Maryland Becomes First State To Pass Bill Banning ‘Surveillance Pricing’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Denver7: Maryland is poised to become the first state in the country to ban “surveillance pricing.” The practice refers to companies using a shopper’s personal data, such as browsing history, location, or purchasing behavior, to tailor prices to individual customers. The Protection From Predat … ⌘ Read more

Amazon To Invest Up To Another $25 Billion In Anthropic
Amazon is expanding its Anthropic partnership with a deal to invest up to another $25 billion, while Anthropic commits to spending more than $100 billion on AWS infrastructure over the next decade to power Claude. “Anthropic’s commitment to run its large language models on AWS Trainium for the next decade reflects the progress we’ve made together on custom silicon, as we … ⌘ Read more

iPhone Video Shows ‘Earthset’ From Space
NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman posted an out-of-this-world iPhone video on Sunday, showing Earth disappear behind the Moon at 8x zoom. “I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view,” said Wiseman, noting that this video is “uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom” and “quite comparable to the view of the human eye.” The New York Times s … ⌘ Read more

PlayStation To Require Age Verification For Messages and Voice Chat
A new email from Sony says that PlayStation will require players to verify their age later this year to keep using communication features like messages and voice chat. Insider-Gaming reports: The initiative comes from the goal of providing “safe, age-appropriate experiences for players and families while respecting their privacy” and provi … ⌘ Read more

Mobile Phones To Be Banned In Schools In England Under New Plans
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: A ban on mobile phones in schools in England is to be introduced by the government to ensure that “critical safeguarding legislation” is passed. The government will table an amendment to the children’s wellbeing and schools bill in the House of Lords after the bill was held up by peers on o … ⌘ Read more

Apple CEO Tim Cook Is Stepping Down
Apple announced that Tim Cook will step down as CEO in September after 15 years in the role, handing the job to hardware chief John Ternus. Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares the news from MarketWatch: Cook leaves an impressive legacy after growing the company to a $4 trillion market capitalization from just $300 billion 15 years ago. Over Cook’s 15-year tenure as CEO, Apple’s stock has risen 1,932%, … ⌘ Read more

Former Palantir Employee Running For Congress Unveils ‘AI Dividend’ Plan
Alex Bores, a former Palantir employee and current Democratic House candidate in New York, is proposing an “AI dividend” that would send direct payments to Americans if AI drives major job losses. “At its core, the AI Dividend is simple: if AI dramatically increases productivity and concentrates wealth, the American people have a stak … ⌘ Read more

Deezer Says 44% of Songs Uploaded To Its Platform Daily Are AI-Generated
Deezer says AI-generated songs now make up 44% of all new uploads to its platform, with nearly 75,000 arriving each day and more than two million per month. The company notes that consumption of these tracks is still very low, “between 1-3% of the total streams,” and 85% are flagged as fraudulent. TechCrunch reports: The l … ⌘ Read more

Trump Administration Begins Refunding $166 Billion In Tariffs
“After a Supreme Court of the United States ruling in Feb. 2026, many tariffs imposed by the Trump administration were declared illegal because the president overstepped his authority,” writes Slashdot reader hcs_$reboot. “As a result, the U.S. government now has to refund a massive amount of money, around $160-170+ billion, paid mainly by importers.” … ⌘ Read more

Palantir Posts Bond Villain Manifesto On X
DeanonymizedCoward writes: Engadget reports that Palantir has posted to X a summary of CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska’s 2025 book, The Technological Republic, which reads like a utopian idealist doodled on a Bond villain’s whiteboard. While the post makes some decent points, it also highlights the Big-AI attitude that the AI surveillance state is in fact a good thing, and strongly i … ⌘ Read more

Allbirds’ Move To AI Has Echoes of the Dot-Com Frenzy
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by writer Austin Carr: Allbirds is pivoting to artificial intelligence. The San Francisco brand, whose wool running shoes were once the sneaker du jour among the tech crowd, announced last week that it was expanding into AI computing infrastructure. The bizarre strategic shift was immediately greeted with a surpris … ⌘ Read more

NSA Using Anthropic’s Mythos Despite Blacklist
Axios reports that the NSA is using Anthropic’s restricted Mythos Preview model despite the Pentagon insisting the company poses a “supply chain risk.” Axios reports: The government’s cybersecurity needs appear to be outweighing the Pentagon’s feud with Anthropic. The department moved in February to cut off Anthropic and force its vendors to follow suit. That case is ongoing. The mil … ⌘ Read more

Robots Beat Human Records At Beijing Half-Marathon
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The winning runner at a Beijing half-marathon for humanoid robots finished the race today in 50 minutes and 26 seconds – significantly faster than the human world record of 57 minutes recently set by Jacob Kiplimo. […] [T]he winning time is a massive improvement over last year’s race, when the fastest robot fin … ⌘ Read more

Videos Catch Amazon Delivery Drones Dropping Packages From 10 Feet in the Air
There’s been a few complaints about Amazon’s drone delivery service. “The automated mailmen are dropping off packages from 10 feet in the air,” reports the New York Post, “rendering the contents of each box susceptible to crashing and smashing.”
One example? Tamara Hancock filmed a drone delivering a bottle of Torani fla … ⌘ Read more

Zoom Partners With Sam Altman’s Iris-Scanning Company To Offer Callers Verifications of Humanness
Zoom “has partnered with World, Sam Altman’s iris-scanning identity company (previously known as Worldcoin), ” reports Digital Trends, “to add real-time human verification inside meetings.”

Zoom is now inviting organizations to join the beta version of the rollout, which Digital Trend … ⌘ Read more

Brave Browser Introduces ‘Origin’, a Pay-Once ‘Minimalist’ Browser
The Brave browser “has introduced Brave Origin, a stripped-down version of its browser that removes built-in monetization features like Rewards and other extras tied to its business model,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli”

The stripped-down browser is available either as a separate browser download or as an upgrade to the existing Brave install, u … ⌘ Read more

Blue Origin Rocket Launches, Successfully Reuses Booster - But Loses Satellite
SpaceNews reports:

Blue Origin’s New Glenn suffered a malfunction of its second stage on the rocket’s third flight April 19, stranding its payload in an unrecoverable “off-nominal” orbit and dealing the company a setback as it seeks to increase its flight rate… AST SpaceMobile had planned to launch 45 to 60 satell … ⌘ Read more

Voyager 1 is Running Out of Power. NASA Just Switched Part of It Off
After 49 years of space travel, Voyager 1 “is running out of power,” reports NPR:

The spacecraft runs on a radioisotope thermoelectric generator — a device that converts heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. It carries no solar panels, no rechargeable batteries. Just the slow, steady release of nuclear warmth, which diminishe … ⌘ Read more

Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Predicts Humankind Won’t Survive Another 50 Years
Live Science spoke with physicist David Gross, who today received the $3 million “Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics”. He was part of a trio that won the 2004 physics Nobel prize for research that helped complete the Standard Model of particle physics. But when asked if physics will reach a unified theo … ⌘ Read more

Is the Iran War Driving a Surge of Interest in Electric Cars?
In October and through November, America’s EV sales reached their lowest point since 2022 after government subsidies expired, remembers Time. “But first-quarter data for 2026 shows that used EV sales were 12% higher than the same time last year and 17% higher than the previous quarter.

“One factor likely helping push buyers toward these cars is hig … ⌘ Read more

Pancreatic Cancer MRNA Vaccine Shows Lasting Results In Early Trial
NBC News reports on a 16-person clinical trial of “personalized messenger RNA vaccines” which use the immune system to fight cancer cells. “The goal is not to eliminate existing tumors, but instead to stamp out lingering, undetected cancer cells, and later any new cells that form before they can cause a recurrence.”
Patients still have s … ⌘ Read more

Motorola Sues Social Media Platforms and Creators in India
“Motorola has filed a lawsuit in India against social media platforms and content creators,” reports TechCrunch, “over posts it alleges are defamatory…”
The lawsuit, filed in a Bengaluru court and obtained by TechCrunch, names platforms such as X, YouTube, and Instagram along with dozens of content creators, and seeks takedown of the content as well as bro … ⌘ Read more

Nevada Police Can Now Track Cellphones Without a Warrant
“Nevada quietly signed an agreement earlier this year with a company that collects location data from cellphones, allowing police to track a device virtually in real time,” reports the Associated Press. “All without a warrant.”

The software from Fog Data Science, adopted this January in Nevada through a Department of Public Safety contract, pulls information fr … ⌘ Read more

HP Will Discontinue ‘HP Anyware’ Remote Desktop, Trusted Zero Clients
kriston (Slashdot reader #7,886) writes:

HP Anyware, the new name of the Teradici PCoIP remote desktop solution that was acquired by HP in 2021, is being discontinued.
“Maintenance and support for customers and partners with multi-year terms will continue until 31 October, 2029,” a href=”https://anyware.hp.com/hp-anyware-end-of-life”>according … ⌘ Read more

Disney Creates Its Own IMAX for ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ After Losing Screens to ‘Dune: Part 3’
Ahead of December’s release of Avengers: Doomsday, Disney has unveiled “Infinity Vision,” reports Kotaku, which they describe as “a new theater-going experience that will be certain to transform your pedestrian $15 night out into an exotic $43 one.” (Though those prices appear to be estimat … ⌘ Read more

Can the ‘Attention Liberation Movement’ Foment a Rebellion Against Screens?
The Associated Press looks at the small-but-growing “rebellion” against attention-hogging devices, citing “a growing body of literature calling for people to move away from screens and pay attention to life.”

D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science at Princeton University and one of the authors of “ Attensity! A Manifest … ⌘ Read more

Remembering Zip Drives - the Trendy Storage Technology of the 1990s
Back in the 1990s, floppy disks “had a mere capacity of 1.44MB,” remembers XDA Developers, “which would soon become absolutely tiny for the increasingly large pieces of software that would come about.”

Floppy disks also felt quite fragile, and while we got “superfloppy” formats that were physically larger and had more capacity, those w … ⌘ Read more

Duolingo CEO Says They’ve Stopped Tracking Employees’ AI Use for Performance Reviews
Last May Duolingo’s stock peaked at $529.05. But while the learning app passed $1 billion in revenue in 2025 and 50 million daily active users, today its stock price has dropped more than 81%, to $100.51.

And there’s been other changes, reports Entrepreneur:

In April 2025, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn made headline … ⌘ Read more

SpaceX, Blue Origin Compete For ‘Artemis III’ Mission
After Artemis II’s astronauts returned to earth, “NASA has Artemis III in its sights,” reports the Associated Press:

In a mission recently added to the docket for next year, Artemis III’s yet-to-be -named astronauts will practice docking their Orion capsule with a lunar lander or two in orbit around Earth. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are racing to … ⌘ Read more

New Movie Trailer Shows First AI-Generated Performance By a Major Star: the Late Val Kilmer
“A trailer has been released for the first film to star an authorised generative AI version of a major Hollywood actor,” writes The Guardian:

Val Kilmer was cast in western As Deep As the Grave before his death in April 2025. Production delays meant he never shot any scenes, but the c … ⌘ Read more

Old Cars ‘Tell Tales’ by Storing Data That’s Never Wiped
Slashdot reader Bismillah shared this report from ITNews:

Research and development engineer Romain Marchand of Paris headquartered Quarkslab obtained a telematic control unit (TCU) from a salvage yard in Poland… Marchand tore down the TCU, which is based on a Qualcomm system on a chip, and extracted the Linux-based file system from the Micron multi-chip package … ⌘ Read more

Fewer US College Students Major in CS. More Choose Data Science, Engineering
“From 2008 to 2024, the number of four-year computer science degrees granted rose about fivefold…” reports the Washington Post. Then in 2025 CS suddenly dropped from the fourth-largest undergraduate major to sixth, they report (citing data from the nonprofit National Student Clearinghouse, which compiles numbers from … ⌘ Read more

US Congress Fails to Pass Long-Term FISA Extension, Authorizes It Through April 30
Yesterday the U.S. Congress approved “a short-term extension” of a FISA law that allows wiretaps without a warrant for surveilling foreign targets, reports CNN — but only until April 30. Republican congressional leaders had sought an 18-month extension, but “failed to secure” the votes after “clamoring from some … ⌘ Read more

30 WordPress Plugins Turned Into Malware After Ownership Change
Wednesday BleepingComputer reported that more than 30 WordPress plugins “have been compromised with malicious code that allows unauthorized access to websites running them.”

A malicious actor planted the backdoor code last year but only recently started pushing it to users via updates, generating spam pages and causing redirects, as per the instruct … ⌘ Read more

Fructose Isn’t Just Sugar. It Acts More Like a Hormone
Slashdot reader smazsyr writes: A new review says we’ve had fructose wrong for decades. The nine authors, led by Richard Johnson at the University of Colorado Anschutz, argue that fructose “is not just another calorie.” It is a signal. It tells the liver to make fat and brace for a famine that never comes. That made sense for a bear fattening up on autumn berries. … ⌘ Read more

20-Year-Old Enters Prison for Historic Breach, Ransoming of Massive Student Database
20-year-old Matthew Lane sent a text message to ABC News as his parents drove him to federal prison in Connecticut. “I’m just scared,” he said, calling the whole situation “extremely sad.”

Barely a year earlier, while still a teenager, he helped launch what’s been described as the biggest cyberattack in U.S. … ⌘ Read more

FSF to OnlyOffice: You Can’t Use the GNU (A)GPL to Take Software Freedom Away
Nextcloud joined a project to create a sovereign replacement for Microsoft Office called “Euro-Office”. But after that project forked OnlyOffice, OnlyOffice suspended its partnership with Nextcloud. “They removed all references to our brand/attribute as required by our license,” argued OnlyOffice CEO Lev Bannov on March 30t … ⌘ Read more

US Government Now Wants Anthropic’s ‘Mythos’, Preparing for AI Cybersecurity Threats
Friday Anthropic’s CEO met with top U.S. officials and “discussed opportunities for collaboration,” according to a White House spokesperson itedd by Politico, “as well as shared approaches and protocols to address the challenges associated with scaling this technology.”

CNN notes the meeting happens at the same … ⌘ Read more

Shuttered Startups Are Selling Old Slack Chats, Emails To AI Companies
Some failed startups are reportedly selling old Slack messages, emails, and other internal records to AI companies as training data, creating a new way to cash out after shutting down. Fast Company reports: Shanna Johnson, the CEO of now-defunct software company Cielo24, told the publication that she was able to sell every Slack message, … ⌘ Read more

NASA Restarts Work To Support Europe’s Uncrewed Trip To Mars After Years of Setbacks
NASA has revived support for the European Space Agency’s long-delayed Rosalind Franklin Mars rover mission. According to the space agency, the current plan is to launch via a SpaceX Falcon Heavy no earlier than 2028. Engadget reports: This is a partnership between NASA and the ESA, with the European agenc … ⌘ Read more

Critical Atlantic Current Significantly More Likely To Collapse Than Thought
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a c … ⌘ Read more

Online Personalities and Comedians Overtake TV and Newspapers as Primary News Sources
A new Ipsos poll finds Americans are increasingly getting news from online personalities and comedians instead of traditional TV or newspapers. The survey says nearly 70% get news online in a given week, versus 55% from TV and 25% from newspapers, with figures like Joe Rogan, Greg Gutfeld, Sean Hannity, a … ⌘ Read more

NIST Limits CVE Enrichment After 263% Surge In Vulnerability Submissions
NIST is narrowing how it handles CVEs in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), saying it will only automatically enrich higher-priority vulnerabilities. “CVEs that do not meet those criteria will still be listed in the NVD but will not automatically be enriched by NIST,” it said. “This change is driven by a surge in CVE submissi … ⌘ Read more

Gazing Into Sam Altman’s Orb Could Solve Ticket Scalping
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Sam Altman’s iris-scanning, humanity-verifying World project announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday that Tinder users around the globe can now put a digital badge on their profiles signaling to potential suitors that they’re a real human, provided they’ve already stared into one of World’s glossy white Orbs … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla ‘Thunderbolt’ Is an Open-Source AI Client Focused On Control and Self-Hosting
BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla’s email subsidiary MZLA Technologies just introduced Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client aimed at organizations that want to run AI on their own infrastructure instead of relying entirely on cloud services. The idea is to give companies full control over their data, models, an … ⌘ Read more

Amazon’s New Fire TV Sticks No Longer Support Sideloading
Amazon’s newest Fire TV Sticks are dropping support for normal sideloading, blocking apps from outside the Amazon Appstore unless the device is registered with developers. Cord Cutters News reports: This week, Amazon announced the upcoming launch of a new Fire TV Stick HD. The new model will run on Amazon’s Vega OS, rather than Android, so most streamin … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Starts Offering a Biology-Tuned LLM
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, OpenAI announced it had developed a large language model specifically trained on common biology workflows. Called GPT-Rosalind after Rosalind Franklin, the model appears to differ from most science-focused models from major tech companies, which have generally taken a more generic approach that works for various fields. … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Increases the FAT32 Limit From 32GB To 2TB
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo writes: Windows has limited FAT32 partitions to a maximum of 32GB for decades now. When memory cards and USB drives exceeded 32GB in size, the only options were exFAT or NTFS. Neither option was well supported on other platforms at first, although exFAT support is fairly widespread now. In their latest blog post, Microsoft announced … ⌘ Read more

Newly Unsealed Records Reveal Amazon’s Price-Fixing Tactics
Newly unsealed records in California’s antitrust case against Amazon allegedly show the company pressured third-party sellers to raise prices on rival sites like Walmart, Target, and Wayfair so Amazon could maintain the appearance of offering the lowest price. California says Amazon used tools like Buy Box suppression to punish cheaper listings elsewhere. T … ⌘ Read more

US To Create High-Tech Manufacturing Zone In Philippines
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: An agreement with the Philippines to establish a high-tech industrial hub is the Trump administration’s latest effort to lessen China’s dominance over global supply chains. The deal to build up American manufacturing across a stretch of the island of Luzon, signed Thursday, will offer U.S. compani … ⌘ Read more