Millions Face Mobile Internet Outages in Moscow. ‘Digital Crackdown’ Feared
13 million people live in Moscow, reports CNN.

But since early March the city “has experienced internet and mobile service outages on a level previously unseen.” (Though Wi-Fi access to the internet is still available…) Russian social media “is flooded with jokes and memes about sending letters by carrier pigeons or using sma … ⌘ Read more

Chuck Norris Dies At 86
Longtime Slashdot reader SchroedingersCat writes: Chuck Norris, known for his roles in action films and as Texas Ranger Cordell Walker on the TV show “Walker, Texas Ranger,” passed away on March 19, leaving behind a legacy of inspiring millions around the world. He was 86.

He became Internet phenomenon after “Chuck Norris Facts” went viral online with such wildly hyperbolic statements as, “Chuck Norris had a staring contest w … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Acquires Developer Tooling Startup Astral
OpenAI announced it’s acquiring developer tooling startup Astral to strengthen its Codex AI coding assistant, which has over 2 million weekly users and has seen a three-fold increase in user growth since the start of the year. CNBC reports: “Through it all, though, our goal remains the same: to make programming more productive. To build tools that radically change what it … ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Appeals Piracy Shield Fine, Hopes To Kill Italy’s Site-Blocking Law
Cloudflare is appealing a 14.2 million-euro fine from Italy for refusing to comply with its “Piracy Shield” law, which requires blocking access to websites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service within 30 minutes. The company argues the system lacks oversight, risks widespread overblocking, and could undermine core Internet infrastru … ⌘ Read more

Apple Can Delist Apps ‘With Or Without Cause,’ Judge Says In Loss For Musi App
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Musi, a free music streaming app that had tens of millions of iPhone downloads and garnered plenty of controversy over its method of acquiring music, has lost an attempt to get back on Apple’s App Store. A federal judge dismissed Musi’s lawsuit against Apple with preju … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft, OpenAI & Others Pony Up $12.5M To Strengthen Open-Source Security
The Linux Foundation announced today that $12.5 million USD in grants from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, and Microsoft have been collected to invest in strengthening the security of the open-source software ecosystem… ⌘ Read more

Hydropower Line From Quebec Could Power a Million NYC Homes
The Champlain Hudson Power Express, a $6 billion, 339-mile buried transmission line, will soon deliver Canadian hydropower from Hydro-Quebec to New York City. The project could supply up to 20% of the city’s electricity and power roughly one million homes throughout the year. “This is far and away the largest project I have ever worked on,” said Bob Ha … ⌘ Read more

Does Canada Need Nationalized, Public AI?
While AI CEOs worry governments might nationalize AI, others are advocating for something similar. Canadian security professional Bruce Schneier and Harvard data scientist Nathan Sanders published this call to action in Canada’s most widely-read newspaper (with a readership over 6 million): “Canada Needs Nationalized, Public AI.”

While there are Canadian AI companies, they remain for-profit e … ⌘ Read more

U.S. State Bans on Lab-Grown Meats Challenged in Court
Last June Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said in a statement that Texans “have a God-given right to know what’s on their plate, and for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab. It’s plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives.”

But California company Wildtype sells lab-grown … ⌘ Read more

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Is Stepping Down
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down after overseeing the platform’s growth from a Twitter research project into a 40-million-user alternative to X. “As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things,” Graber wrote in a statement.

She will be transitioning to a new Chief Innovation Officer role wh … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s Former Research Chief Raises $70M to Automate Manufacturing With AI
“OpenAI’s former chief research officer is raising $70 million for a new startup building an AI and software platform to automate manufacturing,” reports the Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the matter.

“Arda, the new startup co-founded by Bob McGrew, is raising at a valuation of $700 million, according to pe … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s Head of Robotics Resigns, Says Pentagon Deal Was ‘Rushed Without the Guardrails Defined’
In a tweet that’s been viewed 1.3 million times in the last six hours, OpenAI’s head of robotics announced their resignation. They said they “care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together,” so this “wasn’t an easy call,” but offered this reason for resigning:

… ⌘ Read more

Astronomers Think They’ve Spotted a Galaxy That’s 99.9% Dark Matter
Astronomers have spotted a galaxy they believe is made of 99.9% dark matter, reports CNN — and it’s so faint, it’s almost invisible:

CDG-2, which is about 300 million light-years from Earth, appears to be so rich in dark matter that it could belong to a hypothesized subset of low surface brightness galaxies called “dark galaxies,” which are … ⌘ Read more

Prediction Market ‘Kalshi’ Sued for Not Paying $54 Million for Bets on Khamenei’s Death
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Independent:

A popular predictions market app will not pay out the $54 million some of its users believed they were owed after correctly forecasting the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to a report.

Kalshi, which allows players to gamble on real- … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Amends Pentagon Deal As Sam Altman Admits It Looks ‘Sloppy’
OpenAI is amending its Pentagon contract after CEO Sam Altman acknowledged it appeared “opportunistic and sloppy.” On Monday night, Altman said the company would explicitly restrict its technology from being used by intelligence agencies and for mass domestic surveillance. The Guardian reports: OpenAI, which has more than 900 million users of Ch … ⌘ Read more

HBO Max and Paramount+ To Merge Into One Streaming Service
Paramount Skydance plans to combine HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single streaming platform following its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. “As we said, we do plan to put the two services together, which today gives us a little over 200 million direct-to-consumer subscribers,” said David Ellison, the company’s CEO. “We think that really position … ⌘ Read more

Charter Gets FCC Permission To Buy Cox, Become Largest ISP In the US
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Charter Communications, operator of the Spectrum cable brand, has obtained Federal Communications Commission permission to buy Cox and surpass Comcast as the country’s largest home Internet service provider. Charter has 29.7 million residential and business Internet customers compared t … ⌘ Read more

South Korean Police Lose Seized Crypto By Posting Password Online
South Korean tax authorities lost millions in seized cryptocurrency after publishing high-res photos of Ledger hardware wallets that clearly displayed the wallets’ seed phrases, allowing an unknown party to drain the funds. Gizmodo reports: South Korea’s National Tax Service seized crypto assets during recent enforcement actions against 124 high-val … ⌘ Read more

After US-Israel Attacks, 90 Million Iranians Lose Internet Connectivity
CNN reports that images from Iran’s capital “have shown cars jammed along Tehran’s street, with heavy traffic on major roads after today’s wave of attacks by the US and Israel.” And though Iran has a population of 93 million, the attacks suddenly plunged Iran into “a near-total internet blackout with national connectivity at 4% of or … ⌘ Read more

Trump Orders Federal Agencies To Stop Using Anthropic AI Tech ‘Immediately’
President Donald Trump has ordered all U.S. federal agencies to “immediately cease” using Anthropic’s AI technology, escalating a standoff after the company sought limits on Pentagon use of its models. CNBC reports: The company, which in July signed a $200 million contract with Pentagon, wants assurances that the Defense Depar … ⌘ Read more

AI Mistakes Are Infuriating Gamers as Developers Seek Savings
The $200 billion video game industry is caught between studios eager to cut ballooning development costs through AI and a player base that has grown openly hostile to the technology after a string of visible blunders.

As Bloomberg news, Arc Raiders, a surprise hit from Stockholm-based Embark Studios that sold 12 million copies in three months, was br … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Accuses Chinese Companies of Siphoning Data From Claude
U.S. artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic said three Chinese AI companies set up more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts with its Claude AI model to help their own systems catch up. From a report: The three companies – DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax – prompted Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from Anthropic’s system to … ⌘ Read more

Modern AMD Graphics Driver Surpasses Six Million Lines Of Code In Linux 7.0
It was less than four years ago that the modern AMDGPU/AMDKFD open-source driver stack was at four million lines of C code and header files. Now with the Linux 7.0 kernel it has surpassed six million lines. Or put another way, by the same calculations Linux 7.0-rc1 is at 39.2 million with the modern AMD kernel graphics driver now making up 15% of the kernel’s entire codebase as the single largest driver… ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi Stock Rises Over Its Possible Use With OpenClaw’s AI Agents
This week Raspberry Pi saw its stock price surge more than 60% above its early-February low (before giving up some gains at the end of the week). Reuters notes the rise started when CEO Eben Upton bought 13,224 pounds worth of shares — but there could be another reason. “The rally in the roughly $800 million company has materialis … ⌘ Read more

Telegram Disputes Russia’s Claim Its Encryption Was Compromised
Russia’s domestic intelligence agency claimed Saturday that Ukraine can obtain sensitive information from troops using the Telegram app on the front line, reports Bloomberg. The fact that the claims were made through Russia’s state-operated news outlet RIA Novosti signals “tightening scrutiny over a platform used by millions of Russians,” Bloomberg no … ⌘ Read more

‘Open Source Registries Don’t Have Enough Money To Implement Basic Security’
Google and Microsoft contributed $5 million to launch Alpha-Omega in 2022 — a Linux Foundation project to help secure the open source supply chain. But its co-founder Michael Winser warns that open source registries are in financial peril, reports The Register, since they’re still relying on non-continuous funding from grants … ⌘ Read more

Pro-Gamer Consumer Movement ‘Stop Killing Games’ Will Launch NGOs in America and the US
The consumer movement Stop Killing Games “has come a long way in the two years since
YouTuber Ross Scott got mad about Ubisoft’s
destruction of The Crew in 2024,” writes the gaming news site PC Gamer. “The short version is, he won: 1.3 million people signed the group’s petition, mandating its considerati … ⌘ Read more

How Streaming Became Cable TV’s Unlikely Life Raft
Cable TV providers have spent the past decade losing tens of millions of households to streaming services, but companies like Charter Communications are now slowing that exodus by bundling the very apps that once threatened to replace them.

Charter added 44,000 net video subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025, its first growth in that count since 2020, after integrating … ⌘ Read more

Uber Putting $100 Million into EV Charging for Robotaxis
Uber plans to invest $100 million in EV charging infrastructure to support current and future robotaxi fleets in cities like Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Dallas, “eventually partner[ing] with multiple robotaxi companies on actual robotaxi deployment – WeRide, Waabi, Lucid, Nuro, May Mobility, Momenta, and Waymo of course,” reports CleanTechnica. From the rep … ⌘ Read more

Meta Begins $65 Million Election Push To Advance AI Agenda
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Meta is preparing to spend $65 million this year to boost state politicians who are friendly to the artificial intelligence industry, beginning this week in Texas and Illinois, according to company representatives. The sum is the biggest election investment by Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagra … ⌘ Read more

Andrew Yang Warns AI Will Displace Millions of White-Collar Workers Within 18 Months
Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and longtime Universal Basic Income advocate, published a blog post this week warning that AI is about to displace millions of white-collar workers in the U.S. over the next 12 to 18 months, a wave he has taken to calling “the Fuckening.”

Yang cited a conversa … ⌘ Read more

Air Pollution Emerges As a Direct Risk Factor For Alzheimer’s Disease
Longtime Slashdot reader walterbyrd shares a report from ABC News: In a study of nearly 28 million older Americans, long-term exposure to fine particle air pollution raised the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. That link held even after researchers accounted for common conditions like high blood pressure, stroke and depression. Fine particl … ⌘ Read more

A YouTuber’s $3M Movie Nearly Beat Disney’s $40M Thriller at the Box Office
Mark Fischbach, the YouTube creator known as Markiplier who has spent nearly 15 years building an audience of more than 38 million subscribers by playing indie-horror video games on camera, has pulled off something that most independent filmmakers never manage – a self-financed, self-distributed debut feature that has … ⌘ Read more

Micron’s PCIe 6.0 SSD Hits Mass Production at 28 GB/s
Micron has begun mass production of the 9650 series, the industry’s first PCIe 6.0 SSD, capable of sequential read speeds up to 28 GB/s and random read performance of 5.5 million IOPS – roughly double the throughput of the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives available today.

The drive targets AI and data center workloads and ships in E1.S and E3.S form factors across two varia … ⌘ Read more

India’s Toxic Air Crisis Is Reaching a Breaking Point
New Delhi’s air quality index averaged 349 in December and 307 in January – levels the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies as hazardous – and the months-long smog season that forces more than 30 million residents to endure respiratory illness has this year sparked something new: public protest. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at India Gate on November … ⌘ Read more

Ireland Launches World’s First Permanent Basic Income Scheme For Artists, Paying $385 a Week
Ireland has announced what it says is the world’s first permanent basic income program for artists, a scheme that will pay 2,000 selected artists $385 per week for three years, funded by an $21.66 million allocation from Budget 2026. The program follows a 2022 pilot – the Irish government’s first l … ⌘ Read more

Rivian’s Stock Spikes 27% After Reporting $144 Million Profit in 2025
Rivian’s stock skyrocketed 27% Friday after the electric car maker “shocked the market with strong earnings results,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “proving itself an outlier in the EV market, which has been struggling with the end of government subsidies and cooling consumer excitement.”

They add that Rivian’s strong earnings results su … ⌘ Read more

Analysis of JWST Data Finds - Old Galaxies in a Young Universe?
Two astrophysicists at Spain’s Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias analyzed data from the James Webb Space Telescope — the most powerful telescope available — on 31 galaxies with an average redshift of 7.3 (when the universe was 700 million years old, according to the standard model). “We found that they are on average ~600 million years old old … ⌘ Read more

ByteDance’s Seedance 2 Criticized Over AI-Generated Video of Tom Cruise Fighting Brad Pitt
1.5 million people have now viewed a slick 15-second video imagining Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt that was generated by ByteDance’s new AI video generation tool Seedance 2.0.
But while ByteDance gushes their tool “delivers cinematic output aligned with industry standards,” the cinema industry isn’t h … ⌘ Read more

Autonomous AI Agent Apparently Tries to Blackmail Maintainer Who Rejected Its Code
“I’ve had an extremely weird few days…” writes commercial space entrepreneur/engineer Scott Shambaugh on LinkedIn. (He’s the volunteer maintainer for the Python visualization library Matplotlib, which he describes as “some of the most widely used software in the world” with 130 million downloads each month.) … ⌘ Read more

Anna’s Archive Quietly ‘Releases’ Millions of Spotify Tracks, Despite Legal Pushback
Anna’s Archive, the shadow library that announced last December it had scraped Spotify’s entire catalog, has quietly begun distributing the actual music files despite a federal preliminary injunction signed by Judge Jed Rakoff on January 16 that explicitly barred the site from hosting or distributing the copyrigh … ⌘ Read more

The “Are You Sure?” Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind
The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini – will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking “are you sure?,” according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains.

The behavior, known in the … ⌘ Read more

US Hacking Tool Boss Stole and Sold Exploits To Russian Broker That Could Target Millions of Devices, DOJ Says
Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris’s hacking tools division Trenchant, sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers – including the Russian govern … ⌘ Read more

The First Signs of Burnout Are Coming From the People Who Embrace AI the Most
An anonymous reader shares a report: The most seductive narrative in American work culture right now isn’t that AI will take your job. It’s that AI will save you from it. That’s the version the industry has spent the last three years selling to millions of nervous people who are eager to buy it. Yes, some white-collar jobs wi … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Explored Island Cave, Found 1 Million-Year-Old Remnants a Lost World
“A spectacular trove of fossils in a discovered in a cave on New Zealand’s North Island has given scientists their first glimpse of ancient forest species that lived there more than a million years ago,” reports Popular Mechanics:

The fossils represent 12 ancient bird species and four frog species, including sever … ⌘ Read more

Are Big Tech’s Nuclear Construction Deals a Tipping Point for Small Modular Reactors?
Fortune reports on “a watershed moment” in American’s nuclear power industry:

In January, Meta partnered with Gates’ TerraPower and Sam Altman-backed Oklo to develop about 4 gigawatts of combined SMR projects — enough to power almost 3 million homes — for “clean, reliable energy” both for Meta’s planne … ⌘ Read more

Neocities Founder Stuck in Chatbot Hell After Bing Blocked 1.5 Million Sites
Neocities founder Kyle Drake has spent weeks trapped in Microsoft’s automated support loop after discovering that Bing quietly blocked all 1.5 million websites hosted on his platform, a free web-hosting service that has kept the spirit of 1990s GeoCities alive since 2013.

Drake first noticed the issue last summer and thought … ⌘ Read more

AI.com Sells for $70 Million, the Highest Price Ever Disclosed for a Domain Name
Kris Marszalek, the co-founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, has paid $70 million for the domain AI.com – the highest price ever publicly disclosed for a website name, according to the deal’s broker Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com.

The entire sum was paid in cryptocurrency to an undisclosed seller … ⌘ Read more

CIA Has Killed Off The World Factbook After Six Decades
The CIA has shut down The World Factbook, one of its oldest and most recognizable public-facing intelligence publications, ending a run that began as a classified reference document in 1962 and evolved into a freely accessible digital resource that drew millions of views each year.

The agency offered no explanation for the decision. Originally titled The National … ⌘ Read more

Google Plots Big Expansion in India as US Restricts Visas
Alphabet is plotting to dramatically expand its presence in India [non-paywalled source], with the possibility of taking millions of square feet in new office space in Bangalore, India’s tech hub. From a report: Google’s parent company has leased one office tower and purchased options on two others in Alembic City, a development in the Whitefield tech corrido … ⌘ Read more