.S. government today imposed economic sanctions on Funnull Technology Inc., a Philippines-based company that provides computer infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams known as "pig butchering." In January 2025, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Funnull was being used as a content delivery network that catered to cybercriminals seeking to route their traffic through U.S.-based cloud providers. "Americans lose billions of dollars annually to these cyber scams, with revenues generated from these crimes rising to record levels in 2024," reads a statement from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which sanctioned Funnull and its 40-year-old Chinese administrator Liu Lizhi. "Funnull has directly facilitated several of these schemes, resulting in over $200 million in U.S. victim-reported losses."... [ Read it >> ]

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Instagram now supports 3:4 aspect ratio photos, allowing users to upload images that "appear just exactly as you shot it." Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the update in a Threads post, noting that "almost every phone camera defaults to" that format. The Verge reports: An image from Instagram's broadcast channel shows how the change makes a difference. You can already post images with a rectangular aspect ratio of 4:5, but with 3:4, your photo won't be cropped at the ends. 3:4 photos are supported with single-photo uploads and with carousels, according to the channel. If you want, you can still post photos with a square or 4:5 aspect ratio.... [ Read it >> ]

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BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: Microsoft just can't leave well enough alone. The company is now injecting formatting features into Notepad, a program that has long been appreciated for one thing -- its simplicity. You see, starting with version 11.2504.50.0, this update is rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels, and it adds bold text, italics, hyperlinks, lists, and even headers. Sadly, this isn't a joke. Notepad is actually being turned into a watered-down word processor, complete with a formatting toolbar and Markdown support. Users can even toggle between styled content and raw Markdown syntax. And while Microsoft is giving you the option to disable formatting or strip it all out, it's clear the direction of the app is changing.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: If you've left a comment on a YouTube video, a new website claims it might be able to find every comment you've ever left on any video you've ever watched. Then an AI can build a profile of the commenter and guess where you live, what languages you speak, and what your politics might be. The service is called YouTube-Tools and is just the latest in a suite of web-based tools that started life as a site to investigate League of Legends usernames. Now it uses a modified large language model created by the company Mistral to generate a background report on YouTube commenters based on their conversations. Its developer claims it's meant to be used by the cops, but anyone can sign up. It costs about $20 a month to use and all you need to get started is a credit card and an email address.... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon has quietly removed billions of product listings through a confidential initiative called "Bend the Curve," according to Business Insider. The project planned to eliminate at least 24 billion ASINs -- unique product identifiers -- from Amazon's marketplace, reducing the total from a projected 74 billion to under 50 billion by December 2024. The purge targets "unproductive selection" including poor-selling items, listings without actual inventory, and product pages inactive for over two years. ... [ Read it >> ]

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United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has harsh words for budget carriers, calling their business model "dead."

"It's dead. Look, it's a crappy model. Sorry," he said when asked about the budget airline approach. Kirby argued that budget carriers like Southwest, Spirit, and Frontier built their operations around what he characterized as customer-hostile practices, saying "The model was, screw the customer ... Trick people, get them to buy, get them to come, and then charge them a whole bunch of fees that they aren't expecting." ... [ Read it >> ]

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WordPress.com parent company Automattic is changing direction... again. From a report: In a blog post titled "Returning to Core" published Thursday evening, Automattic announced it will unpause its contributions to the WordPress project. This is despite having said only last month that the 6.8 WordPress release would be the final major release for all of 2025. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Major broadband lobby groups have asked the Trump administration to sue states that require internet service providers to offer low-cost plans to low-income residents, following their unsuccessful court challenges against such laws. The cable, telecom, and mobile industry associations filed the request this week with the Justice Department's new Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force, specifically targeting New York's law that mandates $15 and $20 monthly broadband options for eligible customers. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Lovable, a Swedish startup that allows users to create websites and apps through natural language prompts, failed to address a critical security vulnerability for months after being notified, according to a new report. A study by Replit employees found that 170 of 1,645 Lovable-created applications exposed sensitive user information including names, email addresses, financial data, and API keys that could allow hackers to run up charges on customers' accounts. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: In a landmark ruling advancing efforts to hold major polluters accountable for transnational climate-related harms, on May 28 a German court concluded that a corporation can be held liable under civil law for its proportional contribution to global climate change, Climate Rights International said today. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House's sweeping "MAHA Report" appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence [non-paywalled source], resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday. Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The three largest U.S. airlines are charging solo travelers higher fares than passengers booking for two or more people on select domestic routes, a pricing strategy analysts believe targets business travelers, according to fare analysis by travel publication Thrifty Traveler.
... [ Read it >> ]

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Almost 40% of glaciers in existence today are already doomed to melt due to climate-heating emissions from fossil fuels, a study has found. The Guardian: The loss will soar to 75% if global heating reaches the 2.7C rise for which the world is currently on track. The massive loss of glaciers would push up sea levels, endangering millions of people and driving mass migration, profoundly affecting the billions reliant on glaciers to regulate the water used to grow food, the researchers said. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Google has begun automatically generating AI-powered email summaries for Gmail Workspace users, eliminating the need to manually trigger the feature that has been available since last year. The company's Gemini AI will now independently determine when longer email threads or messages with multiple replies would benefit from summarization, displaying these summaries above the email content itself. The automatic summaries currently appear only on mobile devices for English-language emails and may take up to two weeks to roll out to individual accounts, with Google providing no timeline for desktop expansion or availability to non-Workspace Gmail users.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Negotiations are under way between the UAE and OpenAI that may make the company's ChatGPT Plus artificial intelligence chatbot available to all residents free of charge, though a final deal has not been reached.

An agreement involving ChatGPT Plus would be part of the recently announced Stargate UAE infrastructure plan to create an AI hub in Abu Dhabi, according to a source familiar with the country's AI strategy. Abu Dhabi's AI company G42 has partnered with OpenAI, Oracle and Nvidia to set up Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt computing cluster that will operate in the newly established 5GW UAE -- US AI Campus.... [ Read it >> ]

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sinij shares a report from the BBC: France's National Assembly has voted to abolish low-emission zones, a key measure introduced during President Emmanuel Macron's first term to reduce city pollution. So-called ZFEs (zones a faibles emissions) have been criticized for hitting those who cannot afford less-polluting vehicles the hardest. A handful of MPs from Macron's party joined opposition parties from the right and far right in voting 98-51 to scrap the zones, which have gradually been extended across French cities since 2019. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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For the first time, scientists have directly observed atmospheric sputtering in action on Mars -- an erosion process driven by solar wind ions that may have played a major role in the planet's atmospheric and water loss. ScienceAlert reports: The only spacecraft with the equipment and orbital configuration to make these observations is NASA's MAVEN. The researchers carefully pored over the data collected by the spacecraft since it arrived in Mars orbit in September 2014, looking to find simultaneous observations of the solar electric field and an upper atmosphere abundance of argon -- one of the sputtered particles, used as a tracer for the phenomenon. They found that, above an altitude of 350 kilometers (217 miles), argon densities vary depending on the orientation of the solar wind electric field, compared to argon densities at lower altitudes that remain consistent.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Whether it is doing sums or working out what to text your new date, some tasks produce a furrowed brow. Now scientists say they have come up with a device to monitor such effort: an electronic tattoo, stuck to the forehead. The researchers say the device could prove valuable among pilots, healthcare workers and other professions where managing mental workload is crucial to preventing catastrophes. "For this kind of high-demand and high-stake scenario, eventually we hope to have this real-time mental workload decoder that can give people some warning and alert so that they can self-adjust, or they can ask AI or a co-worker to offload some of their work," said Dr Nanshu Lu, an author of the research from the University of Texas at Austin, adding the device may not only help workers avoid serious mistakes but also protect their health.... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon has launched a new innovation-focused team called ZeroOne, led by Xbox co-creator J Allard, to develop breakthrough consumer products across hardware and software. CNBC reports: The ZeroOne team is spread across Seattle, San Francisco and Sunnyvale, California, and is focused on both hardware and software projects, according to job postings from the past month. The name is a nod to its mission of developing emerging product ideas from conception to launch, or "zero to one." [...] The new group is being led by J Allard, who spent 19 years at Microsoft, most recently as technology chief of consumer products, a role he left in 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was a key architect of the Xbox game console, as well as the Zune, a failed iPod competitor.... [ Read it >> ]

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A Texas jury ruled that Intel may hold a license to patents owned by VLSI Technology through its agreement with Finjan Inc., both controlled by Fortress Investment Group -- potentially nullifying over $3 billion in previous patent infringement verdicts against Intel. Reuters reports: VLSI has sued Intel in multiple U.S. courts for allegedly infringing several patents covering semiconductor technology. A jury in Waco, Texas awarded VLSI $2.18 billion in their first trial in 2021, which a U.S. appeals court has since overturned and sent back for new proceedings.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An accused movie pirate who stole more than 1,000 Blu-ray discs and DVDs while working for a DVD manufacturing company struck a plea deal (PDF) this week to lower his sentence after the FBI claimed the man's piracy cost movie studios millions. Steven Hale no longer works for the DVD company. He was arrested in March, accused of "bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying" and ripping pre-release copies of movies he could only access because his former employer was used by major movie studios. As alleged by the feds, his game was beating studios to releases to achieve the greatest possible financial gains from online leaks.... [ Read it >> ]

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Google's Gemini AI can now analyze and summarize video files stored in Google Drive, letting users ask questions about content like meeting takeaways or product updates without watching the footage. The Verge reports: The Gemini in Drive feature provides a familiar chatbot interface that can provide quick summaries describing the footage or pull specific information. For example, users can ask Gemini to list action items mentioned in recorded meetings or highlight the biggest updates and new products in an announcement video, saving time spent on manually combing through and taking notes.... [ Read it >> ]

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A Texas jury ruled that Intel may hold a license to patents owned by VLSI Technology through its agreement with Finjan Inc., both controlled by Fortress Investment Group -- potentially nullifying over $3 billion in previous patent infringement verdicts against Intel. Reuters reports: VLSI has sued Intel in multiple U.S. courts for allegedly infringing several patents covering semiconductor technology. A jury in Waco, Texas awarded VLSI $2.18 billion in their first trial in 2021, which a U.S. appeals court has since overturned and sent back for new proceedings.... [ Read it >> ]

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