OpenAI Used Song Lyrics In Violation of Copyright Laws, German Court Says
A Munich court ruled that OpenAI violated German copyright law by training its models on lyrics from nine songs and allowing ChatGPT to reproduce them. OpenAI now faces damages as it considers an appeal. Reuters reports: The regional court in Munich found that the company trained its AI on protected content from nine German songs, … ⌘ Read more

Google Announces Even More AI In Photos App, Powered By Nano Banana
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Big G is finally making good on its promise to add its market-leading Nano Banana image-editing model to the app. The model powers a couple of features, and it’s not just for Google’s Android platform. Nano Banana edits are also coming to the iOS version of the app. […] The Photo … ⌘ Read more

FFmpeg To Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending Bugs
FFmpeg, the open source multimedia framework that powers video processing in Google Chrome, Firefox, YouTube and other major platforms, has called on Google to either fund the project or stop burdening its volunteer maintainers with security vulnerabilities found by the company’s AI tools. The maintainers patched a bug that Google’s AI agent discovered in code for decoding a 1995 vi … ⌘ Read more

US Senator Challenges Defense Industry on Right-to-Repair Opposition
Democratic U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is escalating pressure on the defense industry to stop opposing military right-to-repair legislation, as House and Senate negotiators work to finalize the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. From a report: In a sharply-worded November 5 letter to the National Defense Industrial Associat … ⌘ Read more

China’s New Scientist Visa is a ‘Serious Bid’ For the World’s Top Talent
China has introduced a visa that will allow young foreign researchers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics to move there without having to secure a job first. From a report: Before the introduction of the K visa, most foreign STEM researchers hoping to move to China had to find a job in advance and then apply for a work visa … ⌘ Read more

UK Unveils Plan To Cut Animal Testing Through Greater Use of AI
Animal testing in science would be phased out faster under a new plan to increase the use of artificial intelligence and 3D bioprinted human tissues, a UK minister has said. The Guardian: The roadmap unveiled by the science minister, Patrick Vallance, backs replacing certain animal tests that are still used where necessary to determine the safety o … ⌘ Read more

Firefox 145 Drops Support For 32-bit Linux
BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla has released Firefox 145.0, and the standout change in this version is the official end of support for 32-bit Linux systems. Users on 32-bit distributions will no longer receive updates and are being encouraged to switch to the 64-bit build to continue getting security patches and new features. While most major Linux distributions have already moved past 32-bit … ⌘ Read more

AI’s $5 Trillion Cost Needs Every Debt Market, JPMorgan Says
The furious push by AI hyperscalers to build out data centers will need about $1.5 trillion of investment-grade bonds over the next five years and extensive funding from every other corner of the market, according to an analysis by JPMorgan. From a report: “The question is not ‘which market will finance the AI-boom?’ Rather, the question is ‘how will financings … ⌘ Read more

The iPad Pro at 10: a Decade of Unrealized Potential
The iPad Pro went on sale ten years ago, launching with a 12.9-inch screen that Apple believed would redefine computing through size alone. The company initially resisted making the device a laptop replacement and maintained strict limitations on multitasking, browser capabilities, and app installation. Over the past decade, Apple reversed course. The iPad Pro gained US … ⌘ Read more

Apple’s $230 iPhone Sock
Apple has launched the iPhone Pocket, a knitted bag designed to hold iPhones. The limited edition collaboration with Japanese designer Issey Miyake costs $229.95 for the crossbody version. A shorter version is priced at $149.95. Apple said the 3D-knitted design was inspired by “a piece of cloth” and was born from the idea of creating an additional pocket for any iPhone and small everyday items. Yoshiyuki Miyamae, design direc … ⌘ Read more

Sam Altman’s Worldcoin Project Struggles Toward Billion-User Ambition With 17.5 Million Sign-Ups
Sam Altman’s Tools for Humanity has verified around 17.5 million people through its iris-scanning Orb device. The company has set a goal of reaching 1 billion users, so it is less than 2% of the way there. The startup has raised $240 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, … ⌘ Read more

Samsung Brings Generative AI-Powered Bixby To Its TVs
Samsung is rolling out new conversational AI across its 2025 TVs that lets users ask questions about what’s on the screen and beyond it. From a report: First announced in September, the generative AI update is rolling out now with support for several languages. Vision AI Companion is based on an upgraded, generative AI-based version of Samsung’s virtual assis … ⌘ Read more

UK Signs Scaled-Back Scientific Collaboration With China
The UK and China today signed a new bilateral agreement on scientific collaboration [non-paywalled source], narrowing the scope of their partnership to exclude sensitive technologies. Lord Patrick Vallance, Britain’s science and technology minister, met his Chinese counterpart Chen Jiachang in Beijing and agreed to focus cooperation on health, climate, plan … ⌘ Read more

UK Secondary Schools Pivoting From Narrowly Focused CS Curriculum To AI Literacy
Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: The UK Department for Education is “replacing its narrowly focused computer science GCSE with a broader, future-facing computing GCSE [General Certificate of Secondary Education] and exploring a new qualification in data science and AI for 16-18-year-olds.” The move aims to … ⌘ Read more

China’s CO2 Emissions Have Been Flat Or Falling For Past 18 Months, Analysis Finds
China’s CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months, “adding evidence to the hope that the world’s biggest polluter has managed to hit its target of peak CO2 emissions well ahead of schedule,” reports the Guardian. From the report: Rapid increases in the deployment of solar and wind power generation – … ⌘ Read more

Saudi Arabia’s Dystopian Futuristic City Project Is Crashing and Burning
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: It appears that Neom – Saudi Arabia’s hugely expensive, architecturally bizarre urban development project – is floundering and close to collapse. A new report from the Financial Times cites high-level sources within the project to paint a picture of dysfunction and failure at the h … ⌘ Read more

A Jailed Hacking Kingpin Reveals All About Cybercrime Gang
Slashdot reader alternative_right shares an exclusive BBC interview with Vyacheslav “Tank” Penchukov, once a top-tier cyber-crime boss behind Jabber Zeus, IcedID, and major ransomware campaigns. His story traces the evolution of modern cybercrime from early bank-theft malware to today’s lucrative ransomware ecosystem, marked by shifting alliances, Russian sec … ⌘ Read more

EU Eyes Banning Huawei, ZTE Corp From Mobile Networks of Member Countries
The European Commission is considering turning its non-binding 2020 guidance on “high-risk vendors” into a legal requirement that would effectively force EU member states to phase out Huawei and ZTE from mobile and fixed-line networks. Bloomberg reports: Commission Vice President Henna Virkkunen wants to convert the European Co … ⌘ Read more

The Linux Kernel Looks To ‘Bite the Bullet’ In Enabling Microsoft C Extensions
Linux kernel developers are moving toward enabling Microsoft C Extensions (-fms-extensions) by default in Linux 6.19, with Linus Torvalds signaling no objection. While some dislike relying on Microsoft-style behavior, the patches in kbuild-next suggest the project is ready to “bite the bullet” and adopt the extensi … ⌘ Read more

Critics Call Proposed Changes To Landmark EU Privacy Law ‘Death By a Thousand Cuts’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Privacy activists say proposed changes to Europe’s landmark privacy law, including making it easier for Big Tech to harvest Europeans’ personal data for AI training, would flout EU case law and gut the legislation. The changes proposed by the European Commission … ⌘ Read more

PDF Will Support JPEG XL Format As ‘Preferred Solution’
The PDF Association is adding JPEG XL (JXL) support to the PDF specification, giving the advanced image format a new path to relevance despite Google’s decision to declare it obsolete and remove it from Chromium. The Register reports: Peter Wyatt, CTO of the PDF Association, said: “We need to adopt a new image [format] that can support HDR [High Dynamic Range] c … ⌘ Read more

Meta Is Killing Off the External Facebook Like Button
Meta is retiring Facebook’s external Like and Share buttons for third-party websites on February 10, 2026, officially closing the book on a once-dominant traffic driver as usage declines and Facebook’s role within Meta continues to shrink.Engadget reports: The blog post from Meta explains that site admins shouldn’t have to take any additional steps as a result of the … ⌘ Read more

New Project Brings Strong Linux Compatibility To More Classic Windows Games
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years now, Valve has been slowly improving the capabilities of the Proton compatibility layer that lets thousands of Windows games work seamlessly on the Linux-based SteamOS. But Valve’s Windows-to-Linux compatibility layer generally only extends back to games writt … ⌘ Read more

Wikipedia Urges AI Companies To Use Its Paid API, and Stop Scraping
Wikipedia on Monday laid out a simple plan to ensure its website continues to be supported in the AI era, despite its declining traffic. From a report: In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs the popular online encyclopedia, called on AI developers to use its content “responsibly” by ensuring its contributions are … ⌘ Read more

The PHP Foundation Is Seeking a New Executive Director
New submitter benramsey writes: The PHP Foundation has launched a search for its next executive director.

The Executive Director serves as the operational leader of the PHP Foundation, defining its strategic vision and translating it into reality while managing day-to-day operations and serving as the primary bridge between the Board, staff, community, and sp … ⌘ Read more

World’s First Green Fuel Levy To Add Almost $32 To Air Fares
Air passengers departing Singapore will pay a green fuel levy of as much as S$41.60 ($31.95) from next year as the city-state locks in a key step in its effort to cut the aviation industry’s emissions. From a report: Travelers flying in economy and premium economy, as well as those on short-haul routes, will be charged far less. Those customers will pay an … ⌘ Read more

Apple Delays Release of Next iPhone Air Amid Weak Sales
An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is delaying the release of next year’s version of the iPhone Air, its thinnest smartphone, after the first model sold below expectations, according to three people involved in the project.

Although the length of the delay remains uncertain, the product won’t be released in fall 2026 as previously planned, they said. App … ⌘ Read more

How HR Took Over the World
Human-resources departments in American companies employed 1.3 million professionals in 2024, a 64% increase over ten years. Overall employment grew 14% in the same period. Professional-services and technology firms saw the number of HR workers double since 2014. Similar patterns have emerged in Australia, Britain and Germany.

Chief human-resources officers also gained ground financially. Their total compensation, which stoo … ⌘ Read more

Africa Finally Has Its Own Drug-Regulation Agency
After more than a decade of planning, the launch of the African Medicines Agency (AMA) is being celebrated in Mombasa, Kenya, this week at the Seventh Biennial Scientific Conference on Medical Products Regulation in Africa. From a report: The agency’s establishment marks a pivotal moment in Africa’s public health, at a time when the need for biomedical research conducted i … ⌘ Read more

The Algorithm Failed Music
An anonymous reader shares a report: Spotify is the most popular music streaming service in the world. While its algorithmic recommendations aren’t necessarily the reason, its reach has meant that hundreds of millions of people are being fed a steady diet of music curated by a machine. Spotify’s goal is to keep you listening no matter what. In her book Mood Machine, journalist Liz Pelly recounts a story told to … ⌘ Read more

Data Centers in Nvidia’s Hometown Stand Empty Awaiting Power
Two of the world’s biggest data center developers have projects in Nvidia’s hometown that may sit empty for years because the local utility isn’t ready to supply electricity. From a report: In Santa Clara, California, where the world’s biggest supplier of artificial-intelligence chips is based, Digital Realty Trust applied in 2019 to build a data cent … ⌘ Read more

Tim Berners-Lee Says AI Will Not Destroy the Web
Tim Berners-Lee thinks AI will help the web, not destroy it. The inventor of the World Wide Web has spent years warning about platform concentration and social media’s corrosive effects, but he views AI differently. AI has accomplished what his Semantic Web project could not. The technology extracts structured data from websites regardless of how the information was formatted. … ⌘ Read more

Subsea Cable Investment Set To Double As Tech Giants Accelerate AI Buildout
Investment in subsea cable projects is expected to reach around $13 billion between 2025 and 2027, almost twice the amount invested between 2022 and 2024, according to telecommunications data provider TeleGeography. Tech giants Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft now represent about 50% of the overall market, up from a neglig … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Bets on Influencers To Close the Gap With ChatGPT
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft, eager to boost downloads of its Copilot chatbot, has recruited some of the most popular influencers in America to push a message to young consumers that might be summed up as: Our AI assistant is as cool as ChatGPT. Microsoft could use the help. The company recently said its family of Copilot assistants attracts 1 … ⌘ Read more

Visa and Mastercard Near Deal With Merchants That Would Change Rewards Landscape
Visa and Mastercard are nearing a settlement with merchants that aims to end a 20-year-old legal dispute by lowering fees stores pay and giving them more power to reject certain credit cards, WSJ reports, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Under terms being discussed, Visa and Mastercard would lowe … ⌘ Read more

What’s the Best Ways for Humans to Explore Space?
Should we leave space exploration to robots — or prioritize human spaceflight, making us a multiplanetary species?

Harvard professor Robin Wordsworth, who’s researched the evolution and habitability of terrestrial-type planets, shares his thoughts:

In space, as on Earth, industrial structures degrade with time, and a truly sustainable life support system must have the capa … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Connects AI GPUs to Early Quantum Processors
“Quantum computing is still years away, but Nvidia just built the bridge that will bring it closer…” argues investment site The Motley Fool, “by linking today’s fastest AI GPUs with early quantum processors…”

NVIDIA’s new hybrid system strengthens communication at microsecond speeds — orders of magnitude faster than before — “allowing AI to stabilize and train qu … ⌘ Read more

Rust Foundation Announces ‘Maintainers Fund’ to Ensure Continuity and Support Long-Term Roles
The Rust Foundation has a responsibility to “shed light on the impact of supporting the often unseen work” that keeps the Rust Project running. So this week they announced a new initiative “to provide consistent, transparent, and long term support for the developers who make the Rust p … ⌘ Read more

Nonprofit Releases Thousands of Rare American Music Recordings Online
The nonprofit Dust-to-Digital Foundation is making thousands of historic songs accessible to the public for free through a new partnership with the University of California, Santa Barbara. The songs represent “some of the rarest and most uniquely American music borne from the Jazz Age and the Great Depression,” according to the … ⌘ Read more

What Happens When Humans Start Writing for AI?
The literary magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa society argues “the replacement of human readers by AI has lately become a real possibility.

“In fact, there are good reasons to think that we will soon inhabit a world in which humans still write, but do so mostly for AI.”

“I write about artificial intelligence a lot, and lately I have begun to think of myself as writing for Al as well, … ⌘ Read more

Apple Explores New Satellite Features for Future iPhones
In 2022 the iPhone 14 featured emergency satellite service, and there’s now support for roadside assistance and the ability to send and receive text messages.

But for future iPhones, Apple is now reportedly working on five new satellite features, reports LiveMint:

As per Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is building an API that would allow developers to add sat … ⌘ Read more

Genetically Engineered Babies Are Banned in the US. But Tech Titans Are Trying to Make One Anyway
“For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby,” reports the Wall Street Journal:

Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, … ⌘ Read more

Python Foundation Donations Surge After Rejecting Grant - But Sponsorships Still Needed
After the Python Software Foundation rejected a $1.5 million grant because it restricted DEI activity, “a flood of new donations followed,” according to a new report. By Friday they’d raised over $157,000, including 295 new Supporting Members paying an annual $99 membership fee, says PSF executi … ⌘ Read more

Blue Origin Livestreams Attempt to Launch Unique “EscaPADE’ Mission to Mars
Blue Origin is livestreaming the launch of its New Glenn rocketreports CNN, “where they will investigate why the barren red planet began to lose its atmosphere billions of years ago.” By observing two Mars locations simultaneously, this mission can measure how Mars responds to space weather in real time — and how the Marti … ⌘ Read more

‘AI Slop’ in Court Filings: Lawyers Keep Citing Fake AI-Hallucinated Cases
“According to court filings and interviews with lawyers and scholars, the legal profession in recent months has increasingly become a hotbed for AI blunders,” reports the New York Times:

Earlier this year, a lawyer filed a motion in a Texas bankruptcy court that cited a 1985 case called Brasher v. Stewart. Only the case doesn’t e … ⌘ Read more

Lost Unix v4 Possibly Recovered on a Forgotten Bell Labs Tape From 1973
“A tape-based piece of unique Unix history may have been lying quietly in storage at the University of Utah for 50+ years,” reports The Register. And the software librarian at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum, Al Kossow of Bitsavers, believes the tape “has a pretty good chance of being recoverable.”

Long-time Slashdot reade … ⌘ Read more

Neurodiverse Professionals 25% More Satisfied With AI Tools and Agents
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:

Neurodiverse professionals may see unique benefits from artificial intelligence tools and agents, research suggests. With AI agent creation booming in 2025, people with conditions like ADHD, autism, dyslexia and more report a more level playing field in the workplace thanks to generative … ⌘ Read more

America’s FAA Grounds MD-11s After Tuesday’s Crash in Kentucky
UPDATE (11/9): America’s Federal Aviation Administration has now grounded all U.S. MD-11 and MD-11F aircrafts after Tuesday’s crash “because the agency has determined the unsafe condition is likely to exist or develop in other products of the same type design,” according to an emergency airworthiness directive obtained by CBS News.

American multinatio … ⌘ Read more

Rust Is Coming To Debian’s APT Package Manager
A maintainer of Debian’s Advanced Package Tool (APT) “has announced plans to introduce hard Rust dependencies into APT starting May 2026,” reports the blog It’s FOSS.

The integration targets critical areas like parsing .deb, .ar, and tar files plus HTTP signature verification using Sequoia. [APT maintainer Julian Andres Klode] said these components “would strongly benefit from m … ⌘ Read more

Hilarious Unused Audio From 2003 Baseball Game Rediscovered by Video Game History Foundation
After popular arcade games like Mortal Kombat and Spy Hunter, Midway Games jumped into the home console market, and in 2003 launched their baseball game franchise “MLB Slugfest” for Xbox, PS2, and GameCube. But at times it was almost a parody of baseball, including announcers filling the lo … ⌘ Read more