Disney "cloned" Dwayne Johnson when filming a live-action Moana, reports the Wall Street Journal, using an AI process that they were ultimately afraid to use:

Under the plan they devised, Johnson's similarly buff cousin Tanoai Reed — who is 6-foot-3 and 250 pounds — would fill in as a body double for a small number of shots. Disney would work with AI company Metaphysic to create deepfakes of Johnson's face that could be layered on top of Reed's performance in the footage — a "digital double" that effectively allowed Johnson to be in two places at once... Johnson approved the plan, but the use of a new technology had Disney attorneys hammering out details over how it could be deployed, what security precautions would protect the data and a host of other concerns. They also worried that the studio ultimately couldn't claim ownership over every element of the film if AI generated parts of it, people involved in the negotiations said. Disney and Metaphysic spent 18 months negotiating on and off over the terms of the contract and work on the digital double. But none of the footage will be in the final film when it's released next summer...

Interviews with more than 20 current and former employees and partners present an entertainment giant torn between the inevitability of AI's advance and concerns about how to use it. Progress has at times been slowed by bureaucracy and hand-wringing over the company's social contract with its fans, not to mention its legal contract with unions representing actors, writers and other creative partners... For Disney, protecting its characters and stories while also embracing new AI technology is key. "We have been around for 100 years and we intend to be around for the next 100 years," said the company's legal chief, Horacio Gutierrez, in an interview. "AI will be transformative, but it doesn't need to be lawless...." [As recently as June, a Disney/Comcast Universal lawsuit had argued that Midjourney "is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism."]

Concerns about bad publicity were a big reason that Disney scrapped a plan to use AI in Tron: Ares — a movie set for release in October about an AI-generated soldier entering the real world. Since the movie is about artificial intelligence, executives pitched the idea of actually incorporating AI into one of the characters... as a buzzy marketing strategy, according to people familiar with the matter. A writer would provide context on the animated character — a sidekick to Jeff Bridges' lead role named Bit — to a generative AI program. Then on screen, the AI program, voiced by an actor, would respond to questions as Bit as cameras rolled. But with negotiations with unions representing writers and actors over contracts happening at the same time, Disney dismissed the idea, and executives internally were told that the company couldn't risk the bad publicity, the people said...

Disney's own history speaks to how studios have navigated technological crossroads before. When Disney hired Pixar to produce a handful of graphic images for its 1989 hit The Little Mermaid, executives kept the incorporation a secret, fearing backlash from fans if they learned that not every frame of the animated film had been hand-drawn. Such knowledge, executives feared, might "take away the magic."

Disney invested $1.5 billion in Fortnite creator Epic Games, acccording to the article, and is planning a world in Fortnite where gamers can interact with Marvel superheroes and creatures from Avatar. But "an experiment to allow gamers to interact with an AI-generated Darth Vader was fraught. Within minutes of launching the AI bot, gamers had figured out a way to make it curse in James Earl Jones's signature baritone." (Though Epic patched the workaround within 30 minutes.)
But the article spells out another concern for Disney executives. "If a Fortnite gamer creates a Darth Vader and Spider-Man dance that goes viral on YouTube, who owns that dance?

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/08/04/0432213/disney-struggles-with-how-to-use-ai---while-retaining-copyrights-and-avoiding-legal-issues?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликован четвёртый выпуск среды рабочего стола Orbitiny Desktop, написанной с нуля с использованием фреймворка Qt. Проект пытается совместить некоторые инновационные идеи, которые раньше не встречались в пользовательских окружениях, с традиционными элементами, такими как панель, меню и размещение пиктограмм на рабочем столе. Код написан на языке C++ и распространяется под лицензией GPL.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63674

Проект Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), предоставляющий денежные вознаграждения за сообщения о неисправленных уязвимостях, анонсировал проведение соревнований Pwn2Own Ireland 2025, которые состоятся в середине октября в Ирландии. Участникам предложено продемонстрирвоать эксплоиты для ранее неизвестных уязвимостей (0-day) в смартфонах, мессенджерах, беспроводных точках доступа, устройствах для умного дома, принтерах, сетевых хранилищах, системах видеонаблюдения и устройствах виртуальной /дополненной реальности. Атака должна быть проведена на самые свежие программы и операционные системы со всеми доступными обновлениями и в конфигурации по умолчанию.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63673

Napster's latest AI pivot "is the latest in a series of attempts by various owners to ride its brand cachet during emerging tech waves," Fast Company reported in July.
In March, it sold for $207 million to Infinite Reality, an immersive digital media and e-commerce company, which also rebranded as Napster last month. Since 2020, other owners have included a British VR music startup (to create VR concerts) and two crypto-focused companies that bought it to anchor a Web3 music platform. Napster's launch follows a growing number of attempts to drive AI adoption beyond smartphones and laptops.

And tonight the Washington Post re-visited the legacy of Napster's original mp3-sharing model, arguing Napster "inspired successive generations of entrepreneurs to risk flouting the law so they could grow enough to get the laws changed to suit them, including Airbnb and Uber."

"Napster to me embodies the idea that it is better to seek forgiveness than permission," said Mark Lemley, director of Stanford Law School's Program in Law, Science & Technology. "It didn't work out well for Napster or for many of the others who got sued, but it worked out very well for everyone else — users, and eventually the content industry, too, which is making record profits...." [Napster co-founder Sean] Parker later advised Spotify, and Napster marketing chief Oliver Schusser is now Apple's vice president for music.

Although many users saw Napster as an extension of rock-and-roll rebellion, that was not the company's real plan. First Fanning's majority-owning uncle, and then venture capital firm Hummer Winblad, wanted the start-up to leverage its knowledge of individual music consumers to make lucrative deals with the labels, according to internal documents this reporter found in researching a book on Napster. They warned that if no agreement were reached and Napster failed, more decentralized pirate services would take the audience and offer the labels nothing.

But settlement talks failed. The litigation blitz also took down a Napster competitor called Scour, which a young Travis Kalanick had joined shortly after its founding. Kalanick later created Uber, dedicated to overthrowing taxi regulations.

The article concludes that "Now it is Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google, among the largest companies in the world, bankrolling the consumption of all media.

"They, too, have absorbed Napster's lessons in realpolitik, namely to build it first and hope the regulators will either yield or catch up."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/08/04/0146202/how-napster-inspired-a-generation-of-rule-breaking-entrepreneurs?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

NBC News reports that in the U.S., many recent graduates looking to enter the labor force "are painting a dire picture of their job search."

NBC News asked people who recently finished technical school, college or graduate school how their job application process was going, and in more than 100 responses, the graduates described months spent searching for a job, hundreds of applications and zero responses from employers — even with degrees once thought to be in high demand, like computer science or engineering.

Some said they struggled to get an hourly retail position or are making salaries well below what they had been expecting in fields they hadn't planned to work in. "It was very frustrating," said Jensen Kornfeind, who graduated this spring from Temple University with a degree in international trade. "Out of 70-plus job applications, I had three job interviews, and out of those three, I got ghosted from two of them."

The national economic data backs up their experience. The unemployment rate among recent graduates has been increasing this year to an average of 5.3%, compared to around 4% for the labor force as a whole, making it one of the toughest job markets for recent graduates since 2015, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released Friday. "Recent college graduates are on the margin of the labor market, and so they're the first to feel when the labor market slows and hiring slows," said Jaison Abel, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Across the economy, hiring in recent months has ground to its slowest pace since the start of the pandemic, with employers adding just 73,000 jobs in July, according to data released Friday... Tech workers have been some of the hardest hit in a slowing job market, with more than 400 employers including Meta, Intel and Cisco announcing more than 130,000 jobs cut in 2025, according to tech job site TrueUp.

The article cites an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab who believes early adoption of AI "is also likely driving some of the cuts and leading employers to rethink hiring plans in anticipation of AI's future role." So besides federal policy changes, the article blames "the emergence of AI, which some companies have said they are using to replace certain entry-level jobs, like those in customer support or basic software development."
Seven months after graduating, one CS major told NBC News he'd applied for 100 jobs, and got one job offer — for the 4 a.m. shift at Starbucks.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/08/04/0048214/a-black-hole-americas-new-graduates-discover-a-dismal-job-market?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"Hyundai sold 79,543 vehicles in the U.S. last month," reports the EV news site Electrek — Hyundai's best July ever, and 15% higher than last year.

"The growth was mainly driven by electrified vehicles, including EVs and hybrids..."

Hyundai said that electrified vehicle sales "reached new heights," after climbing 50% compared to July 2024. Electrified vehicles accounted for nearly a third (32%) of Hyundai's retail sales in July 2025, with several popular nameplates setting new all-time monthly sales records, including the new IONIQ 5.
Hyundai IONIQ 5 sales surged 71% in July with 5,818 units sold. Through the first seven months of 2025, Hyundai has now sold nearly 25,000 IONIQ 5 models in the US. Hyundai's electric SUV remains one of the top-selling EVs in the US, boasting a long driving range, ultra-fast charging capabilities, advanced technology, and a stylish design. After upgrading it for the 2025 model year, the IONIQ 5 now features a range of up to 318 miles, an upgraded infotainment system, and a built-in NACS port, allowing you to charge at Tesla Superchargers... Hyundai is also offering a complimentary ChargePoint L2 home EV charger with the purchase or lease of a new 2025 IONIQ 5 or 2026 IONIQ 9.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/03/2339217/hyundais-electric-car-sales-surged-50-over-july-2024?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Started in 1984, it's been described as the internet's longest-running contest. And yesterday 2025's International Obfuscated C Code Contest concluded — with 23 new winners announced in a special four-and-a-half-hour livestreamed ceremony!
Programmers submitted their funniest programs showcasing C's unusual/obscure subtleties while having some fun. (And demonstrating the importance of clarity and style with some very bad examples...) Among this year's winners were an OpenRISC 32-bit CPU emulator, a virtual machine capable of running Doom, and some kind of salmon recipe that makes clever use of C's U"string" literal prefix...

But yes, every entry's source code is ridiculously obfuscated. ("Before you set off on your adventure to decode this program's logic, make sure you have enough food, ammo, clothes, oxen, and programming supplies," read the judge's remarks on the winner of this year's "diabolical logistics" prize. "You'll be driving for 2170 miles through a wild wilderness inspired by Oregon Trail...") And one entrant also struggled mightily in adapting a rough port of their program's old Atari 2600 version, but was never gonna give it up...

And long-time Slashdot reader achowe has submitted winning entries in four different decades (starting in 1991 and continuing through 2024)...
Including a 2004 award for the best abuse of the contest's guidelines. ("We are not exactly sure how many organisations will be upset with this entry, but we are considering starting an IOCCC standards body just to reign in the likes of Mr Howe....")

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/03/2216259/winners-announced-in-2025s-international-obfuscated-c-code-competition?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader ffkom writes: The air around you mostly consists of nitrogen [78%]. And in that air exist happy little monogamous pairs of two nitrogen atoms per molecule, also known as N2. Researchers from the University of Giessen, Germany, recently managed to synthesize N6 molecules, "the first, to our knowledge, experimentally realized neutral molecular nitrogen allotrope beyond N2 that exhibits unexpected stability."

And these appear to be pretty angry little molecules, as they detonate at more than twice the energy density than good old TNT:

A kiloton of N6 is 1.19×10**7mol, which can release an energy of 2.20×109kcal (9.21terajoules) based on the enthalpy. Considering that the standard kiloton TNT equivalent is 4.184terajoules, N6 can release 2.2 times the energy of TNT of the same weight. On the basis of the documented TNT equivalent based on weight for HMX (1.15) and RDX (1.15), N6 can release 1.9 times the energy of HMX or RDX with the same weight.

In interviews the researchers contemplated the possibility of using N6 as rocket fuel, given its superior energy density and that its reaction product is just N2, so basically air, but no smoke, no CO2 or other potentially harmful substances.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/08/03/2042230/n6-hexanitrogen-synthesized-for-the-first-time---twice-as-energy-dense-as-tnt?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликованы исходные тексты работ, победивших в двадцать восьмом конкурсе IOCCC (International Obfuscated C Code Contest), участникам которого предлагалось подготовить наиболее запутанный и трудноразбираемый код на языке Си. 28 конкурс проведён после четырёхлетнего перерыва и примечателен разрешением использовать кодировку UTF-8 в коде.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63668

IBM's legendary Model M keyboard was sturdy and solid. But "What would happen if you took the classic layout and look of the Model M and rebuilt it with modern mechanical guts?" asks long-time Slashdot reader uninet.

Writing for the long-running tech blog Open for Business , they review a new wireless keyboard from Vortex that was clearly inspired by the Model M:

The result is a unique keyboard with one foot in two different decades... Let's call it the Vortex M for simplicity's sake.

I first became aware of it on a Facebook ad and was immediately fascinated. It looked so close to the original Model M, I wondered if someone else had gotten access to an original mold and was trying Unicomp's game. No, they've just managed to copy the aesthetic to a nearly uncanny level... The Vortex M eschews the normal eye candy we expect on modern keyboards and attempts the closest duplication of IBM's staid early PC design sensibility I can imagine. Off-white, rugged and absolutely no frills of lighting. If you're looking for cutesy, forget it.
The keyboard's casing has the same highly textured plastic that looks and feels instantly familiar to anyone who spent too many hours interacting with early PCs. Model M to a tee. The keycaps likewise look the part... The Vortex M looks like a Model M. Its build quality feels like a Model M. But one key press and it becomes clear this is a different beast. Underneath the Model M-styled skin, Vortex's keyboard is a very modern design — everything the Unicomp is not. For our test, Vortex provided a keyboard with Cherry MX Blues, the classic clicky option the company and I both thought would best match up against Model M's buckling springs...

Vortex's product configurator offers a variety of common and less common Cherry and Gateron options, if you want to get a different sort of feel in lieu of the clicky I tested. This is possible with an MX switch-style keyboard and impossible with buckling springs with their one option of bold clicky. Not only can this be done when ordering, but also later on, thanks to hot swap switches that allow changes without soldering. Following the modern premium board theme, Vortex paired high end switches with a gasket mount and foam padding. The combination provides a solid feeling, sound dampened typing experience. Ironically, though, for a keyboard that apes the design of perhaps the loudest keyboard on the market today, the Vortex M is (relatively) quiet even with the clicky Blues on tap...

The review's highlights:

"The keyboard is exquisitely crafted to look like the IBM original... "
"The Vortex M supports connecting to three different devices via Bluetooth, along with a 2.4 GHz receiver and a USB Type-C wired connection. "
There's a full complement of media hot keys — "including an emoji key ala recent Macs. "
"For repetitive tasks, the keyboard is programmable with macros... And unlike Unicomp's boards, Vortex's can switch between PC and Mac layouts with the press of a hotkey."
The keyboard uses AA batteries rather than having a built-in rechargeable battery

The keyboard ultimately gave the reviewer some cognitive dissonance. "How am I typing on a Model M and not making a racket...?"
"Pricing varies based on options, but as tested, it clocked in at $154. That's the low end of the 'premium' market and this is an exceptional board for that price."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/08/03/1953207/vortexs-wireless-take-on-the-model-m-keyboard-cover-band-or-new-legend?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

America's nonprofit College Board lets high school students take college-level classes — including a computer programming course that culminates with a 90-minute test. But students did better on questions about If-Then statements than they did on questions about arrays, according to the head of the program. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp explains:
Students exhibited "strong performance on primitive types, Boolean expressions, and If statements; 44% of students earned 7-8 of these 8 points," says program head Trevor Packard. But students were challenged by "questions on Arrays, ArrayLists, and 2D Arrays; 17% of students earned 11-12 of these 12 points."

"The most challenging AP Computer Science A free-response question was #4, the 2D array number puzzle; 19% of students earned 8-9 of the 9 points possible."
You can see that question here. ("You will write the constructor and one method of the SumOrSameGame class... Array elements are initialized with random integers between 1 and 9, inclusive, each with an equal chance of being assigned to each element of puzzle...") Although to be fair, it was the last question on the test — appearing on page 16 — so maybe some students just didn't get to it.

theodp shares a sample Java solution and one in Excel VBA solution (which includes a visual presentation).

There's tests in 38 subjects — but CS and Statistics are the subjects where the highest number of students earned the test's lowest-possible score (1 out of 5). That end of the graph also includes notoriously difficult subjects like Latin, Japanese Language, and Physics.

There's also a table showing scores for the last 23 years, with fewer than 67% of students achieving a passing grade (3+) for the first 11 years. But in 2013 and 2017, more than 67% of students achieved that passsing grade, and the percentage has stayed above that line ever since (except for 2021), vascillating between 67% and 70.4%.

2018: 67.8%
2019: 69.6%
2020: 70.4%
2021: 65.1%
2022: 67.6%
2023: 68.0%
2024: 67.2%
2025: 67.0%

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/03/0351204/the-toughest-programming-question-for-high-school-students-on-this-years-cs-exam-arrays?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The Chinese government "has embarked on an all-out drive to transform the technology from a remote concept to a newfangled reality, with applications on factory floors and in hospitals and government offices..." reports the Washington Post.

"[E]xperts say Beijing is pursuing an alternative playbook in an attempt to bridge the gap" with America: "aggressively pushing for the adoption of AI across the government and private sector."

DeepSeek has been put to work over the last six months on a wide variety of government tasks. Procurement documents show military hospitals in Shaanxi and Guangxi provinces specifically requesting DeepSeek to build online consultation and health record systems. Local government websites describe state organs using DeepSeek for things like diverting calls from the public and streamlining police work. DeepSeek helps "quickly discover case clues and predict crime trends," which "greatly improves the accuracy and timeliness of crime fighting," a city government in China's Inner Mongolia region explained in a February social media post. Anti-corruption investigations — long a priority for Chinese leader Xi Jinping — are another frequent DeepSeek application, in which models are deployed to comb through dry spreadsheets to find suspicious irregularities. In April, China's main anti-graft agency even included a book called "Efficiently Using DeepSeek" on its official book recommendation list...

Alfred Wu, an expert on China's public governance at the National University of Singapore, said Beijing has disseminated a "top-down" directive to local governments to use AI. This is motivated, Wu said, by a desire to improve China's AI prowess amid a fierce rivalry with Washington by providing models access to vast stores of government data.

But not everyone is convinced that China has the winning hand, even as it attempts to push AI application nationwide. For one, China's sluggish economy will impact the AI industry's ability to grow and access funding, said Scott Singer [an expert on China's AI sector at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was attending the conference]... Others point out that local governments trumpeting their usage of DeepSeek is more about signaling than real technology uptake. Shen Yang, a professor at Tsinghua University's school of artificial intelligence, said DeepSeek is not being used at scale in anti-corruption work, for example, because the cases involve sensitive information and deploying new tools in these investigations requires long and complex approval processes.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/08/02/0243223/chinas-government-pushes-real-world-ai-use-to-jumpstart-its-adoption?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Microsoft's AI coding assistant "GitHub Copilot" has now had 20 million "all-time users," a GitHub spokesperson told TechCrunch.

That means 5 million people have tried out GitHub Copilot for the first time in the last three months — the company reported in April the tool had reached 15 million users.
Microsoft and GitHub don't report how many of these 20 million people have continued to use the AI coding tool on a monthly or daily basis — though those metrics are likely far lower.
Microsoft also reported that GitHub Copilot, which is among the most popular AI coding tools offered today, is used by 90% of the Fortune 100. The product's growth among enterprise customers has also grown about 75% compared to last quarter, according to the company... In 2024, Nadella said GitHub Copilot was a larger business than all of GitHub was when Microsoft acquired it in 2018. In the year since, it seems GitHub Copilot's growth rate has continued in a positive direction.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/03/037202/5-million-people-tried-microsofts-ai-coding-tool-github-copilot-in-the-last-3-months?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

убрал все дубли - теперь должно быть правильно

An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget:

Nintendo sold 5.82 million Switch 2s in less than four weeks and is on pace to hit its target of 15 million units by April 2026, the company said in its latest earnings report. If that pans out, the Switch 2 would easily outsell the original Switch, which took a full year to hit that same 15 million sales number...

Despite those superb sales figures, Nintendo says demand is outstripping supply in many regions and promises to boost production as soon as possible. There's some insight into Nintendo's available inventory elsewhere in the earnings report. The 5.82 million number counts sales up to June 30, and the company says that as of July 25, it had sold through "more than 6 million" consoles. That's not the clearest figure, but it definitely shows sales cratered in July despite consistent demand.
Switch 2 software sales were also strong with 8.67 million units sold...

"Nintendo had a very good quarter, more than doubling revenue over last year..."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/08/03/0357231/nintendo-has-sold-over-6-million-switch-2s-but-still-cant-keep-up-with-demand?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"Did Craigslist drive the downfall of print classifieds?" That's the question asked in a new article from the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies:

"I've always wondered about that," Newmark said in a Zoom interview July 1. "I think it had an effect." But portraying him and the list as torpedoing an otherwise great business model is way overblown, he still believes. Citing an influential essay by Thomas Baekdal, Newmark contends that the root of newspapers' trouble was the loss of readers. "TV hit hard. ... (And) l'm like the folks on 'CSI,' I follow the evidence. That goes back at least to the '60s."
Bad in itself, the loss also took away newspapers' dominant share of local audiences and ability to charge premium classified ad rates. The slide in circulation looks even worse, Baekdal pointed out, when compared to continued increases in the number of households over the years.
Still, Craigslist came to symbolize the shift. Dozens of other vertical digital sites cropped up, before and after, all offering a deadly competitive pairing of an effective and much cheaper service than newspaper classifieds. Even if Craigslist was just one of many, though, it was arguably Newmark who put a face on the massive disruption... By the early 2000s, newspaper executives had a dawning awareness of the business challenge from Craigslist and similar sites. They took minimal action to meet it...

The biggest response was that three big companies — Knight-Ridder, Tribune and Gannett — bought a copycat of Monster called CareerBuilder... By the time newspapers acted, online classifieds had a full head of steam... By 2010, 70% of the newspaper industry's print classified business was gone. Reliable statistics are no longer kept, but the trend continued over the last 15 years... Newspapers continue to do well only with paid obituaries and legal notices, though the latter is now also under threat by digital startups.

The article cites a 2019 analysis from Peter Zollman, whose AIM Group consultancy has followed the classified business for 25 years. "Craigslist has often been blamed for killing newspapers, but that's a gross canard. It just isn't true."
American newspapers stumbled while several well-managed counterparts in places like Scandinavia found ways to prosper, he argued.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/03/0611232/did-craigslist-really-kill-the-newspaper-industry?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"Digital storefront Itch.io is reindexing its free adult games," reports Engadget, "and is talking to its partnered payment processors about plans to gradually reintroduce paid NSFW content..."
In a statement included in the Itch.io update, Stripe said it hasn't closed the door on the possibility of being able to support adult content again in the future. In the meantime, Itch.io says it is talking to its other payment partners about accepting the card payments Stripe is currently no longer able to process.

Itch's founder told the gaming news site Aftermath that it was a notice from Visa that led to the sudden deindexing of so many games. But Aftermath notes that Visa and Mastercard have now "both released statements effectively washing their hands of the situation but also, paradoxically, justifying any actions they might have taken."

- Visa: "When a legally operating merchant faces an elevated risk of illegal activity, we require enhanced safeguards for the banks supporting those merchants..."
- Mastercard: "Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content."

Aftermath's take?

The part where the two companies act as though their hands have been tied by the long arm of the law is, frankly, bullshit. None of the games removed from Steam or Itch were illegal. They depict actions that are perfectly legal in other mediums. To re-quote Mike Stabile, director of policy at the Free Speech Coalition: "The stuff [companies] are talking about is entirely legal. It's legal to have in a book, it's legal to have in a game. They are making decisions based on their brand, based on public pressure from anti-porn groups, and that can be reversed."

Meanwhile, gamers are still pushing back:
It's difficult to say just how many people have spent the past several days tying up the lines of card companies and payment processors, but the movement has made itself visible enough to gain support from larger industry bodies like the Communications Workers of America [the largest communications/media labor union in America] and the International Game Developers Association.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/08/03/0537212/itchio-starts-returning-the-free-games-it-removed-from-its-store?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

TOP10 VISITORS:

[1] 45.135.180.x point=239 web=0 up=20.5MB (67%) <--- yesterlink (10/hr)
[2] PetalBot point=2 web=1013 up=6.0MB (19%) <--- PetalBot
[3] Google point=1 web=208 up=1.4MB (4%) <--- Google
[4] 217.114.158.x point=25 web=0 up=0.9MB (2%) <--- fox (1/hr)
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[10] 51.222.253.x point=0 web=7 up=61KB

TOTAL TRAFFIC: 30MB

Один из участников соревнования UIUCTF 2025, подробно разобрал, как ему удалось выполнить задание, требующее добиться исполнения своего кода на сервере, имея лишь возможность изменения содержимого текста комментария в коде.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63669

Established in 1943 to coordinate America's building of the first atomic bomb, the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico is still "one of the world's largest and most advanced scientific institutions" notes Wikipedia.

And it now has a "National Security AI Office," where senior director Jason Pruet is working to help "prepare for a future in which AI will reshape the landscape of science and security," according to the lab's science and technology magazine 1663. "This year, the Lab invested more in AI-related work than at any point in history..."
Pruet: AI is starting to feel like the next great foundation for scientific progress. Big companies are spending billions on large machines, but the buy-in costs of working at the frontiers of AI are so high that no university has the exascale-class machines needed to run the latest AI models. We're at a place now where we, meaning the government, can revitalize that pact by investing in the infrastructure to study AI for the public good... Part of what we're doing with the Lab's machines, like Venado — which has 2500 GPUs — is giving universities access to that scale of computing. The scale is just completely different. A typical university might have 50 or 100 GPUs.
Right now, for example, we have partnerships with the University of California, the University of Michigan, and many other universities where researchers can tap into this infrastructure. That's something we want to expand on. Having university collaboration will be critical if the Department of Energy is going to have a comprehensive AI program at scale that is focused on national security and energy dominance...

There was a time when I wouldn't have advocated for government investment in AI at the scale we're seeing now. But the weight of the evidence has become overwhelming. Large models — "frontier models" — have shown such extraordinary capabilities with recent advances in areas as diverse as hypothesis generation, mathematics, biological design, and complex multiphysics simulations. The potential for transformative impact is too significant to ignore.
"He no longer views the technology as just a tool, but as a fundamental shift in how scientists approach problems and make discoveries," the article concludes.

"The global race humanity is now in... is about how to harness the technology's potential while mitigating its harms."
Thanks to Slashdot reader rabbitface25 — also a Los Alamo Lab science writer — for sharing his article.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/08/03/0447207/americas-los-alamos-lab-is-now-investing-heavily-in-ai-for-science?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

It's a cultural milestone. Fiverr just released an ad mocking vibe coding.
The video features what its description calls a "clueless entrepreneur" building an app to tell if an avocado is ripe — who soon ends up blissfully singing with an avocado to the tune of the cheesy 1987 song "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now." The avocado sings joyously of "a new app on the rise in a no-code world that's too good to be true" (rhyming that with "So close. Just not tested through...")

"Let them say we're crazy. I don't care about bugs!" the entrepreneur sings back. "Built you in a minute, now I'm so high off this buzz..."

But despite her singing to the overripe avocado that "I don't need a backend if I've got the spark!" and that they can "build this app together, vibe-coding forever. Nothing's going to stop us now!" — the build suddenly fails. (And it turns out that avocado really was overripe...) Fiverr then suggests viewers instead hire one of their experts for building their apps...

The art/design site Creative Bloq acknowledges Fiverr "flip-flopping between scepticism and pro-AI marketing." (They point out a Fiverr ad last November had ended with the tagline "Nobody cares that you use AI! They care about the results — for the best ones higher Fiverr experts who've mastered every digital skill including AI.") But the site calls this new ad "a step in the right direction towards mindful AI usage."

Just like an avocado that looks perfect on the outside, once you inspect the insides, AI-generated code can be deceptively unripe.

Fiverr might be feeling the impact of vibecoding themselves. The freelancing web site saw the company's share price fall over 14% this week, with one Yahoo! Finance site saying this week's quarterly results revealed Fiverr's active buyers dropped 10.9% compared to last year — a decrease of 3.4 million buyers which "overshadowed a 9.8% increase in spending per buyer."

Even when issuing a buy recommendation, Seeking Alpha called it "a short-term rebound play, as the company faces longer-term risks from AI and active buyer churn."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/03/0141234/fiverr-ad-mocks-vibe-coding---with-a-singing-overripe-avocado?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Remember, it's all synthesized "anthropomorphizing". But with that caveat, Science News reports:
In populations of simple software agents (like characters in "The Sims" but much, much simpler), having "guilt" can be a stable strategy that benefits them and increases cooperation, researchers report July 30 in Journal of the Royal Society Interface... When we harm someone, we often feel compelled to pay a penance, perhaps as a signal to others that we won't offend again. This drive for self-punishment can be called guilt, and it's how the researchers programmed it into their agents. The question was whether those that had it would be outcompeted by those that didn't, say Theodor Cimpeanu, a computer scientist at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and colleagues.
Science News spoke to a game-theory lecturer from Australia who points out it's hard to map simulations to real-world situations — and that they end up embodying many assumptions. Here researchers were simulating The Prisoner's Dilemma, programming one AI agent that "felt guilt (lost points) only if it received information that its partner was also paying a guilt price after defecting." And that turned out to be the most successful strategy.

One of the paper's authors then raises the possibility that an evolving population of AIs "could comprehend the cold logic to human warmth."

Thanks to Slashdot reader silverjacket for sharing the article.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/08/02/1921226/would-ai-perform-better-if-we-simulated-guilt?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The women-only app Tea now "faces two class action lawsuits filed in California" in response to a recent breach," reports NPR — even as the company is now boasting it has more than 6.2 million users.

A spokesperson for Tea told the CBC it's "working to identify any users whose personal information was involved" in a breach of 72,000 images (including 13,000 verification photos and images of government IDs) and a later breach of 1.1 million private messages. Tea said they will be offering those users "free identity protection services."

The company said it removed the ID requirement in 2023, but data that was stored before February 2024, when Tea migrated to a more secure system, was accessed in the breach... [Several sites have pointed out Tea's current privacy policy is telling users selfies are "deleted immediately."]

Tea was reportedly intended to launch in Canada on Friday, according to information previously posted on the App Store, but as of this week the launch date is now in February 2026. Tea didn't respond to CBC's questions about the apparent delay. Yet even amid the current turmoil, Tea's waitlist has ballooned to 1.5 million women, all eager to join, the company posted on Wednesday. A day later, Tea posted in its Instagram stories that it had approved "well over" 800,000 women into the app that day alone.

So, why is it so popular, despite the drama and risks?

Tea tapped into a perceived weakness of ther dating apps, according to an associate health studies professor at Ontario's Western University interviewed by the CBC, who thinks users should avoid Tea, at least until its security is restored.
Tech blogger John Gruber called the incident "yet another data point for the argument that any 'private messaging' feature that doesn't use E2EE isn't actually private at all." (And later Gruber notes Tea's apparent absence at the top of the charts in Google's Play Store. "I strongly suspect that, although Google hasn't removed Tea from the Play Store, they've delisted it from discovery other than by searching for it by name or following a direct link to its listing.")

Besides anonymous discussions about specific men, Tea also allows its users to perform background and criminal record checks, according to NPR, as well as reverse image searches. But the recent breach, besides threatening the safety of its users, also "laid bare the anonymous, one-sided accusations against the men in their dating pools." The CBC points out there's a men's rights group on Reddit now urging civil lawsuits against tea as part of a plan to get the app shut down. And "Cleveland lawyer Aaron Minc, who specializes in cases involving online defamation and harassment, told The Associated Press that his firm has received hundreds of calls from people upset about what's been posted about them on Tea."
Yet in response to Tea's latest Instagram post, "The comments were almost entirely from people asking Tea to approve them, so they could join the app."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/08/02/2334243/despite-breach-and-lawsuits-tea-dating-app-surges-in-popularity?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports:
In early July, a wasp nest with a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations was found inside the grounds of a sprawling Cold War-era nuclear site in South Carolina that today partly serves as a storage area for radioactive liquid waste. Federal officials said Friday that at least three more contaminated wasp nests were found within the 310-square-mile Savannah River Site, which encompasses an area more than four times the size of the District of Columbia...

[F]ederal authorities said that the discoveries were not cause for alarm and experts noted that the discovery of radioactivity in wildlife near nuclear facilities did not necessarily indicate the likelihood of a major leak... In a statement sent to reporters, Edwin Deshong, manager of the Savannah River Site's Office of Environmental Management, said the wasp nests had "very low levels of radioactive contamination" and did not pose health risks to the site's workers, nearby residents or the environment... The Savannah River Site's 43 active underground waste tanks have more than 34 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste. The oldest tanks have previously "developed small hairline cracks" that led to small-volume leaks, the Savannah River Site says on its website.
A July report after the first nest was found said there was "no impact" from the contaminated nest, the Post reports, with the nest's high radioactivity level due to "on-site legacy radioactive contamination" rather than "a loss of contamination control."

More from the Associated Press:

The tank farm is well inside the boundaries of the site and wasps generally fly just a few hundred yards from their nests, so there is no danger they are outside the facility, according to a statement from Savannah River Mission Completion which now oversees the site. If there had been wasps found, they would have significantly lower levels of radiation than their nests, according to the statement which was given to the Aiken Standard.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger for sharing the news.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/08/02/1848200/four-radioactive-wasp-nests-found-near-us-nuclear-storage-site?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

After an 8.8 earthquake off the coast of Russia, "weather authorities leapt into action," reports SFGate, by modeling the threat of a tsunami "and releasing warnings and advisories to prepare their communities..."

But some residents of Hawaii, Japan and North America's West Coast turned to AI tools for updates that "appear to have badly bungled the critical task at hand." Google's "AI Overview," for example, reportedly gave "inaccurate information about authorities' safety warnings in Hawaii and elsewhere," according to reports on social media.

Thankfully, the tsunami danger quickly subsided on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning without major damage. Still, the issues speak to the growing role of AI tools in people's information diets... and to the tools' potentially dangerous fallibility... A critic of Google — who prompted the search tool to show an AI overview by adding "+ai" to their search — called the text that showed up "dangerously wrong."

Responding to similar complaints, Grok told one user on X.com "We'll improve accuracy."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/08/02/1645254/ai-tools-gave-false-information-about-tsunami-advisories?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

There's now an "influx" of startups fightging wildfires, reports the Washington Post.

"More than 100 new wildfire-related technologies have launched in the U.S. and around the world since 2023, according to Lori Moore-Merrell, who served as U.S. fire administrator during the Biden administration... Unmanned lookout poles that use AI to sense smoke have been erected in the West. Swarms of military-grade drones are increasingly used for wildfire detection and management. AI technology also tracks lightning strikes, which can ignite wildfires..."

As America contends with what is already a punishing year of wildfires across massive swaths of the country, new, extremely precise satellite images beamed from space from the initiative FireSat. In March, a satellite outfitted with infrared sensors was launched more than 370 miles into space with the sole task of detecting and monitoring fires. With the ability to loop millions of miles around the planet each day, it found active fires and burn scars using bands of infrared light, demonstrating technology that the project's leaders and its early adopters said could be integral to filling technological gaps in the way they fight burns.

The satellite initiative was launched by a nonprofit coalition called Earth Fire Alliance (EFA). Its partners include Muon Space, which is developing the satellites; Google, which is using AI to help filter through the images; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; and the Environmental Defense Fund. The goal is to have 50 satellites in orbit by 2030 to capture the entire world. At full capacity, the constellation is aiming to sweep the entire Earth every 20 minutes to detect small fires. By spring or summer of next year, it plans to launch three more satellites into space that will coordinate with agencies in states including California and Colorado to help them detect and fight fire.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/02/0059225/satellites-drones-and-ai-the-new-high-tech-quest-to-fight-wildfires?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"The July 2025 results of the Steam Survey were posted a few minutes ago," Phoronix reported last night, "and show a healthy 0.32% increase to put the Linux gaming marketshare at 2.89%."
That's a recent high in percentage terms and while Steam saw around 3% in the early days of Steam on Linux a decade ago, in absolute terms this is likely the largest surveyed figure ever for the Linux gaming population.
Linux was at 2.89% for July while macOS was at 1.88% and Windows at 95.23%.

There does seem to be a jagged line that's trending upward...

November: 2.03%
December: 2.29%
January: 2.06%
February: 1.45%
March: 2.33%
April: 2.27%
May: 2.69%
June: 2.57%
July: 2.89%

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/08/02/0551235/new-steam-on-linux-market-share-stats-likely-the-largest-surveyed-figure-ever?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

After it began "peering into the distant universe" in 2022, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope "has discovered a rash of 'little red dots'," reports Science magazine. There's "hundreds of them, shining within the first billion years of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe, so small and red that they defied conventional explanation."

"Only in the past few months has a picture begun to emerge. The little red dots, astronomers say, may be an entirely new type of object: a colossal ball of bright, hot gas, larger than the Solar System, powered not by nuclear fusion, but by a black hole..."

The objects, which some astronomers are calling "black hole stars," could be a missing link in the evolution of galaxies and help explain the rapid growth of supermassive black holes that lie at their hearts. "The big breakthrough of the past 6 months is actually the realization that we can throw out all these other models we've been playing with before," says astronomer Anna de Graaff of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy... JWST couldn't resolve the dots into a recognizable shape, which meant they must have been tiny — less than 2% of the diameter of the Milky Way. "It was a mystery ... as to why they were so spatially compact," says Caitlin Casey of the University of Texas at Austin. An impossibly dense packing of stars would be needed to explain their brightness. "I was excited," Casey says...

For Mitch Begelman, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, the observations are a vindication. Earlier this month, he and a colleague posted a preprint on arXiv reviving a scenario for the formation of hypothetical "quasi-stars" that he and others had proposed 20 years ago. The first generation of stars, they calculated, could have grown to colossal size in the early universe, which was made up almost entirely of hydrogen, the raw material of stars. When a giant star ran out of fuel, they said, its core would have collapsed into a black hole, but the outer envelope of hydrogen was so dense it survived the blast, enclosing the newborn black hole. As the black hole chewed at its shroud of gas, the entire system glowed as a quasi-star larger than the Solar System. "That's what the quasi-star envelope is doing, it's force-feeding the black hole by pushing matter into it," Begelman says.

Given how common little red dots appear to be in the early universe, theorists are beginning to wonder whether this giant-ball-of-gas phase is an essential part of black hole growth and the evolution of galaxies. "We're probably looking at kind of a new phase of black hole growth that we didn't know about before," de Graaff says.

"If the red dots do turn out to be black hole stars, it will be precisely the sort of breakthrough expected from JWST — and the kind of discovery astronomers live for."
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/08/02/0516214/early-universes-little-red-dots-may-be-black-hole-stars?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

In Shanghai at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (which ran until Tuesday), the Chinese government "announced an international organization for AI regulation and a 13-point action plan aimed at fostering global cooperation to ensure the technology's beneficial and responsible development," reports the Washington Post.
The theme of the conference was "Global Solidarity in the AI Era," the article notes, and "the expo is one part of Beijing's bid to establish itself as a responsible AI leader for the international community."

CNN points out that China's announcement comes "just days after the United States unveiled its own plan to promote U.S. dominance."
Chinese Premier Li Qiang unveiled China's vision for future AI oversight at the World AI Conference, an annual gathering in Shanghai of tech titans from more than 40 countries... While Li did not directly refer to the U.S. in his speech, he alluded to the ongoing trade tensions between the two superpowers, which include American restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports — a component vital for powering and training AI, which is currently causing a shortage in China. "Key resources and capabilities are concentrated in a few countries and a few enterprises," said Li in his speech on Saturday. "If we engage in technological monopoly, controls and restrictions, AI will become an exclusive game for a small number of countries and enterprises...."

Secretary-General of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Dr. Kao Kim Hourn, also called for "robust governance" of artificial intelligence to mitigate potential threats, including misinformation, deepfakes, and cybersecurity threats... Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt reiterated the call for international collaboration, explicitly calling on the U.S. and China to work together... "We have a vested interest to keep the world stable, keep the world not at war, to keep things peaceful, to make sure we have human control of these tools."

China's plan "called for establishing an international open-source community," reports the Wall Street Journal, "through which AI models can be freely deployed and improved by users." Industry participants said that plan "showed China's ambition to set global standards for AI and could undermine the U.S., whose leading models aren't open-source... While the world's best large language model is still American, the best model that everyone can use free is now Chinese."

"The U.S. should commit to ensuring that powerful models remain openly available," argues an opinion piece in The Hill by Stability AI's former head of public policy.
Ubiquity is a matter of national security: retreating behind paywalls will leave a vacuum filled by strategic adversaries. Washington should treat open technology not as a vector for Chinese Communist Party propaganda but as a vessel to transmit U.S. influence abroad, molding the global ecosystem around U.S. industry. If DeepSeek is China's open-source "Sputnik moment," we need a legislative environment that supports — not criminalizes — an American open-source Moon landing.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/02/030232/facing-us-chip-restrictions-china-pitches-global-cooperation-on-ai?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The vehicle "once led the Space Shuttle down the runway at Edwards Air Force Base," The Drive reported in 2022, noting it was won in an auction for $21,061 (beating 18 other bidders). "I just figured the NASA brand combined with Airsteam hip seemed like a can't lose combination," the buyer says now, in a listing for the vehicle on the on the automotive sales site Hemmings.com asking $199,000..

They're touting it as a priceless marketing/publicity prop — "a once in a lifetime opportunity" to own what was once an "onsite command center complete with communications and atmospheric monitoring... Imagine pulling into Burning Man driving this..." The seller points out it's the only custom-built "Airstream" trailer ever sold by NASA. (The others were crushed, except for one donated to the Kennedy museum.) But for this one "Apparently there was some miscommunication when the vehicle was decommissioned. It should have been offered to museums but the sales team did not know what it was.")
"Has only 8240 miles on it as driven from Ohio to California then around the Edwards base."

The seller apparently first tried listing it on eBay in May for $50,000. ("Reserve not met," says that listing page now. "Very well maintained, minor dings on exterior...")

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

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/08/02/0426200/for-sale-a-1990-airstream-trailernasa-command-vehicle-for-space-shuttle-landings?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Silicon Valley's AI talent war just reached a compensation milestone that makes even the most legendary scientific achievements of the past look financially modest. When Meta recently offered AI researcher Matt Deitke $250 million over four years (an average of $62.5 million per year)—with potentially $100 million in the first year alone -- it shattered every historical precedent for scientific and technical compensation we can find on record. [Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly also offered an unnamed AI engineer $1 billion in compensation to be paid out over several years.] That includes salaries during the development of major scientific milestones of the 20th century. [...]

To put these salaries in a historical perspective: J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project that ended World War II, earned approximately $10,000 per year in 1943. Adjusted for inflation using the US Government's CPI Inflation Calculator, that's about $190,865 in today's dollars -- roughly what a senior software engineer makes today. The 24-year-old Deitke, who recently dropped out of a PhD program, will earn approximately 327 times what Oppenheimer made while developing the atomic bomb. [...] The Apollo program offers another striking comparison. Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon, earned about $27,000 annually -- roughly $244,639 in today's money. His crewmates Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins made even less, earning the equivalent of $168,737 and $155,373, respectively, in today's dollars. Current NASA astronauts earn between $104,898 and $161,141 per year. Meta's AI researcher will make more in three days than Armstrong made in a year for taking "one giant leap for mankind." The report notes that the sums being offered to some of these AI researchers top even the most popular sports athletes. "The New York Times noted that Steph Curry's most recent four-year contract with the Golden State Warriors was $35 million less than Deitke's Meta deal (although soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo will make $275 million this year as the highest-paid professional athlete in the world)," reports Ars.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/237243/top-ai-salaries-dwarf-those-of-the-manhattan-project-and-the-space-race?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A Rutgers-led study using advanced computational modeling reveals that expanding solar power by just 15% could reduce U.S. carbon emissions by over 8.5 million metric tons annually, with the greatest benefits concentrated in specific regions like California, Texas, and the Southwest. The study has been published in Science Advances. From the report: The study quantified both immediate and delayed emissions reductions resulting from added solar generation. For example, the researchers found that in California, a 15% increase in solar power at noon was associated with a reduction of 147.18 metric tons of CO2 in the region in the first hour and 16.08 metric tons eight hours later.

The researchers said their methods provide a more nuanced understanding of system-level impacts from solar expansion than previous studies, pinpointing where the benefits of increased solar energy adoption could best be realized. In some areas, such as California, Florida, the mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, Texas and the Southwest, small increases in solar were estimated to deliver large CO2 reductions, while in others, such as New England, the central U.S., and Tennessee, impacts were found to be minimal -- even at much larger increases in solar generation.

In addition, the researchers said their study demonstrates the significant spillover effects solar adoption has on neighboring regions, highlighting the value of coordinated clean energy efforts. For example, a 15% increase in solar capacity in California was associated with a reduction of 913 and 1,942 metric tons of CO2 emissions per day in the northwest and southwest regions, respectively. "It was rewarding to see how advanced computational modeling can uncover not just the immediate, but also the delayed and far-reaching spillover effects of solar energy adoption," said the lead author Arpita Biswas, an assistant professor with the Department of Computer Science at the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences. "From a computer science perspective, this study demonstrates the power of harnessing large-scale, high-resolution energy data to generate actionable insights. For policymakers and investors, it offers a roadmap for targeting solar investments where emissions reductions are most impactful and where solar energy infrastructure can yield the highest returns."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/2313250/researchers-map-where-solar-energy-delivers-the-biggest-climate-payoff?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликован релиз проекта FEX 2508, развивающего эмулятор для выполнения игр и приложений, собранных для архитектур x86 и x86-64, в Linux-окружении на системах с процессорами ARM64 (AArch64). Эмулятор FEX применяется проектом Asahi для запуска на системах с ARM-чипами Apple Silicon игр из каталога Steam, собранных для архитектуры x86_64. Код проекта написан на языке С++ с ассемблерными вставками и распространяется под лицензией MIT.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63666

TOP10 VISITORS:

[1] 45.135.180.x point=240 web=0 up=20.7MB (49%) <--- yesterlink (10/hr)
[2] DataForSeoBot point=2 web=152 up=7.2MB (17%) <--- DataForSeoBot
[3] PetalBot point=0 web=1005 up=5.9MB (14%)
[4] Google point=0 web=428 up=3.4MB (8%)
[5] 146.19.215.x point=0 web=3 up=1.6MB (3%)
[6] 217.114.158.x point=26 web=0 up=1.0MB (2%) <--- fox (1/hr)
[7] Amazon point=0 web=51 up=0.5MB (1%)
[8] Facebook point=0 web=36 up=0.3MB (<1%)
[9] 51.222.253.x point=0 web=26 up=0.2MB (<1%)
[10] TikTok point=0 web=8 up=0.2MB (<1%)

TOTAL TRAFFIC: 41MB

Нейт Грэм (Nate Graham), разработчик, занимающийся контролем качества в проекте KDE, опубликовал очередной отчёт о разработке KDE. Среди недавних изменений в кодовой базе, формирующей будущий релиз KDE Plasma 6.5, намеченный на 16 октября.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63665

A new paper from Bangor University outlines the "bizarre phenomenon" known as the transparency paradox: that transparency is needed to foster public trust in science, but being transparent about science, medicine and government can also reduce trust. The paper argues that while openness in science is intended to build trust, it can backfire when revealing uncomfortable truths. Philosopher Byron Hyde and author of the study suggests that public trust could be improved not by sugarcoating reality, but by educating people to expect imperfection and understand how science actually works. Phys.org reports: The study revealed that, while transparency about good news increases trust, transparency about bad news, such as conflicts of interest or failed experiments, decreases it. Therefore, one possible solution to the paradox, and a way to increase public trust, is to lie (which Hyde points out is unethical and ultimately unsustainable), by for example making sure bad news is hidden and that there is always only good news to report.

Instead, he suggests that a better way forward would be to tackle the root cause of the problem, which he argues is the public overidealising science. People still overwhelmingly believe in the 'storybook image' of a scientist who makes no mistakes, which creates unrealistic expectations. Hyde is calling for a renewed effort to teach the public about scientific norms, which would be done through science education and communication to eliminate the "naive" view of science as infallible. "... most people know that global temperatures are rising, but very few people know how we know that," says Hyde. "Not enough people know that science 'infers to the best explanation' and doesn't definitively 'prove' anything. Too many people think that scientists should be free from biases or conflicts of interest when, in fact, neither of these are possible. If we want the public to trust science to the extent that it's trustworthy, we need to make sure they understand it first."

The study has been published in the journal Theory and Society.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/2254211/lying-increases-trust-in-science-study-finds?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликован стабильный релиз интерфейса для упрощения настройки параметров сети - NetworkManager 1.54.0. Плагины для поддержки VPN (Libreswan, OpenConnect, Openswan, SSTP и др.) развиваются в рамках собственных циклов разработки.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63664

Компания Mozilla сообщила о выявлении фишинг-атаки на разработчиков дополнений к Firefox. Как и в случае недавних атак на сопровождающих пакеты в репозиториях PyPI и NPM, участники каталога дополнений AMO (addons.mozilla.org) стали получать письма, стилизованные под уведомления от Mozilla и информирующие о необходимости обновления информации в профиле для продолжения доступа к возможностям каталога.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63663

в idec.test получилось много дублей почему-то - вернул как было

в idec.talks тоже наверное дубли - надо почистить...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Anthropic revoked OpenAI's API access to its models on Tuesday, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell WIRED. OpenAI was informed that its access was cut off due to violating the terms of service. "Claude Code has become the go-to choice for coders everywhere, and so it was no surprise to learn OpenAI's own technical staff were also using our coding tools ahead of the launch of GPT-5," Anthropic spokesperson Christopher Nulty said in a statement to WIRED. "Unfortunately, this is a direct violation of our terms of service." According to Anthropic's commercial terms of service, customers are barred from using the service to "build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models" or "reverse engineer or duplicate" the services. This change in OpenAI's access to Claude comes as the ChatGPT-maker is reportedly preparing to release a new AI model, GPT-5, which is rumored to be better at coding.

OpenAI was plugging Claude into its own internal tools using special developer access (APIs), instead of using the regular chat interface, according to sources. This allowed the company to run tests to evaluate Claude's capabilities in things like coding and creative writing against its own AI models, and check how Claude responded to safety-related prompts involving categories like CSAM, self-harm, and defamation, the sources say. The results help OpenAI compare its own models' behavior under similar conditions and make adjustments as needed. "It's industry standard to evaluate other AI systems to benchmark progress and improve safety. While we respect Anthropic's decision to cut off our API access, it's disappointing considering our API remains available to them," OpenAI's chief communications officer Hannah Wong said in a statement to WIRED. Nulty says that Anthropic will "continue to ensure OpenAI has API access for the purposes of benchmarking and safety evaluations as is standard practice across the industry."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/2237220/anthropic-revokes-openais-access-to-claude-over-terms-of-service-violation?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Electrek: Peak Energy shipped out its first sodium-ion battery energy storage system, and the New York-based company says it's achieved a first in three ways: the US's first grid-scale sodium-ion battery storage system; the largest sodium-ion phosphate pyrophosphate (NFPP) battery system in the world; and the first megawatt-hour scale battery to run entirely on passive cooling -- no fans, pumps, or vents. That's significant because removing moving parts and ditching active cooling systems eliminates fire risk.

According to the Electric Power Research Institute, 89% of battery fires in the US trace back to thermal management issues. Peak's design doesn't have those issues because it doesn't have those systems. Instead, the 3.5 MWh system uses a patent-pending passive cooling architecture that's simpler, more reliable, and cheaper to run and maintain. The company says its technology slashes auxiliary power needs by up to 90%, saves about $1 million annually per gigawatt hour of storage, and cuts battery degradation by 33% over a 20-year lifespan. [...]

Peak is working with nine utility and independent power producer (IPP) customers on a shared pilot this summer. That deployment unlocks nearly 1 GWh of future commercial contracts now under negotiation. The company plans to ship hundreds of megawatt hours of its new system over the next two years, and it's building its first US cell factory, which is set to start production in 2026.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/2120225/peak-energy-ships-americas-first-grid-scale-sodium-ion-battery?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Aurora Innovation has expanded its autonomous trucking operations with nighttime driverless runs between Dallas and Houston and a new Phoenix terminal. "Efficiency, uptime, and reliability are important for our customers, and Aurora is showing we can deliver," said Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora, in a press release. "Just three months after launch, we're running driverless operations day and night and we've expanded our terminal network to Phoenix. Our rapid progress is beginning to unlock the full value of self-driving trucks for our customers, which has the potential to transform the trillion-dollar trucking industry." FreightWaves reports: The expansion allows for continuous utilization, shortening delivery times and serving as part of its path to autonomous trucking profitability. Aurora notes that the unlocking of nighttime autonomous operations can also improve road safety. It cited a 2021 Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration report on large truck and bus crashes that noted a disproportionate 37% of fatal crashes involving large trucks occurred at night. This comes despite trucks traveling fewer miles during those hours.

Aurora's SAE L4 autonomous driving system, called the Aurora Driver, can detect objects in the dark more than 450 meters away via its proprietary, long-range FirstLight Lidar. The lidar can identify pedestrians, vehicles, and debris up to 11 seconds sooner than a traditional driver, according to the company. In addition to the fleet and operations expansion, the new terminal in Phoenix, which opened in June, is part of an infrastructure-light approach. Aurora notes this design will closely resemble how the company plans to integrate with future customer endpoints, optimized for speed to market.

This expansion of the more than 15-hour Fort Worth to Phoenix route opens up opportunities to showcase the autonomous truck's ability to cut transit time in half compared to a single driver, who is limited to the 11-hour hours-of-service limitation. Aurora is piloting the autonomous trucking Phoenix lane with two customers, Hirschbach and Werner.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/2242247/auroras-self-driving-trucks-are-now-driving-at-night?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader Mr_Blank shares a report from Autoblog: Once a new OTA update becomes available, owners of GM vehicles have 45 days to install the update. After this date, the company will not cover any damages or issues that are caused by ignoring the update. "Damage resulting from failure to install over-the-air software updates is not covered," states the warranty booklet for 2025 and 2026 models.

This same rule applies to all GM's brands in the USA: Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac, and GMC. However, if the software update itself causes any component damage, that will be covered by the warranty. Owners coming from older GM vehicles will have to adapt as the company continues to implement its Global B electronic architecture on newer models, which relies heavily on OTA updates. Similar policies appear in the owner's manual for Tesla. Software-defined vehicles are here to stay, even if some of them have far more tech glitches than they should -- just ask Volvo.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/2116210/skipping-over-the-air-car-updates-could-be-costly?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: An airline leaving all of its passengers' travel records vulnerable to hackers would make an attractive target for espionage. Less obvious, but perhaps even more useful for those spies, would be access to a premium travel service that spans 10 different airlines, left its own detailed flight information accessible to data thieves, and seems to be favored by international diplomats. That's what one team of cybersecurity researchers found in the form of Airportr, a UK-based luggage service that partners with airlines to let its largely UK- and Europe-based users pay to have their bags picked up, checked, and delivered to their destination. Researchers at the firm CyberX9 found that simple bugs in Airportr's website allowed them to access virtually all of those users' personal information, including travel plans, or even gain administrator privileges that would have allowed a hacker to redirect or steal luggage in transit. Among even the small sample of user data that the researchers reviewed and shared with WIRED they found what appear to be the personal information and travel records of multiple government officials and diplomats from the UK, Switzerland, and the US.

Airportr's CEO Randel Darby confirmed CyberX9's findings in a written statement provided to WIRED but noted that Airportr had disabled the vulnerable part of its site's backend very shortly after the researchers made the company aware of the issues last April and fixed the problems within a few day. "The data was accessed solely by the ethical hackers for the purpose of recommending improvements to Airportr's security, and our prompt response and mitigation ensured no further risk," Darby wrote in a statement. "We take our responsibilities to protect customer data very seriously." CyberX9's researchers, for their part, counter that the simplicity of the vulnerabilities they found mean that there's no guarantee other hackers didn't access Airportr's data first. They found that a relatively basic web vulnerability allowed them to change the password of any user to gain access to their account if they had just the user's email address -- and they were also able to brute-force guess email addresses with no rate limitations on the site. As a result, they could access data including all customers' names, phone numbers, home addresses, detailed travel plans and history, airline tickets, boarding passes and flight details, passport images, and signatures.

By gaining access to an administrator account, CyberX9's researchers say, a hacker could also have used the vulnerabilities it found to redirect luggage, steal luggage, or even cancel flights on airline websites by using Airportr's data to gain access to customer accounts on those sites. The researchers say they could also have used their access to send emails and text messages as Airportr, a potential phishing risk. Airportr tells WIRED that it has 92,000 users and claims on its website that it has handled more than 800,000 bags for customers. [...] The researchers found that they could monitor their browser's communications as they signed up for Airportr and created a new password, and then reuse an API key intercepted from those communications to instead change another user's password to anything they chose. The site also lacked a "rate limiting" security measure that would prevent automated guesses of email addresses to rapidly change the password of every user's account. And the researchers were also able to find email addresses of Airportr administrators that allowed them to take over their accounts and gain their privileges over the company's data and operations. "Anyone would have been able to gain or might have gained absolute super-admin access to all the operations and data of this company," says Himanshu Pathak, CyberX9's founder and CEO. "The vulnerabilities resulted in complete confidential private information exposure of all airline customers in all countries who used the service of this company, including full control over all the bookings and baggage. Because once you are the super-admin of their most sensitive systems, you have have the ability to do anything."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/219227/a-luggage-services-web-bugs-exposed-the-travel-plans-of-every-user?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Palantir has secured a massive $10 billion contract with the U.S. Army to unify 75 contracts into a single AI-focused enterprise framework, streamlining procurement and enhancing military readiness. CNBC reports: The agreement creates a "comprehensive framework for the Army's future software and data needs" that provides the government with purchasing flexibility and removes contract-related fees and procurement timelines, according to a release. Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp has been a vocal proponent of protecting U.S. interests and joining forces on AI to fend off adversaries.

Earlier this year, Palantir delivered its first two AI-powered systems in its $178 million contract with the U.S. Army. In May, the Department of Defense boosted its Maven Smart Systems contract to beef up AI capabilities by $795 million.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/2055248/palantir-lands-10-billion-army-software-and-data-contract?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Atlassian laid off 150 employees via a pre-recorded video. "While not specifically outlined, the affected staff seem to be from the company's European operations, with The Australian saying that Cannon-Brooke's overshared that it would be difficult to axe its European staff due to contract arrangements, but that the company had already begun moving in that direction," reports CyberDaily. While the company claims the cuts weren't directly caused by AI, it has simultaneously rolled out AI-enhanced customer service tools and emphasized automation as a key part of its digital transformation strategy. From the report: Atlassian CEO and co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes sent the video titled "Restructuring the CSS Team: A Difficult Decision for Our Future" to staff on Wednesday morning (30 July), informing them that 150 staff had been made redundant. The video reportedly did not make it seem that the decision was difficult, but rather said it would allow its staff "to say goodbye." The video itself did not announce who was leaving, but it told employees they would have to wait 15 minutes for an email about their employment. Those who were terminated had their laptops blocked immediately. They reportedly will receive six months' pay.

"AI is going to change Australia," [said former co-CEO and co-founder Scott Farquhar]. "Every person should be using AI daily for as many things as they can. Like any new technology, it will feel awkward to start with, but every business person, every business leader, every government leader, and every bureaucrat should be using it." He also said that governments should be implementing AI more broadly. [...] Commenting on the termination, Farquhar said the mass termination was due to the customer service team no longer being needed in the same capacity, as larger clients required less complex support following a move to the cloud.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/2049255/atlassian-terminates-150-staff-with-pre-recorded-video?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sees an opportunity to deliver ads to users during their conversations with the company's AI-powered digital assistant, Alexa+, he said during Amazon's second-quarter earnings call Thursday. "People are excited about the devices that they can buy from us that has Alexa+ enabled in it. People do a lot of shopping [with Alexa+]; it's a delightful shopping experience that will keep getting better," said Jassy on the call with investors and Wall Street analysts. "I think over time, there will be opportunities, as people are engaging in more multi-turn conversations, to have advertising play a role to help people find discovery, and also as a lever to drive revenue."

[...] Amazon has made Alexa+ free for Prime customers (who pay $14.99 a month) and added a $20-a-month subscription tier for Alexa+ on its own. Jassy suggested on Thursday that Alexa+ could eventually include subscription tiers beyond what's available today -- perhaps an ad-free tier. Up until now, ads have only appeared in Alexa in limited ways. Users may occasionally see a visual ad on Amazon's smart display device, the Echo Show, or hear a pre-recorded ad in between songs on one of Alexa's smart speakers. But Jassy's description of an AI-generated ad that Alexa+ delivers in a multistep conversation, which could help users find new products, is uncharted territory for Amazon and the broader tech industry. Marketers have expressed interest in advertising in AI chatbots, and specifically Alexa+, but exactly how remains unclear. [...] Jassy is betting that users will talk to Alexa+ more than Alexa, which could drive more advertising and more shopping on Amazon.com. However, early reviews of Alexa+ have been mixed. Amazon has reportedly struggled to ship some of Alexa+'s more complicated features, and the rollout has been slower than many expected.

There's a lot to figure out before Amazon puts ads in Alexa+. Like most AI models, Alexa+ is not immune to hallucinations. Before advertisers agree to make Alexa+ a spokesperson for their products, Amazon may have to come up with some ways to ensure that its AI will not offer false advertising for a product. Jassy seems enthusiastic about making advertising a larger part of Amazon business. Amazon's advertising revenue went up 22% in the second quarter, compared to the same period last year. Delivering ads in AI chatbot conversations may also raise privacy concerns. People tend to talk more with AI chatbots compared to deterministic assistants, like the traditional Alexa and Siri products. As a result, generative AI chatbots tend to collect more information on users. Some users might be unsettled by having that information sold to advertisers and having ads appear in their natural language conversations with AI.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/2043256/amazon-ceo-wants-to-put-ads-in-your-alexa-conversations?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

India's national university ranking will start penalizing institutions if a sizable number of papers published by their researchers are retracted -- a first for an institutional ranking system. Nature: The move is an attempt by the government to address the country's growing number of retractions due to misconduct. Many retractions correct honest mistakes in the literature, but others arise because of misconduct.

India has had more papers retracted than any country apart from China and the United States, according to an analysis of the public database maintained by Retraction Watch of retractions over the past three decades. But whereas less than 1 paper is retracted for every 1,000 papers published in the United States, more than 3 are retracted for every 1,000 published in China, and the figure is 2 per 1,000 in India. The majority in India and China are withdrawn because of misconduct or research-integrity concerns.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/1938215/india-to-penalize-universities-with-too-many-retractions?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Yesterday, when Epic won its Google antitrust lawsuit for a second time, it wasn't quite clear how soon Google would need to start dismantling its affirmed illegal monopoly.

Today, Google admits the answer is: 14 days. Google has just 14 days to enact major changes to its Google Play app store, and the way it does business with phonemakers, cellular carriers, and app developers, unless it wins an emergency stay (pause) from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as it continues to appeal. It must stop forcing apps to use Google Play Billing, allow app developers to freely steer their users to other platforms, and limit the perks it can offer in exchange for preinstalled apps, among other changes.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/195251/google-has-just-two-weeks-to-begin-cracking-open-android-it-admits-in-emergency-filing?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple CEO Tim Cook appears unfazed by concerns that advancements in AI could topple the iPhone's dominance. During Thursday's earnings call, Wamsi Moen, an analyst with Bank of America, asked Cook directly how Apple is preparing for a world where dependence on screen-based devices "significantly diminishes," thanks to advances in AI. Cook didn't seem to see an imminent threat to Apple's hero product.

"When you when you think about all the things an iPhone can do, from connecting people to bringing app and game experiences to life, to taking photos and videos, to helping users explore the world and conduct their financial lives and pay for things and so much more, you know, it's difficult to see a world where iPhone's not living in it," Cook said. "And that doesn't mean that we are not thinking about other things as well," Cook added, "but I think that the devices are likely to be complementary devices, not substitution." Apple said yesterday it had sold 3 billion iPhones since the product's launch in 2007

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/191248/tim-cook-says-its-difficult-to-see-a-world-without-iphones?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.