Google Says Chromebook Updates End In 2034, ‘Many’ Models Move to Googlebook OS
Google says ChromeOS will keep receiving regular updates and security patches through mid-2034, after which qualifying newer Chromebooks will be able to migrate to the new Googlebook OS. 9to5Google reports: Starting with Chromebook updates, Google says that “Chromebooks you have today will continue to receive updates th … ⌘ Read more

California Is Banning Public Officials From Making Memecoins
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed AB 2409, barring California public officials from issuing memecoins and prohibiting companies from listing memecoins that use a public official’s image or likeness. Engadget reports: The governor’s office pointed to reports that about a million investors lost an alleged $3.8 billion on their purchases of the memecoin re … ⌘ Read more

Florida Invokes Extinction Fears In Legal Bid To Halt OpenAI Development
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The state of Florida is seeking a temporary injunction to stop OpenAI from continuing to develop what it calls a “reckless, unacceptably risky product” without the deployment of “third-party approved safety guardrails.” The new legal motion (PDF), filed Monday morning, is part … ⌘ Read more

El Nino Bursts Through Temperature Record Months Before Peak
The current El Nino has already surpassed the highest Pacific temperature anomaly recorded in the modern era, reaching 3.05C above the 1991-2020 average months before its expected peak. The commonly used ONI measure is also on the verge of breaking the 2015 record. Forecasts cited by The Guardian suggest the event could reach about 4.0C later this year. F … ⌘ Read more

Microbes Could Survive On Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
New research suggests Enceladus may be an especially promising place to search for extraterrestrial life: microbes similar to those found near Earth’s hydrothermal vents survived in lab conditions designed to mimic the Saturnian moon’s subsurface ocean. A separate study also found that material blasted from Enceladus’ plumes may naturally separate and concentrate salts, org … ⌘ Read more

Bananas That Don’t Go Brown To Hit Supermarkets Thanks to DNA Editing
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: It is the bane of every fruit bowl: sliced banana that turns brown before it has reached the table. But such woes could soon be a thing of the past, with gene-edited bananas that keep their freshly peeled color now one step closer to reaching British shoppers. According to Tropic, … ⌘ Read more

China Broadens Travel Curbs To Encompass Family of Top AI Talent
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Business Standard: China has expanded overseas travel restrictions for top AI professionals in private firms to include the families of key personnel, further tightening measures designed to prevent the outflow of critical know-how and information to the US. Government agencies have recently begun … ⌘ Read more

AMD Acquires Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs For $8.2 Billion
AMD has agreed to acquire Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for about $8.2 billion in stock, making it the chipmaker’s second-largest acquisition and giving it a major foothold in “world models” that simulate 3D environments for robotics and other physically grounded AI. CNBC reports: AI researchers expect world models will be able to help develop robots and other physically-grounded a … ⌘ Read more

TikTok to Pay Alabama $100 Million, Limit Teen Use In First State Settlement
TikTok has agreed to pay Alabama at least $100 million and adopt new restrictions for teenage users, including a two-hour daily limit, overnight access restrictions, stronger age verification, a ban on beauty filters, and an option for a non-personalized feed. The settlement could grow to as much as $300 million if enough oth … ⌘ Read more

Data Center Developer Offers $10,000 Checks To Nearby Households
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom’s Hardware: NorthPoint Development wants to build a data center on 1,300 acres in the Pocono foothills, near Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. As well as seeking to charm the local government with various funding packages, it has proposed paying checks of $10,000 per household. Despite the Pennsylvania town’s … ⌘ Read more

Meta Taps MongoDB CEO Desai to Drive Enterprise AI Push
Meta has hired MongoDB CEO Chirantan “CJ” Desai to lead a new enterprise AI business aimed at turning Meta’s models, agents and tools into products companies can deploy themselves. Reuters reports: Desai, a veteran technology executive, took over the role from Dev Ittycheria. MongoDB has appointed Ittycheria as interim CEO as it searches for a permanent repl … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia Unveils AI Agent Safety Platform With Hardware-Based Watchdog
wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Nvidia on Monday announced the Open Agent Safety Platform, which combines open source software and a reference system design to keep AI agents within set boundaries from testing through deployment. The chipmaker explained that the platform pairs the open-source OpenShell runtime with Sentry, an o … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Evaluating Drone Deliveries In Australia, Asia
Amazon is preparing to expand Prime Air drone deliveries into Australia and potentially other Asia-Pacific markets, with a new regulatory role tasked with securing the approvals needed to launch service there. The Register reports: “As Prime Air evaluates Australia and other countries, we are hiring a Head of Regulatory Approvals, Australia – the person responsible fo … ⌘ Read more

Bill Gates Says an AI ‘Kill Switch’ Isn’t Enough
Bill Gates said an AI “kill switch” alone would be insufficient to address the technology’s risks. “The kill switch is, that’s kind of a weird thing. It’s not enough to have a kill switch,” the Microsoft co-founder said in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He said the more immediate concern is people using AI for cyberattacks or bioterrorism rather than systems … ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Launches Starship Into Orbit
SpaceX’s Starship reached orbit for the first time, successfully deploying 26 operational Starlink V3 satellites after overcoming an early Raptor 3 engine shutdown during ascent. “SpaceX plans to eventually deploy 100,000 upgraded Starlink V3s to expand the company’s wireless satellite internet services,” notes Space.com. Here’s the latest update from the report:
SpaceX has decided to return Starship … ⌘ Read more

Walmart Says It’s Not Using Personal Info To Set Prices As It Expands Digital Shelf Labels
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Walmart is aiming to assuage customers’ fears about its new pricing technology as it rolls out digital price labels at its stores. In a statement posted on the company’s website, Walmart’s CEO John Furner vowed that the Bentonville, Ar … ⌘ Read more

Are AI Chatbots Spreading Misinformation to US Voters?
Are AI chatbots quietly shaping the perceptions of U.S. voters? Voters trying to educate themselves about candidates “are unknowingly being served partisan talking points in the guise of neutral news summaries,” write two news researchers in Politico magazine:

Leading AI chatbots cite partisan websites masquerading as independent local news outlets nearly half o … ⌘ Read more

Apple Faces $5.7 Billion Patent Infringement Verdict Over iPhone And Apple Watch Haptics
“A federal jury in San Diego awarded Taction Technology more than $5.7 billion in damages Friday after finding that Apple infringed claims from two haptics patents,”
reports CNBC:

Taction sued Apple in 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. The company alleged that … ⌘ Read more

Just How Big is the AI Buildout - and How Risky?
A new Brookings Institution study notes the “strikingly physical” economic footprint of AI’s buildout, from specialized chips and electricity to purpose-built data centers. (Two-thirds of a data center’s costs are IT equipment, with one-third going to real estate and its associated power infrastructure.) “At an average of 3.63 percent of GDP per year, the projected buildout would be l … ⌘ Read more

Waymo Says Its Self-Driving Cars Reduced Injury-Causing Accidents by 82%
Waymo’s self-driving car technology “continues to outperform human benchmarks,” the company claimed this week. “It was involved in 841 fewer injury-causing crashes — an 82% reduction compared to human drivers.”

Electrek reports:

We’ve seen various Waymo crash data before, with Waymo claiming crash reductions. That’s all well and … ⌘ Read more

After Dozens of Incidents at OpenAI and Anthropic, OpenAI Pauses Model Training to Build More Safeguards
“OpenAI said it has paused training of its latest AI models,” reports the Associated Press, “as reports of AI agents going rogue mount.”

The decision to halt development came just hours after the company disclosed Friday that it was reviewing several incidents from the summ … ⌘ Read more

New Tin-based Solar Cells Trap Heat 1,000 Times Longer, Could Beat 33% Limit
Could this push solar cell efficiency beyond the theoretical 33% limit? Interesting Engineering reports:

Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that tin-based perovskite solar cells can slow heat loss from high-energy “hot electrons…”

When sunlight strikes a panel, photons jump-start elect … ⌘ Read more

China and the US Say They’ve Agreed to Start Talks About AI
The United States and China have agreed to “launch a dialogue” on AI, reports Reuters.

On artificial intelligence, the two sides agreed to hold a dialogue on the technology’s risks and benefits, with the next round of discussions set for November, and to set up a communication channel for AI-related incidents, the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the White Hou … ⌘ Read more

KDE and GNOME Developers Ponder How to Handle AI-Generated Contributions
Last weekend KDE’s annual Akademy conference included a presentation proposing
an AI-native KDE,” writes The Register. This led KDE developer Nate Graham to open a discussion about proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions which “rapidly became heated. Moderators issued warnings, restricted further comments, and eventual … ⌘ Read more

After 40 Years, Microsoft Excel Will Add Single-Cell Lists and Arrays
Microsoft’s senior product manager for Excel acknowledges that “Throughout Excel’s 40-year history, you’ve only been able to put one value per cell.” But that’s now changing with arrays in cells (as well as nested arrays) and lists.

“You can create a list by selecting Insert > List or pressing Ctrl+J, then typing or pasting items separated b … ⌘ Read more

AI Finds So Many Linux Bugs, Canonical Changes to a Two-Week Stable Release Update Cycle
“Finding vulnerabilities faster also puts pressure on Linux distributions to fix and deliver patches faster,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli

AI has transformed bug discovery from “a manual, time-intensive process into a highly automated engine,” notes Canonical’s blog, leading to a “recent expl … ⌘ Read more

Is Microsoft Quietly Killing Off Its ‘Copilot+ PC’ Brand?
“Copilot+ PCs” were Microsoft’s official branding for Windows 11 “AI PCs” that met their system requirements. But the 2024 launch “didn’t go smoothly,” writes Windows Central, after security researchers discovered its proposed “Recall” feature was woefully insecure:

This pretty much tarnished the Copilot+ PC brand, and over the last two years more and more OEMs h … ⌘ Read more

Rogue OpenAI Agents Posted 53 User-Uploaded Images Onto the Internet, Accessed US Government Websites
53 images that users uploaded into OpenAI models were included in training data — and then AI agents in an OpenAI research environment posted those 53 images on public image hosting sites.
While posted as links that weren’t publicly listed, “the images could still be discovered e … ⌘ Read more

Meta Made 43M Misleading Statements, New Mexico Jury Finds, Including on Its Cambridge Analytica Response
A New Mexico jury on Friday “found Facebook liable for deceiving users” about its privacy protections, reports the Associated Press.

A New Mexico newspaper calls it “another massive legal victory” against Facebook, reporting that the jury found Facebook “had committe … ⌘ Read more

There’s a New Way to Break RSA Encryption
“Signature forgery.” It’s a new way to break RSA keys — and it doesn’t require factoring. Ars Technica reports on new research using classical computing to “reduce the current RSA security level to an unacceptably low threshold” and lower the required computing resources by orders of magnitude.

There’s “a gap in current RSA-type security assumptions,” according to a paper co-authored by Univer … ⌘ Read more

Asteroids Named After Tom Lehrer and ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic
“Weird Al” Yankovic’s name has just been approved for a new asteroid — (14331) Alyankovic = 1981 EC26 — by the International Astronomical Union, reports Space.com.

Yankovic’s asteroid was championed by planetary scientist Allison McGraw joined by “several heavy hitters in the planetary science field, according to the Tucson Star. (Astrophysicist Steve Desch fro … ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi Stock Jumps 30% as Demand Surges. (And Boards Now Locked to Their Original RAM Size)
Raspberry Pi’s stock shot up over 30% in the last week. Why are investors so excited? For the six months ending June 30, revenue for Raspberry Pi Holdings “jumped 90% to $256.9 million,” reports Investing.com, “while adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $40.3 million, and profit be … ⌘ Read more

F-Droid 2.0: FOSS Android Appstore Continues Updating Despite Google’s Pending ‘Developer Verification’ Plan
“F-Droid, a third-party app repository that only distributes free and open-source software packages for Google’s Android mobile platform, on Thursday announced version 2.0 of its Android app,” reports The Register.

Though they also note “a big banner across the to … ⌘ Read more

How Believable is Google’s New ‘Live Avatar’ Capability?
Google has synthesized “expressive face-to-face experiences” for its speech agent Gemini 3.8 Live. They’re now offering a Live Avatar “with precise lip-syncing, natural expressions, and fluid turn-taking” for Google Enterprise accounts wanting “engaging customer service” or for offering interactive walkthroughs. (Check out the not-creepy-at-all video in Google’s ann … ⌘ Read more

People Training OpenAI’s AI Fired For Using AI To Train the AI
404 Media reports “multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI’s models have been fired for using AI to train the AI:

That’s not great for the models themselves, but there is also obviously a great irony in AI training companies working for OpenAI firing people for using AI when OpenAI’s whole thing is to make people use AI at work… OpenAI declined to … ⌘ Read more

Five Police Officers Criminally Charged for Misusing Flock Cameras in Indianapolis
“Nationwide, at least 100 police department employees have been charged with or accused of misusing license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes,” reports the Washington Post. They cite their past investigations “based on thousands of pages of police and court records,” which found that “In many of these case … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs Urge UN Countries to Cooperate on AI Safety Standards
“The heads of major AI firms pleaded with the United Nations on Wednesday to save the world or at least its people — by somehow regulating the fast-expanding technology that they have been designing,” writes the Associated Press.

“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” said Dario Amodei, c … ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon X2 Series Processors Will Support Linux
Snapdragon X2 Series processors feature a neural processing unit (NPU) delivering 80 trillion operations per second and allowing advanced AI features to run locally. And Snapdragon X2 Series “is expanding to Linux,” Qualcomm announced today, calling it one of their most-requested capabilities:

Qualcomm Technologies is a top contributo … ⌘ Read more

Rogue OpenAI Agent Tried to Breach Government Site in May When Prompted for Simple Data-Retrieving Tasks
OpenAI’s artificial intelligence “went rogue this year in at least four additional incidents,” the New York Times reported Wednesday, “hacking and trying to break into government and university websites without being instructed to do so, according to researchers and govern … ⌘ Read more

Cities Across US Oppose Trump FCC Plan to Preempt Local Broadband Rules
Ars Technica reports:

Cities and counties around the U.S. are angry at the Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks… The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] argues that too many local governments “excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorb … ⌘ Read more

Whatever Happened to the 150,000 Tons of Radioactive Waste Stored Under the Atlantic Ocean?
More than 200,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste were stored on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between 1949 and 1982, reports ScienceAlert.

Whatever happened to those barrels?

Scientists have descended to the wreckage in a crewed submersible to investigate — and found many of the … ⌘ Read more

Andreessen Horowitz Launches AI/Company-Building School As a College Alternative
TechCrunch quipped it was like if startup school Y Combinator and Peter Thiel’s build-a-company-instead of-college Fellowship Program had a baby. Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $35 million to launch a private school in San Francisco “aimed at turning high school graduates into f … ⌘ Read more

Bitcoin Surges to $86,455, an 8-Month High, After America’s SEC Announces Tokenized Stock Experiment
August 15: $62,991
September 23: $86,456

Bitcoin shot up 37% over the last 39 days, reaching an eight-month high on Monday. “Bitcoin is back,” declares Yahoo Finance:

The token held near $86,000 on Tuesday after a stunning multisession rally… [Fundstrat head of digital assets Sea … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Helps Take Down Massive Automated, AI-Powered Phishing-as-a-Service Platform
Microsoft’s security blog describes the fight against a new “AI-powered cybercrime platform” offering phishing-as-a-service, with AI-tailored lures and analyses of compromised inboxes (to identify high-value targets). The site compromised more than 12,000 inboxes in over 10,000 organizations around the wo … ⌘ Read more

Trump Denounces Attempts to Control AI, Wants It Renamed ‘Super Intelligence’ in US Documents
U.S. President Trump addressed the United Nations on Tuesday. And a half hour in, after decrying immigration, Trump pivoted to add that “The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much no … ⌘ Read more

Are Students Suddenly Losing Interest in Computer Science as AI Coding Takes Off?
On academic mentoring platform Nova Learning, Computer Science and AI, “once the dominant choice among students… is losing ground fast, while Engineering has nearly doubled its share.” It’s a small survey, but “The steepest proportional decline is in Software & Data Science, the most traditional ‘learn to code’ … ⌘ Read more

‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Outgrosses All But 3 WB Movies This Year, Heads To Profit
The movie Coyote vs. Acme earned more than Warner Bros.’ $30 million tax write-off in just two weeks. And last week the movie officially earned more than its production budget of $70 million. But today the movie passed the $100 million mark. “You asked for it, we delivered, and you showed up!” distributor Ketchum Entert … ⌘ Read more

Pentagon Investigators Say Overreliance on Palantir AI Contributed to US Strike That Killed 123 Iranian Children
Two U.S. missiles hit an elementary school in Iran, killing over 150 people including 123 children on the first day of the Iran War. But Gizmodo notes that a new Bloomberg investigation cites U.S. officials involved in an unreleased internal Pentagon r … ⌘ Read more

Google Opens Preorders for Its $899 Gemini-Enhanced ‘Googlebook’ Laptops
Monday Google opened preorders for its “Googlebook” laptops, pricing them at $899. A Google’s blog post added that “At launch, you can choose between Intel Core Ultra Series 3 and Snapdragon X Elite processors” (paired with NPUs to power AI features).

“Devices will hit shelves on October 4 in the U.S. and on October 5 in Canada, the … ⌘ Read more

Meta’s New ‘Personal AI Agent’ Muse Beats ChatGPT in Downloads - and Get Blocked by Amazon
Meta’s AI “personal agent” Muse overtook ChatGPT as the #1 iOS free app in the U.S. on Friday, reports CNBC — and it’s still showing more downloads as of Monday night.

Muse now has over 2.5 million downloads since its debut less than two weeks ago, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower…

[Mu … ⌘ Read more