Senator Dick Durbin questioned a Texas-led effort to move Space Shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian to Space Center Houston, describing it as an expensive "heist" costing an estimated $305 million, not the $85 million initially budgeted. "This is not a transfer. It's a heist," said Durbin during a budget markup hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee. "A heist by Texas because they lost a competition 12 years ago." In April, Texas Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz introduced legislation to move the Space Shuttle Discovery from Virginia to Houston, which ultimately passed into law on July 4 as part of the "One Big Beautiful Bill." Ars Technica reports: "In the reconciliation bill, Texas entered $85 million to move the space shuttle from the National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia, to Texas. Eighty-five million dollars sounds like a lot of money, but it is not nearly what's necessary for this to be accomplished," Durbin said. Citing research by NASA and the Smithsonian, Durbin said that the total was closer to $305 million and that did not include the estimated $178 million needed to build a facility to house and display Discovery once in Houston.

Furthermore, it was unclear if Congress even has the right to remove an artifact, let alone a space shuttle, from the Smithsonian's collection. The Washington, DC, institution, which serves as a trust instrumentality of the US, maintains that it owns Discovery. The paperwork signed by NASA in 2012 transferred "all rights, interest, title, and ownership" for the spacecraft to the Smithsonian. "This will be the first time ever in the history of the Smithsonian someone has taken one of their displays and forcibly taken possession of it. What are we doing here? They don't have the right in Texas to claim this," said Durbin. [...]

To be able to bring up his points at Thursday's hearing, Durbin introduced the "Houston, We Have a Problem" amendment to "prohibit the use of funds to transfer a decommissioned space shuttle from one location to another location." He then withdrew the amendment after having voiced his objections. "I think we're dealing with something called waste. Eighty-five million dollars worth of waste. I know that this is a controversial issue, and I know that there are other agencies, Smithsonian, NASA, and others that are interested in this issue; I'm going to withdraw this amendment, but I'm going to ask my colleagues be honest about it," said Durbin. "I hope that we think about this long and hard."

"I am glad to see this pass as part of the Senate's One Big Beautiful Bill and look forward to welcoming Discovery to Houston and righting this egregious wrong," Cornyn said in a statement. "Houston has long been the cornerstone of our nation's human space exploration program, and it's long overdue for Space City to receive the recognition it deserves by bringing Space Shuttle Discovery home."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Automated surgery could be trialled on humans within a decade, say researchers, after an AI-trained robot armed with tools to cut, clip and grab soft tissue successfully removed pig gall bladders without human help. The robot surgeons were schooled on video footage of human medics conducting operations using organs taken from dead pigs. In an apparent research breakthrough, eight operations were conducted on pig organs with a 100% success rate by a team led by experts at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the US. [...]

The technology allowing robots to handle complex soft tissues such as gallbladders, which release bile to aid digestion, is rooted in the same type of computerized neural networks that underpin widely used artificial intelligence tools such as Chat GPT or Google Gemini. The surgical robots were slightly slower than human doctors but they were less jerky and plotted shorter trajectories between tasks. The robots were also able to repeatedly correct mistakes as they went along, asked for different tools and adapted to anatomical variation, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Science Robotics. The authors from Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Columbia universities called it "a milestone toward clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems." [...]

In the Johns Hopkins trial, the robots took just over five minutes to carry out the operation, which required 17 steps including cutting the gallbladder away from its connection to the liver, applying six clips in a specific order and removing the organ. The robots on average corrected course without any human help six times in each operation. "We were able to perform a surgical procedure with a really high level of autonomy," said Axel Krieger, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. "In prior work, we were able to do some surgical tasks like suturing. What we've done here is really a full procedure. We have done this on eight gallbladders, where the robot was able to perform precisely the clipping and cutting step of gallbladder removal without any human intervention. "So I think it's a really big landmark study that such a difficult soft tissue surgery is possible to do autonomously." Currently, nearly all of the NHS's 70,000 annual robotic surgeries are human-controlled, but the UK plans to expand robot-assisted procedures to 90% within the next decade.

Over 240 browser extensions with nearly a million total installs have been covertly turning users' browsers into web-scraping bots. "The extensions serve a wide range of purposes, including managing bookmarks and clipboards, boosting speaker volumes, and generating random numbers," reports Ars Technica. "The common thread among all of them: They incorporate MellowTel-js, an open source JavaScript library that allows developers to monetize their extensions." Ars Technica reports: Some of the data swept up in the collection free-for-all included surveillance videos hosted on Nest, tax returns, billing invoices, business documents, and presentation slides posted to, or hosted on, Microsoft OneDrive and Intuit.com, vehicle identification numbers of recently bought automobiles along with the names and addresses of the buyers, patient names and the doctors they saw, travel itineraries hosted on Priceline, Booking.com, and airline websites, Facebook Messenger attachments and Facebook photos, even when the photos were set to be private. The dragnet also collected proprietary information belonging to Tesla, Blue Origin, Amgen, Merck, Pfizer, Roche, and dozens of other companies.

Tuckner said in an email Wednesday that the most recent status of the affected extensions is:

- Of 45 known Chrome extensions, 12 are now inactive. Some of the extensions were removed for malware explicitly. Others have removed the library.
- Of 129 Edge extensions incorporating the library, eight are now inactive.
- Of 71 affected Firefox extensions, two are now inactive.

Some of the inactive extensions were removed for malware explicitly. Others have removed the library in more recent updates. A complete list of extensions found by Tuckner is here.

Samsung on Wednesday unveiled three new foldable smartphones at a time when the company is facing increased competition from Chinese rivals such as Honor and Oppo, reports CNBC. The company's share of the global foldable phone market slipped to 45% in 2024, down from 54% a year earlier. Today's new devices include the ultra-thin Galaxy Z Fold 7, the clamshell-style Galaxy Z Flip 7, and the more affordable Flip 7 FE. Here's a breakdown of each: The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is super thin at a thickness of 8.9 millimeters (0.35 inches) closed and only 4.2 millimeters open. It's also much lighter than its predecessor, weighing 215 grams (7.62 ounces). These stats put the phone on par with both Honor's Magic V5 and the Oppo Find N5. The new Fold device has a 6.5-inch cover screen and an 8-inch main display when opened, making it bigger than its predecessor. It's also decked out with premium new cameras, featuring a 200-megapixel main lens, as well as a 10-megapixel telephoto sensor, 12-megapixel ultra-wide and two 10-megapixel front cameras on both the cover screen and on the main display.

Samsung's new Fold generation is, nevertheless, much more limited than other devices in the market when it comes to battery capacity. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 has a 4,400 milliampere-hour (mAh) battery -- far less than the 6,100 mAh power pack in Honor's Magic V5's or the Oppo Find N5's 5,600 mAh battery. Samsung says its device is capable of 24 hours of video playback.

Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip 7 is also thinner than its predecessor, coming in at 6.5 millimeters when opened flat. By contrast, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 has a depth of 6.9 millimeters when unfolded. The new phone has a 4.1-inch cover screen and a 6.9-inch main display. It comes with a 50-megapixel main camera and 12-megapixel ultra-wide sensor on the back and a 10-megapixel lens on the main display. It also has a bigger 4,300 mAh battery, which Samsung says supports 31 hours of video playtime on a single charge.

In addition to Flip 7, Samsung is also introducing a cheaper version of the phone, called the Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE, which is slightly smaller and thicker than its more premium counterpart. What about the AI features, you ask? They all include various AI-driven camera tools that can identify and suggest removal of unwanted people or objects in photos, and an audio eraser that filters out background noise in videos.

The Galaxy Z Flip 7 also integrates Gemini Live, allowing users to overlay the AI assistant during live video recordings -- for instance, to receive real-time outfit suggestions.

The Z Fold 7 starts at $1,999, and the Z Flip 7 starts at $1,099. Meanwhile, the Flip 7 FE is priced at $899.

AMD is warning users of a newly discovered form of side-channel attack affecting a broad range of its chips that could lead to information disclosure. Register: Akin to Meltdown and Spectre, the Transient Scheduler Attack (TSA) comprises four vulnerabilities that AMD said it discovered while looking into a Microsoft report about microarchitectural leaks.

The four bugs do not appear too venomous at face value -- two have medium-severity ratings while the other two are rated "low." However, the low-level nature of the exploit's impact has nonetheless led Trend Micro and CrowdStrike to assess the threat as "critical."

The reasons for the low severity scores are the high degree of complexity involved in a successful attack -- AMD said it could only be carried out by an attacker able to run arbitrary code on a target machine. It affects AMD processors (desktop, mobile and datacenter models), including 3rd gen and 4th gen EPYC chips -- the full list is here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The herbicide ingredient used to replace glyphosate in Roundup and other weedkiller products can kill gut bacteria and damage organs in multiple ways, new research shows. The ingredient, diquat, is widely employed in the US as a weedkiller in vineyards and orchards, and is increasingly sprayed elsewhere as the use of controversial herbicide substances such as glyphosate and paraquat drops in the US. But the new piece of data suggests diquat is more toxic than glyphosate, and the substance is banned over its risks in the UK, EU, China and many other countries. Still, the EPA has resisted calls for a ban, and Roundup formulas with the ingredient hit the shelves last year. [...]

Diquat is also thought to be a neurotoxin, carcinogen and linked to Parkinson's disease. An October analysis of EPA data by the Friends of the Earth non-profit found it is about 200 times more toxic than glyphosate in terms of chronic exposure. [...] The new review of scientific literature in part focuses on the multiple ways in which diquat damages organs and gut bacteria, including by reducing the level of proteins that are key pieces of the gut lining. The weakening can allow toxins and pathogens to move from the stomach into the bloodstream, and trigger inflammation in the intestines and throughout the body. Meanwhile, diquat can inhibit the production of beneficial bacteria that maintain the gut lining. Damage to the lining also inhibits the absorption of nutrients and energy metabolism, the authors said.

The research further scrutinizes how the substance harms the kidneys, lungs and liver. Diquat "causes irreversible structural and functional damage to the kidneys" because it can destroy kidney cells' membranes and interfere with cell signals. The effects on the liver are similar, and the ingredient causes the production of proteins that inflame the organ. Meanwhile, it seems to attack the lungs by triggering inflammation that damages the organ's tissue. More broadly, the inflammation caused by diquat may cause multiple organ dysfunction syndrome, a scenario in which organ systems begin to fail. The authors note that many of the studies are on rodents and more research on low, long-term exposure is needed. The report notes that the EPA is not reviewing the chemical, "and even non-profits that push for tighter pesticide regulations have largely focused their attention elsewhere."

"[T]hat was in part because U.S. pesticide regulations are so weak that advocates are tied up with battles over ingredients like glyphosate, paraquat and chlorpyrifos -- substances that are banned elsewhere but still widely used here. Diquat is 'overshadowed' by those ingredients."

Google DeepMind's chief business officer says Alphabet's drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs "is preparing to launch human trials of AI-designed drugs," according to a report in Fortune, "pairing cutting-edge AI with pharma veterans to design medicines faster, cheaper, and more accurately." "There are people sitting in our office in King's Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer," said Colin Murdoch [DeepMind's chief business officer and president of Isomorphic Labs]. "That's happening right now."

After years in development, Murdoch says human clinical trials for Isomorphic's AI-assisted drugs are finally in sight. "The next big milestone is actually going out to clinical trials, starting to put these things into human beings," he said. "We're staffing up now. We're getting very close."

The company, which was spun out of DeepMind in 2021, was born from one of DeepMind's most celebrated breakthroughs, AlphaFold, an AI system capable of predicting protein structures with a high level of accuracy. Interactions of AlphaFold progressed from being able to accurately predict individual protein structures to modeling how proteins interact with other molecules like DNA and drugs. These leaps made it far more useful for drug discovery, helping researchers design medicines faster and more precisely, turning the tool into a launchpad for a much larger ambition... In 2024, the same year it released AlphaFold 3, Isomorphic signed major research collaborations with pharma companies Novartis and Eli Lilly. A year later, in April 2025, Isomorphic Labs raised $600 million in its first-ever external funding round, led by Thrive Capital. The deals are part of Isomorphic's plan to build a "world-class drug design engine..."

Today, pharma companies often spend millions attempting to bring a single drug to market, sometimes with just a 10% chance of success once trials begin. Murdoch believes Isomorphic's tech could radically improve those odds. "We're trying to do all these things: speed them up, reduce the cost, but also really improve the chance that we can be successful," he says. He wants to harness AlphaFold's technology to get to a point where researchers have 100% conviction that the drugs they are developing are going to work in human trials. "One day we hope to be able to say — well, here's a disease, and then click a button and out pops the design for a drug to address that disease," Murdoch said. "All powered by these amazing AI tools."

The Free Software Foundation's services face "ongoing (and increasing) distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks," senior systems administrator Ian Kelling wrote Wednesday. But "Even though we are under active attack, gnu.org, ftp.gnu.org, and savannah.gnu.org are up with normal response times at the moment, and have been for the majority of this week, largely thanks to hard work from the Savannah hackers Bob, Corwin, and Luke who've helped us, your sysadmins."

"We've shielded these sites for almost a full year of intense attacks now, and we'll keep on fighting these attacks for as long as they continue." Our infrastructure has been under attack since August 2024. Large Language Model (LLM) web crawlers have been a significant source of the attacks, and as for the rest, we don't expect to ever know what kind of entity is targeting our sites or why.

- In the fall Bulletin, we wrote about the August attack on gnu.org. That attack continues, but we have mitigated it. Judging from the pattern and scope, the goal was likely to take the site down and it was not an LLM crawler. We do not know who or what is behind the attack, but since then, we have had more attacks with even higher severity.

- To begin with, GNU Savannah, the FSF's collaborative software development system, was hit by a massive botnet controlling about five million IPs starting in January. As of this writing, the attack is still ongoing, but the botnet's current iteration is mitigated. The goal is likely to build an LLM training dataset. We do not know who or what is behind this.

- Furthermore, gnu.org and ftp.gnu.org were targets in a new DDoS attack starting on May 27, 2025. Its goal seems to be to take the site down. It is currently mitigated. It has had several iterations, and each has caused some hours of downtime while we figured out how to defend ourselves against it. Here again, the goal was likely to take our sites down and we do not know who or what is behind this.

- In addition, directory.fsf.org, the server behind the Free Software Directory, has been under attack since June 18. This likely is an LLM scraper designed to specifically target Media Wiki sites with a botnet. This attack is very active and now partially mitigated...

Even though we are under active attack, gnu.org, ftp.gnu.org, and savannah.gnu.org are up with normal response times at the moment, and have been for the majority of this week, largely thanks to hard work from the Savannah hackers Bob, Corwin, and Luke who've helped us, your sysadmins. We've shielded these sites for almost a full year of intense attacks now, and we'll keep on fighting these attacks for as long as they continue.
The full-time FSF tech staff is just two systems administrators, "and we currently lack the funds to hire more tech staff any time soon," Kelling points out. Kelling titled his post "our small team vs millions of bots," suggesting that supporters purchase FSF memberships "to improve our staffing situation... Can you join us in our crucial work to guard user freedom and defy dystopia?"

Kelling also points out they're also facing "run-of-the-mill standard crawlers, SEO crawlers, crawlers pretending to be normal users, crawlers pretending to be other crawlers, uptime systems, vulnerability scanners, carrier-grade network address translation, VPNs, and normal browsers hitting our sites..."

"Some of the abuse is not unique to us, and it seems that the health of the web has some serious problems right now."

"Some of our basic assumptions about the biological process of aging might be wrong," reports the New York Times — citing new research on a small Indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon. [Alternate URL here.] Scientists have long believed that long-term, low-grade inflammation — also known as "inflammaging" — is a universal hallmark of getting older. But this new data raises the question of whether inflammation is directly linked to aging at all, or if it's linked to a person's lifestyle or environment instead. The study, which was published Monday, found that people in two nonindustrialized areas experienced a different kind of inflammation throughout their lives than more urban people — likely tied to infections from bacteria, viruses and parasites rather than the precursors of chronic disease. Their inflammation also didn't appear to increase with age.

Scientists compared inflammation signals in existing data sets from four distinct populations in Italy, Singapore, Bolivia and Malaysia; because they didn't collect the blood samples directly, they couldn't make exact apples-to-apples comparisons. But if validated in larger studies, the findings could suggest that diet, lifestyle and environment influence inflammation more than aging itself, said Alan Cohen, an author of the paper and an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. "Inflammaging may not be a direct product of aging, but rather a response to industrialized conditions," he said, adding that this was a warning to experts like him that they might be overestimating its pervasiveness globally.

"How we understand inflammation and aging health is based almost entirely on research in high-income countries like the U.S.," said Thomas McDade, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University. But a broader look shows that there's much more global variation in aging than scientists previously thought, he added... McDade, who has previously studied inflammation in the Tsimane group, speculated that populations in nonindustrialized regions might be exposed to certain microbes in water, food, soil and domestic animals earlier in their lives, bolstering their immune response later in life.
More from The Independent: Chronic inflammation is thought to speed up the ageing process and contribute to various health conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes... However, other experts shared a word of caution before jumping to conclusions from the study. Vishwa Deep Dixit, director of the Yale Center for Research on Aging, told the New York Times it's not surprising that people less exposed to pollution would see lower rates of chronic disease.
Aurelia Santoro, an associate professor at the University of Bologna, also cautioned about the results, according to the Times. "While they had lower rates of chronic disease, the two Indigenous populations tended to have life spans shorter than those of people in industrialized regions, meaning they may simply not have lived long enough to develop inflammaging, Santoro said."

And Bimal Desai, a professor of pharmacology who studies inflammation at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, told the Times that the study "sparks valuable discussion" but needs more follow-up "before we rewrite the inflammaging narrative."

Software engineer Sean Goedecke argues that AI coding agents have already been commoditized because they require no special technical advantages, just better base models. He writes: All of a sudden, it's the year of AI coding agents. Claude released Claude Code, OpenAI released their Codex agent, GitHub released its own autonomous coding agent, and so on. I've done my fair share of writing about whether AI coding agents will replace developers, and in the meantime how best to use them in your work. Instead, I want to make what I think is now a pretty firm observation: AI coding agents have no secret sauce.

[...] The reason everyone's doing agents now is the same reason everyone's doing reinforcement learning now -- from one day to the next, the models got good enough. Claude Sonnet 3.7 is the clear frontrunner here. It's not the smartest model (in my opinion), but it is the most agentic: it can stick with a task and make good decisions over time better than other models with more raw brainpower. But other AI labs have more agentic models now as well. There is no moat.

There's also no moat to the actual agent code. It turns out that "put the model in a loop with a 'read file' and 'write file' tool" is good enough to do basically anything you want. I don't know for sure that the closed-source options operate like this, but it's an educated guess. In other words, the agent hackers in 2023 were correct, and the only reason they couldn't build Claude Code then was that they were too early to get to use the really good models.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The sweeping layoffs announced by Microsoft this week have been especially hard on its gaming studios, but one Xbox executive has a solution to "help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss": seek advice from AI chatbots.

In a now-deleted LinkedIn post captured by Aftermath, Xbox Game Studios' Matt Turnbull said that he would be "remiss in not trying to offer the best advice I can under the circumstances." The circumstances here being a slew of game cancellations, services being shuttered, studio closures, and job cuts across key Xbox divisions as Microsoft lays off as many as 9,100 employees across the company.

Turnbull acknowledged that people have some "strong feelings" about AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot, but suggested that anybody who's feeling "overwhelmed" could use them to get advice about creating resumes, career planning, and applying for new roles.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Law enforcement officials are investigating a former employee of a company that negotiates with hackers and facilitates cryptocurrency payments during ransomware attacks, according to a statement from the firm, DigitalMint. DigitalMint President Marc Jason Grens this week told organizations it works with that the US Justice Department is examining allegations that the then-employee struck deals with hackers to profit from extortion payments, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Grens did not identify the employee by name and characterized their actions as isolated, said the person, who spoke on condition that they not be identified describing private conversations. DigitalMint is cooperating with a criminal investigation into "alleged unauthorized conduct by the employee while employed here," Grens said in an email to Bloomberg News. The Chicago-based company is not the target of the investigation and the employee "was immediately terminated," Grens said, adding that he can't provide more information because the probe is ongoing.

"For-profit companies are pushing the narrative that they can do space inexpensively," writes Slashdot reader RUs1729 in response to an opinion piece from SpaceNews. "Their track record reveals otherwise: cutting corners won't do it for the foreseeable future." Here's an excerpt from the article, written by Robert N. Eberhart: The headlines in the space industry over the past month have delivered a sobering reminder: space is not forgiving, and certainly not friendly to overpromising entrepreneurs. From iSpace's second failed lunar landing attempt (making them 0 for 2) to SpaceX's ongoing Starship test flight setbacks -- amid a backdrop of exploding prototypes and shifting goalposts -- the evidence is mounting that the commercialization of space is not progressing in the triumphant arc that press releases might suggest. This isn't just a series of flukes. It points to a structural, strategic and cultural problem in how we talk about innovation, cost and success in space today.

Let's be blunt: 50 years ago, we did this. We sent humans to the moon, not once but repeatedly, and brought them back. With less computational power than your phone, using analog systems and slide rules, we achieved feats of incredible precision, reliability and coordination. Today's failures, even when dressed up as "learning opportunities," raises the obvious question: Why are we struggling to do now what we once achieved decades ago with far more complexity and far less technology?

Until very recently, the failure rate of private lunar exploration efforts underscored this reality. Over the past two decades, not a single private mission had fully succeeded -- until last March when Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander touched down on the moon. It marked the first fully successful soft landing by a private company. That mission deserves real credit. But that credit comes with important context: It took two decades of false starts, crashes and incomplete landings -- from Space IL's Beresheet to iSpace's Hakuto-R and Astrobotic's Peregrine -- before even one private firm delivered on the promise of lunar access. The prevailing industry answer -- "we need to innovate for lower cost" -- rings hollow. What's happening now isn't innovation; it's aspiration masquerading as disruption... "This is not a call for a retreat to Cold War models or Apollo-era budgets," writes Eberhart, in closing. "It's a call for seriousness. If we're truly entering a new space age, then it needs to be built on sound engineering, transparent economics and meaningful technical leadership -- not PR strategy. Let's stop pretending that burning money in orbit is a business model."

"The dream of a sustainable, entrepreneurial space ecosystem is still alive. But it won't happen unless we stop celebrating hype and start demanding results. Until then, the real innovation we need is not in spacecraft -- it's in accountability."

Robert N. Eberhart, PhD, is an associate professor of management and the faculty director of the Ahlers Center for International Business at the Knauss School of Business of University of San Diego. He is the author of several academic publications and books. He is also part of Oxford University's Smart Space Initiative and contributed to Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory. Before his academic career, Prof. Eberhart founded and ran a successful company in Japan.

Avantare writes: Microsoft Authenticator houses your passwords and lets you sign into all of your Microsoft accounts using a PIN, facial recognition such as Windows Hello, or other biometric data, like a fingerprint. Authenticator can be used in other ways, such as verifying you're logging in if you forgot your password, or using two-factor authentication as an extra layer of security for your Microsoft accounts.
In June, Microsoft stopped letting users add passwords to Authenticator, but here's a timeline of other changes you can expect, according to Microsoft:

July 2025: You won't be able to use the autofill password function.
August 2025: You'll no longer be able to use saved passwords.

Mitch Kapor dropped out of MIT's business school in 1979 — and had soon cofounded the pioneering spreadsheet company Lotus. He also cofounded the EFF, was the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, and is now a billionaire (and an VC investor at Kapor Capital).

45 years later, when the 74-year-old was invited to give a guest lecture at MIT's business school last year by an old friend (professor Bill Aulet), he'd teased the billionaire that "there's only one problem, Mitch, I see here you haven't graduated from MIT."

The Boston Globe tells the story... After graduating from Yale in 1971 and bouncing around for almost a decade as "a lost and wandering soul," working as a disc jockey, a Transcendental Meditation teacher, and a mental health counselor, Kapor said he became entranced by the possibilities of the new Apple II personal computer. He started writing programs to solve statistics problems and analyze data, which caught the attention of Boston-area software entrepreneurs Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who co-created VisiCalc, one of the first spreadsheet programs. They introduced Kapor to their California-based software publisher, Personal Software.

Midway through Kapor's 12-month master's program, the publisher offered him the then-princely sum of about $20,000 if he'd adapt his stats programs to work with VisiCalc. To finish the project, he took a leave from MIT, but then he decided to leave for good to take a full-time job at Personal. Comparing his decision to those of other famed tech founder dropouts, like Bill Gates, Kapor said he felt the startup world was calling to him. "It was just so irresistible," he said. "It felt like I could not let another moment go by without taking advantage of this opportunity or the window would close...."

When Aulet made his joke on the phone call with his old friend in 2024, Kapor had largely retired from investing and realized that he wanted to complete his degree. "I don't know what prompted me, but it started a conversation" with MIT about the logistics of finally graduating, Kapor said. By the time Kapor gave the lecture in March, Aulet had discovered Kapor was only a few courses short. MIT does not give honorary degrees, but school officials allow students to make up for missing classes with an independent study and a written thesis. Kapor decided to write a paper on the roots and development of his investing strategy. "It's timely, it's highly relevant, and I have things to say," he said.

One 77-page thesis later, Kapor, donning a cap and gown, finally received his master's degree in May, at a ceremony in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Cambridge, not far from where he founded Lotus.

The Wall Street Journal reports that "consumers have less trust in offerings labeled as being powered by artificial intelligence, which can reduce their interest in buying them, researchers say." The effect is especially pronounced for offerings perceived to be riskier buys, such as a car or a medical-diagnostic service, say the researchers, who were from Washington State University and Temple University. "When we were thinking about this project, we thought that AI will improve [consumers' willingness to buy] because everyone is promoting AI in their products," says Dogan Gursoy, a regents professor of hospitality business management at Washington State and one of the study's authors. "But apparently it has a negative effect, not a positive one."

In multiple experiments, involving different people, the researchers split participants into two groups of around 100 each. One group read ads for fictional products and services that featured the terms "artificial intelligence" or "AI-powered," while the other group read ads that used the terms "new technology" or "equipped with cutting-edge technologies." In each test, members of the group that saw the AI-related wording were less likely to say they would want to try, buy or actively seek out any of the products or services being advertised compared with people in the other group. The difference was smaller for items researchers called low risk — such as a television and a generic customer-service offering...

Meanwhile, a separate, forthcoming study from market-research firm Parks Associates that used different methods and included a much larger sample size came to similar conclusions about consumers' reaction to AI in products. "We straight up asked consumers, 'If you saw a product that you liked that was advertised as including AI, would that make you more or less likely to buy it?' " says Jennifer Kent, the firm's vice president of research. Of the roughly 4,000 Americans in the survey, 18% said AI would make them more likely to buy, 24% said less likely and to 58% it made no difference, according to the study. "Before this wave of generative AI attention over the past couple of years, AI-enabled features actually have tested very, very well," Kent says.

Bcachefs "pitches itself as a filesystem that 'doesn't eat your data'," writes the open source/Linux blog It's FOSS. Although it was last October that Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet was restricted from participating in the Linux 6.13 kernel development cycle (after ending a mailing list post with "Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit.")

And now with the upcoming Linux kernel 6.17 release, Linus Torvalds has decided to drop Bcachefs support, they report, "owing to growing tensions" with Overstreet: The decision follows a series of disagreements over how fixes and changes for it were submitted during the 6.16 release cycle... Kent filed a pull request to add a new feature called "journal-rewind". It was meant to improve bcachefs repair functionality, but it landed during the release candidate (RC) phase, a time usually reserved for bug fixes, not new features, as Linus pointed out. [Adding "I remain steadfastly convinced that anybody who uses bcachefs is expecting it to be experimental. They had better."]

Theodore Ts'o, a long-time kernel developer and maintainer of ext4, also chimed in, saying that Kent's approach risks introducing regressions, especially when changes affect sensitive parts of a filesystem like journaling. He reminded Kent that the rules around the merge window have been a long-standing consensus in the kernel community, and it's Linus's job to enforce them. After some more back and forth, Kent pushed back, arguing that the rules around the merge window aren't absolute and should allow for flexibility, even more so when user data is at stake. He then went ahead and resubmitted the patch, citing instances from XFS and Btrfs where similar fixes made it into the kernel during RCs. Linus merged it into his tree, but ultimately decided to drop Bcachefs entirely in the 6.17 merge window.

To which Kent responded by clarifying that he wasn't trying to shut Linus out of Bcachefs' decisions, stressing that he values Linus's input...
This of course follows the great Torvalds-Overstreet "filesystem people never learn" throwdown back in April.

Seven people have now received Neuralink's N1 brain implant, which enables individuals with ALS or spinal cord injuries to control a computer with their thoughts. PCMag reports: In a February 2025 update, Neuralink confirmed that three people had received its brain-computer interface (BCI). That increased to five by June, when it also reported a $650 million funding round. We're now at seven, Barrow tweeted today; Neuralink retweeted that message.

Six of the seven are participating in the PRIME study, conducted by Barrow, which handles the implantations from its Phoenix, Arizona, office. It aims to prove that the N1 implant, the R1 surgical robot, and the N1 User App on the computer are safe and effective, according to the program brochure. (No BCIs have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.)

Participants in the study get the implant through a surgery in which a custom-built robotic arm drills a hole in their skull and implants the device. The implant connects to a computer via Bluetooth, allowing patients to move the cursor, select words to type, browse the web, and even play video games -- a favorite activity of Neuralink's first human patient, Noland Arbaugh, who can do this all without moving any limbs or fingers. [...] Arbaugh, now 31, became paralyzed during a diving accident. Other Neuralink patients include Alex, a former machine parts builder who lost function of his arms and uses his N1 Implant to design 3D machine parts with computer-aided design (CAD). The third patient is Brad, the first person with ALS to receive the N1 implant, according to Barrow.

Mike is the fourth patient, and "the first person with a full-time job to use the N1 Implant," Barrow says. "He worked as a survey technician for city government and spent the majority of his time in the field until his ALS made the work too difficult. Like Alex, Mike has used CAD software with his Neuralink device to continue doing survey work from home and provide for his family." The fifth publicly named patient is RJ, a veteran who became paralyzed after a motorcycle accident, according to the University of Miami. The other two patients remain anonymous, but we can expect Neuralink to continue recruiting more people (here's how to apply).

Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Car and Driver with the comment: "Lack of visibility is a significant consequence of improving safety on the front overlap crash testing." Here's an excerpt from the report: The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has a new method to look at what drivers can't look at, and the results of a DOT study using the method suggest that things have gotten worse over the past quarter-century. [...] For the study, researchers with the U.S. Department of Transportation's Volpe Center used the IIHS method to examine every generation of some popular vehicles sold between 1997 and 2023. The models chosen were the Chevrolet Suburban, the Ford F-150, the Honda Accord, the Honda CR-V, the Jeep Grand Cherokee, and the Toyota Camry. The analysis measured how much of a 10-meter radius is visible to a driver; this distance was chosen because that's approximately how much space a driver needs to react and stop when traveling at 10 mph. The study also measured visibility between 10 and 20 meters from the vehicle.

The biggest model-specific difference was observed with the Honda CR-V. In a 1997 model, the researchers measured 68 percent visibility, while the 2022 came in at just 28 percent. In a 2000 Suburban, the study measured 56 percent visible area within the 10-meter radius, but in a 2023 model it was down to 28 percent. The study concluded that higher hoods on newer versions of both models had the biggest impact on outward visibility. The F-150 started out with low visibility (43% for a 1997 model) and also declined (36% for the 2015 version). The two sedans in the study saw the least regression: A 2003 Accord was measured at 65 percent visibility, with the 2023 close behind at 60 percent, and the Camry went from 61 percent for the 2007 model to 57 percent for a 2023. Results for visibility between 10 and 20 meters were mixed, with some improving and others decreasing over subsequent generations.

While this is not conclusive evidence across the industry, the results from these representative vehicles suggest an overall decline in outward frontal visibility. The study also notes that, during the same time period, pedestrian and bicyclist deaths on U.S. roads increased dramatically -- 37 and 42 percent, respectively. There's likely at least some causation with that correlation, even when you consider the addition of features such as automated emergency braking that are meant to intervene and prevent such collisions.

Facebook is prompting users to opt into a feature that uploads photos from their camera roll -- even those not shared on the platform -- to Meta's servers for AI-driven suggestions like collages and stylized edits. While Meta claims the content is private and not used for ads, opting in allows the company to analyze facial features and retain personal data under its broad AI terms, raising privacy concerns. TechCrunch reports: The feature is being suggested to Facebook users when they're creating a new Story on the social networking app. Here, a screen pops up and asks if the user will opt into "cloud processing" to allow creative suggestions. As the pop-up message explains, by clicking "Allow," you'll let Facebook generate new ideas from your camera roll, like collages, recaps, AI restylings, or photo themes. To work, Facebook says it will upload media from your camera roll to its cloud (meaning its servers) on an "ongoing basis," based on information like time, location, or themes.

The message also notes that only you can see the suggestions, and the media isn't used for ad targeting. However, by tapping "Allow," you are agreeing to Meta's AI Terms. This allows your media and facial features to be analyzed by AI, it says. The company will additionally use the date and presence of people or objects in your photos to craft its creative ideas. [...] According to Meta's AI Terms around image processing, "once shared, you agree that Meta will analyze those images, including facial features, using AI. This processing allows us to offer innovative new features, including the ability to summarize image contents, modify images, and generate new content based on the image," the text states.

The same AI terms also give Meta's AIs the right to "retain and use" any personal information you've shared in order to personalize its AI outputs. The company notes that it can review your interactions with its AIs, including conversations, and those reviews may be conducted by humans. The terms don't define what Meta considers personal information, beyond saying it includes "information you submit as Prompts, Feedback, or other Content." We have to wonder whether the photos you've shared for "cloud processing" also count here.