‘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

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

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

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

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

‘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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linux Developers Consider Retiring The x32 ABI
The Linux kernel mailing list has a new patch proposing the retirement of the x32 ABI, reports Phoronix:

The Linux x32 ABI for x86_64 processors allow making use of the full 64-bit register file and wide data path but retaining 32-bit pointers to provide for a smaller memory footprint when not needing 64-bit pointers. Linux x32 came to the party late and didn’t enjoy much adopt … ⌘ Read more

‘Call Of Duty: Warzone’ Is Shutting Down On PS4 And Xbox One
Call Of Duty: Warzone is shutting down on PS4 and Xbox One later this year, reports Kotaku.

As Call of Duty fully transitions to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S (and Switch 2), its popular battle royale spin-off, Warzone, is also ditching the old consoles. Later this year, Warzone will no longer be playable on PS4 or Xbox One…

Shortly after Modern Warfare 4 ( … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Criticized for Threatening Legal Action Against Security Researcher
“A security researcher published a series of unpatched bugs in Microsoft products,” reports TechCrunch, “along with code to exploit them.”

Microsoft’s response to the researcher? “Threatening to take legal action and call the cops on them.”

On Wednesday, Microsoft published a blog post criticizing the researcher, who goe … ⌘ Read more

Mars Minerals Reveals an Ancient Ocean’s Potential For Life - and a Possible Way to Make Oxygen
Researchers have identified a ring of minerals around the largest basin in the northern hemisphere of Mars (which past research suggests held a large body of water). Phys.org says the research provides new clues on when life may have been possible on Mars — and how future astronauts … ⌘ Read more

DuckDuckGo Installs Up 30% After Google Announced AI Search
After Google announced AI-emphasizing changes to its search results, many web surfers began defecting to DuckDuckGo, reports TechCrunch. (They describe DuckDuckGo as “a privacy-focused alternative” that accounts for around 2% of the U.S. search market…)

DuckDuckGo said U.S. app installs went up 18.1% week-over-week on average during the May 20 to May 25 … ⌘ Read more

Ozempic May Be Reshaping the Brain, Scientists Say
A research team found “extensive changes” on brain scans of 13 young women taking
GLP-1 drugs, reports the Washington Post:

Within only a few months, the brain connections in the salience network, which helps target attention, had multiplied… [“We didn’t expect to see this effect, and we really don’t know what it means,” said an assistant professor assisting the resea … ⌘ Read more

Software Stocks Have Best Month Since 2001. Talk of ‘SaaSpocalypse’ Subsides
Security company Okta shot up 30% Friday, reported CNBC, while data platform provider Snowflake jumped 50% this week.

They see it as part of a larger trend where software stocks “soared this week,” signaling “some companies are navigating their way through AI disruption better than Wall Street expected” and that investors “may ha … ⌘ Read more

US Aims to Give Cold War Plutonium to Startups For Nuclear Fuel
The Trump administration is planning to provide Cold War-era plutonium from dismantled nuclear warheads to nuclear startups that want to convert it into reactor fuel, arguing it could help address a looming fuel shortage for advanced reactors. Critics warn the idea raises serious nonproliferation, security, cost, and technical concerns. The New … ⌘ Read more

Apple Working To Cram Massive Gemini Model Into iPhone To Power New Siri
Apple is reportedly working to shrink Google’s Gemini models enough to power parts of a long-delayed AI-enhanced Siri on iPhones. But despite Apple’s best efforts to run the AI locally, “the iPhone’s Gemini makeover will lean heavily on Google and Nvidia in the cloud,” reports Ars Technica. That could complicate Apple’s privacy-f … ⌘ Read more

RIP: Marcia Lucas, Oscar-Winning Star Wars Editor, Dies At 80
```Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 brings word that Marcia Lucas, part of the editing team for both Star Wars and Return of the Jedi, has died at age 80 after a battle with metastatic cancer.

Married to George Lucas from 1969 to 1983, Marcia is remembered by The Wrap as “a powerful asset in the early days of the Star Wars series, helping sh … ⌘ Read more`

Dell Stock Surges 32% in One Day. Big Revenue From AI Servers Stuns Analysts
Dell’s stock skyrocketed 32.76% on Friday, “its best day ever,” reports CNBC, after Dell “reported its fastest pace for revenue growth for any period since returning to the public market in 2018…”

“Shares are now up 234% in 2026.”

Dell, which reported first-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday, saw a flood of artificia … ⌘ Read more

Wix Is the Latest To Cut 20% of Jobs While Citing AI
Wix is laying off roughly 20% of its workforce, about 1,000 employees, as CEO Avishai Abrahami cites both the rapid evolution of AI and currency pressure from a stronger Israeli shekel against the dollar. The web developer joins a growing list of tech companies making similar cuts, including Amazon, Block, Cisco, Cloudflare, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Intuit. Fast Company re … ⌘ Read more

Blue Origin Rocket Exploded Thursday Night During Hot-Fire Test
Spaceflight Now shared their video of the explosion, which the Orlando Sentinel describes as showing Blue Origin’s rocket “become engulfed in flames. The fireball expands out and covers the entire launch pad as the fuselage of the rocket can be seen crumbling into the flames.”

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said on X.com “It’s too early to know … ⌘ Read more

Supreme Court Lets Vermont’s Meta Lawsuit Proceed, Opening Door To 50-State Legal Wave
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a push to avoid a lawsuit alleging that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users, a decision that comes as social media companies increasingly face legal scrutiny. Parent company Meta appealed after Vermont’s highest co … ⌘ Read more

FBI Arrests CIA Official With $40 Million In Gold Bars In His Home
A senior CIA official, David Rush, was arrested after investigators found more than $40 million in gold bars and about $2 million in cash at his Virginia home. According to the New York Times, “The only charge lodged against David Rush is that he inflated his academic credentials and obtained military leave pay worth tens of thousands of dollar … ⌘ Read more

NASA Details Its Plan to Build a Lunar Base At the Moon’s South Pole
NASA has outlined a three-phase plan to build a lunar base at the moon’s south pole. The first phase, from 2026 to 2029, will focus on robotic missions, landers, rovers, reactors, satellites, and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance test. Later phases will add habitats, power systems, communications, cargo logistics, and rotating cr … ⌘ Read more

MIT Researchers Develop a Low-Cost Technique To Get Lithium Out of Rocks
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT News: Currently, lithium hard rock extraction involves baking the rock at over 1,000 Celsius and chemically leaching it to extract lithium. The rest of the rock is discarded. Now, a team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere has developed a low-temperature process for extracting batt … ⌘ Read more

Europe Told To Cool Its Datacenter Boom Before Water, Power Run Short
A new Grundfos report warns that Europe’s datacenter boom could strain water supplies and power grids unless regulators bake water and energy efficiency into planning, reporting, and incentives for new facilities. The Register reports: According to the report, the EU-wide server farm IT load is about 10 GW today, and is expected to r … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Releases Opus 4.8 With New ‘Dynamic Workflow’ Tool
Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4.8 with stronger performance and better handling of uncertain or flawed data, including a greater tendency to flag issues rather than make unsupported claims. The update also introduces a “Dynamic Workflows” research preview for coordinating complex tasks across many subagents. TechCrunch reports: Opus 4.8 comes with the expec … ⌘ Read more

Occupy Wall Street Co-Founder Built an On-Device AI For Activists
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: In an era where Silicon Valley’s conservatism is both expressed openly and becoming more intense by the day, it’s strange to think that tech was once seen as a hive of liberalism. The right-wing nature of today’s tech industry means that its products tend to also be seen as serving right-wing int … ⌘ Read more

Trump Loses More Control Over AI Regulation As Illinois Passes Landmark Law
Illinois lawmakers on Wednesday passed a landmark AI safety bill (SB 315) that would require major AI companies to publish safety plans, submit annual third-party testing reports, report serious incidents quickly, and protect whistleblowers who flag emerging risks. OpenAI and Anthropic supported the bill, which could make Illi … ⌘ Read more

Valve’s Steam Deck Sells Out Again, Even After 40% Price Increase
Valve’s Steam Deck has sold out again despite a steep price increase that pushed the 1TB OLED model as high as $949 – about $300 above its original price. “Even with the $300 price bump, the Steam Deck sold out after less than 24 hours back in stock,” reports IGN’s Jacqueline Thomas. “I don’t know how many units Valve was able to stock into its s … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Allegedly Leaked Dutch Civil Servants’ Data To the US
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cybernews: The technology giant Microsoft has been accused of leaking the data of civil servants working for the Netherlands’ regulatory agencies to the US House of Representatives. The civil servants affected by the leak work at the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) and the Dutch Data Protection Autho … ⌘ Read more

IBM, Red Hat Commit $5 Billion To Secure Open Source Supply Chains
IBM and Red Hat are committing $5 billion to a new initiative called “Project Lightwell,” which aims to secure open-source software supply chains with AI-assisted vulnerability discovery, triage, patch validation, and upstream maintenance. Longtime Slashdot reader wiggles shares a press release from IBM: IBM and Red Hat today announced Project … ⌘ Read more

Robinhood Now Lets Your AI Agents Trade Stocks
Robinhood is launching beta support for a new feature that will let AI agents make payments and trade stocks on users’ behalf. The company is also rolling out a virtual credit card for AI agents, with spending limits and approval controls. TechCrunch reports: Robinhood said users on its platform can now create a separate account for their AI agents and connect them to a dedicated wa … ⌘ Read more

DOJ Charges Google Employee With $1.2 Million Polymarket Bet On Search Term
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Federal prosecutors charged a Google employee with fraud on Wednesday, alleging that he made $1.2 million off of bets using insider information on Polymarket. Prosecutors claim that Michele Spagnuolo, a staff information security engineer at Google, used confidential information to … ⌘ Read more

Last.fm Goes Independent After Breaking Up With Paramount Skydance
Last.fm announced that it is independent again after separating from Paramount Skydance, nearly two decades after CBS acquired the music-tracking service in 2007. The company says accounts, scrobbles, privacy settings, Pro subscriptions, and billing information will remain intact. Additional details are forthcoming. Engadget reports: … ⌘ Read more

Perfect Randomness Realized For the First Time
ETH Zurich researchers say they have generated certified “perfect randomness” for the first time by using a quantum Bell-test setup with two entangled superconducting chips connected by a 30-meter cooled link. “In the long term, this work could play a similar role in digital security as atomic clocks do for timekeeping: a physically certified source of randomness that other syst … ⌘ Read more

Websites Have a New Way To Spy On Visitors: Analyzing Their SSD Activity
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Now sites have a new way to spy on their visitors: measuring subtle interactions with their solid-state drives. The technique, named FROST (fingerprinting remotely using OPFS-based SSD timing), allows sites to monitor other sites a visitor is viewing and what apps are open … ⌘ Read more

Meta To Start Testing AI Subscription Services
Meta will begin testing paid subscriptions for its Meta AI app and website, with a $7.99/month Meta One Plus plan and a more capable $19.99/month Meta One Premium plan offering. The test will start next month in Singapore, Guatemala, and Bolivia as Meta looks for AI revenue beyond advertising while continuing to offer a free tier. CNBC reports: Naomi Gleit, the head of product at M … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia To Spend $150 Billion a Year In Taiwan
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the company plans to spend around $150 billion a year in Taiwan, calling it the “epicenter of the AI revolution.” “Four years ago, five years ago, Nvidia was spending about $10, $15 billion dollars a year in Taiwan. Now we’re spending $100, going to $150 billion dollars in Taiwan each year,” Huang said. Reuters reports: Huang was speaking at a launch celebratio … ⌘ Read more

Rust Will Save Linux From AI, Says Greg Kroah-Hartman
Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman says Rust can help Linux deal with a flood of AI-discovered security bugs (namely Dirty Frag, Copy Fail, and Fragnesia) by preventing common C mistakes around memory, locking, error handling, and untrusted data at build time rather than during human review. It’s “not a silver bullet” and does not mean rewriting the whol … ⌘ Read more

The AI Fight Brewing Inside the New York Times
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: How newsrooms should use AI – or if they should at all – has been a recurrent debate within the media industry over the last several years. Increasingly, these rules are being hammered out at the bargaining table between unions and publishers. Right now, employees at The New York Times are gearing up for a fight. Unionized staff … ⌘ Read more

YouTube To Automatically Detect, Label AI-Generated Videos
YouTube will begin automatically labeling videos when its systems detect “significant” photorealistic AI use, while also making AI-content disclosures more visible below long-form videos and directly on Shorts. “We’ve heard consistently from our community that they value transparency when it comes to generative AI content,” YouTube said in a blog post. “These … ⌘ Read more

Roku Updates Its UI For the First Time In a Decade
Roku is rolling out its first major homescreen update in a decade. The UI doesn’t look too dramatically different, but users will notice more personalization-driven changes, including frequently used apps, “top picks,” household-specific layouts, and recommendations based on viewing habits. Rest assured, Engadget adds, “Everything is still in various shades of purp … ⌘ Read more

Tech CEOs Are Apparently Suffering From AI Psychosis
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: There is a certain wildness in the tech industry these days that both mimics previous eras of large changes, like cloud computing (runaway costs in the early days), and is like nothing we’ve ever seen before (record revenues accompanied by mass layoffs). One possible explanation: tech executives, especially CEOs, are … ⌘ Read more

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston To Step Down After 19 Years
Dropbox founder Drew Houston is stepping down as CEO after 19 years and will become executive chairman, with product chief Ashraf Alkarmi set to take over after a co-CEO transition period. CNBC reports: Drew Houston founded Dropbox
nearly two decades ago at age 24, eventually becoming a household name in Silicon Valley and the first tech entrepreneur to take a comp … ⌘ Read more

Company Behind School Bus AI Cameras Wants To Share Footage With Police
joshuark writes: BusPatrol, a company that has installed AI-powered cameras in tens of thousands of school buses around the U.S., now plans to turn those cameras into automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), capturing the location of every vehicle the buses drive past, and give that data to law enforcement, 404 Media has learned. Bus … ⌘ Read more