CIA Reportedly Used Secret Quantum Tool To Find Downed Airman in Iran
alternative_right quotes a report from the New York Post: The CIA used a futuristic new tool called “Ghost Murmur” to find and rescue the second American airman who was shot down in southern Iran, The Post has learned. The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic fingerprint of a human heartbea … ⌘ Read more

Planet Labs Tests AI-Powered Object Detection On Satellite
BrianFagioli writes: Artificial intelligence has now run directly on a satellite in orbit. A spacecraft about 500km above Earth captured an image of an airport and then immediately ran an onboard AI model to detect airplanes in the photo. Instead of acting like a simple camera in space that sends raw data back to Earth for later analysis, the satellite perfo … ⌘ Read more

Russian Government Hackers Broke Into Thousands of Home Routers To Steal Passwords
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A group of Russian government hackers have hijacked thousands of home and small business routers around the world as part of an ongoing campaign aimed at redirecting victim’s internet traffic to steal their passwords and access tokens, security researchers and … ⌘ Read more

Apple Faces ‘Massive Dilemma’ With Success of the MacBook Neo
Apple may have a supply problem on its hands with the MacBook Neo… The laptop reportedly relies on “binned” A18 Pro chips with one GPU core disabled, and demand is so strong that the supply of those cheaper leftover chips could run out before the next model is ready. That leaves Apple choosing between lower margins, shifting production plans, or ch … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Unveils ‘Claude Mythos’, Powerful AI With Major Cyber Implications
“Anthropic has unveiled Claude Mythos, a new AI model capable of discovering critical vulnerabilities at scale,” writes Slashdot reader wiredmikey. “It’s already powering Project Glasswing, a joint effort with major tech firms to secure critical software. But the same capabilities could also accelerate offensive cyber operation … ⌘ Read more

Chrome Is Finally Getting Vertical Tabs
Chrome is finally adding built-in vertical tabs, “which will move the tabs to the side of the browser window, making it easier to read full page titles and manage tab groups,” reports TechCrunch. The company is also introducing an immersive reading mode for a distraction-free, text-focused experience. From the report: The company notes that the new vertical tabs can be enabled at any time by rig … ⌘ Read more

Supreme Court Wipes Piracy Liability Verdict Against Grande Communications
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Following on the heels of the landmark Cox v. Sony ruling, the Supreme Court has vacated the contributory copyright infringement verdict against ISP Grande Communications, ordering the Fifth Circuit to reconsider its decision in light of the new precedent. […] The order … ⌘ Read more

Testing Suggests Google’s AI Overviews Tells Millions of Lies Per Hour
A New York Times analysis found Google’s AI Overviews now answer questions correctly about 90% of the time, which might sound impressive until you realize that roughly 1 in 10 answers is wrong. “[F]or Google, that means hundreds of thousands of lies going out every minute of the day,” reports Ars Technica. From the report: The Times … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Reveals $30 Billion Run Rate, Plans To Use 3.5GW of New Google AI Chips
Anthropic says its annualized revenue run rate has surpassed $30 billion and disclosed plans to secure roughly 3.5 gigawatts of next-generation Google TPU compute starting in 2027. Broadcom will supply the key chips and networking gear for the effort, the company announced. The Register reports: News of the two d … ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Fast-Tracks Post-Quantum Rollout To 2029
Cloudflare is accelerating its post-quantum security plans and now aims to make its entire platform fully post-quantum secure by 2029. “The updated timeline follows new developments in quantum computing research that suggest current cryptographic standards could be broken sooner than previously expected,” reports SiliconANGLE. From the report: The decision by Cloudflare t … ⌘ Read more

New Revelations Reignite Crypto Scandal Involving Argentina’s President Milei
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: President Javier Milei of Argentina promoted a cryptocurrency last year that quickly skyrocketed in value then cratered just as fast, costing investors millions of dollars and setting off a scandal and an investigation. Mr. Milei said he was simply highlighting a … ⌘ Read more

Stanford Daily Ponders Fate of Bill Gates Namesake Building On April Fools’ Day
theodp writes: “Gates Computer Science Building renamed Peter Thiel Center for Panoptic Computing” reads the headline of an April Fools’ Day story that ran in the Humor section of The Stanford Daily (with the further disclaimer that “This article is purely satirical and fictitious”). The story begins: “Following revel … ⌘ Read more

LinkedIn Faces Spying Allegations Over Browser Extension Scanning
LinkedIn is facing allegations that it quietly scans users’ browsers for installed Chrome extensions. The German group Fairlinked e.V. goes so far as to claim that the site is “running one of the largest corporate espionage operations in modern history.”

“The program runs silently, without any visible indicator to the user,” the group says. “It … ⌘ Read more

China Flies World’s First Megawatt-Class Hydrogen Turboprop Engine
Longtime Slashdot reader walterbyrd shares a report from Fuel Cells Works: China says the AEP100, a megawatt-class hydrogen-fueled turboprop engine developed by the Aero Engine Corporation of China, has completed its maiden flight on a 7.5-ton unmanned cargo aircraft in Zhuzhou, Hunan. The 16-minute test covered 36km at 220km/h and 300 meters … ⌘ Read more

New Jersey Cannot Regulate Kalshi’s Prediction Market, US Appeals Court Rules
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A federal appeals court ruled on Monday that New Jersey gaming regulators cannot prevent Kalshi from allowing people in the state to use its prediction market to place financial bets on the outcome of sporting events.
A three-judge panel of the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Ci … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Calls For Robot Taxes, Public Wealth Fund, and 4-Day Workweek To Tackle AI Disruption
OpenAI is proposing (PDF) sweeping policy changes to help manage the societal disruption caused by advanced AI, including taxes on automated labor, a public wealth fund, and experiments with a four-day workweek. The company said the policy document offered a series of “initial ideas” to address … ⌘ Read more

Teardown of Unreleased LG Rollable Shows Why Rollable Phones Aren’t a Thing
A teardown video of LG’s never-released Rollable phone helps explain why rollable phones never became a real product category: they were likely too expensive, fragile, and complicated to manufacture at scale.

“The complexity of the internals would have made the Rollable extremely expensive to manufacture, and it would have … ⌘ Read more

AP Offers Buyouts As Part of Pivot Away From Newspaper Journalism
The Associated Press is offering buyouts to U.S. journalists “as part of an acceleration away from the focus on newspaper journalism that sustained the company since the mid-1800s,” the not-for-profit outlet reported today. AP says it is making the move from a position of strength, responding to shrinking newspaper revenue and growing demand fr … ⌘ Read more

Artemis II Astronauts Break Apollo Record For Farthest Distance Humans Have Traveled From Earth
Artemis II has broken the Apollo 13 record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth. NASA reports: The Artemis II crew of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen have set th … ⌘ Read more

Samsung’s Messages App Is Shutting Down
Samsung says it will discontinue its Samsung Messages app in July 2026 and is directing Galaxy users to switch to Google Messages instead. Android Central reports: […] Samsung says users can switch to Google Messages as their default app to maintain a consistent Android messaging experience. The fine print also states that once the app is discontinued, “sending messages via Samsung Messages … ⌘ Read more

Germany Doxes ‘UNKN,’ Head of RU Ransomware Gangs REvil, GandCrab
An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: An elusive hacker who went by the handle “UNKN” and ran the early Russian ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil now has a name and a face. Authorities in Germany say 31-year-old Russian Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin headed both cybercrime gangs and helped carry out at least 130 acts of computer … ⌘ Read more

More Americans Are Breaking Into the Upper Middle Class
More Americans have moved into upper-middle-class incomes over the past several decades (source paywalled; alternative source), with new research suggesting that group has grown sharply while the lower and core middle class have shrunk. The Wall Street Journal reports: In 2024, about 31% of Americans were part of the upper middle class, up from about 10% in 1979, … ⌘ Read more

Peter Thiel Is Betting Big On Solar-Powered Cow Collars
Halter, a New Zealand agtech startup now valued at $2 billion, has raised $220 million to expand its AI-powered cattle management system. “Halter is now valued at $2 billion following the Series E, which was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund with participation from Blackbird, DCVC, Bond, Bessemer, and several others,” reports Inc. From the report: alter plans to … ⌘ Read more

Copilot Is ‘For Entertainment Purposes Only,’ According To Microsoft’s ToS
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: AI skeptics aren’t the only ones warning users not to unthinkingly trust models’ outputs – that’s what the AI companies say themselves in their terms of service. Take Microsoft, which is currently focused on getting corporate customers to pay for Copilot. But it’s also been getting d … ⌘ Read more

Linux Finally Starts Removing Support for Intel’s 37-Year-Old i486 Processor
“It’s finally time,” writes Phoronix — since “no known Linux distribution vendors are still shipping with i486 CPU support.”
“A patch queued into one of the development branches ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window is set to finally begin the process of phasing out and ultimately removing Intel 486 CPU support from … ⌘ Read more

Russia’s VPN Crackdown Caused Bank Outages, Telegram Founder Says
Russia’s “great crackdown” on VPNs — and a clampdown on Telegram’s messaging platform — had an unintended side effect, reports Bloomberg. It “triggered the widespread banking outage seen across the country this week, Telegram’s billionaire founder Pavel Durov said.”

“Telegram was banned in Russia, yet 65 million Russians still use it daily via VP … ⌘ Read more

Artemis Astronauts Enter Moon’s Gravitational Pull, Catch First Glimpses of Far Side
NASA’s Artemis astronauts are now entering “the lunar sphere of influence,” reports NBC News, “meaning the pull of the moon’s gravity will become stronger than Earth’s.” Now as they begin their swing around the moon, the Artemis astronauts “are chasing after Apollo 13’s maximum range from Earth,” reports t … ⌘ Read more

Internet Bug Bounty Pauses Payouts, Citing ‘Expanding Discovery’ From AI-Assisted Research
The Internet Bug Bounty program “has been paused for new submissions,” they announced last week.

Running since 2012, the program is funded by “a number of leading software companies,” reports InfoWorld, “and has awarded more than $1.5m to researchers who have reported bugs “

Up to now, 80% of its p … ⌘ Read more

Claude Code Leak Reveals a ‘Stealth’ Mode for GenAI Code Contributions - and a ‘Frustration Words’ Regex
That leak of Claude Code’s source code “revealed “all kinds of juicy details,” writes PC World.
The more than 500,000 lines of code included:
- An ‘undercover mode’ for Claude that allows it to make ‘stealth’ contributions to public code bases
- An ‘always-on’ age … ⌘ Read more

Hundreds of Theatres Show Apocalyptic-Yet-Optomistic New Movie, ‘The AI Doc’
Hundreds of theatres are now showing a new documentary called The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist. Variety calls it “playful and heady,“edited “with a spirit of ADHD alertness.” The New York Times suggests it “tries to cover so much that it ends up being more confusing than clarifying, but parts are fascina … ⌘ Read more

Will ‘AI-Assisted’ Journalists Bring Errors and Retractions?
Meet the “journalist” who “uploads press releases or analyst notes into AI tools and prompts them to spit out articles that he can edit and publish quickly,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

“AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune’s web traffic in the second half of 2025.” And most were written by 42-year-old Nick Lichtenberg, who has … ⌘ Read more

Crooks Behind $27M in ‘Refund’ Scams Busted By YouTube Pranksters After Being Lured to Fake Funeral
One crime ring scammed 2,000 elderly people of more than $27 million between 2021 and 2023 using tech support/bank impersonation/refund scams. “Victims were in their 70s and 80s,” reports the U.S. Attorney’s office for California’s southern district. Victims were first told they’d r … ⌘ Read more

Apple Brings Device-Level Age Verification to Two More Countries
11 days ago Apple launched device-level age restrictions in the U.K. There were some glitches, reports the blog 9to5Mac.

For me, the experience was an entirely painless one, taking less than 30 seconds. All I had to do was tap a confirm and continue button, and Apple told me that the length of time I’d had an Apple account was used to confirm t … ⌘ Read more

Chrome 148 Will Start ‘Lazy Loading’ Video and Audio to Improve Performance
“Google has announced that it’s currently testing a new feature for Chrome 148 that could speed up day-to-day browsing,” reports PC World:

[T]he browser can intelligently postpone the loading of certain elements. Why load all images at the start when it can instead load images as you get close to them while scrolling? Chrome and … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Engineered a Plant To Produce 5 Different Psychedelics At Once
Plants, toads, and mushrooms “can all produce psychedelic substances,” writes ScienceAlert.

“And now their powers have been combined in one plant.”

[S]cientists have taken the genes these organisms use to make five natural psychedelics and introduced them into a tobacco plant ( Nicotiana benthamiana), which then produced a … ⌘ Read more

Does Ubuntu Now Require More RAM Than Windows 11?
“Canonical is no longer pretending that 4GB is enough,” writes the blog How-to-Geek, noting Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “raises the baseline memory to 6GB, alongside a 2GHz dual-core processor, and 25GB of storage…”

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) set the floor at 1GB — a modest ask when it launched more than a decade ago in 2014. Then came the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) that pus … ⌘ Read more

Apple’s First 50 Years Celebrated - Including How Steve Jobs Finally Accepted an ‘Open’ App Store
Apple’s 50th anniversary got celebrated in weird and wild ways. CEO Tim Cook posted a special 30-second video rewinding backwards through the years of Apple’s products until it reaches the Apple I. Podcaster Lex Fridman noticed if you play the sound in reverse, “It’s the Think Differ … ⌘ Read more

Top NPM Maintainers Targeted with AI Deepfakes in Massive Supply-Chain Attack, Axios Briefly Compromised
“Hackers briefly turned a widely trusted developer tool into a vehicle for credential-stealing malware that could give attackers ongoing access to infected systems,” the news site Axios.com reported Tuesday, citing security researchers at Google.

The compromised package … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Pulls Then Re-Issues Windows 11 Preview Update. Also Begins Force-Updating Windows 11
Nine days ago Microsoft released a non-security “preview” update for Windows 11 — not mandatory for the average Windows user, notes ZDNet, “but rather as optional, more for IT admins and power users who want to test them.”
TechRepublic adds that the update “was to bring ‘production-rea … ⌘ Read more

America’s CIA Recruited Iran’s Nuclear Scientists - By Threatening To Kill Them
A former U.S. spy spoke to The New Yorker about “years of clandestine work for the C.I.A. — which, he said, had ‘prevented Iran from getting a nuke’.”

[Kevin] Chalker told me that, as he understood it, the Pentagon had suggested running commando operations to kill key Iranian scientists, as Israel subsequently did. … ⌘ Read more

Before Webcomics: Selling Political Cartoons On BBSes In 1992
Slashdot reader Kirkman14 writes: A year before the Web opened to the public, Texas entrepreneur Don Lokke was trying to syndicate weekly political cartoons to bulletin board systems. His “telecomics,” as he called them, represent an overlooked early experiment in online comics. Lokke launched his main series, “Mack the Mouse” at the height of the 1992 … ⌘ Read more

Are Employers Using Your Data To Figure Out the Lowest Salary You’ll Accept?
MarketWatch looks at “surveillance wages,” pay rates “based not on an employee’s performance or seniority, but on formulas that use their personal data, often collected without employees’ knowledge.”

According to Nina DiSalvo, policy director at labor advocacy group Towards Justice, some systems use signals associated with fi … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Announces Claude Subscribers Must Now Pay Extra to Use OpenClaw
Anthropic’s making a big and sudden change — and connecting its Claude AI to third-party agentic tools “is about to get a lot more expensive,” writes the Verge:

Beginning April 4th at 3PM ET, users will “no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw,” according to an email sen … ⌘ Read more

No, AMD Is Not Buying Intel
“The April 1st timing should have been your first clue,” writes Gadget Review. TechSpot’s false story was just an April Fool’s prank — although Gadget Review thinks it’s still funny how “something about this particular piece of satire felt uncomfortably plausible.”

Maybe it’s because AMD stock sits around $196 while Intel hovers near $41, or perhaps it’s the poetic justice of the underdog finally eating the giant. The semi … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Must Negotiate With First Warehouse Workers Union, US Labor Board Rules
Amazon “must negotiate with a labor union representing some 5,000 workers at a company warehouse on Staten Island,” reports Reuters, citing a ruling Wednesday from America’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The union formed in 2022, according to the article, and “has been seeking to negotiate with Amazon over pay, … ⌘ Read more

The Document Foundation Removes Dozens of Collabora Developers
Long-time GNOME/OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice contributor
Michael Meeks is now general manager of Collabora Productivity. And earlier this month he complained when LibreOffice decided to bring back its LibreOffice Online project, as reported by Neowin, which had been inactive since 2022. After the original project went dormant — to which Collabora was a … ⌘ Read more

‘Cognitive Surrender’ Leads AI Users To Abandon Logical Thinking, Research Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect reasoning or factual fl … ⌘ Read more

Colorado’s New Speed Camera System Makes Waze Nearly Useless
Colorado is rolling out an average-speed camera system that tracks vehicles across multiple points instead of catching them at a single camera, making it much harder for drivers to dodge tickets with apps like Waze and Radarbot. Motor1 reports: The state’s new automated vehicle identification systems (AVIS) use several cameras to calculate your average spe … ⌘ Read more

Artemis II Astronauts Pass 100,000 Miles From Earth On Voyage To the Moon
The Artemis II crew has passed 100,000 miles from Earth and is now on a “free-return” path around the moon after a successful “translunar” injection burn. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am so, so excited to be able to tell you that for the first time since 1972 during Apollo 17, human beings have left Earth orbit,” NASA’s Dr Lori Gl … ⌘ Read more

‘AI’ Is Coming For Your Online Gaming Servers Next
“Consumer PC parts aren’t the only things being gobbled up by the ‘AI’ industry,” writes PCWorld’s Michael Crider. “A Starcraft-inspired strategy game is shutting down its multiplayer servers because the hosting company got bought out for ‘AI.’” The game will still be playable offline for now, but the shutdown highlights the ripple effects of the AI boom on the gaming indust … ⌘ Read more