Apple announced that macOS 26 "Tahoe" will be the final version to support Intel-based Macs, with future macOS releases running exclusively on Apple Silicon devices (that is, 2020 M1 models and newer). They will, however, continue to receive security updates for a few more years. 9to5Mac reports: In some ways, Apple has already stopped supporting some non-Apple Silicon models of its lineup. macOS Tahoe does not work with any Intel MacBook Air or Mac mini for instance. But Tahoe does still support some Intel Macs. That includes compatibility with the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, the 2020 Intel 13-inch MacBook Pro, 2020 iMac, and the 2019 Mac Pro.

Based on Apple's warning, you can expect that macOS 27 will drop support for all of these legacy machines, and therefore macOS 26 will be the last compatible version. These devices will continue to receive security updates for another three years, however. Going forward, the minimum support hardware generations will be from 2020 onwards, as that is when Apple began the Apple Silicon transition with the M1. M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pros followed in 2021.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/06/09/2245206/apple-will-end-support-for-intel-macs-next-year?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Robert F. Smith, CEO of Vista Equity Partners, told attendees at the SuperReturn International 2025 conference in Berlin last week that 60% of the 5,500 finance professionals present will be "looking for work" next year due to AI disruption.

Smith predicted that while 40% of attendees will adopt AI agents -- programs that autonomously perform complex, multi-step tasks -- the remaining majority will need to find new employment as AI transforms the sector. "All of the jobs currently carried out by one billion knowledge workers today would change due to AI," Smith said, clarifying that while jobs won't disappear entirely, they will fundamentally transform.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/0016235/private-equity-ceo-predicts-ai-will-leave-60-of-finance-conference-attendees-jobless?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has called for changes to the roster of officials appointed to oversee the forthcoming election at the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC), the latest twist in a conflict that stretches back years and has left the African regional internet registry in limbo. From a report: AFRINIC is one of the world's five regional internet registries, the governance bodies that delegate and manage IP addresses and autonomous systems numbers in co-ordination with ICANN. The African organization has essentially been dead in the water, operating without a board or CEO since 2022. The problems started in 2020 when AFRINIC alleged that one of its members -- a company called Cloud Innovation -- had breached its agreement with the registry in ways that could lead AFRINIC to reclaim the company's IP address holdings.

Cloud Innovation countered that AFRINIC acted improperly and launched multiple lawsuits in Mauritius, the Indian Ocean nation the registry calls home. Other parties also sued AFRINIC for similar reasons. The lawsuits left AFRINIC's bank accounts frozen and meant it was unable to convene a board or run elections. In February 2025, the Supreme Court of Mauritius appointed a receiver to secure AFRINIC's assets and reconstitute its board.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/0111203/icann-waves-hands-in-protest-at-afrinic-election-arrangement?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

South Asia has warmed far more slowly than the rest of the world over the past four decades with temperatures rising just 0.09C per decade compared to 0.30C elsewhere on land, according to new climate research. Scientists believe this "warming hole" results from two factors that have masked the true impact of global warming: heavy aerosol pollution that reflects sunlight back to space and expanded irrigation that cools air through evaporation.

The protective effect is temporary and comes at a deadly cost. Air pollution currently kills between 2 million and 3 million people annually in South Asia, while extreme heat causes 100,000 to 600,000 deaths. As governments reduce pollution and groundwater depletion limits irrigation expansion, atmospheric scientists predict India will warm at twice the rate of the past 20 years. By 2047, the average Indian could experience a four-fold increase in dangerous heat stress days, threatening a region where only 10% of households have air conditioning.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/0216200/if-india-chokes-less-it-will-fry-more?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: The head of the Federal Aviation Administration just outlined an ambitious goal to upgrade the U.S.'s air traffic control (ATC) system and bring it into the 21st century. According to NPR, most ATC towers and other facilities today feel like they're stuck in the 20th century, with controllers using paper strips and floppy disks to transfer data, while their computers run Windows 95. While this likely saved them from the disastrous CrowdStrike outage that had a massive global impact, their age is a major risk to the nation's critical infrastructure, with the FAA itself saying that the current state of its hardware is unsustainable.

"The whole idea is to replace the system. No more floppy disks or paper strips," acting FAA administrator Chris Rocheleau told the House Appropriations Committee last Wednesday. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also said earlier this week," This is the most important infrastructure project that we've had in this country for decades. Everyone agrees -- this is non-partisan. Everyone knows we have to do it." The aviation industry put up a coalition pushing for ATC modernization called Modern Skies, and it even ran an ad telling us that ATC is still using floppy disks and several older technologies to keep our skies safe. [...]

Currently, the White House hasn't said what this update will cost. The FAA has already put out a Request For Information to gather data from companies willing to take on the challenge of upgrading the entire system. It also announced several 'Industry Days' so companies can pitch their tech and ideas to the Transportation Department. Duffy said that the Transportation Department aims to complete the project within four years. However, industry experts say this timeline is unrealistic. No matter how long it takes, it's high time that the FAA upgrades the U.S.'s ATC system today after decades of neglect.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/06/09/2249232/faa-to-eliminate-floppy-disks-used-in-air-traffic-control-systems?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Blue Origin is falling far short of its goal to launch the New Glenn rocket eight times in 2025, with its second flight now delayed until at least mid-August. Key leadership changes were also announced, including the departure of the New Glenn program head, as the company faces pressure to increase launch cadence and compete with SpaceX for federal contracts and Amazon's Project Kuiper deployments. Ars Technica reports: The mission, with an undesignated payload, will be named "Never Tell Me the Odds," due to the attempt to land the booster. "One of our key mission objectives will be to land and recover the booster," [chief executive of Blue Origin, Dave Limp] wrote. "This will take a little bit of luck and a lot of excellent execution. We're on track to produce eight GS2s this year, and the one we'll fly on this second mission was hot-fired in April."

In this comment, GS2 stands for "Glenn stage 2," or the second stage of the large rocket. It is telling that Limp commented on the company tracking toward producing eight second stages, which would match the original launch cadence planned for this year. This likely is a fig leaf offered to Bezos, who, two sources said, was rather upset that Blue Origin would not meet (or even approach) its original target of eight launches this year. One person familiar with the progress on the vehicle told Ars that even a launch date in August is unrealistic -- this too may have been set aggressively to appease Bezos -- and that September is probably the earliest the rocket is likely to be ready for launch. Blue Origin has not publicly stated what the payload will be, but this second flight is expected to carry the ESCAPADE mission for NASA.

On May 28, a couple of days after Limp's all-hands meeting, the chief executive emailed his entire team to announce an "organizational update." As part of this, the company's senior vice president of engines, Linda Cova, was retiring. Multiple sources confirmed this retiring was expected and that the company's program to produce BE-4 rocket engines is going well. However, the other name in the email raised some eyebrows, coming so soon after the announcement that New Glenn's cadence would be significantly slower than expected. Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president running the New Glenn program, was said to be "stepping away from his role and taking a well deserved year off" starting on August 15. It is unclear whether this departure was linked to Bezos' displeasure with the rocket program. One company official said Jones' sabbatical had been planned, but the timing is curious. A search for internal and external candidates to fill his role is ongoing.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/09/230255/second-new-glenn-launch-slips-toward-fall-as-program-leadership-departs?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Meta is preparing to unveil a new AI research lab dedicated to pursuing "superintelligence," a hypothetical A.I. system that exceeds the powers of the human brain, as the tech giant jockeys to stay competitive in the technology race, New York Times reported Tuesday, citing four people with the knowledge of the company's plans. From the report: Meta has tapped Alexandr Wang, 28, the founder and chief executive of the A.I. start-up Scale AI, to join the new lab, the people said, and has been in talks to invest billions of dollars in his company as part of a deal that would also bring other Scale employees to the company.

Meta has offered seven- to nine-figure compensation packages to dozens of researchers from leading A.I. companies such as OpenAI and Google, with some agreeing to join, according to the people. The new lab is part of a larger reorganization of Meta's A.I. efforts, the people said. The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has recently grappled with internal management struggles over the technology, as well as employee churn and several product releases that fell flat, two of the people said.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/0738216/meta-is-creating-a-new-ai-lab-to-pursue-superintelligence?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

После шести месяцев разработки сформирован релиз FreeBSD 14.3. Установочные образы подготовлены для архитектур amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv7, aarch64 и riscv64. Дополнительно подготовлены сборки для систем виртуализации (QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, raw) и облачных окружений Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine и Vagrant.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63382

Компания "Открытая мобильная платформа" представила инструментарий, позволяющий использовать в ОС Аврора технологию KMP (Kotlin Multiplatform). KMP позволяет создавать многоплатформенный код на языке Kotlin, вынося общую бизнес-логику в библиотеку, адаптированную для платформ Аврора, Android, iOS, Web или Linux.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63381

Дэвид Эйрли (David Airlie), мэйнтейнер подсистемы DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) в ядре Linux, объявил о принятии в состав Mesa изменений, добавляющих в Vulkan-драйвер radv (GPU AMD) поддержку аппаратного ускорения декодирования видео в формате VP9. Возможность реализована при помощи Vulkan-расширения VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9, весной подготовленного рабочей группой Vulkan WG. Аппаратное ускорение доступно для GPU AMD начиная с Navi 10 на базе микроархитектуры RDNA 1.0. Реализация успешно проходит все тесты CTS (Compatibility Test Suite).

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63386

В осеннем выпуске Ubuntu 25.10 решено прекратить поддержку сеанса GNOME на базе X11 и оставить на экране входа в систему только возможности запуска сеанса на базе Wayland. Возможность запуска X11-приложений при помощи XWayland остаётся без изменений. В дистрибутиве также продолжат поставлять пакеты с компонентами X.org и альтернативными десктоп-окружениями, использующими X11, которые можно будет установить из репозитория.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63383

Опубликован первый выпуск проекта CoMaps, развивающего форк приложения Organic Maps для оффлайн навигации с использованием картографических данных OpenStreetMap. Выпуск доступен для платформы Android в формате APK. Ведётся работа над публикацией приложения в каталогах F-Droid, Google Play Store и iOS App Store. Код проекта распространяется под лицензией Apache 2.0.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63380

Компания Google опубликовала релиз открытой мобильной платформы Android 15. Связанные с новым выпуском исходные тексты размещены в Git-репозитории проекта (ветка android-16.0.0_r1). Сборки прошивки подготовлены для устройств Pixel 6/6a/6 Pro, Pixel 7/7a/7 Pro, Pixel 8/8a/8 Pro, Pixel 9/9 Pro/9 Pro XL/9 Pro Fold, Pixel Fold и Pixel Tablet. В ближайшие месяцы прошивки с новой версией ожидаются для смартфонов Samsung, Honor, iQOO, Lenovo, Motorola, Nothing, OnePlus, Oppo, realme, Sharp, Sony, Tecno, vivo и Xiaomi. Дополнительно будут сформированы универсальные сборки GSI (Generic System Images), подходящие для разных устройств на базе архитектур ARM64 и x86_64.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63388

Опубликован 65-й выпуск рейтинга 500 самых высокопроизводительных компьютеров мира. В 65 редакции рейтинга кластеры, занимавшие в прошлом рейтинге первые три места, сохранили свои позиции.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63390

Хочу поделиться с сообществом ЛОР: я завершил доработку Казаков: Снова Война версии 1.52.

Основные изменения:

• Улучшена поддержка Linux через Wine и Proton.

• Введена поддержка многоядерности (тестировал на 40 000 армии).

• Сняты ограничения на разрешение экрана.

• Перевод графики и звука на SDL2. Полностью удалены DirectDraw и DirectSound:

• никаких ошибок вида «DirectDraw init error»;

• курсор работает корректно, не зависает;

• игра сворачивается и разворачивается без проблем.

• Обновлён интерфейс, переработан AI.

• Добавлены новые команды (читы), переработаны настройки.

• Добавлена поддержка локализаций и собственных переводов.

• Интегрированы моды:

• mod1

• reloaded

• ultimate pack

• В комплекте идут карты для сетевой и одиночной игры.

Нативная компиляция, к сожалению, невозможна, так как проект всё ещё использует ряд закрытых DLL. Тем не менее, из движка удалено большое количество устаревших зависимостей от WinAPI, что позволило значительно улучшить работу игры на Linux.

Скачать и ознакомиться [ можно на GitHub ]( https://github.com/MisterCoderman/cossacks-2025 ) .

https://www.linux.org.ru/news/games/17995592

Команда РОСА рада представить вам РОСА ФРЕШ Сервер 13.0 — новый продукт на 13-й платформе, созданный для энтузиастов и любителей Linux!

Что это?
Это компактный Linux-сервер с текстовым интерфейсом, который можно развернуть где угодно: в уголке вашей сети, на виртуальной машине или даже на старом железе. Всего 1 ГБ оперативной памяти (при использовании текстового инсталлятора) и 10 ГБ диска (будет свободно больше половины) — и у вас есть основа полноценного сервера для раздачи файлов, управления домашним доменом или экспериментов!

( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/russia/17995970#cut ) )

Адриан Вовк (Adrian Vovk), создатель атомарно обновляемого дистрибутива carbonOS и инсталлятора для GNOME OS, а также один из разработчиков systemd-homed и systemd-sysupdate, объявил о внесении в GNOME изменений, которые усилят зависимость проекта от systemd. В грядущих выпусках GNOME 49 и 50 некоторые собственные компоненты для управления сеансами экрана входа будут заменены на штатные возможности systemd, что потребует создания новых прослоек для поставки GNOME в дистрибутивах и операционных системах, не использующих systemd. Отмечается, что удаление старого кода в пользу возможностей systemd упростит сопровождение, избавит проект от костылей и даст возможность расширить функциональность.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63391

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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