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

GhostBSD 26.1 Now Based On FreeBSD 15.0, Switches to XLibre X Server
GhostBSD 26.1-R15.0p2 released today as a big upgrade for this desktop-focused, BSD operating system derived from FreeBSD… ⌘ 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

Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake Linux Graphics Performance Up ~17% Over Past Year
Given the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release being imminent and also realizing it’s been nearly one year to the day since reviewing the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition laptop under Linux, I ran some fresh benchmarks for seeing how the integrated Xe2 graphics have evolved on Linux over the past year. ⌘ Read more

Reed Hastings Is Leaving Netflix After 29 Years
Reed Hastings is stepping down from Netflix’s board in June, ending a 29-year run at the company he co-founded and helped transform from a DVD-by-mail business into a global streaming giant. Hastings said in a shareholder (PDF) letter that heâ™s stepping down to focus on “his philanthropy and other pursuits.” Engadget reports: Hastings has served as chairman of Netflix’s board … ⌘ Read more

Intel’s New Core Series 3 Is Its Answer To the MacBook Neo
Intel has launched a new budget-focused Core Series 3 processor line for lower-cost laptops – “Intel’s response to budget CPUs that are appearing in laptops like the Apple MacBook Neo,” writes PCWorld’s Mark Hachman. From the report: Intel unexpectedly launched the Core Series 3, based on its excellent “Panther Lake” (Core Ultra Series 3) architecture and 1 … ⌘ Read more

Sperm Whales’ Communication Closely Parallels Human Language, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales – enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales’ vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered … ⌘ Read more

‘TotalRecall Reloaded’ Tool Finds a Side Entrance To Windows 11 Recall Database
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two years ago, Microsoft launched its first wave of “Copilot+” Windows PCs with a handful of exclusive features that could take advantage of the neural processing unit (NPU) hardware being built into newer laptop processors. These NPUs could enable AI and machine le … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s Big Codex Update Is a Direct Shot At Claude Code
OpenAI is updating Codex with more agent-like capabilities, positioning it as a more direct rival to Anthropic’s Claude Code. Some of the new features include the ability to operate macOS desktop apps, browse the web inside the app, generate images, use new workplace plug-ins, and remember useful context from past tasks. The Verge reports: Codex will now … ⌘ Read more

Is Linux Mint In Trouble?
BrianFagioli writes: The developers behind Linux Mint say the project is rethinking its release strategy and moving toward a longer development cycle, with the next version now expected around Christmas 2026. In a monthly update, project lead Clement Lefebvre said the team reached a “crossroads” and needs more flexibility to fix bugs, improve the desktop, and adapt to rapid changes across the Linux ecosystem. The upcoming … ⌘ Read more

Europe Has ‘Maybe 6 Weeks of Jet Fuel Left’
The head of the International Energy Agency warned that Europe may have only “six weeks or so” of jet fuel left if oil supplies remain blocked by the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz stays disrupted. The Associated Press reports: IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol painted a sobering picture of the global repercussions of what he called “the largest energy crisis we have ever faced,” s … ⌘ Read more

Google, Pentagon Discuss Classified AI Deal
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet’s Google is negotiating an agreement with the Department of Defense that would allow the Pentagon to deploy its Gemini AI models in classified settings, the Information reported on Thursday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the discussions. The two parties are discussing an agreement that would allow the Pentagon to use Go … ⌘ Read more

IPv6 Usage Reaches Historic 50% Across Google Services
IPv6 usage briefly reached 50% across Google services for the first time, marking a major milestone for a protocol created in 1998 to solve IPv4’s address shortage. Tom’s Hardware reports: […] IPv6 was dismissed early on as a headache-inducing, hard-to-implement complication that would hardly ever gain any traction – despite offering 2^128 possible numbers, solv … ⌘ Read more

Mir 2.26 Begins Working On Rust-Based Input Platform
Canonical today released Mir 2.26 as the newest feature release for this compositor for building Wayland-based shells. Notable with Mir 2.26 is a Rust-based input platform is in development as part of their broader effort for bringing Rust code into Mir… ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Rolls Out Claude Opus 4.7, an AI Model That Is Less Risky Than Mythos
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7, calling it its strongest generally available model and an improvement over Opus 4.6 in areas like software engineering, instruction-following, tool use, and agentic coding. But the company says it is “less broadly capable” than the restricted Claude Mythos Preview, “which Anthropic rolled … ⌘ Read more