The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter has captured the first-ever images of the sun's poles by tilting its orbit out of the ecliptic plane. Space.com reports: The captured images of the solar south pole were taken between March 16 and 17, 2025, with the Solar Orbiter's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), and Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instruments. They constitute humanity's first ever look at the sun's poles. This was the Solar Orbiter mission's first high-angle observation campaign of the sun, conducted at an angle of 15 degrees below the solar equator. Just a few days after snapping these images, the ESA spacecraft reached a maximum viewing angle of 17 degrees, which it sits in currently as it performs its first "pole-to-pole" orbit of our star. [...]

One of the first discoveries made by the Solar Orbiter is the fact that the magnetic fields around the sun's southern poles appear to be, for lack of a better phrase, a complete mess. While standard magnetic fields have well-defined north and south poles, these new observations reveal that north and south polarities are both found at the sun's southern pole. This seems to happen at solar maximum when the poles of the sun are about to flip. Following this exchange of poles, the fields at the north and south poles will maintain an orderly single polarity during solar minimum until solar maximum during the next 11-year cycle.

The Solar Orbiter observations also revealed that while the equator of the sun, where the most sunspots appear, possesses the strongest magnetic fields, those at the poles of our star have a complex and ever-changing structure. The Solar Orbiter's SPICE instrument provided another first for the ESA spacecraft, allowing scientists to track elements via their unique emissions as they move through the sun. Tracing the specific spectral lines of elements like hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, neon, and magnesium, a process called "Doppler measurement," revealed how materials flow through different layers of the sun. The Solar Orbiter also allowed scientists to measure the speed of carbon atoms as they are ejected from the sun in plumes and jets. "This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter's 'stairway to heaven.' In the coming years, the spacecraft will climb further out of the ecliptic plane for ever better views of the sun's polar regions," ESA's Solar Orbiter project scientist Daniel Muller said. "These data will transform our understanding of the sun's magnetic field, the solar wind, and solar activity."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/12/0022206/humanity-takes-its-first-look-at-the-suns-poles?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

В день 20-летия публикации первого открытого релиза проекта представлена web-версия RTS-игры Warzone 2100, которая может быть запущена в любом браузере, поддерживающем WebAssembly и WebGL 2. Среди прочего, игра может быть запущена в браузере на планшетах iPad и устройствах на базе Android, оснащённых относительно большим экраном. В веб-версии доступен однопользовательский режим, включая оригинальную кампанию и сражение.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63396

Началась разработка смартфона Liberux NEXX, создатели которого намерены совместимость в одном устройстве аппаратную начинку уровня ноутбука, возможности для обеспечения конфиденциальности и открытую прошивку LiberuxOS на базе Linux. Смартфон находится на стадии рабочего прототипа - разработана и отлажена материнская плата устройства. После устранения ряда имеющихся проблем в течение нескольких месяцев планируют начать распространение платы для разработчиков. Дата поставки готового устройства пока не определена. Затраты на начальное производство и выход на рынок планируют покрыть через привлечение совместного финансирования.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63397

Состоялся релиз дистрибутива Rocky Linux 10.0, развивающего свободную сборку Red Hat Enterprise Linux, способную занять место классического CentOS. Дистрибутив бинарно совместим с Red Hat Enterprise Linux и может использоваться в качестве замены RHEL 10 и CentOS 10 Stream. Поддержка ветки Rocky Linux 10 будет осуществляться до 2035 года. Установочные iso-образы Rocky Linux подготовлены для архитектур x86-64-v3, aarch64, ppc64le (IBM POWER), s390x (IBM Z) и riscv64. Дополнительно предложены live-сборки с рабочими столами GNOME и KDE, опубликованные для архитектуры x86_64.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63395

Shubhanshu Shukla will become the first Indian astronaut to visit the International Space Station as part of a four-person mission by Axiom Space launching from the U.S.. The mission will include 14 days aboard the ISS and over 60 scientific studies. The Guardian reports: He will be the third astronaut of Indian origin to reach orbit, following Rakesh Sharma, who was part of a 1984 flight onboard a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft, and Kalpana Chawla, who was born in India but became a US citizen and flew on two space shuttle missions, including the 2003 Columbia flight that ended in disaster when the spacecraft disintegrated, killing all seven astronauts onboard. "I truly believe that even though, as an individual, I am traveling to space, this is the journey of 1.4 billion people," Shukla was quoted as saying by the Hindu newspaper this year. Shukla said he hoped to "ignite the curiosity of an entire generation in my country."

India's department of space has called the trip a "defining chapter" in its ambitious space exploration program. The International Space Station mission (ISS) "stands as a symbol of a confident, forward-looking nation ready to reclaim its place in the global space race," the agency said before the launch. "His journey is more than just a flight -- it's a signal that India is stepping boldly into a new era of space exploration." New Delhi has paid more than $60m for the mission, according to Indian media reports. [...]

Shukla trained at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia in 2020, before undertaking further training at the ISRO's centre in Bengaluru. He has said the journey aboard the Axiom Mission 4, and the expected 14 days on the ISS, will provide "invaluable" lessons to bring back home. Shukla will be led by the mission commander, Peggy Whitson, a former Nasa astronaut and an Axiom employee, and joined by the European Space Agency astronaut Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski, of Poland, and Tibor Kapu, of Hungary. They will conduct 60 scientific studies, including microgravity research, earth observation, and life, biological and material sciences experiments.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/12/0012240/india-to-send-first-astronaut-on-mission-to-iss?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

TOP10 VISITORS:

[1] 45.135.180.x point=221 web=0 up=18.6MB (41%) <--- yesterlink (9/hr)
[2] TikTok point=0 web=731 up=10.7MB (24%)
[3] PetalBot point=14 web=1167 up=8.0MB (18%) <--- PetalBot (1/hr)
[4] 24.130.121.x point=21 web=23 up=1.9MB (4%) <--- spnet (1/hr)
[5] Google point=1 web=127 up=0.9MB (1%) <--- Google
[6] 47.128.121.x point=0 web=102 up=0.7MB (1%)
[7] 47.82.60.x point=0 web=89 up=0.6MB (1%)
[8] Facebook point=0 web=98 up=0.6MB (1%)
[9] 47.82.61.x point=0 web=56 up=0.4MB (<1%)
[10] 47.128.96.x point=0 web=44 up=0.3MB (<1%)

TOTAL TRAFFIC: 44MB

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Australian SaaS-y graphic design service Canva now requires candidates for developer jobs to use AI coding assistants during the interview process. [...] Canva's hiring process previously included an interview focused on computer science fundamentals, during which it required candidates to write code using only their actual human brains. The company now expects candidates for frontend, backend, and machine learning engineering roles to demonstrate skill with tools like Copilot, Cursor, and Claude during technical interviews, Canva head of platforms Simon Newton wrote in a Tuesday blog post.

His rationale for the change is that nearly half of Canva's frontend and backend engineers use AI coding assistants daily, that it's now expected behavior, and that the tools are "essential for staying productive and competitive in modern software development." Yet Canva's old interview process "asked candidates to solve coding problems without the very tools they'd use on the job," Newton admitted. "This dismissal of AI tools during the interview process meant we weren't truly evaluating how candidates would perform in their actual role," he added. Candidates were already starting to use AI assistants during interview tasks -- and sometimes used subterfuge to hide it. "Rather than fighting this reality and trying to police AI usage, we made the decision to embrace transparency and work with this new reality," Newton wrote. "This approach gives us a clearer signal about how they'll actually perform when they join our team." The initial reaction among engineers "was worry that we were simply replacing rigorous computer science fundamentals with what one engineer called 'vibe-coding sessions,'" Newton said.

The company addressed these concerns with a recruitment process that sees candidates expected to use their preferred AI tools, to solve what Newton described as "the kind of challenges that require genuine engineering judgment even with AI assistance." Newton added: "These problems can't be solved with a single prompt; they require iterative thinking, requirement clarification, and good decision-making."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/12/005258/canva-now-requires-use-of-llms-during-coding-interviews?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A coordinated spam operation has infiltrated abandoned subdomains belonging to major institutions including Nvidia, Stanford University, NPR, and the U.S. government's vaccines.gov site, flooding them with AI-generated content that subsequently appears in search results and Google's AI Overview feature.

The scheme, reports 404 Media, posted over 62,000 articles on Nvidia's events.nsv.nvidia.com subdomain before the company took it offline within two hours of being contacted by reporters. The spam articles, which included explicit gaming content and local business recommendations, used identical layouts and a fake byline called "Ashley" across all compromised sites. Each targeted domain operates under different names -- "AceNet Hub" on Stanford's site, "Form Generation Hub" on NPR, and "Seymore Insights" on vaccines.gov -- but all redirect traffic to a marketing spam page. The operation exploits search engines' trust in institutional domains, with Google's AI Overview already serving the fabricated content as factual information to users searching for local businesses.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/12/019221/abandoned-subdomains-from-major-institutions-hijacked-for-ai-generated-spam?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The abstract of a study featured on NBER: We examine the labor market effects of AI chatbots using two large-scale adoption surveys (late 2023 and 2024) covering 11 exposed occupations (25,000 workers, 7,000 workplaces), linked to matched employer-employee data in Denmark.

AI chatbots are now widespread -- most employers encourage their use, many deploy in-house models, and training initiatives are common. These firm-led investments boost adoption, narrow demographic gaps in take-up, enhance workplace utility, and create new job tasks. Yet, despite substantial investments, economic impacts remain minimal. Using difference-in-differences and employer policies as quasi-experimental variation, we estimate precise zeros: AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation, with confidence intervals ruling out effects larger than 1%. Modest productivity gains (average time savings of 3%), combined with weak wage pass-through, help explain these limited labor market effects. Our findings challenge narratives of imminent labor market transformation due to Generative AI.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/12/0117247/large-language-models-small-labor-market-effects?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A dating site launched last week by Belgian artist Dries Depoorter matches potential partners based on their internet browsing histories rather than curated profiles or photos. Browser Dating requires users to download a Chrome or Firefox extension that exports and uploads their recent search data, creating matches based on shared online behaviors and interests rather than traditional dating app metrics.

Less than 1,000 users have signed up since the platform's launch, paying a one-time fee of $10.3 for unlimited matches or using a free tier limited to five connections. Depoorter, known for digital art projects exploring surveillance and technology, says the concept emerged from a 2016 workshop where participants shared a year of search history data. The platform processes browsing data locally using Google's Firebase tools.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/12/0043259/an-experimental-new-dating-site-matches-singles-based-on-their-browser-histories?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Amazon Web Services has signed a long-term deal with Talen Energy to receive up to 1,920 megawatts of carbon-free electricity from the Susquehanna nuclear plant through 2042 to support AWS's AI and cloud operations. The partnership also includes plans to explore new Small Modular Reactors and expand nuclear capacity amid rising U.S. energy demand. Utility Drive reports: Under the PPA, Talen's existing 300-MW co-location arrangement with AWS will shift to a "front of the meter" framework that doesn't require Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approval, according to Houston-based Talen. The company expects the transition will occur next spring after transmission upgrades are finished. FERC in November rejected an amended interconnection service agreement that would have facilitated expanded power sales to a co-located AWS data center at the Susquehanna plant. The agency is considering potential rules for co-located loads in PJM.

Talen expects to earn about $18 billion in revenue over the life of the contract at its full quantity, according to an investor presentation. The contract, which runs through 2042, calls for delivering 840 MW to 1,200 MW in 2029 and 1,680 MW to 1,920 MW in 2032. Talen will act as the retail power supplier to AWS, and PPL Electric Utilities will be responsible for transmission and delivery, the company said.
Amazon on Monday said it plans to spend about $20 billion building data centers in Pennsylvania.

"We are making the largest private sector investment in state history -- $20 billion-- to bring 1,250 high-skilled jobs and economic benefits to the state, while also collaborating with Talen Energy to help power our infrastructure with carbon-free energy," Kevin Miller, AWS vice president of global data centers, said.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/2127254/talen-energy-and-amazon-sign-nuclear-power-deal-to-fuel-data-centers?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Apple has released a new developer tool on GitHub called Container, offering a fresh approach to running Linux containers directly on macOS. Unlike Docker or Podman, this tool is designed to feel at home in the Apple ecosystem and hooks into frameworks already built into the operating system. Container runs standard OCI images, but it doesn't use a single shared Linux VM. Instead, it creates a small Linux virtual machine for every container you spin up. That sounds heavy at first, but the VMs are lightweight and boot quickly. Each one is isolated, which Apple claims improves both security and privacy. Developers can run containerized workloads locally with native macOS support and without needing to install third-party container platforms.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/2116233/apple-quietly-launches-container-on-github-to-bring-linux-development-to-macos?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Since filing for bankruptcy in March, 23andMe has received data deletion requests from 1.9 million users -- around 15% of its customer base. That number was revealed by 23andMe's interim chief executive Joseph Selsavage during a House Oversight Committee hearing, during which lawmakers scrutinized the company's sale following an earlier bankruptcy auction. "The bankruptcy sparked concerns that the data of millions of Americans who used 23andMe could end up in the hands of an unscrupulous buyer, prompting customers to ask the company to delete their data," adds TechCrunch. From the report: Pharmaceutical giant Regeneron won the court-approved auction in May, offering $256 million for 23andMe and its banks of customers' DNA and genetic data. Regeneron said it would use the 23andMe data to aid the discovery of new drugs, and committed to maintain 23andMe's privacy practices. Truly deleting your personal genetic information from the DNA testing company is easier said than done. But if you were a 23andMe customer and are interested, MIT Technology Review outlines that steps you can take.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/214242/23andme-says-15-of-customers-asked-to-delete-their-genetic-data-since-bankruptcy?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: Nintendo Switch 2 is off to a roaring start. Early on Wednesday, Nintendo announced that it had sold 3.5 million units of its new console in just four days, making it Nintendo's fastest-selling console ever. In fact, this is likely the biggest console launch of all time -- by quite some margin. For comparison, PlayStation 5 shipped 4.5 million units in its first seven weeks, PlayStation 4 sold 2.1 million in a little over two weeks, and Nintendo Switch sold 2.74 million in its first month. [...]

Nintendo has predicted it will sell 15 million Switch 2s during its current financial year. It's well on the way to that figure already, although Nintendo still faces the challenges of maintaining stock availability and extending this expensive console's reach past the first wave of early adopters. If Switch 2 hits its first-year target, it will join Nintendo's other fasters sellers over the first year on sale: Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 3DS, and the original Switch. Over the weekend, the Switch 2 beat the record for the "most-sold console within 24 hours and is on track to shatter the two-month record," according to TweakTown.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/2017228/nintendo-switch-2-is-fastest-selling-game-console-of-all-time?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Amazon has launched its AI-powered Video Generator tool in the U.S., allowing sellers to quickly create photorealistic, motion-enhanced video ads often with a single click. "We'll likely see Amazon retailers utilizing AI-generated video ads in the wild now that the tool is generally available in the U.S. and costs nothing to use -- unless the ads are so convincing that we don't notice anything at all," says The Verge. From the report: New capabilities include motion improvements to show items in action, which Amazon says is best for showcasing products like toys, tools, and worn accessories. For example, Video Generator can now create clips that show someone wearing a watch on their wrist and checking the time, instead of simply displaying the watch on a table. The tool generates six different videos to choose from, and allows brands to add their logos to the finished results.

The Video Generator can now also make ads with multiple connected scenes that include humans, pets, text overlays, and background music. The editing timeline shown in Amazon's announcement video suggests the ads max out at 21 seconds.. The resulting ads edge closer to the traditional commercials we're used to seeing while watching TV or online content, compared to raw clips generated by video AI tools like OpenAI's Sora or Adobe Firefly.

A new video summarization feature can create condensed video ads from existing footage, such as demos, tutorials, and social media content. Amazon says Video Generator will automatically identify and extract key clips to generate new videos formatted for ad campaigns. A one-click image-to-video feature is also available that creates shorter GIF-style clips to show products in action.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/207231/amazon-is-about-to-be-flooded-with-ai-generated-video-ads?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Hong Kong authorities have invoked national security laws for the first time to ban the Taiwan-made video game Reversed Front: Bonfire, accusing it of promoting "secessionist agendas, such as 'Taiwan independence' and 'Hong Kong independence.'" Engadget reports: Reversed Front: Bonfire was developed by a group known as ESC Taiwan, who are outspoken critics of the China's Communist Party. The game disappeared from the Apple App Store in Hong Kong less than 24 hours after authorities issued the warning. Google already removed the game from the Play Store back in May, because players were using hate speech as part of their usernames. ESC Taiwan told The New York Times that that the game's removal shows that apps like theirs are subject to censorship in mainland China. The group also thanked authorities for the free publicity on Facebook, as the game experienced a surge in Google searches.

The game uses anime-style illustrations and allows players to fight against China's Communist Party by taking on the role of "propagandists, patrons, spies or guerrillas" from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Mongolia and Xinjiang, which is home to ethnic minorities like the Uyghur. That said, they can also choose to play as government soldiers. In its warning, Hong Kong Police said that anybody who shares or recommends the game on the internet may be committing several offenses, including "incitement to secession, "incitement to subversion" and "offenses in connection with seditious intention." Anybody who has downloaded the game will be considered in "possession of a publication that has a seditious intention," and anybody who provides financial assistance to it will be violating national security laws, as well. "Those who have downloaded the application should uninstall it immediately and must not attempt to defy the law," the authorities wrote.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/203218/hong-kong-bans-video-game-using-national-security-laws?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The robot built by [Yuntao Ma and his team at ETH Zurich] was called ANYmal and resembled a miniature giraffe that plays badminton by holding a racket in its teeth. It was a quadruped platform developed by ANYbotics, an ETH Zurich spinoff company that mainly builds robots for the oil and gas industries. "It was an industry-grade robot," Ma said. The robot had elastic actuators in its legs, weighed roughly 50 kilograms, and was half a meter wide and under a meter long. On top of the robot, Ma's team fitted an arm with several degrees of freedom produced by another ETH Zurich spinoff called Duatic. This is what would hold and swing a badminton racket. Shuttlecock tracking and sensing the environment were done with a stereoscopic camera. "We've been working to integrate the hardware for five years," Ma said.

Along with the hardware, his team was also working on the robot's brain. State-of-the-art robots usually use model-based control optimization, a time-consuming, sophisticated approach that relies on a mathematical model of the robot's dynamics and environment. "In recent years, though, the approach based on reinforcement learning algorithms became more popular," Ma told Ars. "Instead of building advanced models, we simulated the robot in a simulated world and let it learn to move on its own." In ANYmal's case, this simulated world was a badminton court where its digital alter ego was chasing after shuttlecocks with a racket. The training was divided into repeatable units, each of which required that the robot predict the shuttlecock's trajectory and hit it with a racket six times in a row. During this training, like a true sportsman, the robot also got to know its physical limits and to work around them.

The idea behind training the control algorithms was to develop visuo-motor skills similar to human badminton players. The robot was supposed to move around the court, anticipating where the shuttlecock might go next and position its whole body, using all available degrees of freedom, for a swing that would mean a good return. This is why balancing perception and movement played such an important role. The training procedure included a perception model based on real camera data, which taught the robot to keep the shuttlecock in its field of view while accounting for the noise and resulting object-tracking errors.

Once the training was done, the robot learned to position itself on the court. It figured out that the best strategy after a successful return is to move back to the center and toward the backline, which is something human players do. It even came with a trick where it stood on its hind legs to see the incoming shuttlecock better. It also learned fall avoidance and determined how much risk was reasonable to take given its limited speed. The robot did not attempt impossible plays that would create the potential for serious damage -- it was committed, but not suicidal. But when it finally played humans, it turned out ANYmal, as a badminton player, was amateur at best. The findings have been published in the journal Science Robotics.

You can watch a video of the four-legged robot playing badminton on YouTube.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/1958227/scientists-built-a-badminton-playing-robot-with-ai-powered-skills?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Indirect carbon emissions from the operations of four of the leading AI-focused tech companies rose on average by 150% from 2020-2023, due to the demands of power-hungry data centers, a United Nations report (PDF) said on Thursday. The use of artificial intelligence by Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta drove up their global indirect emissions because of the vast amounts of energy required to power data centers, the report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the U.N. agency for digital technologies, said.

Indirect emissions include those generated by purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling consumed by a company.
Amazon's operational carbon emissions grew the most at 182% in 2023 compared to three years before, followed by Microsoft at 155%, Meta at 145% and Alphabet at 138%, according to the report. The ITU tracked the greenhouse gas emissions of 200 leading digital companies between 2020 and 2023. [...] As investment in AI increases, carbon emissions from the top-emitting AI systems are predicted to reach up to 102.6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, the report stated.

The data centres that are needed for AI development could also put pressure on existing energy infrastructure. "The rapid growth of artificial intelligence is driving a sharp rise in global electricity demand, with electricity use by data centers increasing four times faster than the overall rise in electricity consumption," the report found. It also highlighted that although a growing number of digital companies had set emissions targets, those ambitions had not yet fully translated into actual reductions of emissions. UPDATE: The headline has been revised to clarify that four leading AI-focused tech companies saw their operational emissions rise to 150% of their 2020 levels by 2023 -- a 50% increase, not a 150% one.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/2154202/tech-giants-indirect-operational-emissions-rose-50-since-2020?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A data broker owned by the country's major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers' domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media. The data includes passenger names, their full flight itineraries, and financial details.

CBP, a part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says it needs this data to support state and local police to track people of interest's air travel across the country, in a purchase that has alarmed civil liberties experts. The documents reveal for the first time in detail why at least one part of DHS purchased such information, and comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detailed its own purchase of the data. The documents also show for the first time that the data broker, called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), tells government agencies not to mention where it sourced the flight data from.

"The big airlines -- through a shady data broker that they own called ARC -- are selling the government bulk access to Americans' sensitive information, revealing where they fly and the credit card they used," Senator Ron Wyden said in a statement. ARC is owned and operated by at least eight major U.S. airlines, other publicly released documents show. The company's board of directors include representatives from Delta, Southwest, United, American Airlines, Alaska Airlines, JetBlue, and European airlines Lufthansa and Air France, and Canada's Air Canada. More than 240 airlines depend on ARC for ticket settlement services.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/1825215/airlines-dont-want-you-to-know-they-sold-your-flight-data-to-dhs?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The Wikimedia Foundation halted an experiment that would have displayed AI-generated summaries atop Wikipedia articles after the platform's volunteer editor community delivered an overwhelmingly negative response to the proposal. The foundation announced the two-week mobile trial on June 2 and suspended it just one day later following dozens of critical comments from editors.

The experiment, called "Simple Article Summaries," would have used Cohere's open-weight Aya model to generate simplified versions of complex Wikipedia articles. The AI-generated summaries would have appeared at the top of articles with a yellow "unverified" label, requiring users to click to expand and read them. Editors responded with comments including "very bad idea," "strongest possible oppose," and simply "Yuck."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/1732215/wikipedia-pauses-ai-generated-summaries-after-editor-backlash?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

HP has unveiled the first commercial hardware for Google Beam, the Android-maker's 3D video conferencing technology formerly known as Project Starline, with a price tag of $24,999. The HP Dimension features a 65-inch light field display paired with six high-speed cameras positioned around the screen to capture speakers from multiple angles, creating what the companies describe as a lifelike 3D representation without requiring headsets or glasses.

The system processes visual data through Google's proprietary volumetric video model, which merges camera streams into 3D reconstructions with millimeter-scale precision at 60 frames per second. Beyond the hardware cost, users must purchase a separate Google Beam license for cloud processing, though pricing for that service remains undisclosed.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/1641226/hps-first-google-beam-3d-video-system-costs-24999-plus-unknown-license-fees?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will begin full operations in the coming months with the world's largest digital camera, capturing 3,200-megapixel images that would require several hundred HD television screens to display at full resolution. The $810 million facility will map the entire southern sky every three to four nights, observing each location approximately 800 times over its planned decade of operations.

The telescope's unusual design allows it to photograph an area equivalent to 45 full moons in each shot and swing between different sky locations every 40 seconds. Its digital camera, roughly the size of a small car, will generate eight million alerts per night when it detects astronomical objects that move or change brightness, according to Tony Tyson, the University of California, Davis astronomer who conceived the project in the 1990s. Astrophysicist Federica Bianco, who received a preview of the telescope's first full-color image, described her reaction simply: "There are so many stars!" The team plans to unveil that inaugural image on June 23.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/168234/major-telescope-hosts-worlds-largest-digital-camera?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Disney and NBCUniversal have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI image generator firm Midjourney in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, marking the first time major Hollywood studios have taken legal action against a generative AI company.

The entertainment giants accuse Midjourney, founded in 2021, of training its software on "countless" copyrighted works without permission and enabling users to create images that "blatantly incorporate and copy" famous characters including Darth Vader, the Minions, Frozen's Elsa, Shrek, and Homer Simpson.

The companies claim they attempted to resolve the matter privately, but Midjourney "continued to release new versions" with "even higher quality infringing images" according to the complaint. Disney's general counsel used the word "piracy," to describe Midjourney's practice, while NBCUniversal's general counsel characterized it as "blatant infringement."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/1533241/disney-nbcu-sue-ai-image-generator-midjourney-over-copyright-infringement?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

WhatsApp has applied to submit evidence in Apple's legal battle against the UK Home Office over government demands for access to encrypted user data. The messaging platform's boss Will Cathcart told the BBC the case "could set a dangerous precedent" by "emboldening other nations" to seek to break encryption protections.

The confrontation began when Apple received a secret Technical Capability Notice from the Home Office earlier this year demanding the right to access data from its global customers for national security purposes. Apple responded by first pulling its Advanced Data Protection system from the UK, then taking the government to court to overturn the request.

Cathcart said WhatsApp "would challenge any law or government request that seeks to weaken the encryption of our services." US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has called the UK's demands an "egregious violation" of American citizens' privacy rights.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/1441251/whatsapp-moves-to-support-apple-against-uk-governments-data-access-demands?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Apple executives defended the company's AI strategy this week after acknowledging that major Siri features announced at last year's Worldwide Developers Conference remain undelivered and were quietly pulled from development plans. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, told the Wall Street Journal that the company is rebuilding Siri from the ground up, admitting that while Apple had working software for the promised features, "it didn't converge in the way quality-wise that we needed it to."

The missing capabilities included Siri's ability to search through apps and respond to on-screen activities, features that were demonstrated a year ago but never shipped to users. In the upcoming iOS 26, Apple has instead incorporated more OpenAI technology, allowing users to interact with ChatGPT through camera and screenshots and generate images using OpenAI's tools. Federighi defended the strategy by comparing Apple's position to the early internet era, when the company focused on making other services accessible rather than building competing platforms.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/144258/apple-executives-defend-ai-strategy?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Fresh data released by piracy tracking outfit MUSO shows that pirate sites remain popular. In a report released today, MUSO reveals that there were 216 billion pirate site visits globally in 2024, a slight decrease compared to the 229 billion visits recorded a year earlier. TV piracy remains by far the most popular category, representing over 44.6% of all website visits. This is followed by the publishing category with 30.7%, with film, software and music all at a respectable distance. Pirate site visitors originate from all over the world, but one country stands tall above all the rest: America. The United States remains the top driver of pirate site traffic accounting for more than 12% of all traffic globally, good for 26.7 billion visits in 2024. India has been steadily climbing the ranks for years and currently sits in second place with 17.6 billion annual visits, with Russia, Indonesia, and Vietnam completing the top five. As a country with one of the largest populations worldwide, it's not a complete surprise that the U.S. tops the list. If we counted visits per internet user, Canada and Ukraine would top the list.

While pirate site visits dipped by more than 5% in 2024, one category saw substantial growth. Visits to publishing-related pirate sites increased 4.3% from 63.6 to 66.4 billion. The increase is largely driven by the popularity of manga, which accounts for more than 70% of all publishing piracy. Traditional book piracy, meanwhile, is stuck at 5%. The publishing piracy boom is relatively new. Over the past five years, the category grew by more than 100% while the overall number of global pirate site visits remained relatively flat. Looking at the global demand, we see that the U.S. also leads the charge here, followed by Indonesia and Russia. Notably, Japan, the home of manga, ranks fifth in the publishing category. This stands out because Japan is not listed in the global top 15 in terms of total pirate site visits.

In the other content categories, MUSO's data shows a dip in pirate site visits. The changes are relatively modest for TV (-6.8%) and software (-2.1%) but the same isn't true for the music and film categories. In 2024, there were 18% fewer visits for pirated movies compared to a year earlier. MUSO notes that this is due to a "lighter blockbuster calendar" which reduced piracy peaks. "The drop in demand is as much about what wasn't released as it is about access," the report explains. The music category saw a 19% decline in piracy visits year over year, with a more uplifting explanation for rightsholders. According to MUSO, the drop can be partly attributed to "secure app ecosystems" and the "wide adoption of licensed platforms like Spotify and Apple Music."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/0116225/pirate-site-visits-dip-to-216-billion-a-year-but-manga-piracy-is-booming?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The FDA plans to use AI to "radically increase efficiency" in deciding whether to approve new drugs and devices, drawing on lessons from Operation Warp Speed to reduce review times to weeks. The plan was laid out in an article published Tuesday in JAMA. The New York Times reports: Another initiative involves a review of chemicals and other "concerning ingredients" that appear in U.S. food but not in the food of other developed nations. And officials want to speed up the final stages of making a drug or medical device approval decision to mere weeks, citing the success of Operation Warp Speed during the Covid pandemic when workers raced to curb a spiraling death count. [...]

Last week, the agency introduced Elsa, an artificial intelligence large-language model similar to ChatGPT. The FDA said it could be used to prioritize which food or drug facilities to inspect, to describe side effects in drug safety summaries and to perform other basic product-review tasks. The FDA officials wrote that A.I. held the promise to "radically increase efficiency" in examining as many as 500,000 pages submitted for approval decisions.

Current and former health officials said the A.I. tool was helpful but far from transformative. For one, the model limits the number of characters that can be reviewed, meaning it is unable to do some rote data analysis tasks. Its results must be checked carefully, so far saving little time. Staff members said that the model was hallucinating, or producing false information. Employees can ask the Elsa model to summarize text or act as an expert in a particular field of medicine.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/015216/fda-to-use-ai-in-drug-approvals-to-radically-increase-efficiency?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A mathematician on Reddit calculated that if all 8.2 billion humans were blended into a uniform goo, the resulting meatball would form a sphere just under 1 kilometer wide -- small enough to fit inside Central Park. ScienceAlert reports: "If you blended all 7.88 billion people on Earth into a fine goo (density of a human = 985 kg/m3, average human body mass = 62 kg), you would end up with a sphere of human goo just under 1 km wide," Reddit contributor kiki2703 wrote in a post ... Reasoning the density of a minced human to be 985 kilograms per cubic meter (62 pounds per cubic foot) is a fair estimate, given past efforts have judged our jiggling sack of grade-A giblets to average out in the ballpark of 1 gram per cubic centimeter, or roughly the same as water. And in mid-2021, the global population was just around 7.9 billion, give or take.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/0050238/a-mathematician-calculated-the-size-of-a-giant-meatball-made-of-every-human?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Indirect carbon emissions from the operations of four of the leading AI-focused tech companies rose on average by 150% from 2020-2023, due to the demands of power-hungry data centers, a United Nations report (PDF) said on Thursday. The use of artificial intelligence by Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta drove up their global indirect emissions because of the vast amounts of energy required to power data centers, the report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the U.N. agency for digital technologies, said.

Indirect emissions include those generated by purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling consumed by a company.
Amazon's operational carbon emissions grew the most at 182% in 2023 compared to three years before, followed by Microsoft at 155%, Meta at 145% and Alphabet at 138%, according to the report. The ITU tracked the greenhouse gas emissions of 200 leading digital companies between 2020 and 2023. [...] As investment in AI increases, carbon emissions from the top-emitting AI systems are predicted to reach up to 102.6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, the report stated.

The data centres that are needed for AI development could also put pressure on existing energy infrastructure. "The rapid growth of artificial intelligence is driving a sharp rise in global electricity demand, with electricity use by data centers increasing four times faster than the overall rise in electricity consumption," the report found. It also highlighted that although a growing number of digital companies had set emissions targets, those ambitions had not yet fully translated into actual reductions of emissions.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/2154202/tech-giants-indirect-emissions-rose-150-in-three-years?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Michael Larabel of Phoronix highlights the key updates in today's stable release of FreeBSD 14.3: FreeBSD 14.3 has back-ported a number of improvements from FreeBSD 15 back to the FreeBSD 14 series. Plus a number of routine package updates and other fixes. Some of the FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE highlights include:

- Updating the ZFS support against OpenZFS 2.2.7.
- Merging of the Realtek RTW88 and RTW89 WiFi drivers based on the Linux 6.14 kernel code.
- The LinuxKPI code has been improved to support crypto offload as well as the 802.11n and 802.11ac standards.
- The Intel IX Ethernet driver has added support for the x550 1000BAS-BX SFP modules.
- Thor2 PCI IDs added to the Broadcom NetXtreme "BNXT" driver along with support for 400G speed modules.
- XZ 5.8.1, OpenSSH 9.9p2, OpenSSL 3.0.16, and many other package updates.
- Syscons as the legacy system console driver is now considered deprecated. Syscons is not compatible with UEFI, lacks UTF-8 support, and is Giant-locked. You can download and learn more about FreeBSD 14.3 via FreeBSD.org.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://bsd.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/2146224/freebsd-143-released?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"Twelve years ago, a baby was born after someone used bitcoin to pay for a frozen egg IVF," writes longtime Slashdot reader bobdevine. "I, for one, welcome..."

Blockworks tells the story of how it all came to be: In February 2012 -- almost two years after Laszlo's pizzas -- a fertility doctor named C. Terence Lee set about a personal and professional quest to onboard his patients to Bitcoin by accepting BTC for his services. He started with a "Bitcoin accepted here" sign in his window, and then a Reddit post.

"Jumping in to do my part to support the BTC economy. This may be a historic first?" Lee wrote in a post on the BitMarket subreddit, titled: "[WTS][USA] Male Fertility Evaluation." Lee was offering a 15-minute consultation to discuss fertility questions and a sperm analysis in exchange for 15 BTC, valued at $70 or so at the time. "Actual value over $100," he wrote. Within three months, he'd found a Bitcoin customer.

"The patient turned out not... so much having a burning desire to know about his fertility, but he was a Bitcoin enthusiast, and he liked the idea of participating in history, in this ritual ceremony of what could be perhaps the world's first Bitcoin medical transaction," Lee explained at a 2013 conference in San Jose. "So we chatted about Bitcoin. He taught me a lot about mining. That's how he acquired bitcoin. And we did a sperm test, and it turned out he had really good sperm ... after it was done he sent me 15 bitcoins... "

Lee changed up his strategy to only quiz his most trusted patients. There was one couple, who, on their fourth attempt at IVF, agreed to pay in bitcoin for a 50% discount, with Lee walking them through exchanging U.S. dollars for bitcoin via CryptoXChange, a now-defunct exchange operating out of Australia. The sperm stuck, leading CNN to reveal, on this day in 2013, "the world's first Bitcoin baby" -- a baby bought entirely with bitcoin. Thirty bitcoin to be exact, an amount then worth $500, or $3 million today.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/2134219/bitcoin-baby-soon-to-be-a-teenager?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"It is true, Google AI is stomping on the entire internet," writes Slashdot reader TheWho79, sharing a report from the Wall Street Journal. "From HuffPost to the Atlantic, publishers prepare to pivot or shut the doors. ... Even highly regarded old school bullet-proof publications like Washington Post are getting hit hard." From the report: Traffic from organic search to HuffPost's desktop and mobile websites fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at the Washington Post, according to digital market data firm Similarweb. Business Insider cut about 21% of its staff last month, a move CEO Barbara Peng said was aimed at helping the publication "endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control." Organic search traffic to its websites declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, according to data from Similarweb.

At a companywide meeting earlier this year, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the Atlantic, said the publication should assume traffic from Google would drop toward zero and the company needed to evolve its business model. [...] "Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine," Thompson said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "We have to develop new strategies."

The rapid development of click-free answers in search "is a serious threat to journalism that should not be underestimated," said William Lewis, the Washington Post's publisher and chief executive. Lewis is former CEO of the Journal's publisher, Dow Jones. The Washington Post is "moving with urgency" to connect with previously overlooked audiences and pursue new revenue sources and prepare for a "post-search era," he said.

At the New York Times, the share of traffic coming from organic search to the paper's desktop and mobile websites slid to 36.5% in April 2025 from almost 44% three years earlier, according to Similarweb. The Wall Street Journal's traffic from organic search was up in April compared with three years prior, Similarweb data show, though as a share of overall traffic it declined to 24% from 29%. Further reading: Google's AI Mode Is 'the Definition of Theft,' Publishers Say

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/2126217/news-sites-are-getting-crushed-by-googles-new-ai-tools?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: President Trump quietly took a red pen to much of the Biden administration's cyber legacy in a little-noticed move late Friday. Under an executive order signed just before the weekend, Trump is tossing out some of the major touchstones of Biden's cyber policy legacy -- while keeping a few others. The order preserves efforts around post-quantum cryptography, advanced encryption standards, and border gateway protocol security, along with the Cyber Trust Mark program -- an Energy Star-type labeling initiative for consumer smart devices. But hallmark programs tied to software bills of materials, zero-trust implementation, and space contractor cybersecurity requirements have been either rescinded or left in limbo. The new executive order amends both the Biden cyber executive order signed in January and an Obama administration order.

Each of the following Biden-era programs is now out the door or significantly rolled back: - A broad requirement for federal software vendors to provide a software bill of materials - essentially an ingredient list of code components - is gone. - Biden-era efforts to encourage federal agencies to accept digital identity documents and help states develop mobile driver's licenses were revoked. - Several AI cybersecurity research mandates, including those focused on AI-generated code security and AI-driven patch management pilots, have been scrapped or deprioritized. - The requirement that software contractors formally attest they followed secure development practices - and submit those attestations to a federal repository - has been cut. Instead, the National Institute of Standards and Technology will now coordinate a new industry consortium to review software security guidelines.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/2044217/trump-quietly-throws-out-bidens-cyber-policies?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Connor Jones reports via The Register: Security researchers managed to access the live feeds of 40,000 internet-connected cameras worldwide and they may have only scratched the surface of what's possible. Supporting the bulletin issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) earlier this year, which warned of exposed cameras potentially being used in Chinese espionage campaigns, the team at Bitsight was able to tap into feeds of sensitive locations. The US was the most affected region, with around 14,000 of the total feeds streaming from the country, allowing access to the inside of datacenters, healthcare facilities, factories, and more. Bitsight said these feeds could potentially be used for espionage, mapping blind spots, and gleaning trade secrets, among other things.

Aside from the potential national security implications, cameras were also accessed in hotels, gyms, construction sites, retail premises, and residential areas, which the researchers said could prove useful for petty criminals. Monitoring the typical patterns of activity in retail stores, for example, could inform robberies, while monitoring residences could be used for similar purposes, especially considering the privacy implications. "It should be obvious to everyone that leaving a camera exposed on the internet is a bad idea, and yet thousands of them are still accessible," said Bitsight in a report. "Some don't even require sophisticated hacking techniques or special tools to access their live footage in unintended ways. In many cases, all it takes is opening a web browser and navigating to the exposed camera's interface."

HTTP-based cameras accounted for 78.5 percent of the total 40,000 sample, while RTSP feeds were comparatively less open, accounting for only 21.5 percent.

To protect yourself or your company, Bitsight says you should secure your surveillance cameras by changing default passwords, disabling unnecessary remote access, updating firmware, and restricting access with VPNs or firewalls. Regularly monitoring for unusual activity also helps to prevent your footage from being exposed online.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/2039202/40000-iot-cameras-worldwide-stream-secrets-to-anyone-with-a-browser?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Starbucks is piloting a generative AI assistant called "Green Dot Assist" to streamline barista tasks and improve service speed, with plans for a broader rollout in fiscal 2026. The assistant is built on Microsoft Azure's OpenAI platform. CNBC reports: Instead of flipping through manuals or accessing Starbucks' intranet, baristas will be able to use a tablet behind the counter equipped with Green Dot Assist to get answers to a range of questions, from how to make an iced shaken espresso to troubleshooting equipment errors. Baristas can either type or verbally ask their queries in conversational language.

As the AI assistant evolves, Starbucks has even bigger plans for its next generation. Those ideas include automatically creating a ticket with IT for equipment issues or generating suggestions for a substitute when a barista calls out of work, according to [Starbucks Chief Technology Officer Deb Hall Lefevre]. [...] Lefevre said tenured baristas have been learning to use the new POS in as little as an hour. Plus, the technology can offer personalized recommendations and loyal customers' repeat orders, helping Starbucks achieve the personalized touch it's looking to bring back to its cafes.
"It's just another example of how innovation technology is coming into service of our partners and making sure that we're doing all we can to simplify the operations, make their jobs just a little bit easier, maybe a little bit more fun, so that they can do what they do best," Lefevre told CNBC.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/2032225/starbucks-to-roll-out-microsoft-azure-openai-assistant-for-baristas?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a blog post from Google: Today, we're bringing you Android 16, rolling out first to supported Pixel devices with more phone brands to come later this year. This is the earliest Android has launched a major release in the last few years, which ensures you get the latest updates as soon as possible on your devices. Android 16 lays the foundation for our new Material 3 Expressive design, with features that make Android more accessible and easy to use.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/2021249/android-16-is-here?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Bluesky's user engagement has fallen roughly 50% since peaking in mid-November, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis, as progressive groups' efforts to migrate users from Elon Musk's X platform show signs of failure. The research found that while many news influencers maintain Bluesky accounts, two-thirds post irregularly compared to more than 80% who still post daily to X. A Washington Post columnist tries to make sense of it: The people who have migrated to Bluesky tend to be those who feel the most visceral disgust for Musk and Trump, plus a smattering of those who are merely curious and another smattering who are tired of the AI slop and unregenerate racism that increasingly pollutes their X feeds. Because the Musk and Trump haters are the largest and most passionate group, the result is something of an echo chamber where it's hard to get positive engagement unless you're saying things progressives want to hear -- and where the negative engagement on things they don't want to hear can be intense. That's true even for content that isn't obviously political: Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who studies AI, recently announced that he'll be limiting his Bluesky posting because AI discussions on the platform are too "fraught."

All this is pretty off-putting for folks who aren't already rather progressive, and that creates a threefold problem for the ones who dream of getting the old band back together. Most obviously, it makes it hard for the platform to build a large enough userbase for the company to become financially self-sustaining, or for liberals to amass the influence they wielded on old Twitter. There, they accumulated power by shaping the contours of a conversation that included a lot of non-progressives. On Bluesky, they're mostly talking among themselves.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/2013239/blueskys-decline-stems-from-never-hearing-from-the-other-side?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The World Bank sharply reduced its global economic growth forecast for 2025 to 2.3% from 2.7%, warning that the current decade is on track to become the weakest for the global economy since the 1960s. The Washington-based lender attributed the downgrade to mounting costs from "international discord -- about trade, in particular," as Donald Trump's tariff policies create unprecedented uncertainty.

The revised forecast would mark the slowest growth rate outside full-blown recessions since 2008. Even with a modest recovery to 2.4% expected in 2026, the bank characterized the outlook as merely "tepid." Chief economist Indermit Gill said "outside of Asia, the developing world is becoming a development-free zone." Growth in developing economies has steadily declined from 6% annually in the 2000s to 5% in the 2010s, now falling below 4% in the 2020s. The bank said that "many of the forces behind the great economic miracle of the last 50 years" have reversed, with more than half of low-income countries either in debt distress or at high risk.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/1959223/2020s-on-course-to-be-weakest-decade-for-global-economy-since-1960s-says-world-bank?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

AI is speeding up the work of America's intelligence services, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Tuesday. From a report: Speaking to a technology conference, Gabbard said AI programs, when used responsibly, can save money and free up intelligence officers to focus on gathering and analyzing information. The sometimes slow pace of intelligence work frustrated her as a member of Congress, Gabbard said, and continues to be a challenge. AI can run human resource programs, for instance, or scan sensitive documents ahead of potential declassification, Gabbard said. Her office has released tens of thousands of pages of material related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother, New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, on the orders of President Donald Trump.

Experts had predicted the process could take many months or even years, but AI accelerated the work by scanning the documents to see if they contained any material that should remain classified, Gabbard said during her remarks at the Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington. "We have been able to do that through the use of AI tools far more quickly than what was done previously -- which was to have humans go through and look at every single one of these pages," Gabbard said.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/1949232/gabbard-says-ai-is-speeding-up-intel-work-including-the-release-of-the-jfk-assassination-files?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

> Сертификат продлён до 10 июня 2025 года

Только сегодня спохватился и продлил ещё на 3 месяца - до 10 сентября 2025

A NASA-backed project using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has released more than 1.5 TB of data for open science, offering the largest view deep into the universe available to date. From a report: The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), a joint project from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Rochester Institute of Technology, has launched a searchable dataset for budding astrophysics enthusiasts worldwide.

As well as a catalog of galaxies, the dataset includes an interactive viewer that users can search for images of specific objects or click them to view their properties, covering approximately 0.54 square degrees of sky with the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and a 0.2 square degree area with the Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Although the raw data was already publicly available to the science community, the aim of the COSMOS-Web project was to make it more usable for other scientists.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/1844246/15-tb-of-james-webb-space-telescope-data-just-hit-the-internet?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

BrianFagioli writes: Ubuntu 25.10, known as Questing Quokka, is taking a big turn under the hood. Canonical has dropped support for the GNOME desktop running on Xorg. Starting with this release, the default Ubuntu session now uses Wayland only. Yes, folks, there's no longer an option to log into GNOME on Xorg.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/181234/ubuntu-linux-2510-quietly-kills-off-gnome-on-xorg-as-wayland-takes-over?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Apple's latest AI models continue to lag behind competitors, according to the company's own benchmark testing it disclosed this week. The tech giant's newest "Apple On-Device" model, which runs locally on iPhones and other devices, performed only "comparably" to similarly-sized models from Google and Alibaba in human evaluations of text generation quality -- not better, despite being Apple's most recent release.

The performance gap widens with Apple's more powerful "Apple Server" model, designed for data center deployment. Human testers rated it behind OpenAI's year-old GPT-4o in text generation tasks. In image analysis tests, evaluators preferred Meta's Llama 4 Scout model over Apple Server, a particularly notable result given that Llama 4 Scout itself underperforms leading models from Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI on various benchmarks.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/1646256/apples-upgraded-ai-models-underwhelm-on-performance?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Cisco is updating its networking and security products to make AI networks speedier and more secure, part of a broader push to capitalize on the AI spending boom. From a report: A new generation of switches -- networking equipment that links computer systems -- will offer a 10-fold improvement in performance, the company said on Tuesday. That will help prevent AI applications from suffering bottlenecks when transferring data, Cisco said. Networking speed has become a bigger issue as data center operators try to manage a flood of AI information -- both in the cloud and within the companies' own facilities. Slowdowns can hinder AI models, Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel said in an interview. That applies to the development phase -- known as training -- and the operation of the models, a stage called inference. A massive build-out of data centers has made Cisco more relevant, he said. "AI is going to be network-bound, both on training and inference," Patel said. Having computer processors sit idle during training because of slow networks is "just throwing away money."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/1557211/cisco-updates-networking-products-in-bid-to-tap-ai-fueled-demand?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A group of 20 internationally renowned scientists have issued a strong warning against attempts to narrow the definition of "forever chemicals" in what they describe as a politically or economically motivated effort to weaken regulation of the potentially harmful chemicals. From a report: Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (Pfas) are a large group of synthetic chemicals used for their oil-, water- and stain-resistant properties in a range of consumer and industrial products from waterproof clothing and non-stick cookware to firefighting foams and electronics.

Their molecular structure makes them resistant to degradation, earning them the nickname "forever chemicals." In the last few years there has been growing awareness of the problems associated with Pfas, and a push for more stringent regulation, resulting in the banning of certain forms. A group of scientists are now raising the alarm about efforts, including by some individuals and groups in the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUpac), to narrow the current international definition of Pfas in ways that could exclude certain chemical subgroups.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/1528243/scientists-warn-against-attempts-to-change-definition-of-forever-chemicals?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The Class of 2025 is encountering the worst entry-level job market in years with unemployment among recent degree-holders aged 22 to 27 reaching 5.8% this spring -- the highest level in approximately four years and well above the national average. According to Federal Reserve Bank of New York data, 85% of the unemployment rate increase since mid-2023 stems from new labor market entrants struggling to find work.

Corporate hiring freezes implemented under threats of President Trump's tariffs, combined with AI replacing traditional entry-level positions, have severely constrained opportunities for new graduates. More than 60% of executives surveyed on LinkedIn indicate that AI will eventually assume tasks currently assigned to entry-level employees, particularly mundane and manual roles.

The impact varies significantly by major, with computer engineering graduates -- once highly sought-after -- now facing a 7.5% unemployment rate, the third-highest among recent graduates. Employment in computer science and mathematical jobs for those under 27 has dropped 8% since 2022, even as it grew 0.8% for older workers.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/1446252/new-grads-join-worst-entry-level-job-market-in-years?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

OpenAI plans to add Alphabet's Google cloud service to meet its growing needs for computing capacity, Reuters reported Tuesday, marking a surprising collaboration between two prominent competitors in the AI race. From the report: The deal, which has been under discussion for a few months, was finalized in May, one of the sources added. It underscores how massive computing demands to train and deploy AI models are reshaping the competitive dynamics in AI, and marks OpenAI's latest move to diversify its compute sources beyond its major supporter Microsoft, including its high-profile Stargate data center project.

It is a win for Google's cloud unit, which will supply additional computing capacity to OpenAI's existing infrastructure for training and running its AI models, sources said, who requested anonymity to discuss private matters. The move also comes as OpenAI's ChatGPT poses the biggest threat to Google's dominant search business in years, with Google executives recently saying that the AI race may not be winner-take-all.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/1359203/openai-taps-google-in-unprecedented-cloud-deal-despite-ai-rivalry?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: The old Code.org curriculum page for middle and high school students has been changed to include a new Python Lab in the tech-backed nonprofit's K-12 offerings. Elsewhere on the site, a Computer Science and AI Foundations curriculum is described that includes units on 'Foundations of AI Programming [in Python]' and 'Insights from Data and AI [aka Data Science].' A more-detailed AI Foundations Syllabus 25-26 document promises a second semester of material is coming soon: "This semester offers an innovative approach to teaching programming by integrating learning with and about artificial intelligence (AI). Using Python as the primary language, students build foundational programming skills while leveraging AI tools to enhance computational thinking and problem-solving. The curriculum also introduces students to the basics of creating AI-powered programs, exploring machine learning, and applying data science principles."

Newly-posted videos on Code.org's YouTube channel appear to be intended to support the new Python-based CS & AI course. "Python is extremely versatile," explains a Walmart data scientist to open the video for Data Science: Using Python. "So, first of all, Python is one of the very few languages that can handle numbers very, very well." A researcher at the Univ. of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) adds, "Python is the gold standard and what people expect data scientists to know [...] Key to us being able to handle really big data sets is our use of Python and cluster computing." Adding to the Python love, an IHME data analyst explains, "Python is a great choice for large databases because there's a lot of support for Python libraries."

Code.org is currently recruiting teachers to attend its CS and AI Foundations Professional Learning program this summer, which is being taught by Code.org's national network of university and nonprofit regional partners (teachers who signup have a chance to win $250 in DonorsChoose credits for their classrooms). A flyer for a five-day Michigan Professional Development program to prepare teachers for a pilot of the Code.org CS & A course touts the new curriculum as "an alternative to the AP [Computer Science] pathway" (teachers are offered scholarships covering registration, lodging, meals, and workshop materials).

Interestingly, Code.org's embrace of Python and Data Science comes as the nonprofit changes its mission to 'make CS and AI a core part of K-12 education' and launches a new national campaign with tech leaders to make CS and AI a graduation requirement. Prior to AI changing the education conversation, Code.org in 2021 boasted that it had lined up a consortium of tech giants, politicians, and educators to push its new $15 million Amazon-bankrolled Java AP CS A curriculum into K-12 classrooms. Just three years later, however, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was boasting to investors that Amazon had turned to AI to automatically do Java coding that he claimed would have otherwise taken human coders 4,500 developer-years to complete.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/06/09/2254257/new-codeorg-curriculum-aims-to-make-schoolkids-python-literate-and-ai-ready?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Компания НТЦ ИТ РОСА опубликовала дистрибутив ROSA Fresh Server 13.0, построенный на платформе Rosa 13. Выпуск ориентирован на использование энтузиастами и позиционируется как экспериментальный компактный серверный дистрибутив с текстовым интерфейсом. При использовании текстового инсталлятора дистрибутив может работать на компьютерах или виртуальных машинах с 1 ГБ ОЗУ. Для загрузки подготовлен установочный iso-образ, размером 2 ГБ (x86_64).

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63393

Компания Google [ выпустила новую версию ]( https://blog.google/products/android/android-16/ ) открытой мобильной платформы Android 16.

Исходный код системы уже [ доступен в Git-репозитории ]( https://source.android.com/docs/setup/download ) проекта (ветка android-16.0.0_r1). Первыми получат обновление устройства линейки Pixel (6/6a/6 Pro, 7/7a/7 Pro, 8/8a/8 Pro, 9/9 Pro/9 Pro XL/9 Pro Fold, Pixel Fold и Pixel Tablet). В ближайшие месяцы прошивки появятся для смартфонов Samsung, Honor, iQOO, Lenovo, Motorola, Nothing, OnePlus, Oppo, realme, Sharp, Sony, Tecno, vivo и Xiaomi. Также будут [ выпущены ]( https://developer.android.com/topic/generic-system-image/releases ) универсальные сборки GSI (Generic System Images), совместимые с устройствами на архитектурах ARM64 и x86_64.

( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/android/17996056#cut ) )