Amazon's data-center expansion turned Umatilla, Oregon into an unlikely nerve center for American infrastructure investment. The community of roughly 8,000 residents has seen home prices double and local government budgets surge from $7 million in 2011 to a hundred and $44 million in the past fiscal year. Yesenia Leon-Tejeda, a Realtor and daughter of Mexican-born farmhands who once worked 12-hour shifts at a distribution center, is now on pace to close 35 deals this year.

Federal data shows investment in software and information-processing equipment drove most of America's GDP growth in the first half of 2025. Goldman Sachs estimated that roughly 72% of all server-farm capacity sat in just 1% of counties as of July. The region's hydroelectric dams and cheap power attracted Amazon Web Services more than a decade ago. Growth has brought rising costs for housing and child care. Political tensions over spending erupted this year when Mayor Caden Sipe sued the city manager and council members.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/04/147232/what-happened-when-small-town-america-became-data-center-usa?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликовано: Tue, 04 Nov 2025 13:01:36 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / DIY или Сделай сам / Хабр

Сегодня мы поговорим о такой интересной теме, как печать нейлоном. Кому эта тема будет интересна: любому, кто занимается техническим творчеством и собирает механические устройства, где требуются шестерёнчатые передачи с повышенной стойкостью к износу, так как нейлон весьма устойчив к трению. Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/companies/ruvds/articles/960250/

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: U.S. prosecutors have charged two rogue employees of a cybersecurity company that specializes in negotiating ransom payments to hackers on behalf of their victims with carrying out ransomware attacks of their own. Last month, the Department of Justice indicted Kevin Tyler Martin and another unnamed employee, who both worked as ransomware negotiators at DigitalMint, with three counts of computer hacking and extortion related to a series of attempted ransomware attacks against at least five U.S.-based companies.

Prosecutors also charged a third individual, Ryan Clifford Goldberg, a former incident response manager at cybersecurity giant Sygnia, as part of the scheme. The three are accused of hacking into companies, stealing their sensitive data, and deploying ransomware developed by the ALPHV/BlackCat group. [...] According to an FBI affidavit filed in September, the rogue employees received more than $1.2 million in ransom payments from one victim, a medical device maker in Florida. They also targeted several other companies, including a Virginia-based drone maker and a Maryland-headquartered pharmaceutical company.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/11/04/0317218/doj-accuses-us-ransomware-negotiators-of-launching-their-own-ransomware-attacks?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликовано: Tue, 04 Nov 2025 11:39:53 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / Робототехника / Хабр

На днях по AI пабликам завирусился робот 1X Neo, который заявляется разработчиками как человекоподобный робот для помощи по дому. Мне стало жутко интересно покопаться в устройстве и начинке этого робота, потому что скрещивание VLM и механизмов может привести к огромному прорыву в индустрии и новым большим изменениям.Поговорим про устройство робота, железо и софт на борту, прикладные задачи и ближайшее будущее. Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/articles/963020/

Опубликовано: 2025-11-04T10:59:08+00:00

Этот короткий ролик — своего рода научная фантазия на тему строительства пирамид. Текст, видеоряд и озвучка созданы Сергеем Кривоплясовым с помощью искусственного интеллекта, в контакте со специалистами по Древнему Египту.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHr_qkm9EHE

Опубликовано: Tue, 04 Nov 2025 10:38:58 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / Программирование микроконтроллеров / Хабр

Близится Новый год, а гирлянда на ёлку не готова. В комоде уложена старая, её использовали уже пять раз и хочется чего-то нового. Предлагаю сделать свою, на популярной плате STM32 BluePIll в связке с адресными светодиодами. Это история с открытым концом. Если читателю идея покажется интересной, будет прошивка на git с реализацией интересных задумок; в противном случае, придётся купить готовую на маркетплейсе. Но мы же этого не допустим? Предложить идею]]>

https://habr.com/ru/articles/962930/

Опубликовано: Tue, 04 Nov 2025 09:52:11 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / Робототехника / Хабр

Может кто помнит старый киберпанковский фильм «Джонни Мнемоник». При просмотре меня больше всего поразил аугментированный дельфин, разум которого усиливался имплантами, которые превращали рыбу в ментальное оружие. Что ж, сегодня Китай пошел иным путем, создав роботов-медуз которые неотличимы от настоящих и способны собирать и передавать данные, в целях шпионажа. Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/articles/962982/

Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: Sales of electric vehicles surged in September as shoppers rushed to take advantage of the $7500 federal EV tax credit before it disappeared at the end of the month. With the government subsidies now gone, EV sales were expected to take a hit in October. While only a few automakers still report sales on a monthly basis, the results we do have do not paint a rosy picture for EVs in a post-tax credit world.

The Korean automakers were hit particularly hard by the loss of the tax credit. The Hyundai Ioniq 5, which was the fifth-best-selling EV through the third quarter of this year, experienced a 63 percent drop, moving 1642 units in October 2025, down from 4498 in 2024. Its platform-mates saw similar declines. The Kia EV6 moved just 508 units, down 71 percent versus the same month the year before, while the luxurious Genesis GV60 only found 93 buyers, a 54 percent slide year over year. Things were even worse at Honda. While the Acura ZDX was recently discontinued after just a single model year, the related Honda Prologue remains on sale but registered just 806 units, down 81 percent from 4130 sales in October 2024. [...]

Obviously, this isn't the full picture, as several major players -- including General Motors, Toyota, Nissan, and Volkswagen -- only release sales reports on a quarterly basis, and others, such as Tesla and Rivian, don't break out individual sales at all. But with four of the top 10 bestselling EVs through Q3 all showing noteworthy declines in October, it spells trouble for the EV market at large. The end-of-year sales figures will provide a much clearer picture of whether October was just a blip or the start of a much more widespread problem for EV sales.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/04/039212/ev-sales-plummet-in-october-after-federal-tax-credit-ends?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликовано: Tue, 04 Nov 2025 08:58:23 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / Робототехника / Хабр

В США роботы подвозят стеллажи, сортируют товары и укладывают коробки. В России те же задачи выполняют люди с тележками. Почему разрыв в технологиях достиг десятилетия и можно ли его сократить? Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/articles/962972/

Опубликовано: Tue, 04 Nov 2025 09:01:56 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / DIY или Сделай сам / Хабр

Раньше для генерации композитного видеосигнала требовались схемотехнические решения, а теперь задачу можно решить, используя микроконтроллер и цифроаналоговый преобразователь.Производительности микроконтроллера хватает для генерирования сигнала с достаточной степенью дискретизации, а цифроаналоговый преобразователь можно собрать, используя минимум электронных компонентов. Естественно, качество такого композитного видеосигнала будет невысоким, но думаю, эффект «Wow» и почва для экспериментов будут обеспечены.Идея генерации композитного сигнала может показаться банальной, так как в интернете без труда можно найти примеры генерации. Но я не встречал системного описания этой темы и хочу исправить этот недочёт. Изначально я хотел это оформить в виде одной статьи, но потом решил, что лучше это оформить в виде серии из двух статей, так как объём одной получился отпугивающим.В школе нам давали знания, но редко говорили, где они могут пригодиться. Ещё раз я убедился, что знание — это сила. Знание линейной алгебры, тригонометрии, дифференциального исчисления, оптики, электромагнетизма, биологии, физиологии и других дисциплин позволило человечеству создать телевидение.К сожалению, всё включить даже в серию статей невозможно, как и невозможно включить ощущения в моменты озарения, когда во вроде бы уже знакомой теме находишь что-то новое. Я надеюсь, что и читатели узнают что-то новое.Кому интересно скоротать несколько вечеров, хочется улучшить свои знания и умения, добро пожаловать под кат. Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/companies/ruvds/articles/950630/

Доступен релиз проекта lsFusion 6.1, развивающего декларативную платформу для разработки бизнес- и веб-приложений. Платформа подходит для разработки корпоративных и учётных приложений и может применяться в качестве открытой и бесплатной альтернативы платформе 1С. Код проекта написан на языке Java и распространяется под лицензией LGPLv3. Типовое ERP-решение для малого и среднего бизнеса MyCompany, использующее lsFusion, распространяется под лицензией Apache 2.0.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=64177

Компания Steinberg, занимающаяся производством оборудования и программных систем для музыкальной индустрии, открыла исходный код инструментариев, связанных с разработкой плагинов VST 3 (Virtual Studio Technology) и использованием протокола ASIO (Audio Stream Input/Output). Выпуск VST SDK 3.8 открыт под лицензий MIT. Также предложен открытый вариант ASIO SDK, доступный под лицензией GPLv3. Для продвижения VST SDK как открытого проекта запущен отдельный сайт vstdev.org. Поддерживается работа в Linux, Windows и macOS.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=64176

TOP10 VISITORS:

[1] ChatGPT point=1 web=1406 up=31.9MB (31%) <--- ChatGPT
[2] 37.252.14.x point=143 web=0 up=27.0MB (26%) <--- ake (6/hr)
[3] 45.135.180.x point=240 web=0 up=20.8MB (20%) <--- yesterlink (10/hr)
[4] PetalBot point=4 web=808 up=4.7MB (4%) <--- PetalBot
[5] Amazon point=0 web=179 up=4.4MB (4%)
[6] 94.25.231.x point=2 web=0 up=1.8MB (1%) <--- 94.25.231.x
[7] TikTok point=1 web=129 up=1.5MB (1%) <--- TikTok
[8] Google point=2 web=193 up=1.3MB (1%) <--- Google
[9] 217.114.158.x point=25 web=0 up=1.0MB (1%) <--- fox (1/hr)
[10] 216.244.66.x point=0 web=27 up=0.6MB (<1%)

TOTAL TRAFFIC: 102MB

Australia's new "solar sharer" program will give households in NSW, south-east Queensland, and South Australia at least three hours of free solar power each day starting in 2026 -- even for those without rooftop panels. Other areas will potentially follow in 2027. The Guardian reports: The government said Australians could schedule appliances such as washing machines, dishwashers and air conditioners and charge electric vehicles and household batteries during this time. The solar sharer scheme would be implemented through a change to the default market offer that sets the maximum price retailers can charge customers for electricity in parts of the country. The climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, said the program would ensure "every last ray of sunshine was powering our homes" instead of some solar energy being wasted.

Australians have installed more than 4m solar systems and there is regularly cheap excess generation in the middle of the day. Part of the rationale for the program is that it could shift demand for electricity from peak times -- particularly early in the evening -- to when it is sunniest. This could help minimize peak electricity prices and reduce the need for network upgrades and intervention to ensure the power grid was stable.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/11/04/032244/australians-to-get-at-least-three-hours-a-day-of-free-solar-power---even-if-they-dont-have-solar-panels?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

После трёх лет разработки опубликована спецификация для формата изображений AVIF 1.2 (AV1 Image Format), использующего технологии внутрикадрового сжатия, применяемые в формате кодирования видео AV1. Контейнер для распространения данных в формате AVIF аналогичен HEIF. Помимо изображений в стандартном динамическом диапазоне (SDR), AVIF поддерживает изображения в расширенном динамическом диапазоне (HDR, High Dynamic Range) и цветовом пространстве Wide-gamut.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=64175

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: An Antarctic glacier shrunk by nearly 50% in just two months, the fastest retreat recorded in modern history, according to a new study -- and the way it retreated could have big implications for global sea level rise. The Hektoria Glacier, roughly the size of Philadelphia, is on the Antarctic Peninsula, a spindly chain of mountains sticking off the continent like a thumb pointing toward South America. It is one of the fastest warming regions on Earth.

Grounded glaciers like Hektoria, which rest on the seabed and don't float, generally retreat no more than a few hundred meters a year. But between November and December 2022, Hektoria retreated by 5 miles, according to the study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience. [...] Understanding more about why this happened is vital; if larger glaciers retreat at similar rates, it could have "catastrophic implications for sea level rise," the authors wrote in a statement accompanying the report. Antarctica holds enough ice to raise global sea level by around 190 feet. Models show that the latest time this kind of ice plain melting occurred was between about 15,000 and 19,000 years ago, "during a period of warming that ended the last Ice Age," notes the report.

"[W]e hadn't seen it play out live before, certainly not at this rate," said Naomi Ochwat, a study co-author and postdoctoral associate at the University of Colorado Boulder.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/04/0026217/antarctic-glacier-saw-the-fastest-retreat-in-modern-history?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Bruce66423 shares a report from the Los Angeles Times: The board of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on Tuesday approved a controversial plan to convert part of the city's largest natural gas-fired power plant into one that also can burn hydrogen. In a 3-0 vote, the DWP board signed off on the final environmental impact report for an $800-million modernization of Units 1 and 2 of the Scattergood Generating Station in Playa del Rey. The power plant dates to the late 1950s and both units are legally required to be shut down by the end of 2029. In their place, the DWP will install new combined-cycle turbines that are expected to operate on a mixture of natural gas and at least 30% hydrogen with the ultimate goal of running entirely on hydrogen as more supply becomes available.

The hydrogen burned at Scattergood is supposed to be green, meaning it is produced by splitting water molecules through a process called electrolysis. Hydrogen does not emit planet-warming carbon dioxide when it is burned, unlike natural gas. [...] Although burning hydrogen does not produce CO2, the high-temperature combustion process can emit nitrogen oxides, or NOx, a key component of smog. [...] [T]he approved plan contains no specifics about where the hydrogen will come from or how it will get to the site. "The green hydrogen that would supply the proposed project has not yet been identified," the environmental report says. Industry experts and officials said the project will help drive the necessary hydrogen production. "Burning hydrogen produced by 'excess' solar or wind power is a means of energy storage," adds Slashdot reader Bruce66423. "The hard question is whether it's the best solution to the storage problem given that other solutions appear to be emerging that would require less infrastructure investment (think pipes to move the hydrogen to the plant and tanks to store it for later use)."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/2351252/ladwp-says-it-will-shift-its-largest-gas-power-plant-to-hydrogen?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A new class-action lawsuit accuses Spotify of allowing billions of fraudulent Drake streams generated by bots between 2022 and 2025, allegedly inflating his royalties at the expense of other artists. "Spotify pays streaming royalties using a 'pro-rata' model based on an artist's market share," notes Consequence. "Each month, revenue from subscriptions and ads is collected into a single, fixed 'pot' of money, which is then distributed to rights holders based on their percentage of the platform's total streams. Because this pot is fixed, an artist who artificially inflates their numbers through bots would dilute the value of every legitimate stream. This allows them to take a larger share of the pot than they earned, effectively siphoning royalties that should have gone to other artists." From the report: According to Rolling Stone, the lawsuit alleges bot use is a widespread problem on Spotify. However, Drake is the only example named, based on "voluminous information" which the company "knows or should know" that proves a "substantial, non-trivial percentage" of his approximately 37 billion streams were "inauthentic and appeared to be the work of a sprawling network of Bot Accounts."

The complaint claims this alleged fraudulent activity took place between "January 2022 and September 2025," with an examination of "abnormal VPN usage" revealing at least 250,000 streams of Drake's song "No Face" during a four-day period in 2024 were actually from Turkey "but were falsely geomapped through the coordinated use of VPNs to the United Kingdom in [an] attempt to obscure their origins." Other notable allegations in the lawsuit are that "a large percentage" of accounts were concentrated in areas where the population could not support such a high volume of streams, including those with "zero residential addresses." The suit also points to "significant and irregular uptick months" for Drake's songs long after their release, as well as a "slower and less dramatic" downtick in streams compared to other artists.

Noting a "staggering and irregular" streaming of Drake's music by individuals, the suit also claims there are a "massive amount of accounts" listening to his songs "23 hours a day." Less than 2% of those users account for "roughly 15 percent" of his streams. "Drake's music accumulated far higher total streams compared to other highly streamed artists, even though those artists had far more 'users' than Drake," the lawsuit concludes.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/11/04/0011221/spotify-sued-over-billions-of-fraudulent-drake-streams?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

concertina226 shares a report from The Register: [A massive power outage in April left tens of millions across Spain, Portugal, and parts of France without electricity for hours due to cascading grid failures, exposing how fragile and interconnected Europe's energy infrastructure is. The incident, though not a cyberattack, reignited concerns about the vulnerability of aging, fragmented, and insecure operational technology systems that could be easily exploited in future cyber or ransomware attacks.] This headache is one the European Commission is focused on. It is funding several projects looking at making electric grids more resilient, such as the eFort framework being developed by cybersecurity researchers at the independent non-profit Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).

TNO's SOARCA tool is the first ever open source security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platform designed to protect power plants by automating the orchestration of the response to physical attacks, as well as cyberattacks, on substations and the network, and the first country to demo it will be the Ukraine this year. At the moment, SOAR systems only exist for dedicated IT environments. The researchers' design includes a SOAR system in each layer of the power station: the substation, the control room, the enterprise layer, the cloud, or the security operations centre (SOC), so that the SOC and the control room work together to detect anomalies in the network, whether it's an attacker exploiting a vulnerability, a malicious device being plugged into a substation, or a physical attack like a missile hitting a substation. The idea is to be able to isolate potential problems and prevent lateral movement from one device to another or privilege escalation, so an attacker cannot go through the network to the central IT management system of the electricity grid. [...]

The SOARCA tool is underpinned by CACAO Playbooks, an open source specification developed by the OASIS Open standards body and its members (which include lots of tech giants and US government agencies) to create standardized predefined, automated workflows that can detect intrusions and changes made by malicious actors, and then carry out a series of steps to protect the network and mitigate the attack. Experts largely agree the problem facing critical infrastructure is only worsening as years pass, and the more random Windows implementations that are added into the network, the wider the attack surface is. [...] TNO's Wolthuis said the energy industry is likely to be pushed soon to take action by regulators, particularly once the Network Code on Cybersecurity (NCCS), which lays out rules requiring cybersecurity risk assessments in the electricity sector, is formalized.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/11/04/000255/ukraine-first-to-demo-open-source-security-platform-to-help-secure-power-grid?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: After a turbulent weekend of updates and clarifications, AMD has published an entire web page to assuage user backlash and reaffirm its commitment to continued support for its RDNA 1 and RDNA 2-based drives, following a spate of confusion surrounding its recent decision to put Radeon RX 5000 and 6000 series cards in "maintenance mode." This comes after AMD had to deny that the RX 7900 cards were losing USB-C power supply moving forward, even though the drive changelog said something quite different.

Just last week, AMD released a new driver update for its graphics cards, and it went anything but smoothly. First, the wrong drivers were uploaded, and even after that was corrected, several glaring errors in the release notes required clarification. AMD was forced to correct claims about its RX 7900 cards, but at the time clarified that, indeed, RX 5000 and 6000 graphics cards were entering "Maintenance Mode," despite some RX 6000 cards being only around four years old. Now, though, AMD has either rolled back that decision or someone higher up the food chain has made a new call, as game optimizations are back on the menu for RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 GPUs. "We've heard your feedback and want to clear up the confusion around the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 driver release," AMD said in a statement. "Your Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series GPUs will continue to receive: Game support for new releases, Stability and game optimizations, and Security and bug fixes," AMD said.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/2142220/amd-will-continue-game-optimization-support-for-older-radeon-gpus-after-all?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

In its largest rollout yet, Waymo said it will launch its driverless robotaxi service to Las Vegas, San Diego, and Detroit in 2026. The Alphabet unit will also debut new Zeekr-built vehicles developed with Geely to complement its existing Jaguar I-PACE fleet. Reuters reports: The new Zeekr model, developed with Chinese automaker Geely, are designed specifically for robotaxi use cases and will be rolled out gradually as the company expands its service. [...] Waymo plans to launch the service in Las Vegas next summer, while in San Diego, it is working with local officials and first responders to secure deployment permits. In Detroit, the company said its winter-weather testing in Michigan's Upper Peninsula has strengthened its ability to operate year-round, where it has long maintained engineering operations.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/2134217/waymo-to-expand-robotaxi-service-to-las-vegas-san-diego-and-detroit-next-year?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Coca-Cola has doubled down on AI-generated holiday ads despite widespread criticism of last year's uncanny results. This year the beverage company is replacing human actors with oddly animated animals in a visually inconsistent campaign. The Verge reports: There's no consistent style, switching between attempted realism and a bug-eyed toony look, and the polar bears, panda, and sloth move unnaturally, like flat images that have been sloppily animated rather than rigged 3D models in CG. Compared to the convincing deepfake videos being generated by tools like OpenAI's Sora 2 or Google's Veo 3, the videos produced for this Coke ad feel extremely dated.

The only notable improvement to my eyes is that the wheels on the iconic Coke trucks are actually consistently turning this year, rather than gliding statically over snow-covered roads. The Wall Street Journal reports that Coca-Cola teamed up with Silverside and Secret Level on its latest holiday campaign, two of the AI studios that previously worked on the 2024 Coke Christmas ads.

Coca-Cola declined to comment on the cost of the new holiday campaign, according to The Wall Street Journal, but said that around 100 people were involved in the project -- a figure comparable to the company's older AI-free productions. That includes five "AI specialists" from Silverside who contributed by prompting and refining more than 70,000 AI video clips.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/2129227/coca-colas-new-ai-holiday-ad-is-a-sloppy-eyesore?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: You may be disappointed if you go looking for Google's open Gemma AI model in AI Studio today. Google announced late on Friday that it was pulling Gemma from the platform, but it was vague about the reasoning. The abrupt change appears to be tied to a letter from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who claims the Gemma model generated false accusations of sexual misconduct against her.

Blackburn published her letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Friday, just hours before the company announced the change to Gemma availability. She demanded Google explain how the model could fail in this way, tying the situation to ongoing hearings that accuse Google and others of creating bots that defame conservatives. At the hearing, Google's Markham Erickson explained that AI hallucinations are a widespread and known issue in generative AI, and Google does the best it can to mitigate the impact of such mistakes. Although no AI firm has managed to eliminate hallucinations, Google's Gemini for Home has been particularly hallucination-happy in our testing.

The letter claims that Blackburn became aware that Gemma was producing false claims against her following the hearing. When asked, "Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?" Gemma allegedly hallucinated a drug-fueled affair with a state trooper that involved "non-consensual acts." Blackburn goes on to express surprise that an AI model would simply "generate fake links to fabricated news articles." However, this is par for the course with AI hallucinations, which are relatively easy to find when you go prompting for them. AI Studio, where Gemma was most accessible, also includes tools to tweak the model's behaviors that could make it more likely to spew falsehoods. Someone asked a leading question of Gemma, and it took the bait.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/2124238/google-removes-gemma-models-from-ai-studio-after-gop-senators-complaint?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A long-simmering battle over who controls credit scoring in America has erupted into open warfare. Fair Isaac, whose FICO score is used in about 90% of consumer-lending decisions in the U.S., announced it will double the price of its mortgage credit score to $10 next year. The company also said it will bypass the three credit-reporting firms that have supplied the data feeding into its algorithm for decades.

Equifax, Experian and TransUnion created VantageScore in 2006 as an alternative to FICO and collectively own the scoring system. The move came months after Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, announced that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would allow lenders to use VantageScore for mortgage approvals. The three credit-reporting firms responded by offering VantageScore free for many loans. Fair Isaac had charged a few cents per score for decades before chief executive Will Lansing began raising prices several years ago. Revenue from selling credit scores reached $920 million in fiscal 2024, nearly five times what it was a decade earlier.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/2018216/a-fight-over-credit-scores-turns-into-all-out-war?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликовано: Mon, 03 Nov 2025 20:55:23 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / DIY или Сделай сам / Хабр

В Telegram уже есть сотни, если не тысячи наборов стикеров — от классических мемов до авторских иллюстраций. Но в какой‑то момент рука сама тянется к кнопке «создать своё».И вот тут на сцену выходят графические нейросети — те самые волшебные механизмы, которые не просто рисуют по описанию, а способны в один клик сгенерировать целый стикерпак.Можно создавать изображения поштучно, можно — сеткой, можно вообще с нуля, а можно на базе своих фото. Стиль — на ваш вкус: минимализм, аниме, реализм, «3D‑кавай»… Всё под контролем.Разберём разные подходы — и вы точно найдёте свой идеальный способ. Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/companies/bothub/articles/962880/

Apple is paying Google to create a custom Gemini-based model that will run on the company's private cloud servers and power the next version of Siri, according to Bloomberg. The decision marks a departure from Apple's tradition of building core technologies in-house. The arrangement follows a competition Apple held this year between Anthropic and Google, the report said. Anthropic offered a superior model, but Google made more financial sense because of the tech giants' existing search relationship. Neither company is expected to discuss the partnership publicly, the report added.

The new Siri will introduce AI-powered web search and other features users have come to expect from voice assistants. The custom model will not flood Siri with Google services or Gemini features already available on Android devices. Instead, it will provide the underlying AI capabilities through an Apple user interface. The company is betting heavily on the revamped Siri to undo years of brand damage.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/2014204/apple-to-white-label-googles-gemini-model-for-next-generation-siri-report-says?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The Internet Archive celebrated archiving its trillionth webpage last month and received congratulations from San Francisco, which declared October 22 "Internet Archive Day." Senator Alex Padilla designated the nonprofit a federal depository library. The organization currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. But these victories arrived after years of bruising copyright battles that forced the removal of more than 500,000 books from the Archive's Open Library. "We survived, but it wiped out the Library," founder Brewster Kahle told ArsTechnica.

In 2024, the Archive lost its final appeal in a lawsuit brought by book publishers over its e-book lending model. Damages could have topped $400 million before publishers announced a confidential settlement. Last month, the organization settled another suit over its Great 78 Project after music publishers sought damages of up to $700 million. That settlement was also confidential. In both cases, the Archive's experts challenged publishers' estimates as massively inflated.

Kahle had envisioned the Open Library as a way for Wikipedia to link to book scans and help researchers reference e-books. The Archive wanted to deepen Wikipedia's authority as a research tool by surfacing information often buried in books. "That's what they really succeeded at -- to make sure that Wikipedia readers don't get access to books," Kahle said of the publishers. He thinks "the world became stupider" when the Open Library was gutted. The Archive is now expanding Democracy's Library, a free online compendium of government research and publications that will be linked in Wikipedia articles.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/1930232/internet-archives-legal-fights-are-over-but-its-founder-mourns-what-was-lost?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Captchas have largely vanished from the web in 2025, replaced by invisible tracking systems that analyze user behavior rather than asking people to decipher distorted text or identify traffic lights in image grids. Google launched reCaptcha v3 in 2018 to generate risk scores based on behavioral signals during site interactions, making bot-blocking technology "completely invisible" for most users, according to Tim Knudsen, a director of product management at Google Cloud.

Cloudflare followed in 2022 by releasing Turnstile, another invisible alternative that sometimes appears as a simple checkbox but actually gathers data from devices and software to determine if users are human. Both companies distribute their security tools for free to collect training data, and Cloudflare now sees 20% of all HTTP requests across the internet.

The rare challenges that do surface have become increasingly bizarre, ranging from requests to identify dogs and ducks wearing various hats to sliding a jockstrap across a screen to find matching underwear on hookup sites.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/1916215/the-curious-case-of-the-bizarre-disappearing-captcha?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Представлен релиз языка системного программирования Nim 2.2.6. Обновление вышло спустя шесть месяцев после релиза версии 2.2.4 и включает 141 коммит с исправлениями ошибок и улучшениями производительности. Nim – статически типизированный компилируемый язык программирования с синтаксисом, вдохновлённым Python, и возможностями метапрограммирования на уровне Lisp. Язык компилируется в C, C++ и JavaScript, обеспечивая производительность на уровне C при выразительности высокоуровневых языков. Код проекта поставляется под лицензией MIT.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=64173

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), an anti-piracy organization representing Japanese IP holders like Studio Ghibli and Bandai Namco, released a letter last week asking OpenAI to stop using its members' content to train Sora 2, as reported by Automaton. The letter states that "CODA considers that the act of replication during the machine learning process may constitute copyright infringement," since the resulting AI model went on to spit out content with copyrighted characters.

Sora 2 generated an avalanche of content containing Japanese IP after it launched on September 30th, prompting Japan's government to formally ask OpenAI to stop replicating Japanese artwork. This isn't the first time one of OpenAI's apps clearly pulled from Japanese media, either -- the highlight of GPT-4o's launch back in March was a proliferation of "Ghibli-style" images.

Altman announced last month that OpenAI will be changing Sora's opt-out policy for IP holders, but CODA claims that the use of an opt-out policy to begin with may have violated Japanese copyright law, stating, "under Japan's copyright system, prior permission is generally required for the use of copyrighted works, and there is no system allowing one to avoid liability for infringement through subsequent objections."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/1857255/studio-ghibli-bandai-namco-square-enix-demand-openai-stop-using-their-content-to-train-ai?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A developer operating under the handle @XenoPanther has stripped Windows 7 down to 69MB. The OS boots but runs almost nothing because critical files like common dialog boxes and common controls are missing. @XenoPanther described the project on X as "more of a fun proof of concept rather than something usable." The desktop appears and the genuine check remains intact.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/1816216/windows-7-squeezed-to-69mb-in-proof-of-concept-build?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: arXiv, a preprint publication for academic research that has become particularly important for AI research, has announced it will no longer accept computer science articles and papers that haven't been vetted by an academic journal or a conference. Why? A tide of AI slop has flooded the computer science category with low-effort papers that are "little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues," according to a press release about the change.

arXiv has become a critical place for preprint and open access scientific research to be published. Many major scientific discoveries are published on arXiv before they finish the peer review process and are published in other, peer-reviewed journals. For that reason, it's become an important place for new breaking discoveries and has become particularly important for research in fast-moving fields such as AI and machine learning (though there are also sometimes preprint, non-peer-reviewed papers there that get hyped but ultimately don't pass peer review muster). The site is a repository of knowledge where academics upload PDFs of their latest research for public consumption. It publishes papers on physics, mathematics, biology, economics, statistics, and computer science and the research is vetted by moderators who are subject matter experts.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/1716252/arxiv-changes-rules-after-getting-spammed-with-ai-generated-research-papers?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Palantir launched a fellowship that recruited high school graduates directly into full-time work, bypassing college entirely. The company received more than 500 applications and selected 22 for the inaugural class. The four-month program began with seminars on Western civilization, U.S. history, and leaders including Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. Fellows then embedded in client teams working on live projects for hospitals, insurance companies, defense contractors, and government agencies.

CEO Alex Karp, who studied at Haverford and Stanford, said in August that hiring university students now means hiring people engaged in "platitudes." The program wraps up in November. Palantir executives said they had a clear sense by the third or fourth week of which fellows were succeeding in the company environment. Fellows who perform well will receive offers for permanent positions without college degrees.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/1620202/palantir-thinks-college-might-be-a-waste-so-its-hiring-high-school-grads?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Представлен выпуск дистрибутива Devuan 6.0 "Excalibur", форка Debian GNU/Linux, поставляемого без системного менеджера systemd. Новая ветка примечательна переходом на пакетную базу Debian 13. Для загрузки подготовлены Live-сборки (1.7 ГБ) и установочные iso-образы для архитектуры amd64. Пакеты собираются для архитектур i386, amd64, armel, armhf, arm64, ppc64el и riscv64.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=64172

Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says only biological beings are capable of consciousness, and that developers and researchers should stop pursuing projects that suggest otherwise. From a report: "I don't think that is work that people should be doing," Suleyman told CNBC in an interview this week at the AfroTech Conference in Houston, where he was among the keynote speakers. "If you ask the wrong question, you end up with the wrong answer. I think it's totally the wrong question."

Suleyman, Microsoft's top executive working on artificial intelligence, has been one of the leading voices in the rapidly emerging field to speak out against the prospect of seemingly conscious AI, or AI services that can convince humans they're capable of suffering.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/1534209/microsoft-ai-chief-says-only-biological-beings-can-be-conscious?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese President Xi Jinping joked about security backdoors while presenting a pair of Xiaomi smartphones to his South Korean counterpart, a rare moment of spontaneous levity captured during a week of tense trade negotiations with Donald Trump.

Xi, in South Korea to meet Trump on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, presented the pair of devices to Korean President Lee Jae Myung. In a video circulated on social media, Lee asked: "Is the line secure?" Xi chuckled, pointed at the gadgets and replied through an interpreter: "You can check if there's a backdoor." The two leaders burst into laughter.

The exchange was striking because the issue of security and alleged espionage is a sensitive one and a major thorn in US-Chinese relations. American lawmakers have raised the possibility that tech companies such as Huawei build backdoors -- ways to gain access to sensitive data -- into their equipment or services, something the firms have repeatedly denied.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/1523219/xi-quips-about-backdoors-during-xiaomi-phone-gift-to-koreas-lee?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

OpenAI will pay Amazon $38 billion for computing power in a seven-year deal that marks the companies' first partnership. Amazon expects all of the computing capacity negotiated as part of the agreement will be available to OpenAI by the end of next year. The ChatGPT maker will train new AI models using Amazon's data centers and use them to process user queries.

The deal is small compared with OpenAI's $300 billion agreement with Oracle and its $250 billion commitment to Microsoft. OpenAI ended its exclusive cloud-computing partnership with Microsoft last month and has since signed almost $600 billion in new cloud commitments. Amazon Web Services is the industry's largest cloud provider, but Microsoft and Google have reported faster cloud-revenue growth in recent years after capturing new demand from AI customers.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/1448202/openai-signs-38-billion-cloud-deal-with-amazon?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Microsoft has released a patch that fixes a longstanding bug in Windows 11 and Windows 10 where selecting "Update and shut down" would restart the computer instead of powering it off. The issue affected users across both operating systems since Windows 10's initial release. The fix arrived in Windows 11 25H2 Build 26200.7019 and the October 2025 optional update KB5067036.

Microsoft confirmed the patch "addressed underlying issue which can cause 'Update and shutdown' to not actually shut down your PC after updating." The problem likely stemmed from the Windows Servicing Stack failing to carry the power-off command through the required reboot phase. During updates Windows must restart into an offline servicing mode to replace system files. The power-off instruction was either cleared or blocked during this transition.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/1249212/microsoft-fixes-decade-old-windows-bug-that-made-update-and-shut-down-restart-pcs?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"During the past two years or so I have been slow-rolling an effort to port the Linux kernel to WebAssembly," reads a surprising post on the Linux kernel mailing list.

I'm now at the point where the kernel boots and I can run basic programs from a shell. As you will see if you play around with it for a bit, it's not very stable and will crash sooner or later, but I think this is a good first step.
Wasm is not necessarily only targeting the web, but that's how I have
been developing this project... This is Linux, booting in your browser tab, accelerated by Wasm.
Phoronix warns that "there are stability issues and it didn't take me long either to trigger crashes for this Linux kernel WASM port when running within Google Chrome."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/0610234/linux-ported-to-webassembly-boots-in-a-browser-tab?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Задачи, которые решает программа:

• анализ файлов ~/.bash_aliases, ~/.bash_history, ~/.zsh_history с историей выполнения команд в терминале Linux в оболочке Bash/Zsh;

• предложение коротких аббревиатур (акронимов) для длинных, долго набираемых и сложно запоминаемых, но часто используемых команд (хотя об этом можно даже не догадываться);

• вывод статистики;

• обработка управляющих параметров.

Установка:

pip3 install -U --upgrade topalias
pipx install --force topalias
python3 -m pip install -U --upgrade topalias
python3.10 -m pip install -U --upgrade topalias

Запуск утилиты topalias:

topalias
python3 -m topalias
python3.10 -m topalias
python3 topalias/cli.py

В этой версии добавлена поддержка Ubuntu 25.10/Python 3.13, Kubuntu 22.04/Python 3.10 и KDE neon Rolling.

https://www.linux.org.ru/news/opensource/18130743

"Rockstar Games fired dozens of employees," reports Bloomberg, "in a move that a British trade union said was designed to prevent the workers from unionizing. The company said they were fired for misconduct."

TheGrand Theft Automaker terminatedbetween 30 and 40 staffersacross multipleoffices in the UK and Canada on Thursday, according to aspokesperson for the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB). All of the employees were part of a private trade union chat groupon Discord and were either members of the union or attempting to organize at the company, the union spokesperson said.

"Rockstar has just carried out one of the most blatant and ruthless acts of union busting in the history of the games industry," Alex Marshall, president of theIWGB, said in a statement. "This flagrant contempt for the law and for the lives of the workers who bring in their billions is an insult to their fans and the global industry."

On BlueSky the IWGB union posted "We won't back down, and we're not scared — we will fight for every member to be reinstated."

Bloomberg notes that Grand Theft Auto VIis slated for release on May 26, 2026, "and is expected to be one of the top-selling video games of all time."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/0542221/grand-theft-auto-studio-accused-of-union-busting-after-firing-dozens?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликован первый стабильный релиз проекта TidesDB, развивающего библиотеку для хранения данных в формате ключ/значение. Проект может использоваться как обособленно запускаемый движок или для встраивания в приложения. Из ключевых возможностей отмечается поддержка ACID-транзакций и оптимизация для эффективного хранения данных на Flash-накопителях и в оперативной памяти. Код написан на языке Си и распространяется под лицензией MPL 2.0. Обвязки подготовлены для языков C++, Go, Java, Python, Rust, Lua и JavaScript.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=64171

Опубликовано: Mon, 03 Nov 2025 08:07:41 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / Системное программирование / Хабр

Многие разработчики привыкли везде ставить if-проверки, даже для условий, гарантированных кодом. Зачем проверять то, что не может нарушиться? Такие проверки создают шум в коде и мусор в релизе. Assert решает эту проблему: документирует допущения и исчезает из финальной сборки. В статье покажу все преимущества assert'ов и предостерегу от подводных камней их использования. Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/articles/962668/

TOP10 VISITORS:

[1] ChatGPT point=0 web=1486 up=42.5MB (36%)
[2] 37.252.14.x point=150 web=0 up=28.3MB (24%) <--- ake (6/hr)
[3] 45.135.180.x point=250 web=0 up=21.7MB (18%) <--- yesterlink (10/hr)
[4] PetalBot point=5 web=1002 up=5.8MB (5%) <--- PetalBot
[5] Amazon point=0 web=206 up=4.7MB (4%)
[6] TikTok point=0 web=180 up=2.4MB (2%)
[7] 217.114.158.x point=26 web=0 up=1.0MB (<1%) <--- fox (1/hr)
[8] Google point=0 web=111 up=0.7MB (<1%)
[9] 216.244.66.x point=0 web=25 up=0.4MB (<1%)
[10] 178.151.245.x point=0 web=6 up=0.4MB (<1%)

TOTAL TRAFFIC: 116MB

Состоялся выпуск интегрированной среды разработки Qt Creator 18, предназначенной для создания кроссплатформенных приложений с использованием библиотеки Qt. Поддерживается как разработка классических программ на языке C++, так и использование языка QML, в котором для определения сценариев используется JavaScript, а структура и параметры элементов интерфейса задаются CSS-подобными блоками. Готовые сборки сформированы для Linux, Windows и maсOS.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=64167

Опубликовано: Mon, 03 Nov 2025 06:45:31 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / DIY или Сделай сам / Хабр

Как разработать источник отрицательного напряжения? Легко, это делается из классического Buck конвертера!Стандартное решение, которое может пригодиться всем, кто хоть раз сталкивался с разработкой DC/DC источников питания или столкнулся сейчас. Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/articles/865612/

Опубликовано: Mon, 03 Nov 2025 06:51:24 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / DIY или Сделай сам / Хабр

В общем-то и целом, мой предыдущий эмулятор ZX Spectrum, написанный на go, работал. Показывал нужное (или очень близко к нужному) и давал чувство приближенности к программистам. Однако у него были очень фундаментальные проблемы, связанные исключительно с языком разработки. Ну по крайней мере я сейчас так думаю.Другим движущим фактором все-таки была бесплатность БЯМок от cloud.ru (не реклама, да и бесплатности больше нет). Ну где еще можно на халяву пожечь сотни миллионов токенов и получить хоть что-то работающее?В общем, я принял волевое решение переписать все на С++. Под катом дневник "переписчика", в котором я последовательно описываю все боли и страдания начинающего писателя эмуляторов. Желающим сразу посмотреть на конечный результат можно сходить на https://github.com/kiltum/zxcpp Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/articles/962612/

"It finally happened," writes the GamingOnLinux site:

Linux gamers on Steam as of the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for October 2025 have crossed over the elusive 3% mark. The trend has been clear for sometime, and with Windows 10 ending support, it was quite likely this was going to be the time for it to happen as more people try out Linux...

Overall, 3% might not seem like much to some, but again — that trend is very clear and equates to millions of people. The last time Valve officially gave a proper monthly active user count was in 2022, and we know Steam has grown a lot since then, but even going by that original number would put monthly active Linux users at well over 4 million.

Additional details from Phoronix:

The only time Steam on Linux use was close to the 3% mark was when Steam on Linux initially debuted a decade ago and at that time the overall Steam user-base was much smaller than it is today. Long story short, thanks to the ongoing success of Valve's Steam Deck and other handhelds plus Steam Play (Proton) working out so well, these October numbers are the best yet... a hearty 0.41% increase to Linux... landing its overall marketshare at 3.05%. Windows meanwhile was at 94.84% (falling below 95% for the first time in a while) and macOS at 2.11%. For comparison, in October 2024 Steam on Linux was at 2.00%.

The Linux-specific data shows SteamOS commanding around 27% of all the Linux installs at large. SteamOS most notably being on the Steam Deck hardware.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/048228/linux-gamers-on-steam-finally-cross-over-the-3-mark?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

TechCrunch reports:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that the company is doing "well more" than $13 billion in annual revenue — and he sounded a little testy when pressed on how it will pay for its massive spending commitments.
His comments came up during a joint interviewon the Bg2 podcast between Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the partnership between their companies. Host Brad Gerstner (who's also founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital) brought upreports that OpenAI is currently bringing in around $13 billion in revenue — a sizable amount, but one that's dwarfed by more than $1 trillion in spending commitments for computing infrastructure that OpenAI has made for the next decade.
"First of all, we're doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer," Altman said, prompting laughs from Nadella. "I just — enough. I think there are a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares."
Altman's answer continued, making the case for OpenAI's business model. "We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. Revenue is growing steeply. We are taking a forward bet that it's going to continue to grow and that not only will ChatGPT keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds, that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing. That AI that can automate science will create huge value...

"We carefully plan, we understand where the technology — where the capability — is going to go, and the products we can build around that and the revenue we can generate. We might screw it up — like, this is the bet that we're making, and we're taking a risk along with that." (That bet-with-risks seems to be the $1.4 trillion in spending commitments — but Altman suggests it's offset by another absolutely certain risk: "If we don't have the compute, we will not be able to generate the revenue or make the models at this kind of scale.")

Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, added his own defense, "as both a partner and an investor. There has not been a single business plan that I've seen from OpenAI that they have put in and not beaten it. So in some sense, this is the one place where in terms of their growth — and just even the business — it's been unbelievable execution, quite frankly..."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/03/0349255/openais-sam-altman-defends-1-trillion-spending-commitments-predicts-steep-revenue-growth-more-products?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device," writes Tom's Hardware.

"That's when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn't consented to."

The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after... He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again... [H]e decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again...

[He discovered] a GD32F103 microcontroller to manage its plethora of sensors, including Lidar, gyroscopes, and encoders. He created PCB connectors and wrote Python scripts to control them with a computer, presumably to test each piece individually and identify what went wrong. From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware. From this, he looked at its software and operating system, and that's where he discovered the dark truth: his smart vacuum was a security nightmare and a black hole for his personal data.

First of all, it's Android Debug Bridge, which gives him full root access to the vacuum, wasn't protected by any kind of password or encryption. The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it. He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home.
This isn't unusual, by far. After all, it's a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer's server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers.

Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader registrations_suck for sharing the article.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/11/02/2241201/manufacturer-remotely-bricks-smart-vacuum-after-its-owner-blocked-it-from-collecting-data?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.