Digg is relaunching again, this time as an AI-focused news aggregator rather than the Reddit-style community site it recently abandoned. TechCrunch reports: On Friday evening, the founder previewed a link to the newly redesigned Digg, which now looks nothing like a Reddit clone and more like the news aggregator it once was. This time around, the site is focused on ranking news -- specifically, AI news to start. In an email to beta testers, the company said the site's goal is to "track the most influential voices in a space" and to surface the news that's actually worth "paying attention to." AI is the area it's testing this idea with, but if successful, Digg will expand to include other topics. The email warned that the site was still raw and "buggy," and was designed more to give users a first look than to serve as its public debut.

On the current homepage, Digg showcases four main stories at the top: the most viewed story, a story seeing rising discussion, the fastest-climbing story, and one "In case you missed it" headline. Below that is a ranked list of top stories for the day, complete with engagement metrics like views, comments, likes, and saves. But the twist is that these metrics aren't the ones generated on Digg itself. Instead, Digg is ingesting content from X in real-time to determine what's being discussed, while also performing sentiment analysis, clustering, and signal detection to determine what matters most. [...] The site also ranks the top 1,000 people involved in AI, as well as the top companies and the top politicians focused on AI issues.

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Nvidia's real AI moat isn't "a piece of hardware," writes Wired's Sheon Han. It's CUDA: a mature, deeply optimized software ecosystem that keeps machine-learning workloads tied to Nvidia GPUs. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: What sounds like a chemical compound banned by the FDA may be the one true moat in AI. CUDA technically stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, but much like laser or scuba, no one bothers to expand the acronym; we just say "KOO-duh." So what is this all-important treasure good for? If forced to give a one-word answer: parallelization. Here's a simple example. Let's say we task a machine with filling out a 9x9 multiplication table. Using a computer with a single core, all 81 operations are executed dutifully one by one. But a GPU with nine cores can assign tasks so that each core takes a different column -- one from 1x1 to 1x9, another from 2x1 to 2x9, and so on -- for a ninefold speed gain. Modern GPUs can be even cleverer. For example, if programmed to recognize commutativity -- 7x9 = 9x7 -- they can avoid duplicate work, reducing 81 operations to 45, nearly halving the workload. When a single training run costs a hundred million dollars, every optimization counts.

Nvidia's GPUs were originally built to render graphics for video games. In the early 2000s, a Stanford PhD student named Ian Buck, who first got into GPUs as a gamer, realized their architecture could be repurposed for general high-performance computing. He created a programming language called Brook, was hired by Nvidia, and, with John Nickolls, led the development of CUDA. If AI ushers in the age of a permanent white-collar underclass and autonomous weapons, just know that it would all be because someone somewhere playing Doom thought a demon's scrotum should jiggle at 60 frames per second. CUDA is not a programming language in itself but a "platform." I use that weasel word because, not unlike how The New York Times is a newspaper that's also a gaming company, CUDA has, over the years, become a nested bundle of software libraries for AI. Each function shaves nanoseconds off single mathematical operations -- added up, they make GPUs, in industry parlance, go brrr. ... [>>>]

cURL creator Daniel Stenberg says Anthropic's hyped Mythos bug-hunting model found only one confirmed low-severity vulnerability in cURL, plus a few non-security bugs, after he expected a much longer list. He argues Mythos may be useful, but not meaningfully beyond other modern AI code-analysis tools. "My personal conclusion can however not end up with anything else than that the big hype around this model so far was primarily marketing," Stenberg said a blog post. "I see no evidence that this setup finds issues to any particular higher or more advanced degree than the other tools have done before Mythos." He went on to call Mythos "an amazingly successful marketing stunt for sure." The Register reports: Stenberg explained in a Monday blog post that he was promised access to Anthropic's Mythos model - sort of - through the AI biz's Project Glasswing program. Part of Glasswing involves giving high-profile open source projects access via the Linux Foundation, but while Stenberg signed up to try Mythos, he said he never actually received direct access to the model. Instead, someone else with access ran Mythos against curl's codebase and later sent him a report. "It's not that I would have a lot of time to explore lots of different prompts and doing deep dive adventures anyway," Stenberg explained. "Getting the tool to generate a first proper scan and analysis would be great, whoever did it."

That scan, which analyzed curl's git repository at a recent master-branch commit, was sent back to him earlier this month, and it found just five things that it claimed were "confirmed security vulnerabilities" in cURL. Saying he had expected an extensive list of vulnerabilities, Stenberg wrote that the report "felt like nothing," and that feeling was further validated by a review of Mythos' findings. "Once my curl security team fellows and I had poked on this short list for a number of hours and dug into the details, we had trimmed the list down and were left with one confirmed vulnerability," Stenberg said, bringing us back to the aforementioned number. ... [>>>]

GM is laying off about 500 to 600 salaried IT workers, mainly in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, as it restructures its technology organization and trims costs. "GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future. As part of that work, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles globally. We are grateful for the contributions of the employees affected and are committed to supporting them through this transition," the automaker said in an emailed statement. CNBC reports: GM reported employing about 68,000 salaried workers globally as of the end of last year, including 47,000 white-collar employees in the U.S. Despite Monday's cuts, GM still is still hiring IT workers. The company has 82 open IT positions that include positions working in artificial intelligence, motorsports and autonomous vehicles, according to the automaker's careers website.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/05/11/1839238/gm-cutting-hundreds-of-salaried-it-workers-as-it-trims-costs-evaluates-needs?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Apple says end-to-end encryption for RCS messages between iPhone and Android is now available in iOS 26.5, though the feature is still considered beta and depends on carrier support on both sides. MacRumors reports: Apple says that it worked with Google to lead a cross-industry effort to add E2EE to RCS. iOS users will need iOS 26.5, while Android users will need the latest version of Google Messages. End-to-end encryption is on by default, and there is a toggle for it in the Messages section of the Settings app. Encrypted messages are denoted with a small lock symbol. On iPhones not running iOS 26.5, RCS messages between iPhone and Android users do not have E2EE, but the new update will put Android to iPhone conversations on par with iPhone to iPhone conversations that are encrypted through iMessage.

Along with Google, Apple worked with the GSM Association to implement E2EE for RCS messages. E2EE is part of the RCS Universal Profile 3.0, published with Apple's help and built on the Messaging Layer Security protocol. RCS Universal Profile 3.0 also includes editing and deleting messages, cross-platform Tapback support, and replying to specific messages inline during cross-platform conversations.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/05/11/1834209/iphone-android-rcs-conversations-are-end-to-end-encrypted-in-ios-265?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Speaking to graduates of University of Central Florida's College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media on May 8, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group, told graduating humanities students that AI is the "next industrial revolution," and was met with thousands of booing graduates. "And let's face it, change can be daunting. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," Caulfield said. At that point, murmurs rippled through the crowd. Caulfield paused, and the crowd erupted into boos. "Oh, what happened?" Caulfield said, turning around with her hands out. "Okay, I struck a chord. May I finish?" Someone in the crowd yelled, "AI SUCKS!"

Her speech begins around the hour and 15 minute mark in the UCF livestream. [...] Before the industrial revolution comment, Caulfield praised Jeff Bezos for his passion and use of Amazon as a "stepping stone" to his real dream: spaceflight. Rattled after the crowd's reaction, she continued her speech: "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives." The crowd cheered. "Okay. We've got a bipolar topic here I see," Caulfield said. "And now AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands." The crowd booed again. "I love it, passion, let's go," she said. "AI is beginning to challenge all major sectors to find their highest and best use," she continued. "Okay, I don't want any giggles when I say this. We have been through this before, these industrial revolutions. In my graduation era, we were faced with the launch of the internet."

She goes on to talk about how cellphones used to be the size of briefcases. "At that time we had no idea how any of these technologies would impact the world and our lives. [...] These were some of the same trepidations and concerns we are now facing. But ultimately it was a game changer for global economic development and the proliferation of new businesses that never existed like Apple and Google and Meta and so many others, and not to mention countless job opportunities. So being an optimist here, AI alongside human intelligence has the potential to help us solve some of humanity's greatest problems. Many of you in this graduating class will play a role in making this happen." ... [>>>]

Google says it has seen the first evidence of cybercriminals using AI to create a zero-day vulnerability. "Google reported its findings to the unnamed firm affected by the vulnerability before releasing its report," reports Politico. "The company then issued a patch to fix the issue." From the report: Google Threat Intelligence Group researchers detailed the development in a report released Monday. Zero-day exploits are considered the most serious type of security flaw because they are not detected by security companies and have no known fixes. The report noted that this was the first time Google had seen evidence of AI being used to develop these vulnerabilities -- marking a major change in the cybersecurity landscape, as it suggests newer AI models could be used to create major exploits, not just find them.

Google concluded that Anthropic's Claude Mythos model -- which has already found thousands of vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser -- was most likely not used to create the zero-day exploit. [...] The Google Threat Intelligence Group report also details efforts by Russia-linked hacking groups to use AI models to target Ukrainian networks with malware, while North Korean government hacking group APT45 used AI technologies to refine and scale up its cyber methods.

John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said the findings made clear that the race to use AI to find network vulnerabilities has "already begun."

"For every zero-day we can trace back to AI, there are probably many more out there," Hultquist said. "Threat actors are using AI to boost the speed, scale, and sophistication of their attacks."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/05/11/1640239/google-says-hackers-used-ai-to-create-zero-day-security-flaw-for-the-first-time?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

Apple now requires Education Store shoppers in the U.S. and several other countries to verify their student, educator, parent, or homeschool-teacher status through UNiDAYS, ending the previous honor-system approach. 9to5Mac reports: Starting today, Apple requires shoppers in the United States to complete verification when making a purchase via the Education Store. This change also applies to Australia, Hong Kong, Turkey, Canada, and Chile. In many other markets around the world, such as the UK, Apple already required verification. As a refresher, people eligible for Apple's Education Store include current and newly accepted college students and their parents, as well as faculty, staff, and homeschool teachers across all grade levels.

Apple is teaming up with UNiDAYS to handle the verification process. Students and educators will be asked to create a UNiDAYS ID and then verify their academic status by logging in to their school's academic portal. Alternatively, users can upload a photo of their student or faculty IDs. Homeschool teachers, meanwhile, will need to provide an identity document such as a driver's license, state ID card, or passport. They'll also need to provide one homeschool document, such as a Letter of Intent (LOI) or Letter of Acknowledgment. Most customers will be verified instantly, and those requiring manual verification should hear back within 24 hours. The same verification process applies both in-store and online for Apple Education Store shoppers. Meanwhile, Apple has added Apple Watch to the Education Store for the first time, offering discounts on the Series 11, SE 3, and Ultra 3.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/26/05/11/0443252/apple-now-requires-verification-for-education-store?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Fictional portrayals of artificial intelligence can have a real effect on AI models, according to Anthropic. Last year, the company said that during pre-release tests involving a fictional company, Claude Opus 4 would often try to blackmail engineers to avoid being replaced by another system. Anthropic later published research suggesting that models from other companies had similar issues with "agentic misalignment."

Apparently Anthropic has done more work around that behavior, claiming in a post on X, "We believe the original source of the behavior was internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation." The company went into more detail in a blog post stating that since Claude Haiku 4.5, Anthropic's models "never engage in blackmail [during testing], where previous models would sometimes do so up to 96% of the time."

What accounts for the difference? The company said it found that training on "documents about Claude's constitution and fictional stories about AIs behaving admirably improve alignment." Related, Anthropic said that it found training to be more effective when it includes "the principles underlying aligned behavior" and not just "demonstrations of aligned behavior alone." "Doing both together appears to be the most effective strategy," the company said.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/05/11/0437206/anthropic-says-evil-portrayals-of-ai-were-responsible-for-claudes-blackmail-attempts?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Linux 7.1 started phasing out support for Intel's 37-year-old i486 processor. Linux 7.2 removed drivers for the old AMD Elan 32-bit systems on a chip.

And now some i586 and i686 class processors are being removed, reports Phoronix:

Supporting those vintage GPUs without the Time Stamp Counter "TSC" instruction are becoming a burden... TSC-capable Intel Pentium processors and the likes will still be supported with this just being for TSC-less i586/i686 CPUs. Among the CPUs impacted by this latest change is the AMD K5 as well as various Cyrix processor models. The K5 was AMD's first entirely in-house designed processor that was first introduced in 1996 to counter the Intel Pentium CPU.

TSC "support can now be assumed as a boot requirement for modern Linux," the article points out, which will allow the removal of various non-TSC code paths from the Linux kernel's x86 code.

Tom's Hardware remembers the K5 "wasn't a very popular processor as it arrived late, then offered lackluster performance in the competitive environment it joined."

Launch SKUs in 1996 were limited to clocks from 75 MHz to 133 MHz, and, due to being late, Intel's Pentium line was already faster. AMD still managed to get an edge on the Cyrix 6x86, though.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/26/05/11/0315223/linux-kernel-starts-retiring-support-for-amds-30-year-old-k5-cpus?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Ford's sales of electrified vehicles — including hybrids and all-electric models — dropped 31% from April 2025, reports Electrek. "Hybrid sales fell 32% to 15,758 vehicles, while EV sales continued to crash with just 3,655 all-electric models sold last month, 25% fewer than in the year prior."

After discontinuing the F-150 Lightning in December, sales of the electric pickup have been in free fall. Ford sold just 884 Lightnings last month, 49% less than it did last April. The Mustang Mach-E isn't doing much better. Sales fell another 9% year over year in April, to just 2,670 models last month. Through the first four months of 2026, Ford's EV sales have fallen 61% from last year, with F-150 Lightning and Mustang Mach-E sales down 67% and 50%, respectively. Ford has sold just over 10,500 electric vehicles in total so far this year... For comparison, Toyota sold just over 10,000 bZ models in the first quarter alone. That's more than Ford's total EV sales in Q1.
April was Ford's fourth straight month of lower sales figures from 2025, the article points out. So Ford is bringing back "employee pricing" discounts on most new 2025 and 2026 Ford and Lincoln vehicles., while also offering "purchase incentives" of up to $9,000 for 2025 Lightning models and up to $6,000 for 2025 Mustang Mach-Es. "It's also offering EV buyers a free Level 2 home charger, 24/7 live support, and proactive roadside assistance through its Power Promise program."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/05/10/237205/fords-electrified-vehicle-sales-dropped-31-in-april-from-one-year-ago?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The free/open source project OrcaSlicer is a popular fork of 3D printer slicing software from Bambu Lab. But Tuesday independent developer Pawel Jarczak shuttered the project "following legal threats from Bambu Lab," reports Tom's Hardware:

Jarczak's fork of OrcaSlicer would have allowed users to bypass Bambu Connect, a middleware application that severely limits OrcaSlicer's access to remote printer functions in the name of security. Jarczak said in a note on GitHub that Bambu Lab threatened him with a cease and desist letter and accused him of reverse engineering its software in order to impersonate Bambu Studio.

From Bambu Lab's blog post:

Bambu Studio is an open-source project under the AGPL-3.0 license. Anyone can take its code, modify it, and distribute it... That's what OrcaSlicer does, and 734 other forks do as well. We have no issue with that and never have. At the same time, a license for code is not a pass to our cloud infrastructure... Our cloud is a private service. Access to it is governed by a user agreement, not the AGPL license... [T]he modification in question worked by injecting falsified identity metadata into network communication. In simple terms: it pretended to be the official Bambu Studio client when communicating with our servers... If this method were widely adopted or incorrectly configured, thousands of clients could simultaneously hit our servers while impersonating the official client.

"User-Agent is not authentication," counters OrcaSlicer's developer. "It is only self-declared client metadata. Any program can set any User-Agent." And "the User-Agent construction comes directly from Bambu Lab's own public AGPL Bambu Studio code.... So on what basis can anyone claim that I am not allowed to use this specific part of AGPL-licensed code under the AGPL license...? My work was based on publicly available Bambu Studio source code together with my own integration layer."

But the bottom line is that Bambu Lab "contacted me directly and demanded removal of the solution." ... [>>>]

In Polymarket's prediction market, "most people end up losing money," reports the Washington Post — typically a few bucks.

"Since Polymarket launched in 2022, a few thousand people have lost the bulk of the money... and an even smaller group — .05 percent of users — has gone home with most of the overall profits, according to a new analysis from finance researcher Pat Akey and colleagues."

A lot of users aren't that good at predicting the future. They're losing money at roughly the same rate as online gamblers betting on sports and other real-life events at traditional sportsbooks, according to the U.K. gambling regulator's analysis of 2024 data. On Polymarket, the odds of making a profit are slightly higher on weather and tech markets — and a little lower on sports...

On Polymarket, just 1,200 people took more than half the profits — $591 million, or more than $100,000 each. ["The top 1% of users capture 76.5% of all trading gains," the researchers write.] When you dabble in prediction markets, you're competing against these sophisticated players who consistently win. Most of those 1,200 big winners didn't place just a few smart bets. They appear to be pros making thousands of trades, mostly in the past year and a half, that were probably automated. One user made $3 million since January on more than a million trades about the Oscars, according to TRM Labs...

The most profitable participants are also just good at picking what to bet on, Akey found, winning so often it was statistically unlikely to be dumb luck. They had some sort of edge — expertise, deep research or, perhaps, inside knowledge.

"Our results suggest that the informational benefits of prediction markets come at a cost to unsophisticated participants," the researchers conclude.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/05/11/0055243/most-polymarket-users-lose-money-while-top-1-claim-765-of-gains-study-finds?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

Open-source PS3 emulator RPCS3 "has been around since 2011," Kotaku notes, and has made 70% of the PlayStation 3's library fully playable, "bolstered in part by the many users who contribute to its GitHub page." But their dev team "took to X today to very kindly and civilly request that users 'stop submitting AI slop code pull requests' to its GitHub page."

Then they immediately proceeded to tell the AI-brain-rotted tech bros attempting to justify their vibe-coding nonsense to kick rocks in the replies, which is somewhat less civil but far more entertaining to read...
My favorite one was when someone asked how the team was certain they weren't rejecting human-written code, to which RPCS3 replied: "You can't possibly handwrite the type of shit AI slop we have been seeing."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/05/11/0012211/playstation3-emulator-devs-politely-ask-contributors-to-stop-submitting-ai-slop-pull-requests?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek:

A newly revealed Honda patent shows the company developing a simulated electronic clutch system for electric motorcycles, complete with torque-boost launches and even haptic feedback designed to mimic the feel of a combustion engine.... Instead of using a traditional mechanical clutch, the system uses electronics to alter how the motor responds based on clutch lever position. Pull the clutch halfway in, and the system proportionally reduces motor output. Pull it fully, and power is cut entirely, regardless of throttle position.

But the more interesting part is how Honda intends to recreate the behavior riders actually use clutches for. According to the patent as reported by AMCN, riders could preload the throttle while holding in the clutch lever, then rapidly release the lever to trigger a burst of torque — essentially simulating the hard launches motocross riders rely on with gas bikes. Honda believes that could be useful in competitive riding situations where precise power modulation matters, especially on loose terrain or during aggressive starts.

Honda also appears to be working on recreating the feel of a gas bike, not just the control inputs. The patent describes multiple vibration motors placed in the handlebars and near the clutch lever to provide haptic feedback that simulates engine vibration and even the "bite point" sensation of a clutch engaging. In other words, Honda may be trying to make an electric dirt bike feel mechanically alive, or at least the old-school idea of what a breathing dirt bike used to feel like.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/05/10/224222/honda-patents-a-fake-clutch-for-electric-motorcycles?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Major American cloud companies with data centers in the Persian Gulf "are channeling data out of the war zone through fiber-optic cables that an Iraqi telecom has strung alongside crude-oil pipelines," reports RestofWorld.org:

The data centers serve customers in more than 190 countries, processing transactions, storing files, and running applications for businesses and individuals from Latin America to South Asia. When Iranian drones struck Amazon's facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on March 1, the effects spread across the region. Apps of major banks in the UAE, including Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, stopped working. Payment and delivery platforms went offline. Snowflake, a U.S. enterprise software company used by thousands of businesses globally, reported Middle East service disruptions tied directly to the Amazon Web Services outage. Amazon told its customers to migrate their workloads out of the Middle East...

[Data from] banking, payment, and enterprise platforms normally travels to Europe through cables running under the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, then connects onward to users across the world. The war has put those cables at risk. The overland route through Iraq is meant to serve as a backup if the sea cables are disabled. The overland route through Iraq is meant to serve as a backup if the sea cables are disabled... [Martin Frank, strategic adviser for IQ Networks, the company that built the network, told Rest of World this overland route is already carrying live traffic.] The company, based in Iraq's Kurdistan region, runs fiber from the southern tip of Iraq to the Turkish border. It is now extending the network through gas-pipeline corridors across Turkey to the European border, with the first link expected early next year, Frank said. When that extension is complete, cloud providers will — for the first time — have the option of an unbroken land-based fiber path from the Gulf into the European network, connecting onward to Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, and Marseille, from where their data connects back to U.S. users. ... [>>>]

This week Amazon opened up its parcel shipping, fulfillment, and distribution "to businesses of all types and sizes." Any business can now ship, store, and deliver "using the same supply chain that supports Amazon," according to Monday's announcement of "Amazon Supply Chain Services."

The move sent shares of UPS and FedEx "tumbling" Monday writes GeekWire. And though both stocks bounced back as the week went on, GeekWire sees this as the latest example of Amazon "turning its internal capabilities into products and services for sale..."

"Amazon had already surpassed both carriers to become the nation's largest parcel shipper by volume, according to parcel-analytics firm ShipMatrix."

Initial customers include Procter & Gamble, which is using Amazon's freight network to transport raw materials; 3M, which is using it to move products to distribution centers; Lands' End, which is fulfilling orders across sales channels from Amazon's warehouses; and American Eagle Outfitters, which is using Amazon's parcel service for last-mile delivery. The service can fulfill orders placed through platforms that compete with Amazon's own marketplace, including Walmart, Shopify, TikTok, and others... Peter Larsen, vice president of Amazon Supply Chain Services, compared the launch to the origins of Amazon's cloud business...

In addition to putting Amazon in competition with existing players in the logistics industry, the move also raises questions about data privacy. Amazon has faced accusations of using nonpublic seller data to compete against merchants on its marketplace, which it has denied. Larsen told the Wall Street Journal that the company prohibits using supply chain customer data for its own marketplace decisions, noting that hundreds of thousands of Amazon sellers already trust the company to fulfill orders placed on rival platforms.

The article notes taht in his annual shareholder letter Amazon's CEO "said the company is also exploring selling its custom AI chips and robotics to outside customers." ... [>>>]

"General Motors sold the data of California drivers without their knowledge or consent," says California's attorney general, "and despite numerous statements reassuring drivers that it would not do so."

In 2024, The New York Times "reported that automakers including GM were sharing information about their customers' driving behavior with insurance companies," remembers TechCrunch, "and that some customers were concerned that their insurance rates had gone up as a result."

Now General Motors "has reached a privacy-related settlement with a group of law enforcement agencies led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta..."

The settlement announcement from Bonta's office similarly alleges that GM sold "the names, contact information, geolocation data, and driving behavior data of hundreds of thousands of Californians" to Verisk Analytics and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which are both data brokers. Bonta's office further alleges that this data was collected through GM's OnStar program, and that the company made roughly $20 million from data sales.

However, Bonta's office also said the data did not lead to increased insurance prices in California, "likely because under California's insurance laws, insurers are prohibited from using driving data to set insurance rates."
As part of the settlement, GM has agreed to pay $12.75 million in civil penalties and to stop selling driving data to any consumer reporting agencies for five years, Bonta's office said. GM has also agreed to delete any driver data that it still retains within 180 days (unless it obtains consent from customers), and to request that Lexis and Verisk delete that data.

"This trove of information included precise and personal location data that could identify the everyday habits and movements of Californians," according to the attorney general's announcement. The settlement "requires General Motors to abandon these illegal practices, and underscores the importance of the data minimization in California's privacy law — companies can't just hold on to data and use it later for another purpose." ... [>>>]

IT sector unemployment "increased to 3.8% in April from 3.6% in March," reports the Wall Street Journal.

But they add that the increase reflects "an ongoing uncertainty in tech as AI continues to play havoc with hiring. That's according to analysis from consulting firm Janco Associates, which bases its findings on data from the U.S. Labor Department."
On Friday, the department said the economy added 115,000 jobs, buoyed by gains in industries including retail, transportation and warehousing and healthcare. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.3%. But the information sector lost 13,000 jobs in April.

While it's still too early to say exactly how AI is affecting employment overall, some businesses, especially in the tech industry, have said it's part of the reason they're cutting staff. In April, Meta Platforms said it would lay off 10% of its staff, or roughly 8,000 people, as it seeks to streamline operations and pay for its own massive investments in AI. Nike will reduce its workforce by roughly 1,400 workers, or about 2%, mostly in its tech department, as it simplifies global operations. And Snap is planning to eliminate 16% of its workforce, or about 1,000 positions, as it aims to boost efficiency. In other areas of IT, which includes telecommunications and data-processing, employment is now down 11%, or 342,000 jobs, from its most recent peak in November 2022.

But there's not just AI to blame. Inflation and economic uncertainty linked to the Iran conflict is giving some chief executives and tech leaders reason to pull back or pause their IT hiring, said Janco Chief Executive Victor Janulaitis.

The article even notes that postings for software developer jobs "are up 15% year-over-year on job-search platform Indeed, according to Hannah Calhoon, its vice president of AI". But employers do seem to be looking for experienced developers, which could pose a problem for recent college graduates.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/05/10/0441253/unemployment-ticked-up-in-americas-it-sector?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

An anonymous reader shared this report from Futurism:

In November, Amazon leaders sent an internal memo to employees, pushing them to use its in-house code generating tool, Kiro, over third-party alternatives from competitors. "While we continue to support existing tools in use today, we do not plan to support additional third party, AI development tools," the memo read, as quoted by Reuters at the time. "As part of our builder community, you all play a critical role shaping these products and we use your feedback to aggressively improve them."
It was an unusual development, considering the tens of billions of dollars the e-commerce giant has invested in its competitors in the space, including Anthropic and OpenAI... Half a year later, Amazon is singing a dramatically different tune. As Business Insider reports, Amazon is officially throwing in the towel, succumbing to growing calls among employees for access to OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude... Given the unfortunate optics of opening the floodgates for Codex and Claude Code, an Amazon spokesperson told the publication in a statement that teams are still "primarily using" Kiro, claiming that 83 percent of engineers at the company are leaning on it.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/05/10/0618225/amazon-relents-lets-its-programmers-use-openais-codex-and-anthropics-claude?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

For just the first three months of 2026, Rocket Lab's launch business reports $63.7 million in revenue, reports CNBC — plus another $136.7 million from its space systems business. Besides beating Wall Street's expectations, Rocket Lab also announced that its backlog has more than doubled from a year ago to $2.2 billion, and that it's buying space robotics company Motiv Space Systems.
Friday its stock price shot up 34% in one day...

Rocket Lab's stock has more than quadrupled over the past year, benefiting from skyrocketing demand for businesses tied to the space economy ahead of SpaceX's hotly anticipated IPO later this year. Demand for space systems and satellites is also escalating as President Donald Trump pursues his ambitious Golden Dome missile defense project and NASA's crewed Artemis missions rev up.

Rocket Lab said Thursday that it signed its largest contract ever with a confidential customer for its Neutron and Electron rockets through 2029, weeks after landing a $190 million deal for 20 hypersonic test flights... "The demand signal is clear," CEO Peter Beck said on an earnings call with analysts, calling the pace of new product releases from the company this year "relentless".... Rocket Lab's good news lifted other space companies. Firefly Aeropspace and Intuitive Machines both jumped more than 20, while Redwire gained 19%. Voyager Technologies rose 14%.

"The company anticipates revenue between $225 million and $240 million during the second quarter."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/05/10/0050223/rocket-lab-reports-growing-demand-for-commercial-space-products-stock-surges-34?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

IT sector unemployment "increased to 3.8% in April from 3.6% in March," reports the Wall Street Journal.

But they add that the increase reflects "an ongoing uncertainty in tech as AI continues to play havoc with hiring. That's according to analysis from consulting firm Janco Associates, which bases its findings on data from the U.S. Labor Department."
On Friday, the department said the economy added 115,000 jobs, buoyed by gains in industries including retail, transportation and warehousing and healthcare. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.3%. But the information sector lost 13,000 jobs in April.

While it's still too early to say exactly how AI is affecting employment overall, some businesses, especially in the tech industry, have said it's part of the reason they're cutting staff. In April, Meta Platforms said it would lay off 10% of its staff, or roughly 8,000 people, as it seeks to streamline operations and pay for its own massive investments in AI. Nike will reduce its workforce by roughly 1,400 workers, or about 2%, mostly in its tech department, as it simplifies global operations. And Snap is planning to eliminate 16% of its workforce, or about 1,000 positions, as it aims to boost efficiency. In other areas of IT, which includes telecommunications and data-processing, employment is now down 11%, or 342,000 jobs, from its most recent peak in November 2022.

But there's not just AI to blame. Inflation and economic uncertainty linked to the Iran conflict is giving some chief executives and tech leaders reason to pull back or pause their IT hiring, said Janco Chief Executive Victor Janulaitis.

The article even notes that postings for software developer jobs "are up 15% year-over-year on job-search platform Indeed, according to Hannah Calhoon, its vice president of AI". But employers do seem to be looking for experienced developers, which could pose a problem for recent college graduates.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/05/10/0441253/unemployed-ticked-up-in-americas-it-sector?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

CNBC reports:

The European Union is considering rules that would restrict its member governments' use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC.

The European Commission — the EU's executive branch — is expected to present its "Tech Sovereignty Package" on May 27, which will include a range of measures aimed at bolstering the bloc's strategic autonomy in key digital areas. As part of preparations for that package, discussions are taking place within the Commission around limiting the exposure of sensitive public-sector data to cloud platforms provided by companies outside of the EU, two Commission officials, who asked to remain anonymous as they weren't authorized to discuss private talks, told CNBC... "The core idea is defining sectors that have to be hosted on European cloud capacity," one of the officials said. They added that companies providing cloud solutions from third countries, including the U.S., could be impacted. Proposals would not prohibit overseas companies' cloud platforms from government contracts entirely, but limit their use in processing sensitive data at public sector organizations, depending on the level of sensitivity, they added. The officials said that talks are ongoing and yet to be finalized...
The officials told CNBC there are discussions around proposing that financial, judicial and health data processed by governments and public-sector organizations require high levels of sovereign cloud infrastructure.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/05/10/032247/the-eu-considers-restricting-use-of-us-cloud-platforms-for-sensitive-government-data?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable," reports the New York Times.

And "After Meta said late last month that it would start tracking employees' computer use, hundreds of workers spoke up." (One employee even told Meta's CTO in an internal post, "Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning."
In an internal post last month, Meta told its U.S. employees that it was making a change that would affect tens of thousands of them. What employees typed into their computer, how they moved their mouse, where they clicked and what they saw on their screen would be tracked, Meta said. The goal, the company said, was to capture employee data so Meta's artificial intelligence models could learn "how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers." Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, calling it antisocial and callous... [One engineering manager even asked "How do we opt out?"] "There is no option to opt-out on your corporate laptop," replied Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer. Employees reacted by posting more than 100 angry and surprised emoji, according to the messages....

Meta is pushing its 78,000 employees to adopt AI tools and factoring their use of the technology in performance reviews. The company is also tracking employees' computer work to feed and train its AI models. And it is cutting jobs to offset its AI spending, saying last month that it would slash 10% of its workforce. That has led to anger and anxiety as employees await news of whether they are affected by the layoffs, which are slated to be carried out May 20, according to 11 current and former Meta employees. Some said they no longer saw Meta as a place for a long career. Others were looking for new jobs or trying to signal that they wanted to be laid off so they could receive severance pay, the current and former employees said. "It's incredibly demoralizing," an employee who does user research wrote in an internal post, which was reviewed by the Times... ... [>>>]

While Nvidia has dominated the "infrastructure boom" since 2022's launch of ChatGPT and "the generative AI craze," CNBC writes that "This week offered the starkest illustration yet of what MIzuho analyst Jordan Klein said could be a 'changing of the guard in AI.'"

Chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel notched gains of about 25%, while memory maker Micron jumped more than 37% and fiber-optic cable maker Corning climbed about 18%. All four of those companies have more than doubled in value this year, with Intel leading the way, up well over 200%. Nvidia, meanwhile, is only slightly ahead of the Nasdaq in 2026, gaining 15% for the year, aided by an 8% rally this week. In spreading the wealth to a wider swath of hardware companies, investors are clearly betting that the bull market in AI has long legs and that data centers are going to need a wider array of advanced components for years to come.

Memory has been the biggest theme of late due to a global shortage that's driven up prices and turned Micron, a 47-year-old company tucked in a sleepy corner of the semiconductor market, into one of the hottest trades over the past 12 months. Micron blew past an $800 billion market capitalization for the first time this week, and the stock is now up over 750% in the past year. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC in March that key customers are only getting "50% to two-thirds of their requirements" because of supply issues. The memory market is largely dominated by Micron, along with Korea-based Samsung and SK Hynix, which are also both in the midst of historic rallies...

Bank of America estimates the data center CPU market could more than double from $27 billion in 2025 to $60 billion in 2030. AMD's quarterly results this week underscored the emerging trend, as earnings, revenue and guidance sailed past estimates on strong data center growth. The company has long led the CPU charge, and CEO Lisa Su said on the earnings call that AMD now expects 35% growth over the next three to five years in the server CPU market, up from a forecast of 18% growth that the company provided in November. ... [>>>]

Under the nonprofit Linux Foundation, "a new Sustaining Package Registries Working Group will seek to identify concrete funding, governance, and security practices," reports ZDNet, "to keep code flowing as download counts grow.... Because software builds, continuous integration pipelines, and AI systems hammer registries at machine speed rather than human speed, the sites can't keep up.
"That growth has brought a surge in bot traffic, automated publishing, security reports, and outright abuse, exposing what the working group bluntly calls a 'sustainability gap'."

Sonatype CTO Brian Fox, who oversees the Maven Central Java registry, estimates open-source registries saw 10 trillion downloads in 2025. And "The same pattern is appearing across ecosystems. More machine traffic. More automation. More scanning. More expectations around uptime, integrity, provenance, and policy enforcement. More cost. More support burden. More dependency on infrastructure that the industry still talks about as though it runs on goodwill and spare time."

ZDNet reports that "To tackle that, Sonatype has teamed up with the Linux Foundation and other package registry leaders, including Alpha-Omega, Eclipse Foundation (OpenVSX), OpenJS Foundation, OpenSSF, Packagist, Python Software Foundation, Ruby Central (RubyGems), and the Rust Foundation (Crates)."

The idea is to give operators a neutral forum to discuss money, governance, and shared operational burdens openly. Once that's dealt with, they'll coordinate how to explain those realities back to companies and organizations that have long assumed registries are "free." No, they're not. They never were. As the Linux Foundation pointed out, "Registries today run primarily on two things: (1) infrastructure donations and credits; and (2) heroic efforts from small paid teams (themselves funded by donations and grants) and unpaid volunteers that operate and maintain registry services. The bulk of donations and grants comes from a small set of donors and doesn't scale with demands on the registry." ... [>>>]

To upgrade its grid for data centers, PJM Interconnection (which serves 13 states) plans to spend $22 billion — and charge nearly $2 billion of that to customers in Maryland, argues Maryland's Office of People's Counsel. The money "will be recovered in rates for decades" and "drive up Maryland customer bills by $1.6 billion over the next ten years alone," they said Friday, announcing an official complaint filed with America's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Extra demand is expected from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois "where demands driven by data centers are projected to grow substantially by 2036," they explain. But that means that Maryland customers "are subsidizing data center-driven transmission buildout by virtue of geographic proximity..." Tom's Hardware explains:

That means an extra $823 million for residential (approx. $345 per customer), $146 million for commercial (approx. $673 per customer), and $629 million for industrial customers (approx. $15,074 per customer)... "Maryland customers have neither caused the need for these billions in new transmission projects nor will they meaningfully benefit from them," [according to Maryland People's Counsel David S. Lapp]....

This is one of the biggest reasons why many AI hyperscalers are facing pushback from the communities where they intend to place their data centers. At the moment, around 69 jurisdictions have passed some sort of moratorium on projects like these, and a survey has shown that nearly half of Americans do not want a data center in their neighborhood. Debates around these projects are passionate, with a few cases turning violent and even resulting in shootings (thankfully, without any casualties), especially as many feel that the construction of these power-hungry assets is threatening their lifestyles and quality of life.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader noshellswill for sharing the news.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/05/09/2155207/will-marylands-utility-bills-increase-16b-to-support-other-states-datacenters?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

NASA's $500 million Neil Gehrels Swift space observatory was launched in 2004. But it's now "at risk of falling back through the atmosphere and burning up without intervention," reports Spaceflight Now.

Fortunately, a mission to prevent that "just passed a notable prelaunch testing milestone."
On Friday, NASA announced that the Link spacecraft, manufactured by Katalyst Space Technologies to intervene before Swift's fate is sealed, completed its slate of environmental testing at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland... "Swift will likely re-enter the atmosphere sometime later this year if we don't attempt to lift it to a higher altitude, [said John Van Eepoel, Swift's mission director at NASA Goddard, in a NASA press release]. "Katalyst has gotten to this point in just eight months, and we're glad they were able to use NASA's facilities to test Link and draw on our expertise to help tackle questions that popped up along the way...."
"Given how quickly Swift's orbit is decaying, we are in a race against the clock, but by leveraging commercial technologies that are already in development, we are meeting this challenge head-on," said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters, at the time... Attempting an orbit boost is both more affordable than replacing Swift's capabilities with a new mission, and beneficial to the nation — expanding the use of satellite servicing to a new and broader class of spacecraft...."

Swift is in an orbit inclined 20.6 degrees from the equator, which is why Katalyst selected Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL air-launched rocket in November to fly the mission. "The versatility offered by Pegasus' unique air-launch capability provides customers with a space launch solution that can be rapidly deployed anywhere on Earth to reach any orbit," said Kurt Eberly, Director of Space Launch for Northrop Grumman.

The mission is set to launch in June.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/05/09/2112200/rush-rescue-mission-for-nasas-500m-space-telescope-passes-key-milestone?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

September 2025? January 2026? Delivery dates keep slipping for the Trump Organization's "Trump Phone" — a gold-coloured Android smartphone priced at $499 (£370). But in March the Verge spotted signs the phone was moving forward:

FCC listings for a smartphone with the trade name "T1" show that it was tested late last year, and granted certification by the FCC in January... [T]he phone was submitted for testing by another company entirely: Smart Gadgets Global, LLC... Smart Gadgets Global's website promises "Top Quality Electronics created for 'YOUR' customer!"

But in April the Trump phone revised its "Terms and Conditions" for preorders. The new language?
A preorder deposit provides only a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale. A deposit is not a purchase, does not constitute acceptance of an order, does not create a contract for sale, does not transfer ownership or title interest, does not allocate or reserve specific inventory, and does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase....
Estimated ship dates, launch timelines, or anticipated production schedule are non-binding estimates only. Trump Mobile does not guarantee that: the Device will be commercially released... Trump Mobile will not be responsible for delay, modification, or failure to release a Device due to causes beyond its reasonable control, including but not limited to regulatory review, carrier certification delays, component shortages, labor disruptions, governmental orders, acts of God, transportation interruptions, or third-party supplier failures...

If Trump Mobile cancels or discontinues the Device offering prior to sale, Trump Mobile will issue a full refund of the deposit amount paid... If Trump Mobile cancels, delays, or does not release the Device, your sole and exclusive remedy is a full refund of the deposit amount actually paid, and you waive any claim for equitable, injunctive, or specific performance relief relating to preorder priority or Device allocation. ... [>>>]

"Plant seeds can sense the vibrations generated by falling raindrops," reports ScienceAlert, "and respond by waking from their state of dormancy to welcome the water, new research shows.... to germinate in 'anticipation' of the coming deluge."
The finding, discovered by MIT mechanical engineers Nicholas Makris and Cadine Navarro, offers the first direct evidence that seeds and seedlings can sense and respond to sounds in nature... "The energy of the rain sound is enough to accelerate a seed's growth," [explains Markis].
Plants don't have the same aural equipment we do to actually hear sounds, of course. But the study suggests that seeds respond to the same vibrations that can produce a sound experience in our human ears. Across a series of experiments, the researchers submerged nearly 8,000 rice seeds in shallow tubs of water, at a depth of around 3 centimeters (1 inch), and exposed some of them to falling water drops over periods of six days... A hydrophone recorded the acoustic vibrations produced by the drops, confirming that the experiment mimicked the vibrations produced by actual raindrops falling in nature — such as the driving downpours that can sometimes pelt Massachusetts' puddles, ponds, and wetlands... In their study, the researchers observed that seeds exposed to the falling drops germinated up to around 37% faster, compared with seeds that did not receive the simulated rainstorm treatment but were housed in otherwise identical conditions.

More information in Scientific American and Scientific Reports.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/05/09/0644208/plant-seeds-do-something-incredible-when-the-sound-of-rain-strikes?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Cisco has released an open-source tool "to trace the origins of AI models," reports SC World, "and compare model similarities for great visibility into the AI supply chain."

[Cisco's Model Provenance Kit] is a Python toolkit and command-line interface (CLI) that looks at signals such as metadata and weights to create a "fingerprint" for AI models that can then be compared to other model fingerprints to determine potential shared origins. "Think of Model Provenance Kit as a DNA test for AI models," Cisco researchers wrote. "[...] Much like a DNA test reveals biological origins, the Model Provenance Kit examines both metadata and the actual learned parameters of a model (like a unique genome that comprises a model), to assess whether models share a common origin and identify signs of modification."

The tool aims to address gaps in visibility into the AI model supply chain. For example, many organizations utilize open-source models from repositories like HuggingFace, where models could potentially be uploaded with incomplete or deceptive documentation. The Model Provenance Kit provides a way for organizations to verify claims about a model's origins, such as claims that a model is trained from scratch, when in reality it may be copied from another model, Cisco said. This may put organizations at risk of using models with unknown biases, vulnerabilities or manipulations and make it more difficult to resolve any incidents that arise from these risks.

Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the news.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/05/09/0616224/cisco-releases-open-source-dna-test-for-ai-models?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

All 20 of America's state-run healthcare marketplace sites "include advertising trackers that share information with Big Tech companies," reports Gizmodo, citing a report from Bloomberg:

Per the report, seven million Americans bought their health insurance through state exchanges in 2026, and many of them may have had personal information shared with companies, including Meta, TikTok, Snap, Google, Nextdoor, and LinkedIn, among others. Some of the data collected and shared with those companies included ZIP codes, a person's sex and citizenship status, and race.

In addition to potentially sensitive biographical details about a person, the trackers also may reveal additional details about their life based on the sites they visit. For instance, Bloomberg found trackers on Medicaid-related web pages in Rhode Island, which could reveal information about a person's financial status and need for assistance. In Maryland, a Spanish-language page titled "Good News for Noncitizen Pregnant Marylanders" and a page designed to help DACA recipients navigate their healthcare options were found to be transmitting data to Big Tech firms...

Per Bloomberg, several states have already removed some trackers from their exchange websites following the report.

Thanks to Slashdot reader JoeyRox for sharing the news.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/05/09/052205/social-media-sites-got-information-from-ad-trackers-on-us-state-health-insurance-sites?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

CNN reports on a "sudden surge of claimed sightings" of "unidentified figures averaging 8 feet tall in wooded areas" along Ohio's Mahoning River.

"And it stopped just as quickly as it started," says Jeremiah Byron, host of the Bigfoot Society Podcast, which collected and mapped the reports .... Byron doesn't take every report at face value, making sure he talks to people directly before publicizing their claims. Once word got out about the reports in Ohio, so did the obvious fakes. "I started to get a lot of AI-generated reports in my email.
It got up to the point where I was probably getting about 1,000 emails a day," he says. But when Byron spoke by phone with people who made the initial reports, they convinced him they weren't making anything up. "It was obvious they weren't just wanting to get their name out there," says Byron. "They were just freaked out by what they experienced, and they didn't want anything else to do with it."

[...] Local law enforcement in Ohio also seem to be enjoying the publicity. Portage County Sheriff Bruce D. Zuchowski made a series of gag posts purporting to show the arrest of Bigfoot and his detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, only for the creature to escape from custody at the Canadian border...

Despite the levity, the sheriff's office really did get some calls from concerned residents, Zuchowski says. "Ten individual people were like, 'Yeah I was walking my dog at 4 a.m. and I saw this hairy figure and I smelled this musty odor and there was this big thing and all of a sudden it ran,'" the sheriff told CNN affiliate WOIO in March.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://idle.slashdot.org/story/26/05/09/0351243/10-people-called-police-to-report-bigfoot-sighting-in-ohio?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A chain of 30 U.S. newspapers including the Sacramento Bee, the Miami Herald and the Idaho Statesman "has started to use a new AI tool that can summarize traditional articles and spit out different versions for different audiences," reports the New York Times.

And the chain's reporters "are not happy about it."

Journalists in many of the company's newsrooms are now withholding their bylines from articles created by the new tool, meaning that those articles will run with a generic credit rather than a reporter's name, as is customary. They are also labeled AI-assisted. "We don't want to put our bylines on stories we did not actually write even if they're based on our work," said Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at the Sacramento Bee and the vice chair of the Sacramento Bee News Guild. "That in itself feels like a lie."

The reporters' byline strike is one of the sharpest conflicts yet between journalists and their companies over the use of AI. Related debates are playing out in newsrooms across the country, as publishers experiment with new AI tools to streamline work that used to take hours, and some even use it to write full articles... [E]xecutives have promoted the tool internally as a way to increase the number of articles published and ultimately gain new subscribers... [Eric Nelson, the vice president of local news] said using reporters' bylines on the AI-generated articles was a way to show "authority" on Google so the search engine would rank the articles higher in the results. He also said the company was experimenting with feeding in reporters' notes to create articles. "Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool are going to win," Nelson said in the meeting. "Journalists who are defiant will fall behind"....

McClatchy's public AI policy states that the company uses AI tools to summarize articles to "help readers quickly understand the main points of a single story or catch up on multiple stories about a larger topic," and that editors review the output before publication. ... [>>>]

America's school districts "spent billions on technology during the pandemic," reports the Washington Post.

"But now some states are limiting in-school screen time because of concerns about its impact on children."

Nationwide [U.S.] schools invested at least $15 billion and possibly as much as $35 billion from federal pandemic relief funds on laptops, learning software and other technology between 2020 and 2024, according to an estimate by the Edunomics Lab, an education think tank. By last school year, 88% of public schools reported in a federal survey they had given every child a laptop, tablet or similar device.

Now, some states and school districts are walking back their technology use following pressure from parents who claim too much in-school screen time has zapped children's attention spans and left them worse off academically. At least a dozen states introduced or adopted policies this year that attempt to regulate screen time in schools — from prescribing limits to allowing families to opt out of virtual instruction... In Missouri, a bill would require every school district in that state to come up with a screen time policy is making its way through the state legislature. "Ed tech is just big tech in a sweater vest," said Missouri state Rep. Tricia Byrnes (R), who introduced the legislation and blames what she described as the overuse of technology for middling test scores...

Complicating the issue is research that shows students do not see any academic gains when provided with laptops. A meta-analysis of studies on reading comprehension suggests paper-based texts are better than digital-based reading... A body of research has established that excessive or unstructured screen time can have detrimental effects on children, including harming language development, weakening social skills and triggering anxiety and depression. But the effects of school-issued devices and in-school usage on children's development are less understood, said Tiffany Munzer, a developmental behavioral pediatrician and digital media researcher at the University of Michigan. Some studies report that high-quality digital tools can support students' learning goals, Munzer said. But "a lot of the apps that are marketed as educational ... are not actually educational and contain a lot of commercialized content." ... [>>>]

A four-foot humanoid robot named Gabi has become a monk at a Buddhist temple in Seoul, participating in a modified initiation ceremony where it pledged to respect life, obey humans, act peacefully toward other robots and objects. "Robots are destined to collaborate with humans in every field in the future," Hong Min-suk, a manager at the Jogye Order, the largest sect of Buddhism in South Korea, tells the New York Times. "It will only be natural for them to be part of our festival." Smithsonian Magazine reports: For the temple, this marks the first time a robot has participated in the sugye initiation ceremony, when followers pledge their devotion to the Buddha and his teachings. Gabi -- a Buddhist name that refers to mercy, Yonhap News Agency reports -- was made by Unitree Robotics, a Chinese civilian robotics company. The model, G1, retails starting at $13,500. During the ceremony, Gabi agreed to five vows usually recited by human monks and slightly altered for the humanoid. The robot pledged to respect life, act with peace toward other robots and objects, listen to humans, refrain from acting or speaking in a deceptive manner and save energy.

Gabi participated in a modified yeonbi purification ritual. While a human monk normally receives a small incense burn on the arm, instead Gabi received a lotus lantern festival sticker and a prayer bead necklace. The landmark event aligns with the promise made during a New Year's address by the Venerable Jinwoo, president of the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, to incorporate artificial intelligence into the Buddhist tradition. "We aim to fearlessly lead the A.I. era and redirect its achievements toward the path of attaining peace of mind and enlightenment," he said, per a statement.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/05/09/0241247/humanoid-robot-becomes-buddhist-monk-in-south-korea?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Cold War spies planted bugs in walls, lamps, and telephones. Now, scientists warn, the cables themselves could listen in. A fiber optic technique used to detect earthquakes can also pick up the faint vibrations of nearby speech, researchers reported this week here at the general assembly of the European Geosciences Union. Freely available artificial intelligence (AI) software turned the fiber optic data into intelligible, real-time transcripts. "Not many people realize that [fiber optic cables] can detect acoustic waves," says Jack Lee Smith, a geophysicist at the University of Edinburgh who presented the result. "We show that in almost every case where you use these fibers, this could be a privacy concern."

Fiber optics can pick up on sound through a technique called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). Using a machine called an interrogator, researchers fire laser pulses down a cable and record the pattern of reflections coming back from tiny glass defects along the length of the fiber optic. When an earthquake's seismic wave crosses a section of the fiber, it stretches and squeezes the defects, leading to shifts in the reflected light that researchers can use to build a picture of an earthquake. DAS essentially turns a fiber cable into a long chain of seismometers that can detect not only earthquakes, but also the rumblings of volcanoes, cars, and college marching bands. And although scientists set up dedicated fiber lines specifically for research, DAS can also be performed on "dark fiber" -- unused strands in the web of fiber optics that runs through cities and across oceans, carrying the world's internet traffic.

DAS can also be used to eavesdrop, the work of Smith and his colleagues shows. They conducted a field test using an existing DAS setup used to study coastal erosion. They set a speaker next to the cable and played pure tones, music, and speech. Human speech contains frequencies ranging from a few hundred to several thousand hertz. The low end of the range could be pulled out of the data "even without any preprocessing," Smith says. "You can easily see acoustic waves." Getting higher frequency speech took a bit of postprocessing, but it was possible. Dumping the data directly into Whisper, a free AI transcription tool, provided accurate real-time transcription. However, this technique worked only for coiled cables, exposed at the surface, at distances of up to 5 meters from the speaker. Burying the cable under just 20 centimeters of dirt was enough to muddy the speech. And straight cables -- even exposed ones right next to the speaker -- did not record speech well. ... [>>>]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Walking into Mexico City's sprawling central Zocalo is a dizzying experience. At one end of the plaza, the capital's cathedral, with its soaring spires, slumps in one direction. An attached church, known as the Metropolitan Sanctuary, tilts in the other. The nearby National Palace also seems off-kilter. The teetering of many of the capital's historic buildings is the most visible sign of a phenomenon that has been ongoing for more than a century: Mexico City is sinking at an alarming rate. Now, the metropolis's descent is being tracked in real time thanks to one of the most powerful radar systems ever launched into space. Known as Nisar, the satellite can detect minute changes in Earth's surface, even through thick vegetation or cloud cover. "Nisar takes radar imaging observations of Earth to the next level," said Marin Govorcin, a scientist at Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory. "Nisar will see any change big or small that happens on Earth from week to week. No other imaging mission can claim this."

Though not the first time that Mexico City's sinking has been observed from space, the Nisar mission has provided a greater sense of how far the sinking spreads and how it changes across different types of land than any other space-based sensor. It has also been able to penetrate areas on the outskirts of the city that were previously challenging to study because of the complex terrain. The implications of the imagery extend far beyond the Mexican capital. "This study of Mexico City speaks to the realm of possibilities that will open up thanks to the Nisar system," said Dario Solano-Rojas, an engineer at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Unam). "And not just for sinking cities but also for studying volcanoes, for studying the deformation associated with earthquakes, for studying landslides." According to Nasa, the technology is also capable of monitoring the climate crisis, glacier sliding, agricultural productivity, soil moisture, forestry, coastal flooding and more. The Nisar system found that some parts of the city are dropping by more than 2cm a month. "First documented in 1925, the city's sinking is a result of centuries of exploitation of the groundwater," the report says. "Because Mexico City and its surrounds were built on an ancient lake bed, the soil beneath the city is extremely soft. When water is pumped out of the aquifer below, this clay-like earth compacts, resulting in a city that is quietly sinking." ... [>>>]

Longtime Slashdot reader cellocgw writes: Hiding inside another layoff report, Fidelity is reorganizing: "The changes are aimed at moving the teams away from an 'agile' makeup -- comprising smaller, siloed squads -- and toward larger teams built to move faster on projects." OMG, as they say: "Sudden outbreak of common sense." According to the Boston Globe, Fidelity is cutting about 1,000 jobs even as it plans to hire roughly 5,300 new workers, many of them early-career engineers. Half of the 3,300 new workers hired this year "will be in tech or product-related roles," the report says, noting that "about 2,000 of those jobs are currently open, and 400 of them are in tech/product-delivery."

"The company also plans to add almost 2,000 new early-career workers, with the goal of making the tech and product-delivery teams more hands-on. In all, that means roughly 5,300 new jobs in the pipeline for Fidelity." The company says AI isn't driving the shift; as cellocgw noted, it's about moving toward larger teams that Fidelity says can move faster on priority projects.

The financial services firm also reported a strong 2025 under CEO Abigail Johnson, with managed assets rising 19% from 2024 to $7.1 trillion and revenue climbing 15% to $37.7 billion. "Throughout the company's history, our investments in technology have fueled our growth and customer service capabilities," Johnson wrote in a letter (PDF) included in the company's annual report. "We will continue to prioritize technology initiatives that help us advance digital capabilities, simplify our technology ecosystem, and protect the firm and our customers."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/05/08/1928254/does-fidelitys-reorganization-signal-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-small-team-agile?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

BrianFagioli writes: Micron says it is now shipping the world's highest-capacity commercially available SSD, and the numbers are honestly hard to wrap your head around. The new Micron 6600 ION packs 245TB into a single drive and is aimed squarely at AI infrastructure, hyperscalers, and cloud providers dealing with exploding data growth. According to the company, the SSD can reduce rack counts by 82 percent compared to HDD deployments offering similar raw capacity, while also cutting power usage and cooling requirements. Micron says the drive tops out at roughly 30W, which it claims is about half the power draw of comparable hard drive setups.

The announcement also feels like another warning sign for spinning disks in the enterprise. Hard drives still dominate bulk storage because of lower cost per terabyte, but SSD capacities keep climbing into territory that used to belong exclusively to HDDs. Micron is also touting major performance gains, claiming up to 84 times better energy efficiency for AI workloads and dramatically lower latency versus HDD-based systems. While nobody is dropping one of these into a home NAS anytime soon, the idea of a quarter petabyte on a single SSD no longer sounds like science fiction.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/05/08/1918210/micron-ships-gigantic-245tb-ssd?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

mrspoonsi shares a report: Dirty Frag is a vulnerability class, first discovered and reported by Hyunwoo Kim (@v4bel), that can obtain root privileges on major Linux distributions by chaining the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write vulnerability and the RxRPC Page-Cache Write vulnerability. Dirty Frag extends the bug class to which Dirty Pipe and Copy Fail belong. Because it is a deterministic logic bug that does not depend on a timing window, no race condition is required, the kernel does not panic when the exploit fails, and the success rate is very high. Because the embargo has been broken, no patch or CVE currently exists. "As with the previous Copy Fail vulnerability, Dirty Frag likewise allows immediate root privilege escalation on all major distributions, and it
chains two separate vulnerabilities," Kim said. Detailed technical information can be found here.

BleepingComputer notes that the two vulnerabilities chained by Dirty Frag are "now tracked under the following CVE IDs: the xfrm-ESP one was assigned CVE-2026-43284, and the RxRPC isye is now CVE-2026-43500."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/26/05/08/1913238/new-linux-dirty-frag-zero-day-gives-root-on-all-major-distros?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Security researcher Dor Zvi and his team at the cybersecurity firm he cofounded, RedAccess, analyzed thousands of vibe-coded web applications created using the AI software development tools Lovable, Replit, Base44, and Netlify and found more than 5,000 of them that had virtually no security or authentication of any kind. Many of these web apps allowed anyone who merely finds their web URL to access the apps and their data. Others had only trivial barriers to that access, such as requiring that a visitor sign in with any email address. Around 40 percent of the apps exposed sensitive data, Zvi says, including medical information, financial data, corporate presentations, and strategy documents, as well as detailed logs of customer conversations with chatbots.

"The end result is that organizations are actually leaking private data through vibe-coding applications," says Zvi. "This is one of the biggest events ever where people are exposing corporate or other sensitive information to anyone in the world." Zvi says RedAccess' scouring for vulnerable web apps was surprisingly easy. Lovable, Replit, Base44, and Netlify all allow users to host their web apps on those AI companies' own domains, rather than the users'. So the researchers used straightforward Google and Bing searches for those AI companies' domains combined with other search terms to identify thousands of apps that had been vibe coded with the companies' tools.

Of the 5,000 AI-coded apps that Zvi says were left publicly accessible to anyone who simply typed their URLs into a browser, he found close to 2,000 that, upon closer inspection, seemed to reveal private data: Screenshots of web apps he shared with WIRED -- several of which WIRED verified were still online and exposed -- showed what appeared to be a hospital's work assignments with the personally identifiable information of doctors, a company's detailed ad purchasing information, what appeared to be another firm's go-to-market strategy presentation, a retailer's full logs of its chatbot's conversations with customers, including the customers' full names and contact information, a shipping firm's cargo records, and assorted sales and financial records from a variety of other companies. In some cases, Zvi says, he found that the exposed apps would have allowed him to gain administrative privileges over systems and even remove other administrators. In the case of Lovable, Zvi says he also found numerous examples of phishing sites that impersonated major corporations, including Bank of America, Costco, FedEx, Trader Joe's, and McDonald's, that appeared to have been created with the AI coding tool and hosted on Lovable's domain. "Anyone from your company at any moment can generate an app, and this is not going through any development cycle or any security check," Zvi says. "People can just start using it in production without asking anyone. And they do." ... [>>>]

The Pentagon has begun releasing new UFO/UAP files through a newly launched public website, starting with 162 documents from agencies including the FBI, State Department, NASA, and others. Officials say more files will be released on a rolling basis. The Associated Press reports: The Pentagon has begun releasing new files on UFOs, saying members of the public can draw their own conclusions on "unidentified anomalous phenomena" like an object that a drone pilot says shone a bright light in the sky and then vanished. It said in a post on X on Friday that while past administrations sought to discredit or dissuade the American people, President Donald Trump "is focused on providing maximum transparency to the public, who can ultimately make up their own minds about the information contained in these files." It said additional documents will be released on a rolling basis.

Besides the Pentagon, the effort is led by the White House, the director of national intelligence, the Energy Department, NASA and the FBI. A newly unveiled website housing the documents on unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, has a decidedly retro feel, with black-and-white military imagery of flying objects displayed prominently on the page, with statements displayed in typewriter-like font. The first release includes 162 files, such as old State Department cables, FBI documents and transcripts from NASA of crewed flights into space.

One document details an FBI interview with someone identified as a drone pilot who, in September 2023, reported seeing a "linear object" with a light bright enough to "see bands within the light" in the sky. "The object was visible for five to ten seconds and then the light went out and the object vanished," according to the FBI interview. Another file is a NASA photograph from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, showing three dots in a triangular formation. The Pentagon says in an accompanying caption that "there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly" but that a new, preliminary analysis indicated that it could be a "physical object." ... [>>>]

Apple and Intel have reportedly reached a preliminary agreement (paywalled; alternative source) for Intel to manufacture some chips used in Apple devices, after more than a year of talks and pressure from the Trump administration. It's still unclear which Apple products would use Intel-made chips, but the deal would mark a major potential win for Intel's foundry ambitions and give Apple another manufacturing option beyond TSMC.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/05/08/174203/apple-intel-have-reached-preliminary-chip-making-agreement?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Skyrocketing hard drive and storage costs caused by the AI data center boom are making it more expensive and more difficult for digital archivists, academics, Wikipedia, and hobby data hoarders to save data and archive the internet. Specific drives favored by some high profile organizations like the Internet Archive have become far more expensive or are difficult to find at all, archivists said. Over the last several months, prices for both consumer level and enterprise solid state drives, hard drives, and other types of storage have skyrocketed. As an example, a 2TB external Samsung SSD I purchased last fall for $159 now costs $575. PC Part Picker, a website that tracks the average price of different types of drives, shows a universal increase in storage prices starting in about October of last year. Prices of many of the drives it tracks have doubled or increased by more than 150 percent, and at some stores SSDs and hard drives are simply sold out. There is now even a secondary market for some SSDs, with people scalping them on eBay and elsewhere.

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, the most important archiving projects in the history of the internet, told 404 Media that the skyrocketing costs of storage is "a very real issue costing us time and money." "We have found that the preferred 28-30TB drives are just not available or at very high price," Kahle said. "We gather over 100 terabytes of new materials each day, and we have over 210 Petabytes of materials already archived on machines that need continuous upgrades and maintenance, so we need to constantly get new hard drives."
"We are fortunate to have an active community that donates to the Archive, and we are also looking for help from hard drive manufacturers in these difficult times. We are always looking for more help," he added. "So far we have ways to work around these shortages, but it is a very real issue causing us time and money."

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and various other projects, including Wikimedia Commons, an open repository of royalty free media, told 404 Media that the cost of storage has become a concern for the foundation's projects as well. "With over 65 million articles on Wikipedia alone, access to server and storage capacity is vital to us. We've certainly seen price increases since the end of 2025. These price increases are of concern to us, as with every other player in the industry. We see the primary impact in the purchase of memory and hard drives but also in terms of lead times on server deliveries and our capacity to place future orders," a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told us. "The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit, and as such how we allocate budget is very carefully considered. We maintain our own data centers to serve our users from all over the world. We're putting workarounds in place where we can, mainly involving being smart with how we prioritize investment in hardware, building in flexibility as well as extending the life of existing hardware where possible." ... [>>>]

Longtime Slashdot reader couchslug shares a report from That Privacy Guy's Alexander Hanff: Two weeks ago I wrote about Anthropic silently registering a Native Messaging bridge in seven Chromium-based browsers on every machine where Claude Desktop was installed. The pattern was: install on user launch of product A, write configuration into the user's installs of products B, C, D, E, F, G, H without asking. Reach across vendor trust boundaries. No consent dialog. No opt-out UI. Re-installs itself if the user removes it manually, every time Claude Desktop is launched. This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google.

Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it. The legal analysis is the same one I gave for the Anthropic case. The environmental analysis is new. At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tons of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push. That is the environmental cost of one company unilaterally deciding that two billion peoples' default browser will mass-distribute a 4GB binary they did not request.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/05/08/0635229/chrome-silently-installs-a-4gb-ai-model-on-your-device-without-consent?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Cloudflare plans to cut about 20% of its workforce, or more than 1,100 employees, as it restructures around an "agentic AI-first operating model." Reuters reports: Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince and co-founder Michelle Zatlyn said in a message to employees that the company was reimagining every team and function to operate in what they described as an agentic AI era. Cloudflare said the job cuts reflect a redesign of internal processes and roles, rather than a response to employee performance or short-term cost pressures. The company added that its own use of AI has increased more than sixfold over the past three months, prompting major changes in how teams operate.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/05/08/040251/cloudflare-to-cut-about-20-workforce-as-ai-adoption-reshapes-operations?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: The Fehrmarnbelt tunnel is a European construction megaproject building a tunnel between Denmark and Germany, crossing the Fehmarnbelt in the Baltic sea. The first segment of the tunnel has now successfully been placed in its designated spot. This is a yet-unseen, next-level engineering feat achieved by the Danish Sund & Baelt construction company. It took 14 hours and used a massive pontoon ship built specifically for this project.

The tunnel segments are 217 meters long, weigh more than 73,000 metric tons, and have to be placed within a tolerance of 3 mm. The tunnel will eventually consist of 89 of these segments, be 18 km long, and connect the Danish city of Rodby with the German island Fehmarn through five individual tunnel tubes: two for cars, two for trains, and one rescue and maintenance tunnel. Crossing time will be reduced from a 45-minute ferry crossing to seven minutes by train or 10 minutes by car, and cut the travel time between the German city of Hamburg and the Danish capital, Copenhagen, down to 2.5 hours. The project's planned completion is set for the year 2029. German news Tagesschau has some details and a neat animation, while further details are available from the German tech news site Heise.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/05/07/1933256/first-segment-of-the-fehmarnbelt-tunnel-is-in-place?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Wired describes the recent Canvas breach as an unusually disruptive ransomware-style extortion incident because one attack on Instructure's learning platform temporarily paralyzed thousands of schools during finals and end-of-year assignments. The hackers using the "ShinyHunters" name claim more than 8,800 schools were affected, while Instructure says exposed data included names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and platform messages. From the report: Higher education has long been a target of ransomware gangs and data extortion attacks. But never before, perhaps, has a cyberattack against a single software platform so thoroughly disrupted the daily operations of thousands of schools across the United States. The widely used digital learning platform Canvas was put into "maintenance mode" on Thursday after its maker, the education tech giant Instructure, suffered a data breach and faced an extortion attempt by attackers using the recognizable moniker "ShinyHunters." Though the hackers have been advertising the breach and attempting to extract a ransom payment from Instructure since May 1, the situation took on additional immediacy for regular people across the US and beyond on Thursday because the Canvas downtime caused chaos at schools, including those in the midst of finals and end-of-year assignments.

Universities like Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, and Georgetown sent alerts to students about the situation in recent days; other institutions, including school districts in at least a dozen states, also appear to have been affected. In a list published by the hackers behind the attack on their ransom-focused dark web site, they claim the breach affected more than 8,800 schools. The exact scale and reach of the breach is currently unclear, though. And the fact that Canvas was down throughout Thursday afternoon and evening further complicated the picture. In a running incident update log that began on May 1, Steve Proud, Instructure's chief information security officer, said that the company had "recently experienced a cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor." He added on May 2 that "the information involved" for "users at affected institutions" included names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages exchanged by users on the platform. ... [>>>]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: As the trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI ended its second week, the Tesla CEO started scoring points against Sam Altman. His witnesses landed three solid punches in testimony about how Altman runs OpenAI as CEO, raising concerns about his dedication to AI safety, the nonprofit's mission, and his honesty as a leader of the organization. [...] This week, Musk's legal team called a parade of witnesses who questioned whether Altman was acting in the interest of the nonprofit. On Thursday, that included a former OpenAI safety researcher, who described a slow erosion of the company's safety teams, which prompted her to leave the company. Witnesses also shared stories about the company launching products without the proper safety reviews -- or the knowledge of the board. Rosie Campbell, a former AI safety researcher at OpenAI, testified that the company became more product-focused during her time there and moved away from the long-term safety work that had initially drawn her in. She said both long-term AI safety teams were eventually eliminated, and that she supported Altman's reinstatement only because she feared OpenAI might otherwise collapse into Microsoft: "It was my understanding at the time that the best way for OpenAI to not disintegrate and fall about would be for Sam to return." Still, Campbell's testimony wasn't entirely favorable to Musk. She also said xAI, Musk's AI company, likely had an inferior approach to safety than OpenAI.

Helen Toner, another former OpenAI board member, also testified about the board's concerns leading up to Altman's removal. She said the board was not primarily worried about ChatGPT's safety, but about Altman's leadership and investor relationships, saying, "The issues that we were concerned about in our decision to fire Sam were exacerbated by relationships with investors." Toner also described concerns that Altman was misrepresenting what others had said, telling the court, "We were concerned that Sam was inserting words into other people's mouths in order to get people to do what he wanted." ... [>>>]