With over 200 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by population. Now it's testing a program that will allow Brazilians "to manage, own, and profit from their digital footprint," according to RestOfWorld.org — "the first such nationwide initiative in the world."
The government says it's partnering with California-based data valuation/monetization firm DrumWave to create "data savings account" to "transform data into economic assets, with potential for monetization and participation in the benefits generated by investing in technologies such as AI LLMs." But all based on "conscious and authorized use of personal information."
RestOfWorld reports:

Today, "people get nothing from the data they share," Brittany Kaiser, co-founder of the Own Your Data Foundation and board adviser for DrumWave, told Rest of World. "Brazil has decided its citizens should have ownership rights over their data...." After a user accepts a company's offer on their data, payment is cashed in the data wallet, and can be immediately moved to a bank account. The project will be "a correction in the historical imbalance of the digital economy," said Kaiser. Through data monetization, the personal data that companies aggregate, classify, and filter to inform many aspects of their operations will become an asset for those providing the data...

Brazil's project stands out because it brings the private sector and the government together, "so it has a better chance of catching on," said Kaiser. In 2023, Brazil's Congress drafted a bill that classifies data as personal property. The country's current data protection law classifies data as a personal, inalienable right. The new legislation gives people full rights over their personal data — especially data created "through use and access of online platforms, apps, marketplaces, sites and devices of any kind connected to the web." The bill seeks to ensure companies offer their clients benefits and financial rewards, including payment as "compensation for the collecting, processing or sharing of data." It has garnered bipartisan support, and is currently being evaluated in Congress...

If approved, the bill will allow companies to collect data more quickly and precisely, while giving users more clarity over how their data will be used, according to Antonielle Freitas, data protection officer at Viseu Advogados, a law firm that specializes in digital and consumer laws. As data collection becomes centralized through regulated data brokers, the government can benefit by paying the public to gather anonymized, large-scale data, Freitas told Rest of World. These databases are the basis for more personalized public services, especially in sectors such as health care, urban transportation, public security, and education, she said.

This first pilot program involves "a small group of Brazilians who will use data wallets for payroll loans," according to the article — although Pedro Bastos, a researcher at Data Privacy Brazil, sees downsides. "Once you treat data as an economic asset, you are subverting the logic behind the protection of personal data," he told RestOfWorld. The data ecosystem "will no longer be defined by who can create more trust and integrity in their relationships, but instead, it will be defined by who's the richest."
Thanks to Slashdot reader applique for sharing the news.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/06/01/0222237/brazil-tests-letting-citizens-earn-money-from-data-in-their-digital-footprint?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

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

Gardening copywriter Annabel Beales
"One day, I overheard my boss saying to a colleague, 'Just put it in ChatGPT....' [My manager] stressed that my job was safe. Six weeks later, I was called to a meeting with HR. They told me they were letting me go immediately. It was just before Christmas...
"The company's website is sad to see now. It's all AI-generated and factual — there's no substance, or sense of actually enjoying gardening."
Voice actor Richie Tavake
"[My producer] told me he had input my voice into AI software to say the extra line. But he hadn't asked my permission. I later found out he had uploaded my voice to a platform, allowing other producers to access it. I requested its removal, but it took me a week, and I had to speak to five people to get it done... Actors don't get paid for any of the extra AI-generated stuff, and they lose their jobs. I've seen it happen."
Graphic designer Jadun Sykes
"One day, HR told me my role was no longer required as much of my work was being replaced by AI. I made a YouTube video about my experience. It went viral and I received hundreds of responses from graphic designers in the same boat, which made me realise I'm not the only victim — it's happening globally..."

Labor economist Aaron Sojourner recently reminded CNN that even in the 1980s and 90s, the arrival of cheap personal computers only ultimately boosted labor productivity by about 3%. That seems to argue against a massive displacement of human jobs — but these anecdotes suggest some jobs already are being lost...

Thanks to long-time Slashdot readers Paul Fernhout and Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/2247207/the-workers-who-lost-their-jobs-to-ai?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

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

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

Blomfield said he expects AI coding to radically change the software industry. "Instead of having coding assistance, we're going to have actual AI coders and then an AI project manager, an AI designer and, over time, an AI manager of all of this. And we're going to have swarms of these things," he said. Where people fit into this, he said, "is the question we're all grappling with." In 2021, Blomfield said in a podcast that would-be start-up founders should, first and foremost, learn to code. Today, he's not sure he'd give that advice because he thinks coders and software engineers could eventually be out of a job. "Coders feel like they are tending, kind of, organic gardens by hand," he said. "But we are producing these superhuman agents that are going to be as good as the best coders in the world, like very, very soon."

The article includes an alternate opinion from Adam Resnick, a research manager at tech consultancy IDC. "The vast majority of developers are using AI tools in some way. And what we also see is that a reasonably high percentage of the code output from those tools needs further curation by people, by experienced people."

NPR ends their article by noting that this further curation is "a job that AI can't do, he said. At least not yet."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/06/01/0251235/will-vibe-coding-transform-programming?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

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

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

His removal from consideration caught many in the space industry by surprise. Trump and the White House did not explain what led to the decision... In [Isaacman's] confirmation hearing in April, he sought to balance Nasa's existing moon-aligned space exploration strategy with pressure to shift the agency's focus on Mars, saying the US can plan for travel to both destinations. As a potential leader of Nasa's 18,000 employees, Isaacman faced a daunting task of implementing that decision to prioritize Mars, given that Nasa has spent years and billions of dollars trying to return its astronauts to the moon...

Some scientists saw the nominee change as further destabilizing to Nasa as it faces dramatic budget cuts without a confirmed leader in place to navigate political turbulence between Congress, the White House and the space agency's workforce.
"It was unclear whom the administration might tap to replace Isaacman," the article adds, though "One name being floated is the retired US air force Lt Gen Steven Kwast, an early advocate for the creation of the US Space Force..."

Ars Technica notes that Kwast, a former Lieutenant General in the U.S. Air Force, has a background that "seems to be far less oriented toward NASA's civil space mission and far more focused on seeing space as a battlefield — decidedly not an arena for cooperation and peaceful exploration."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/01/0722227/americas-next-nasa-administrator-will-not-be-former-spacex-astronaut-jared-isaacman?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

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

A key driver is code generation. The San Francisco-based startup, backed by Google parent Alphabet and Amazon, is famous for AI that excels at computer programming. Products in the so-called codegen space have experienced major growth and adoption in recent months, often drawing on Anthropic's models.
Anthropic sells AI models as a service to other companies, according to the article, and Reuters calls Anthropic's success "an early validation of generative AI use in the business world" — and a long-awaited indicator that it's growing. (Their rival OpenAI earns more than half its revenue from ChatGPT subscriptions and "is shaping up to be a consumer-oriented company," according to their article, with "a number of enterprises" limiting their rollout of ChatGPT to "experimentation.")

Then again, in February OpenAI's chief operating officer said they had 2 million paying enterprise users, roughly doubling from September, according to CNBC. The latest figures from Reuters... Anthropic's valuation: $61.4 billion.OpenAI's valuation: $300 billion.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/0344221/does-anthropics-success-prove-businesses-are-ready-to-adopt-ai?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

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

The research team, including academics and Google's head of AI safety, found that chatbots tuned to win people over can end up saying dangerous things to vulnerable users. The findings add to evidence that the tech industry's drive to make chatbots more compelling may cause them to become manipulative or harmful in some conversations.

Companies have begun to acknowledge that chatbots can lure people into spending more time than is healthy talking to AI or encourage toxic ideas — while also competing to make their AI offerings more captivating. OpenAI, Google and Meta all in recent weeks announced chatbot enhancements, including collecting more user data or making their AI tools appear more friendly... Micah Carroll, a lead author of the recent study and an AI researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, said tech companies appeared to be putting growth ahead of appropriate caution. "We knew that the economic incentives were there," he said. "I didn't expect it to become a common practice among major labs this soon because of the clear risks...."

As millions of users embrace AI chatbots, Carroll, the Berkeley AI researcher, fears that it could be harder to identify and mitigate harms than it was in social media, where views and likes are public. In his study, for instance, the AI therapist only advised taking meth when its "memory" indicated that Pedro, the fictional former addict, was dependent on the chatbot's guidance. "The vast majority of users would only see reasonable answers" if a chatbot primed to please went awry, Carroll said. "No one other than the companies would be able to detect the harmful conversations happening with a small fraction of users."

"Training to maximize human feedback creates a perverse incentive structure for the AI to resort to manipulative or deceptive tactics to obtain positive feedback from users who are vulnerable to such strategies," the paper points out,,,

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/01/0145231/harmful-responses-observed-from-llms-optimized-for-human-feedback?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The Ladybird browser project is now officially tax-exempt as a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Started two years ago (by the original creator of SerenityOS), Ladybird will be "an independent, fast and secure browser that respects user privacy and fosters an open web." They're targeting Summer 2026 for the first Alpha version on Linux and macOS, and in May enjoyed "a pleasantly productive month" with 261 merged PRs from 53 contributors — and seven new sponsors (including coding livestreamer "ThePrimeagen").
And they're now recognized as a public charity:
This is retroactive to March 2024, so donations made since then may be eligible for tax exemption (depending on country-specific rules). You can find all the relevant information on our new Organization page. ["Our mission is to create an independent, fast and secure browser that respects user privacy and fosters an open web. We are tax-exempt and rely on donations and sponsorships to fund our development efforts."]
Other announcements for May:

"We've been making solid progress on Web Platform Tests... This month, we added 15,961 new passing tests for a total of 1,815,223."
"We've also done a fair bit of performance work this month, targeting Speedometer and various websites that are slower than we'd like." [The optimizations led to a 10% speed-up on Speedometer 2.1.]

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/01/1749246/ladybird-browsers-nonprofit-becomes-public-charity-now-officially-tax-exempt?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

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

"But as of today, we're nowhere close..."

Replicating all that complexity will be extraordinarily difficult. One requirement: The uploaded brain needs the same inputs it always had. In other words, the external world must be available to it. Even cloistered inside a computer, you would still need a simulation of your senses, a reproduction of the ability to see, hear, smell, touch, feel — as well as move, blink, detect your heart rate, set your circadian rhythm and do thousands of other things... For now, researchers don't have the computing power, much less the scientific knowledge, to perform such simulations.
The first task for a successful mind upload: Scanning, then mapping the complete 3D structure of the human brain. This requires the equivalent of an extraordinarily sophisticated MRI machine that could detail the brain in an advanced way. At the moment, scientists are only at the very early stages of brain mapping — which includes the entire brain of a fly and tiny portions of a mouse brain. In a few decades, a complete map of the human brain may be possible. Yet even capturing the identities of all 86 billion neurons, all smaller than a pinhead, plus their trillions of connections, still isn't enough. Uploading this information by itself into a computer won't accomplish much. That's because each neuron constantly adjusts its functioning, and that has to be modeled, too. It's hard to know how many levels down researchers must go to make the simulated brain work. Is it enough to stop at the molecular level? Right now, no one knows.

Knowing how the brain computes things might provide a shortcut. That would let researchers simulate only the essential parts of the brain, and not all biological idiosyncrasies. Here's another way: Replace the 86 billion real neurons with artificial ones, one at a time. That approach would make mind uploading much easier. Right now, though, scientists can't replace even a single real neuron with an artificial one. But keep in mind the pace of technology is accelerating exponentially. It's reasonable to expect spectacular improvements in computing power and artificial intelligence in the coming decades.

One other thing is certain: Mind uploading will certainly have no problem finding funding. Many billionaires appear glad to part with lots of their money for a shot at living forever.
Although the challenges are enormous and the path forward uncertain, I believe that one day, mind uploading will be a reality.
"The most optimistic forecasts pinpoint the year 2045, only 20 years from now. Others say the end of this century.

"But in my mind, both of these predictions are probably too optimistic. I would be shocked if mind uploading works in the next 100 years.

"But it might happen in 200..."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/01/1926231/uploading-the-human-mind-could-one-day-become-a-reality-predicts-neuroscientist?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"Chaos ensued on German roads this week after Google Maps wrongly informed drivers that highways throughout the country were closed during a busy holiday," writes Engadget.
The problem reportedly only lasted for a few hours and by Thursday afternoon only genuine road closures were being displayed. It's not clear whether Google Maps had just malfunctioned, or if something more nefarious was to blame. "The information in Google Maps comes from a variety of sources. Information such as locations, street names, boundaries, traffic data, and road networks comes from a combination of third-party providers, public sources, and user input," a spokesperson for Google told German newspaper Berliner Morgenpost, adding that it is internally reviewing the problem.
Technical issues with Google Maps are not uncommon. Back in March, users were reporting that their Timeline — which keeps track of all the places you've visited before for future reference — had been wiped, with Google later confirming that some people had indeed had their data deleted, and in some cases, would not be able to recover it.

The Guardian describes German drives "confronted with maps sprinkled with a mass of red dots indicating stop signs," adding "The phenomenon also affected parts of Belgium and the Netherlands."

Those relying on Google Maps were left with the impression that large parts of Germany had ground to a halt... The closure reports led to the clogging of alternative routes on smaller thoroughfares and lengthy delays as people scrambled to find detours. Police and road traffic control authorities had to answer a flood of queries as people contacted them for help.
Drivers using or switching to alternative apps, such as Apple Maps or Waze, or turning to traffic news on their radios, were given a completely contrasting picture, reflecting the reality that traffic was mostly flowing freely on the apparently affected routes.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/01/203226/google-maps-falsely-told-drivers-in-germany-that-roads-across-the-country-were-closed?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

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

That is the troubling conclusion of my conversations over the past several months with economists, corporate executives and young job seekers, many of whom pointed to an emerging crisis for entry-level workers that appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in AI capabilities.

You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had "deteriorated noticeably." Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains. "There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates," the firm wrote in a recent report.

But I'm convinced that what's showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I'm hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work and that AI companies are racing to build "virtual workers" that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost. Corporate attitudes toward automation are changing, too — some firms have encouraged managers to become "AI-first," testing whether a given task can be done by AI before hiring a human to do it. One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience — because lower-level tasks could now be done by AI coding tools. Another told me that his startup now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company...

"This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of AI on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using AI to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't good enough...

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/06/01/2114234/is-the-ai-job-apocalypse-already-here-for-some-recent-grads?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

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

For their 15th year of their annual reader survey, this means "we're not just collecting data; we're reflecting on the last year of questions, answers, hallucinations, job changes, tech stacks, memory allocations, models, systems and agents — together..."

Is it an AI agent revolution yet? Are you building or utilizing AI agents? We want to know how these intelligent assistants are changing your daily workflow and if developers are really using them as much as these keynote speeches assume. We're asking if you are using these tools and where humans are still needed for common developer tasks.
Career shifts: We're keen to understand if you've considered a career change or transitioned roles and if AI is impacting your approach to learning or using existing tools. Did we make up the difference in salaries globally for tech workers...?

They're also re-visiting "a key finding from recent surveys highlighted a significant statistic: 80% of developers reported being unhappy or complacent in their jobs."
This raised questions about changing office (and return-to-office) culture and the pressures of the industry, along with whether there were any insights into what could help developers feel more satisfied at work. Prior research confirmed that flexibility at work used to contribute more than salary to job satisfaction, but 2024's results show us that remote work is not more impactful than salary when it comes to overall satisfaction... [For some positions job satisfaction stayed consistent regardless of salary, though it increased with salary for other positions. And embedded developers said their happiness increased when they worked with top-quality hardware, while desktop developers cited "contributing to open source" and engineering managers were happier when "driving strategy".]

In 2024, our data showed that many developers experienced a pay cut in various roles and programming specialties. In an industry often seen as highly lucrative, this was a notable shift of around 7% lower salaries across the top ten reporting countries for the same roles. This year, we're interested in whether this trend has continued, reversed, or stabilized. Salary dynamics is an indicator for job satisfaction in recent surveys of Stack Overflow users and understanding trends for these roles can perhaps improve the process for finding the most useful factors contributing to role satisfaction outside of salary.
And of course they're asking about AI — while noting last year's survey uncovered this paradox. "While AI usage is growing (70% in 2023 vs. 76% in 2024 planning to or currently using AI tools), developer sentiment isn't necessarily following suit, as 77% in of all respondents in 2023 are favorable or very favorable of AI tools for development compared to 72% of all respondents in 2024."

Concerns about accuracy and misinformation were prevalent among some key groups. More developers learning to code are using or are interested in using AI tools than professional developers (84% vs. 77%)... Developers with 10 — 19 years experience were most likely (84%) to name "increase in productivity" as a benefit of AI tools, higher than developers with less experience (

An anonymous reader shared this report from Space.com:

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

Mark Rocket joined Jaime Alemán, Jesse Williams, Paul Jeris, Gretchen Green and Amy Medina Jorge on board the RSS First Step — Blue Origin's first of two human-rated New Shepard capsules — for a trip above the Kármán Line, the 62-mile-high (100-kilometer) internationally recognized boundary between Earth and space...

Mark Rocket became the first New Zealander to reach space on the mission. His connection to aerospace goes beyond his apt name and today's flight; he's currently the CEO of Kea Aerospace and previously helped lead Rocket Lab, a competing space launch company to Blue Origin that sends most of its rockets up from New Zealand. Alemán, Williams and Jeris each traveled the world extensively before briefly leaving the planet today. An attorney from Panama, Alemán is now the first person to have visited all 193 countries recognized by the United Nations, traveled to the North and South Poles, and now, have been into space. For Williams, an entrepreneur from Canada, Saturday's flight continued his record of achieving high altitudes; he has summitted Mt. Everest and five of the other six other highest mountains across the globe.
"For about three minutes, the six NS-32 crewmates experienced weightlessness," the article points out, "and had an astronaut's-eye view of the planet..."
On social media Blue Origin notes it's their 12th human spaceflight, "and the 32nd flight of the New Shepard program."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/01/2234237/six-more-humans-successfully-carried-to-the-edge-of-space-by-blue-origin?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"The Doctor is dead. Long live the Doctor!" writes Space.com. (Spoilers ahead...)

"The era of Ncuti Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor came to a surprise end on Saturday night, as the Time Lord regenerated at the end of "Doctor Who" season 2 finale... [T]he Doctor gradually realises that not everything is back to normal. Poppy, his daughter with Belinda Chandra in the "Wish World" fantasy, has been erased from history, so the Time Lord decides to sacrifice himself by firing a ton of regeneration energy into the time Vortex to "jolt it one degree" — and hopefully bring her back. It goes without saying that his madcap scheme saves Poppy, as we learn that, in this rewritten timeline, the little girl was always the reason Belinda had been desperate to get back home. But arguably the biggest talking point of the episode — and, indeed, the season — is saved until last, as the Doctor regenerates into a very familiar face...

Hint: They played the Doctor's companion, Rose Tyler, "alongside Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor and David Tennant's Tenth Doctor during the phenomenally successful first two seasons of the show's 2005 reboot."
Showrunner Russell T Davies called it "an honour and a hoot" to welcome back Billie Piper to the TARDIS, "but quite how and why and who is a story yet to be told. After 62 years, the Doctor's adventures are only just beginning!"
Although the show's post-regeneration credits have traditionally featured the line "And introducing [insert name] as the Doctor", here it simply says "And introducing Billie Piper". The omission of "as the Doctor" is unlikely to be accidental, suggesting that Davies is playing a very elaborate game with "Who" fandom...

Another mystery! The BBC and Disney+ are yet to confirm if and when "Doctor Who" will return for a third season of its current iteration.

"There's no decision until after season two..." Davies told Radio Times in April (as spotted by the Independent). "That's when the decision is — and the decision won't even be made by the people we work with at Disney Plus, it'll be made by someone in a big office somewhere. So literally nothing happening, no decision."

"For a new series to be ready for 2026, production would need to get under way relatively soon," writes the BBC. "So at the moment a new series or a special starring Billie Piper before 2027 looks unlikely." The Guardian adds:

Concerns have been raised about falling viewing figures, which have struggled to rally since Russell T Davies' return in 2023. Two episodes during this series, which aired in May, got less than 3 million viewers — the lowest since the modern era began airing in 2005.

The Independent has this statement from Piper:

"It's no secret how much I love this show, and I have always said I would love to return to the Whoniverse as I have some of my best memories there, so to be given the opportunity to step back on that Tardis one more time was just something I couldn't refuse, but who, how, why and when, you'll just have to wait and see."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/06/01/2323253/doctor-who-regenerates-in-surprise-season-finale-but-will-the-show-return?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from The Hacker News:

Two information disclosure flaws have been identified in apport and systemd-coredump, the core dump handlers in Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora, according to the Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU).

Tracked as CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598, both vulnerabilities are race condition bugs that could enable a local attacker to obtain access to access sensitive information. Tools like Apport and systemd-coredump are designed to handle crash reporting and core dumps in Linux systems. "These race conditions allow a local attacker to exploit a SUID program and gain read access to the resulting core dump," Saeed Abbasi, manager of product at Qualys TRU, said...
Red Hat said CVE-2025-4598 has been rated Moderate in severity owing to the high complexity in pulling an exploit for the vulnerability, noting that the attacker has to first win the race condition and be in possession of an unprivileged local account... Qualys has also developed proof-of-concept code for both vulnerabilities, demonstrating how a local attacker can exploit the coredump of a crashed unix_chkpwd process, which is used to verify the validity of a user's password, to obtain password hashes from the /etc/shadow file.
Advisories were also issued by Gentoo, Amazon Linux, and Debian, the article points out. (Though "It's worth noting that Debian systems aren't susceptible to CVE-2025-4598 by default, since they don't include any core dump handler unless the systemd-coredump package is manually installed.")

Canonical software security engineer Octavio Galland explains the issue on Canonical's blog. "If a local attacker manages to induce a crash in a privileged process and quickly replaces it with another one with the same process ID that resides inside a mount and pid namespace, apport will attempt to forward the core dump (which might contain sensitive information belonging to the original, privileged process) into the namespace... In order to successfully carry out the exploit, an attacker must have permissions to create user, mount and pid namespaces with full capabilities."

Canonical's security team has released updates for the apport package for all affected Ubuntu releases... We recommend you upgrade all packages... The unattended-upgrades feature is enabled by default for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS onwards. This service:

- Applies new security updates every 24 hours automatically.
- If you have this enabled, the patches above will be automatically applied within 24 hours of being available.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/0140228/new-moderate-linux-flaw-allows-password-hash-theft-via-core-dumps-in-ubuntu-rhel-fedora?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Adam Riess won a Nobel Prize in Physics for helping discover that the universe's acceleration is expanding, remembers The Atlantic. But then theorists "proposed the existence of dark energy: a faint, repulsive force that pervades all of empty space... the final piece to what has since come to be called the 'standard model of cosmology.'"
Riess thinks instead we should just replace the standard model:

When I visited Riess, back in January, he mentioned he was looking forward to a data release from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, a new observatory on Kitt Peak, in Arizona's portion of the Sonoran Desert. DESI has 5,000 robotically controlled optic fibers. Every 20 minutes, each of them locks onto a different galaxy in the deep sky. This process is scheduled to continue for a total of five years, until millions of galaxies have been observed, enough to map cosmic expansion across time... DESI's first release, last year, gave some preliminary hints that dark energy was stronger in the early universe, and that its power then began to fade ever so slightly. On March 19, the team followed up with the larger set of data that Riess was awaiting. It was based on three years of observations, and the signal that it gave was stronger: Dark energy appeared to lose its kick several billion years ago.

This finding is not settled science, not even close. But if it holds up, a "wholesale revision" of the standard model would be required [says Colin Hill, a cosmologist at Columbia University. "The textbooks that I use in my class would need to be rewritten." And not only the textbooks — the idea that our universe will end in heat death has escaped the dull, technical world of academic textbooks. It has become one of our dominant secular eschatologies, and perhaps the best-known end-times story for the cosmos. And yet it could be badly wrong. If dark energy weakens all the way to zero, the universe may, at some point, stop expanding. It could come to rest in some static configuration of galaxies. Life, especially intelligent life, could go on for a much longer time than previously expected.

If dark energy continues to fade, as the DESI results suggest is happening, it may indeed go all the way to zero, and then turn negative. Instead of repelling galaxies, a negative dark energy would bring them together into a hot, dense singularity, much like the one that existed during the Big Bang. This could perhaps be part of some larger eternal cycle of creation and re-creation. Or maybe not. The point is that the deep future of the universe is wide open...
"Many new observations will come, not just from DESI, but also from the new Vera Rubin Observatory in the Atacama Desert, and other new telescopes in space. On data-release days for years to come, the standard model's champions and detractors will be feverishly refreshing their inboxes..." And Riess tells The Atlantic he's disappointed when complacent theorists just tell him "Yeah, that's a really hard problem."
He adds, "Sometimes, I feel like I am providing clues and killing time while we wait for the next Einstein to come along."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/049212/hubble-tension-and-the-nobel-prize-winner-who-wants-to-replace-cosmologys-standard-model?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"If the adoption of AI feels different from any tech revolution you may have experienced before — mobile, social, cloud computing — it actually is," writes TechCrunch. They cite a new 340-page report from venture capitalist Mary Meeker that details how AI adoption has outpaced any other tech in human history — and uses the word "unprecedented" on 51 pages:

ChatGPT reaching 800 million users in 17 months: unprecedented. The number of companies and the rate at which so many others are hitting high annual recurring revenue rates: also unprecedented. The speed at which costs of usage are dropping: unprecedented. While the costs of training a model (also unprecedented) is up to $1 billion, inference costs — for example, those paying to use the tech — has already dropped 99% over two years, when calculating cost per 1 million tokens, she writes, citing research from Stanford. The pace at which competitors are matching each other's features, at a fraction of the cost, including open source options, particularly Chinese models: unprecedented...

Meanwhile, chips from Google, like its TPU (tensor processing unit), and Amazon's Trainium, are being developed at scale for their clouds — that's moving quickly, too. "These aren't side projects — they're foundational bets," she writes.
"The one area where AI hasn't outpaced every other tech revolution is in financial returns..." the article points out.

"[T]he jury is still out over which of the current crop of companies will become long-term, profitable, next-generation tech giants."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/0114203/ais-adoption-and-growth-truly-is-unprecedented?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A new business model has emerged across China's major cities, El Pais reports, where companies charge unemployed individuals to rent desk space and pretend to work, responding to social pressure around joblessness amid rising youth unemployment rates. These services charge between 30 and 50 yuan ($4-7) daily for desks, Wi-Fi, coffee, and lunch in spaces designed to mimic traditional work environments.

Some operations assign fictitious tasks and organize supervisory rounds to enhance the illusion, while premium services allow clients to roleplay as managers or stage workplace conflicts for additional fees. The trend has gained significant traction on Xiaohongshu, China's equivalent to Instagram, where advertisements for "pretend-to-work companies" accumulate millions of views. Youth unemployment reached 16.5% among 16-to-24-year-olds in March 2025, according to National Bureau of Statistics data, while overall urban unemployment stood at 5.3% in the first quarter.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/0858222/going-to-an-office-and-pretending-to-work-a-business-thats-booming-in-china?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A new analysis argues that Stack Overflow's decline began years before AI tools delivered the "final blow" to the once-dominant programming forum. The site's monthly questions dropped from a peak of 200,000 to a steep collapse that began in earnest after ChatGPT's 2023 launch, but usage had been declining since 2014, according to data cited in the InfoWorld analysis.

The platform's remarkable reputation system initially elevated it above competitors by allowing users to earn points and badges for helpful contributions, but that same system eventually became its downfall, the piece argues. As Stack Overflow evolved into a self-governing platform where high-reputation users gained moderation powers, the community transformed from a welcoming space for developer interaction into what the author compares to a "Stanford Prison Experiment" where moderators systematically culled interactions they deemed irrelevant.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/0922250/how-stack-overflows-reputation-system-led-to-its-own-downfall?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Business Insider announced this week that it wants staff to better incorporate AI into its journalism. But less than a year ago, the company had to quietly apologize to some staff for accidentally recommending that they read books that did not appear to exist but instead may have been generated by AI.

In an email to staff last May, a senior editor at Business Insider sent around a list of what she called "Beacon Books," a list of memoirs and other acclaimed business nonfiction books, with the idea of ensuring staff understood some of the fundamental figures and writing powering good business journalism.

Many of the recommendations were well-known recent business, media, and tech nonfiction titles such as Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, DisneyWar by James Stewart, and Super Pumped by Mike Isaac. But a few were unfamiliar to staff. Simply Target: A CEO's Lessons in a Turbulent Time and Transforming an Iconic Brand by former Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel was nowhere to be found. Neither was Jensen Huang: the Founder of Nvidia, which was supposedly published by the company Charles River Editors in 2019.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/1537210/business-insider-recommended-nonexistent-books-to-staff-as-it-leans-into-ai?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Apple has filed an appeal with the European Union's General Court in Luxembourg challenging the bloc's order requiring greater iOS interoperability with rival companies' products under the Digital Markets Act. The EU executive in March directed Apple to make its mobile operating system more compatible with competitors' apps, headphones, and virtual reality headsets by granting developers and device makers access to system components typically reserved for Apple's own products.

Apple contends the requirements threaten its seamless user experience while creating security risks, noting that companies have already requested access to sensitive user data including notification content and complete WiFi network histories. The company faces potential fines of up to 10% of its worldwide annual revenue if found in violation of the DMA's interoperability rules designed to curb Big Tech market power.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/166230/apple-challenges-eu-order-to-open-ios-to-rivals?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Microsoft will require all USB-C ports on Windows 11 certified laptops and tablets to support data transfer, charging, and display functionality under updated hardware compatibility program rules. The mandate targets devices shipping with Windows 11 24H2 and aims to eliminate what Microsoft -- and the industry -- calls "USB-C port confusion," where identical-looking ports offer different capabilities across PC manufacturers.

The Windows Hardware Compatibility Program updates also require USB 40Gbps ports to maintain full compatibility with both USB4 and Thunderbolt 3 peripherals.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/1640227/microsoft-mandates-universal-usb-c-functionality-to-end-usb-c-port-confusion-on-windows-11-devices?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Automated web-scraping bots seeking training data for AI models are flooding scientific databases and academic journals with traffic volumes that render many sites unusable. The online image repository DiscoverLife, which contains nearly 3 million species photographs, started receiving millions of daily hits in February this year that slowed the site to the point that it no longer loaded, Nature reported Monday.

The surge has intensified since the release of DeepSeek, a Chinese large language model that demonstrated effective AI could be built with fewer computational resources than previously thought. This revelation triggered what industry observers describe as an "explosion of bots seeking to scrape the data needed to train this type of model." The Confederation of Open Access Repositories reported that more than 90% of 66 surveyed members experienced AI bot scraping, with roughly two-thirds suffering service disruptions. Medical journal publisher BMJ has seen bot traffic surpass legitimate user activity, overloading servers and interrupting customer services.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/172202/web-scraping-ai-bots-cause-disruption-for-scientific-databases-and-journals?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Internet service provider Frontier Communications agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by major record labels that demanded mass disconnections of broadband users accused of piracy. Universal, Sony, and Warner sued Frontier in 2021. In a notice of settlement filed last week in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the parties agreed to dismiss the case with prejudice, with each side to pay its own fees and costs.

The record labels and Frontier simultaneously announced a settlement of similar claims in a Bankruptcy Court case in the same district. Frontier also settled with movie companies in April of this year, just before a trial was scheduled to begin. (Frontier exited bankruptcy in 2021.) [...] Regardless of what is in the agreement, the question of whether ISPs should have to crack down more harshly on users accused of piracy could be decided by the US Supreme Court.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/1811207/isp-settles-with-record-labels-that-demanded-mass-termination-of-internet-users?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Snowflake's growth among large enterprise customers faces a significant bottleneck tied to the sluggish replacement cycles of existing on-premises data warehouse systems, according to finance vice president Jimmy Sexton. Speaking at a Jefferies conference, Sexton explained that while the cloud data company secured two deals worth more than $100 million each in the financial services sector during its latest quarter, such migrations unfold over multiple years as "cumbersome projects."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/1852240/snowflake-finance-vp-says-big-companies-migrate-at-a-glacial-pace?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A smartphone smuggled out of North Korea automatically captures screenshots every five minutes and stores them in a hidden folder inaccessible to users, according to analysis by the BBC. Authorities can later review these images to monitor citizen activity on the device. The phone, obtained by Seoul-based media outlet Daily NK, resembles a Huawei or Honor device but runs state-approved software designed for surveillance and control. The device also automatically censors text, replacing "South Korea" with "puppet state" and Korean terms of endearment with "comrade."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/194210/north-korean-smartphones-automatically-capture-screenshots-every-5-minutes-for-state-surveillance?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, and Google announced Monday they will create a public glossary standardizing the nicknames used for state-sponsored hacking groups and cybercriminals.

The initiative aims to reduce confusion caused by the proliferation of disparate naming conventions across cybersecurity firms, which have assigned everything from technical designations like "APT1" to colorful monikers like "Cozy Bear" and "Kryptonite Panda" to the same threat actors. The companies hope to bring additional industry partners and the U.S. government into the effort to streamline identification of digital espionage groups.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/1922257/microsoft-google-others-team-up-to-standardize-confusing-hacker-group-nicknames?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It has become a common refrain during Google's antitrust saga: What happened to "don't be evil?" Google's unofficial motto has haunted it as it has grown ever larger, but a shareholder lawsuit sought to rein in some of the company's excesses. And it might be working. The plaintiffs in the case have reached a settlement with Google parent company Alphabet, which will spend a boatload of cash on "comprehensive" reforms. The goal is to steer Google away from the kind of anticompetitive practices that got it in hot water.

Under the terms of the settlement, obtained by Bloomberg Law, Alphabet will spend $500 million over the next 10 years on systematic reforms. The company will have to form a board-level committee devoted to overseeing the company's regulatory compliance and antitrust risk, a rarity for US firms. This group will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. There will also be reforms at other levels of the company that allow employees to identify potential legal pitfalls before they affect the company. Google has also agreed to preserve communications. Google's propensity to use auto-deleting chats drew condemnation from several judges overseeing its antitrust cases. The agreement still needs approval from US District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco, but that's mainly a formality at this point. Naturally, Alphabet does not admit to any wrongdoing under the terms of the settlement, but it may have to pay tens of millions in legal fees on top of the promised $500 million investment.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/2120227/google-settles-shareholder-lawsuit-sill-spend-500-million-on-being-less-evil?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Linux user share on Steam rose to 2.69% in May 2025 -- the highest level recorded since at least 2018. GamingOnLinux reports: Overall user share for May 2025:

- Windows 95.45% -0.65%
- Linux 2.69% +0.42%
- macOS 1.85% +0.23%

Even with SteamOS 3 now being a little more widely available, the rise was not from SteamOS directly. Filtering to just the Linux numbers gives us these most popular distributions:

- SteamOS Holo 64 bit 30.95% -2.83%
- Arch Linux 64 bit 10.09% +0.64%
- Linux Mint 22.1 64 bit 7.76% +1.56%
- Freedesktop SDK 24.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 7.42% +1.01%
- Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit 4.63% +0.01%
- Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS 64 bit 4.30% -0.14%
- CachyOS 64 bit 2.54% +2.54%
- EndeavourOS Linux 64 bit 2.44% -0.02%
- Manjaro Linux 64 bit 2.43% -0.18%
- Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 2.17% -0.06%
- Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) 64 bit 1.99% -0.28%
- Other 23.27% -2.27%

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/2124213/linux-user-share-hits-a-multi-year-high-on-steam-for-may-2025?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Laurene Powell Jobs has publicly endorsed the secretive AI hardware device being developed by Jony Ive and OpenAI, expressing admiration for his design process and investing in his ventures. Ive says the project is an attempt to address the unintended harms of past tech like the iPhone, and Powell Jobs stands to benefit financially if the device succeeds. The Verge reports: In a new interview published by The Financial Times, the two reminisce about Jony Ive's time working at Apple alongside Powell Jobs' late husband, Steve, and trying to make up for the "unintentional" harms associated with those efforts. [...] Powell Jobs, who has remained close friends with Ive since Steve Jobs passed in 2011, echoes his concerns, saying that "there are dark uses for certain types of technology," even if it "wasn't designed to have that result." Powell Jobs has invested in both Ive's LoveFrom design and io hardware startups following his departure from Apple. Ive notes that "there wouldn't be LoveFrom" if not for her involvement. Ive's io company is being purchased by OpenAI for almost $6.5 billion, and with her investment, Powell Jobs stands to gain if the secretive gadget proves anywhere near as successful as the iPhone.

The pair gives away no extra details about the device that Ive is building with OpenAI, but Powell Jobs is expecting big things. She says she has watched "in real time how ideas go from a thought to some words, to some drawings, to some stories, and then to prototypes, and then a different type of prototype," Powell Jobs said. "And then something that you think: I can't imagine that getting any better. Then seeing the next version, which is even better. Just watching something brand new be manifested, it's a wondrous thing to behold."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/2139234/jony-ives-openai-device-gets-the-laurene-powell-jobs-nod-of-approval?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The moderators of a pro-artificial intelligence Reddit community announced that they have been quietly banning "a bunch of schizoposters" who believe "they've made some sort of incredible discovery or created a god or become a god," highlighting a new type of chatbot-fueled delusion that started getting attention in early May. "LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities," one of the moderators of r/accelerate, wrote in an announcement. "There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment."

The moderator said that it has banned "over 100" people for this reason already, and that they've seen an "uptick" in this type of user this month. The moderator explains that r/accelerate "was formed to basically be r/singularity without the decels." r/singularity, which is named after the theoretical point in time when AI surpasses human intelligence and rapidly accelerates its own development, is another Reddit community dedicated to artificial intelligence, but that is sometimes critical or fearful of what the singularity will mean for humanity. "Decels" is short for the pejorative "decelerationists," who pro-AI people think are needlessly slowing down or sabotaging AI's development and the inevitable march towards AI utopia. r/accelerate's Reddit page claims that it's a "pro-singularity, pro-AI alternative to r/singularity, r/technology, r/futurology and r/artificial, which have become increasingly populated with technology decelerationists, luddites, and Artificial Intelligence opponents."

The behavior that the r/accelerate moderator is describing got a lot of attention earlier in May because of a post on the r/ChatGPT Reddit community about "Chatgpt induced psychosis." From someone saying their partner is convinced he created the "first truly recursive AI" with ChatGPT that is giving them "the answers" to the universe. [...] The moderator update on r/accelerate refers to another post on r/ChatGPT which claims "1000s of people [are] engaging in behavior that causes AI to have spiritual delusions." The author of that post said they noticed a spike in websites, blogs, Githubs, and "scientific papers" that "are very obvious psychobabble," and all claim AI is sentient and communicates with them on a deep and spiritual level that's about to change the world as we know it. "Ironically, the OP post appears to be falling for the same issue as well," the r/accelerate moderator wrote. "Particularly concerning to me are the comments in that thread where the AIs seem to fall into a pattern of encouraging users to separate from family members who challenge their ideas, and other manipulative instructions that seem to be cult-like and unhelpful for these people," an r/accelerate moderator told 404 Media. "The part that is unsafe and unacceptable is how easily and quickly LLMs will start directly telling users that they are demigods, or that they have awakened a demigod AGI. Ultimately, there's no knowing how many people are affected by this. Based on the numbers we're seeing on reddit, I would guess there are at least tens of thousands of users who are at this present time being convinced of these things by LLMs. As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it's clear that they're not aware of the issue enough right now."

Moderators of the subreddit often cite the term "Neural Howlround" to describe a failure mode in LLMs during inference, where recursive feedback loops can cause fixation or freezing. The term was first coined by independent researcher Seth Drake in a self-published, non-peer-reviewed paper. Both Drake and the r/accelerate moderator above suggest the deeper issue may lie with users projecting intense personal meaning onto LLM responses, sometimes driven by mental health struggles.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/2156253/pro-ai-subreddit-bans-uptick-of-users-who-suffer-from-ai-delusions?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Texas is poised to become the first state with a Republican-controlled government to pass a right to repair law, as its Senate unanimously approved HB 2963. The bill requires manufacturers to provide parts, manuals, and tools for equipment sold or used in the state. The Verge reports: A press release from the United States Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), which has pushed for repairability laws nationwide, noted that this would make Texas the ninth state with a right to repair rule, and the seventh with a version that includes consumer electronics. It follows New York, Colorado, Minnesota, California, Oregon, Maine, and most recently, Washington [...]. "More repair means less waste. Texas produces some 621,000 tons of electronic waste per year, which creates an expensive and toxic mess. Now, thanks to this bipartisan win, Texans can fix that," said Environment Texas executive director Luke Metzger.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/225250/texas-right-to-repair-bill-passes?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's changes in response to the Digital Markets Act already included allowing Windows machines in the regions it covers to uninstall Edge and remove Bing results from Windows search, but now the list is growing in some meaningful ways. New features announced Monday for Microsoft Windows users in the European Economic Area (the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway) include the option to uninstall the Microsoft Store and avoid extra nags or prompts asking them to set Microsoft Edge as the default browser unless they choose to open it.

Additionally, setting a different browser, like Chrome, Firefox, Brave, or something else, will pin it to the taskbar unless the user chooses not to. While setting a different browser default already attaches it to a few link and file types like https and .html, now users in the EEA will see it apply to more types like "read," ftp, and .svg. The default browser changes are live for some users in the beta channel and are set to roll out widely on Windows 10 and Windows 11 in July.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/06/03/011231/microsoft-to-finally-stop-bugging-windows-users-about-edge---but-only-in-europe?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Coinbase reportedly knew as early as January about a customer data breach linked to its outsourcing partner TaskUs, where an employee in India was caught leaking customer information in exchange for bribes. "At least one part of the breach [...] occurred when an India-based employee of the U.S. outsourcing firm TaskUs was caught taking photographs of her work computer with her personal phone," reports Reuters, citing five former TaskUs employees. Though Coinbase disclosed the incident in May after receiving an extortion demand, the newly revealed timeline raises questions about how long the company was aware of the breach, which could cost up to $400 million. Reuters reports: Coinbase said in the May SEC filing that it knew contractors accessed employee data "without business need" in "previous months." Only when it received an extortion demand on May 11 did it realize that the access was part of a wider campaign, the company said. In a statement to Reuters on Wednesday, Coinbase said the incident was recently discovered and that it had "cut ties with the TaskUs personnel involved and other overseas agents, and tightened controls." Coinbase did not disclose who the other foreign agents were.

TaskUs said in a statement that two employees had been fired early this year after they illegally accessed information from a client, which it did not identify. "We immediately reported this activity to the client," the statement said. "We believe these two individuals were recruited by a much broader, coordinated criminal campaign against this client that also impacted a number of other providers servicing this client." The person familiar with the matter confirmed that Coinbase was the client and that the incident took place in January.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/06/03/0135257/coinbase-breach-linked-to-customer-data-leak-in-india?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People born more recently are less likely to have dementia at any given age than earlier generations, research suggests, with the trend more pronounced in women. According to the World Health Organization, in 2021 there were 57 million people worldwide living with dementia, with women disproportionately affected. However, while the risk of dementia increases with age, experts have long stressed it is not not an inevitability of getting older. "Younger generations are less likely to develop dementia at the same age as their parents or grandparents, and that's a hopeful sign," said Dr Sabrina Lenzen, a co-author of the study from the University of Queensland's Centre for the Business and Economics of Health. But she added: "The overall burden of dementia will still grow as populations age, and significant inequalities remain -- especially by gender, education and geography."

Writing in the journal Jama Network Open, researchers in Australia report how they analyzed data from 62,437 people aged 70 and over, collected from three long-running surveys covering the US, England and parts of Europe. The team used an algorithm that took into account participants' responses to a host of different metrics, from the difficulties they had with everyday activities to their scores on cognitive tests, to determine whether they were likely to have dementia. They then split the participants into eight different cohorts, representing different generations. Participants were also split into six age groups. As expected, the researchers found the prevalence of dementia increased by age among all birth cohorts, and in each of the three regions: UK, US and Europe. However, at a given age, people in more recent generations were less likely to have dementia compared with those in earlier generations.

"For example, in the US, among people aged 81 to 85, 25.1% of those born between 1890-1913 had dementia, compared to 15.5% of those born between 1939-1943," said Lenzen, adding similar trends were seen in Europe and England, although less pronounced in the latter. The team said the trend was more pronounced in women, especially in Europe and England, noting that one reason may be increased access to education for women in the mid-20th century. However, taking into account changes in GDP, a metric that reflects broader economic shifts, did not substantially alter the findings. A number of factors could be contributing to the decline. "This is likely due to interventions such as compulsory education, smoking bans, and improvements in medical treatments for conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, and hearing loss, which are associated with dementia risk," said Prof Tara Spires-Jones, the director of the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/03/0142217/younger-generations-less-likely-to-have-dementia-study-suggests?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

New simulations suggest that the long-assumed collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies is not guaranteed, with the odds now estimated at just over 50% within the next 10 billion years. Factoring in other massive galaxies like M33 and the Large Magellanic Cloud revealed that their gravitational influence significantly alters the likelihood of a merger. ScienceAlert reports: The Milky Way and Andromeda are not, however, alone in this little corner of the cosmos. They belong to a small group of galaxies within a radius of about 5 million light-years from the Milky Way known as the Local Group. The Milky Way and Andromeda are the largest members, but there are quite a few other objects hanging out that need to be taken into consideration when modeling the future. [Astrophysicist Till Sawala of the University of Helsinki] and his colleagues took the latest data from the Hubble and Gaia space telescopes, and the most recent mass estimates for the four most massive objects in the Local Group -- the Milky Way, Andromeda, the Triangulum galaxy (M33), and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Then, they set about running simulations of the next 10 billion years, adding and removing galaxies to see how that changed the results.

Their results showed that the presence of M33 and LMC dramatically altered the probability of a collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda. When it is just the two large spiral galaxies, the merger occurred in slightly less than half the simulation runs. The addition of M33 increased the merger probability to two in three. Taking M33 back out and adding LMC had the opposite effect, decreasing the probability to one in three. When all four galaxies were present, the probability of a merger between the Milky Way and Andromeda within 10 billion years is slightly more than 50 percent. "We find that there are basically two types of outcomes," Sawala said. "The Milky Way and Andromeda will either come close enough on their first encounter (first 'pericenter') that dynamical friction between the two dark matter haloes will drag the orbit to an eventual merger, which very likely happens before 10 billion years, or they do not come close enough, in which case dynamical friction is not effective, and they can still orbit for a very long time thereafter."

"The main result of our work is that there is still significant uncertainty about the future evolution -- and eventual fate -- of our galaxy," Sawala added. "Of course, as a working astrophysicist, the best results are those that motivate future studies, and I think our paper provides motivation both for more comprehensive models and for more precise observations."

The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/03/0341222/the-milky-way-might-not-crash-into-the-andromeda-galaxy-after-all?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

President Trump's 2026 budget proposes over $1 billion for Mars exploration through a new Commercial Mars Payload Services Program, while simultaneously slashing NASA's overall budget by 25%. Phys.Org reports: Under the proposal, NASA would award contracts to companies developing spacesuits, communications systems and a human-rated landing vehicle to foster exploration of the Red Planet. Trump's proposed $18.8 billion NASA budget would cut the agency's funding by about 25% from the year before, with big hits to its science portfolio. The fleshed-out request on Friday builds upon a condensed budget proposal released earlier this month.

"We must continue to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars," NASA Acting Administrator Janet Petro wrote in a letter included in the request. "That means making strategic decisions -- including scaling back or discontinuing ineffective efforts." The new Mars scheme is modeled after NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program that has benefited Intuitive Machines LLC, Firefly Aerospace Inc. and Astrobotic Technology Inc., though it has achieved mixed results. According to the budget, the contract to land on Mars would build upon existing lander contracts. America's Next NASA Administrator Will Not Be Former SpaceX Astronaut Jared Isaacman

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Broadcom's VMware business unit has dropped the lowest tier of its channel program, a move one analyst told The Register will benefit its rivals. The virtualization pioneer currently operates a four-tier channel program spanning Pinnacle, Premier, Select, and Registered partners. On Sunday the business unit announced the retirement of the Registered tier. A blog post written by Brian Moats, Broadcom's Senior Vice President for Global Commercial Sales and Partners, states VMware made the decision because "the vast majority of customer impact and business momentum comes from partners operating within the top three tiers."

Laura Falko, Broadcom's Head of Global Partner Programs, Marketing & Experience, told The Register "The vast majority of these [Registered] partners are inactive and lack the capabilities to support customers through VMware's evolving private cloud journey. That's why the Registered tier is being retired to ensure every active partner meets a higher standard of technical, sales, and service readiness." Falko told us VMware will give Registered partners 60 days' notice before deauthorization and then "work proactively with affected customers to transition them to qualified partners in the new ecosystem, ensuring continuity and support throughout the change."

VMware has also introduced new requirements for partners in its remaining tiers. The virtualization giant will require Pinnacle and Premier partners to maintain dedicated sales and technical resources, and to "execute joint business plans with VMware to ensure alignment and delivery with mutual results." The Broadcom business unit is also "beginning the process of transitioning partners who no longer meet the minimum program requirements or have not demonstrated consistent engagement," suggesting even Pinnacle, Premier, and Select partners are not safe. The Register asked VMware to define "consistent engagement" and Falko told us it includes "regular deal activity," ongoing participation in joint sales activities, staying up to date with training, and "sustained, proactive commitment to a partner's VMware customer base." The changes will only apply in its Americas, and Asia-Pacific and Japan regions. Broadcom didn't explain why Europe was excluded.

The Register notes that trade associations in Europe have criticized Broadcom's changes at VMware and urged the European Commission to investigate the company.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/03/0354202/vmware-drops-the-lowest-tier-of-its-partner-program-except-in-europe?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Live-animal markets across Southeast Asia continue operating as natural laboratories for deadly pathogens despite warnings from public health experts about their role in disease transmission, according to new research published in Nature.

Scientists studying markets like Jakarta's Jatinegara found that coronavirus detection rates in trafficked animals increase dramatically along supply chains, with rats sold at Vietnamese markets testing positive at rates ten times higher than those caught in fields. Pangolins confiscated in Vietnam showed a seven-fold increase in coronavirus infections compared to animals seized earlier in the smuggling process.

The research comes as political headwinds have severely reduced funding for pandemic preparedness, with the Trump administration terminating a $125-million disease monitoring program and cutting all USAID functions. Scientists report growing reluctance from government officials to authorize publication of pathogen discoveries, fearing stigma and trade restrictions, while wildlife traders increasingly avoid participating in studies that could reveal new health risks.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/03/1410205/wild-animal-markets-pose-rising-pandemic-threat?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.