A Michigan federal magistrate judge has banned a lawyer from using a cartoon dragon watermark on legal filings, calling the practice "juvenile and impertinent." Judge Ray Kent of the Western District of Michigan issued the order on April 28 after receiving a complaint featuring a purple, suit-wearing dragon on every page.

"Each page of plaintiff's complaint appears on an e-filing which is dominated by a large multi-colored cartoon dragon dressed in a suit," Kent wrote. "The Court is not a cartoon." The watermark belongs to Jacob A. Perrone of Dragon Lawyers, who told The New York Times he purchased the image online for $20 because "people like dragons."

Perrone said it plans to continue using the logo in his practice but will tone it down in future court submissions.

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A thought experiment involving a cat trapped in a steel box with a potentially lethal device, first proposed by physicist Erwin Schrodinger in 1935, remains at the center of scientific and philosophical debate as it marks its 90th anniversary.

The paradox, initially published in a technical review of quantum mechanics, presented a scenario where a cat could theoretically exist in a superposition of states -- both alive and dead simultaneously -- until observed, highlighting profound questions about quantum reality. "Schrodinger understood that under no circumstances could his cat be considered to be both alive and dead at the same time," science writer Jim Baggott noted in a recently published essay. Baggott co-authored "Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement" in 2024.

The thought experiment gained cultural traction largely through science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin's 1974 short story "Schrodinger's Cat," which wrestled with the paradox's philosophical implications. This sparked widespread appearances across literature, film, and television.

The paradox continues to divide physicists between those accepting quantum mechanics as a mathematical framework for prediction and others, like Einstein and Schrodinger himself, who considered the theory fundamentally incomplete.

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Almost all new homes in England will be fitted with solar panels during construction within two years, the UK government will announce after Keir Starmer rejected Tony Blair's criticism of net zero policies. From a report: Housebuilders will be legally required to install solar panels on the roofs of new properties by 2027 under the plans. The policy is estimated to add between $4,000 and $5,320 to building a home but homeowners would save more than $1,331 on their annual energy bills, according to the Times.

Labour has set a target of building 1.5m homes by the end of the parliament. The party has promised to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 and cut household energy bills by $400 a year.

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Redis, the popular in-memory data store, has returned to open source licensing with Redis 8 now available under the AGPL v3 license. The move reverses last year's controversial shift to proprietary licensing schemes (RSALv2 and SSPLv1) that aimed to force major cloud providers to pay for offering Redis as a managed service.

The decision follows significant market pressure, including AWS, Google, and Oracle backing the Valkey fork, which gained momentum in the open source community.

Redis believes the AGPL license provides sufficient protection from cloud providers while satisfying open source requirements. Redis 8 will incorporate vector sets and integrate previously separate Redis Stack features including JSON, Time Series, and probabilistic data support.

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An invisible molecular cloud that could shed light on how stars and planets form has been detected surprisingly close to Earth. From a report: Named Eos after the Greek goddess of the dawn, the cloud of gas would appear huge in the night sky if visible to the naked eye. It measures roughly 40 moons in width and has a weight about 3,400 times the mass of the sun, researchers reported in a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"In astronomy, seeing the previously unseen usually means peering deeper with ever more sensitive telescopes -- detecting those smaller planets ... those more distant galaxies," said study coauthor Thomas Haworth, an astrophysicist at Queen Mary University of London. "This thing was pretty much in our cosmic backyard, and we've just missed it," he added. Molecular clouds are composed of gas and dust from which hydrogen and carbon monoxide molecules can form. Dense clumps within these clouds can collapse to form young stars. The article clarifies that Eos is 300 light-years away, which to be sure, is closer than any of the molecular clouds that we've known about previously.

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The FDA has approved gene-edited pigs for human consumption, potentially marking the first major commercial application of CRISPR technology in the food chain. Created by British company Genus, these pigs have had their DNA modified to remove the receptor that the porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) virus uses to enter cells, rendering them immune to 99% of known virus variants.

PRRS causes losses of approximately $300 million annually in the US alone by killing piglets and spreading rapidly through factory farms. According to Matt Culbertson, chief operating officer of Genus subsidiary Pig Improvement Company, the gene-edited pork could reach US markets sometime next year. Before launching sales to pig farms, Genus must secure regulatory approval in key export markets including Mexico, Canada, Japan, and China.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/05/02/1651254/us-approves-crispr-pigs-for-food?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Pinterest is having some weird moderation issues. Reports of sweeping pin removals and account suspensions have appeared across social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and X, with many users saying they received no warning or explanation about the ban before being locked out of their accounts.

The r/Pinterest subreddit is also currently dominated by posts from confused users who claim their accounts have been suspended without evidence explaining how they violated the platform's guidelines. Users are also reporting they're experiencing an unusually high quantity of pins being deleted by Pinterest with absurd explanations, such as quilting magazines, cross-stitch art, and Minecraft bunk bed builds all being flagged for "adult content."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/02/1724245/pinterest-users-left-confused-by-mass-account-suspensions?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is teaming up with startup Anthropic on a new "vibe-coding" software platform that will use AI to write, edit and test code on behalf of programmers.

The system is a new version of Xcode, Apple's programming software, that will integrate Anthropic's Claude Sonnet model, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Apple will roll out the software internally and hasn't yet decided whether to launch it publicly, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the initiative hasn't been announced.

The work shows how Apple is using AI to improve its internal workflow, aiming to speed up and modernize product development. The approach is similar to one used by companies such as Windsurf and Cursor maker Anysphere, which offer advanced AI coding assistants popular with software developers. Further reading: 'Vibe Coding' is Letting 10 Engineers Do the Work of a Team of 50 To 100, Says YC CEO.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/05/02/181227/apple-anthropic-team-up-to-build-ai-powered-vibe-coding-platform?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The UK financial regulator is preparing to ban retail investors from using borrowed funds such as credit card balances to invest in cryptocurrency as it seeks to overhaul supervision of the fast-growing digital assets market. The Guardian: The soaring values of virtual currencies such as bitcoin after Donald Trump's election have put pressure on the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to take a tougher line while it also lays the groundwork for the industry to flourish in the UK.

According to a recent YouGov survey, the proportion of people in the UK using borrowed funds to make crypto purchases more than doubled from 6% in 2022 to 14% last year. Borrowing to fund investments, when asset values could change dramatically, meant consumers risked losing their entire investment and potentially other assets, such as their home. These characteristics closely resembled gambling, the Treasury committee found.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/02/1832253/uk-preparing-to-ban-consumers-from-buying-crypto-with-borrowed-funds?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the nearly two months since former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space, the billionaire has not said much publicly about his plans for the launch company. However, his intentions for Relativity now appear to be increasingly clear: He wants to have the capability to launch a significant amount of computing infrastructure into space.

We know this because Schmidt appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce during a hearing in April, speaking on the future of AI and US competitiveness. Among the topics raised then was the need for more electricity -- both renewable and non-renewable -- to power data centers that will facilitate the computing needs for AI development and applications. Schmidt noted that an average nuclear power plant in the United States generates 1 gigawatt of power.

"People are planning 10 gigawatt data centers," Schmidt said. "Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is. Many people think that the energy demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation. One of the estimates that I think is most likely is that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027, and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. These things are industrial at a scale that I have never seen in my life."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/05/02/1839250/eric-schmidt-apparently-bought-relativity-space-to-put-data-centers-in-orbit?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: A European Union privacy watchdog fined TikTok 530 million euros ($600 million) on Friday after a four-year investigation found that the video sharing app's data transfers to China put users at risk of spying, in breach of strict EU data privacy rules. Ireland's Data Protection Commission also sanctioned TikTok for not being transparent with users about where their personal data was being sent and ordered the company to comply with the rules within six months.

The Irish national watchdog serves as TikTok's lead data privacy regulator in the 27-nation EU because the company's European headquarters is based in Dublin. "TikTok failed to verify, guarantee and demonstrate that the personal data of (European) users, remotely accessed by staff in China, was afforded a level of protection essentially equivalent to that guaranteed within the EU," Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said in a statement. The Irish watchdog said its investigation found that TikTok failed to address "potential access by Chinese authorities" to European users' personal data under Chinese laws on anti-terrorism, counterespionage, cybersecurity and national intelligence that were identified as "materially diverging" from EU standards. Grahn said TikTok has "has never received a request for European user data from the Chinese authorities, and has never provided European user data to them."

[...] The investigation, which opened in September 2021, also found that TikTok's privacy policy at the time did not name third countries, including China, where user data was transferred. The watchdog said the policy, which has since been updated, failed to explain that data processing involved "remote access to personal data stored in Singapore and the United States by personnel based in China." TikTok faces further scrutiny from the Irish regulator, which said that the company had provided inaccurate information throughout the inquiry by saying that it didn't store European user data on Chinese servers. It wasn't until April that it informed the regulator that it discovered in February that some data had in fact been stored on Chinese servers. TikTok disagrees with the decision and plans to appeal. The company said the decision focuses on a "select period" ending in May 2023, before it embarked on a data localization project called Project Clover that involved building three data centers in Europe.

"The facts are that Project Clover has some of the most stringent data protections anywhere in the industry, including unprecedented independent oversight by NCC Group, a leading European cybersecurity firm," said Christine Grahn, TikTok's European head of public policy and government relations. "The decision fails to fully consider these considerable data security measures."

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Pinterest is facing widespread user backlash over abrupt account suspensions and pin removals, with many reporting no clear reason or warning before being locked out. The Verge reports: The r/Pinterest subreddit is also currently dominated by posts from confused users who claim their accounts have been suspended without evidence explaining how they violated the platform's guidelines. Users are also reporting they're experiencing an unusually high quantity of pins being deleted by Pinterest with absurd explanations, such as quilting magazines, cross-stitch art, and Minecraft bunk bed builds all being flagged for "adult content."

"We hear your concerns about recent account deactivations on Pinterest," the company said on X. "To ensure Pinterest remains a safe and positive platform, we continuously monitor for content that violates our Community Guidelines and accounts with violative content may be deactivated as a result." "Pinterest has long-established, public Community Guidelines that clearly outline what is and isn't allowed on the platform," Pinterest spokesperson Ivy Choi said in a statement to The Verge. "We're committed to building a safer and more positive platform, and enforce these policies rigorously and continuously. Users who believe their account may have been deactivated mistakenly may submit an appeal."

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Uber is partnering with Chinese autonomous driving startup Momenta to launch robotaxi services outside the U.S. and China, starting in Europe in early 2026 with safety operators onboard. CNBC reports: Uber said the goal is to combine its global ridesharing network with Momenta's technology to deliver safe and efficient robotaxi services. "This collaboration brings together Uber's global ridesharing expertise and Momenta's AI-first autonomous driving technology, paving the way for a future where more riders around the world experience the benefits of reliable and affordable autonomous mobility," Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in the press release. Momenta CEO Xudong Cao said the arrangement "completes the key ecosystem needed to scale autonomous driving globally."

Momenta, based in Beijing, is a leading autonomous driving company known for its "two-leg" product strategy. It offers both Mpilot, a mass-production-ready assisted driving system, and MSD (Momenta Self-Driving), aimed at full autonomy. The company has years of experience operating autonomous vehicles in cities across China and has partnerships with large equipment manufacturers.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Temu has said it will stop selling goods imported from China in the US directly to customers from its platform. The online marketplace said sales would now be handled by "locally based sellers," with orders fulfilled from within the country. The move comes as a duty-free rule for low-value packages is closed.

Temu, and rival Chinese retail giant Shein, had previously relied on the so-called "de minimis" exemption to sell and ship low-value items directly to the US without having to pay duties or import taxes. Temu said it had been actively recruiting US firms to join the platform. "All sales in the US are now handled by locally based sellers, with orders fulfilled from within the country. "The move is designed to help local merchants reach more customers and grow their businesses," it added.

Supporters of the de minimis loophole, which applied to parcels worth less than $800, argue it helped streamline the customs process. But both Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, said it damaged American businesses and was used to smuggle illegal goods, including drugs. In February, Trump briefly closed the loophole but the suspension was quickly paused as delivery services and customs agencies struggled to adjust. During the pause, the U.S. Postal Service even stopped accepting parcels from mainland China and Hong Kong.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/02/2121218/temu-to-stop-selling-goods-from-china-directly-to-us-customers?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The U.S. government is seeking to break up Google's advertising technology business after a judge ruled the company holds an illegal monopoly over ad tools for publishers, marking the second such antitrust case following a similar request to divest Chrome. The Guardian reports: "We have a defendant who has found ways to defy" the law, US government lawyer Julia Tarver Wood told a federal court in Virginia, as she urged the judge to dismiss Google's assurance that it would change its behavior. "Leaving a recidivist monopolist" intact was not appropriate to solve the issue, she added. [...] The US government specifically alleged that Google controls the market for publishing banner ads on websites, including those of many creators and small news providers.

The hearing in a Virginia courtroom was scheduled to plan out the second phase of the trial, set for September, in which the parties will argue over how to fix the ad market to satisfy the judge's ruling. The plaintiffs argued in the first phase of the trial last year that the vast majority of websites use Google ad software products which, combined, leave no way for publishers to escape Google's advertising technology and pricing.

The district court judge Leonie Brinkema agreed with most of that reasoning, ruling last month that Google built an illegal monopoly over ad software and tools used by publishers, but partially dismissed the argument related to tools used by advertisers. The US government said it would use the trial to recommend that Google should spin off its ad publisher and exchange operations, as Google could not be trusted to change its ways. "Behavioral remedies are not sufficient because you can't prevent Google from finding a new way to dominate," Tarver Wood said.

Google countered that it would recommend that it agree to a binding commitment that it would share information with advertisers and publishers on its ad tech platforms. Google lawyer Karen Dunn did, however, acknowledge the "trust issues" raised in the case and said the company would accept monitoring to guarantee any commitments made to satisfy the judge. Google is also arguing that calls for divestment are not appropriate in this case, which Brinkema swiftly refused as an argument. The judge urged both sides to mediate, stressing that coming to a compromise solution would be cost-effective and more efficient than running a weeks-long trial.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/02/2243229/us-asks-judge-to-break-up-googles-ad-tech-business?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Microsoft has appointed a Deputy CISO for Europe to address growing regulatory pressure and reassure EU leaders about its cybersecurity commitment. "The move also highlights strong fears from European IT execs and government officials that the Trump administration may exert significant influence on cybersecurity companies," reports CSO Online. From the report: Who that Deputy CISO will ultimately be is unclear. Wednesday's statement simply said that Microsoft CISO Igor Tsyganskiy is "appointing a new Deputy CISO for Europe as part of the Microsoft Cybersecurity Governance Council," but the phrasing made it unclear when that would happen. However, Tsyganskiy made a separate announcement on LinkedIn that he has given the role to current Deputy CISO Ann Johnson. But he then said that Johnson, who is based at Microsoft's head office in Redmond, Washington, will hold that post "temporarily."

In his LinkedIn post, Tsyganskiy explained that the Cybersecurity Governance Council, which was created in 2024, consists of "our Global CISO and Deputy Chief Information Security Officers (Deputy CISOs) representing each of our technology services. This Council oversees the company's cyber risks, defenses, and compliance across regions and domains." "The Deputy CISO for Europe will be accountable for compliance with current and emerging cybersecurity regulations in Europe, including the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), the NIS 2 Directive, and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)," Tsyganskiy wrote. "These laws will prove transformative not only in EU markets, but worldwide, and Microsoft is actively engaged in preparing for what lies ahead." Microsoft said in Wednesday's statement: "the appointment of a Deputy CISO for Europe reflects the importance and global influence of EU cybersecurity regulations and the company's commitment to meeting and exceeding those expectations to prioritize cybersecurity across the region. This new position will report directly to Microsoft's CISO."

Michela Menting, France-based digital security research director at ABI Research, said when she heard on Wednesday that Microsoft was creating such a role, "I was mostly surprised that they don't already have one."

"GDPR has been in place for quite some time now and the fact they are only now putting in a European deputy CISO is concerning," Menting added. "They are playing catch up."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/02/2251200/microsoft-appoints-deputy-ciso-for-europe-to-reassure-european-it-leaders?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Driverless trucks are officially running their first regular long-haul routes, making roundtrips between Dallas and Houston. On Thursday, autonomous trucking firm Aurora announced it launched commercial service in Texas under its first customers, Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines, which delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight. Both companies conducted test runs with Aurora, including safety drivers to monitor the self-driving technology dubbed "Aurora Driver." Aurora's new commercial service will no longer have safety drivers.

"We founded Aurora to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly, said Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of Aurora, in a release on Thursday. "Now, we are the first company to successfully and safely operate a commercial driverless trucking service on public roads." The trucks are equipped with computers and sensors that can see the length of over four football fields. In four years of practice hauls the trucks' technology has delivered over 10,000 customer loads. As of Thursday, the company's self-driving tech has completed over 1,200 miles without a human in the truck. Aurora is starting with a single self-driving truck and plans to add more by the end of 2025.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/02/2258206/first-driverless-semis-have-started-running-regular-longhaul-routes?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Astronomers may have found the best candidate yet for the elusive Planet Nine: a mysterious object in infrared sky surveys taken 23 years apart that appears to be more massive than Neptune and about 700 times farther from the sun than Earth. Space.com reports: [A] team led by astronomer Terry Long Phan of the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan has delved into the archives of two far-infrared all-sky surveys in search of Planet Nine -- and incredibly, they have found something that could possibly be Planet Nine. The Infrared Astronomy Satellite, IRAS, launched in 1983 and surveyed the universe for almost a year before being decommissioned. Then, in 2006, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched AKARI, another infrared astronomy satellite that was active between 2006 and 2011. Phan's team were looking for objects that appeared in IRAS's database, then appeared to have moved by the time AKARI took a look. The amount of movement on the sky would be tiny -- about three arcminutes per year at a distance of approximately 700 astronomical units (AU). One arcminute is 1/60 of an angular degree.

But there's an extra motion that Phan's team had to account for. As the Earth orbits the sun, our view of the position of very distant objects changes slightly in an effect called parallax. It is the same phenomenon as when you hold your index finger up to your face, close one eye and look at your finger, and then switch eyes -- your finger appears to move as a result of you looking at it from a slightly different position. Planet Nine would appear to move on the sky because of parallax as Earth moves around the sun. On any particular day, it might seem to be in one position, then six months later when Earth is on the other side of the sun, it would shift to another position, perhaps by 10 to 15 arcminutes -- then, six months after that, it would seem to shift back to its original position. To remove the effects of parallax, Phan's team searched for Planet Nine on the same date every year in the AKARI data, because on any given date it would appear in the same place, with zero parallax shift, every year. They then also scrutinized each candidate object that their search threw up on an hourly basis. If a candidate is a fast-moving, nearby object, then its motion would be detectable from hour to hour, and could therefore be ruled out. This careful search led Phan's team to a single object, a tiny dot in the infrared data.

It appears in one position in IRAS's 1983 image, though it was not in that position when AKARI looked. However, there is an object seen by AKARI in a position 47.4 arcminutes away that isn't there in the IRAS imagery, and it is within the range that Planet Nine could have traveled in the intervening time. In other words, this object has moved a little further along its orbit around the sun in the 23 or more years between IRAS and AKARI. The knowledge of its motion in that intervening time is not sufficient to be able to extrapolate the object's full orbit, therefore it's not yet possible to say for certain whether this is Planet Nine. First, astronomers need to recover it in more up-to-date imagery. [...] Based on the candidate object's brightness in the IRAS and AKARI images, Phan estimates that the object, if it really is Planet Nine, must be more massive than Neptune. This came as a surprise, because he and his team were searching for a super-Earth-size body. Previous surveys by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have ruled out any Jupiter-size planets out to 256,000 AU, and any Saturn-size planets out to 10,000 AU, but a smaller Neptune or Uranus-size world could still have gone undetected. Phan told Space.com that he had searched for his candidate in the WISE data, "but no convincing counterpart was found because it has moved since the 2006 position," and without knowing its orbit more accurately, we can't say where it has moved to.
"Once we know the position of the candidate, a longer exposure with the current large optical telescopes can detect it," Phan told Space.com. "However, the follow-up observations with optical telescopes still need to cover about three square degrees because Planet Nine would have moved from the position where AKARI detected it in 2006. This is doable with a camera that has a large field of view, such as the Dark Energy Camera, which has a field of view of three square degrees on the Blanco four-meter telescope [in Chile]."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/05/03/0118242/evidence-of-controversial-planet-9-uncovered-in-sky-surveys-taken-23-years-apart?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A 25-year-old from Santa Clarita has pleaded guilty to hacking a Disney employee's computer using malware disguised as an AI art tool, stealing over 1 terabyte of confidential Disney data and threatening to leak it under the guise of a fake Russian hacktivist group. Variety reports: Santa Clarita resident Ryan Mitchell Kramer, 25, pleaded guilty to two felony charges, including one count of accessing a computer and obtaining information and one count of threatening to damage a protected computer. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison. According to the plea agreement, in early 2024 Kramer posted a computer program on various online platforms that appeared to be used to create AI-generated art, when it really contained a malicious file to gain access to victims' computers.

Between April and May 2024, a Disney employee downloaded the program, and Kramer gained access to the victim's personal and work accounts, including a non-public Disney Slack channel. Kramer dowloaded approximately 1.1 terabytes of confidential data from thousands of Disney Slack channels. In July, Kramer contacted the victim by pretending to be a member of a fake Russian hacktivist group called "Nullbulge" and threatened to leak their personal information and Disney Slack data. On July 12, Kramer publicly released the data, including the victim's bank, medical, and personal information on multiple online platforms.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/03/0126234/man-pleads-guilty-to-stealing-11-terabytes-of-disneys-slack-data?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Google plans to roll out its Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot next week for children under 13 (source paywalled; alternative source) who have parent-managed Google accounts, as tech companies vie to attract young users with A.I. products. "Gemini Apps will soon be available for your child," the company said in an email this week to the parent of an 8-year-old. "That means your child will be able to use Gemini" to ask questions, get homework help and make up stories. The chatbot will be available to children whose parents useFamily Link, a Google service that enables families to set up Gmail and opt into services like YouTube for their child. To sign up for a child account, parents provide the tech company with personal data like their child's name and birth date. Gemini has specific guardrails for younger users to hinder the chatbot from producing certain unsafe content, said Karl Ryan, a Google spokesman. When a child with a Family Link account uses Gemini, he added, the company will not use that data to train its A.I.

Introducing Gemini for children could accelerate the use of chatbots among a vulnerable population as schools, colleges, companies and others grapple with the effects of popular generative A.I. technologies. Trained on huge amounts of data, these systems can produce humanlike text and realistic-looking images and videos. [...] Google acknowledged some risks in its email to families this week, alerting parents that "Gemini can make mistakes" and suggesting they "help your child think critically" about the chatbot. The email also recommended parents teach their child how to fact-check Gemini's answers. And the company suggested parents remind their child that "Gemini isn't human" and "not to enter sensitive or personal info in Gemini." Despite the company's efforts to filter inappropriate material, the email added, children "may encounter content you don't want them to see."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/03/0136232/google-plans-to-roll-out-its-ai-chatbot-to-children-under-13?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Remember when U.S. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz mistakenly included a journalist in an encrypted chatroom to discuss looming U.S. military action against Yemen's Houthis?

A recent photo of a high-level cabinet meeting caught Waltz using a "less-secure Signal app knockoff," reports the Guardian:

The chat app Waltz was using appears to be a modified version of Signal called TM SGNL, made by a company that copies messaging apps but adds an ability to retain messages and archive them. The White House officials may be using the modified Signal in order to comply with the legal requirement that presidential records be preserved... That function suggests the end-to-end encryption that makes Signal trusted for sharing private communications is possibly "not maintained, because the messages can be later retrieved after being stored somewhere else", according to 404 Media.

Thursday the national security adviser was removed from his position, the article points out.
He was instead named America's ambassador to the United Nations.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/03/0427226/us-national-security-official-caught-using-less-secure-signal-app-knockoff?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares this excerpt from a new article in Science magazine:

At first, astronomers knew of only one cosmic scenario that fit the bill for the violent formation of "jewelry shop" elements [gold and sliver]: the collision of two ultra-dense stellar corpses called neutron stars.

Now, a second has stepped onto the scene.

As they report this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers have discovered signatures of this heavy element formation — called the r-process — in a giant flare first detected from a highly magnetic neutron star in 2004. The flare, which released more energy than our Sun does in a million years as it spewed electrically charged material, has remained shrouded in mystery since its discovery 20 years ago. Researchers quickly traced the outburst to a nearby magnetar, a special breed of neutron star whose magnetic fields are trillions times stronger than Earth's. But ten minutes after the massive flare, a second, fainter signal inexplicably came from the same star.

More r-process sources may still be looming in the dark. The new study accounts for about 10% of the Milky Way's heavy elements, suggesting that astronomers will have to scour the cosmos for even more places where the r-process is hiding. One potential spot is a rare type of supernova that births rapidly rotating neutron stars, says says Anirudh Patel, the new study's lead author and an astronomer at Columbia University. He hopes that with more observations, astronomers will be able to sharpen that picture.... "It's humbling to realize that these were made in such extreme astrophysical environments."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/05/03/0245209/new-gold-creating-phenomenon-confirmed-in-space-using-2004-neutron-star-flare-readings?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:

Facebook's loosening of its content moderation standards early this year got lots of attention and criticism. But a new study suggests that it might matter less what is taken down than when. The research finds that Facebook posts removed for violating standards or other reasons have already been seen by at least three-quarters of the people who would be predicted to ever see them.

"Content takedowns on Facebook just don't matter all that much, because of how long they take to happen," said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and the lead author of the paper in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety. Social media platforms generally measure how many bad posts they have taken down as an indication of their efforts to suppress harmful or illegal material. The researchers advocate a new metric: How many people were prevented from seeing a bad post by Facebook taking it down...?
"Removed content we saw was mostly garden-variety spam — ads for financial scams, [multilevel marketing] schemes, that kind of thing," Edelson said... The new research is a reminder that platforms inadvertently host lots of posts that everyone agrees are bad.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/03/0525218/facebooks-content-takedowns-take-so-long-they-dont-matter-much-researchers-find?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

May is Maintainer Month: Celebrating those who secure Open Source

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The Open Source Initiative is joining "a global community of contributors" for GitHub's annual event "honoring the individuals who steward and sustain Open Source projects."
And the theme of the 4th Annual "Maintainer Month" will be: securing Open Source:

Throughout the month, OSI and our affiliates will be highlighting maintainers who prioritize security in their projects, sharing their stories, and providing a platform for collaboration and learning... Maintainer Month is a time to gather, share knowledge, and express appreciation for the people who keep Open Source projects running. These maintainers not only review issues and merge pull requests — they also navigate community dynamics, mentor new contributors, and increasingly, adopt security best practices to protect their code and users....

- OSI will publish a series of articles on Opensource.net highlighting maintainers whose work centers around security...
- As part of our programming for May, OSI will host a virtual Town Hall [May 21st] with our affiliate organizations and invite the broader Open Source community to join....
- Maintainer Month is also a time to tell the stories of those who often work behind the scenes. OSI will be amplifying voices from across our affiliate network and encouraging communities to recognize the people whose efforts are often invisible, yet essential.

"These efforts are not just celebrations — they are opportunities to recognize the essential role maintainers play in safeguarding the Open Source infrastructure that underpins so much of our digital world," according to the OSI's announcement. And this year they're focusing on three key areas of open source security:

Adopting security best practices in projects and communities
Recognizing contributors who improve project security
Collaborating to strengthen the ecosystem as a whole

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/03/0653227/may-is-maintainer-month-open-source-initiative-joins-github-to-celebrate-open-source-security?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Threads has now grown to over 350 million monthly active users, reports TechCrunch, citing Mark Zuckerberg's comments on a company earnings call. That means Threads grew by 9.4% in roughly 90 days:

That's an increase of 30 million users since the prior quarter, where Meta reported that Threads had 320 million users. The new figure represents increased growth, as Threads added 30 million in the first quarter of this year, compared with 20 million in Q4 2024.

It's also worth noting that in a single quarter, Threads added nearly the same number of users to its network as one of its newer competitors, Bluesky. The latter, a decentralized social app, today has roughly 35 million users.

Zuckerberg also said there's been a 35% increase in time spent on Threads, according to the article, as a result of improvements to its recommendations systems.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/03/0546227/threads-jumps-to-350-million-adding-30-million-users-in-three-months?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

America's federal government "is a veritable cosmos of information, made up of constellations of databases," warns the Atlantic. The FBI "has a facial-recognition apparatus capable of matching people against more than 640 million photos — a database made up of driver's license and passport photos, as well as mug shots. The Homeland Security department holds data "about the movements of every person who travels by air commercially". America's Drug Enforcement Administration "tracks license plates scanned on American roads." And there's also every taxpayer's finance and employment history..."
Government agencies including the IRS, the FBI, DHS, and the Department of Defense have all purchased cellphone-location data, and possibly collected them too, via secretive groups such as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. That means the government has at least some ability to map or re-create the past everyday movements of some American citizens.
But now the information at individual agencies "is being pooled together. The question is Why? And what does the administration intend to do with it?" A White House spokesperson confirmed to the Atlantic that data collected by different agencies is now being combined. (They said that "Through data sharing between agencies, departments are collaborating to identify fraud and prevent criminals from exploiting hardworking American taxpayers.") But a March executive explicitly stated an aim "to eliminate the data silos that keep everything separate." The article accuses the administration officials of "not just undoing decades of privacy measures. They appear to be ignoring that they were ever written."

The Atlantic spoke with former government officials "who have spent time in these systems," reporting that "to a person, these experts are alarmed about the possibilities for harm, graft, and abuse... Collecting and then assembling data in the industrial way — just to have them in case they might be useful — would represent a huge and disturbing shift for the government..."

"A fragile combination of decades-old laws, norms, and jungly bureaucracy has so far prevented repositories such as these from assembling into a centralized American surveillance state. But that appears to be changing... DOGE has systematically gained access to sensitive data across the federal government "in ways that people in several agencies have described to us as both dangerous and disturbing."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/03/1844236/the-atlantic-warns-combining-us-government-databases-could-create-a-panopticon?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader piojo writes: Tim Friede, Wisconsin man, has been injecting himself with snake venom for 18 years to gain protection from his pet snakes. The antibodies he developed have formed two components of a three-part antivenom, which gives partial or total protection against 18 of 19 species of venomous snakes that were tested. Notably, the antivenom is ineffective against vipers.

From Australia's public broadcaster ABC:

The team's results have been published today in the journal Cell... The new antivenom described in the study is very different to traditional antivenoms, according to Peter Kwong, a biochemist at Columbia University and one of the study's authors.

The scientists call their new antivenom "unparallel," according to the BBC, though the snake enthusiast (a former truck mechanic) had "initially wanted to build up his immunity to protect himself when handling snakes, documenting his exploits on YouTube."

The team is trying to refine the antibodies further and see if adding a fourth component could lead to total protection against elapid snake venom... "Tim's antibodies are really quite extraordinary — he taught his immune system to get this very, very broad recognition," said Professor Peter Kwong [one of the researchers at Columbia University].

In a video interview, CNN shows footage of the man inducing snake bites (calling it "a classic do-not-try-this-at-home moment"). "I have a lot of notes in Excel files," he tells CNN, "where I hit these particular windows to where I know I can boost up before a bite."

"I don't just take the bite, because that can kill you. I properly boost up, and methodically take notes, and weigh the venomes out very specifically..."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/05/03/2040208/unparalleled-snake-antivenom-made-with-antibodies-from-a-man-bitten-200-times?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"Researchers have created the first laboratory analog of the 'black hole bomb'," reports ScienceAlert, "a theoretical concept developed by physicists in the 1970s..."

There's no black hole involved; their experiment just simulates the "electromagnetic analogue" of the theoretical concept — the "exponential runaway amplification of spontaneously generated electromagnetic modes."

Or, as ScienceAlert puts it, "It doesn't, just to set your mind at ease, pose any danger. It consists of a rotating aluminum cylinder, placed inside layers of coils that generate magnetic fields that rotate around it, at controllable speeds."

As Roger Penrose proposed in 1971, the powerful rotational energy of a spinning black hole could be used to amplify the energy of nearby particles. Then, physicist Yakov Zel'Dovich figured out that you didn't need a black hole to see this phenomenon in action. An axially symmetrical body rotating in a resonance chamber, he figured, could produce the same energy transfer and amplification, albeit on a much smaller scale. Later work by other physicists found that, if you enclose the entire apparatus in a mirror, a positive feedback loop is generated, amplifying the energy until it explodes from the system.

This concept was named the black hole bomb, and a team of physicists led by Marion Cromb of the University of Southampton in the UK now claim to have brought it to life. A paper describing their experiment has been uploaded to preprint server arXiv... [W]hat the team's experiment does is simulate it, using magnetic fields as a proxy for the particles, with the coils around the system acting as the reflector to produce the feedback loop. When they ran the experiment, they found that, when the cylinder is rotating faster than, and in the same direction as, the magnetic field, the magnetic field is amplified, compared to when there is no cylinder. When the cylinder rotates more slowly than the magnetic field, however, the magnetic field is dampened. This is a really interesting result, because it demonstrates a very clear amplification effect, based on the theories described decades ago...

Because we can't probe black holes directly, analogs such as this are an excellent way to understand their properties... [T]he experiment could represent a significant step towards better understanding the physics of the most gravitationally extreme objects in the Universe.

"The exponential amplification from noise supports theoretical investigations into black hole instabilities," the researchers write, "and is promising for the development of future experiments to observe quantum friction in the form of the Zeldovich effect seeded by the quantum vacuum..."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/05/03/2018249/scientists-simulate-first-ever-black-hole-bomb-laboratory-analog?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.