Minecraft 26.3 Snapshot 4 brings SDL3, and prefers Wayland on Linux
Minecraft is set for another big update with a fresh Minecraft 26.3 Snapshot 4 ready for testing, and overall it’s quite a big technical upgrade.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

EV Batteries Defy Expectations, Last Hundreds of Thousands of Miles
247,000 miles on an EV battery? So says the owner of a U.K.-based used-car sales company that specializes in Evs, who tells the Wall Street Journal EV batteries keep performing well even after several hundred thousand miles. “They are proving themselves to be exceptionally reliable.”

After five years on the road, the average EV will still b … ⌘ Read more

Hobbit-like Humans May Have Scavenged Komodo Dragons’ Leftovers to Survive
CNN reports:

Prehistoric human relatives, nicknamed “hobbits” due to their short stature, may have been scavengers, rather than skilled hunters capable of taking down big game or building cooking fires, according to new research. The study adds to growing evidence that Homo floresiensis, which had a brain only slightl … ⌘ Read more

New Google Ad Imagines America’s ‘Declaration of Independence’ Written With AI Help
An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:

Two hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a new commercial from Google asks: What if the Founding Fathers had access to Google Workspace?
With the tagline “Group project, but make it 1776,” the ad depicts a large … ⌘ Read more

Are Wars Blurring Lines Between Corporate and National Security?
Subsea cables. Ukrainian power stations. Russian oil refineries. Even airports, water-desalination plants and Amazon data centers.

They’ve all become targets in wartime, notes the Wall Street Journal, and around the world now arguments “are already brewing between companies and governments over new regulations and potential costs.”

In Germany, po … ⌘ Read more

New DNA Tech Identifies Soldier Killed in America’s Revolution in 1780
South Carolina’s pine forests “have spent centuries hiding a secret as old as America itself,” reports CBS News:

In August 1780, British and American soldiers clashed there, leading to a terrible defeat for the Continental army [fighting for the 13 colonies rebelling against England]. Battlefield archaeologists Jim Legg and Steve Smi … ⌘ Read more

842,000 American Households Lost Power Today During a Heatwave
As America began celebrating its 250th birthday Saturday, 842,000 homes reported power outages, notes ABC News. Figures from tracking site PowerOutage showed states in America’s Northeast and Midwest were impacted by severe weather and extreme heat.

That number, which will fluctuate throughout the day as crews work to restore power, is for households … ⌘ Read more

Did Microsoft Shift Its Profits to Low-Tax Countries?
Microsoft is apparently shifting its profits to countries with low taxes — and out of countries where they have many more employees and significant sales. Back in 2005 Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer even said that a low corporate tax rate “is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland,” remembers long-time Slashdot reader theodp. (Ballmer added “It wo … ⌘ Read more

FSF Shares Update on ‘LibrePhone’ and New Automated Site Monitoring Tool
At the end of 2025, the FSF launched LibrePhone project, which is working to “better understand and reverse-engineer the nonfree blobs used by a great majority of (if not all) system on a chip designs available today.” The FSF’s summer newsletter shares this update:

We started with researching the proprietary files in Android phone … ⌘ Read more

AOL’s Owner Bending Spoons Hits Wall Street with $1.7 billion IPO
“The owner of AOL and other tech businesses hit Wall Street with a $1.7 billion initial public offering Wednesday,” reports the Associated Press:

The company is getting $1 billion in proceeds, while the rest is going to shareholders. The stock surged 39.7% in its first day of trading under the symbol “BSP” on the Nasdaq, giving it a market value of $2 … ⌘ Read more

EchoStar’s US Satellite Pay-TV Provider Dish DBS Files for Bankruptcy
EchoStar’s satellite pay-TV unit Dish DBS has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
protection, reports Reuters. The move also applies to its wireless subsidiaries, according to the article, and “facilitates the wind-down of Dish Wireless’s 5G network operations following an unexpected delay in a spectrum license sale to AT&T… unde … ⌘ Read more

Decades-Old Bash Tricks Expose AI Coding Agents To Supply Chain Attacks
Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: AI security researchers have uncovered a structural security flaw dubbed GuardFall that allows decades-old Bash shell tricks to bypass safeguards in most open source AI coding agents. By exploiting shell behaviors such as quote removal and variable expansion, attackers can hide malicious commands … ⌘ Read more

What Is a Quantum Computer Good For? Absolutely Nothing - Yet
The Verge argues that researchers “have made genuine progress in quantum computing — it’s just been largely incremental and too esoteric to immediately capture the public’s imagination.”

And there are predictions that quantum computers will finally do something useful as soon as 2028:

The drama can overshadow the real progress in quantum computing. … ⌘ Read more

Startup Targets Datacenters With 3D-Printed Nuclear Reactor Module
Startup Ampera has unveiled what it calls the first 3D-printed nuclear reactor module, built around a silicon-carbide core and pressure vessel designed for a thorium-based microreactor. The company says future systems could deliver 15 or 30 megawatts for up to 30 years without refueling. When The Register asked about availability, their s … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s cool to hear!

Looking at my access logs, something seems to be off, though:

2026-07-04T04:11:26+02:00 200
2026-07-04T05:16:09+02:00 304
2026-07-04T06:33:34+02:00 304
2026-07-04T06:37:46+02:00 304 # just four minutes since last crawl
2026-07-04T06:41:55+02:00 304 # another four minutes
2026-07-04T07:11:33+02:00 304
2026-07-04T07:11:40+02:00 200 # no conditional request just seven seconds later
2026-07-04T07:43:25+02:00 304
2026-07-04T07:43:33+02:00 200 # just eight seconds since last crawl
2026-07-04T09:18:06+02:00 304
2026-07-04T09:22:53+02:00 304 # just four minutes since last crawl
2026-07-04T09:27:03+02:00 304 # another four minutes

Video Game History Foundation Says Piracy Remains the Only Viable Preservation Method
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechSpot: Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi recently supported claims that piracy is the only effective way to preserve video games. The comments lay the blame squarely on game companies’ refusal to keep legacy content available or allow archivis … ⌘ Read more

Alibaba To Ban Claude Code In Workplace Over Alleged Backdoor Risks
Alibaba has reportedly banned employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code and directed them to its own Qoder platform amid a growing dispute over features that can help identify China-linked users. Reuters reports: The ban is part of a deepening spat between the two companies after Anthropic accused Alibaba of illicitly extracting its Claude AI … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Blames Piracy Apps With Malware For Killing New Fire Stick Sideloading
Amazon says it is ending sideloading on new Fire Sticks because “apps that facilitate piracy, and other apps, can carry malware,” adding that there is “a good amount of evidence” that sideloaded apps may contain unwanted code or behavior. However, the company did not provide specific examples of Fire Stick users being har … ⌘ Read more

Google Pulls the Plug On Tenor API, Killing GIF Pickers Around the Web
Google has shut down the Tenor API, breaking GIF pickers in services that still relied on it and forcing platforms such as X to migrate elsewhere. 9to5Google notes that the library itself remains available at Tenor.com and “integrations within Google products are also still active, including Gboard, Google Messages, and more.” From the … ⌘ Read more

California Bill To Preserve Online Games Fails Committee Vote
California’s Protect Our Games Act, which would require publishers to warn players before shutting down paid online games and offer refunds or continued access, failed to advance after a state Senate committee vote. Four state senators voted in favor, three voted against, and four abstained. Engadget reports: The committee unanimously voted in favor of g … ⌘ Read more

Apple iPhone 18 Details Leaked In Tata Data Breach
“Another breach at Tata has leaked details about Apple’s iPhone 18, along with documents belonging to several other Tata clients,” writes Longtime Slashdot reader Ritz_Just_Ritz. “It’s becoming a recurring theme for the company.” Reuters reports: Reuters has previously reported the Tata Electronics leak of more than 200,000 files on the dark web by World Leaks had files wit … ⌘ Read more

Claude Science is Here, Antibiotics Designed by Text Prompt Among Applications
Anthropic has launched Claude Science, an AI workbench that connects more than 60 scientific databases and tools through a single interface. Through the platform, Basecamp Research is making its EDEN models available for tasks such as designing antibiotic peptides and predicting vaccine targets from simple text promp … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Previews Linux Containers That Run In Windows
Microsoft has released a public preview of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) containers, adding a built-in command-line tool and API for running Linux containers directly inside Windows applications without third-party software. The update also introduces faster file access, improved networking and memory management, plus integration with Defender, Intune, and VS … ⌘ Read more

County With 37 Data Centers Asks Schools To ‘Conserve Electricity’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: On June 26, the County Manager of Henrico County, Virginia, John Vithoulkas, sent an email to thousands of county employees asking them to help the local government conserve electricity. “Beginning July 1st, the rate we pay for electricity used in all Henrico County government and school fa … ⌘ Read more

South Korea To Spend $1 Trillion On More Memory Chip Production, Humanoid Robots
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: South Korea’s government and top tech companies are committing $1 trillion to several flagship megaprojects that could bolster global memory chip supply, build new AI data centers and spur commercial deployment of humanoid robots by 2028. […] “We must sec … ⌘ Read more

US Supreme Court Rules Geofence Warrants Require Constitutional Privacy Protections
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 (PDF) in Chatrie v United States (No. 25-112) that geofence warrants sweeping up smartphone location data constitute searches under the Fourth Amendment. The Court found that individuals have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in such data, even when the tracking covers only … ⌘ Read more

Remembering How Microsoft’s Fake Windows Error Ended In a $280 Million Secret Settlement
Slashdot reader joshuark summarizes this walk down memory lane from the tech site MakeUseOf:
Facing real competition from Digital Research’s DR DOS, Microsoft secretly embedded a sabotaging mechanism known as “AARD code” into beta versions of Windows 3.1 to prevent it from running on Digital Research’s com … ⌘ Read more

Ford Rehires ‘Gray Beard’ Engineers After AI Falls Short
Ford executives said they’ve hired 350 veteran engineers — some of them former employees — after AI and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality, reports TechCrunch:

Bloomberg reports the company’s chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told journalists that Ford had been “relying more and more on automated quality systems” with disappointing resul … ⌘ Read more

South Korea Plans To Train Entire Military As ‘Drone Warriors’
“South Korea plans to train every single member of its nearly half-million-strong military to operate drones as easily as they handle personal firearms,” reports Ars Technica:

The goal is to make drones a “universal combat tool” for all troops by training them to use drones like a “second personal weapon,” said Ahn Gyu-back, South Korea’s Minister of … ⌘ Read more

Ex-Governors, Big Tech Launch Coalition To Help Workers ‘Navigate the AI Economy’
“Amid growing public anger over A.I. and a debate over how to regulate it, a group of employers, state governors and foundations has raised $500 million to try to answer some of those questions themselves,” reports the New York Times.

“Just how many jobs will AI upend?” asks the Wall Street Journal, reporting that t … ⌘ Read more

IBM Says It Can Fit Nearly 100 Billion Transistors On a Chip
IBM has unveiled “what it says is the world’s first sub-1-nanometer chip technology,” reports ZDNet, “designed to pack nearly 100 billion transistors on a fingernail-size die, roughly doubling the density of IBM’s earlier 2-nm test chip, first shown in 2021… Today, the smallest, most powerful chips top out at about 80 billion transistors.”

At the … ⌘ Read more

RADV Enables Vulkan Descriptor Heap Support By Default
In time for the Mesa 26.2 stable release expected out in August, the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver is now exposing the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap descriptor heap support by default… ⌘ Read more

Scientists Think Neptune and Uranus May Not Be the Ice Giants We Imagined
The planets Neptune and Uranus may be better described as “magma-ocean giants” rather than “ice giants,” according to a team of researchers from the University of California. Gizmodo reports:

While the Voyager flyby confirmed the planets’ classification as ice giants… [a]s the least explored planets in the solar system, … ⌘ Read more

Trump-Shuttered Climate Change Site Now Back Online In Nonprofit Hands
Donald Trump shuttered the web site Climate.gov in 2025, cutting off public access to climate information from America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

But “former members of the site’s team have brought much of it back at a new domain,” reports The Register:

“Trusted climate information should not disappear … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Slammed for Building Copyright-Infringing Supercomputer for OpenAI in New Court Filing
The New York Times alleges Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal its copyrighted work, reports Ars Technica, citing a new (and heavily redacted) court filing Thursday:

NYT’s motion comes after the [U.S.] Supreme Court sided with Cox Communications in a case where Sony tried … ⌘ Read more

Spain-Backed Fund Joins FOSSA’s Sovereign Satellite Communications Push
Spanish startup FOSSA Systems “has raised about $10.5 million to expand its connectivity constellation,” reports Space News, noting some funding is backed by Spain’s government:

The support from the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETT) comes a year after the fund injected 14 million euros into Spain’s Sateliot , … ⌘ Read more

China’s AI Matches Anthropic in Cybersecurity, Causing Worry Over US Restrictions
Chinese AI systems “have matched the performance of Anthropic’s powerful model Mythos in some cybersecurity scenarios,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
They call it “a development poised to reset the global tech race and pressure the White House in its overhaul of U.S. AI policy.”

Security researchers said that a new … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2-rc1 Released: “Things Look Reasonably Normal” While Landing AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL, AMD ISP4 & CAS
As expected, Linux 7.2-rc1 was released a brief time ago to cap off the Linux 7.2 merge window. Now it’s off for eight weeks or so of testing before Linux 7.2 stable is released that will in turn go on to power the likes of Fedora 45 and Ubuntu 26.10… ⌘ Read more

Are Checks Sent Through the Mail Vulnerable to Theft?
The New York Times tells the story of a 63-year-old retiree who wrote a check for several thousand dollaras to pay her taxes. But she discovered much later that her taxes were never paid because that check had been intercepted and then altered to be payable to someone else:

In some cases, thieves may pilfer one or more checks from local mailboxes. Adam Rust, director … ⌘ Read more

US Agency Cancels Contract For Warrantless Tracking of Mobile Devices
America’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has “canceled its contract for a surveillance tool that enables warrantless tracking of mobile devices,” reports the Associated Press.

They note the move comes “after lawmakers, a prosecutor and a judge raised concerns about the legality of the tool in criminal investigation … ⌘ Read more

Students Around the World are Using AI-Powered Smart Glasses to Cheat on Tests
Students are using AI-powered smart glasses to cheat on tests, reports CNN. “And in East Asia’s test-obsessed societies, where a single exam could impact the trajectory of a student’s future career and social status, educators are scrambling to get ahead of the problem.”

Already, countries are stepping up inspections … ⌘ Read more

‘Supergirl’ Movie Criticized for Script, Poor Visual Effects
The Onion joked the new movie Supergirl is about a hero who must single-handedly save the world “after the catastrophic collapse of interest in the genre.”

Unfortunately, The Hollywood Reporter says the film’s reviews “range from negative to tepid praise (averaging a 58 percent Rotten Tomatoes score).”

Many point fingers at the film’s script, wi … ⌘ Read more

Developer AI Token Costs Could Exceed Their Salaries in Two Years
“Enterprises may soon be paying as much for their developers’ AI token usage as they do for their salaries,” writes InfoWorld:

According to Gartner, these costs will meet, or even exceed, the typical software engineer’s monthly salary within the next two years. This is not only because developers are increasingly adopting generative AI and agent … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de 26°C inside, 30°C outside right now.

An Amazon Seller Says They Were Offered a Way to Bribe an Amazon Employee
Jack Nekhala had a business selling on Amazon — and in December he received an unusual offer, reports Bloomberg. A woman said she could bribe an Amazon employee “to help him retrieve $90,000 in funds that the e-commerce giant had frozen after suspending him over an alleged violation of review policy.”

Hoping to ingratiate himsel … ⌘ Read more

IBM is Getting Ready to Scale Quantum Computing
IBM spent a decade “building, testing and improving” quantum computing, reports the Wall Street Journal.

“This year, the company is laying the groundwork to turn that technology into a fully-fledged, scalable business from an expensive science project.”

IBM said last month it plans to form a new independent subsidiary called Anderon, a foundry to produce the silicon wafers n … ⌘ Read more

Renewable Energy Just Hit 30% of America’s Electricity Generation
America generated 10.06% more energy with renewables in the first four months of 2026 than it did in the same period the year before. That’s according to new figures from America’s Energy Information Administration, cited in this report from Electrek:

The growth was led by utility-scale solar (+21.3%), hydropower (+15.7%), small-scale solar
… ⌘ Read more

How a Seemingly Harmless Image Can Jailbreak Vision-Language AI Models
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: Florida International University researchers have developed a technique called JaiLIP (Jailbreaking with Loss-guided Image Perturbation) that uses subtle image modifications to bypass AI safety guardrails. Unlike traditional jailbreaks that rely on carefully crafted prompts, the attack works through ima … ⌘ Read more

France’s Heat This Week Was Worse Than a Dire Scenario Imagined For 2050
There’s a deadly, record-breaking heat wave spreading east across Europe, reports the Washington Post — and it’s even worse than a dire earlier forecast:

The forecast was recorded in 2014 as part of a campaign coordinated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that invited about 60 presenters worldwide to imagine a weather … ⌘ Read more

Max Planck Slapped With Two Paper Retractions By Suspected Rogue Algorithm
Max Planck won 1918’s Nobel Prize for physics. Yet two of his papers were retracted — a move now being criticized by Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec and Mahdi Khelfaoui, a fellow historian of science at UQ Trois-Rivières. Science reports:

The papers, both quietly retracted in 2011, original … ⌘ Read more