slashdot 

feeds.twtxt.net

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

Fedora Linux 43 Exposes 20-Year-Old Microsoft Outlook Security Failure
BrianFagioli writes: Fedora Linux 43 users upgrading to the latest Dovecot mail server discovered something rather unsettling: some older Microsoft Outlook configurations may have been silently ignoring SSL/TLS settings for POP3 email connections for years. According to a Fedora community blog post, affected Outlook clients reportedl … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

EU Plots To Abandon US Tech
Ancient Slashdot reader whitroth shares a report from Politico, with the caption: “shutting down Microsoft Office for the International Criminal Court (ICC) was clearly a wake-up call.” From the report: The EU is moving to counter American dominance in technology by reaching for one of the oldest tools in its arsenal: industrial strategy. As the European Commission unveiled a plan Wednesday to reduce Europe’s reliance … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

MacBook Neo is So Popular That Apple Reportedly Doubled Production
According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple has reportedly doubled 2026 MacBook Neo production from 5 million to 10 million units after stronger-than-expected demand for its $599 budget laptop. MacRumors reports: On an earnings call in late April, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said that customer response to the MacBook Neo was “off the c … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Google Launches ‘Gemma 4 12B’ AI Model That Can Run On Your Laptop
Google has launched Gemma 4 12B, a 12-billion-parameter open AI model designed to run locally on your laptop without depending entirely on cloud infrastructure. WION reports: According to Google, the new model delivers performance close to much larger AI systems while requiring significantly less memory. The company says Gemma 4 12B can run … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Google Shares Fitbit Air Blueprints So Anyone Can 3D-Print Accessories
Google has released (PDF) technical specs and 2D CAD drawings for the Fitbit Air to encourage users to make their own accessories. “These CAD drawings include crucial mating dimensions, tolerances, and mating force specifications – including attach and detach force – to help you build a high-quality accessory band,” Google says … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Microsoft Plans Linux Tools, RTX Spark Desktop For Windows Devs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft’s Build developer conference kicked off today, and as with almost everything the company has done in the last few years, Microsoft’s opening keynote focused overwhelmingly on AI and other closely related technologies. […] On the hardware front, we didn’t get any updates for existi … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Meta Workers Can Opt Out of Workplace Tracking for Up to 30 Minutes
Meta is scaling back parts of its employee tracking initiative after staff objected to software that collected mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and other actions for AI training data. According to Reuters, the company will now let workers pause collection for up to 30 minutes and request exemptions. Reuters reports: [Stephane Kasriel, a … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Microsoft Claims New Quantum Chip 1,000 Times Better Than Before
Microsoft says its new Majorana 2 quantum chip is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor, with qubits lasting about 20 seconds instead of milliseconds, and claims it could have a commercially useful quantum machine by 2029. The BBC reports: “We will have a quantum machine in 2029 that can solve commercially viable, reasonable problems,” … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Android Gets Fake Call Detection That Uses RCS
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Phone by Google wants to combat the “growing threat of impersonation scams” and protect Android users against “sophisticated, AI-powered deepfake attacks” with fake call detection. […] Fake call detection requires that both parties are on Android and use the Phone by Google app, while Google Messages and Google Contacts also … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Thanks To Robots, Ukraine Is Now Talking About Winning, Not Just Surviving
fjo3 shares a report from Defense One: A small but growing number of European officials and analysts are saying what four years ago was unthinkable: Ukraine isn’t just surviving its grueling war with Russia, it is in some ways thriving and may even be on a path to victory. This isn’t yet captured in headlines – for example, abo … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Trump Administration to Dismantle Ocean Monitoring System
The Trump administration is moving to dismantle the National Science Foundation’s $368 million Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of more than 900 deep-sea instruments used to monitor ocean currents, marine ecosystems, carbon absorption, heat waves, fisheries, coastal flooding, and climate change. The NSF said it would send ships in June to begin the re … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Microsoft’s Project Solara Is an OS For Devices That Run AI Agents Instead of Apps
An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: A team inside Microsoft has been quietly building a platform for devices that run AI agents instead of apps, based on Android instead of Windows, with two working hardware designs so far, and an initial set of big-name companies lined up to run pilots. The p … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Mathematicians Warn of AI Threats to Profession As Industry Encroaches
A new Leiden Declaration, endorsed by the International Mathematical Union and published on June 2, 2026, warns that AI could undermine mathematics by flooding the field with plausible but flawed proofs, weakening attribution, shifting incentives, and giving tech companies too much influence over research priorities. “Mathematicians … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

European Parliament Ditches Google For French Search Firm
The European Parliament is replacing Google with French search engine Qwant as the default on in-house computers, citing digital sovereignty and privacy concerns. Politico reports: As of Thursday June 4, “Qwant will replace Google as default search engine on European Parliament computers,” officials told lawmakers in an email seen by POLITICO. The change is be … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Russian Spy Agency Says Foreign Spies Turned Officials’ Smartphones Into Surveillance Devices
Russia’s FSB claims foreign intelligence services compromised smartphones belonging to senior Russian officials, allegedly turning them into surveillance devices capable of stealing data, recording conversations, and activating microphones or cameras. “This software is used to steal existing … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Microsoft Deliberately Bricking All Office For Mac 2019/2021 Installations
Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac will reportedly drop into “reduced functionality mode” on July 13, 2026, when a license-validation certificate expires, leaving perpetually licensed apps able to open files but not edit or save them. Slashdot reader joshuark shares a report from OSnews: “Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Microsoft Unveils Scout, an Autonomous AI Agent Built On OpenClaw
Microsoft has unveiled Scout, an experimental always-on AI “autopilot” agent for Microsoft 365 that can operate across Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, calendars, contacts, browsers, and external apps via MCP. “Autopilots stay active in the background, understand how work gets done across your apps and systems, and take action without need … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Trump Signs AI Executive Order Asking Companies To Give Government Early Access To Models
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order asking artificial intelligence companies to provide models to the federal government to assess their capabilities ahead of a full release. The order asks companies, on a voluntary basis, to pa … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Adafruit Pauses Blog After Demand Letter From Flux.ai’s Lawyers
Longtime Slashdot reader Matt_Bennett shares a blog post from Adafruit: Adafruit received at 10:38 p.m. ET on May 22, 2026 a letter from former FBI chief of staff, Jonathan F. Lenzner, and partner at Fenwick & West LLP, counsel for Flux, demanding, among other things, that Adafruit refrain from publishing an article addressing what the letter charact … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

User-Replaceable Batteries Are Coming Back In a Big Way
New EU battery rules taking effect early next year are pushing tech makers toward user-replaceable batteries in products like headphones, e-readers, handheld consoles, laptops, and possibly earbuds. But carve-outs for smartphones and tablets may mean replaceable batteries won’t necessarily return to phones in the way many users remember. The Verge’s Dominic Pr … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

GitHub Copilot Users React To New Usage-Based Pricing System
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In April, GitHub announced that it was moving subscribers from request-based billing to a usage-based model for its AI-powered Copilot service. As that new pricing model goes into effect today, many GitHub Copilot users are reporting some extreme sticker shock as they realize just how quickly their p … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Google Requests Permission to Release 32 Million Mosquitoes In California and Florida
Google has asked the EPA for permission to release up to 32 million sterile male mosquitoes in California and Florida over two years. The effort is part of the company’s Debug program, which uses Wolbachia-infected males to reduce populations of disease-spreading Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Google cites a si … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Texas Adds Another Huge Solar Farm As ERCOT Grid Demand Soars
Texas is adding another large solar project as ERCOT electricity demand rises. According to Electrek, Vesper Energy has secured $236 million in financing for its 201 MW Nazareth Solar farm in Swisher County, which will be capable of generating enough electricity for about 53,000 homes. The project is expected to begin construction in June 2026 and … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Remote Work, Not AI, Has Sidelined Recent College Graduates, Research Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The buzz on college campuses is that AI is disrupting the job market for young college graduates. But new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that the culprit may be something else: remote work. An analysis of federal employment data, paired with a deep dive int … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After The Raid
Twenty years after Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay’s Stockholm data center and seized its servers, the site remains online. In fact, the 2006 crackdown arguably made it more famous, helping turn it into “one of the most resilient and iconic websites on the internet,” reports TorrentFreak. From the report: On May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pir … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Hackers Simply Asked Meta’s AI To Take Over High-Profile Instagram Accounts
“Hackers used Meta’s AI support chatbot to change email addresses associated with high-profile Instagram accounts, such as Barack Obama’s White House account, allowing them to change the passwords and gain control over the accounts,” writes Slashdot reader fropenn. Other accounts affected include the Chief Master Sergeant of … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Florida Sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, Accusing Them of Putting Profit Over Safety
Florida’s attorney general has sued (PDF) OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging the company prioritized growth and market value over user safety and failed to adequately warn about risks tied to ChatGPT. The lawsuit, the first by a U.S. state over OpenAI safety concerns, is separate from a criminal investigation … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Anthropic Files to Go Public
Anthropic says it has confidentially filed an IPO prospectus with the SEC, “setting up a potentially historic share sale for investors ready to jump into artificial intelligence,” reports CNBC. The move puts Anthropic ahead of OpenAI’s expected filing and follows explosive reported growth, a massive new valuation, major infrastructure deals, and ongoing tensions with the Pentagon over its models. From the report: “This gi … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Anthropic Invites EU To Access Mythos
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: Anthropic has extended an invitation to the European Commission granting the EU’s cyber agency access to its powerful AI hacking tool Mythos, according to a Commission official familiar with the process. The AI firm made the formal invitation after a meeting with the Commission in San Francisco last Thursday, the official said, adding the EU now has to p … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

United Airlines Flight To Spain Pulls U-Turn Over Bluetooth Device Name
Tony Isaac shares a report from NPR: A United Airlines flight traveling from Newark, New Jersey, to Palma de Mallorca, Spain, was forced to make a U-turn and return to Newark after more than four hours in the air due to a security concern. According to passenger reports and air traffic control audio, the disruption was caused by a … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Red Hat npm Packages Compromised to Spread a Credential-Stealing Worm
Aikido Security says more than 30 official @redhat-cloud-services npm packages were compromised with a credential-stealing worm called “Miasma,” a variant resembling the open-sourced Mini Shai-Hulud supply-chain malware. “The packages were published via GitHub Actions OIDC, indicating the CI/CD pipeline was compromised rather than an npm … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Dell Rivals Apple’s MacBook Neo With $699 Touchscreen XPS 13 Laptop
Dell has introduced a redesigned $699 XPS 13 aimed squarely at Apple’s budget MacBook Neo, offering a premium aluminum design, touch display, backlit keyboard, Wi-Fi 7, 512GB of base storage, and various other configuration options. Dell’s machine costs more than Apple’s entry model but tries to justify the difference with lighter weight, … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Botnet of More Than 17 Million Devices Dismantled
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Authorities in the Netherlands said they dismantled a botnet that comprised more than 17 million devices and were managed by 200 servers in a joint operation by the police and the National Cyber Security Center. The action, announced Thursday, came about after a security researcher reported the sprawling network to authorit … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

NVIDIA Unveils New ARM-Based AI/Graphics Superchip Coming to Windows PCs and Laptops
“The company best known for powering the AI boom is coming for the PC,” reports Axios.

Nvidia’s CEO unveiled a new ARM-based “N1X processor made alongside Microsoft,” reports CNBC, that “will be incorporated into a new RTX Spark superchip, debuting in the fall on a fresh line of Windows PCs from Microso … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

New Lawsuit Against Amazon: ‘Subscribe and Save’ Program Can Actually Cost You More
Amazon’s “Subscribe & Save” program — for recurring purchasees — has triggered a new lawsuit, reports Oregon Live.

“The lawsuit contends that after luring in customers with ‘artificially low prices,’ the world’s biggest online retailer jacked up the prices in the months after their first shipments arrived.”

In … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

New Desalination System Turns Seawater Into Drinking Water and Useful Salts - Including Lithium
“Scientists have developed a solar desalination system that turns seawater into drinking water without creating environmentally damaging brine,” reports ScienceDaily.

“Special laser-textured metal panels use sunlight to evaporate water while automatically moving salt deposits away … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Something Made Earth’s Molten Core Reverse Direction In 2010
ScienceAlert reports:
In the molten ocean of iron churning in Earth’s outer core, a section deep beneath the Pacific Ocean suddenly reversed direction and started moving eastward against the planet’s usual westward flow. This happened in 2010, according to satellite measurements of Earth’s magnetic field, and scientists are still trying to figure out what … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

US, Australia, and UK Plan New Unmanned Vehicles to Protect Undersea Data Cables
“Around 570 cables (plus a further 80 planned) carry between 95% and 99% of the world’s intercontinental telecommunications data,” reports CNN (since fiber cables offer speeds of terabits per second, carry much more data than satellite links). And “networks of green energy cables carrying electricity are also starting … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

‘The Oral Tradition That Built Software May Not Survive AI’
A historian-turned-software engineer warns that “so little is ever written down” by professional programmers in a new article for Fast Company:

Perhaps there’s an early design doc, but then it turns out that everything was substantially revised before work began. Maybe there are a few wiki pages explaining known issues, some of which were solved a long … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

US Teachers’ Union Urges Schools To Curb AI Chatbots and Screen Time
Axios reports:

The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers’ union in the U.S., released a 10-point plan to introduce AI and screen-time guardrails in classrooms. The plan would limit AI use and ban screens for students in prekindergarten through second grade “unless there is a compelling reason,” such as supporting st … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

New Star Wars Movie Falls to #3 Behind Two Movies Directed By YouTube Stars
Disney’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu “suffered a catastrophic 70% drop in its second weekend,” reports Variety, suggesting the movie isn’t finding audiences “beyond an aging group of core fans.”

“Despite playing on far more screens, The Mandalorian and Grogu landed in third place on weekend charts behind Ba … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Renewable Energy is Surging in Africa
Almost a fifth of the earth’s population lives in Africa. And Africa’s next generation of power projects “is increasingly being built around solar and wind power and battery storage,” reports the Associated Press, “as governments and investors shift away from coal and large hydropower dams in search of cheaper, faster and more reliable electricity.”

The shift is visible in a $1.5 billion energy … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

AI Agents Get Their Own Directory Built Atop DNS
“In the future, AI agents will be able to find one another using the Domain Name System (DNS), instead of crawling about and probing ports or checking configured resources,” writes The Register.

InfoWorld writes that “numerous proprietary agent registries are on the market, but the Linux Foundation suggests we simply extend the distributed, open Domain Name System (DNS) infras … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

‘Virtual OS Museum’ Lets You Try 570 Extinct Operating Systems
You can try 570 extinct operating systems at a new “virtual museum,” according to a new article by ZDNet. Their reporter downloaded the ancient OS NeXTStep, and was “shocked” by how easy it was to run it, “and by the sheer number of operating systems to choose from.”

Essentially, what you do is download a zipped file, unzip it, change into the newly c … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Ohio Suspends Data Center Tax Break as Opposition Grows
The state of Ohio — one of America’s hot regions for data center construction — “is suspending a tax break that has been critical to its competition with other states,” reports the Associated Press.

The move “comes as tax breaks for energy-hungry AI data centers are increasingly playing a role in state budgets,” the article points out. But they also note the expan … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Zig Bans AI Code Contributions Because They’re ‘Invariably Garbage’
The Zig programming language wants to be a modern alternative to C (including better memory safety features). It’s maintained by as an open-source project by a 501©(3) nonprofit and a network of contributors.

But Business Insider notes that Zig bans the submission of AI-assisted code:

On the JetBrains podcast, Zig President Andrew Kel … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

UK-Based Rockstar Games North Workers Formally Announce Union
Rockstar Games has a 2,000-employee studio in Scotland called Rockstar North. And Thursday its workers announced they’d formed a union, reports the gaming news site Aftermath:

The union [part of the wider Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) union] includes workers from Rockstar Games offices in Leeds, London, Edinburgh, Dundee, and Lincoln, … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Fed Up With Vibe Coders, Dev Sneaks Data-Nuking Prompt Injection Into Testing App
It all started when the German developer behind an open-source app for Java testing “added hidden instructions to sabotage projects performed by AI coding agents,” reports Ars Technica:

The instructions were added to jqwik, a test engine for JUnit 5… The salient change in the update was a line that read: … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Pentagon Says US Military Personnel Targeted Using Commercial Location Data
U.S. forces deployed to war zones “have been targeted using commercially available location data,” reports Reuters, citing “reports fielded by military officials.”

Reuters calls it “an illustration of how the global surveillance economy is shaping the battlefield.”

In a letter shared with Reuters by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More

Journalist Spots Fugitive Terrorist Using Facial Recognition Software
Slashdot reader Bruce66423 writes: A German court this week sentenced a member of the Red Army Faction — a far-left terrorist organisation that operated in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s — to jail. [67-year-old Daniela Klettewas was sentenced to 13 years for armed robberies, according to the Guardian, and “she also faces trial for … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More