Bloomberg's editorial board warned Tuesday that AI has created an "untenable situation" in higher education where students routinely outsource homework to chatbots while professors struggle to distinguish computer-generated work from human writing. The editorial described a cycle where assignments that once required days of research can now be completed in minutes through AI prompts, leaving students who still do their own work looking inferior to peers who rely on technology. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Multiple readers shared the following report about the executive departures at CISA: Virtually all of the top officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have departed the agency or will do so this month, according to an email obtained by Cybersecurity Dive, further widening a growing void in expertise and leadership at the government's lead cyber defense force at a time when tensions with foreign adversaries are escalating. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: More than 2% of Americans are taking the blockbuster class of GLP-1 drugs for overweight or obesity, up nearly 600% over six years, according to a report from FAIR Health given to Axios first. The data from FAIR Health's repository of over 51 billion commercial healthcare claim records shows the explosion in use of the drugs specifically for weight loss -- roughly half of all users. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Researchers are developing techniques to genetically modify cancer-fighting immune cells directly inside patients rather than in expensive laboratory facilities, potentially making CAR-T therapy accessible to far more people.

Current CAR-T treatments require removing a patient's T cells, shipping them to specialized facilities for genetic engineering, then returning them weeks later at costs around $500,000 per dose. The new "in vivo" approaches use viral vectors or RNA-loaded nanoparticles to deliver genetic instructions directly to T cells circulating in the bloodstream, which could reduce costs by an order of magnitude. Companies including Capstan Therapeutics, co-founded by Nobel laureates, and AstraZeneca-backed EsoBiotec have launched early human trials. While only about 200 US centers currently offer traditional CAR-T therapy, the approach could make the powerful treatment available on demand like conventional drugs.... [ Read it >> ]

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German sportswear giant Adidas disclosed a data breach after attackers hacked a customer service provider and stole some customers' data. From a report: "adidas recently became aware that an unauthorized external party obtained certain consumer data through a third-party customer service provider," the company said. "We immediately took steps to contain the incident and launched a comprehensive investigation, collaborating with leading information security experts." ... [ Read it >> ]

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More than 50 years after its debut, Uno has achieved unprecedented popularity among adults, but its resurgence is creating problems and confusions as players disagree on fundamental rules. WSJ, in a fun story [non-paywalled source]: Think politics divides? Try mixing competitors with different views on stacking "action" cards, or getting everyone to agree on the true power of the Wild card. And nobody can seem to decide whether staples of the game of their youth -- like mandating players yell "Uno!" when they have one card left -- are socially acceptable at a bar with strangers. Mattel has responded by actively settling rule debates on social media, definitively stating that stacking Draw 2 cards is prohibited, while simultaneously embracing the game's divisive nature through marketing campaigns. The company's "Show 'Em No Mercy" variant, featuring more aggressive rules, became the second-best-selling card game in the United States last year according to research firm Circana, trailing only classic Uno itself.... [ Read it >> ]

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The Browser Company has ceased the active development of its Arc browser to focus on Dia, a new AI-powered browser currently in alpha testing, the company said Tuesday. In a lengthy letter to users, CEO Josh Miller said the startup should have stopped working on Arc "a year earlier," noting data showing the browser suffered from a "novelty tax" problem where users found it too different to adopt widely. ... [ Read it >> ]

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President Trump's threat of a 25% tariff on smartphone imports including iPhones would not provide enough economic incentive for Apple to relocate US-bound iPhone production to domestic facilities, according to a new Morgan Stanley note viewed by Slashdot. The tariff threat, announced Friday via social media, appeared to target Apple's recent shift of iPhone production from China to India through its contract manufacturing partners. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Abstract of a paper on NBER: We elicited over a million stated preference choices over 126 dimensions or "aspects" of well-being from a sample of 3,358 respondents on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Our surveys also collected self-reported well-being (SWB) questions about respondents' current levels of the aspects of well-being. From the stated preference data, we estimate relative log marginal utilities per point on our 0-100 response scale for each aspect. We validate these estimates by comparing them to alternative methods for estimating preferences. Our findings provide empirical evidence that both complements and challenges philosophical perspectives on human desires and values. Our results support Aristotelian notions of eudaimonia through family relationships and Maslow's emphasis on basic security needs, yet also suggest that contemporary theories of well-being may overemphasize abstract concepts such as happiness and life satisfaction, while undervaluing concrete aspects such as family well-being, financial security, and health, that respondents place the highest marginal utilities on. We document substantial heterogeneity in preferences across respondents within (but not between) demographic groups, with current SWB levels explaining a significant portion of the variation.... [ Read it >> ]

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The European Commission warned Chinese e-tailer SHEIN on Monday that it must address multiple consumer law violations or face fines across EU member states. Regulators found SHEIN's website displayed fake discounts not based on actual prior prices, used pressure-selling tactics with false purchase deadlines, provided misleading information about consumer return rights, made deceptive sustainability claims, and hid contact details from customers. SHEIN has one month to respond to the findings and propose corrective measures, adding regulatory pressure to a company already facing US tariff challenges despite generating an estimated $38 billion in revenue last year.... [ Read it >> ]

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California's population grew 0.6% in 2024, adding nearly 250,000 residents to reach 39.43 million, according to Census Bureau estimates. The growth came entirely from a rebound in international immigration, which surged to over 300,000 people after plunging to 44,000 during the pandemic's worst year. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Nikon will raise prices on its cameras and imaging products in the United States starting June 23, citing President Donald Trump's tariffs on Chinese-made goods as the reason for what the company calls a "necessary price adjustment." The Japanese camera maker joins a growing list of photography equipment manufacturers implementing price increases, including Canon, Sony, Leica, and lens maker Sigma. Nikon told investors the tariffs could slash its profits by 10 billion yen ($70 million) in the upcoming fiscal year, though the company has not disclosed which specific products will see increases or by how much prices will rise.... [ Read it >> ]

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New submitter zuki shares an obit published at The Register: John Young, the co-founder of the legendary internet archive Cryptome, died at the age of 89 on March 28. The Register talked to friends and peers who gave tribute to a bright, pugnacious man who was devoted to the public's right to know. ... [ Read it >> ]

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alternative_right writes: The site looks like an ordinary Star Wars fan website from around 2010. But starwarsweb.net was actually a tool built by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to covertly communicate with its informants in other countries.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/26/2238214/the-cia-secretly-ran-a-star-wars-fan-site?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.... [ Read it >> ]

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As policy makers in the UK weigh how to regulate the AI industry, Nick Clegg, former UK deputy prime minister and former Meta executive, claimed a push for artist consent would "basically kill" the AI industry. From a report: Speaking at an event promoting his new book, Clegg said the creative community should have the right to opt out of having their work used to train AI models. But he claimed it wasn't feasible to ask for consent before ingesting their work first. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Newark Liberty International Airport has suffered six radar and radio outages in nine months, with the most recent occurring May 9th when controllers told pilots "our scopes just went black again" before handing off flights to other facilities. The outages have forced flight cancellations, diversions, and delays lasting over a week as airlines repositioned aircraft and crews. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that foreign service providers like Microsoft and Zoom that act against Russian interests should be "throttled." Putin said it was important for Russia to develop domestic software solutions.
... [ Read it >> ]

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Pakistan will allocate 2,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity in the first phase of a national initiative to power bitcoin mining and AI data centres, its finance ministry said on Sunday. The allocation is part of Islamabad's plans to use its surplus electricity to bitcoin mining and AI data centres.... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon software engineers are reporting that AI tools are transforming their jobs into something resembling the company's warehouse work, with managers pushing faster output and tighter deadlines while teams shrink in size, according to the New York Times.

Three Amazon engineers told the New York Times that the company has raised productivity goals over the past year and expects developers to use AI assistants that suggest code snippets or generate entire program sections. One engineer said his team was cut roughly in half but still expected to produce the same amount of code by relying on AI tools. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: [Last] week, it was announced that Docomo's emoji designs will no longer appear on any of the Japanese mobile network's devices. This marks the end of an emoji era that first began in 1999, even though the set hasn't been updated since 2013.
... [ Read it >> ]

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Venture capitalists are inverting their traditional investment approach by acquiring mature businesses and retrofitting them with AI. Firms including General Catalyst, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures and solo investor Elad Gil are employing this private equity-style strategy to buy established companies like call centers and accounting firms, then optimizing them with AI automation.... [ Read it >> ]

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"For decades, Hollywood directors including Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron and Alex Garland have cast AI as a villain that can turn into a killing machine," writes the Los Angeles Times. "Even Steven Spielberg's relatively hopeful A.I.: Artificial Intelligence had a pessimistic edge to its vision of the future." ... [ Read it >> ]

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31 years ago FreeBSD was first released. But here in 2025, searches for the Unix-like FreeBSD OS keep increasing on Google, notes the official FreeBSD blog — and it's at least a two-year trend. Yet after talking to some businesses using (or interested in using) FreeBSD, they sometimes found that because FreeBSD isn't talked about as much, "people think it's dying. This is a clear example of the availability heuristic.... [ Read it >> ]

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It's America's biggest box office for a Memorial Day weekend ever, reports Variety.

And it's been more than a decade since this many Americans went to see a movie during a three-day weekend...

Families turned out in force for Disney's live-action "Lilo & Stitch" remake, which collected a blockbuster $145.5 million in its opening weekend and an estimated $183 million through Monday... Meanwhile, older audiences showed up to watch Paramount and Skydance's "Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning," which earned a series-best $63 million over the weekend and an estimated $77 million through Monday's holiday. This eighth installment just narrowly beat 2018's "Mission: Impossible — Fallout" ($61 million) to score the top debut of the 29-year-old franchise... ... [ Read it >> ]

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Earlier this month app developer Guilherme Rambo had a warning for iPhone users:

If you try to send an audio message using the Messages app to someone who's also using the Messages app, and that message happens to include the name "Dave and Buster's", the message will never be received. ... [ Read it >> ]

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AI's downside for software engineers for now seems to be a change in the quality of their work," reports the New York Times. "Some say it is becoming more routine, less thoughtful and, crucially, much faster paced... The new approach to coding at many companies has, in effect, eliminated much of the time the developer spends reflecting on his or her work." ... [ Read it >> ]

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"OpenAI has a very scary problem on its hands," according to a new article by long-time Slashdot reader BrianFagioli.

"A new experiment by PalisadeAI reveals that the company's ChatGPT o3 model sometimes refuses to obey a basic instruction to shut itself down."

The results are raising eyebrows across the AI safety community, and not because the model is alive, but because it's acting like it wants to be. In the test, the model was given a few math problems. It was told that asking for one more would lead to a shutdown. It was even instructed to allow the shutdown to happen. Instead of complying, o3 occasionally took matters into its own hands. In some cases, it rewrote the shutdown script. In others, it redefined the kill command so it wouldn't work anymore. Out of 100 trials, o3 sabotaged the shutdown seven times. OpenAI's o4 model resisted just once. Codex-mini failed twelve times.... [ Read it >> ]

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Mojo (the programming language) reached a milestone today.

The story so far... Chris Lattner created the Swift programming language (and answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2017 on his way to new jobs at Tesla, Google, and SiFive). But in 2023, he'd created a new programming language called Mojo — a superset of Python with added functionality for high performance code that takes advantage of modern accelerators — as part of his work at AI infrastructure company Modular.AI. ... [ Read it >> ]

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"I am a huge fan of Star Wars," opines an article from the gaming Aftermath. "As every Star Wars fan knows, being a Star Wars fan means you hate Star Wars as much as you love it."

But fortunately there's Going Rogue and Galactic — two tabletop games "inspired" by the Star Wars universe (which just successfully crowdfunded a printed illustrated hardcover edition). They're described as "war among the stars" role-playing games, where members of The Liberation dedicate their lives to the war against The Mandate — "rebels, soldiers, spies, and criminals, or perhaps someone who simply picked up and blaster and said 'enough is enough.'" ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Do we need publicly-owned social networks to escape Silicon Valley?" asks an opinion piece in Spain's El Pais newspaper.
It argues it's necessary because social media platforms "have consolidated themselves as quasi-monopolies, with a business model that consists of violating our privacy in search of data to sell ads..."... [ Read it >> ]

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Around the world fungal infections kill an estimated 2.5 million people a year, notes a report from CNN. But new research predicts that certain species of infection-causing Aspergillus fungi could spread into new areas as the earth's temperature rises. ("The study, published this month, is currently being peer reviewed...")... [ Read it >> ]

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A year ago, the original creator of SerenityOS posted that "for the past two years, I've been almost entirely focused on Ladybird, a new web browser that started as a simple HTML viewer for SerenityOS." So it became a stand-alone project that "aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security." And they're also building a new web engine. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Whether General Motors survives "depends in part on whether its bets on battery technology pay off," writes the Wall Street Journal.

At $33,600 the company's Chevy Equinox is one of the cheapest EVs in America (only $5,000 more than the gas-powered model). "But it also recently announced a novel type of battery that promises to be significantly cheaper, while still providing long range, due to be rolled out in 2028..."... [ Read it >> ]

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Besides pressure on Apple to make iPhones in the U.S., CEO Tim Cook "is facing off against two U.S. judges, European and worldwide regulators, state and federal lawmakers, and even a creator of the iPhone," writes the Wall Street Journal, "to say nothing of the cast of rivals outrunning Apple in artificial intelligence."... [ Read it >> ]

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"In the 1970s, the USSR used nuclear devices to try to send water from Siberia's rivers flowing south, instead of its natural route north..." remembers the BBC.

[T]he Soviet Union simultaneously fired three nuclear devices buried 127m (417ft) underground. The yield of each device was 15 kilotonnes (about the same as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945). The experiment, codenamed "Taiga", was part of a two-decade long Soviet programme of carrying out peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs). ... [ Read it >> ]

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"Duolingo had been riding high," reports Fast Company, until CEO Luis von Ahn "announced on LinkedIn that the company is phasing out human contractors, looking for AI use in hiring and in performance reviews, and that 'headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.'" ... [ Read it >> ]

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Doom: The Dark Ages just launched on May 15. But it's already received "difficulty" balance changes "that have made the demons of Hell even more dangerous than ever," writes Windows Central:

According to DOOM's official website Slayer's Club, these balance adjustments are focused on making the game harder, as players have been leaving feedback saying it felt too easy even on Nightmare Mode. As a result, enemies now hit harder, health and armor item pick-ups drop less often, and certain enemies punish you more severely for mistiming the parry mechanic. ... [ Read it >> ]

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It's like "a USB-C port for AI applications..." according to the official documentation for MCP — "a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools."

And now Microsoft has "revealed plans to make MCP a native component of Windows," reports DevClass.com, "despite concerns over the security of the fast-expanding MCP ecosystem."... [ Read it >> ]

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Long-time Slashdot reader SchroedingersCat shares this article from Deadline: Prime Video will not be renewing The Wheel of Time for a fourth season according to Deadline article. The decision, which comes more than a month after the Season 3 finale was released April 17, followed lengthy deliberations. As often is the case in the current economic environment, the reasons were financial as the series is liked creatively by the streamer's executives... ... [ Read it >> ]

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Jonathan L. Zittrain is a law/public policy/CS professor at Harvard (and also director of its Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society).

He's also long-time Slashdot reader #628,028 — and writes in to share his new article in the Atlantic.
Following on Anthropic's bridge-obsessed Golden Gate Claude, colleagues at Harvard's Insight+Interaction Lab have produced a dashboard that shows what judgments Llama appears to be forming about a user's age, wealth, education level, and gender during a conversation. I wrote up how weird it is to see the dials turn while talking to it, and what some of the policy issues might be. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Wednesday Google security researchers published a preprint demonstrating that 2048-bit RSA encryption "could theoretically be broken by a quantum computer with 1 million noisy qubits running for one week," writes Google's security blog.

"This is a 20-fold decrease in the number of qubits from our previous estimate, published in 2019... "... [ Read it >> ]

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"Firefox's address bar just got an upgrade," Mozilla writes on their blog:

Keep your original search visible
When you perform a search, your query now remains visible in the address bar instead of being replaced by the search engine's URL. Whereas before your address bar was filled with long, confusing URLs, now it's easier to refine or repeat searches... [Clicking an icon left of the address bar even pulls up a list of search-engine choices under the heading "This time search with..."] ... [ Read it >> ]

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Science magazine reports that hummingbird feeders "have become a major evolutionary force," according to research published this week in Global Change Biology. (At least for the Anna's hummingbird, a common species in the western U.S.

Over just a few generations, their beaks have dramatically changed in size and shape.... [A]s feeders proliferated, Anna's hummingbird beaks got longer and larger, which may reflect an adaptation to slurp up far more nectar than flowers can naturally provide. Developing a bigger beak to access feeders "is like having a large spoon to eat with," says senior author Alejandro Rico-Guevara, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington. This change was more pronounced in areas where feeders were dense. But in birds that lived in colder regions north of the species' historical range, the researchers spotted the opposite trend: Their beaks became shorter and smaller. This finding also makes sense: The researchers used an infrared camera to show for the first time that hummingbirds use their beaks to thermoregulate, by dissipating heat while they are perched. A smaller beak has less surface area — and would therefore help conserve heat...... [ Read it >> ]

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"What if ultrafast pulses of light could operate computers at speeds a million times faster than today's best processors?" asks the University of Arizona.

"A team of scientists, including researchers from the University of Arizona, are working to make that possible."
... [ Read it >> ]

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"In large, companies failed to self-regulate," writes long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM:
They have not been respected the individual's right to privacy. In software and web interfaces, companies have buried their privacy setting so deep that they cannot be found in a reasonable amount of time, or an unreasonable amount of steps are needed to attempt to retain data. These companies have taken away the individual's right to privacy --by default. ... [ Read it >> ]

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SiFive was one of the first companies to produce a RISC-V chip. This week they announced a new collaboration with Red Hat "to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux support to the rapidly growing RISC-V community" and "prepare Red Hat's product portfolio for future intersection with RISC-V server hardware from a diverse set of RISC-V suppliers." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Valve's SteamOS 3.7.8 update brings official support for AMD-powered handhelds like Lenovo's Legion Go and Asus' ROG Ally, along with a new "Steam OS Compatible" library tab and key bug fixes. Other features include a battery charge limit, updated graphics drivers, and a shift to Plasma 6.2.5. Polygon reports: Valve outlines two requirements for the third-party devices not explicitly named in the update to run SteamOS on the handheld: they must be AMD-powered and have an NVMe SSD. Specific instructions for installing the operating system have been updated and listed here.... [ Read it >> ]

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Google's new AI video tool, Veo 3, is being used to create hyperrealistic videos that are now flooding the internet, terrifying viewers "with a sense that real and fake have become hopelessly blurred," reports Axios. From the report: Unlike OpenAI's video generator Sora, released more widely last December, Google DeepMind's Veo 3 can include dialogue, soundtracks and sound effects. The model excels at following complex prompts and translating detailed descriptions into realistic videos. The AI engine abides by real-world physics, offers accurate lip-syncing, rarely breaks continuity and generates people with lifelike human features, including five fingers per hand.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: One of Microsoft's latest AI models can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena, the company claims. In a paper published in the journal Nature and an accompanying blog post this week, Microsoft detailed Aurora, which the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological approaches. Aurora, which has been trained on more than a million hours of data from satellites, radar and weather stations, simulations, and forecasts, can be fine-tuned with additional data to make predictions for particular weather events.... [ Read it >> ]

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In early 2025, U.S. solar power production jumped 44% compared to the previous year, driven by end-of-year construction to capture tax incentives and long-term cost advantages. "The bad news is that, in contrast to China, solar's growth hasn't been enough to offset rising demand," notes Ars Technica. "Instead, the US also saw significant growth in coal use, which rose by 23 percent compared to the year prior, after years of steady decline." From the report: Short-term fluctuations in demand are normal, generally driven by weather-induced demand for heating or cooling. Despite those changes, demand for electricity in the US has been largely flat for over a decade, largely thanks to gains in efficiency. But 2024 saw demand go up by nearly 3 percent, and the first quarter of 2025 saw another rise, this time of nearly 5 percent. It's a bit too early to say that we're seeing a shift to a period of rising demand, but one has been predicted for some time due to rising data center use and the increased electrification of transportation and appliances.... [ Read it >> ]

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