An anonymous reader shares a report: HP is close to ending production of North-America-bound products in China, after US tariffs kicked a hole in its quarterly profits. "A quarter ago, we shared that our goal was to have less than ten percent of the products in North America being shipped from China by September," HP president and CEO Enrique Lores told investors on the company's Q2 2025 earnings call. "We have accelerated that and we share that now almost no products will be coming from China sold in the US by June. It's a very significant acceleration of the plan that we have."

"We accelerated the shift of factories out from China into Southeast Asia, into Mexico to a certain extent in the US to mitigate the impact of the change," he added. Lores also revealed that HP has removed the US as a distribution hub for products sold in Canada or to Latin America. Doing so means HP doesn't have to pay tariffs.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/1450252/hp-hastens-china-exit-as-tariffs-kick-a-hole-in-its-profits?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Apple's upcoming macOS 26 operating system may abandon support for several older Mac models, according to AppleInsider. The casualties will include 2018 MacBook Pro models, the 2020 Intel MacBook Air, the 2017 iMac Pro, and the 2018 Mac mini -- all currently the oldest machines compatible with macOS Sequoia, the report said, citing a source familiar with the matter. The 2019 MacBook Pro models and 2020 5K iMac models will retain compatibility with the new system, codenamed "Cheer," said AppleInsider.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/1528238/macos-26-may-not-support-2018-macbook-pros-2019-imacs-or-the-imac-pro?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

California's battery power capacity rose from 500 megawatts in 2018 to nearly 16,000 megawatts in 2025. Nearly a quarter of America's battery capacity is now in California alone, according to Bloomberg.

At their daily peak around 8pm, batteries can provide as much as 30% of the state's electricity. The batteries charge in the afternoon when solar power is cheap and release energy in the evenings when Californians get home and crank up their air conditioners. In the middle of the day, when the sun is strongest, as much as three-quarters of the state's electricity can come from solar.

California relied on regulation to achieve this scale. In 2013, the California Public Utilities Commission ordered the state's three big investor-owned utilities to procure 1,325 megawatts of energy storage by 2020 to help meet renewable targets and stabilize the grid. That goal was easily met. Mark Jacobson, an engineering professor at Stanford University, told Economist that most days this year contained periods when solar, hydropower and wind, helped by batteries, met 100% of California's demand -- even though just 54% of the state's electricity generation comes from renewables.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/164217/california-has-got-really-good-at-building-giant-batteries?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

New submitter salyavin writes: The final issue of Linux Format has been released. After 25 years the magazine is going out with a bang. Interviewing the old staff members, and looking back at old Linux distros [...] The last 10-15 years have been absolutely brutal to computer hobbyist magazines -- (or magazines and media at large, in general).

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/1650210/linux-format-ceases-publication?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

International interest in American higher education has plummeted to levels not seen since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new data tracking prospective student behavior online. Studyportals, which operates a global directory of degree programs, reports that clicks on American university courses have reached their lowest point since the early pandemic period.

Weekly page views of US university courses halved between January 5th and the end of April. First-quarter traffic to American undergraduate and master's degree programs fell more than 20% compared to the same period last year, while interest in PhD programs dropped by one-third. India, which supplies nearly a third of America's international students, showed the steepest decline at 40%. The data suggests British universities would be the primary beneficiaries of students looking elsewhere.

The sharp drop in interest follows the Trump administration's escalating restrictions on international students, including stripping Harvard University of its enrollment authority on May 22nd and suspending all new student visa interviews on May 27th. International students contributed $43.8 billion to the American economy during the 2023-24 academic year, with about three-quarters of international PhD students indicating they plan to remain in the country after graduation.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/1738234/demand-for-american-degrees-has-already-hit-covid-era-lows?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The entertainment industry has achieved an unprecedented milestone: more film and television content exists today than at any point in human history. The technical infrastructure to deliver this content directly to consumers' homes works flawlessly. The problem? Actually finding something to watch has become a user experience nightmare that would make early-2000s software developers cringe.

Multiple streaming platforms are suffering from fundamental interface design failures that actively prevent users from discovering content. Cameron Nudleman, an Austin-based user, told Salon that scrolling through streaming service landing pages feels "like a Herculean task," while his Amazon Fire Stick setup -- designed to consolidate multiple services -- delivers consistent crashes across Paramount+ and Max, with Peacock terminating randomly "for no discernible reason."

The technical problems extend beyond stability issues to basic functionality failures. Max automatically enables closed captions despite user preferences, while Paramount+ crashes during show transitions. Chicago media writer Tim O'Reilly describes "every single interface" as "complete garbage except for Netflix's," though even Netflix has recently implemented changes that degrade user experience.

The industry eliminated simple discovery mechanisms like newspaper listings and Moviefone's telephone service in favor of algorithm-driven interfaces that Tennessee attorney Claire Tuley says have "turned art into work," transforming what was supposed to "democratize movies" into "a system that requires so many subscriptions, searching and effort."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/1825254/theres-more-film-and-television-for-you-to-watch-than-ever-before---good-luck-finding-it?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei is warning that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years -- and overall unemployment potentially spiking between 10 and 20% during that period.

The prediction comes as new data from venture capital firm SignalFire shows Big Tech companies have already reduced their hiring of new graduates by approximately 50% compared to pre-pandemic levels, with AI adoption cited as a contributing factor. Amodei told Axios that AI companies and government officials are "sugarcoating" the risks of mass job displacement in technology, finance, law, and consulting sectors.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/1835258/anthropic-ceo-warns-ai-could-eliminate-half-of-all-entry-level-white-collar-jobs-within-five-years?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

India faces a paradoxical climate challenge that requires embracing air conditioning despite the environmental costs, according to analysis of the country's warming patterns and pollution crisis. While the past decade marked India's warmest on record, the nation has warmed at only 0.09C per decade compared to 0.30C globally, with horrific air pollution serving as an unintended cooling agent by intercepting solar radiation and making clouds more reflective.

The cooling effect creates a dangerous trade-off: cleaner air would accelerate temperature rises just as the country desperately needs relief from intensifying heat waves. Only one in ten Indian households owns air conditioning, compared to two-thirds in China and four-fifths in Malaysia, despite air-conditioner sales doubling between 2020 and 2024. During heat waves, cooling systems already account for one-fifth of power demand, mostly supplied by coal plants that worsen the pollution problem India must eventually solve.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/2011206/india-needs-to-turn-the-air-con-on?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: China's Ministry of Commerce is meeting with some of the country's biggest automakers to discuss whether the industry is using a loophole to mask weakening sales. Reuters adds: It comes after Great Wall Motor's Chairman Wei Jianjun said in an interview with Sina Finance last week that a phenomenon called "secondhand cars with zero mileage" had emerged in the Chinese market as a result of the industry's years-long price war.

The phenomenon, he said, involved cars that had been registered and had licence plates -- marking them as sold -- but had never been driven being sold in the secondhand market. Wei said that at least 3,000 to 4,000 vendors on Chinese used car platforms were selling such cars. The source said the tactic was seen as a potential method within the industry for automakers and dealers to support new car sales as they try to meet aggressive sales targets.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/2028234/china-summons-top-carmakers-over-zero-mileage-used-vehicles?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SC Media: Thousands of ASUS routers have been compromised with malware-free backdoors in an ongoing campaign to potentially build a future botnet, GreyNoise reported Wednesday. The threat actors abuse security vulnerabilities and legitimate router features to establish persistent access without the use of malware, and these backdoors survive both reboots and firmware updates, making them difficult to remove.

The attacks, which researchers suspect are conducted by highly sophisticated threat actors, were first detected by GreyNoise's AI-powered Sift tool in mid-March and disclosed Thursday after coordination with government officials and industry partners. Sekoia.io also reported the compromise of thousands of ASUS routers in their investigation of a broader campaign, dubbed ViciousTrap, in which edge devices from other brands were also compromised to create a honeypot network. Sekoia.io found that the ASUS routers were not used to create honeypots, and that the threat actors gained SSH access using the same port, TCP/53282, identified by GreyNoise in their report. The backdoor campaign affects multiple ASUS router models, including the RT-AC3200, RT-AC3100, GT-AC2900, and Lyra Mini.

GreyNoise advises users to perform a full factory reset and manually reconfigure any potentially compromised device. To identify a breach, users should check for SSH access on TCP port 53282 and inspect the authorized_keys file for unauthorized entries.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/2052229/asus-router-backdoors-affect-9000-devices-persists-after-firmware-updates?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The SEC on Thursday voluntarily dismissed its lawsuit against Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. It brings an end to one of the last remaining crypto enforcement actions brought by the agency. Reuters reports: The SEC had accused the defendants in 2023 of artificially inflating trading volumes, diverting customer funds, failing to restrict U.S. customers from Binance's platform, and misleading investors about its market surveillance controls. It also accused Binance of unlawfully facilitating trading of several tokens that prior SEC leadership deemed unregistered securities. Developing...

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A Texas jury ruled that Intel may hold a license to patents owned by VLSI Technology through its agreement with Finjan Inc., both controlled by Fortress Investment Group -- potentially nullifying over $3 billion in previous patent infringement verdicts against Intel. Reuters reports: VLSI has sued Intel in multiple U.S. courts for allegedly infringing several patents covering semiconductor technology. A jury in Waco, Texas awarded VLSI $2.18 billion in their first trial in 2021, which a U.S. appeals court has since overturned and sent back for new proceedings.

An Austin, Texas jury determined that VLSI was entitled to nearly $949 million from Intel in a separate patent infringement trial in 2022. Intel has argued in that case that the verdicts should be thrown out based on a 2012 agreement that gave it a license to patents owned by Finjan and other companies "under common control" with it. U.S. District Judge Alan Albright held the latest jury trial in Austin to determine whether Finjan and VLSI were under the "common control" of Fortress. VLSI said it was not subject to the Finjan agreement, and that the company did not even exist until four years after it was signed.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/2058225/intel-wins-jury-trial-over-patent-licenses-in-3-billino-vlsi-fight?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Google's Gemini AI can now analyze and summarize video files stored in Google Drive, letting users ask questions about content like meeting takeaways or product updates without watching the footage. The Verge reports: The Gemini in Drive feature provides a familiar chatbot interface that can provide quick summaries describing the footage or pull specific information. For example, users can ask Gemini to list action items mentioned in recorded meetings or highlight the biggest updates and new products in an announcement video, saving time spent on manually combing through and taking notes.

The feature requires captions to be enabled for videos, and can be accessed using either Google Drive's overlay previewer or a new browser tab window. It's available in English for Google Workspace and Google One AI Premium users, and anyone who has previously purchased Gemini Business or Enterprise add-ons, though it may take a few weeks to fully roll out. You can learn more about the update in Google's blog post.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/211200/gemini-can-now-watch-google-drive-videos-for-you?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An accused movie pirate who stole more than 1,000 Blu-ray discs and DVDs while working for a DVD manufacturing company struck a plea deal (PDF) this week to lower his sentence after the FBI claimed the man's piracy cost movie studios millions. Steven Hale no longer works for the DVD company. He was arrested in March, accused of "bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying" and ripping pre-release copies of movies he could only access because his former employer was used by major movie studios. As alleged by the feds, his game was beating studios to releases to achieve the greatest possible financial gains from online leaks.

Among the popular movies that Hale is believed to have leaked between 2021 and 2022 was Spider-Man: No Way Home, which the FBI alleged was copied "tens of millions of times" at an estimated loss of "tens of millions of dollars" for just one studio on one movie. Other movies Hale ripped included animated hits like Encanto and Sing 2, as well as anticipated sequels like The Matrix: Resurrections and Venom: Let There Be Carnage. The cops first caught wind of Hale's scheme in March 2022. They seized about 1,160 Blu-rays and DVDs in what TorrentFreak noted were the days just "after the Spider-Man movie leaked online." It's unclear why it took close to three years before Hale's arrest, but TorrentFreak suggested that Hale's case is perhaps part of a bigger investigation into the Spider-Man leaks. A plea deal for Hale significantly reduced the estimated damages from his piracy case to under $40,000 and led to the dismissal of two charges, though he still faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for one remaining copyright infringement charge. His final sentence and restitution amount will be decided at a court hearing in Tennessee at the end of August.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/216216/man-who-stole-1000-dvds-from-employer-strikes-plea-deal-over-movie-leaks?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A Texas jury ruled that Intel may hold a license to patents owned by VLSI Technology through its agreement with Finjan Inc., both controlled by Fortress Investment Group -- potentially nullifying over $3 billion in previous patent infringement verdicts against Intel. Reuters reports: VLSI has sued Intel in multiple U.S. courts for allegedly infringing several patents covering semiconductor technology. A jury in Waco, Texas awarded VLSI $2.18 billion in their first trial in 2021, which a U.S. appeals court has since overturned and sent back for new proceedings.

An Austin, Texas jury determined that VLSI was entitled to nearly $949 million from Intel in a separate patent infringement trial in 2022. Intel has argued in that case that the verdicts should be thrown out based on a 2012 agreement that gave it a license to patents owned by Finjan and other companies "under common control" with it. U.S. District Judge Alan Albright held the latest jury trial in Austin to determine whether Finjan and VLSI were under the "common control" of Fortress. VLSI said it was not subject to the Finjan agreement, and that the company did not even exist until four years after it was signed.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/2058225/intel-wins-jury-trial-over-patent-licenses-in-3-billion-vlsi-fight?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Amazon has launched a new innovation-focused team called ZeroOne, led by Xbox co-creator J Allard, to develop breakthrough consumer products across hardware and software. CNBC reports: The ZeroOne team is spread across Seattle, San Francisco and Sunnyvale, California, and is focused on both hardware and software projects, according to job postings from the past month. The name is a nod to its mission of developing emerging product ideas from conception to launch, or "zero to one." [...] The new group is being led by J Allard, who spent 19 years at Microsoft, most recently as technology chief of consumer products, a role he left in 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was a key architect of the Xbox game console, as well as the Zune, a failed iPod competitor.

Allard joined Amazon in September, and the company confirmed at the time that he would be part of the devices and services team under Panos Panay, who left Microsoft for Amazon in 2023 to lead the group. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed Allard oversees ZeroOne but declined to comment further on the group's work. The job postings provide few specific details about what ZeroOne is building, though one listing references working on "conceiving, designing, and bringing to market computer vision techniques for a new smart-home product." Another post for a senior customer insights manager in San Francisco says the job entails owning "the methodology and execution of concept testing and early feedback for ZeroOne programs." "You'll be part of a team that embraces design thinking, rapid experimentation, and building to learn," the description says. "If you're excited about working in small, nimble teams to create entirely new product categories and thrive in the ambiguity of breakthrough innovation, we want to talk to you."

Amazon has pulled in staffers from other business units that have experience developing innovative technologies, including its Alexa voice assistant, Luna cloud gaming service and Halo sleep tracker, according to Linkedin profiles of ZeroOne employees. The head of a projection mapping startup called Lightform that Amazon acquired is helping lead the group. While Amazon is expanding this particular corner of its devices group, the company is scaling back other areas of the sprawling devices and services division.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/2149241/amazon-taps-xbox-co-founder-to-develop-breakthrough-consumer-products?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Whether it is doing sums or working out what to text your new date, some tasks produce a furrowed brow. Now scientists say they have come up with a device to monitor such effort: an electronic tattoo, stuck to the forehead. The researchers say the device could prove valuable among pilots, healthcare workers and other professions where managing mental workload is crucial to preventing catastrophes. "For this kind of high-demand and high-stake scenario, eventually we hope to have this real-time mental workload decoder that can give people some warning and alert so that they can self-adjust, or they can ask AI or a co-worker to offload some of their work," said Dr Nanshu Lu, an author of the research from the University of Texas at Austin, adding the device may not only help workers avoid serious mistakes but also protect their health.

Writing in the journal Device, Lu and colleagues describe how using questionnaires to investigate mental workload is problematic, not least as people are poor at objectively judging cognitive effort and they are usually conducted after a task. Meanwhile, existing electroencephalography (EEG) and electrooculography (EOG) devices, that can be used to assess mental workload by measuring brain waves and eye movements respectively, are wired, bulky and prone to erroneous measurements arising from movements. By contrast, the "e-tattoo" is a lightweight, flexible, wireless device.

The black, wiggly path of the e-tattoo is composed of a graphite-based conductive material, and is attached to the forehead using conductive adhesive film. Four square EEG electrodes, positioned on the forehead, each detect a different region of brain activity -- with a reference electrode behind the ear -- while rectangular EOG electrodes, placed vertically and horizontally around the eyes, provide data about eye movements. Each of the stretchable electrodes is coated in an additional conductive material. The e-tattoo, which is bespoke and disposable, is connected to a reusable flexible printed circuit using conductive tape, while a lightweight battery can be clipped to the device. The device is expected to cost less than $200 and be accompanied with an app to alert the user if their mental workload is too high.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/05/29/222251/e-tattoo-could-track-mental-workload-for-people-in-high-stake-jobs-study-says?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

For the first time, scientists have directly observed atmospheric sputtering in action on Mars -- an erosion process driven by solar wind ions that may have played a major role in the planet's atmospheric and water loss. ScienceAlert reports: The only spacecraft with the equipment and orbital configuration to make these observations is NASA's MAVEN. The researchers carefully pored over the data collected by the spacecraft since it arrived in Mars orbit in September 2014, looking to find simultaneous observations of the solar electric field and an upper atmosphere abundance of argon -- one of the sputtered particles, used as a tracer for the phenomenon. They found that, above an altitude of 350 kilometers (217 miles), argon densities vary depending on the orientation of the solar wind electric field, compared to argon densities at lower altitudes that remain consistent.

The results showed that lighter isotopes of argon vary, leaving behind an excess of heavy argon -- a discrepancy that is best explained by active sputtering. This is supported by observations of a solar storm, the outflows of which arrived at Mars in January 2016. During this time, the evidence of sputtering became significantly more pronounced. Not only does this support the team's finding that argon density variations at high Martian altitudes are the result of sputtering, it demonstrates what conditions may have been like billions of years ago, when the Sun was younger and rowdier, undergoing more frequent storm activity. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/040234/scientists-have-clear-evidence-of-martian-atmosphere-sputtering?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

sinij shares a report from the BBC: France's National Assembly has voted to abolish low-emission zones, a key measure introduced during President Emmanuel Macron's first term to reduce city pollution. So-called ZFEs (zones a faibles emissions) have been criticized for hitting those who cannot afford less-polluting vehicles the hardest. A handful of MPs from Macron's party joined opposition parties from the right and far right in voting 98-51 to scrap the zones, which have gradually been extended across French cities since 2019. [...]

The low-emission zones began with 15 of France's most polluted cities in 2019 and by the start of this year had been extended to every urban area with a population of more than 150,000, with a ban on cars registered before 1997. Those produced after 1997 need a round "Crit'Air" sticker to drive in low-emission zones, and there are six categories that correspond to various types of vehicle. The biggest restrictions have been applied in the most polluted cities, Paris and Lyon, as well as Montpellier and Grenoble. The BBC notes that while the abolition is expected to pass France's Senate, it must still be included in a broader bill approved by the lower house in June and cleared by the Constitutional Council, which isn't guaranteed.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/0410208/french-mps-vote-to-scrap-low-emission-zones?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Negotiations are under way between the UAE and OpenAI that may make the company's ChatGPT Plus artificial intelligence chatbot available to all residents free of charge, though a final deal has not been reached.

An agreement involving ChatGPT Plus would be part of the recently announced Stargate UAE infrastructure plan to create an AI hub in Abu Dhabi, according to a source familiar with the country's AI strategy. Abu Dhabi's AI company G42 has partnered with OpenAI, Oracle and Nvidia to set up Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt computing cluster that will operate in the newly established 5GW UAE -- US AI Campus.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/147218/openai-and-uae-in-talks-for-free-chatgpt-plus-for-all-report-says?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Google has begun automatically generating AI-powered email summaries for Gmail Workspace users, eliminating the need to manually trigger the feature that has been available since last year. The company's Gemini AI will now independently determine when longer email threads or messages with multiple replies would benefit from summarization, displaying these summaries above the email content itself. The automatic summaries currently appear only on mobile devices for English-language emails and may take up to two weeks to roll out to individual accounts, with Google providing no timeline for desktop expansion or availability to non-Workspace Gmail users.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/1448240/gmails-ai-summaries-now-appear-automatically?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Almost 40% of glaciers in existence today are already doomed to melt due to climate-heating emissions from fossil fuels, a study has found. The Guardian: The loss will soar to 75% if global heating reaches the 2.7C rise for which the world is currently on track. The massive loss of glaciers would push up sea levels, endangering millions of people and driving mass migration, profoundly affecting the billions reliant on glaciers to regulate the water used to grow food, the researchers said.

However, slashing carbon emissions and limiting heating to the internationally agreed 1.5C target would save half of glacier ice. That goal is looking increasingly out of reach as emissions continue to rise, but the scientists said that every tenth-of-a-degree rise that was avoided would save 2.7tn tonnes of ice.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/153212/almost-40-of-worlds-glaciers-already-doomed-due-to-climate-crisis?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The three largest U.S. airlines are charging solo travelers higher fares than passengers booking for two or more people on select domestic routes, a pricing strategy analysts believe targets business travelers, according to fare analysis by travel publication Thrifty Traveler.

American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines implement the practice by opening different fare categories based on passenger count. United charges $269 for a solo traveler flying from Chicago O'Hare to Peoria, while two passengers pay $181 each for identical seats. American's Charlotte-to-Fort Myers route costs solo travelers $422 versus $266 per person for pairs.

The airlines appear to be "segmenting" customers by charging business travelers paying with corporate cards more while offering better deals to families booking together. Solo travelers are more likely to be business flyers using employer funds and "less likely to care about paying another $80 or more," according to the analysis.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/1614212/us-airlines-are-quietly-hitting-solo-and-business-travelers-with-higher-fares?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House's sweeping "MAHA Report" appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence [non-paywalled source], resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday. Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post.

Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all, a fact first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS on Thursday morning. Some references include "oaicite" attached to URLs -- a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of "oaicite" is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company. A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate -- as well as the tendency to "hallucinate" studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/1643248/maha-report-found-to-contain-citations-to-nonexistent-studies?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a landmark ruling advancing efforts to hold major polluters accountable for transnational climate-related harms, on May 28 a German court concluded that a corporation can be held liable under civil law for its proportional contribution to global climate change, Climate Rights International said today.

Filed in 2015, the case against German energy giant RWE AG challenged the corporation to pay for its proportional share of adaptation costs needed to protect the Andean city of Huaraz, Peru, from a flood from a glacial lake exacerbated by global warming. RWE AG, one of Europe's largest emitters, is estimated to be responsible for approximately 0.47% of global historical global greenhouse gas emissions.

"This groundbreaking ruling confirms that corporate emitters can no longer hide behind borders, politics, or scale to escape responsibility," said Lotte Leicht, Advocacy Director at Climate Rights International. "The court's message is clear: major carbon polluters can be held legally responsible for their role in driving the climate crisis and the resulting human rights and economic harms. If the reasoning of this decision is adopted by other courts, it could lay the foundation for ending the era of impunity for fossil fuel giants and other big greenhouse gas emitters."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/1741255/german-court-confirms-civil-liability-for-corporate-climate-harms?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Lovable, a Swedish startup that allows users to create websites and apps through natural language prompts, failed to address a critical security vulnerability for months after being notified, according to a new report. A study by Replit employees found that 170 of 1,645 Lovable-created applications exposed sensitive user information including names, email addresses, financial data, and API keys that could allow hackers to run up charges on customers' accounts.

The vulnerability, published this week in the National Vulnerabilities Database, stems from misconfigured Supabase databases that Lovable's AI-generated code connects to for storing user data. Despite being alerted to the problem in March, Lovable initially dismissed concerns and only later implemented a limited security scan that checks whether database access controls are enabled but cannot determine if they are properly configured.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/1810246/the-hottest-new-vibe-coding-startup-may-be-a-sitting-duck-for-hackers?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Major broadband lobby groups have asked the Trump administration to sue states that require internet service providers to offer low-cost plans to low-income residents, following their unsuccessful court challenges against such laws. The cable, telecom, and mobile industry associations filed the request this week with the Justice Department's new Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force, specifically targeting New York's law that mandates $15 and $20 monthly broadband options for eligible customers.

The industry groups suffered a significant legal defeat when the Supreme Court refused to hear their challenge to New York's affordability mandate in December 2024, after losing in federal appeals court. Now they face a potential wave of similar legislation, with California proposing $15 plans offering 100 Mbps speeds and ten other states considering comparable requirements.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/1854205/isps-ask-justice-department-to-sue-states-over-low-income-broadband-mandates-after-court-losses?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

WordPress.com parent company Automattic is changing direction... again. From a report: In a blog post titled "Returning to Core" published Thursday evening, Automattic announced it will unpause its contributions to the WordPress project. This is despite having said only last month that the 6.8 WordPress release would be the final major release for all of 2025.

"After pausing our contributions to regroup, rethink, and plan strategically, we're ready to press play again and return fully to the WordPress project," the new blog post states. "Expect to find our contributions across all of the greatest hits -- WordPress Core, Gutenberg, Playground, Openverse, and WordPress.org. This return is a moment of excitement for us as it's about continuing the mission we've always believed in: democratizing publishing for everyone, everywhere," it reads.

Automattic says it's learned a lot from the pause in terms of the many ways WordPress is used, and that it's now committed to helping it "grow and thrive." The post also notes that WordPress today powers 43% of the web.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/1918217/automattic-says-it-will-start-contributing-to-wordpress-again-after-pause?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has harsh words for budget carriers, calling their business model "dead."

"It's dead. Look, it's a crappy model. Sorry," he said when asked about the budget airline approach. Kirby argued that budget carriers like Southwest, Spirit, and Frontier built their operations around what he characterized as customer-hostile practices, saying "The model was, screw the customer ... Trick people, get them to buy, get them to come, and then charge them a whole bunch of fees that they aren't expecting."

He said he believes that these airlines struggle to retain customers once they reach sufficient scale to require repeat business.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/1946239/united-chief-dismisses-budget-airline-model-as-dead-and-crappy?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Amazon has quietly removed billions of product listings through a confidential initiative called "Bend the Curve," according to Business Insider. The project planned to eliminate at least 24 billion ASINs -- unique product identifiers -- from Amazon's marketplace, reducing the total from a projected 74 billion to under 50 billion by December 2024. The purge targets "unproductive selection" including poor-selling items, listings without actual inventory, and product pages inactive for over two years.

The initiative represents a shift for the company that built its reputation as "The Everything Store" through three decades of relentless catalog expansion. Bend the Curve forms part of CEO Andy Jassy's broader cost-cutting strategy, saving Amazon's retail division over $22 million in AWS server costs during 2024 by reducing the number of hosted product pages.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/1954240/amazon-purges-billions-of-product-listings-in-cost-cutting-drive?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: If you've left a comment on a YouTube video, a new website claims it might be able to find every comment you've ever left on any video you've ever watched. Then an AI can build a profile of the commenter and guess where you live, what languages you speak, and what your politics might be. The service is called YouTube-Tools and is just the latest in a suite of web-based tools that started life as a site to investigate League of Legends usernames. Now it uses a modified large language model created by the company Mistral to generate a background report on YouTube commenters based on their conversations. Its developer claims it's meant to be used by the cops, but anyone can sign up. It costs about $20 a month to use and all you need to get started is a credit card and an email address.

The tool presents a significant privacy risk, and shows that people may not be as anonymous in the YouTube comments sections as they may think. The site's report is ready in seconds and provides enough data for an AI to flag identifying details about a commenter. The tool could be a boon for harassers attempting to build profiles of their targets, and 404 Media has seen evidence that harassment-focused communities have used the developers' other tools. YouTube-Tools also appears to be a violation of YouTube's privacy policies, and raises questions about what YouTube is doing to stop the scraping and repurposing of peoples' data like this. "Public search engines may scrape data only in accordance with YouTube's robots.txt file or with YouTube's prior written permission," it says.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/2133227/developer-builds-tool-that-scrapes-youtube-comments-uses-ai-to-predict-where-users-live?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: Microsoft just can't leave well enough alone. The company is now injecting formatting features into Notepad, a program that has long been appreciated for one thing -- its simplicity. You see, starting with version 11.2504.50.0, this update is rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels, and it adds bold text, italics, hyperlinks, lists, and even headers. Sadly, this isn't a joke. Notepad is actually being turned into a watered-down word processor, complete with a formatting toolbar and Markdown support. Users can even toggle between styled content and raw Markdown syntax. And while Microsoft is giving you the option to disable formatting or strip it all out, it's clear the direction of the app is changing.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/2138237/microsoft-tests-notepad-text-formatting-in-windows-11?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Instagram now supports 3:4 aspect ratio photos, allowing users to upload images that "appear just exactly as you shot it." Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the update in a Threads post, noting that "almost every phone camera defaults to" that format. The Verge reports: An image from Instagram's broadcast channel shows how the change makes a difference. You can already post images with a rectangular aspect ratio of 4:5, but with 3:4, your photo won't be cropped at the ends. 3:4 photos are supported with single-photo uploads and with carousels, according to the channel. If you want, you can still post photos with a square or 4:5 aspect ratio.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/2146239/instagram-isnt-just-for-square-photos-anymore?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The U.S. government today imposed economic sanctions on Funnull Technology Inc., a Philippines-based company that provides computer infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams known as "pig butchering." In January 2025, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Funnull was being used as a content delivery network that catered to cybercriminals seeking to route their traffic through U.S.-based cloud providers. "Americans lose billions of dollars annually to these cyber scams, with revenues generated from these crimes rising to record levels in 2024," reads a statement from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which sanctioned Funnull and its 40-year-old Chinese administrator Liu Lizhi. "Funnull has directly facilitated several of these schemes, resulting in over $200 million in U.S. victim-reported losses."

The Treasury Department said Funnull's operations are linked to the majority of virtual currency investment scam websites reported to the FBI. The agency said Funnull directly facilitated pig butchering and other schemes that resulted in more than $200 million in financial losses by Americans. Pig butchering is a rampant form of fraud wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in fraudulent cryptocurrency trading platforms. Victims are coached to invest more and more money into what appears to be an extremely profitable trading platform, only to find their money is gone when they wish to cash out. The scammers often insist that investors pay additional "taxes" on their crypto "earnings" before they can see their invested funds again (spoiler: they never do), and a shocking number of people have lost six figures or more through these pig butchering scams.

KrebsOnSecurity's January story on Funnull was based on research from the security firm Silent Push, which discovered in October 2024 that a vast number of domains hosted via Funnull were promoting gambling sites that bore the logo of the Suncity Group, a Chinese entity named in a 2024 UN report (PDF) for laundering millions of dollars for the North Korean state-sponsored hacking group Lazarus. Silent Push found Funnull was a criminal content delivery network (CDN) that carried a great deal of traffic tied to scam websites, funneling the traffic through a dizzying chain of auto-generated domain names and U.S.-based cloud providers before redirecting to malicious or phishous websites. The FBI has released a technical writeup (PDF) of the infrastructure used to manage the malicious Funnull domains between October 2023 and April 2025.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/2151248/us-sanctions-cloud-provider-funnull-as-top-source-of-pig-butchering-scams?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

In a full-circle moment for Palmer Luckey, Meta and his defense tech company Anduril are teaming up to develop mixed reality headsets for the U.S. military under the Army's revamped SBMC Next program. The collaboration will merge Meta's Reality Labs hardware and Llama AI with Anduril's battlefield software, marking Meta's entry into military XR through the very company founded by Luckey after his controversial departure from Facebook. "I am glad to be working with Meta once again," Luckey said in a blog post. "My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that." TechCrunch reports: This partnership stems from the Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) Next program, formerly called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) Next. IVAS was a massive military contract, with a total $22 billion budget, originally awarded to Microsoft in 2018 intended to develop HoloLens-like AR glasses for soldiers. But after endless problems, in February the Army stripped management of the program from Microsoft and awarded it to Anduril, with Microsoft staying on as a cloud provider. The intent is to eventually have multiple suppliers of mixed reality glasses for soldiers.

All of this meant that if Luckey's former employer, Meta, wanted to tap into the potentially lucrative world of military VR/AR/XR headsets, it would need to go through Anduril. The devices will be based on tech out of Meta's AR/VR research center Reality Labs, the post says. They'll use Meta's Llama AI model, and they will tap into Anduril's command and control software known as Lattice. The idea is to provide soldiers with a heads-up display of battlefield intelligence in real time. [...] An Anduril spokesperson tells TechCrunch that the product family Meta and Anduril are building is even called EagleEye, which will be an ecosystem of devices. EagleEye is what Luckey named Anduril's first imagined headset in Anduril's pitch deck draft, before his investors convinced him to focus on building software first. After the announcement, Luckey said on X: "It is pretty cool to have everything at our fingertips for this joint effort -- everything I made before Meta acquired Oculus, everything we made together, and everything we did on our own after I was fired."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/0015201/meta-and-anduril-work-on-mixed-reality-headsets-for-the-military?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Billions of stolen cookies are being sold on the dark web and Telegram, with over 1.2 billion containing session data that can grant cybercriminals access to accounts and systems without login credentials, bypassing MFA. The Register reports: More than 93.7 billion of them are currently available for criminals to buy online and of those, between 7-9 percent are active, on average, according to NordVPN's breakdown of stolen cookies by country. Adrianus Warmenhoven, cybersecurity advisor at NordVPN, said: "Cookies may seem harmless, but in the wrong hands, they're digital keys to our most private information. What was designed to enhance convenience is now a growing vulnerability exploited by cybercriminals worldwide. Most people don't realize that a stolen cookie can be just as dangerous as a password, despite being so willing to accept cookies when visiting websites, just to get rid of the prompt at the bottom of the screen. However, once these are intercepted, a cookie can give hackers direct access to all sorts of accounts containing sensitive data, without any login required."

The vast majority of stolen cookies (90.25 percent) contain ID data, used to uniquely identify users and deliver targeted ads. They can also contain data such as names, home and email addresses, locations, passwords, phone numbers, and genders, although these data points are only present in around 0.5 percent of all stolen cookies. The risk of ruinous personal data exposure as a result of cookie theft is therefore pretty slim. Aside from ID cookies, the other statistically significant type of data that these can contain are details of users' sessions. Over 1.2 billion of these are still up for grabs (roughly 6 percent of the total), and these are generally seen as more of a concern.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/0020249/billions-of-cookies-up-for-grabs-as-experts-warn-over-session-security?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A lack of action by big tech firms is enabling the "industrial scale theft" of premium video services, especially live sport, a new report says. The research by Enders Analysis accuses Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft of "ambivalence and inertia" over a problem it says costs broadcasters revenue and puts users at an increased risk of cyber-crime. Gareth Sutcliffe and Ollie Meir, who authored the research, described the Amazon Fire Stick -- which they argue is the device many people use to access illegal streams -- as "a piracy enabler." [...] The device plugs into TVs and gives the viewer thousands of options to watch programs from legitimate services including the BBC iPlayer and Netflix. They are also being used to access illegal streams, particularly of live sport.

In November last year, a Liverpool man who sold Fire Stick devices he reconfigured to allow people to illegally stream Premier League football matches was jailed. After uploading the unauthorized services on the Amazon product, he advertised them on Facebook. Another man from Liverpool was given a two-year suspended sentence last year after modifying fire sticks and selling them on Facebook and WhatsApp. According to data for the first quarter of this year, provided to Enders by Sky, 59% of people in UK who said they had watched pirated material in the last year while using a physical device said they had used a Amazon fire product. The Enders report says the fire stick enables "billions of dollars in piracy" overall. [...]

The researchers also pointed to the role played by the "continued depreciation" of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems, particularly those from Google and Microsoft. This technology enables high quality streaming of premium content to devices. Two of the big players are Microsoft's PlayReady and Google's Widevine. The authors argue the architecture of the DRM is largely unchanged, and due to a lack of maintenance by the big tech companies, PlayReady and Widevine "are now compromised across various security levels." Mr Sutcliffe and Mr Meir said this has had "a seismic impact across the industry, and ultimately given piracy the upper hand by enabling theft of the highest quality content." They added: "Over twenty years since launch, the DRM solutions provided by Google and Microsoft are in steep decline. A complete overhaul of the technology architecture, licensing, and support model is needed. Lack of engagement with content owners indicates this a low priority."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/0029226/football-and-other-premium-tv-being-pirated-at-industrial-scale?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Artificial intelligence could soon outpace Bitcoin mining in energy consumption, according to Alex de Vries-Gao, a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam's Institute for Environmental Studies. His research estimates that by the end of 2025, AI could account for nearly half of all electricity used by data centers worldwide -- raising significant concerns about its impact on global climate goals.

"While companies like Google and Microsoft disclose total emissions, few provide transparency on how much of that is driven specifically by AI," notes DIGIT. To fill this gap, de Vries-Gao employed a triangulation method combining chip production data, corporate disclosures, and industry analyst estimates to map AI's growing energy footprint.

His analysis suggests that specialized AI hardware could consume between 46 and 82 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025 -- comparable to the annual energy usage of countries like Switzerland. Drawing on supply chain data, the study estimates that millions of AI accelerators from NVIDIA and AMD were produced between 2023 and 2024, with a potential combined power demand exceeding 12 gigawatts (GW). A detailed explanation of his methodology is available in his commentary published in Joule.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/0049238/ai-could-consume-more-power-than-bitcoin-by-the-end-of-2025?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A five-year study by Wageningen University and the German Primate Research Center found that wild chimpanzees in Guinea-Bissau repeatedly strike stones against trees, presumably as a form of communication. Phys.Org reports: Over the course of a five-year field study, the research team collected video footage at five distinct locations within a nature reserve in Guinea-Bissau. This was made possible through the use of camera traps and with essential support from local field guides. In specific areas, a striking behavioral pattern was observed: adult male chimpanzees repeatedly struck stones against tree trunks, resulting in characteristic piles of stones at the base of these trees. [...]

The observations point to cultural transmission. Young chimpanzees adopt the behavior from older group members, indicating that it is learned socially rather than genetically inherited. Marc Naguib, Professor of Behavioral Ecology, underscores the broader significance of the discovery: "It illustrates that culture is not unique to humans and that such behaviors need to be considered also in nature conservation." The study is published in the journal Biology Letters.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/010235/five-year-study-suggests-chimpanzees-strike-stones-against-trees-as-form-of-communication?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SiliconANGLE: Hugging Face has open-sourced the blueprints of two internally developed robots called HopeJR and Reachy Mini. The company debuted the machines on Thursday. Hugging Face is backed by more than $390 million in funding from Nvidia Corp., IBM Corp. and other investors. It operates a GitHub-like platform for sharing open-source artificial intelligence projects. It says its platform hosts more than 1 million AI models, hundreds of thousands of datasets and various other technical assets.

The company started prioritizing robotics last year after launching LeRobot, a section of its platform dedicated to autonomous machines. The portal provides access to AI models for powering robots and datasets that can be used to train those models. Hugging Face released its first hardware blueprint, a robotic arm design called the SO-100, late last year. The SO-100 was developed in partnership with a startup called The Robot Studio. Hugging Face also collaborated with the company on the HopeJR, the first new robot that debuted this week. According to TechCrunch, it's a humanoid robot that can perform 66 movements including walking.

HopeJR is equipped with a pair of robotic arms that can be remotely controlled by a human using a pair of specialized, chip-equipped gloves. HopeJR's arms replicate the movements made by the wearer of the gloves. A demo video shared by Hugging Face showed that the robot can shake hands, point to a specific text snippet on a piece of paper and perform other tasks. Hugging Face's other new robot, the Reachy Mini, likewise features an open-source design. It's based on technology that the company obtained through the acquisition of a venture-backed startup called Pollen Robotics earlier this year. Reachy Mini is a turtle-like robot that comes in a rectangular case. Its main mechanical feature is a retractable neck that allows it to follow the user with its head or withdraw into the case. This case, which is stationary, is compact and lightweight enough to be placed on a desk. Hugging Face will offer pre-assembled versions of its open-source Reach Mini and HopeJR robots for $250 and $3,000, with the first units starting to ship by the end of the year.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/015237/hugging-face-introduces-two-open-source-robot-designs?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"More than 200 climate and weather scientists from across the U.S. are taking part in a marathon livestream on YouTube," according to this report from Space.com. For 100 hours (that started Wednesday) they're sharing their scientific work and answering questions from viewers, "to prove the value of climate science," according to the article.

The event is being stated in protest of recent government funding cuts at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States Geological Survey, and the National Science Foundation. (The event began with "scientists documenting their last few hours at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies as the office was shuttered.")
The marathon stream features mini-lectures, panels and question-and-answer sessions with hundreds of scientists, each speaking in their capacity as private citizens rather than on behalf of any institution. These include talks from former National Weather Service directors, Britney Schmidt, a groundbreaking glacier researcher, and legendary meteorologist John Morales.

In its first 30 hours, the stream got over 77,000 views.

Ultimately, the goal of the event is to give members of the public the chance to learn more about meteorology and climate science in an informal setting — and for free. "We really felt like the American public deserves to know what we do," Duffy said. However, many of the speakers and organizers also hope the transference of this knowledge will spur people to take action. The event's website features a link to 5 Calls, an organization that makes it easy for folks to contact their representatives in Congress about the importance of funding climate and weather research.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/0856253/why-200-us-climate-scientists-are-hosting-a-100-hour-youtube-livestream?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Thursday Anthropic's CEO/cofounder Dario Amodei again warned unemployed could spike 10 to 20% within the next five years as AI potentially eliminated half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.

But CNN's senior business writer dismisses that as "all part of the AI hype machine," pointing out that Amodei "didn't cite any research or evidence for that 50% estimate."

And that was just one of many of the wild claims he made that are increasingly part of a Silicon Valley script: AI will fix everything, but first it has to ruin everything. Why? Just trust us.
In this as-yet fictional world, "cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don't have jobs," Amodei told Axios, repeating one of the industry's favorite unfalsifiable claims about a disease-free utopia on the horizon, courtesy of AI. But how will the US economy, in particular, grow so robustly when the jobless masses can't afford to buy anything? Amodei didn't say... Anyway. The point is, Amodei is a salesman, and it's in his interest to make his product appear inevitable and so powerful it's scary. Axios framed Amodei's economic prediction as a "white-collar bloodbath."

Even some AI optimists were put off by Amodei's stark characterization. "Someone needs to remind the CEO that at one point there were more than (2 million) secretaries. There were also separate employees to do in office dictation," wrote tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban on Bluesky. "They were the original white collar displacements. New companies with new jobs will come from AI and increase TOTAL employment."

Little of what Amodei told Axios was new, but it was calibrated to sound just outrageous enough to draw attention to Anthropic's work, days after it released a major model update to its Claude chatbot, one of the top rivals to OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Amodei told CNN Thursday this great societal change would be driven by how incredibly fast AI technology is getting better and better — and that the AI boom "is bigger and it's broader and it's moving faster than anything has before...!"

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/0439205/cnn-challenges-claim-ai-will-eliminate-half-of-white-collar-jobs-calls-it-part-of-the-ai-hype-machine?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"We've officially entered the age of watching robots clobber each other in fighting rings," writes Vice.com.

A kick-boxing competition was staged Sunday in Hangzhou, China using four robots from Unitree Robotics, reports Futurism. (The robots were named "AI Strategist", "Silk Artisan", "Armored Mulan", and "Energy Guardian".) "However, the robots weren't acting autonomously just yet, as they were being remotely controlled by human operator teams."

Although those ringside human controllers used quick voice commands, according to the South China Morning Post:
Unlike typical remote-controlled toys, handling Unitree's G1 robots entails "a whole set of motion-control algorithms powered by large [artificial intelligence] models", said Liu Tai, deputy chief engineer at China Telecommunication Technology Labs, which is under research institute China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

More from Vice:

The G1 robots are just over 4 feet tall [130 cm] and weigh around 77 pounds [35 kg]. They wear gloves. They have headgear. They throw jabs, uppercuts, and surprisingly sharp kicks... One match even ended in a proper knockout when a robot stayed down for more than eight seconds. The fights ran three rounds and were scored based on clean hits to the head and torso, just like standard kickboxing...

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

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/0727206/china-just-held-the-first-ever-humanoid-robot-fight-night?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

In March an executive order directed America's treasury secretary to create two stockpiles of crypto assets (to accompany already-existing "strategic reserves"of gold and foreign currencies). And the Washington Post notes these new stockpiles would include "cryptocurrency seized by federal agencies in criminal or civil proceedings." But how big would America's "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve" be — and what other cryptocurrencies would the U.S. government hold in its "Digital Asset Stockpile"?
"New data on what crypto cash the U.S. government has seized may now provide some answers.

It suggests the crypto reserves will together hold more than $21 billion in cryptocurrency... The stockpile will be funded with whatever crypto assets the Treasury holds other than bitcoin, leaving the stockpile's composition to be largely determined by a mixture of chance and criminal conduct. That unconventional method for selecting government financial holdings had the benefit of making the reserves cost-neutral for the taxpayer.

It also provided a way to estimate what exactly might go into the two pools before results are released from an official accounting of U.S. crypto holdings that is underway.Because government seizures are disclosed in court documents, news releases and other sources, crypto-tracking firms can use those notices to monitor which digital assets the U.S. government holds. Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics firm, reviewed cryptocurrency wallets that appear to be associated with the U.S. government for The Washington Post. The company estimated how much bitcoin it holds, and the other crypto tokens in its top 20 digital holdings as of May 13, by tracking transactions involving those wallets.

The United States' top 20 crypto holdings according to Chainalysis are worth about $20.9 billion as of 3 p.m. Eastern on May 28, with $20.4 billion in bitcoin and about $493 million in other digital assets. It has been scooped up from crimes such as stolen funds, scams and sales on dark net markets. Those estimates put the U.S. government's top crypto holdings at less than the approximately $25 billion worth of oil held in the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Their value is nearly double the Fed's listing for U.S. gold holdings, although that figure uses outdated pricing and would be over $850 billion at current prices...

The crypto tokens headed for the U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile according to the Chainalysis list include ethereum, the world's second-largest digital asset, and a string of other crypto tokens with punier name recognition. They include derivatives of bitcoin and ethereum that mirror those cryptocurrencies' prices, several stable coins designed to be pegged in value to the U.S. dollar, and 10 tokens tied to specific companies, including the cryptocurrency exchanges FTX, which imploded in 2022 after defrauding customers, and Binance.
Two U.S. states have already passed legislation creating their own cryptocurrency reserve funds, the article points out. But ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin complained to the Post in March that crypto's "original spirit...is about counterbalancing power" — including government and corporate power, and getting too close to "one particular government team" could conflict with its mission of decentralization and openness. And he's not the only one concerned:

Austin Campbell, a professor at New York University's business school and a principal at crypto advisory firm Zero Knowledge, sees hypocrisy in crypto enthusiasts cheering the government's strategic reserves. The bitcoin community in particular "has historically been about freedom from sovereign interference," he said.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/0636246/whats-in-the-us-governments-new-strategic-reserve-of-seized-crytocurrencies?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Apple's end-to-end iCloud encryption product ("Advanced Data Protection") was famously removed in the U.K. after a government order demanded backdoors for accessing user data.

So now a Google software engineer wants to build an open source version of Advanced Data Protection for everyone. "We need to take action now to protect users..." they write (as long-time Slashdot reader WaywardGeek). "The whole world would be able to use it for free, protecting backups, passwords, message history, and more, if we can get existing applications to talk to the new data protection service."

"I helped build Google's Advanced Data Protection (Google Cloud Key VaultService) in 2018, and Google is way ahead of Apple in this area. I know exactly how to build it and can have it done in spare time in a few weeks, at least server-side... This would be a distributed trust based system, so I need folks willing to run the protection service. I'll run mine on a Raspberry PI...

The scheme splits a secret among N protection servers, and when it is time to recover the secret, which is basically an encryption key, they must be able to get key shares from T of the original N servers. This uses a distributed oblivious pseudo random function algorithm, which is very simple.

In plain English, it provides nation-state resistance to secret back doors, and eliminates secret mass surveillance, at least when it comes to data backed up to the cloud... The UK and similarly confused governments will need to negotiate with operators in multiple countries to get access to any given users's keys. There are cases where rational folks would agree to hand over that data, and I hope we can end the encryption wars and develop sane policies that protect user data while offering a compromise where lives can be saved.
"I've got the algorithms and server-side covered," according to their original submission. "However, I need help." Specifically...

Running protection servers. "This is a T-of-N scheme, where users will need say 9 of 15 nodes to be available to recover their backups."Android client app. "And preferably tight integration with the platform as an alternate backup service."An iOS client app. (With the same tight integration with the platform as an alternate backup service.)Authentication. "Users should register and login before they can use any of their limited guesses to their phone-unlock secret."
"Are you up for this challenge? Are you ready to plunge into this with me?"

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/1859206/help-wanted-to-build-an-open-source-advanced-data-protection-for-everyone?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A U.S. federal judge has decided that free-speech protections in the First Amendment "don't shield an AI company from a lawsuit," reports Legal Newsline.
The suit is against Character.AI (a company reportedly valued at $1 billion with 20 million users)

Judge Anne C. Conway of the Middle District of Florida denied several motions by defendants Character Technologies and founders Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the mother of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III. Setzer killed himself with a gun in February of last year after interacting for months with Character.AI chatbots imitating fictitious characters from the Game of Thrones franchise, according to the lawsuit filed by Sewell's mother, Megan Garcia.

"... Defendants fail to articulate why words strung together by (Large Language Models, or LLMs, trained in engaging in open dialog with online users) are speech," Conway said in her May 21 opinion. "... The court is not prepared to hold that Character.AI's output is speech."

Character.AI's spokesperson told Legal Newsline they've now launched safety features (including an under-18 LLM, filter Characters, time-spent notifications and "updated prominent disclaimers" (as well as a "parental insights" feature). "The company also said it has put in place protections to detect and prevent dialog about self-harm. That may include a pop-up message directing users to the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, according to Character.AI."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/1940219/judge-rejects-claim-ai-chatbots-protected-by-first-amendment-in-teen-suicide-lawsuit?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Journalists from Der Spiegel and Danwatch were able to use proxy servers in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia to circumvent network restrictions and access documents about Russia's nuclear weapon sites, reports Cybernews.com.

"Data, including building plans, diagrams, equipment, and other schematics, is accessible to anyone in the public procurement database."

Journalists from Danwatch and Der Spiegel scraped and analyzed over two million documents from the public procurement database, which exposed Russian nuclear facilities, including their layout, in great detail. The investigation unveils that European companies participate in modernizing them. According to the exclusive Der Spiegel report, Russian procurement documents expose some of the world's most secret construction sites. "It even contains floor plans and infrastructure details for nuclear weapons silos," the report reads.

Some details from the Amsterdam-based Moscow Times:
Among the leaked materials are construction plans, security system diagrams and details of wall signage inside the facilities, with messages like "Stop! Turn around! Forbidden zone!," "The Military Oath" and "Rules for shoe care." Details extend to power grids, IT systems, alarm configurations, sensor placements and reinforced structures designed to withstand external threats...
"Material like this is the ultimate intelligence," said Philip Ingram, a former colonel in the British Army's intelligence corps. "If you can understand how the electricity is conducted or where the water comes from, and you can see how the different things are connected in the systems, then you can identify strengths and weaknesses and find a weak point to attack."

Apparently Russian defense officials were making public procurement notices for their construction projects — and then attaching sensitive documents to those public notices...

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/2033201/russian-nuclear-site-blueprints-exposed-in-public-procurement-database?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.