M John Harrison Becomes First Sci-Fi Author To Win Booker Prize
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Eighty-one-year-old M John Harrison has won the Booker prize for The End of Everything, a postapocalyptic novel set on a near-future Kent coast, becoming the oldest winner in the award’s history. Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that while plenty of previous winne … ⌘ Read more

Google Fi Brings Back Network Switching With ‘Secondary’ Partner
Google Fi is bringing back network switching through an unnamed “secondary” 5G carrier. “Most users will be on the ‘Primary network,’ but Google Fi will automatically switch users to the ‘Secondary network’ if it meaningfully improves performance with so-called ‘smart thresholds’ for doing so,” reports 9to5Google. “At launch, there is no manual s … ⌘ Read more

Fireworks AI Confirms Wider Breach Affecting Notion AI Chats
Fireworks AI says its October breach was broader than initially disclosed, with attackers gaining access to customer account and billing information as well as some datasets, incomplete model weights and secrets. Notion, the popular productivity and note-taking app, disclosed that it was impacted in the breach but “fewer than 1% of Notion workspaces” were … ⌘ Read more

New York Launches Nation’s First State AI Testing Program
New York is launching a state-backed AI safety research center at Binghamton University that will independently study and test AI systems, develop safety and security techniques, and train researchers in responsible AI. “While the federal government fails to act, New York is leading the way on AI safety and holding big tech accountable,” New York Gov. Kathy Hoch … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Launches New Workplace Features To Take On Microsoft and Google
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic announced new workplace features on Tuesday, including Claude Meetings, which brings Claude into video calls to begin working on tasks while participants are still talking. The company also unveiled Claude Whiteboards and Claude Sheets. The launch of Anthropic’s new … ⌘ Read more

Starlink Mini 2 Adds a Swappable Battery, Wi-Fi 6
SpaceX has unveiled the Starlink Mini 2, equipping the company’s smallest satellite internet terminal with a removable 71Wh battery and Wi-Fi 6. Preorders are opening to select U.S. customers for $999, which includes a year of Roam Unlimited service. Shipments are expected to begin in mid-December. InterestingEngineering reports: The removable battery represents the biggest fun … ⌘ Read more

Nintendo Is Officially Investing In Game Preservation
Nintendo is hiring a digital archivist to help ensure the company’s historical records are “preserved for future generations.” The 12-month position is tasked with designing and implementing a “structured framework for organizing technical records, engineering documentation, source materials, and institutional knowledge related to legacy systems and platforms.” Polyg … ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.3 Released With Nvidia DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, Vulkan Default
Blender 5.3 has been released with support for 3D Gaussian Splats, Nvidia DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction and Vulkan as the default graphics backend on Linux. Phoronix reports: Blender now allows importing Gaussian Splats from PLY, SPZ, and glTF files. Also new to Blender 5.3 is NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction support as a new … ⌘ Read more

Reddit Is Turning User Conversations Into AI-Powered Product Reviews
Reddit is rolling out an AI-powered shopping feature called “Reddit Reviews” that summarizes user conversations about products and turns them into dedicated reviews. TechCrunch reports: Reddit’s announcement points to its rules and its latest measures to combat automated abuse and spam, as well as its practice involving community moderato … ⌘ Read more

Europe Must Rethink Security As Big Tech Power Grows, EU Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The European Union must rethink security to take into account challenges and risks posed by the growing power of major technology companies that go beyond traditional competition concerns, European Commission Executive Vice-President Teresa Ribera said on Monday. “We need to review and to deepen our concep … ⌘ Read more

Uber Is Launching Its Own Parking Reservation Service
Uber is launching Uber Parking, integrating technology from its SpotHero acquisition to let users find and reserve parking garages and lots directly through the Uber app. “You can also filter your results based on criteria like whether you want to self-park or use a valet, or other specific amenities,” adds Engadget. From the report: To book a spot, you’ll need to pro … ⌘ Read more

Boston Dynamics Adds Wheels to Atlas Humanoid
Boston Dynamics has equipped its Atlas humanoid with wheels, allowing the robot to rapidly roll across flat terrain while still using its articulated legs to navigate obstacles and uneven surfaces. “The ‘experiment’ combined classical model-based motor control with whole-body reinforcement learning to maintain dynamic stability across unstructured, real-world terrain,” reports Th … ⌘ Read more

FDA Warns GLP-1s May Increase Risk of Sudden Blindness
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Food and Drug Administration said Monday that GLP-1 drugmakers must add a warning label about a rare eye condition that can cause sudden blindness. The condition, called nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or NAION, affects the optic nerve, which carries signals from the eye to the brain. When blo … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Took 31 Years to Let You Kill Windows 11’s Sticky Keys Popup
Microsoft is testing a Windows 11 option that lets users permanently disable the Sticky Keys and Filter Keys activation prompts directly from the pop-ups themselves, ending a 31-year-old annoyance without requiring a trip into Settings. Windows Latest reports: Sadly, the dialog is still the same aging Win32 window, but we spotted Micr … ⌘ Read more

Trump Backs Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Amid Chinese Spy Affair Investigation
President Donald Trump says the FBI is investigating Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with a woman alleged by U.S. intelligence to have gathered information for Beijing. “I know the FBI is looking into it in terms of something else, and I think that he’ll be in good shape,” Trump said at a White House briefing. The Associated Pre … ⌘ Read more

Epic Games Comments On Planned Linux Distribution Support
Epic Games says it plans to support its new Linux launcher on as many distributions as possible, specifically naming Fedora, SteamOS, CachyOS and Omarchy. GamingOnLinux’s Liam Squires-Hand reports: Speaking to Jake Jones, Communications Director at Epic Games, they said: “Hey Liam! The new Epic Games Launcher is still in Preview and we plan to support as many … ⌘ Read more

France Accuses Iran of Supermarket Fridge Hacking
France has accused Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of being behind last month’s cyberattacks on fridges and freezers across the country. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the attack was “unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression,” adding those who were responsible would be hit with sanctions “at the European level.” The BBC reports: The cy … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Launches New Claude Fable and Mythos 5.2 Models
Anthropic has released Claude Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2 with “improvements in areas like coding, reasoning, and vision,” while cutting Fable’s input price and claiming 30% faster responses. TechCrunch reports: It’s Anthropic’s first model release since the arrival of a third-party report from the assessment group METR, which suggested the lab might be approaching rec … ⌘ Read more

Commerce Dept. Chip Inquiry Was Halted After Nvidia Intervention
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Investigators at the Commerce Department were deep into a monthslong investigation of a Singaporean company that they suspected of smuggling Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips into China when their work came to a sudden halt late last year. The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a … ⌘ Read more

Google Unveils Two New Specialized AI Chips to Widen Its Challenge to Nvidia
Google is expanding its AI chip lineup with two specialized TPUs arriving next year: the TPU 8tx, which encrypts sensitive data at the chip level for confidential computing, and the TPU 8i Max, which combines two TPU chips to provide more processing power and memory for long-context workloads. The move broadens Google’s ch … ⌘ Read more

Huawei Says It’s Made a 100% Chinese PC
Huawei has unveiled the Qingyun HM650, a desktop PC it claims is made entirely from Chinese-manufactured components, including its own 10-core Kirin X90 processor and an enterprise version of HarmonyOS. “While Huawei has reportedly claimed local companies manufactured 100 percent of the components in the machine, it is unclear if all those components use Chinese designs,” notes The Register. Fr … ⌘ Read more

Reddit Founder Says Building Social Media Apps Is ‘Not Cool Anymore’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Alexis Ohanian wants to figure out the future of user-generated content. According to the Reddit cofounder, building social media apps is “not cool anymore” and so much of the internet has been compromised. “I’m expecting some better version of the group chat to be that new version of UGC,” Oha … ⌘ Read more

Orbiter Detects Signs of Possible Volcanic Activity on Mars
Futurism reports:

While many scientists have long held that Mars is “geologically dead” inside, new research is adding to the growing body of evidence to the contrary.

As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers examined data collected by the European and Russian ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter … ⌘ Read more

Surprise for Cast of ‘Return of the Living Dead’ Sequel. They Were Replaced by AI
A crowdfunded sequel to the movie Return of the Living Dead was uploaded last weekend — but producer Richard Driscoll is drawing criticism for what he did to the 1985 punk/zombie classic.

Kotaku reports:
[The release of the movie] came to the surprise to the original cast, who were attached to star in th … ⌘ Read more

Asahi Linux Drops MIT and Goes Full GPL After Spotting LLM-Assisted License Laundering
It’s FOSS reports:

Asahi Linux is the reason you can run Linux on an Apple Silicon Mac today. For years, the project put most of its own code under the MIT license so that anyone, including the BSDs, could reuse it as needed… They have announced that Asahi is moving all of its repositories to the GNU … ⌘ Read more

Electric Cars Are Close to Overtaking Petrol In the UK, Data Shows
69 million people people live in the United Kingdom. And now >Electrek reports:

Battery-electric cars took 32% of the UK’s new car market in October, while petrol cars fell to just 37.2%, according to new data from the SMMT. That’s the closest the two have been. At the current pace, electric cars will outsell petrol in the UK within a yea … ⌘ Read more

Can CrowdStrike’s New ‘AI Kill Switch’ Shut Down Rogue AI Agents?
CrowdStrike’s “Falcon Guardian” protects Windows systems by enforcing policy, restricting unauthorized applications and blocking USB devices, notes Gartner.
And now CrowdStrike says they’re giving security teams “the ultimate human control over AI agents” with — an “AI Kill Switch… a defender can terminate it where it runs, block it from launching … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia CEO Admits Affair With Alleged Chinese Spy. Investigation Opened
CNBC reports new details about the relationship of alleged Chinese spy with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang:

Huang told Nvidia staff in a email on Sunday that he had an affair with the woman and that Nvidia’s board of directors had opened an independent investigation into the spying allegations. “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions … ⌘ Read more

Parents Sue Google Over AI Safety Risks On School Chromebooks
The New York Times reports:

After chatting for months with Google’s artificial intelligence on a school-issued Chromebook laptop, a 13-year-old student made plans to end her life, according to a lawsuit filed in California Superior Court on Monday, the latest in a wave of litigation over Big Tech’s effects on young people. The lawsuit, which refers to … ⌘ Read more

Salon, One of the Web’s Pioneering News Outlets, Shuts Down After 31 Years
“It has been an extraordinary privilege,” says the subheading on Thursday’s announcement. After 31 years Salon.com will stop publishing, according to an announcement which appeared on the site under the byline “Salon”. It remembers that Salon “was an idea about what journalism could be, born at a moment when the internet was stil … ⌘ Read more

Claude Code’s ‘Don’t Ask Again’ File Exposes Passwords and Keys in 1,122 Public Copies on GitHub
Be careful with the file .claude/settings.local.json, warns The Hacker News:

Passwords and API keys that developers typed into commands they approved in Claude Code are sitting in public GitHub repositories, where anyone can read them. When a user selects “Yes, and don’t ask again,” Anthro … ⌘ Read more

Do Data Centers Have a Smaller Effect on Electricity Prices Than We Think?
“According to a new study by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, data centers are probably having only a small effect on residential electricity prices,” reports the Washington Post.

“The researchers calculated that these operations were responsible for just 4% of the utility rate increase … ⌘ Read more

Norwegians Release FOSS GNOME Software for Music Recording, Internet Radio, and Cameras
ole (Slashdot reader #19,909) writes in about his free, Norwegian open-source music recording studio for GNOME called GarageJam, which he says allows musicians to compose, record, and share original music seamlessly on the Internet.
The latest release, GarageJam 8.0.1, is available in C and Pyth … ⌘ Read more

Python’s CVEs Triple. Anthropic Funds a New Security Developer
In the last year CVEs have increased 3x for Python and its package manager Pip, according to Python’s security developer in residence Seth Larson. “And the amount of malware published and removed from the Python Package Index (PyPI) is up 60%.” Securing Python’s ecosystem is getting more complex, he writes, especially given “the evolving role of … ⌘ Read more

Aaron Swartz Would’ve Been 40 Today. His ‘Legacy Lives On’ Says FSF
“Aaron Swartz would have turned forty this year,” writes FSF deputy director Sean O’Brien. “November 8 is Aaron Swartz Day, when we remember a pioneer of free software and information sharing whose contributions helped shape the modern internet.”

The Internet Archive will host a hackathon Sunday in San Francisco celebrating Aaron’s Swartz’s li … ⌘ Read more

NASA Announces It’s Looking for New Astronauts
Saturday NASA officials announced it’s accepting applications for a new astronaut class, reports the Associated Press:

With only 32 active astronauts, the space agency needs more recruits as it looks to expand humanity’s presence beyond low-Earth orbit as quickly as possible… “We have far more work than we have astronauts,” Artemis III commander Randy Bresnik told The Associat … ⌘ Read more

Scifi Magazine ‘Starlog’ Relaunches, and Back Issues Return to Internet Archive
Slashdot reader sandbagger brings news about the classic science ficdtion magazine Starlog. It’s 33-year run from 1976 to 2009 is now available on the Internet Archive.

And 17 years after publishing its final issue, Starlog is relaunching, publishing one issue a year starting November 13, according to The Holly … ⌘ Read more

AlpineBSD Announced - an AI-free FOSS OS
Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030) shares his article about a new OS in the BSD family “combining NetBSD’s kernel and libc with a port of the Alpine Linux userland” — and promising it won’t use AI-generated code:

AlpineBSD is so new that it barely exists yet. There are no installation media available, though it’s possible to manually bootstrap an installation. What AlpineBSD does already have i … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Removes PC-to-PC Migration from Windows 11, Points Users to OneDrive-Based Backup
Windows 11 offered a PC-to-PC Migration feature that “moved files and settings directly between two PCs over Wi-Fi or Ethernet,” reports Ghacks. But according to an updated Microsoft support page, the tool is no longer available.

“Microsoft’s support documentation now redirects users to Window … ⌘ Read more

Data Centers are Being Powered By Giant Gas Plants, Possibly Increasing Carbon Pollution for Decades
Rather than racing toward their net-zero targets, Amazon and other AI/cloud computing companies “are driving emissions sharply higher,” reports the Washington Post:

To support their data centers, tech firms are driving construction of a new generation of supersized, gas-f … ⌘ Read more

Is Mandating AI Use in the Workplace Backfiring?
Some workplaces are holding mandatory AI training sessions, while others “are requiring employees to use a specific number of tokens,” reports the Washington Post, “or log a certain amount of time on AI platforms.”
The article’s headline? “Why mandating AI use in the workplace can backfire.”

[A] lot of employers are going about it the wrong way, said Arvind Karunakaran, an assi … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Find Rare Meteorite From Mars With Signs of Ancient Water
“I didn’t think a rock like this existed on Earth,” a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas told the Washington Post. It looks like a polished rock, dark brown with a clay-colored stripe — but it’s actually one of the oldest Mars meteorites ever found, blasted by an impact from the surface of Mars billions of years ag … ⌘ Read more

A Third Major US Offshore Wind Farm Is Now Fully Operational
Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to halt development on a $6.2 billion wind farm, it’s now “completely up and running,” reports the nonprofit energy news site Canary Media, delivering enough electricity to power the equivalent over 350,000 homes:

On Thursday, the Danish energy giant Ørsted said its 704-megawatt wind farm near Connecticut and R … ⌘ Read more

AlmaLinux Shows Advantages of ABI Compatibility After RHEL Restricted Source Code Access
“AlmaLinux OS charted a new path in 2023 when Red Hat restricted source code access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” remembers Linux Magazine.

“Rather than pursue 1:1 compatibility with RHEL like other Enterprise Linux alternatives, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation chose application binary interface (ABI) … ⌘ Read more

China’s Top Spy Agency Recruited Woman Who Targeted Jensen Huang
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with the chief executive of one of the most important artificial intelligence companies in the United States was a spy for China’s Ministry of State Security, Beijing’s top intelligence agency, according to people briefed on U.S. surveillan … ⌘ Read more

Cryosphere Faces Permanent Damage When World Overshoots 1.5C, Scientists Warn
A UN-backed report warns that even temporarily overshooting the Paris agreement’s 1.5C warming target could cause permanent and widespread losses of glaciers, snow and polar ice sheets. With Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets already melting about six times faster than in the 1990s, the report argues that global temperatur … ⌘ Read more

Vibrating Mattress Helps Clear Alzheimer’s Protein From the Brain
A vibrating mattress combined with two pills that release nitric oxide enhanced the brain’s ability to clear an Alzheimer’s-related protein. According to New Scientist, the experiment “caused the brain’s blood vessels to swell and constrict more strongly, which enhanced the glymphatic system’s clearance of [the protein].” From the report: \ … ⌘ Read more

Mexico’s Senate Approves ISP Rules To Disconnect Persistent Online Pirates
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: On Tuesday, Mexico’s Senate approved (PDF) a reform of the Federal Copyright Law that ties ISP liability to having a policy to terminate repeat infringers. [This policy has to be published permanently on their website and in their terms of service, and it must include a basi … ⌘ Read more

EU Says TikTok’s ‘Rabbit Hole’ Effect Must Stop
The European Commission has preliminarily found that TikTok violates the Digital Services Act because its For You recommendation algorithm can create a “rabbit hole effect,” repeatedly exposing users to potentially harmful content involving topics such as sadness, isolation and body image. TikTok must change the feed’s design or potentially face fines of up to 6% of its global annua … ⌘ Read more

Chainalysis Says Breach Exposed Credentials For All Customers
Chainalysis says attackers exposed usernames, password hashes and live tokens for all of its customers. “While the company locked Chainalysis accounts as a precaution after discovering that some customers’ passwords had been exposed and asked users to reset their passwords before signing in again, it has now taken the login portal offline, together with … ⌘ Read more