An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Gates Foundation opened an external review earlier this year into its engagement with the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the philanthropic group said on Tuesday. The foundation has been mired in controversy due to Chairman Bill Gates' association with Epstein. A release of emails in January by the U.S. Justice Department also showed communication between Epstein and the Gates Foundation's staff.

"Early this year, Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman commissioned an external review to assess past foundation engagement with Epstein, and our current policies for vetting and developing new philanthropic partnerships," the foundation said in a statement. "That review is underway, and we expect the board and management will receive an update this summer," it added. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news earlier on Tuesday, said Suzman told staff in a memo, "this is a challenging time for our organization in many ways, but it also highlights the critical importance of taking the tough actions now." The WSJ also reports that the Gates Foundation will eliminate up to 500 jobs, or about 20% of its staff, by 2030. It said the foundation has a 2026 budget of about $9 billion, but plans to cap operating expenses at $1.25 billion.

Further reading: The Bill Gates-Epstein Bombshell - and What Most People Get Wrong

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/04/22/195209/gates-foundation-to-cut-20-of-staff-review-epstein-ties?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader mmarlett writes: The Atlantic has a long article on the story of missing scientists recently featured here on Slashdot. In short, it is an incoherent conspiracy theory that spreads wide and far, not paying any attention to boundaries of time, space, or area of expertise. "Which is all to say that another piece of flagrant nonsense has ascended to the highest levels of U.S. politics and media," writes the Atlantic's Daniel Engber. "To call it a conspiracy theory would be far too kind, because no comprehensive theory has been floated to explain the pattern of events. But then, even the phrase pattern of events is imprecise, because there is no pattern here at all. Given all the people who could have been roped into this narrative but weren't, any hope of finding meaning falls away. Barring any dramatic new disclosures, the mystery of the missing scientists has the dubious honor of being a sham in every way at once."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/04/22/1934234/the-missing-scientist-story-is-unbelievably-dumb?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Bloomberg reports that a small group of unauthorized users gained access to Anthropic's restricted Mythos model through a mix of contractor-linked access and online sleuthing. Anthropic says it is investigating and has no evidence the access extended beyond a third-party vendor environment or affected its own systems. From the report: The users relied on a mix of tactics to get into Mythos. These included using access the person had as a worker at a third-party contractor for Anthropic and trying commonly used internet sleuthing tools often employed by cybersecurity researchers, the person said. The users are part of a private Discord channel that focuses on hunting for information about unreleased models, including by using bots to scour for details that Anthropic and others have posted on unsecured websites such as GitHub. [...] To access Mythos, the group of users made an educated guess about the model's online location based on knowledge about the format Anthropic has used for other models, the person said, adding that such details were revealed in a recent data breach from Mercor, an AI training startup that works with a number of top developers.

Crucially, the person also has permission to access Anthropic models and software related to evaluating the technology for the startup. They gained this access from a company for which they have performed contract work evaluating Anthropic's AI models. Bloomberg is not naming the company for security reasons. The group is interested in playing around with new models, not wreaking havoc with them, the person said. The group has not run cybersecurity-related prompts on the Mythos model, the person said, preferring instead to try tasks like building simple websites in an attempt to avoid detection by Anthropic. The person said the group also has access to a slew of other unreleased Anthropic AI models.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/04/22/2038241/anthropics-mythos-model-is-being-accessed-by-unauthorized-users?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Sony AI's autonomous table-tennis robot Ace has become the first robot to compete against top-level human players. Reuters reports: Ace, created by the Japanese company Sony's AI research division, is the first robot to attain expert-level performance in a competitive physical sport, one that requires rapid decisions and precision execution, the project's leader said. Ace did so by employing high-speed perception, AI-based control and a state-of-the-art robotic system. There have been various ping-pong-playing robots since 1983, but until now they were unable to rival highly skilled human competitors. Ace changed that with its performances against human elite-level and professional players in matches following the rules of the International Table Tennis Federation, the sport's governing body, and officiated by licensed umpires.

The project's goal was not only to compete at table tennis but to develop insights into how robots can perceive, plan and act with human-like speed and precision in dynamic environments. In matches detailed in the study, Ace in April 2025 won three out of five versus elite players and lost two matches against professional players, the top skill level in the sport. Sony AI said that since then Ace beat professional players in December 2025 and last month. "The success of Ace, with its perception system and learning-based control algorithm, suggests that similar techniques could be applied to other areas requiring fast, real-time control and human interaction -- such as manufacturing and service robotics, as well as applications across sports, entertainment and safety-critical physical domains," said Peter Durr, director of Sony AI Zurich and leader for Sony AI's project Ace.

The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/04/22/2138211/ping-pong-robot-makes-history-by-beating-top-level-human-players?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams shares a report from the BBC: The Trump family's World Liberty crypto venture is being sued by one of its billionaire backers over allegations of extortion. Justin Sun has accused World Liberty of an "illegal scheme" to seize his WLFI tokens, a cryptocurrency issued by the company. Sun alleges the firm, co-founded by U.S. President Donald Trump and his son Eric Trump, has "frozen" all of his tokens and stripped him of his right to vote on governance issues.

[...] Sun alleged that those running World Liberty, including another co-founder, Chase Herro, are using it as a "golden opportunity to leverage the Trump brand to profit through fraud." In his complaint, filed on Tuesday in a San Francisco federal court, Sun argues that initial promises to give token-holders the option to trade the currency in future "were false and misleading." While the tokens at large became tradeable, Sun said World Liberty has blocked him from being able to sell a single one, and is now threatening to "burn" his - deleting them entirely. WLFI said in a post on X: "Does anyone still believe @justinsuntron? Justin's favorite move is playing the victim while making baseless allegations to cover up his own misconduct. Same playbook, different target. WLFI isn't the first. We have the contracts. We have the evidence. We have the truth. See you in court pal."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/04/22/2146235/billionaire-backer-sues-trump-familys-crypto-firm-over-alleged-extortion?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Nearly half of children in the United States are breathing dangerous levels of air pollution, according to a new report, as experts warned Donald Trump's expansive rollback of protections will make the situation worse. The 27th annual air quality report from the American Lung Association (ALA) released on Wednesday evaluates pollution across the country by grading levels of ground-level ozone -- also known as smog -- as well as year-round and short-term spikes in particle pollution, commonly referred to as soot. The report analyzed quality-assured data collected between 2022 and 2024. It found that 33.5 million children in the US -- 46% of those under 18 -- live in areas that received a failing grade for at least one measure of air pollution. The report also found that 7 million children, or 10% of all children in the US, live in communities that failed all three measures.

The report further found that communities of color are disproportionately exposed to unhealthy air. As a result, they are more likely to live with one or more chronic health conditions that make them more vulnerable to pollution, including asthma, diabetes, and heart disease. Although people of color make up 42.1% of the US population, they represent 54.2% of those living in counties with at least one failing grade, the report noted. It also found that a person of color is 2.42 times more likely than a white person to live in a community that fails all three pollution measures. Smog remains the most widespread pollutant affecting Americans' health. Between 2022 and 2024, 38% of the US population -- approximately 129.1 million people -- were exposed to ozone levels that put their health at risk. This marks the highest number recorded in the ALA's report in six years, and a 3.9 million increase from the previous year.

Several factors contributed to these unhealthy pollution levels, including extreme heat, drought and wildfires which have exposed a growing share of the population to harmful ozone, the report said. The regions most affected by high ozone levels include south-western states from California to Texas, as well as much of the midwest. This is mainly driven by smoke from Canada's 2023 wildfires crossing into the US, along with high temperatures and weather patterns that favored ozone formation in 2023 and 2024 -- particularly in southern states. More broadly, the report found that climate change is intensifying ozone pollution by boosting precursor emissions and creating atmospheric conditions such as higher temperatures and lower wind speeds that allow pollutants to build up and ozone to form. Another growing source of pollution: datacenters. The report notes how they rely on regional electricity grids where fossil fuels like methane gas and coal still account for a large portion of generation. Many datacenters also use dozens of large diesel-powered backup generators, which emit carcinogenic particulate matter.

"Children's lungs are still developing," said Will Barrett, assistant vice-president of the ALA's Nationwide Clean Air Policy. "For their body size, they're breathing more air. And also, kids play outdoors, they're more active, they're breathing in more outdoor air [...]. So, air pollution exposure in children can contribute to long-term developmental harm to their lungs, new cases of asthma, increased risks of respiratory illness and other health considerations later in life."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/04/22/2345209/nearly-half-of-us-children-are-breathing-dangerous-levels-of-air-pollution?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Не связанный с компанией Microsoft энтузиаст реализовал инструментарий WSL9x (Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux), позволяющий запускать современные ядра Linux внутри ядра Windows 95/98/ME. Проект даёт возможность в одной системе бок о бок выполнять приложения для Linux и Windows 9x, по аналогии с тем как прослойка WSL позволяет работать с Linux-приложениями в современных версиях Windows. Поддерживается запуск только консольных Linux-программ. Код компонентов WSL9x написан на Си и ассемблере и распространяется под лицензией GPLv3.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=65270

alternative_right writes: A new technology has been proposed that could fundamentally solve the issue of smartphones overheating during high-spec gaming or extended video streaming. Researchers at KAIST have discovered the principle of processing signals using the minute vibrations of magnets (spin waves) instead of electrons. This method significantly reduces heat generation and power consumption while enabling instantaneous frequency switching within the several GHz range. This breakthrough is expected to pave the way for smart devices with less heat and longer battery life, as well as ultra-low-power, high-speed computing. Professor Kab-Jin Kim from the Department of Physics said: "This study is a case that proves we can implement and control the nonlinear dynamics of magnons -- the principle of information processing using magnetic vibrations -- in actual nano-devices, which had previously only been proposed in theory. It will serve as an important foundation for the development of a new information processing paradigm using spin waves instead of electrons."

The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/04/22/2314218/your-phones-next-speed-boost-may-come-from-magnetic-chips?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Доступен выпуск проекта Nuitka 4.0, развивающего компилятор для трансляции скриптов на языке Python в представление на языке C, которое затем можно скомпилировать в исполняемый файл, использующий libpython для обеспечения максимальной совместимости с CPython (используются штатные средства CPython для управления объектами). Обеспечена полная совместимость с актуальными выпусками Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.4 - 3.13. По сравнению с CPython скомпилированные скрипты демонстрируют в тестах pystone повышение производительности на 335%. Код проекта распространяется под лицензией Apache.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=65271

21 апреля состоялся крупный выпуск QEMU версии 11.0 — свободной программы с открытым исходным кодом для эмуляции аппаратного обеспечения различных платформ.

( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/opensource/18272555#cut0 ) )

QEMU включает в себя эмуляцию процессоров Intel x86 и устройств ввода-вывода. Может эмулировать 80386, 80486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, AMD64 и другие x86-совместимые процессоры; ARM, MIPS, RISC-V, PowerPC, SPARC, SPARC64 и частично m68k. Работает на Syllable, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, FreeDOS, Linux, Windows 9x, Windows 2000, Mac OS X, QNX, Android и др. Подробности можно посмотреть [ на странице Википедии ]( https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU ) и [ на странице проекта ]( https://wiki.qemu.org/Main_Page ) .

15 апреля Фонд СПО признал лицензию ONLYOFFICE несовместимой с лицензией AGPLv3. Поводом для разбирательства послужил конфликт вокруг проекта Euro-Office - европейского форка пакета ONLYOFFICE. В марте 2026 года создатели Euro-Office удалили из лицензии AGPLv3 некоторые дополнительные пункты, которые ONLYOFFICE добавил в 2021 году. Эти пункты, в частности, требовали от всех производных продуктов сохранять оригинальный логотип ONLYOFFICE. Разработчики ONLYOFFICE посчитали, что удаление этих требований является нарушением лицензии, и пригрозили судебными исками.

Юрист Фонда СПО Кшиштоф Севич (Krzysztof Siewicz) выступил с официальным разъяснением, встав на сторону Euro-Office. Он заявил, что дополнительные требования ONLYOFFICE выходят за рамки, разрешенные AGPLv3.

( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/opensource/18273131#cut0 ) )

Представлен релиз проекта QEMU 11.0.0. В качестве эмулятора QEMU позволяет запустить программу, собранную для одной аппаратной платформы на системе с совершенно иной архитектурой, например, выполнить приложение для ARM на x86-совместимом ПК. В режиме виртуализации в QEMU производительность выполнения кода в изолированном окружении близка к аппаратной системе за счёт прямого выполнения инструкций на CPU и задействования гипервизора Xen или модуля KVM в Linux, или модуля NVMM в NetBSD.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=65269