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.
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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.
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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."
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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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Kraken is launching tokenized versions of U.S. equities for 24/7 trading outside the U.S., giving global investors blockchain-based access to major companies like Apple and Tesla. Reuters reports: Tokenization refers to the process of issuing digital representations of publicly-traded securities. Instead of holding the securities directly, investors hold tokens that represent ownership of the securities. The tokens' launch outside the U.S. comes amid growing interest in blending traditional finance with blockchain infrastructure. While tokenized securities have yet to gain widespread adoption, proponents say they hold the potential to significantly reshape how people access and invest in financial markets.... [ Read it >> ]

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Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a press release from the White House, outlining a series of executive orders that overhaul the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and speed up deployment of new nuclear power reactions in the U.S.. From a report: The NRC is a 50-year-old, independent agency that regulates the nation's fleet of nuclear reactors. Trump's orders call for a "total and complete reform" of the agency, a senior White House official told reporters in a briefing. Under the new rules, the commission will be forced to decide on nuclear reactor licenses within 18 months. Trump said Friday the orders focus on small, advanced reactors that are viewed by many in the industry as the future. But the president also said his administration supports building large plants. "We're also talking about the big plants -- the very, very big, the biggest," Trump said. "We're going to be doing them also."... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Jalopnik: With the gradual rise of semi-autonomous vehicles, there will likely be multiple cameras pointing back when you pull out a phone to take a photo or record video of a car. One reddit user found out earlier this month that car-mounted lidar sensors can damage a phone camera under certain circumstances. It was the technological equivalent of staring directly into the Sun. Their phone's camera was toast, but only because it was close-up and pointed directly at the lidar sensor.... [ Read it >> ]

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Richard Speed writes via The Register: It was 30 years ago when the first public release of the Java programming language introduced the world to Write Once, Run Anywhere -- and showed devs something cuddlier than C and C++. Originally called "Oak," Java was designed in the early 1990s by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. Initially aimed at digital devices, its focus soon shifted to another platform that was pretty new at the time -- the World Wide Web.... [ Read it >> ]

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Google's new AI Mode for Search, which is rolling out to everyone in the U.S., has sparked outrage among publishers, who call it "the definition of theft" for using content without fair compensation and without offering a true opt-out option. Internal documents revealed by Bloomberg earlier this week suggest that Google considered giving publishers more control over how their content is used in AI-generated results but ultimately decided against it, prioritizing product functionality over publisher protections.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Nate Anderson: Don't worry about the "mission-driven not-for-profit" College Board -- it's drowning in cash. The US group, which administers the SAT and AP tests to college-bound students, paid its CEO $2.38 million in total compensation in 2023 (the most recent year data is available). The senior VP in charge of AP programs made $694,662 in total compensation, while the senior VP for Technology Strategy made $765,267 in total compensation. Given such eye-popping numbers, one would have expected the College Board's transition to digital exams to go smoothly, but it continues to have issues.... [ Read it >> ]

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Spain's grid operator has accused some large power plants of not doing their job to help regulate the country's electricity system in the moments before last month's catastrophic blackout across the Iberian peninsula. From a report: Beatriz Corredor, chair of grid operator Red Electrica's parent company, said power plants fell short in controlling the voltage of the electricity system. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Out of 186 countries, only Guyana produces enough food to self-sufficiently feed all its citizens without foreign imports, according to new research. From a report: The study, published in Nature Food, investigated how well each country could feed their populations in seven food groups: fruits, vegetables, dairy, fish, meat, plant-based protein and starchy staples. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Several romance novelists have accidentally left AI writing prompts embedded in their published books, exposing their use of chatbots, 404Media reports. Readers discovered passages like "Here's an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable" in K.C. Crowne's "Dark Obsession," for instance, and similar AI-generated instructions in works by Lena McDonald and Rania Faris.... [ Read it >> ]

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Rice plants can inherit tolerance to cold without changes to their genomes, according to a decade-long study carried out by researchers in China. From a report: The work, published in Cell this week, strengthens the evidence for a form of evolution in which environmental pressures induce heritable changes that do not alter an organism's DNA. The study conducted experiments that demonstrate, for the first time, the mechanism for these changes -- 'epigenetic' tweaks to chemical markers on the plant's DNA that don't actually tinker with the sequences themselves. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Harvard University's Galileo Project is using AI to automate the search for unidentified anomalous phenomena, marking a significant shift in how academics approach what was once considered fringe research. The project operates a Massachusetts observatory equipped with infrared cameras, acoustic sensors, and radio-frequency analyzers that continuously scan the sky for unusual objects. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Glitch, the coding platform where developers can share and remix projects, will soon no longer offer its core feature: hosting apps on the web. From a report: In an update on Thursday, Glitch CEO Anil Dash said it will stop hosting projects and close user profiles on July 8th, 2025 -- but stopped short of saying that it's shutting down completely. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Cornell University researchers have solved a kitchen mystery by demonstrating that sharp knives produce fewer and slower-moving droplets when cutting onions compared to dull blades. The findings used high-speed cameras and particle tracking to analyze droplet formation during onion cutting at speeds up to 20,000 frames per second. ... [ Read it >> ]

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