US Narrows Who Pays $100,000 H-1B Visa Fee
President Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee will apply only to new visa applicants outside the country, the government confirmed in new guidance on Monday. From a report: That means that under the new policy, employers won’t need to pay the fee for anyone already living in the U.S., such as international students. The new guidance: Under the new guidance published on Monday, U.S. Citizenship an … ⌘ Read more

Japanese Convenience Stores Are Hiring Robots Run By Workers in the Philippines
Filipino workers in Manila are remotely operating robots that restock convenience store shelves across Tokyo. The partnership represents a new economic model where physical labor can be offshored through telepresence. Around 60 workers at Astro Robotics monitor the machines and intervene when problems occur about … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Plans To Avoid Hiring 600,000 Workers Through Automation by 2033, Leaked Documents Show
Amazon executives believe the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 workers in the United States by 2027 through robotic automation. Internal documents viewed by The New York Times show the automation would save approximately 30 cents on each item the company picks, packs and deli … ⌘ Read more

Lloyds Banking Group Claims Microsoft Copilot Saves Staff 46 Minutes a Day
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Lloyds Banking Group claims employees save 46 minutes daily using Microsoft 365 Copilot, based on a survey of 1,000 users among nearly 30,000 deployed licenses. According to Lloyds Banking Group (LBG), the rollout is “helping teams summarize documents, prepare for meetings, and … ⌘ Read more

Alibaba Cloud Says It Cut Nvidia AI GPU Use By 82% With New Pooling System
Alibaba Cloud claims its new Aegaeon GPU pooling system cuts Nvidia GPU use by 82%, letting 213 H20 accelerators handle workloads that previously required 1,192. The advancements have been detailed in a paper (PDF) at the 2025 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems (SOSP) in Seoul. Tom’s Hardware reports: Unlike training-time br … ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Launches 10,000th Starlink Satellite
SpaceX surpassed the 10,000-satellite milestone for its Starlink constellation after two Falcon 9 launches on Oct. 19 added 56 more satellites to orbit. The company now operates about two-thirds of all active satellites worldwide and continues to break reuse records. Space.com reports: A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 28 Starlink internet satellites lifted off from California’s Vandenberg Space … ⌘ Read more

Mystery Object From ‘Space’ Strikes United Airlines Flight Over Utah
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed Sunday that it is investigating an airliner that was struck by an object in its windscreen, mid-flight, over Utah. “NTSB gathering radar, weather, flight recorder data,” the federal agency said on the social media site X. “Windscreen being … ⌘ Read more

$62 SanDisk Memory Card Found Intact At Titan Wreck Site
Investigators recovered the OceanGate Titan sub’s underwater camera nearly intact, discovering a SanDisk SD card that survived the 2023 implosion and still contained 12 images and 9 videos. TechSpot reports: Scott Manley, the science communication YouTuber, gamer, astrophysicist, and programmer, posted about the latest find: a hardened SubC-branded Rayfin Mk2 … ⌘ Read more

Foreign Hackers Breached a US Nuclear Weapons Plant Via SharePoint Flaws
Foreign hackers breached the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC) by exploiting unpatched Microsoft SharePoint vulnerabilities. The intrusion happened in August and is possibly linked to either Chinese state actors or Russian cybercriminals. CSO Online notes that “roughly 80% of the … ⌘ Read more

iOS 26.1 Beta 4 Lets Users Control Liquid Glass Transparency With New Toggle
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: With the fourth betas of iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS 26.1, Apple has introduced a new setting that’s designed to allow users to customize the look of Liquid Glass. The toggle lets users select from a clear look for Liquid Glass, or a tinted look. Clear is the current … ⌘ Read more

Chess Influencer and Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky Dies At 29
U.S. Grandmaster and beloved chess commentator Daniel Naroditsky has tragically passed away at the age of 29. “The news has sent shockwaves around the chess community, which is grieving the loss of one of the most beloved and influential voices,” reports Chess.com. From the report: The devastating news was first shared by Naroditsky’s club, Charlotte … ⌘ Read more

Florida Issues Criminal Subpoenas To Roblox Over Child Safety
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has issued criminal subpoenas to Roblox, calling it a “breeding ground for predators” and accusing the platform of profiting while failing to protect children. NBC News reports: The subpoenas will allow prosecutors to gather more information about the alleged criminal activity on the platform, including evidence … ⌘ Read more

Kohler Unveils a Camera For Your Toilet
Kohler has launched the Dekoda, a $599 smart toilet camera that analyzes users’ waste to track hydration, gut health, and detect potential issues like blood. “It also comes with a rechargeable battery, a USB connection, and a fingerprint sensor to identify who’s using the toilet,” reports TechCrunch. From the report: The Dekoda is currently available for preorder, with shipments scheduled to be … ⌘ Read more

Claude Code Gets a Web Version
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic has added web and mobile interfaces for Claude Code, its immensely popular command-line interface (CLI) agentic AI coding tool. The web interface appears to be well-baked at launch, but the mobile version is limited to iOS and is in an earlier stage of development. The web version of Claude Code can be given access to a GitHub repository. Once that’s don … ⌘ Read more

Hackers Say They Have Personal Data of Thousands of NSA and Other Government Officials
An anonymous reader shares a report: A hacking group that recently doxed hundreds of government officials, including from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has now built dossiers on tens of thousands of U.S. government officials, including NSA employ … ⌘ Read more

Louvre Museum Security ‘Outdated and Inadequate’ at Time of Heist
A Court of Accounts report written before Sunday’s theft of crown jewels from the Louvre revealed the museum’s security systems were outdated and inadequate [non-paywalled source]. The report noted a lack of basic CCTV equipment across multiple wings. Cameras had mainly been installed only when rooms were refurbished due to repeated postponements … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia CEO Says Company Went from 95% to 0 Market Share in China
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says his company has lost all access to China’s market after U.S. export restrictions eliminated what was once a 95% share. Speaking in an interview with Citadel Securities, Huang questioned the wisdom of policies that cost America one of the world’s largest markets.

The Biden Administration imposed rules in 2022 to restri … ⌘ Read more

Google To Let ‘Superfans’ Test In-Development Pixel Phones
Google plans to let Pixel smartphone enthusiasts test out the company’s next handset ahead of its public introduction. From a report: Google has invited members of its “Superfans” group to apply to test future Pixel hardware, asking entrants to profess their knowledge and passion for the brand in hopes of being able to beta test forthcoming products.

Consumer … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s ‘Embarrassing’ Math
An anonymous reader writes: “Hoisted by their own GPTards.” That’s how Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun described the blowback after OpenAI researchers did a victory lap over GPT-5’s supposed math breakthroughs. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis added, “this is embarrassing.” The Decoder reports that in a since-deleted tweet, OpenAI VP Kevin Weil declared that “GPT-5 found solutions to 10 (!) previously unsolved … ⌘ Read more

The Sims Mobile is Shutting Down Next Year
The Sims is in a period of transition – and as part of that, the ongoing mobile version will be shutting down in a few months. From a report: EA announced that today’s update for The Sims Mobile will be its last, and that on January 20th, 2026 the game “will no longer be accessible to play and will be sunset.” The mobile iteration of the franchise first launched in 2018, and has seen more … ⌘ Read more

China Accuses NSA of Hacking National Timekeeping Agency
China says it has uncovered what it describes as irrefutable evidence of American government cyber attacks targeting the National Time Service Center. The Ministry of State Security said the National Security Agency exploited vulnerabilities in employees’ mobile phones beginning March 25, 2022, and later used stolen login credentials to access the center’s computers … ⌘ Read more

Experts Hail ‘Remarkable’ Success of Electronic Implant in Restoring Sight
An electronic eye implant has restored reading ability to patients blinded by geographic atrophy, a form of dry age-related macular degeneration. Results published Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that 84% of trial participants regained the ability to read letters, numbers, and words after receiving the Pr … ⌘ Read more

Peanut Allergies Have Plummeted in Children, Study Shows
Food allergies in children dropped sharply in the years after new guidelines encouraged parents to introduce infants to peanuts, a study has found. The New York Times: For decades, as food allergy rates climbed, experts recommended that parents avoid exposing their infants to common allergens. But a landmark trial in 2015 found that feeding peanuts to babies c … ⌘ Read more

India Draft Plan Reveals $21 Trillion Net-Zero Investment Need
India will need as much as $21 trillion to achieve its climate goals and lift its population out of poverty, according to a draft government plan seen by Bloomberg. From the report: The estimate offers a first glimpse of how the country intends to live up to its target of net zero emissions by 2070. The updated scenario implies hitting peak emissions … ⌘ Read more

Are We Living in a Golden Age of Stupidity?
Test scores across OECD countries peaked around 2012 and have declined since. IQ scores in many developed countries appear to be falling after rising throughout the twentieth century. Nataliya Kosmyna at MIT’s Media Lab began noticing changes around two years ago when strangers started emailing her to ask if using ChatGPT could alter their brains. She posted a study in June tracking bra … ⌘ Read more

AWS Outage Takes Thousands of Websites Offline for Three Hours
AWS experienced a three-hour outage early Monday morning that disrupted thousands of websites and applications across the globe. The cloud computing provider reported DNS problems with DynamoDB in its US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia starting at 12:11 a.m. Pacific time. Over 4 million users reported issues, according to Downdetector. Snapchat saw … ⌘ Read more

Should We Edit Nature to Help It Survive Climate Change?
A recent article in Noema magazines explores the issues in “editing nature to fix our failures.”

“It turns out playing God is neither difficult nor expensive,” the article points out. “For about $2,000, I can go online and order a decent microscope, a precision injection rig, and a vial of enough CRISPR-Cas9 — an enzyme-based genome-editing tool — to genetica … ⌘ Read more

‘The AI Revolution’s Next Casualty Could Be the Gig Economy’
“The gig economy is facing a reckoning,” argues Business Insider’s BI Today newsletter.”

Two stories this past week caught my eye. Uber unveiled a new way for its drivers to earn money. No, not by giving rides, but by helping train the ride-sharing company’s AI models instead. On the same day, Waymo announced a partnership with DoorDash to test driverless groce … ⌘ Read more

Windows 11 Update Breaks Recovery Environment, Making USB Keyboards and Mice Unusable
“Windows Recovery Environment (RE), as the name suggests, is a built-in set of tools inside Windows that allow you to troubleshoot your computer, including booting into the BIOS, or starting the computer in safe mode,” writes Tom’s Hardware.

“It’s a crucial piece of software that has now, unfortunately, bee … ⌘ Read more

Was the Web More Creative and Human 20 Years Ago?
Readers in 2025 “may struggle to remember the optimism of the aughts, when the internet seemed to offer endless possibilities for virtual art and writing that was free…” argues a new review at Bookforum. “The content we do create online, if we still create, often feels unreflectively automatic: predictable quote-tweet dunks, prefabricated poses on Instagram, TikTok dances th … ⌘ Read more

A Plan for Improving JavaScript’s Trustworthiness on the Web
On Cloudflare’s blog, a senior research engineer shares a plan for “improving the trustworthiness of JavaScript on the web.”

“It is as true today as it was in 2011 that Javascript cryptography is Considered Harmful.”

The main problem is code distribution. Consider an end-to-end-encrypted messaging web application. The application generates cryptogr … ⌘ Read more

Should Workers Start Learning to Work With AI?
“My boss thinks AI will solve every problem and is wildly enthusiastic about it,” complains a mid-level worker at a Fortune 500 company, who considers the technology “unproven and wildly erratic.”

So how should they navigate the next 10 years until retirement, they ask the Washington Post’s “Work Advice” columnist. The columnist first notes that “Despite promises that AI will elimina … ⌘ Read more

To Fight Business ‘Enshittification’, Cory Doctorow Urges Tech Workers: Join Unions
Cory Doctorow has always warned that companies “enshittify” their services — shifting “as much as they can from users, workers, suppliers, and business customers to themselves.” But this week Doctorow writes in Communications of the ACM that enshittification “would be much, much worse if not for tech workers,” who … ⌘ Read more

GIMP Now Offers an Official Snap Package For Linux Users
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: GIMP has officially launched its own Snap package for Linux, finally taking over from the community-maintained Snapcrafters project. The move means all future GIMP releases will now be built directly from the team’s CI pipeline, ensuring faster, more consistent updates across distributions. The developers also introduced a ne … ⌘ Read more

Desperate to Stop Waymo’s Dead-End Detours, a San Francisco Resident Tried an Orange Cone with a Sign
“This is an attempt to stop Waymo cars from driving into the dead end,” complains a home-made sign in San Francisco, “where they are forced to reverse and adversely affect the lives of the residents.”

On an orange traffic post, the home-made sign declares “NO WAYMO - 8:00 p. … ⌘ Read more

Sony Applies to Establish National Crypto Bank, Issue Stablecoin for US Dollar
An anonymous reader shared this report from Cryptonews:

Sony has taken Wall Street by surprise after its banking division, Sony Bank, filed an application with the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a national crypto bank under its subsidiary “Connectia Trust.” The move positions the Japa … ⌘ Read more

Why Signal’s Post-Quantum Makeover Is An Amazing Engineering Achievement
“Eleven days ago, the nonprofit entity that develops the protocol, Signal Messenger LLC, published a 5,900-word write-up describing its latest updates that bring Signal a significant step toward being fully quantum-resistant,” writes Ars Technica:

The mechanism that has made this constant key evolution possible over the past decade … ⌘ Read more

Are Supershear Earthquakes Even More Dangerous Than We Thought?
Long-time Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shared this article from the Los Angeles Times:

Scientists have increasingly observed how the rupturing of a fault during an earthquake can be even faster than the speed of another type of damaging seismic wave, theoretically generating energy on the level of a sonic boom. These shock waves — created during “sup … ⌘ Read more

FSF Reminds Consumers That Truly Free OS’s Exist
“Microsoft does everything in its power to keep Windows users under its control,” warns the Free Software Foundation in a new blog post this week.

They argue that the lack of freedom that comes with proprietary code “forces users to surrender to decisions made by Microsoft to maximize its profits and further lock users into its product ecosystem” — describing both the problem an … ⌘ Read more

Extortion and Ransomware Drive Over Half of Cyberattacks — Sometimes Using AI, Microsoft Finds
Microsoft said in a blog post this week that “over half of cyberattacks with known motives were driven by extortion or ransomware… while attacks focused solely on espionage made up just 4%.”

And Microsoft’s annual digital threats report found operations expanding even more through AI … ⌘ Read more

New Data Shows Record CO2 Levels in 2024. Are Carbon Sinks Failing?
The Guardian reports that atmospheric carbon dioxide “soared by a record amount in 2024 to hit another high, UN data shows.”
But what’s more troubling is why:

Several factors contributed to the leap in CO2, including another year of unrelenting fossil fuel burning despite a pledge by the world’s countries in 2023 to “transition away” from coa … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Cofounder Builds New Open Source LLM ‘Nanochat’ - and Doesn’t Use Vibe Coding
An anonymous reader shared this report from Gizmodo:

It’s been over a year since OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy exited the company. In the time since he’s been gone, he coined and popularized the term “vibe coding” to describe the practice of farming out coding projects to AI tools. But earlier this w … ⌘ Read more

Repair Plan Underway to Restore Power at Ukrainian Nuclear Plant
Repair Plan Underway to Restore Power at Ukrainian Nuclear Plant

The Associated Press reports:

Work has begun to repair the damaged power supply to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the head of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog said Saturday. The repairs are hoped to end a precarious four-week outage that saw it dependent on backup gene … ⌘ Read more

Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead
Long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 shares an announcement from the U.S.-based nonprofit Consumer Reports:

Protein powders still carry troubling levels of toxic heavy metals, according to a new Consumer Reports (CR) investigation. Our latest tests of 23 protein powders and ready-to-drink shakes from popular brands found that heavy metal contamination has become even … ⌘ Read more

You Only Need $750 to Pilfer Unencrypted Data From Satellites, Researchers Say
“A new study published on Monday found that communications from cellphone carriers, retailers, banks, and even militaries are being broadcast unencrypted through geostationary satellites…” reports Gizmodo. “The team obtained unencrypted internet communications from U.S. military sea vessels and even communications re … ⌘ Read more

Should Scientists Be Allowed to Edit Genes of Wild Animals? Top Conservation Groups Just Voted Yes
It’s the world’s largest network of environmental groups, according to NBC News, with more than 1,400 members from roughly 160 countries. It meets once every four years.

And in a vote Tuesday, the International Union for Conservation of Nature “approved further exploration of … ⌘ Read more

Windows 10 Refugees Flock To Linux as Zorin OS Claims ‘Biggest Launch Ever’
“Windows 10 is officially dead,” writes Slashdot user darwinmac, “and the vultures are circling. Or maybe they are liberators, depending on your point of view.” Neowin reports:

Of all the projects trying to poach Windows users, Zorin Group might be the most aggressive, launching its biggest OS upgrade, Zorin OS 18, on the ver … ⌘ Read more

Perplexity’s AI Browser ‘Comet’ is Now Free, with Big Marketing Deals to Challenge Chrome
“Earlier available only to the paying subscribers, the Comet browser now offers its core features to all users at no cost,” writes the Times of India. “This includes AI-powered search, contextual recommendations, and integrated tools designed to streamline research and content discovery.” They say the move … ⌘ Read more

Researchers Build Complex 3D-Printed, Carbon-Absorbing Bridge Inspired by Bones
Concrete accounts for about 8% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, notes CNN. But a research team at the University of Pennsylvania just used a robotic 3D printer to construct a bridge with “complex, lattice-like patterns” that are just as strong and durable — but with materials that absorb more carbon dioxide.

… ⌘ Read more

‘How We Sharpened the James Webb Telescope’s Vision From a Million Kilometers Away’
The James Webb Space Telescope gets its highest resolution with the aperture masking interferometer (or AMI), “a tiny piece of precisely machined metal that slots into one of the telescope’s cameras,” according to a new article by Benjamin Pope, an associated math professor at Macquarie University.
“We can fi … ⌘ Read more