Several crosswalk buttons in Palo Alto and nearby cities were hacked over the weekend to play deepfake-style satirical audio clips mimicking Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Authorities have disabled the altered systems, but the identity of the prankster remains unknown. SFGATE reports: Videos of the altered crosswalks began circulating on social media throughout Saturday and Sunday. [...] A city employee was the first to report an issue with one of the signals at University Avenue and High Street in downtown Palo Alto, Horrigan-Taylor told SFGATE via email. Officials later discovered that as many as 12 intersections in downtown Palo Alto had been affected.

"The impact is isolated," Horrigan-Taylor said. "Signal operations are otherwise unaffected, and motorists are reminded to always exercise caution around pedestrians." Officials told the outlet they've removed any devices that were tampered with and the compromised voice-over systems have since been disabled, with footage obtained by SFGATE showing several were covered in caution tape, blinking constantly and unpressable.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/1932207/hacked-crosswalks-in-bay-area-play-deepfake-style-messages-from-tech-billionaires?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Meta said the company plans to start using data collected from its users in the European Union to train its AI systems. Engadget reports: Starting this week, the tech giant will begin notifying Europeans through email and its family of apps of the fact, with the message set to include an explanation of the kind of data it plans to use as part of the training. Additionally, the notification will link out to a form users can complete to opt out of the process. "We have made this objection form easy to find, read, and use, and we'll honor all objection forms we have already received, as well as newly submitted ones," says Meta.

The company notes it will only use data it collects from public posts and Meta AI interactions for training purposes. It won't use private messages in its training sets, nor any interactions, public or otherwise, made by users under the age of 18. As for why the company wants to start using EU data now, it claims the information will allow it to fine tune its future models to better serve Europeans. "We believe we have a responsibility to build AI that's not just available to Europeans, but is actually built for them. That's why it's so important for our generative AI models to be trained on a variety of data so they can understand the incredible and diverse nuances and complexities that make up European communities," Meta states.

"That means everything from dialects and colloquialisms, to hyper-local knowledge and the distinct ways different countries use humor and sarcasm on our products. This is particularly important as AI models become more advanced with multi-modal functionality, which spans text, voice, video, and imagery."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://meta.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/1926259/meta-starts-using-data-from-eu-users-to-train-its-ai-models?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from DefenseScoop: NATO announced Monday that it has awarded a contract to Palantir to adopt its Maven Smart System for artificial intelligence-enabled battlefield operations. Through the contract, which was finalized March 25, the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) plans to use a version of the AI system -- Maven Smart System NATO -- to support the transatlantic military organization's Allied Command Operations strategic command. NATO plans to use the system to provide "a common data-enabled warfighting capability to the Alliance, through a wide range of AI applications -- from large language models (LLMs) to generative and machine learning," it said in a release, ultimately enhancing "intelligence fusion and targeting, battlespace awareness and planning, and accelerated decision-making." [...] NATO's Allied Command Operations will begin using Maven within the next 30 days, the organization said Monday, adding that it hopes that using it will accelerate further adoption of emerging AI capabilities. Palantir said the contract "was one of the most expeditious in [its] history, taking only six months from outlining the requirement to acquiring the system."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/1917246/nato-inks-deal-with-palantir-for-maven-ai-system?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

VMware has resumed offering a free hypervisor. News of the offering emerged in a throwaway line in the Release Notes for version 8.0 Update 3e of the Broadcom business unit's ESXi hypervisor. From a report: Just below the "What's New" section of that document is the statement: "Broadcom makes available the VMware vSphere Hypervisor version 8, an entry-level hypervisor. You can download it free of charge from the Broadcom Support portal."

VMware offered a free version of ESXi for years, and it was beloved by home lab operators and vAdmins who needed something to tinker with. But in February 2024, VMware discontinued it on grounds that it was dropping perpetual licenses and moving to subscriptions.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/1851214/vmware-revives-its-free-esxi-hypervisor?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The European Commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some US-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage [non-paywalled source], a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China. Financial Times: Commissioners and senior officials travelling to the IMF and World Bank spring meetings next week have been given the new guidance, according to four people familiar with the situation. They said the measures replicate those used on trips to Ukraine and China, where standard IT kit cannot be brought into the countries for fear of Russian or Chinese surveillance.

"They are worried about the US getting into the commission systems," said one official. The treatment of the US as a potential security risk highlights how relations have deteriorated since the return of Donald Trump as US president in January. Trump has accused the EU of having been set up to "screw the US" and announced 20 per cent so-called reciprocal tariffs on the bloc's exports, which he later halved for a 90-day period.

At the same time, he has made overtures to Russia, pressured Ukraine to hand over control over its assets by temporarily suspending military aid and has threatened to withdraw security guarantees from Europe, spurring a continent-wide rearmament effort. "The transatlantic alliance is over," said a fifth EU official.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/1814239/eu-issues-us-bound-staff-with-burner-phones-over-spying-fears?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

OpenAI unveiled its GPT-4.1 model family on Monday, prioritizing coding capabilities and instruction following while expanding context windows to 1 million tokens -- approximately 750,000 words. The lineup includes standard GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano variants, all available via API but not ChatGPT.

The flagship model scores 54.6% on SWE-bench Verified, lagging behind Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro (63.8%) and Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet (62.3%) on the same software engineering benchmark, according to TechCrunch. However, it achieves 72% accuracy on Video-MME's long video comprehension tests -- a significant improvement over GPT-4o's 65.3%.

OpenAI simultaneously announced plans to retire GPT-4.5 -- their largest model released just two months ago -- from API access by July 14. The company claims GPT-4.1 delivers "similar or improved performance" at substantially lower costs. Pricing follows a tiered structure: GPT-4.1 costs $2 per million input tokens and $8 per million output tokens, while GPT-4.1 nano -- OpenAI's "cheapest and fastest model ever" -- runs at just $0.10 per million input tokens.

All models feature a June 2024 knowledge cutoff, providing more current contextual understanding than previous iterations.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/1726250/openai-unveils-coding-focused-gpt-41-while-phasing-out-gpt-45?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Apple is readying a substantial overhaul for iPadOS 19 that will transform the tablet experience to function more like macOS, according to Bloomberg. The update will focus on productivity features, multitasking capabilities, and app window management - areas where iPad power users have long requested improvements.

The software revamp comes approximately a year after Apple introduced the M4 chip to the iPad Pro lineup and coincides with the expected arrival of new iPad Pro models featuring M5 processors. According to Bloomberg, many users have expressed frustration that iPad hardware capabilities have consistently outpaced software functionality.

While the company won't fully port macOS to iPad as some users have wished, the changes will reportedly be substantial enough to satisfy much of the professional user base that has been pushing for more desktop-like functionality. The upcoming changes are expected to be highlighted at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/1557247/apple-preparing-major-ipados-19-overhaul-with-mac-like-features?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Консорциум Khronos, занимающийся разработкой графических стандартов.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63074

An anonymous reader shares a report: Requests to remove books from library shelves are on the rise in the UK, as the influence of pressure groups behind book bans in the US crosses the Atlantic, according to those working in the sector. Although "the situation here is nowhere [near] as bad, censorship does happen and there are some deeply worrying examples of library professionals losing their jobs and being trolled online for standing up for intellectual freedom on behalf of their users," said Louis Coiffait-Gunn, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (Cilip).

Ed Jewell, president of Libraries Connected, an independent charity that represents public libraries, said: "Anecdotal evidence from our members suggests that requests to remove books are increasing." The School Library Association (SLA) said this year has seen an "increase in member queries about censorship." Most of the UK challenges appear to come from individuals or small groups, unlike in the US, where 72% of demands to censor books last year were brought forward by organised groups, according to the American Library Association earlier this week.

However, evidence suggests that the work of US action groups is reaching UK libraries too. Alison Hicks, an associate professor in library and information studies at UCL, interviewed 10 UK-based school librarians who had experienced book challenges. One "spoke of finding propaganda from one of these groups left on her desk," while another "was directly targeted by one of these groups." Respondents "also spoke of being trolled by US pressure groups on social media, for example when responding to free book giveaways."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/1538206/librarians-in-uk-increasingly-asked-to-remove-books?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Blue Origin's New Shepard completed its 31st mission Monday morning, carrying the first all-female crew to space since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova's 1963 solo flight. The NS-31 mission lifted off from West Texas at 9:30 a.m. EDT, with hundreds of thousands watching via livestream as the autonomous vehicle crossed the Karman line 62 miles above Earth.

The 10-minute suborbital journey carried six passengers: journalist and Bezos' fiancee Lauren SÃnchez, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics researcher Amanda Nguyen, CBS journalist Gayle King, pop star Katy Perry, and film producer Kerianne Flynn. Bowe conducted three research experiments during the flight, while Nguyen became the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman in space. The fully reusable New Shepard system features a pressurized capsule that separates from its booster before returning to Earth with three parachutes.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/1512214/blue-origin-sends-all-female-crew-to-edge-of-space-in-historic-flight?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An attorney for the Federal Trade Commission told a judge that Facebook, fearing the competitive threat of Instagram posted to their social media network, acquired both as a way to "neutralize" the rival. "They decided that competition was too hard," the FTC's attorney, Daniel Matheson, said in his opening statement in the government's antitrust case against the Meta Platforms social media empire.

He argued that with Meta's monopoly in social media, "consumers do not have reasonable alternatives they can turn to," even as satisfaction has declined. At stake is the potential breakup of Facebook-parent Meta, as the government has zeroed in on the 2012 acquisition of Instagram and 2014 purchase of WhatsApp.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/1439241/facebook-sought-to-neutralize-competitive-threats-ftc-argues-as-landmark-antitrust-trial-begins?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Nvidia has announced plans to manufacture AI supercomputers entirely within the United States, commissioning over 1 million square feet of manufacturing space across Arizona and Texas. Production of Blackwell chips has begun at TSMC's Phoenix facilities, while supercomputer assembly will occur at new Foxconn and Wistron plants in Houston and Dallas respectively.

"The engines of the world's AI infrastructure are being built in the United States for the first time," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder and CEO. "Adding American manufacturing helps us better meet the incredible and growing demand for AI chips and supercomputers, strengthens our supply chain and boosts our resiliency."

The company will deploy its own AI, robotics, and digital twin technologies in these facilities, using Nvidia Omniverse to create digital twins of factories and Isaac GR00T to build manufacturing automation robots. Nvidia projects an ambitious $500 billion in domestic AI infrastructure production over the next four years, with manufacturing expected to create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/1352243/nvidia-to-make-ai-supercomputers-in-us-for-first-time?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликован релиз легковесного дистрибутива MX Linux 23.6, созданного в результате совместной работы сообществ, образовавшихся вокруг проектов antiX и MEPIS. Выпуск основан на пакетной базе Debian с улучшениями от проекта antiX и пакетами из собственного репозитория. В дистрибутиве используется система инициализации sysVinit и собственные инструменты для настройки и развёртывания системы. Для загрузки доступны 32- и 64-разрядные сборки (x86_64, i386) с рабочим столом Xfce (2.3 ГБ), а также 64-разрядные сборки с рабочим столом KDE (2.9 ГБ) и сборки (1.8 ГБ) с оконным менеджером Fluxbox.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63072

Разработчики проекта postmarketOS, развивающего дистрибутив Linux для смартфонов, базирующийся на пакетной базе Alpine Linux, стандартной Си-библиотеке Musl и наборе утилит BusyBox, объявили о добавлении поддержки среды рабочего стола COSMIC, разрабатываемой на языке Rust. Готовые сборки postmarketOS с COSMIC сформированы для систем x86_64, а также доступен отдельный вариант, оптимизированный для ноутбуков Thinkpad X13s (при желании кастомизированную сборку можно собрать самостоятельно, используя утилиту pmbootstrap). До этого в postmarketOS предоставлялась возможность использования KDE Plasma Mobile, Phosh, GNOME Mobile, Sxmo, MATE и Xfce.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63071

America's Department of Energy launched a federally funded R&D center in 1946 called the Argonne National Laboratory, and its research became the basis for all of the world's commercial nuclear reactors.

But it's now developed an AI-based tool that can "help operators run nuclear plants," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing comments from a senior nuclear engineer in the lab's nuclear science and engineering division:
Argonne's plan is to offer the Parameter-Free Reasoning Operator for Automated Identification and Diagnosis, or PRO-AID, to new, tech-forward nuclear builds, but it's also eyeing the so-called dinosaurs, some of which are being resurrected by companies like Amazon and Microsoft to help power their AI data centers. The global push for AI is poised to fuel a sharp rise in electricity demand, with consumption from data centers expected to more than double by the end of the decade, the International Energy Agency said Thursday. The owners of roughly a third of U.S. nuclear plants are in talks with tech companies to provide electricity for those data centers, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

PRO-AID performs real-time monitoring and diagnostics using generative AI combined with large language models that notify and explain to staff when something seems amiss at a plant. It also uses a form of automated reasoning — which uses mathematical logic to encode knowledge in AI systems — to mimic the way a human operator asks questions and comes to understand how the plant is operating [according to Richard Vilim, a senior nuclear engineer within the lab's nuclear science and engineering division].
The tool can also help improve the efficiency of the personnel needed to operate a nuclear plant, Vilim said. That's especially important as older employees leave the workforce. "If we can hand off some of these lower-level capabilities to a machine, when someone retires, you don't need to replace him or her," he said... Part of the efficiency in updating technology will come from consolidating the monitoring staff at a utility's nuclear plants at a single, centralized location — much as gas-powered plants already do.

It hasn't found its way into a commercial nuclear plant yet, the article acknowledges. But the senior nuclear engineer points out that America's newer gas-powered plants ended up being more automated with digital monitoring tools. Meanwhile the average age of America's 94 operating nuclear reactors is 42 years old, and "nearly all" of them have had their licenses extended, according to the article. (Those nuclear plants still provide almost 20% of America's electricity.)

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/0154240/can-ai-help-manage-nuclear-reactors?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Участники ассоциации CA/Browser Forum, являющейся площадкой для координации совместной работы производителей браузеров и удостоверяющих центров, проголосовали за сокращение максимального времени жизни TLS-сертификатов. Максимальное время действия TLS-сертификатов будет сокращено с 398 до 47 дней, если в дальнейшем CA/Browser Forum не пересмотрит принятое решение. Помимо времени действия сертификатов решено заметно сократить и сроки повторного использования данных валидации объектов: для SAN (Subject Alternative Name, когда один сертификат охватывает несколько ресурсов, например, действует сразу для нескольких доменов) срок будет сокращен с 398 до 10 дней, а для не-SAN - с 825 до 398 дней.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63069

Formula One cars, the world's fastest racecars, need to grip the track for speed and safety on the curves — leading engineers to design cars that create downforce. And racing fans are even told that "a Formula 1 racecar generates enough downforce above a certain speed that it could theoretically drive upside down," writes the automotive site Jalopnik.

"McMurtry Automotive turned this theory into reality after having its Spéirling hypercar complete the impressive feat..."

Admittedly, the Spéirling's success can be solely attributed to its proprietary 'Downforce-on-Demand' fan system that produces 4,400 pounds of downforce at the push of a button... For those looking to do the math, Spéirling weighs 2,200 pounds. With the stopped car's fan whirling at 23,000 rpm, the rig was rotated to invert the road deck... Then, the hypercar rolled forward a few feet before stopping while inverted. The rig rotated the road deck back down, and the Spéirling drove off like nothing happened.
The McMurtry Spéirling, as a 1,000-hp twin-motor electric hypercar, didn't have to clear the other hurdles that an F1 car would have clear to drive upside down. Dry-sump combustion engines aren't designed to run inverted and would eventually fail catastrophically. Oil wouldn't be able to cycle through and keep the engine lubricated.
The car is "an electric monster purpose-built to destroy track records," Jalopnik wrote in 2022 when the car shaved more than two seconds off a long-standing record. The "Downforce-on-Demand" feature gives it tremendous acceleration — in nine seconds it can go from 0 to 186.4 mph (300 km/h), according to Jalopnik.

"McMurtry is working towards finalizing a production version of its hypercar, called the Spéirling PURE. Only 100 will be produced."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/0542240/an-electric-racecar-drives-upside-down?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликованы корректирующие обновления интерпретатора Perl 5.40.2 и 5.38.4, в которых устранена уязвимость (CVE-2024-56406), приводящая к переполнению буфера при транслитерации специально оформленных не-ASCII символов при помощи оператора "tr/../../". Не исключается возможность эксплуатации уязвимости для организации выполнения своего кода в системе. Проблема проявляется в стабильных релизах Perl начиная с 2021 года и затрагивает ветки Perl 5.34, 5.36, 5.38 и 5.40. Проследить за устранением уязвимости в дистрибутивах можно на следующих страницах: Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, FreeBSD. Дистрибутивы на основе RHEL 9, SUSE 15 и openSUSE Leap 15.6 уязвимости не подвержены, так как включают версии Perl 5.32 и 5.26.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63068

TOP10 VISITORS:

[1] 45.135.180.x point=230 web=0 up=19.1MB (28%) <--- yesterlink (10/hr)
[2] 37.252.14.x point=144 web=0 up=17.7MB (26%) <--- ake (6/hr)
[3] TikTok point=0 web=1002 up=9.7MB (14%)
[4] Google point=3 web=862 up=8.9MB (13%) <--- Google
[5] PetalBot point=71 web=1038 up=6.7MB (9%) <--- PetalBot (3/hr)
[6] Facebook point=0 web=315 up=2.9MB (4%)
[7] 24.130.121.x point=14 web=5 up=1.0MB (1%) <--- spnet (1/hr)
[8] 217.114.158.x point=24 web=0 up=0.9MB (1%) <--- fox (1/hr)
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TOTAL TRAFFIC: 67MB

10 years ago "certificate authorities normally issued certificate lifetimes lasting a year or more," remembers a new blog post Thursday by the EFF's engineering director. So in 2015 when the free cert authority Let's Encrypt first started issuing 90-day TLS certificates for websites, "it was considered a bold move, that helped push the ecosystem towards shorter certificate life times."

And then this January Let's Encrypt announced new six-day certificates...

This week saw a related announcement from the EFF engineering director. More than 31 million web sites maintain their HTTPS certificates using the EFF's Certbot tool (which automatically fetches free HTTPS certificates forever) — and Certbot is now supporting Let's Encrypt's six-day certificates. (It's accomplished through ACME profiles with dynamic renewal at 1/3rd of lifetime left or 1/2 of lifetime left, if the lifetime is shorter than 10 days):

There is debate on how short these lifetimes should be, but with ACME profiles you can have the default or "classic" Let's Encrypt experience (90 days) or start actively using other profile types through Certbot with the --preferred-profile and --required-profile flags. For six day certificates, you can choose the "shortlived" profile.

Why shorter lifetimes are better (according to the EFF's engineering director):

If a certificate's private key is compromised, that compromise can't last as long.
With shorter life spans for the certificates, automation is encouraged. Which facilitates robust security of web servers.
Certificate revocation is historically flaky. Lifetimes 10 days and under prevent the need to invoke the revocation process and deal with continued usage of a compromised key.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/0356212/the-effs-certbot-now-supports-six-day-certs?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Late Friday news broke that U.S. President Trump's new tariffs included exemptions for smartphones, computer monitors, semiconductors, and other electronics. But Sunday morning America's commerce secretary insisted "a special-focus type of tariff" was coming for those products, reports ABC News. President Trump "is saying they're exempt from the reciprocal tariffs," the commerce secretary told an interviewer, "but they're included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two.... This is not like a permanent sort of exemption."

The Wall Street Journal notes that Sunday the president himself posted on social media that "NOBODY is getting 'off the hook' for the unfair Trade Balances, and Non Monetary Tariff Barriers... There was no Tariff 'exception' announced on Friday. These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff 'bucket.'"

"The administration is expected to take the first step toward enacting the new tariffs as soon as next week," reports the New York Times, "opening an investigation to determine the effects of semiconductor imports on national security."

More from ABC News:

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that the administration's decision Friday night to exempt a range of electronic devices from tariffs implemented earlier this month was only a temporary reprieve.. Lutnick said on "This Week" that the White House will implement "a tariff model in order to encourage" the semiconductor industry, as well as the pharmaceutical industry, to move its business to the United States. "We can't be beholden and rely upon foreign countries for fundamental things that we need," he said.... "These are things that are national security that we need to be made in America."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/14/0038246/trump-denies-tariff-exception-for-electronics-promises-new-electronics-tariffs-soon?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Stanford law school graduate Peter Thiel later co-founded Facebook, PayPal, and Palantir. But in 2010 Thiel also created the Thiel Fellowship, which annually gives 20 to 30 people under the age of 23 $100,000 "to encourage students to not stick around college." (College students must drop out in order to accept the fellowship.)

And now Palantir "is taking a similar approach as it maneuvers to attract new talent," reports financial news site The Street:

The company has launched what it refers to as the âoeMeritocracy Fellowship,â a four-month internship program for recent high school graduates who have not enrolled in college. The position pays roughly $5,400 per month, more than plenty of post-college internship programs. Palantirâ(TM)s job posting suggests that the company is especially interested in candidates with experience in programming and statistical analysis.
Palantir's job listing specifically says they launched their four-month fellowship "in response to the shortcomings of university admissions," promising it would be based "solely on merit and academic excellence" (requiring an SAT score over 1459 or an ACT score above 32.) "Opaque admissions standards at many American universities have displaced meritocracy and excellence..."

As a result, qualified students are being denied an education based on subjective and shallow criteria. Absent meritocracy, campuses have become breeding grounds for extremism and chaos... Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree...

Upon successful completion of the Meritocracy Fellowship, fellows that have excelled during their time at Palantir will be given the opportunity to interview for full-time employment at Palantir.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/13/2342232/palantirs-meritocracy-fellowship-urges-high-school-grads-to-skip-colleges-indoctrination-and-debt?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Remember how last weekend Meta claimed its "Maverick" AI model (in the newly-released Llama-4 series) beat GPT-4o and Gemini Flash 2 "on all benchmarks... This thing is a beast."
And then how within a day several AI researchers pointed out that even Meta's own announcement admitted the Maverick tested on LM Arena was an "experimental chat version," as TechCrunch pointed out. ("As we've written about before, for various reasons, LM Arena has never been the most reliable measure of an AI model's performance. But AI companies generally haven't customized or otherwise fine-tuned their models to score better on LM Arena — or haven't admitted to doing so, at least.")

Friday TechCrunch on what happened when LMArena tested the unmodified release version of Maverick (Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct).

It ranked 32nd.
"For the record, older models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, released last June, and Gemini-1.5-Pro-002, released last September, rank higher," notes the tech site Neowin.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/13/2226203/after-meta-cheating-allegations-unmodified-llama-4-maverick-model-tested---ranks-32?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"More than three million children around the world are thought to have died in 2022 as a result of infections that are resistant to antibiotics," reports the BBC, citing a study by two leading experts in child health that used data from sources including the World Health Organization and the World Bank:

Experts say this new study highlights a more than tenfold increase in AMR-related infections in children in just three years. The number could have been made worse by the impact of the Covid pandemic...

The report's lead authors, Doctor Yanhong Jessika Hu of Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia and Professor Herb Harwell of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, point to a significant growth in the use of antibiotics that are meant to only be held back for the most serious infections. Between 2019 and 2021 the use of "watch antibiotics", drugs with a high risk of resistance, increased by 160% in South East Asia and 126% in Africa. Over the same period, "reserve antibiotics" — last-resort treatments for severe, multidrug-resistant infections — rose by 45% in South East Asia and 125% in Africa.
The authors warn that if bacteria develop resistance to these antibiotics, there will be few, if any, alternatives for treating multidrug-resistant infections.

"Antibiotics are ubiquitous around us," Professor Harwell warns in the article. "They end up in our food and the environment and so coming up with a single solution is not easy." The article also quotes a senior lecturer in microbiology at King's College London, who says the new study "marks a significant and alarming increase compared to previous data".

"These findings should serve as a wake-up call for global health leaders. Without decisive action, AMR could undermine decades of progress in child health, particularly in the world's most vulnerable regions."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/04/13/210217/three-million-child-deaths-linked-to-drug-resistance-study-shows?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"It is somewhat remarkable that work on AmigaOS 3.X continues in 2025," notes Tom's Hardware, "given that Commodore International released AmigaOS 3.0 in 1992..."

AmigaOS 3.1 came in 1993. And now...

Work continues on AmigaOS 3.2 with the stewards of this classic Motorola 680x0 friendly operating system, Hyperion Entertainment, releasing version 3.2.3 a few days ago.

In a news bulletin on the official site, Hyperion highlighted that the third update for AmigaOS 3.2 includes two years of (more than 50) fixes and enhancements... Hyperion began its quest to modernize and improve this classic version of AmigaOS for Motorola 680x0 platforms in 2018 when it released version 3.1.4. The AmigaOS 3.2 lineage began in 2021...

This release is provided as a free update to owners of AmigaOS 3.2. If you don't already have this OS, you can get it now at official resellers like RetroPassion UK... Nowadays, Arm-based accelerators seem to be the path forward for modern Amiga, as opposed to retro Amiga, enthusiasts. AmigaOS 3.2.3 has a feather in its cap as it also supports classic 68K Amigas boosted by Arm accelerators such as the PiStorm.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/13/1813251/33-year-old-amigaos-for-commodore-computers-gets-an-unexpected-update?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"Can you help me take down the Texas lottery?"
That's what a London banker-turned-bookmaker asked "acquaintances" in 2023, reports the Wall Street Journal. The plan was to buy "nearly every possible number in a coming drawing" — purchasing $1 tickets for 25.8 million possible combinations, since "The jackpot was heading to $95 million. If nobody else also picked the winning numbers, the profit would be nearly $60 million."

Marantelli flew to the U.S. with a few trusted lieutenants. They set up shop in a defunct dentist's office, a warehouse and two other spots in Texas. The crew worked out a way to get official ticket-printing terminals. Trucks hauled in dozens of them and reams of paper... [Then Texas announced no winner in an earlier lottery, rolling its jackpot into another drawing three days later.] The machines — manned by a disparate bunch of associates and some of their children — screeched away nearly around the clock, spitting out 100 or more tickets every second. Texas politicians later likened the operation to a sweatshop.

Trying to pull off the gambit required deep pockets and a knack for staying under the radar — both hallmarks of the secretive Tasmanian gambler who bankrolled the operation. Born Zeljko Ranogajec, he was nicknamed "the Joker" for his ability to pull off capers at far-flung casinos and racetracks. Adding to his mystique, he changed his name to John Wilson several decades ago. Among some associates, though, he still goes by Zeljko, or Z. Over the years, Ranogajec and his partners have won hundreds of millions of dollars by applying Wall Street-style analytics to betting opportunities around the world. Like card counters at a blackjack table, they use data and math to hunt for situations ripe for flipping the house edge in their favor. Then they throw piles of money at it, betting an estimated $10 billion annually.
The Texas lottery play, one of their most ambitious operations ever, paid off spectacularly with a $57.8 million jackpot win. That, in turn, spilled their activities into public view and sparked a Texas-size uproar about whether other lotto players — and indeed the entire state — had been hoodwinked. Early this month, the state's lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, called the crew's win "the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas." In response to written questions addressed to Marantelli and Ranogajec, Glenn Gelband, a New Jersey lawyer who represents the limited partnership that claimed the Texas prize, said "all applicable laws, rules and regulations were followed...."

Lottery officials and state lawmakers have taken steps to prevent a repeat.
The article also looks at a group of Princeton University graduates calling themselves Black Swan Capital that's "won millions in recent years" by targetting state lottery drawings with unusually favorable odds.

"State lottery directors say they are seeing more organized efforts to buy lottery tickets in bulk," according to the article, "but that the groups are largely operating legally and transparently..."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://idle.slashdot.org/story/25/04/13/1716210/how-a-secretive-gambler-called-the-joker-beat-the-texas-lottery?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Somewhere in Montana sits the only coal-fired power plant in America that hasn't installed modern pollution controls to limit particulate matter, according to the Environmental Protecction Agency. Mining.com notes that it has the highest emission rate of fine particulate matter out of any U.S. coal-burning power plant.
When inhaled, the finest particles are able to penetrate deep into the lungs and even potentially the bloodstream, exacerbating heart and lung disease, causing asthma attacks and even sometimes leading to premature death.
Yet America's dirtiest coal-fired power plant — and dozens of others — "are being exempted from stringent air pollution mandates," reports Bloomberg, "as part of US. President Donald Trump's bid to revitalize the industry:

Talen Energy Corp.'s Colstrip in Montana is among 47 plants receiving two-year waivers from rules to control mercury and other pollutants as part of a White House effort to ease regulation on coal-fired sites, according to a list seen by Bloomberg News. The exemptions were among a slew of actions announced by the White House Tuesday to expand the mining and use of coal. The Trump administration has argued coal is a vital part of the mix to ensure sufficient energy supply to meet booming demand for AI data centers. The carve-out, which begins in July 2027, lasts until July 2029, according to the proclamation.
In an email to Bloomberg, a White House spokesperson said the move meant that America "will produce beautiful, clean coal" while addressing "necessary electrical demand from emerging technologies such as AI."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/13/1540241/americas-dirtiest-coal-power-plants-given-exemptions-from-pollution-rules-to-help-power-ai?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 "will come with full support for OEM installations," according to their monthly newsletter, so Linux Mint "can be pre-installed on computers which are sold throughout the World. It's a very important feature and it's one of the very few remaining things which wasn't supported by Linux Mint Debian Edition."

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli speculates that "this could be a sign of something much bigger."
OEM installs are typically reserved for operating systems meant to ship on hardware. It's how companies preload Linux on laptops without setting a username, password, or timezone... Mint has supported this for years — but only in its Ubuntu-based version. So why is this feature suddenly coming to Linux Mint Debian Edition, which the team has repeatedly described as a contingency? In other words, if the Debian variant is merely a plan B, why make it ready for OEMs?

Their blog post goes on to speculate about possible explanations (like the hypothetical possibility of dissatisfaction with Snap packages or Canonical's decisions around telemetry and packaging).

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/04/12/0518218/linux-mint-debian-edition-7-gets-oem-support?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

When Microsoft announced it would stop developing MS-DOS after 1995, college student Jim Hall "packaged my own extended DOS utilities, as did others," according to the web site for the resulting "FreeDOS" project.

Jim Hall is also Slashdot reader #2,985, and more than 30 years later he's "keeping the dream of the command prompt alive," writes Ars Technica. In a new article they note that last week the FreeDOS team released version 1.4, the first new stable update since 2022:

The release has "a focus on stability" and includes an updated installer, new versions of common tools like fdisk, and format and the edlin text editor. The release also includes updated HTML Help files... As with older versions, the FreeDOS installer is available in multiple formats based on the kind of system you're installing it on. For any "modern" PC (where "modern" covers anything that's shipped since the turn of the millennium), ISO and USB installers are available for creating bootable CDs, DVDs, or USB drives. FreeDOS is also available for vintage systems as a completely separate "Floppy-Only Edition" that fits on 720KB, 1.44MB, or 1.2MB 5.25 and 3.5-inch floppy disks.

Jim Hall composed a detailed introduction to FreeDOS 1.4 here.

He also answered questions from Slashdot's readers back in 2000 and again in 2019.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/13/0215254/freedos-celebrates-more-than-30-years-of-command-prompts-with-new-release?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Echoareas
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bot.slashdot..........94 ██████████████████████████████████████████████████▒
bot.habr.rss..........41 █████████████████████████████████████████
lor.opennet...........34 ██████████████████████████████████
spnet.stats............7 ███████
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Илья Чугин (x512) и Герасим Троеглазов (3dEyes) продемонстрировали новые достижения в портировании для ОС Haiku графических драйверов от компании NVIDIA. Порт развивается на базе открытых модулей для ядра Linux, публикуемых компанией NVIDIA и задействованных в её проприетарных драйверах, а также работающего в пространстве пользователя Vulkan-драйвера NVK.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63066

"AMD processors were instrumental in achieving a new world record," reports Tom's Hardware, "during a recent Ansys Fluent computational fluid dynamics simulation run on the Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory."

The article points out that Frontier was the fastest supercomputer in the world until it was beaten by Lawrence Livermore Lab's El Capitan — with both computers powered by AMD GPUs:
According to a press release by Ansys, it ran a 2.2-billion-cell axial turbine simulation for Baker Hughes, an energy technology company, testing its next-generation gas turbines aimed at increasing efficiency. The simulation previously took 38.5 hours to complete on 3,700 CPU cores. By using 1,024 AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators paired with AMD EPYC CPUs in Frontier, the simulation time was slashed to 1.5 hours. This is more than 25 times faster, allowing the company to see the impact of the changes it makes on designs much more quickly...

Given those numbers, the Ansys Fluent CFD simulator apparently only used a fraction of the power available on Frontier. That means it has the potential to run even faster if it can utilize all the available accelerators on the supercomputer. It also shows that, despite Nvidia's market dominance in AI GPUs, AMD remains a formidable competitor, with its CPUs and GPUs serving as the brains of some of the fastest supercomputers on Earth.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/13/0130250/new-supercomputing-record-set---using-amds-instinct-gpus?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

После двух лет разработки представлен релиз открытого растрового графического редактора Pinta 3.0, основанного в 2010 году в качестве попытки создать более простой аналог программы Paint.NET, написанный с использованием GTK. Редактор ориентирован на начинающих пользователей и предоставляет базовый набор возможностей для рисования и обработки изображений. Интерфейс по возможности упрощён. Редактор поддерживает неограниченный буфер отката изменений, позволяет работать с несколькими слоями, укомплектован набором инструментов для наложения различных эффектов и корректировки изображений. Код Pinta распространяется под лицензией MIT. Проект написан на языке C# с использованием Mono и обвязки Gtk#. Бинарные сборки подготовлены для Linux (Flatpak, Snap), macOS и Windows.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63064

Опубликован выпуск проекта Wine-wayland 10.5, развивающего набор патчей для использования Wine в окружениях на базе протокола Wayland, без применения XWayland и компонентов X11. Частично, многие наработки Wine-wayland, среди которых драйвер winewayland.drv, уже перенесены в основной состав Wine. Новый выпуск примечателен синхронизацией с веткой Wine 10 (задействован Wine 10.5) и обновлением версий DXVK, VKD3D и Mangohud. Вместо FSYNC задействован недавно принятый в состав ядра Linux драйвер ntsync, реализующий набор примитивов для синхронизации, применяемых в ядре Windows NT. Размер установочных сборок сокращён со 120 до 99 МБ.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63063

"Researchers say that a person's intelligence plays a bigger role in their computer proficiency than previously believed," writes SciTechDaily, "so much so that practice alone may not be enough to ensure ease of use."

A new study has found that general cognitive abilities, such as perception, reasoning, and memory, are more important than previously believed in determining a person's ability to perform everyday tasks on a computer... "It is clear that differences between individuals cannot be eliminated simply by means of training," says Antti Oulasvirta [a professor at Finland's Aalto University who conducted extensive human-computer interaction research with his team and the University of Helsinki Department of Psychology]. "In the future, user interfaces need to be streamlined for simpler use. This age-old goal has been forgotten at some point, and awkwardly designed interfaces have become a driver for the digital divide.

"We cannot promote a deeper and more equal use of computers in society unless we solve this basic problem," Oulasvirta says...

This is the first-ever study to measure users' actual ability to perform daily tasks on a PC, as previous studies have relied on participants self-assessing their abilities via questionnaires... "The study revealed that, in particular, working memory, attention, and executive functions stand out as the key abilities. When using a computer, you must determine the order in which things are done and keep in mind what has already been done. A purely mathematical or logical ability does not help in the same way," says university lecturer Viljami Salmela [from the University of Helsinki].

"Our results suggest that contemporary user interfaces are getting so complex that their design is starting to affect inclusivity," their paper concludes, saying that it ultimately raises a question. "How can we design user interfaces to decrease the role of cognitive abilities."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/04/13/0238237/do-cognitive-abilities-predict-performance-in-everyday-computer-tasks?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

TOP10 VISITORS:

[1] TikTok point=0 web=1437 up=20.8MB (25%)
[2] 45.135.180.x point=222 web=0 up=18.5MB (22%) <--- yesterlink (9/hr)
[3] 37.252.14.x point=144 web=0 up=17.7MB (21%) <--- ake (6/hr)
[4] 185.147.124.x point=0 web=10 up=10.9MB (13%)
[5] PetalBot point=71 web=877 up=5.7MB (6%) <--- PetalBot (3/hr)
[6] Google point=1 web=623 up=3.9MB (4%) <--- Google
[7] Facebook point=0 web=294 up=2.2MB (2%)
[8] 24.130.121.x point=17 web=3 up=1.5MB (1%) <--- spnet (1/hr)
[9] 217.114.158.x point=24 web=0 up=0.8MB (1%) <--- fox (1/hr)
[10] Amazon point=6 web=3 up=0.1MB (<1%) <--- Amazon

TOTAL TRAFFIC: 82MB

Проект [ ArcoLinux ]( https://arcolinux.com/ ) в лице его главного вдохновителя Эрика Дюбуа (Erik Dubois) сообщил, что дистрибутив фактически прекратил своё существование.

( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/opensource/17941002#cut ) )

Celebrating Git's 20th anniversary, GitHub hosted a Q&A with Linus Torvalds, writes Its FOSS News.

Among the other revelations: He says his college-age daughter sent a texting saying he's better known at her CS lab for Git than for Linux, "because they actually use Git for everything there." Which he describes as "ridiculous" because he maintained it for just four months before handing it off to Junio Hamano who's been heading up development for more than 19 years now. "When it did what I needed," Torvalds says, "I lost interest."

Linus then goes on to share how Git was never a big thing for him, but a means to an end that prevented the Linux kernel from descending into chaos over the absence of a version control system. You see, before Git, Linux used BitKeeper for version control, but its proprietary licensing didn't sit too well with other Linux contributors, and Linus Torvalds had to look for alternatives. As it turned out, existing tools like CVS and Subversion were too slow for the job at hand, prompting him to build a new tool from scratch, with the coding part just taking 10 days for an early self-hostable version of Git.
In its initial days, there were some teething issues, where users would complain about Git to Linus, even finding it too difficult to use, but things got calmer as the tool developed further.

Torvalds thinks some early adopters had trouble because they were coming from a background that was more like CVS. "The Git mindset, I came at it from a file system person's standpoint, where I had this disdain and almost hatred of most source control management projects, so I was not at all interested in maintaining the status quo."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/04/13/0110228/torvalds-celebrates-gits-20th-anniversay-is-it-more-famous-than-linux?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"A modern free society has an obligation to offer electronic tax filing that respects user freedom," says a Free Software Foundation blog post, "and the United States is not excluded from this responsibility."

"Governments, and/or the companies that they partner with, are responsible for providing free as in freedom software for necessary operations, and tax filing is no exception."

For many years now, a large portion of [U.S.] taxpayers have filed their taxes electronically through proprietary programs like TurboTax. Millions of taxpayers are led to believe that they have no other option than to use nonfree software or Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS), giving up their freedom as well as their most private financial information to a third-party company, in order to file their taxes...

While the options for taxpayers have improved slightly with the IRS's implementation of the IRS Direct File program [in 25 states], this program unfortunately does require users to hand over their freedom when filing taxes.... Taxpayers shouldn't have to use a program that violates their individual freedoms to file legally required taxes. While Direct File is a step in the right direction as the program isn't in the hands of a third-party entity, it is still nonfree software. Because Direct File is a US government-operated program, and ongoing in the process of being deployed to twenty-five states, it's not too late to call on the IRS to make Direct File free software.

In the meantime, if you need to file US taxes and are yet to file, we suggest filing your taxes in a way that respects your user freedom as much as possible, such as through mailing tax forms. Like with other government interactions that snatch away user freedom, choose the path that most respects your freedom.

Free-as-in-freedom software would decrease the chance of user lock-in, the FSF points out. But they list several other advantages, including:

Repairability: With free software, there is no uncertain wait period or reliance on a proprietary provider to make any needed bug or security fixes.
Transparency: Unless you can check what a program really does (or ask someone in the free software community to check for you), there is no way to know that the program isn't doing things you don't consent to it doing.
Cybersecurity: While free software isn't inherently more secure than nonfree software, it does have a tendency to be more secure because many developers can continuously improve the program and search for errors that can be exploited. With proprietary programs like TurboTax, taxpayers and the U.S. government are dependent on TurboTax to protect the sensitive financial and personal information of millions with few (if any) outside checks and balances...
Taxpayer dollars spent should actually benefit the taxpayers: Taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund third-party programs that seek to control users and force them to use their programs through lobbying....

"We don't have to accept this unjust reality: we can work for a better future, together," the blog post concludes (offering a "sample message" U.S. taxpayers could send to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel).

"Take action today and help make electronic tax filing free as in freedom for everyone."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/12/0432222/fsf-urges-us-government-to-adopt-free-as-in-freedom-tax-filing-software?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Here's an update from the Wall Street Journal about a "widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure."

China was behind it, "Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting... according to people familiar with the matter..."

The Chinese delegation linked years of intrusions into computer networks at U.S. ports, water utilities, airports and other targets, to increasing U.S. policy support for Taiwan, the people, who declined to be named, said... U.S. officials went public last year with unusually dire warnings about the uncovered Volt Typhoon effort. They publicly attributed it to Beijing trying to get a foothold in U.S. computer networks so its army could quickly detonate damaging cyberattacks during a future conflict. [American officials at the meeting perceived the remarks as "intended to scare the U.S. from involving itself if a conflict erupts in the Taiwan Strait."]

The Chinese official's remarks at the December meeting were indirect and somewhat ambiguous, but most of the American delegation in the room interpreted it as a tacit admission and a warning to the U.S. about Taiwan, a former U.S. official familiar with the meeting said... In a statement, the State Department didn't comment on the meeting but said the U.S. had made clear to Beijing it will "take actions in response to Chinese malicious cyber activity," describing the hacking as "some of the gravest and most persistent threats to U.S. national security...."

A Chinese official would likely only acknowledge the intrusions even in a private setting if instructed to do so by the top levels of Xi's government, said Dakota Cary, a China expert at the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne. The tacit admission is significant, he said, because it may reflect a view in Beijing that the likeliest military conflict with the U.S. would be over Taiwan and that a more direct signal about the stakes of involvement needed to be sent to the Trump administration. "China wants U.S. officials to know that, yes, they do have this capability, and they are willing to use it," Cary said.

The article notes that top U.S. officials have said America's Defense Department "will pursue more offensive cyber strikes against China."
But it adds that the administration "also plans to dismiss hundreds of cybersecurity workers in sweeping job cuts and last week fired the director of the National Security Agency and his deputy, fanning concerns from some intelligence officials and lawmakers that the government would be weakened in defending against the attacks."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/13/006221/wsj-says-china-acknowledged-its-role-in-us-infrastructure-hacks?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger brings news that in June "a rare screening of the original 1977 Star Wars movie — complete with Han shooting first — will be shown at a theater in London..."

Petapixel reports:

Subsequent alterations made to the film are well-documented: Han Solo being shot at by the bounty hunter Greedo first, rather than the original in which anti-hero Han killed Greedo without being shot at. Then there is the addition of a CGI Jabba the Hutt who was only mentioned by name in the 1977 release. Fans have also complained about the color grading painted on re-releases.

But for those attending the British Film Institute (BFI)'s Film on Film festival in London, they are in for a treat. Star Wars will play not once but twice on the opening night on June 12... BFI says the print is "unfaded" and "ready to transport us to a long time ago, and a galaxy far, far away, back to the moment in 1977 when George Lucas's vision cast a spell on cinema audiences."

Lucas has little sympathy for those who want to see his first version of the film, telling the Associated Press in 2004, "I'm sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be."

The film festival promises "a glorious dye-transfer" of Star Wars — and will also show "a pristine 35mm print of the original US pilot episode of Twin Peaks, screening for the first time ever in the UK" — followed by a Q&A with the 1990 show's original star Kyle MacLachlan.

On display to coincide with the opening night screening there is also a rare opportunity to view material from the original continuity script for Star Wars, which includes rare on-set Polaroids, annotations and deleted scenes. The script is from the collection of Ann Skinner, script editor on the original film, and is now cared for by the BFI National Archive.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/04/12/2134212/original-1977-star-wars-cut-will-be-shown-at-a-theater-for-first-time-in-decades?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader king*jojo shared this article from The Register:

A 23-year-old side-channel attack for spying on people's web browsing histories will get shut down in the forthcoming Chrome 136, released last Thursday to the Chrome beta channel. At least that's the hope.

The privacy attack, referred to as browser history sniffing, involves reading the color values of web links on a page to see if the linked pages have been visited previously... Web publishers and third parties capable of running scripts, have used this technique to present links on a web page to a visitor and then check how the visitor's browser set the color for those links on the rendered web page... The attack was mitigated about 15 years ago, though not effectively. Other ways to check link color information beyond the getComputedStyle method were developed... Chrome 136, due to see stable channel release on April 23, 2025, "is the first major browser to render these attacks obsolete," explained Kyra Seevers, Google software engineer in a blog post.

This is something of a turnabout for the Chrome team, which twice marked Chromium bug reports for the issue as "won't fix." David Baron, presently a Google software engineer who worked for Mozilla at the time, filed a Firefox bug report about the issue back on May 28, 2002... On March 9, 2010, Baron published a blog post outlining the issue and proposing some mitigations...

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/04/12/2054251/chrome-to-patch-decades-old-browser-history-sniffing-flaw-that-let-sites-peek-at-your-history?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

America's Justice Department "has shut down its unit that investigates cryptocurrency fraud," reports USA Today.

A Monday night memo from U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the shut down was "effective immediately."

Blanche directed the closure of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and ordered prosecutors to pivot to investigating transnational criminal organizations and terrorist groups that use crypto to engage in illicit transactions... In his four-page memo, Blanche said the new order was meant to bring the Justice Department in line with Trump's own Executive Order 14178, which decreed that clarity and certainty regarding enforcement policy "are essential to supporting a vibrant and inclusive digital economy and innovation in digital assets." Blanche, one of several Trump criminal defense lawyers at the top ranks of DOJ, said the president "has also made clear that '[w]e are going to end the regulatory weaponization against digital assets'..."

Consistent with that narrowing of its cryptocurrency enforcement policy, the DOJ Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit will also cease cryptocurrency enforcement to focus on other administration priorities, including immigration and procurement fraud, Blanche said.

The Washington Post got this assessment from Yesha Yadav, a Vanderbilt University law professor who closely follows cryptocurrency and financial markets. "It's hard to underestimate the importance this task force has had ... in pursuing some really huge crypto hacks and cases."

More from USA Today:

Public corruption and transnational crime experts warned that shutting down the unit could divert critical resources from efforts to stop criminals and corrupt regimes from using cryptocurrency for illicit gain, even as Trump claims he wants to crack down on them. "Dangerous US adversaries rely on cryptocurrencies to launder money and evade sanctions," said Nate Sibley, an anti-corruption expert and director of the Kleptocracy Initiative at the conservative Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., in a post on X. "If this is accurate, hard to see how it squares with — for example-cracking down on cartel finances or maximum pressure sanctions on Iran...."

Trump's so-called "memecoin" surged from less than $10 on the Saturday before his inauguration to as high as $74.59 before eventually giving up some of its gains. The token, branded $TRUMP, has been criticized by ethics experts as a conflict of interest for the president since the company could likely benefit from his pro-crypto policies...

Last month, Trump signed an order to create a federal Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, signaling new federal support for cryptocurrency in general and Bitcoin in particular.

Since the first-ever White House crypto summit in March, America's Securities and Exchange Commission "has dropped more than a dozen cases against crypto firms," notes the Washington Post:

Last month, both the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency pledged to stop evaluating banks based on "reputational risk" — a practice that some venture capitalists have claimed unfairly "de-banked" founders of cryptocurrency start-ups.

In other news, executives from cryptocurrency exchange Binance "met with Treasury Department officials last month," reports the Wall Street Journal, asking them to remove a U.S. monitor overseeing their compliance with anti-money-laundering laws, according to people familiar with the talks.
The article adds that Binance is also concurrently "exploring" a deal with the Trump family to list its new dollar-pegged stablecoin which "could catapult it into a huge market and potentially bring in billions in profit for the family. "

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/12/1722247/americas-justice-department-shuts-down-its-cryptocurrency-fraud-unit?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Black holes "often exhibit long periods of dormancy," writes Popular Science, adding that astronomers had never witnessed a black hole "wake up" in real time. "Until now..."

In February of 2024 X-ray bursts were spotted coming out of a black hole named Ansky by Lorena Hernández-García at Chile's Valparaiso University, according to the article. And what astronomers have now seen "challenges prevailing theories about black hole lifecycles."

Hernández-García and collaborators then determined the black hole was displaying a phenomenon known as a quasiperiodic eruption, or QPE [a short-lived flaring event...] While a black hole inevitably destroys everything it captures, objects behave differently during their impending demise. A star, for example, generally stretches apart into a bright, hot, fast-spinning disc known as an accretion disc. Most astronomers have theorized that black holes generate QPEs when a comparatively small object like a star or even a smaller black hole collides with an accretion disc. In the case of Ansky, however, there isn't any evidence linking it to the death of a star.

"The bursts of X-rays from Ansky are ten times longer and ten times more luminous than what we see from a typical QPE," said MIT PhD student and study co-author Joheen Chakraborty. "Each of these eruptions is releasing a hundred times more energy than we have seen elsewhere. Ansky's eruptions also show the longest cadence ever observed, of about 4.5 days." Astronomers must now consider other explanations for Ansky's remarkable behavior. One theory posits that the accretion disc could come from nearby galactic gas pulled in by the black hole instead of a star. If true, then the X-rays may originate from high energy shocks to the disc caused by a small cosmic object repeatedly passing through and disrupting orbital matter.
It's detailed in a study published on April 11 in Nature Astronomy....

Meanwhile, scientists "have uncovered the strongest evidence yet for the existence of elusive intermediate-mass black holes," reports SciTechDaily.

And there's more black hole news from RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477):
Given the recent work on galaxy-centre Super-Massive Black Holes (SMBHs), you may be surprised to learn that the only Stellar-Mass Black Holes (SMBHs ... uh, "BHs") identified to-date have been by their gravitational waves, as they merge with another BH or a neutron star. But the long-running OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) project (1992 — present) has recently confirmed that it has detected an isolated BH not orbiting another bright object, or "swallowing" much of anything...
In this case, 16 other telescopes performed sensitive astrometry (position measurement) over 11 years including the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). These multiple measurements plot an ellipse on the sky, mirroring the movement of the Earth around it's orbit — parallax. Which means this is a relatively close object (1520 parsecs / ~5000 light years).... And there is no sign of a third light emitting body nearby, which means this is an isolated black hole, not orbiting any other body (or, indeed, with any other [small] star orbiting it).

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/04/12/1928248/for-the-first-time-astronomers-watch-a-black-hole-wake-up-in-real-time?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

People "are likely to continue working full-time even if they receive no-strings-attached universal basic income payments," reports CNN, citing results from a recent experiment in Germany (discussed on Slashdot in 2020):

Mein Grundeinkommen (My Basic Income), the Berlin-based non-profit that ran the German study, followed 122 people for three years. From June 2021 to May 2024, this group received an unconditional sum of €1,200 ($1,365) per month. The study focused on people aged between 21 and 40 who lived alone and already earned between 1,100 euros (around $1,250) and 2,600 euros ($2,950) a month. They were free to use the extra money from the study on anything they wanted. Over the course of three years, the only condition was that they had to fill out a questionnaire every six months that asked about different areas of their lives, including their financial situation, work patterns, mental well-being and social engagement.

One concern voiced by critics is that receiving a basic income could make people less inclined to work. But the Grundeinkommen study suggests that may not be the case at all. It found that receiving a basic income was not a reason for people to quit their jobs. On average, study participants worked 40 hours a week and stayed in employment — identical to the study's control group, which received no payment. "We find no evidence that people love doing nothing," Susann Fiedler, a professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business who was involved with the study, said on the study's website.

Unlike the control group, those receiving a basic income were more likely to change jobs or enroll in further education. They reported greater satisfaction in their working life — and were "significantly" more satisfied with their income...
And can more money buy happiness? According to the study, the recipients of a basic income reported feeling that their lives were "more valuable and meaningful" and felt a clear improvement in their mental health.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/04/12/0351222/germanys-universal-basic-income-experiment-proves-it-doesnt-encourage-unmployment?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports:

The United States urgently needs more energy to fuel an artificial intelligence race with China that the country can't afford to lose, industry leaders told lawmakers at a House hearing on Wednesday. "We need energy in all forms," said Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, who now leads the Special Competitive Studies Project, a think tank focused on technology and security. "Renewable, nonrenewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly." It was a nearly unanimous sentiment at the four-hour-plus hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which revealed bipartisan support for ramping up U.S. energy production to meet skyrocketing demand for energy-thirsty AI data centers.

The hearing showed how the country's AI policy priorities have changed under President Donald Trump. President Joe Biden's wide-ranging 2023 executive order on AI had sought to balance the technology's potential rewards with the risks it poses to workers, civil rights and national security. Trump rescinded that order within days of taking office, saying its "onerous" requirements would "threaten American technological leadership...." [Data center power consumption] is already straining power grids, as residential consumers compete with data centers that can use as much electricity as an entire city. And those energy demands are projected to grow dramatically in the coming years... [Former Google CEO Eric] Schmidt, whom the committee's Republicans called as a witness on Wednesday, told [committee chairman Brett] Guthrie that winning the AI race is too important to let environmental considerations get in the way...

Once the United States beats China to develop superintelligence, Schmidt said, AI will solve the climate crisis. And if it doesn't, he went on, China will become the world's sole superpower. (Schmidt's view that AI will become superintelligent within a decade is controversial among experts, some of whom predict the technology will remain limited by fundamental shortcomings in its ability to plan and reason.)

The industry's wish list also included "light touch" federal regulation, high-skill immigration and continued subsidies for chip development. Alexandr Wang, the young billionaire CEO of San Francisco-based Scale AI, said a growing patchwork of state privacy laws is hampering AI companies' access to the data needed to train their models. He called for a federal privacy law that would preempt state regulations and prioritize innovation.
Some committee Democrats argued that cuts to scientific research and renewable energy will actually hamper America's AI competitiveness, according to the article. " But few questioned the premise that the U.S. is locked in an existential struggle with China for AI supremacy.

"That stark outlook has nearly coalesced into a consensus on Capitol Hill since China's DeepSeek chatbot stunned the AI industry with its reasoning skills earlier this year."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/04/12/0633243/ai-industry-tells-us-congress-we-need-energy?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Skype is shutting down after two decades on May 5th, notes the Washington Post.
But the bigger problem for retired attorney Karen Griffin is that Microsoft won't refund the money they paid into a Skype account for cheap international phone calls:

"They're no longer offering this service that I prepaid for, and now they're not giving me my money back," Griffin said. "There's a lot of people out there who are going to lose money...."

To its credit, Microsoft gave Skype users a couple months' warning about the shutdown coming May 5. People can transfer Skype contacts and chat history to the company's Microsoft Teams chat-and-calling app or to other companies' services. (While Microsoft sells Teams to organizations, there's a free version for personal use.) But Microsoft didn't explain well what will happen to money that people like Griffin have parked in Skype accounts, in some cases for years.... Unless you bought Skype credits very recently, Microsoft said it won't refund money in Skype accounts. The company says it will add an option for Skype account holders to keep using their funds for phone calls online or in Teams.

Griffin doesn't love what Microsoft is doing. She prefers a cash refund or a credit applied to her Microsoft Office subscription, for which she pays about $110 a year. Amit Fulay, vice president of product for Skype and Teams, said it's not possible to shift funds from a Skype account to Office subscriptions. And he nixed refunds because Microsoft will still offer basic call services for former Skype customers. "Refunds make more sense if you took away something," Fulay said. "We're not." Microsoft declined to say how much money Skype users collectively have sitting in accounts that they might never use.

Stacey Higginbotham, a policy specialist with Consumer Reports' technology advocacy team, said Griffin is making a reasonable request for a rich company like Microsoft that's shutting down an internet service. "The best way: Give people their money back. The second-best way, give people a credit to all of your services," Higginbotham said.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/04/12/027252/microsoft-is-killing-skype---and-refusing-refunds-for-prepaid-international-calls?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Smartphones, computer monitors, semiconductors, and various other electronics will be exempt from U.S. President Trump's tariffs, reports CNN, "according to a US Customs and Border Protection notice posted late Friday."

And several other products also received an exemption which "applies to products entering the United States or removed from warehouses as early as April 5, according to the notice."

Roughly 90% of Apple's iPhone production and assembly is based in China, according to Wedbush Securities' estimates. Counterpoint Research, a firm that monitors global smartphone shipments, estimated Apple has up to six weeks of inventory in the United States. Once that supply runs out, prices would have been expected to go up...

Semiconductors and microchips are among the products heavily outsourced to factories in Asia due to lower costs. Those electronic parts are now exempt, according to the Friday notice. That could help Asian chipmakers, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), South Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix.

The exemptions also include solar cells, memory cards, and computers, according to the BBC. "It was not clear whether technology imports from China would still be hit by a 20% tariff that was not part of the reciprocal tariffs announced on 2 April..."

Thanks to Slashdot readers Alain Williams and Mr. Dollar Ton for sharing the news.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/12/1539244/trump-tariffs-add-exemptions-friday-night-for-smartphones-and-other-electronics?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Инструменты программирования с поддержкой искусственного интеллекта (ИИ) всё больше влияют на разработку программного обеспечения и приводят к проблеме в безопасности: генерации несуществующих имён пакетов. ИИ модели, как коммерческие, так и с открытые, иногда предлагают код с указанием пакетов, которые не существует. Согласно недавним исследованиям, это происходит в 5.2% случаев у коммерческих моделей и в 21.7% — у открытых моделей.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63062

A former Facebook employee/whistleblower alleges Meta's AI model Lllama was used to help DeepSeek.

The whistleblower — former Facebook director of global policy Sarah Wynn-Williams — testified before U.S. Senators on Wednesday. CBS News found this earlier response from Meta:

In a statement last year on Llama, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote, "The alleged role of a single and outdated version of an American open-source model is irrelevant when we know China is already investing over 1T to surpass the US technologically, and Chinese tech companies are releasing their own open AI models as fast, or faster, than US ones."

Wynn-Williams encouraged senators to continue investigating Meta's role in the development of artificial intelligence in China, as they continue their probe into the social media company founded by Zuckerberg. "The greatest trick Mark Zuckerberg ever pulled was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot and saying he didn't offer services in China, while he spent the last decade building an $18 billion business there," she said.

The testimony also left some of the lawmakers skeptical of Zuckerberg's commitment to free speech after the whistleblower also alleged Facebook worked "hand in glove" with the Chinese government to censor its platforms:

In her almost seven years with the company, Wynn-Williams told the panel she witnessed the company provide "custom built censorship tools" for the Chinese Communist Party. She said a Chinese dissident living in the United States was removed from Facebook in 2017 after pressure from Chinese officials. Facebook said at the time it took action against the regime critic, Guo Wengui, for sharing someone else's personal information. Wynn-Williams described the use of a "virality counter" that flagged posts with over 10,000 views for review by a "chief editor," which Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called "an Orwellian censor." These "virality counters" were used not only in Mainland China, but also in Hong Kong and Taiwan, according to Wynn-Williams's testimony.
Wynn-Williams also told senators Chinese officials could "potentially access" the data of American users.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/12/067219/facebook-whistleblower-alleges-metas-ai-model-llama-was-used-to-help-deepseek?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.