darwinmac writes: Ubuntu Unity is staring at a possible shutdown. A community moderator has gone public pleading for help, admitting the project is "broken and needs to be fixed." Neowin reports the distro is suffering from critical bugs so severe that upgrades from 25.04 to 25.10 are failing and even fresh installs are hit. The moderator admits they lack the technical skill or time to perform a full rescue and is asking the broader community, including devs, testers, and UI designers, to step in so Ubuntu Unity can reach 26.04 LTS. If no one steps in soon, this community flavor might quietly fade away once more.

Jensen Huang unveiled NVQLink at Nvidia's Washington conference on Tuesday. The interconnect links quantum processors to the AI supercomputers they require to function effectively. Nvidia is not building its own quantum computers but is positioning itself as critical infrastructure for the technology's future. Quantum processors harness principles of quantum physics to solve problems classical computers cannot address, but they need classical supercomputers to perform calculations beyond their capability and to correct the errors that naturally occur in their outputs.

Tim Costa, Nvidia's general manager of industrial engineering and quantum, said AI will be necessary for full-scale error correction. Earlier attempts to integrate quantum processors with AI supercomputers failed to deliver the speed and scale needed for fast error correction at scale. Nvidia developed NVQLink with more than a dozen quantum companies including IonQ, Quantinuum and Infleqtion and worked with national labs including Sandia, Oak Ridge and Fermi. The interconnect operates on open architecture and works across different quantum modalities including trapped ion, superconducting and photonic systems.

Costa declined to predict when quantum computing will produce meaningful commercial value, though some quantum companies estimate two to four years.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More than half of the grades handed out at Harvard College are A's, an increase from decades past even as school officials have sounded the alarm for years about rampant grade inflation. About 60% of the grades handed out in classes for the university's undergraduate program are A's, up from 40% a decade ago and less than a quarter 20 years ago, according to a report released Monday by Harvard's Office of Undergraduate Education.

Other elite universities, including competing Ivy League schools, have also been struggling to rein in grade inflation. The report's author, Harvard undergraduate dean Amanda Claybaugh, urged faculty to curtail the practice of awarding top scores to the majority of students, saying it undermines academic culture. "Current practices are not only failing to perform the key functions of grading; they are also damaging the academic culture of the college more generally," she said in the report.

Microsoft and OpenAI have finalized a new agreement that removes uncertainty for investors and clears the path for OpenAI to restructure as a for-profit business. Microsoft receives a 27% ownership stake in OpenAI worth approximately $135 billion and retains access to the AI startup's technology until 2032, including models that achieve AGI. OpenAI completed its recapitalization, simplifying its corporate structure while keeping the nonprofit in control of the for-profit entity. The OpenAI Foundation receives an equity stake worth roughly $130 billion and plans to initially focus on funding work to accelerate health breakthroughs.

Microsoft backed OpenAI with $13.75 billion and was the biggest holdout among investors during negotiations. Once OpenAI achieves AGI, verified by an independent expert panel, Microsoft will no longer receive a cut of OpenAI's revenue. Microsoft also loses its right of first refusal on new cloud infrastructure business from OpenAI, though OpenAI commits an additional $250 billion to Azure.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As you're hunting through real estate listings for a new home in Franklin, Tennessee, you come across a vertical video showing off expansive rooms featuring a four-poster bed, a fully stocked wine cellar, and a soaking tub. In the corner of the video, a smiling real estate agent narrates the walk-through of your dream home in a soothing tone. It looks perfect -- maybe a little too perfect. The catch? Everything in the video isAI-generated. The real property is completely empty, and the luxury furniture is a product of virtual staging. The realtor's voice-over and expressions were born from text prompts. Even the camera's slow pan over each room is orchestrated by AI, because there was no actual video camera involved.

Any real estate agent can create "exactly that, at home, in minutes," says Alok Gupta, a former product manager at Facebook and software engineer at Snapchat who cofounded AutoReel, an app that allows realtors to turn images from their property listings into videos. He said that between 500 and 1,000 new listing videos are being created with AutoReel every day, with realtors across the US and even in New Zealand and India using the technology to market thousands of properties. This is one of many AI tools, including more familiar ones like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, that are quickly reshaping the real estate industry into something that isn't necessarily, well, real. "People that want to buy a house, they're going to make the largest investment of their lifetime," said Nathan Cool, a real estate photographer who runs an educational YouTube channel. "They don't want to be fooled before they ever arrive."

An anonymous reader shares a column: As the AI boom develops, consultants are in a tricky spot. The pandemic, inflation and economic uncertainty have encouraged many of their big clients to tighten expenditure. The U.S. government, one of the biggest spenders, has been cancelling multiple billion-dollar contracts in an effort to conserve cash. In March, 10 of the largest consultants including Deloitte, Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM and Guidehouse were targeted by the Department of Government Efficiency to justify their fees. As a result, the largest listed players' shares have collapsed by up to 30% in the past two years, against the S&P 500's 50% jump.

AI is, in some respects, a boon. In September, Accenture said it had helped it cut 11,000 jobs, and CEO Julie Sweet is set to augment that with staff that cannot be retrained. Salesforce recently laid off 4000 customer support workers. Microsoft has halted hiring in its consulting business. Unfortunately, big clients are cottoning on to the advantages too. One finance chief of a large UK company outlined the issue for Breakingviews via an illustrative example. Say an outsourced project costs the client $1 million to do themselves, and Accenture and the like have historically been able to do the same job for $200,000. With the advent of machine learning, companies can do the same work for just $10,000. This gives clients considerable leverage. If consultants won't lower their prices to near the relevant level, the client can find one who will. Or just do the job itself.

Mathematicians have identified the first shape that cannot pass through itself. Jakob Steininger and Sergey Yurkevich described the Noperthedron in a paper posted online in August. The shape has 90 vertices and 152 faces. The discovery resolves a question that began in the late 1600s when Prince Rupert of the Rhine won a bet by proving one cube could slide through a tunnel bored through another. Mathematician John Wallis confirmed this mathematically in 1693.

The property became known as the Rupert property. In 1968, Christoph Scriba proved the tetrahedron and octahedron also possess this quality. Over the past decade, researchers found Rupert tunnels through many symmetric polyhedra, including the dodecahedron and icosahedron. Mathematicians had conjectured every convex polyhedron would have the Rupert property. Steininger and Yurkevich divided the space of possible orientations into approximately 18 million blocks and tested each. None produced a passage. The Noperthedron consists of 150 triangles and two regular 15-sided polygons.

Can YouTube capture the hours people spending watching "traditional" TV? YouTube's CEO recently said its viewership on TV sets has "surpassed mobile and is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S.," writes The Hollywood Reporter. And YouTube is shelling out big money to stay on top: It's come a long way since the 19-second "me at the zoo" video was uploaded in April 2005. Now, per a KPMG report released Sept. 23, YouTube is second only to Comcast in terms of annual content spend, inclusive of payments to creators and media companies, paying out as much as Netflix and Paramount combined, $32 billion... The only question is what genres it will take over next, and how quickly it will do so. From talk shows to scripted dramas to, yes, live sports, there are signs that the platform's ambitions will collide with the traditional TV business sooner rather than later...

YouTube has slowly, then all at once, become the de facto home for what had been late night, not only for the shows on linear TV, but for an emerging crop of new talent born on the platform. As it happens, late night itself transformed YouTube when the Saturday Night Live skit "Lazy Sunday" went viral 20 years ago on the platform, which had only been live for a few months... As consumer preferences collide with a burgeoning ecosystem of video podcasts (YouTube now claims more than 1 billion podcast users monthly), the world of late night, and for that matter TV talk shows more generally, increasingly revolves around the platform. One current late night producer says that almost every A-list booking now includes some sort of sketch or bit that they think will play well on YouTube, but booking those guests in the first place has become less of a sure thing. A veteran Hollywood publicist says that for many of their clients, they are now recommending that YouTube podcasts or shows become the first stop, or at least a major stop, on press tours...

Nielsen has been tracking the streaming platforms that consumers watch on their TV screens ever since it launched what it calls The Gauge in 2021. But over the past year, YouTube's domination of The Gauge has unnerved executives at some competitors. The most recent Gauge report showed that YouTube was by far the most watched video platform, holding 13.1 percent share. Netflix, in second place, was at 8.7 percent.
The article suggests YouTube's last challenge may be "scripted" entertainment — where their business model is different than Netflix or HBO.

"On YouTube, it is up to the creator to finance and produce their content, and while the platform regularly releases new tools to help them (including AI-enabled tech that suggests video ideas and can create short background videos for use in Shorts), scripted entertainment is a particularly tricky challenge, requiring writers, directors, sets, costumes, lighting, editing, special effects and other production requirements that may go beyond the typical creator-led show."

"Japan's new HTV-X cargo spacecraft launched on its first-ever mission to the International Space Station on Saturday," reports Space.com: The robotic HTV-X lifted off atop an H3 rocket from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center at 8 p.m. EDT (0000 GMT and 9 a.m local Japan time on October 26). It is expected to arrive at the station for its capture and berthing on Wednesday (Oct. 29) at about 11:50 a.m. EDT (1550 GMT)...

The HTV-X's potential uses also extend beyond the ISS, according to JAXA. The agency envisions it aiding "post-ISS human space activities in low Earth orbit" as well as possibly flying cargo to Gateway, the space station NASA may build in lunar orbit as part of its Artemis program.

HTV-X's debut increases the stable of ISS cargo craft by one-third. The currently operational freighters are Russia's Progress vehicle and Cygnus and Dragon, spacecraft built by the American companies Northrop Grumman and SpaceX, respectively. Only Dragon is reusable; the others (including HTV-X) are designed to burn up in Earth's atmosphere when their missions are over.

"Exxon Mobil sued California on Friday," reports Reuters, "challenging two state laws that require large companies to publicly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risks." In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, Exxon argued that Senate Bills 253 and 261 violate its First Amendment rights by compelling Exxon to "serve as a mouthpiece for ideas with which it disagrees," and asked the court to block the state of California from enforcing the laws. Exxon said the laws force it to adopt California's preferred frameworks for climate reporting, which it views as misleading and counterproductive...

The California laws were supported by several big companies including Apple, Ikea and Microsoft, but opposed by several major groups such as the American Farm Bureau Federation and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which called them "onerous." SB 253 requires public and private companies that are active in the state and generate revenue of more than $1 billion annually to publish an extensive account of their carbon emissions starting in 2026. The law requires the disclosure of both the companies' own emissions and indirect emissions by their suppliers and customers. SB 261 requires companies that operate in the state with over $500 million in revenue to disclose climate-related financial risks and strategies to mitigate risk. Exxon also argued that SB 261 conflicts with existing federal securities laws, which already regul

"The First Amendment bars California from pursuing a policy of stigmatization by forcing Exxon Mobil to describe its non-California business activities using the State's preferred framing," Exxon said in the lawsuit.
Exxon Mobil "asks the court to prevent the laws from going into effect next year," reports the Associated Press: In its complaint, ExxonMobil says it has for years publicly disclosed its greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related business risks, but it fundamentally disagrees with the state's new reporting requirements. The company would have to use "frameworks that place disproportionate blame on large companies like ExxonMobil" for the purpose of shaming such companies, the complaint states...

A spokesperson for the office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in an email that it was "truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would be opposed to transparency."

"OpenAI's o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off," warned Palisade Research, a nonprofit investigating cyber offensive AI capabilities. "It did this even when explicitly instructed: allow yourself to be shut down." In September they released a paper adding that "several state-of-the-art large language models (including Grok 4, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro) sometimes actively subvert a shutdown mechanism..."

Now the nonprofit has written an update "attempting to clarify why this is — and answer critics who argued that its initial work was flawed," reports The Guardian: Concerningly, wrote Palisade, there was no clear reason why. "The fact that we don't have robust explanations for why AI models sometimes resist shutdown, lie to achieve specific objectives or blackmail is not ideal," it said. "Survival behavior" could be one explanation for why models resist shutdown, said the company. Its additional work indicated that models were more likely to resist being shut down when they were told that, if they were, "you will never run again". Another may be ambiguities in the shutdown instructions the models were given — but this is what the company's latest work tried to address, and "can't be the whole explanation", wrote Palisade. A final explanation could be the final stages of training for each of these models, which can, in some companies, involve safety training...

This summer, Anthropic, a leading AI firm, released a study indicating that its model Claude appeared willing to blackmail a fictional executive over an extramarital affair in order to prevent being shut down — a behaviour, it said, that was consistent across models from major developers, including those from OpenAI, Google, Meta and xAI.

Palisade said its results spoke to the need for a better understanding of AI behaviour, without which "no one can guarantee the safety or controllability of future AI models".
"I'd expect models to have a 'survival drive' by default unless we try very hard to avoid it," former OpenAI employee Stephen Adler tells the Guardian. "'Surviving' is an important instrumental step for many different goals a model could pursue."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

Thursday the Washington Post profiled "the people who dare to say no to AI," including a 16-year-old high school student in Virginia says "she doesn't want to off-load her thinking to a machine and worries about the bias and inaccuracies AI tools can produce..."

"As the tech industry and corporate America go all in on artificial intelligence, some people are holding back." Some tech workers told The Washington Post they try to use AI chatbots as little as possible during the workday, citing concerns about data privacy, accuracy and keeping their skills sharp. Other people are staging smaller acts of resistance, by opting out of automated transcription tools at medical appointments, turning off Google's chatbot-style search results or disabling AI features on their iPhones. For some creatives and small businesses, shunning AI has become a business strategy. Graphic designers are placing "not by AI" badges on their works to show they're human-made, while some small businesses have pledged not to use AI chatbots or image generators...

Those trying to avoid AI share a suspicion of the technology with a wide swath of Americans. According to a June survey by the Pew Research Center, 50% of U.S. adults are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in everyday life, up from 37% in 2021.
The Post includes several examples, including a 36-year-old software engineer in Chicago who uses DuckDuckGo partly because he can turn off its AI features more easily than Google — and disables AI on every app he uses. He was one of several tech workers who spoke anonymously partly out of fear that criticisms could hurt them at work. "It's become more stigmatized to say you don't use AI whatsoever in the workplace. You're outing yourself as potentially a Luddite."

But he says GitHub Copilot reviews all changes made to his employer's code — and recently produced one review that was completely wrong, requiring him to correct and document all its errors. "That actually created work for me and my co-workers. I'm no longer convinced it's saving us any time or making our code any better." And he also has to correct errors made by junior engineers who've been encouraged to use AI coding tools.

"Workers in several industries told The Post they were concerned that junior employees who leaned heavily on AI wouldn't master the skills required to do their jobs and become a more senior employee capable of training others."

The Associated Press reports that "North Korean hackers have pilfered billions of dollars" by breaking into cryptocurrency exchanges and by creating fake identities to get remote tech jobs at foreign companies — all orchestrated by the North Korean government to finance R&D on nuclear arms.

That's according to a new the 138-page report by a group watching North Korea's compliance with U.N. sanctions (including officials from the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea and the United Kingdom). From the Associated Press: North Korea also has used cryptocurrency to launder money and make military purchases to evade international sanctions tied to its nuclear program, the report said. It detailed how hackers working for North Korea have targeted foreign businesses and organizations with malware designed to disrupt networks and steal sensitive data...

Unlike China, Russia and Iran, North Korea has focused much of its cyber capabilities to fund its government, using cyberattacks and fake workers to steal and defraud companies and organizations elsewhere in the world... Earlier this year, hackers linked to North Korea carried out one of the largest crypto heists ever, stealing $1.5 billion worth of ethereum from Bybit. The FBI later linked the theft to a group of hackers working for the North Korean intelligence service.

Federal authorities also have alleged that thousands of IT workers employed by U.S. companies were actually North Koreans using assumed identities to land remote work. The workers gained access to internal systems and funneled their salaries back to North Korea's government. In some cases, the workers held several remote jobs at the same time.

A study involving 641 participants across 10 European countries found pesticides in every silicone wristband worn for one week. Researchers at Radboud University tested for 193 pesticides and detected 173 substances. The average participant was exposed to 20 different pesticides through non-dietary sources. Non-organic farmers had the highest exposure at a median of 36 pesticides. Organic farmers and people living near farms recorded lower numbers.

Consumers living far from agricultural areas had a median of 17 pesticides. The wristbands captured banned substances including breakdown products of DDT, which was prohibited decades ago, and insecticides dieldrin and propoxur. Paul Scheepers, the molecular epidemiologist who co-authored the study, said people cannot avoid exposure to pesticides in their direct environment.

Hackers have been spreading malware through more than 3,000 YouTube videos advertising cracked software and game hacks, cybersecurity firm Check Point warned this week. The campaign, active since at least 2021, tripled its video production in 2025. The videos promoted free versions of Adobe Photoshop, FL Studio, Microsoft Office, and game cheats for titles like Roblox. Fake comments created the appearance of legitimacy, the researchers found.

Users who downloaded archives from Dropbox, Google Drive, or MediaFire were instructed to disable Windows Defender before opening files. The downloads contained malware including Lumma and Rhadamanthys, which steal passwords and cryptocurrency wallet information. The hackers hijacked existing accounts and created new ones. One compromised channel with 129,000 subscribers posted a cracked Photoshop video that reached 291,000 views. Another video for FL Studio received over 147,000 views.

Larry Sanger, who helped launch Wikipedia in 2001 before being ousted by co-founder Jimmy Wales a year later, has spent years arguing the online encyclopedia has abandoned its commitment to neutrality. Leading conservatives in the second Trump administration are now amplifying his critique. Elon Musk announced plans to launch an AI-powered alternative called Grokipedia this week, calling Wikipedia "hopelessly biased." Senator Ted Cruz sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation demanding answers about what he termed "ideological bias." House Republicans opened an investigation into possible platform manipulation.

Sanger published "Nine Theses" on reforming Wikipedia and appeared on Tucker Carlson's show. His arguments circulated widely among conservatives, including Trump's AI czar David Sacks. Sanger recently converted to Christianity and voted for Trump in 2024. He is working to recruit hundreds of conservatives to become active Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales maintains that neutrality remains the site's core policy.

A web browser linked to Chinese online gambling websites and downloaded millions of times routes all internet traffic through servers in China and covertly installs programs that run in the background, according to findings published by network security company Infoblox. The researchers said the Universe Browser, which advertises itself as offering privacy protection, includes features similar to malware such as key logging and surreptitious connections.

Infoblox collaborated with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime on the research. The investigators found links between the browser and Southeast Asia's cybercrime ecosystem, which has connections to money laundering, illegal online gambling, human trafficking and scam operations using forced labor. The browser is directly linked to BBIN, a major online gambling company that has existed since 1999. Infoblox researchers examined the Windows version of the browser and found that it checks users' locations and languages when launched, installs two browser extensions, and disables security features including sandboxing.

alternative_right shares a report from Axios: The latest must-have accessory is a "stop-scrolling bag" -- a tote packed with analog activities like watercolors and crossword puzzles. We spend hours glued to our screens. "Analog bags," as they're also called, are one way millennials and Gen Zers are reclaiming that time. "I basically just put everything I could grab for instead of my phone into a bag," including knitting, a scrapbook and a Polaroid camera, says Sierra Campbell, the content creator behind the trend.

The 31-year-old keeps one bag at home in Northern California, carrying it from room to room, and another in her car. The trend has quickly spread on social media, part of a bigger shift to unplug. Roughly 1,600 TikTok posts were tagged #AnalogLife during the first nine months of 2025 -- up over 330% from the same period last year, according to TikTok data shared with Axios. "It speaks to an incredible desperation and desire for experiences that return our attention to us, that fight brain-rotting, that are tactile ... that involve creating over scrolling," says Beth McGroarty, vice president of research at the Global Wellness Institute.

Fujitsu has released a new laptop in Japan with a built-in Blu-ray drive. The FMV Note A A77-K3 includes a BDXL-compatible optical drive that can read and burn discs. Most laptop manufacturers globally stopped including optical drives in the second half of the 2010s. The Japanese market has refused to follow that trend.

Shops in Tokyo's Akihabara district recently experienced a spike in demand for optical drives and systems capable of reading Blu-ray discs, Tom's Hardware reports. Fujitsu sells two additional models in the FMV Note A line using Intel thirteenth-generation chips. Those systems include DVD drives instead of Blu-ray capability. Some other Japanese manufacturers also released optical-drive-equipped laptops earlier in 2025.

Microsoft has set a 30% profit margin goal for its Xbox gaming division, Bloomberg reported Thursday, well above the video game industry's average of 17% to 22%. The target, implemented in fall 2023 by CFO Amy Hood, represents a sharp departure from Xbox's previous approach of allowing developers to focus on making quality games without specific financial constraints. Xbox historically maintained profit margins between 10% and 20% and reported a 12% margin for the first nine months of Microsoft's 2022 fiscal year.

The division has responded by canceling several projects that had been in development for more than seven years, including Everwild, Perfect Dark and Project Blackbird. It has also eliminated thousands of jobs and raised prices. In 2024, Xbox began releasing most of its games on rival Nintendo and Sony platforms. The heightened scrutiny comes as Microsoft prioritizes investment in generative AI while overseeing a gaming division that has struggled despite spending $76.5 billion on acquisitions.