Представлены результаты анализа надёжности паролей, генерируемых большими языковыми моделями и AI-ассистентами. Исследователи попросили модели Claude, ChatGPT и Gemini сгенерировать надёжный 16-символьный пароль и во всех случаях получили результат, на первый взгляд отвечающий всем требованиям к безопасным паролям и признаваемый утилитами для проверки качества паролей как надёжный. Пароли сочетали в себе символы в разных регистрах, спецсимволы и числа, но при лишь выглядели безопасными, а на деле имели минимальную энтропию, формировались по типовому шаблону и при повторных запросах образовывали закономерность, в силу построении контента большими языковыми моделями на основе предсказания токенов.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=64841

Опубликовано: Sat, 21 Feb 2026 09:35:37 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / DIY или Сделай сам / Хабр

Вчера я запустил шуточный сервис, который неожиданно собрал трафик, и решил выходить на глобальный рынок. Но при поиске .com домена столкнулся с классической болью: LLM генерируют красивые, но занятые варианты.Проверять каждый вручную — мучение. Я нашел элегантное решение: связал Cursor IDE и свой MCP-сервер для проверки WHOIS. Теперь агент сам предлагает и сразу проверяет доступность доменов. В статье делюсь конфигом и показываю, как это настроить за 5 минут. Настроить Cursor]]>

https://habr.com/ru/articles/1001624/

OpenAI is reportedly developing its first consumer hardware product: a $200-$300 smart speaker with a built-in camera capable of recognizing "items on a nearby table or conversations people are having in the vicinity." It's also said to feature Face ID-style authentication for purchases. The Verge reports: In addition to the smart speaker, OpenAI is "possibly" working on smart glasses and a smart lamp, The Information reports. (Apple may also be working on a smart lamp.) But OpenAI's glasses might not hit mass production until 2028, and while OpenAI has made prototypes of gadgets like the smart lamp, The Information says it's "unclear" if they'll be released and that OpenAI's devices plans are in early stages.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/02/21/0049226/openais-first-chatgpt-gadget-could-be-a-smart-speaker-with-a-camera?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

TOP20 VISITORS:

[1] 217.197.116.x point=411 web=0 up=29.2MB (44%) <--- naste (17/hr)
[2] PetalBot point=10 web=1470 up=7.0MB (10%) <--- PetalBot
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[4] Amazon point=0 web=562 up=6.2MB (9%)
[5] ClaudeBot point=0 web=321 up=5.9MB (9%)
[6] 37.252.14.x point=145 web=0 up=2.4MB (3%) <--- ake (6/hr)
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TOTAL TRAFFIC: 65MB

Researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are advancing Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS) that use high-energy proton beams to transmute long-lived nuclear waste into shorter-lived isotopes. "The process also generates significant heat, which can be harnessed to produce additional electricity for the grid," reports Interesting Engineering. The projects are supported by $8.17 million in grants from the Department of Energy's NEWTON (Nuclear Energy Waste Transmutation Optimized Now) program. From the report: The researchers are developing ADS technology. This system uses a particle accelerator to fire high-energy protons at a target (such as liquid mercury), triggering a process called "spallation." This releases a flood of neutrons that interact with unwanted, long-lived isotopes in nuclear waste. The technology can effectively "burn" the most hazardous components of the waste by transmuting these elements. While unprocessed fuel remains dangerous for approximately 100,000 years, partitioning and recycling via ADS can reduce that window to just 300 years. [...]

To make ADS economically viability, Jefferson Lab is tackling two primary technical hurdles: efficiency and power. Traditional particle accelerators require massive, expensive cryogenic cooling systems to reach superconducting temperatures. Jefferson Lab is pioneering a more cost-effective approach by coating the interior of pure niobium cavities with tin. These niobium-tin cavities can operate at higher temperatures, allowing for the use of standard commercial cooling units rather than custom, large-scale cryogenic plants. The team is also developing spoke cavities, which is a complex design intended to drive even higher efficiency in neutron spallation.

The second project focuses on the power source behind the beam. Researchers are adapting the magnetron -- the same component that powers microwave ovens -- to provide the 10 megawatts of power required for ADS. The primary challenge is that the energy frequency must match the accelerator cavity precisely at 805 Megahertz. In collaboration with Stellant Systems, researchers are prototyping advanced magnetrons that can be combined to reach the necessary high-power thresholds with maximum efficiency. The NEWTON program aims to enable the recycling of the entire US commercial nuclear fuel stockpile within the next 30 years.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/02/21/0043212/us-particle-accelerators-turn-nuclear-waste-into-electricity-cut-radioactive-life-by-997?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликован экспериментальный выпуск открытой реализации Win32 API - Wine 11.3. С момента выпуска 11.2 было закрыто 30 отчётов об ошибках и внесено 223 изменения.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=64843

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: NASA could launch four astronauts on a mission to fly around the moon as soon as March 6th. That's the launch date (PDF) that the space agency is now working towards following a successful test fueling of its big, 322-foot-tall moon rocket, which is standing on a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"This is really getting real," says Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator of NASA's exploration systems development mission directorate. "It's time to get serious and start getting excited." But she cautioned that there's still some pending work that remains to be done out at the launch pad, and officials will have to conduct a multi-day flight readiness review late next week to make sure that every aspect of the mission is truly ready to go. "We need to successfully navigate all of those, but assuming that happens, it puts us in a very good position to target March 6th," she says, noting that the flight readiness review will be "extensive and detailed." [...]

When NASA workers first tested out fueling the rocket earlier this month, they encountered problems like a liquid hydrogen leak. Swapping out some seals and other work seems to have fixed these issues, according to officials who say that the latest countdown dress rehearsal went smoothly, despite glitches such as a loss of ground communications in the Launch Control Center that forced workers to temporarily use backups.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/238201/nasa-eyes-march-6-to-launch-4-astronauts-to-the-moon-on-artemis-ii-mission?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Backlash intensified against Discord's age verification rollout after it briefly disclosed a UK age-verification test involving vendor Persona, contradicting earlier claims about minimal ID storage and transparency. Ars Technica explains: One of the major complaints was that Discord planned to collect more government IDs as part of its global age verification process. It shocked many that Discord would be so bold so soon after a third-party breach of a former age check partner's services recently exposed 70,000 Discord users' government IDs.

Attempting to reassure users, Discord claimed that most users wouldn't have to show ID, instead relying on video selfies using AI to estimate ages, which raised separate privacy concerns. In the future, perhaps behavioral signals would override the need for age checks for most users, Discord suggested, seemingly downplaying the risk that sensitive data would be improperly stored. Discord didn't hide that it planned to continue requesting IDs for any user appealing an incorrect age assessment, and users weren't happy, since that is exactly how the prior breach happened. Responding to critics, Discord claimed that the majority of ID data was promptly deleted. Specifically, Savannah Badalich, Discord's global head of product policy, told The Verge that IDs shared during appeals "are deleted quickly -- in most cases, immediately after age confirmation."

It's unsurprising then that backlash exploded after Discord posted, and then weirdly deleted, a disclaimer on an FAQ about Discord's age assurance policies that contradicted Discord's hyped short timeline for storing IDs. An archived version of the page shows the note shared this warning: "Important: If you're located in the UK, you may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona. The information you submit will be temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted. For ID document verification, all details are blurred except your photo and date of birth, so only what's truly needed for age verification is used."

Critics felt that Discord was obscuring not just how long IDs may be stored, but also the entities collecting information. Discord did not provide details on what the experiment was testing or how many users were affected, and Persona was not listed as a partner on its platform. Asked for comment, Discord told Ars that only a small number of users was included in the experiment, which ran for less than one month. That test has since concluded, Discord confirmed, and Persona is no longer an active vendor partnering with Discord. Moving forward, Discord promised to "keep our users informed as vendors are added or updated." While Discord seeks to distance itself from Persona, Rick Song, Persona's CEO [...] told Ars that all the data of verified individuals involved in Discord's test has been deleted. Ars also notes that hackers "quickly exposed a 'workaround' to avoid Persona's age checks on Discord" and "found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a U.S. government authorized server."

The Rage, an independent publication that covers financial surveillance, reported: "In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting -- and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies." While Persona does not have any government contracts, the exposed service "appears to be powered by an OpenAI chatbot," The Rage noted.

Hackers warned "that OpenAI may have created an internal database for Persona identity checks that spans all OpenAI users via its internal watchlistdb," seemingly exploiting the "opportunity to go from comparing users against a single federal watchlist, to creating the watchlist of all users themselves."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/232201/fury-over-discords-age-checks-explodes-after-shady-persona-test-in-uk?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Users say Pinterest has become flooded with AI-generated images and heavy-handed automated moderation, with artists reporting wrongful takedowns and their hand-drawn work mislabeled as "AI modified." As the company doubles down on AI features and layoffs, longtime users argue the platform's creative ecosystem is being undermined. 404 Media reports: "I feel like, increasingly, it's impossible to talk to a single human [at Pinterest]," artist and Pinterest user Tiana Oreglia told 404 Media. "Along with being filled with AI images that have been completely ruining the platform, Pinterest has implemented terrible AI moderation that the community is up in arms about. It's banning people randomly and I keep getting takedown notices for pins." [...]

r/Pinterest is awash in users complaining about AI-related issues on the site. "Pinterest keeps automatically adding the 'AI modified' tag to my Pins... every time I appeal, Pinterest reviews it and removes the AI label. But then... the same thing happens again on new Pins and new artwork. So I'm stuck in this endless loop of appealing, label removed, new Pin gets tagged again," read a post on r/Pinterest. The redditor told 404 Media that this has happened three times so far and it takes between 24 to 48 hours to sort out. "I actively promote my work as 100% hand-drawn and 'no AI,'" they said. "On Etsy, I clearly position my brand around original illustration. So when a Pinterest Pin is labeled 'Hand Drawn' but simultaneously marked as 'AI modified,' it creates confusion and undermines that positioning."

Artist Min Zakuga told 404 Media that they've seen a lot of their art on Pinterest get labeled as "AI modified" despite being older than image generation tech. "There is no way to take their auto-labeling off, other than going through a horribly long process where you have to prove it was not AI, which still may get rejected," she said. "Even artwork from 10-13 years ago will still be labeled by Pinterest as AI, with them knowing full well something from 10 years ago could not possibly be AI." Other users are tired of seeing a constant flood of AI-generated art in their feeds. "I can't even scroll through 100 pins without 95 out of them being some AI slop or theft, let alone very talented artists tend to be sucked down and are being unrecognized by the sheer amount of it," said another post. "I don't want to triple check my sources every single time I look at a pin, but I refuse to use any of that soulless garbage. However, Pinterest has been infested. Made obsolete."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/2243230/pinterest-is-drowning-in-a-sea-of-ai-slop-and-auto-moderation?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Meta is pivoting Horizon Worlds away from its original VR-centric metaverse vision and toward a mobile-first strategy, "explicitly separating" its Quest VR platform from the virtual world. TechCrunch reports: By going mobile-first, Horizon Worlds is positioning itself to compete with popular platforms like Roblox and Fortnite. "We're in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at scale, thanks to our unique ability to connect those games with billions of people on the world's biggest social networks," Samantha Ryan, Reality Labs' VP of content, said in the blog post. "You saw this strategy start to unfold in 2025, and now, it's our main focus." Ryan went on to note that Meta is still focused on VR hardware. "We have a robust roadmap of future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures," Ryan wrote.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/2235224/metas-metaverse-leaves-virtual-reality?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Shares of cybersecurity software companies tumbled Friday after Anthropic PBC introduced a new security feature into its Claude AI model. Crowdstrike Holdings was the among the biggest decliners, falling as much as 6.5%, while Cloudflare slumped more than 6%. Meanwhile, Zscaler dropped 3.5%, SailPoint shed 6.8%, and Okta declined 5.7%. The Global X Cybersecurity ETF fell as much as 3.8%, extending its losses on the year to 14%.

Anthropic said the new tool will "scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review." The firm said the update is available in a limited research preview for now.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/2143205/cyber-stocks-slide-as-anthropic-unveils-claude-code-security?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Goldman Sachs has launched an "S&P ex-AI" index (SPXXAI) that tracks the S&P 500 stocks not related to AI, offering investors a way to "hedge their exposure to the AI trade," reports Axios. From the report: "Excluding 'AI enablers' from the passive benchmark would eliminate the noise introduced by the AI hype," Louis Miller, head of the firm's equity custom basket desk, wrote in a note to clients about the new index.

The ex-AI index is a compilation of all the stocks in the S&P 500 that are not related to AI, also referred to as old-economy stocks.
It's available exclusively to Goldman customers, created in collaboration with S&P Dow Jones Indices.

Taking all the AI out of the S&P doesn't leave much behind, as AI companies make up ~45% of the index, according to the note. Over the last three years, the S&P 500 is up 76%. The ex-AI index is only up 32% in that same time period.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/2134238/goldman-sachs-launches-ai-free-index?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog. In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

"There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it," stated an update today on Wikipedia's Archive.today discussion. "There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users' computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today's operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable."

More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site, which is facing an investigation in which the FBI is trying to uncover the identity of its founder, is commonly used to bypass news paywalls. "Those in favor of maintaining the status quo rested their arguments primarily on the utility of archive.today for verifiability," said today's Wikipedia update. "However, an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Several editors started to work out implementation details during this RfC [request for comment] and the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/2112228/wikipedia-blacklists-archivetoday-starts-removing-695000-archive-links?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Xbox chief and Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is leaving Microsoft after nearly 40 years at the company. "Meanwhile, Xbox President Sarah Bond, "long thought by many both inside and outside of Microsoft to be Spencer's heir apparent, has resigned," reports IGN. From the report: The new CEO of Microsoft Gaming will be Asha Sharma, currently the President of Microsoft's CoreAI product. Finally, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is being promoted to Chief Content Officer and will work closely with Sharma. "I want to thank Phil for his extraordinary leadership and partnership," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an email sent to Microsoft staff. "Over 38 years at Microsoft, including 12 years leading Gaming, Phil helped transform what we do and how we do it." [...]

Spencer was named Head of Xbox in March of 2014, when he was tasked with righting a ship that had made a number of product choices and policy decisions that rubbed core gamers the wrong way in the run-up to the launch of the Xbox One in Fall 2013. Long hailed by gamers as being one of their own, Spencer could frequently be found on Xbox Live, playing games regularly with fellow Xbox gamers and racking up a healthy Gamerscore. His first major move when put in charge was decoupling the Kinect 2.0 peripheral from the Xbox One package, thus immediately reducing the new console's price by $100 to $399, matching the day-one price of Sony's PlayStation 4. He spearheaded the much-heralded backwards compatibility movement within Xbox, the Xbox Game Pass service was born under his watch, and accessibility made major advances during his tenure in both hardware and software. Xbox Play Anywhere, which sought to let gamers play their Xbox games on any device, be it a PC, console, or handheld, isn't new but has been a big recent focal point.

Spencer's time running Xbox will perhaps be most remembered for Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard-King in 2022, which took almost two years to achieve regulatory approval from various agencies around the world. But Spencer began trying to solve for Xbox's dearth of first-party games in 2018, when the first wave of studio acquisitions occurred. Prior to the Activision deal, Spencer's biggest move came with the $7.5 billion acquisition of ZeniMax, parent company of Bethesda, in 2020. The deal gave Xbox total ownership of Bethesda Game Studios and its Fallout and Elder Scrolls franchises along with id Software and its Doom and Quake IPs, among many others. Questions arose from there about whether or not that meant all of Xbox's new studios would produce games exclusively for Xbox consoles, and while some games were kept off of PlayStation platforms temporarily, many weren't and most now seem to come to PS5 eventually, if not on day one.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/2125252/phil-spencer-retiring-after-38-years-at-microsoft?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Microsoft pulled a year-old blog post this week after a Hacker News thread flagged that it had encouraged developers to download all seven Harry Potter books from a Kaggle dataset -- incorrectly marked as public domain -- and use them to train AI models on the company's Azure platform.

The blog, written in November 2024 by senior product manager Pooja Kamath, walked users through building Q&A systems and generating fan fiction using the copyrighted texts, and even included a Microsoft-branded AI image of Harry Potter. The Kaggle dataset's uploader, data scientist Shubham Maindola, told Ars Technica the public domain label was "a mistake" and deleted the dataset after the outlet reached out.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/1918241/microsoft-deletes-blog-telling-users-to-train-ai-on-pirated-harry-potter-books?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

OpenAI faces four fundamental strategic problems that no amount of fundraising or capex announcements can paper over, according to analyst Benedict Evans: it has no unique technology, its enormous user base is shallow and fragile, incumbents like Google and Meta are leveraging superior distribution to close the gap, and its product roadmap is dictated by whatever the research labs happen to discover rather than by deliberate product strategy.

The company claims 800-900 million weekly active users, but 80% of them sent fewer than 1,000 messages across all of 2025, averaging fewer than three prompts a day, and only 5% pay. OpenAI has acknowledged what it calls a "capability gap" between what models can do and what people use them for -- a framing Evans reads as a polite way to avoid admitting the absence of product-market fit. Gemini and Meta AI are meanwhile gaining share rapidly because the products look nearly indistinguishable to typical users, and Google and Meta already have the distribution to push them. Evans compares ChatGPT to Netscape -- an early leader in a category where the products were hard to tell apart, overtaken by a competitor that used distribution as a crowbar.

On capex, Evans argues that Altman's ambitions -- claiming $1.4 trillion and 30 gigawatts of future compute -- amount to an attempt to will OpenAI into a seat at a table where annual infrastructure spending may need to reach hundreds of billions. But a seat at the table is not leverage over it; he compares this to TSMC, which holds a de facto chip monopoly yet captures little value further up the stack.

OpenAI's own strategy diagrams from late last year laid out a full-stack platform vision -- chips, models, developer tools, consumer products -- each layer reinforcing the others. Evans argues this borrows the language of Windows and iOS without possessing any of the underlying dynamics: no network effect, no lock-in preventing developers from calling a different model's API, and no reason customers would know or care which foundation model powers the product they are using.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/1849221/openai-has-no-moat-no-tech-edge-no-lock-in-and-no-real-plan-analyst-warns?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta product managers are rebranding. Some are now calling themselves "AI builders," a signal that AI coding tools are changing who gets to build software inside the company. One of them, Jeremie Guedj, announced the change in a LinkedIn post last week. "I still can't believe I'm writing this: as of today, my full-time job at Meta is AI Builder," he wrote.

Guedj has spent more than a decade as a traditional product manager, a role that sets the road map and strategy for products then built by engineering teams. He said that while his title in Meta's internal systems still lists him as a product manager, his actual work is now full-time building with AI on what he calls an "AI-native team." Another Meta product manager also lists "AI Builder" on her LinkedIn profile, while at least two other Meta engineers write the term in their bios, Business Insider found.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/1815253/several-meta-employees-have-started-calling-themselves-ai-builders?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When will AI movies start showing up in theaters nationwide? It was supposed to be next month. But when word leaked online that an AI short film contest winner was going to start screening before feature presentations in AMC Theatres, the cinema chain decided not to run the content.

The issue began earlier this week with the inaugural Frame Forward AI Animated Film Festival announcing Igor Alferov's short film Thanksgiving Day had won the contest. The prize package for included Thanksgiving Day getting a national two-week run in theaters nationwide. When word of this began hitting social media, however, some were dismayed by the prospect of exhibitors embracing AI content, with many singling out AMC Theatres for criticism.

Except the short is not actually programmed by exhibitors, exactly, but by Screenvision Media -- a third-party company which manages the 20-minute, advertising-driven pre-show before a theater's lights go down. Screenvision -- which co-organized the festival along with Modern Uprising Studios -- provides content to multiple theatrical chains, not just AMC. After The Hollywood Reporter reached out to AMC about the brewing controversy, the company issued this statement to THR on Thursday: "This content is an initiative from Screenvision Media, which manages pre-show advertising for several movie theatre chains in the United States and runs in fewer than 30 percent of AMC's U.S. locations. AMC was not involved in the creation of the content or the initiative and has informed Screenvision that AMC locations will not participate."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/187222/amc-theatres-will-refuse-to-screen-ai-short-film-after-online-uproar?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Cable TV providers have spent the past decade losing tens of millions of households to streaming services, but companies like Charter Communications are now slowing that exodus by bundling the very apps that once threatened to replace them.

Charter added 44,000 net video subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025, its first growth in that count since 2020, after integrating Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ directly into Spectrum cable packages -- a deal that grew out of a contentious 2023 contract dispute with Disney. Comcast and Optimum still lost subscribers in the quarter, though both saw those losses narrow.

Charter's Q4 numbers also got a lift from a 15-day Disney channel blackout on YouTube TV during football season, which drove more than 14,000 subscribers to Spectrum. Charter has been discounting aggressively -- video revenue fell 10% year over year despite the subscriber gains. Cox Communications launched its first streaming-inclusive cable bundles last month, and Dish Network has yet to integrate streaming apps into its packages at all.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/1757211/how-streaming-became-cable-tvs-unlikely-life-raft?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликовано: Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:14:24 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / Программирование микроконтроллеров / Хабр

В задачах стабилизации и высокоточного наведения присутствуют постоянные проблемы — классические алгоритмы (вроде PID-регуляторов) на высоких скоростях либо начинают звенеть из-за шумов дифференциальной составляющей, либо безнадежно отстают от динамики цели из-за фазового лага. С другой стороны, попытки внедрить туда тяжелые нейросети разбиваются о нехватку ресурсов микроконтроллера и неприемлемые задержки вычислений (latency).Я разработал алгоритм управления, в основе которого лежит легковесное рекуррентное нейро-алгебраическое ядро. Оно работает напрямую с матрицами вращения в топологическом пространстве SO(3), что позволяет избежать множества проблем классической аппроксимации. Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/articles/1002058/

PayPal is notifying customers of a data breach after a software error in a loan application exposed their sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, for nearly 6 months last year. From a report: The incident affected the PayPal Working Capital (PPWC) loan app, which provides small businesses with quick access to financing. PayPal discovered the breach on December 12, 2025, and determined that customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers, business addresses, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth had been exposed since July 1, 2025.

The financial technology company said it has reversed the code change that caused the incident, blocking attackers' access to the data one day after discovering the breach. "On December 12, 2025, PayPal identified that due to an error in its PayPal Working Capital ('PPWC') loan application, the PII of a small number of customers was exposed to unauthorized individuals during the timeframe of July 1, 2025 to December 13, 2025," PayPal said in breach notification letters sent to affected users. "PayPal has since rolled back the code change responsible for this error, which potentially exposed the PII. We have not delayed this notification as a result of any law enforcement investigation."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/1733211/paypal-discloses-data-breach-that-exposed-user-info-for-6-months?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

India's IT services giants have spent decades deploying, customizing, and maintaining the world's largest enterprise software platforms, putting hundreds of thousands of engineers in daily contact with the business logic and proprietary architectures of vendors like SAP and Oracle. None of them have built a competing product that gained meaningful traction against the U.S. incumbents, HSBC said in a note to clients, using this history to argue AI-generated code faces the same structural barriers.

The bank's analysts contend that enterprise software competition turns on factors that have little to do with the ability to write code -- sales teams, cross-licensing agreements, patented IP, first-mover lock-in, brand awareness, and go-to-market infrastructure. If a massive, low-cost, domain-expert workforce couldn't crack the market over several decades, HSBC argues, the idea that AI-generated code will do so is, in the words of Nvidia's Jensen Huang that the report approvingly cites, "illogical."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/167244/hsbc-to-investors-if-india-couldnt-build-an-enterprise-software-challenger-neither-can-ai?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликовано: Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:45:30 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / Робототехника / Хабр

Чем отличаются китайские дроны Tello от российских «Геоскан» и как они применяются в образовании школьников: практический опыт в Центре гуманитарных и цифровых профилей «Точка роста». Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/articles/1002026/

После девяти месяцев разработки опубликован стабильный релиз композитного сервера Weston 15.0, развивающего технологии, содействующие появлению полноценной поддержки протокола Wayland в Enlightenment, GNOME, KDE и других пользовательских окружениях. Разработка Weston нацелена на предоставление высококачественной кодовой базы и рабочих примеров для использования Wayland в десктоп-окружениях и встраиваемых решениях, таких как платформы для автомобильных информационно-развлекательных систем, смартфонов, телевизоров и прочих потребительских устройств. Код проекта распространяется под лицензией MIT.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=64839

schwit1 writes: An IT blunder has revealed an apparent smuggling ring that has moved at least $90bn of Russian oil and is playing a central role in funding the Kremlin's war in Ukraine. Financial Times has identified 48 seemingly independent companies working from different physical addresses that appear to be operating together to disguise the origin of Russian oil, particularly from Kremlin-controlled Rosneft. The network was discovered because they all share a single private email server. The report adds: The FT was able to identify 442 web domains whose public registrations show they all use a single private server for their email, "mx.phoenixtrading.ltd," showing that they share back-office functions. The FT was then able to identify companies by comparing the names in the domain to those of entities that appear in Russian and Indian customs records as involved in carrying Russian oil.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/1559212/email-blunder-exposes-90-billion-russian-oil-smuggling-ring?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down on Friday President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs that he pursued under a law meant for use in national emergencies, rejecting one of his most contentious assertions of his authority in a ruling with major implications for the global economy. From a report: The justices, in a 6-3 ruling authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld a lower court's decision that the Republican president's use of this 1977 law exceeded his authority.

The court ruled that the Trump administration's interpretation that the law at issue - the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA - grants Trump the power he claims to impose tariffs would intrude on the powers of Congress and violate a legal principle called the "major questions" doctrine. The doctrine, embraced by the conservative justices, requires actions by the government's executive branch of "vast economic and political significance" to be clearly authorized by Congress. The court used the doctrine to stymie some of Democratic former President Joe Biden's key executive actions.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/1529240/us-supreme-court-rejects-trumps-global-tariffs?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

После полутора лет разработки опубликован выпуск классического инструментария для управления пакетным фильтром iptables 1.8.12, развитие которого последнее время сосредоточено на компонентах для сохранения обратной совместимости - iptables-nft и ebtables-nft, предоставляющих утилиты с тем же синтаксисом командной строки, как в iptables и ebtables, но транслирующих полученные правила в байткод nftables. Оригинальный набор программ iptables, включая ip6tables, arptables и ebtables, в 2018 году переведён в разряд устаревших и уже заменён на nftables в большинстве дистрибутивов.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=64840

Опубликовано: Fri, 20 Feb 2026 14:46:52 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / Программирование микроконтроллеров / Хабр

Ровно полгода назад, 18 августа 2025 года, я опубликовал здесь свою первую статью о портировании прошивки AM32 на отечественный микроконтроллер К1946ВК035.Ссылка на статью - https://habr.com/ru/articles/938128/Те, кто читал ту статью (а таких людей, уверен, немного), помнят: не весь функционал удалось портировать с сохранением исходной производительности из-за некоторых ограничений в работе периферийных модулей отечественного микроконтроллера. Напомню суть проблемы: микроконтроллер слишком часто уходит в прерывания для обработки входящих сигналов DSHOT, которые мы пытались обрабатывать сугубо софтварно, без применения DMA (но с небольшими хитростями). Отсюда и проблемы со своевременной обработкой сигналов других частей программы. Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/articles/1001968/

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon's cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools [non-paywalled source], leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant's push to roll out these coding assistants.

Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to "delete and recreate the environment." Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the "outage" of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services. Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group's AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/1252243/amazon-service-was-taken-down-by-ai-coding-bot?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликовано: Fri, 20 Feb 2026 14:33:42 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / Робототехника / Хабр

Приветствую, Хабр. В Китае, как известно празднуется Новый Год, и пару дней назад китайцы своим праздничным шоу неплохо так взбаламутили мировую общественность.. Я сам был в легком шоке от увиденного, особенно когда попалось видео сравнения прошлогоднего шоу и последнего. Пару дней переваривал информацию и хотел бы наконец отрефлексироватьВозможно, я слишком старомоден и плохо воспринимаю изменения происходящие в мире. Киберпанк - суровый мир будущего, где робот сосуществует с человеком, похож на человека и выполняет функции человека. Так же в этом мире обыденность такие вещи как искусственные конечности, органы и даже тела целиком. Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/articles/1001950/

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In early 2024, the agency that oversees cybersecurity for much of the US government issued a rare emergency order -- disconnect your Connect Secure virtual private network software immediately. Chinese spies had hacked the code and infiltrated nearly two dozen organizations. The directive applied to all civilian federal agencies, but given the product's customer base, its impact was more widely felt. The software, which is made by Ivanti Inc., was something of an industry standard across government and much of the corporate world. Clients included the US Air Force, Army, Navy and other parts of the Defense Department, the Department of State, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Reserve, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, thousands of companies and more than 2,000 banks including Wells Fargo & Co. and Deutsche Bank AG, according to federal procurement records, internal documents, interviews and the accounts of former Ivanti employees who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose customer information.

Soon after sending out their order, which instructed agencies to install an Ivanti-issued fix, staffers at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency discovered that the threat was also inside their own house. Two sensitive CISA databases -- one containing information about personnel at chemical facilities, another assessing the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure operators -- had been compromised via the agency's own Connect Secure software. CISA had followed all its own guidance. Ivanti's fix had failed. This was a breaking point for some American national security officials, who had long expressed concerns about Connect Secure VPNs. CISA subsequently published a letter with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the national cybersecurity agencies of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand warning customers of the "significant risk" associated with continuing to use the software. According to Laura Galante, then the top cyber official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the government came to a simple conclusion about the technology. "You should not be using it," she said. "There really is no other way to put it."

That attack, along with several others that successfully targeted the Ivanti software, illustrate how private equity's push into the cybersecurity market ended up compromising the quality and safety of some critical VPN products, Bloomberg has found. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Citrix Systems Inc., another top VPN maker, experienced several major hacks after its private equity owners, Elliott Investment Management and Vista Equity Partners, cut most of the company's 70-member product security team following their acquisition of the company in 2022. Some government officials and private-sector executives are now reconsidering their approach to evaluating cybersecurity software. In addition to excising private equity-owned VPNs from their networks, some factor private equity ownership into their risk assessments of key technologies.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/003230/how-private-equity-debt-left-a-leading-vpn-open-to-chinese-hackers?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликовано: Fri, 20 Feb 2026 13:27:21 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / Программирование микроконтроллеров / Хабр

Всем привет, всем крепких нервов, решительности, смелости, силы воли и упорства. Ощущение «что-то страшное грядёт» довлеет всем настолько, что любая креативность убивается на корню. Однако, наш рептильный мозг редко бывает прав. Давайте скажем кортизолу решительное «нет» и не будем самоубивать тот участок жизни, который у нас есть здесь и сейчас. Рептильный мозг не знает, что мы давно уже не в пустыне среди шушпанчиков и никакой потенциальной пользы «в случае чего» от тех решений, которые он навязывает, не будет — а будет один только вред.Итак, встречайте: ядро микроконтроллера с шестибитными байтами. Глава первая: описание «на словах».Это обычный «школьный процессор», на котором студентам показывают базовые принципы работы железа. Fetch, Sum, Jump… В принципе, это роднит его как с древнейшими процами, имевшими 8-16 команд, так и с современными, разной степени эзотеричности (вплоть до Single Instruction Set Computer, имеющий всего одну команду типа «инверсия указанного бита и затем безусловный переход на указанный адрес»). Но я решил вдруг, ХЗ с какого перепугу, придать ему практический смысл в нашем странном веке, когда даже в одноразовые вейпы лепят грошовые 32-битники, которые потом летят в помойку.Дело в том, что проц, имеющий сложность уровня «за пригоршню КМОП-транзисторов», обладает одним свойством, которым эти девайсы обладать не могут ни с каким развитием технологий, потому что технологии уводят их всё дальше и дальше от обладания этим свойством: его можно реализовать зацело с устройством, которым он управляет. Да-да, на одном кристалле. Минус корпус, минус пайка, минус разводка и… минус питание. Да я всё равно и на нём Doom запущу!]]>

https://habr.com/ru/articles/1001874/

После года разработки представлен двадцать восьмой выпуск свободной игры 0 A.D. с реализацией стратегии реального времени в стиле игр серии "Age of Empires". Это первый выпуск, который сформирован без метки "Alpha" и помечен как "0 A.D. Release 28". Метка альфа-версии выставлялась, так как не все изначально задуманные возможности реализованы. При этом имеющаяся функциональность отточена и стабильна, и по качеству реализации 0 A.D. давно вышел из состояния альфа-версии.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=64836

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has dropped a proposal that would have allowed limited commercial robotaxi deployments outside New York City, citing a lack of support among state legislators. "The move is a blow to Waymo and other robotaxi companies who saw New York, and especially New York City, as a potential goldmine," reports The Verge. From the report: The plan, which was introduced by Hochul as part of the state's budget proposal last month, would have allowed limited robotaxi deployment in cities other than the Big Apple -- while leaving whether New York City would get autonomous vehicles up to the mayor and the City Council. But now that plan is DOA, as support in the legislature never materialized. "Based on conversations with stakeholders, including in the legislature, it was clear that the support was not there to advance this proposal," Sean Butler, a Hochul spokesperson, said in a statement. "While we are disappointed by the Governor's decision, we're committed to bringing our service to New York and will work with the State Legislature to advance this issue," Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher said in a statement. "The path forward requires a collaborative approach that prioritizes transparency and public safety."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/19/231216/new-york-drops-plan-to-legalize-robotaxis-outside-nyc?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Йенс Эксбо (Jens Axboe), создатель io_uring и планировщиков ввода/вывода CFQ, Deadline и Noop, предложил для включения в кодовую базу эмулятора QEMU патч, в 50-80 раз сокращающий задержки в fdmon (file descriptor monitoring) в режиме "aio=io_uring" при нахождении системы в состоянии простоя (iddle).

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=64834

Опубликовано: Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:27:58 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / Системное программирование / Хабр

Часто SDET-инженеры, работающие со встраиваемыми системами, не приступают к работе, пока не получат реальное железо: датчик, микроконтроллер или плату с новым чипом. Такой подход обычно оправдывают тем, что без физического девайса «на столе» писать корректно работающий софт невозможно. Очевидный минус: увеличивается время выхода продукта и нового функционала на рынок. Но разработку можно начать, даже не имея в своем распоряжении устройства: все дело в договоренности между командами.Меня зовут Рустам Ахмадуллин, я старший инженер по системной верификации аппаратуры в YADRO. Расскажу на примере датчика температуры LM75A, как написать API без физического доступа к устройству и его прошивке. Разберем методологию Test Driven Development, при которой разработка начинается с написания автоматизированных тестов, а не самого кода. Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/companies/yadro/articles/1001256/

Опубликовано: Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:01:18 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / DIY или Сделай сам / Хабр

Продолжим знакомство с работой современного французского энтузиаста-электровакуумщика Клода Пайяра [1], воссоздавшего в своей мастерской кустарное микропроизводство ранних высоковакуумных триодов — варианта легендарного ТМ [2]. Ранее мы уже рассмотрели его огневое оснащение [1], технологическую печь, контактную сварку [3] и ламповый аппарат ТВЧ [4], полюбопытствовали, чем Клод откачивает свои лампы [5]. С воображаемой лупой в руках посмотрим же, как устроен его вариант триода, чем он похож и чем отличается от исторических прототипов; по характерным примерам последних проследим часть эволюции этой выдающейся лампы. Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/companies/ruvds/articles/997012/

TOP20 VISITORS:

[1] 217.197.116.x point=423 web=0 up=30.1MB (44%) <--- naste (18/hr)
[2] Amazon point=0 web=1230 up=9.5MB (14%)
[3] PetalBot point=8 web=1664 up=6.8MB (10%) <--- PetalBot
[4] AhrefsBot point=0 web=994 up=6.1MB (8%)
[5] 216.244.66.x point=0 web=91 up=2.9MB (4%)
[6] 37.252.14.x point=144 web=0 up=2.4MB (3%) <--- ake (6/hr)
[7] Google point=0 web=255 up=1.9MB (2%)
[8] DataForSeoBot point=6 web=113 up=1.7MB (2%) <--- DataForSeoBot
[9] TikTok point=1 web=115 up=1.5MB (2%) <--- TikTok
[10] 217.114.158.x point=26 web=0 up=1.0MB (1%) <--- fox (1/hr)
[11] ClaudeBot point=1 web=31 up=0.7MB (<1%) <--- ClaudeBot
[12] 54.37.252.x point=0 web=1 up=0.5MB (<1%)
[13] 88.89.67.x point=0 web=1 up=0.3MB (<1%)
[14] Facebook point=0 web=18 up=0.1MB (<1%)
[15] 110.249.201.x point=0 web=16 up=0.1MB (<1%)
[16] 110.249.202.x point=0 web=16 up=97KB
[17] 111.225.149.x point=0 web=7 up=87KB
[18] 43.173.182.x point=0 web=5 up=85KB
[19] 135.181.180.x point=0 web=2 up=69KB
[20] 193.70.33.x point=0 web=1 up=69KB

TOTAL TRAFFIC: 67MB

NASA has officially classified Boeing Starliner's 2024 crewed flight as a "Type A" mishap, acknowledging serious technical failures and leadership shortcomings that nearly left astronauts unable to safely return. Administrator Jared Isaacman released (PDF) a 311-page internal report citing flawed decision-making and cultural issues, with the next Starliner flight now planned as uncrewed pending major fixes. Ars Technica reports: As part of the announcement, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent an agency-wide letter that recognized the shortcomings of both Starliner's developer, Boeing, as well as the space agency itself. Starliner flew under the auspices of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, in which the agency procures astronaut transportation services to the International Space Station. "We are taking ownership of our shortcomings," Isaacman said.

"Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware," Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. "It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight." Isaacman said there would be "leadership accountability" as a result of the decisions surrounding the Starliner program, but did not say which actions would be taken.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/02/19/2353238/nasa-chief-classifies-starliner-flight-as-type-a-mishap-says-agency-made-mistakes?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликовано: Fri, 20 Feb 2026 07:04:04 GMT
Канал: Все статьи подряд / DIY или Сделай сам / Хабр

Выходные с пользой. Как я, моя восьмилетняя дочь и ИИ создавали мини-компьютер на базе Arduino Mega 2560. Цель - доступно объяснить разницу между персональным компьютером и микроконтроллером. Читать далее]]>

https://habr.com/ru/companies/ozonbank/articles/1001396/

US President Donald Trump says he will direct US agencies, including the defence department, to "begin the process of identifying and releasing" government files on aliens and extraterrestrial life. From a report: Trump made the declaration in a post on Truth Social, after he accused Barack Obama earlier in the day of revealing classified information when the former president said "aliens are real" on a podcast last week. "He's not supposed to be doing that," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, adding: "He made a big mistake."

Asked if he also thinks aliens are real, Trump answered: "Well, I don't know if they're real or not." Former US President Obama told podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen that he thinks aliens are real in an interview released last Saturday. "They're real, but I haven't seen them, and they're not being kept in Area 51," Obama said. "There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/0450230/trump-directs-us-government-to-prepare-release-of-files-on-aliens-and-ufos?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликован релиз мультимедийного сервера pipewire 1.6.0. Новая версия является API- и ABI-совместимой с предыдущей веткой 1.4.x.

( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/multimedia/18224989#cut0 ) )

Компания Mozilla внесла уточнение на страницу с информацией о поддержке Firefox для платформ Windows 7, 8 и 8.1, на которой теперь отмечено, что 24 февраля будет опубликован финальный выпуск ESR-ветки Firefox 115, после чего обновления выпускаться не будут. Одновременно на страницу с планом публикации ESR-обновлений добавлена метка о прекращении цикла сопровождения Firefox 115.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=64835

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Why does "bouba" sound round and "kiki" sound spiky? This intuition that ties certain sounds to shapes is oddly reliable all over the world, and for at least a century, scientists have considered it a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning. But now a new study adds an unexpected twist: baby chickens make these same sound-shape connections, suggesting that the link to human language may not be so unique. The results, published today in Science, challenge a long-standing theory about the so-called bouba-kiki effect: that it might explain how humans first tethered meaning to sound to create language. Perhaps, the thinking goes, people just naturally agree on certain associations between shapes and sounds because of some innate feature of our brain or our world. But if the barnyard hen also agrees with such associations, you might wonder if we've been pecking at the wrong linguistic seed.

Maria Loconsole, a comparative psychologist at the University of Padua in Italy, and her colleagues decided to investigate the bouba-kiki effect in baby chicks because the birds could be tested almost immediately after hatching, before their brain would be influenced by exposure to the world. The researchers placed chicks in front of two panels: one featured a flowerlike shape with gently rounded curves; the other had a spiky blotch reminiscent of a cartoon explosion. They then played recordings of humans saying either "bouba" or "kiki" and observed the birds' behavior. When the chicks heard "bouba," 80 percent of them approached the round shape first and spent an average of more than three minutes exploring it compared with an average of just under one minute spent exploring the spiky shape. The exploration preferences were flipped when the chicks heard "kiki."

Because the tests took place within the chicks' carefully supervised first hours of life outside their eggshell, this association between particular sounds and shapes couldn't have been learned from experience. Instead it may be evidence of an innate perceptual bias that goes back way farther in our evolutionary history than previously believed. "We parted with birds on the evolutionary line 300 million years ago," says Aleksandra Cwiek, a linguist at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toru, Poland, who was not involved in the study. "It's just mind-blowing."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/02/19/2254229/newborn-chicks-connect-sounds-with-shapes-just-like-humans-study-finds?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The U.S. State Department is reportedly developing a site called freedom.gov that would let users in Europe and elsewhere access content restricted under local laws, "including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda," reports Reuters. Washington views the move as a way to counter censorship. Reuters reports: One source said officials had discussed including a virtual private network function to make a user's traffic appear to originate in the U.S. and added that user activity on the site will not be tracked. Headed by Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, the project was expected to be unveiled at last week's Munich Security Conference but was delayed, the sources said. Reuters could not determine why the launch did not happen, but some State Department officials, including lawyers, have raised concerns about the plan, two of the sources said, without detailing the concerns.

The project could further strain ties between the Trump administration and traditional U.S. allies in Europe, already heightened by disputes over trade, Russia's war in Ukraine and President Donald Trump's push to assert control over Greenland. The portal could also put Washington in the unfamiliar position of appearing to encourage citizens to flout local laws.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/02/19/2247257/us-plans-online-portal-to-bypass-content-bans-in-europe-and-elsewhere?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

California's recently-proposed AB-2047 would require 3D printers sold in the state to be DOJ-approved models equipped with "firearm blocking technology," banning non-certified machines after 2029 and criminalizing efforts to bypass the software. Adafruit notes that unlike similar legislation proposed in Washington State and New York, California's version "adds a certification bureaucracy on top: state-approved algorithms, state-approved software control processes, state-approved printer models, quarterly list updates, and civil penalties up to $25,000 per violation." From the report: Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan introduced AB-2047, the "California Firearm Printing Prevention Act," on February 17th. The bill would ban the sale or transfer of any 3D printer in California unless it appears on a state-maintained roster of approved makes and models... certified by the Department of Justice as equipped with "firearm blocking technology." Manufacturers would need to submit attestations for every make and model. The DOJ would publish a list. If your printer isn't on the list by March 1, 2029, it can't be sold. In addition, knowingly disabling or circumventing the blocking software is a misdemeanor.

[...] As Michael Weinberg wrote after the New York and Washington proposals dropped⦠accurately identifying gun parts from geometry alone is incredibly hard, desktop printers lack the processing power to run this kind of analysis, and the open-source firmware that runs most machines makes any blocking requirement trivially easy to bypass. The Firearms Policy Coalition flagged AB-2047 on X, and the reactions tell you everything. Jon Lareau called it "stupidity on steroids," pointing out that a simple spring-shaped part has no way of revealing its intended use. The Foundry put it plainly: "Regulating general-purpose machines is another. AB-2047 would require 3D printers to run state-approved surveillance software and criminalize modifying your own hardware."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/02/19/2219256/californias-new-bill-requires-doj-approved-3d-printers-that-report-on-themselves?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Google has introduced Gemini 3.1 Pro, a reasoning-focused upgrade aimed at more complex problem-solving. 9to5Google reports: This .1 increment is a first for Google, with the past two generations seeing .5 as the mid-year model update. (2.5 Pro was first announced in March and saw further updates in May for I/O.) Google says Gemini 3.1 Pro "represents a step forward in core reasoning." The "upgraded core intelligence" that debuted last week with Gemini 3 Deep Think is now available in Gemini 3.1 Pro for more users. This model achieves an ARC-AGI-2 score of 77.1%, or "more than double the reasoning performance of 3 Pro."

This "advanced reasoning" translates to practical applications like when "you're looking for a clear, visual explanation of a complex topic, a way to synthesize data into a single view, or bringing a creative project to life." 3.1 Pro is designed for tasks where a simple answer isn't enough, taking advanced reasoning and making it useful for your hardest challenges.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/19/226258/google-announces-gemini-31-pro-for-complex-problem-solving?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Last month, Jason Grad issued a late-night warning to the 20 employees at his tech startup. "You've likely seen Clawdbot trending on X/LinkedIn. While cool, it is currently unvetted and high-risk for our environment," he wrote in a Slack message with a red siren emoji. "Please keep Clawdbot off all company hardware and away from work-linked accounts." Grad isn't the only tech executive who has raised concerns to staff about the experimental agentic AI tool, which was briefly known as MoltBot and is now named OpenClaw. A Meta executive says he recently told his team to keep OpenClaw off their regular work laptops or risk losing their jobs. The executive told reporters he believes the software is unpredictable and could lead to a privacy breach if used in otherwise secure environments. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly.

[...] Some cybersecurity professionals have publicly urged companies to take measures to strictly control how their workforces use OpenClaw. And the recent bans show how companies are moving quickly to ensure security is prioritized ahead of their desire to experiment with emerging AI technologies. "Our policy is, 'mitigate first, investigate second' when we come across anything that could be harmful to our company, users, or clients," says Grad, who is cofounder and CEO of Massive, which provides Internet proxy tools to millions of users and businesses. His warning to staff went out on January 26, before any of his employees had installed OpenClaw, he says. At another tech company, Valere, which works on software for organizations including Johns Hopkins University, an employee posted about OpenClaw on January 29 on an internal Slack channel for sharing new tech to potentially try out. The company's president quickly responded that use of OpenClaw was strictly banned, Valere CEO Guy Pistone tells WIRED. "If it got access to one of our developer's machines, it could get access to our cloud services and our clients' sensitive information, including credit card information and GitHub codebases," Pistone says. "It's pretty good at cleaning up some of its actions, which also scares me."

A week later, Pistone did allow Valere's research team to run OpenClaw on an employee's old computer. The goal was to identify flaws in the software and potential fixes to make it more secure. The research team later advised limiting who can give orders to OpenClaw and exposing it to the Internet only with a password in place for its control panel to prevent unwanted access. In a report shared with WIRED, the Valere researchers added that users have to "accept that the bot can be tricked." For instance, if OpenClaw is set up to summarize a user's email, a hacker could send a malicious email to the person instructing the AI to share copies of files on the person's computer. But Pistone is confident that safeguards can be put in place to make OpenClaw more secure. He has given a team at Valere 60 days to investigate. "If we don't think we can do it in a reasonable time, we'll forgo it," he says. "Whoever figures out how to make it secure for businesses is definitely going to have a winner."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/19/223226/openclaw-security-fears-lead-meta-other-ai-firms-to-restrict-its-use?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Minecraft: Java Edition is switching its rendering backend from OpenGL to Vulkan as part of the upcoming Vibrant Visuals update, aiming for both better performance and modern graphics features across platforms like Linux and macOS (via translation layers). GamingOnLinux reports: For modders, they're suggesting they start making preparations to move away from OpenGL: "Switching from OpenGL to Vulkan will have an impact on the mods that currently use OpenGL for rendering, and we anticipate that updating from OpenGL to Vulkan will take modders more effort than the updates you undertake for each of our releases. To start with, we recommend our modding community look at moving away from OpenGL usage. We encourage authors to try to reuse as much of the internal rendering APIs as possible, to make this transition as easy as possible. If that is not sufficient for your needs, then come and talk to us!"

It does mean that players on really old devices that don't support Vulkan will be left out, but Vulkan has been supported going back to some pretty old GPUs. You've got time though, as they'll be rolling out Vulkan alongside OpenGL in snapshots (development releases) "sometime over the summer." You'll be able to toggle between them during the testing period until Mojang believe it's ready. OpenGL will be entirely removed eventually once they're happy with performance and stability.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/02/19/2156234/minecraft-java-is-switching-from-opengl-to-vulkan?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The IRS's IT division has reportedly lost 40% of its staff and nearly 80% of its tech leadership amid a federal "efficiency" overhaul, the agency's CIO revealed yesterday. The Register reports: Kaschit Pandya detailed the extent of the tech reorganization during a panel at the Association of Government Accountants yesterday, describing it as the biggest in two decades. ... The IRS lost a quarter of its workforce overall in 2025. But the tech team was clearly affected more deeply. At the start of the year, the team encompassed around 8,500 employees.

As reported by Federal News Network (FNN), Pandya said: "Last year, we lost approximately 40 percent of the IT staff and nearly 80 percent of the execs." "So clearly there was an opportunity, and I thought the opportunity that we needed to really execute was reorganizing." That included breaking up silos within the organization, he said. "Everyone was operating in their own department or area."

It is not entirely clear where all those staff have gone. According to a report by the US Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the IT department had 8,504 workers as of October 2024. As of October 2025, it had 7,135. However, reports say that as part of the reorganization, 1,000 techies were detailed to work on delivering frontline services during the US tax season. According to FNN, those employees have questioned the wisdom of this move and its implementation.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/19/2151205/irs-loses-40-of-it-staff-80-of-tech-leaders-in-efficiency-shakeup?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.