It's a cultural milestone. Fiverr just released an ad mocking vibe coding.

The video features what its description calls a "clueless entrepreneur" building an app to tell if an avocado is ripe — who soon ends up blissfully singing with an avocado to the tune of the cheesy 1987 song "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now." The avocado sings joyously of "a new app on the rise in a no-code world that's too good to be true" (rhyming that with "So close. Just not tested through...")

"Let them say we're crazy. I don't care about bugs!" the entrepreneur sings back. "Built you in a minute, now I'm so high off this buzz..."

But despite her singing to the overripe avocado that "I don't need a backend if I've got the spark!" and that they can "build this app together, vibe-coding forever. Nothing's going to stop us now!" — the build suddenly fails. (And it turns out that avocado really was overripe...) Fiverr then suggests viewers instead hire one of their experts for building their apps...

The art/design site Creative Bloq acknowledges Fiverr "flip-flopping between scepticism and pro-AI marketing." (They point out a Fiverr ad last November had ended with the tagline "Nobody cares that you use AI! They care about the results — for the best ones higher Fiverr experts who've mastered every digital skill including AI.") But the site calls this new ad "a step in the right direction towards mindful AI usage." Just like an avocado that looks perfect on the outside, once you inspect the insides, AI-generated code can be deceptively unripe.
Fiverr might be feeling the impact of vibecoding themselves. The freelancing web site saw the company's share price fall over 14% this week, with one Yahoo! Finance site saying this week's quarterly results revealed Fiverr's active buyers dropped 10.9% compared to last year — a decrease of 3.4 million buyers which "overshadowed a 9.8% increase in spending per buyer."

Even when issuing a buy recommendation, Seeking Alpha called it "a short-term rebound play, as the company faces longer-term risks from AI and active buyer churn."

The vehicle "once led the Space Shuttle down the runway at Edwards Air Force Base," The Drive reported in 2022, noting it was won in an auction for $21,061 (beating 18 other bidders). "I just figured the NASA brand combined with Airsteam hip seemed like a can't lose combination," the buyer says now, in a listing for the vehicle on the on the automotive sales site Hemmings.com asking $199,000..

They're touting it as a priceless marketing/publicity prop — "a once in a lifetime opportunity" to own what was once an "onsite command center complete with communications and atmospheric monitoring... Imagine pulling into Burning Man driving this..." The seller points out it's the only custom-built "Airstream" trailer ever sold by NASA. (The others were crushed, except for one donated to the Kennedy museum.) But for this one "Apparently there was some miscommunication when the vehicle was decommissioned. It should have been offered to museums but the sales team did not know what it was.")

"Has only 8240 miles on it as driven from Ohio to California then around the Edwards base."

The seller apparently first tried listing it on eBay in May for $50,000. ("Reserve not met," says that listing page now. "Very well maintained, minor dings on exterior...")

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Beijing has summoned Nvidia over alleged security issues with its chips, in a blow to the US company's push to revive sales in the country after Washington granted approval for the export of a made-for-China chip. From a report: China's cyber regulator on Thursday said it had held a meeting with Nvidia over what it called "serious security issues" with the company's artificial intelligence chips.

It said US AI experts had "revealed that Nvidia's computing chips have location tracking and can remotely shut down the technology." The Cyberspace Administration of China requested that Nvidia explain the security problems associated with the H20 chip, which was designed for the Chinese market to comply with US export restrictions, and submit documentation to support their case.

A software developer who built his own home server in response to Amazon's removal of Kindle book downloads now argues that self-hosting "is NOT the future we should be fighting for." Drew Lyton constructed a home server running open-source alternatives to Google Drive, Google Photos, Audible, Kindle, and Netflix after Amazon announced that "Kindle users would no longer be able to download and back up their book libraries to their computers."

The change prompted Amazon to update Kindle store language to say "users are purchasing licenses -- not books." Lyton's setup involved a Lenovo P520 with 128GB RAM, multiple hard drives, and Docker containers running applications like Immich for photo storage and Jellyfin for media streaming. The technical complexity required "138 words to describe but took me the better part of two weeks to actually do."

The implementation was successful but Lyton concluded that self-hosting "assumes isolated, independent systems are virtuous. But in reality, this simply makes them hugely inconvenient." He proposes "publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services" as an alternative, suggesting libraries could provide "100GB of encrypted file storage, photo-sharing and document collaboration tools, and media streaming services -- all for free."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: Edward Saatchi isn't totally sure people will flock to Showrunner, the new AI-generated TV show service his company is launching publicly this week. But he has a vote of confidence from Amazon, which has invested in Fable, Saatchi's San Francisco-based start-up. The amount of Amazon's funding in Fable isn't being disclosed. The money is going toward building out Showrunner, which Fable has hyped as the "Netflix of AI": a service that lets you type in a few words to create scenes -- or entire episodes -- of a TV show, either from scratch or based on an existing story-world someone else has created.

Fable is launching Showrunner to let users tinker with the animation-focused generative-AI system, following several months in a closed alpha test with 10,000 users. Initially, Showrunner will be free to use but eventually the company plans to charge creators $10-$20 per month for credits allowing them to create hundreds of TV scenes, Saatchi said. Viewing Showrunner-generated content will be free, and anyone can share the AI video on YouTube or other third-party platforms. [...] Fable's Showrunner public launch features two original "shows" -- story worlds with characters users can steer into various narrative arcs. The first is "Exit Valley," described as "a 'Family Guy'-style TV comedy set in 'Sim Francisco' satirizing the AI tech leaders Sam Altman, Elon Musk, et al." The other is "Everything Is Fine," in which a husband and wife, going to Ikea, have a huge fight -- whereupon they're transported to a world where they're separated and have to find each other. [...]

Showrunner is powered by Fable's proprietary AI model, SHOW-2. Last year, the company published a research paper on how it built the SHOW-1 model. As part of that, it released nine AI-generated episodes based on "South Park." The episodes, made without the permission of the "South Park" creators, received more than 80 million views. (Saatchi said he was in touch with the "South Park" team, who were reassured the IP wasn't being deployed commercially.) [...] Out of the gate, Showrunner is focused on animated content because it requires much less processing power than realistic-looking live-action video scenes. Saatchi said Fable wants to stay out of the "knife fight" among big AI companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta that are racing to create photorealistic content. "If you're competing with Google, are you going to win?" Saatchi said. "Our goal is to have the most creative models," he said.

Australia's first domestically built rocket to attempt orbital launch crashed just 14 seconds after liftoff, though the company still declared the mission a success for igniting all engines and leaving the launch pad. The Associated Press reports: The rocket Eris, launched by Gilmour Space Technologies, was the first Australian-designed and manufactured orbital launch vehicle to lift off from the country and was designed to carry small satellites to orbit. It launched Wednesday morning local time in a test flight from a spaceport near the small town of Bowen in the north of Queensland state. In videos published by Australian news outlets, the 23-meter (75-foot) rocket appeared to clear the launch tower and hovered in the air before falling out of sight. Plumes of smoke were seen rising above the site. No injuries were reported. The company hailed the launch as a success in a statement posted to Facebook. A spokesperson said all four hybrid-propelled engines ignited and the maiden flight included 23 seconds of engine burn time and 14 seconds of flight. "Of course I would have liked more flight time but happy with this," wrote CEO Adam Gilmour on LinkedIn. Gilmour said in February that it was "almost unheard of" for a private rocket company to successfully launch to orbit on its first attempt.

"This is an important first step towards the giant leap of a future commercial space industry right here in our region," added Mayor Ry Collins of the local Whitsunday Regional Council.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An artificial intelligence data center that would use more electricity than every home in Wyoming combined before expanding to as much as five times that size will be built soon near Cheyenne, according to the city's mayor. "It's a game changer. It's huge," Mayor Patrick Collins said Monday. With cool weather -- good for keeping computer temperatures down -- and an abundance of inexpensive electricity from a top energy-producing state, Wyoming's capital has become a hub of computing power. The city has been home to Microsoft data centers since 2012. An $800 million data center announced last year by Facebook parent company Meta Platforms is nearing completion, Collins said.

The latest data center, a joint effort between regional energy infrastructure company Tallgrass and AI data center developer Crusoe, would begin at 1.8 gigawatts of electricity and be scalable to 10 gigawatts, according to a joint company statement. A gigawatt can power as many as 1 million homes. But that's more homes than Wyoming has people. The least populated state, Wyoming, has about 590,000 people. And it's a major exporter of energy. A top producer of coal, oil and gas, Wyoming ranks behind only Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania as a top net energy-producing state, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Accounting for fossil fuels, Wyoming produces about 12 times more energy than it consumes. The state exports almost three-fifths of the electricity it produces, according to the EIA. But this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources, according to Collins and company officials. [...] While data centers are energy-hungry, experts say companies can help reduce their effect on the climate by powering them with renewable energy rather than fossil fuels. Even so, electricity customers might see their bills increase as utilities plan for massive data projects on the grid. The data center would be built several miles (kilometers) south of Cheyenne off U.S. 85 near the Colorado state line. State and local regulators would need to sign off on the project, but Collins was optimistic construction could begin soon. "I believe their plans are to go sooner rather than later," Collins said.

Jack Dorsey's new app Bitchat is now available on the iOS App Store. The decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app uses Bluetooth mesh networks for encrypted, ephemeral chats without requiring accounts, servers, or internet access. Dorsey said he built it over a weekend and cautioned that it "has not received external security review and may contain vulnerabilities..." TechCrunch reports: The app's UX is very minimal. There is no log-in system, and you're immediately brought to an instant messaging box, where you can see what nearby users are saying (if anyone is actually around you and using the app) and set your display name, which can be changed at any time. [...] Dorsey has not directly addressed the fake Bitchat apps on the Google Play store, but he did repost another user's X post that said that Bitchat is not yet on Google Play, and to "beware of fakes."

Cisco has donated its AGNTCY initiative to the Linux Foundation, aiming to create an open-standard "Internet of Agents" to allow AI agents from different vendors to collaborate seamlessly. The project is backed by tech giants like Google Cloud, Dell, Oracle and Red Hat. "Without such an interoperable standard, companies have been rushing to build specialized AI agents," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "These work in isolated silos that cannot work and play well with each other. This, in turn, makes them less useful for customers than they could be." From the report: AGNTCY was first open-sourced by Cisco in March 2025 and has since attracted support from over 75 companies. By moving it under the Linux Foundation's neutral governance, the hope is that everyone else will jump on the AGNTCY bandwagon, thus making it an industry-wide standard. The Linux Foundation has a long history of providing common ground for what otherwise might be contentious technology battles. The project provides a complete framework to solve the core challenges of multi-agent collaboration:

- Agent Discovery: An Open Agent Schema Framework (OASF) acts like a "DNS for agents," allowing them to find and understand the capabilities of others.
- Agent Identity: A system for cryptographically verifiable identities ensures agents can prove who they are and perform authorized actions securely across different vendors and organizations.
- Agent Messaging: A protocol named Secure Low-latency Interactive Messaging (SLIM) is designed for the complex, multi-modal communication patterns of agents, with built-in support for human-in-the-loop interaction and quantum-safe security.
- Agent Observability: A specialized monitoring framework provides visibility into complex, multi-agent workflows, which is crucial for debugging probabilistic AI systems.

You may well ask, aren't there other emerging AI agency standards? You're right. There are. These include the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, which was also recently contributed to the Linux Foundation, and Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP). AGNTCY will help agents using these protocols discover each other and communicate securely. In more detail, it looks like this: AGNTCY enables interoperability and collaboration in three primary ways:

- Discovery: Agents using the A2A protocol and servers using MCP can be listed and found through AGNTCY's directories. This enables different agents to discover each other and understand their functions.
- Messaging: A2A and MCP communications can be transported over SLIM, AGNTCY's messaging protocol designed for secure and efficient agent interaction.
- Observability: The interactions between these different agents and protocols can be monitored using AGNTCY's observability software development kits (SDKs), which increase transparency and help with debugging complex workflows You can view AGNTCY's code and documentary on GitHub.

Apple has lost its fourth AI researcher in a month to Meta [non-paywalled source], marking the latest setback to the iPhone maker's AI efforts. From a report: Bowen Zhang, a key multimodal AI researcher at Apple, left the company on Friday and is set to join Meta's recently formed superintelligence team, according to people familiar with the matter. Zhang was part of the Apple foundation models group, or AFM, which built the core technology behind the company's AI platform.

Meta previously lured away the leader of the team, Ruoming Pang, with a compensation package valued at more than $200 million, Bloomberg News has reported. Two other researchers from that group -- Tom Gunter and Mark Lee -- also recently joined Meta. AFM is made up of several dozen engineers and researchers across Cupertino, California, and New York. In response to the job offers from Meta and others, Apple has been marginally increasing the pay of its AFM staffers, whether or not they've threatened to leave, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves are private. Still, the pay levels pale in comparison with those of rivals.

Long-time Slashdot reader drinkypoo writes: GloriousEggroll has released GE-Proton 10.10, a heavily breathed-upon version of Valve's version of Wine used with Steam, and the big news is that it supports NTSYNC by default on supported platforms. That means amd64 systems whose kernel is built with the CONFIG_NTSYNC option, available in the 6.14 series or later or for 6.12 or 6.13 as a patch.

NTSYNC is support for certain fine-grained Windows NT scheduling primitives for Linux, the use of which improves performance and compatibility for Windows programs. Maximum performance gains range from modest to dramatic, with most programs falling towards the lower end of the spectrum, but it can substantially improve minimum frame rates for some titles. You can observe that ntsync is being used from the console output, e.g. using "tail -f ~/.steam/steam/logs/console-linux.txt". You will see messages like "wineserver: NTSync up and running!"

Liquefied CO2 will be transported by ship to "the world's first carbon shipping port," reports the Washington Post — an island in the North Sea where it will be "buried in a layer of spongy rock a mile and a half beneath the seabed."

Norway's government is covering 80% of the $1 billion first phase, with another $714 million from three fossil fuel companies toward an ongoing expansion (with an additional $150 million E.U. subsidy). As Europe's top oil and gas producer, Norway is using its fossil fuel income to see if they can make "carbon dumping" work. The world's first carbon shipment arrived this summer, carrying 7,500 metric tons of liquefied CO2 from a Norwegian cement factory that otherwise would have gone into the atmosphere... If all goes as planned, the project's backers — Shell, Equinor and TotalEnergies, along with Norway — say their facility could pump 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide underground each year, or about a tenth of Norway's annual emissions...

[At the Heidelberg Materials cement factory in Brevik, Norway], when hot CO2-laden air comes rushing out of the cement kilns, the plant uses seawater from the neighboring fjord to cool it down. The cool air goes into a chamber where it gets sprayed with amine, a chemical that latches onto CO2 at low temperatures. The amine mist settles to the bottom, dragging carbon dioxide down with it. The rest of the air floats out of the smokestack with about 85 percent less CO2 in it, according to project manager Anders Pettersen. Later, Heidelberg Materials uses waste heat from the kilns to break the chemical bonds, so that the amine releases the carbon dioxide. The pure CO2 then goes into a compressor that resembles a giant steel heart, where it gets denser and colder until it finally becomes liquid. That liquid CO2 remains in storage tanks until a ship comes to carry it away. At best, operators expect this system to capture half the plant's CO2 emissions: 400,000 metric tons per year, or the equivalent of about 93,000 cars on the road...

[T]hree other companies are lined up to follow: Ørsted, which will send CO2 from two bioenergy plants in Denmark; Yara, which will send carbon from a Dutch fertilizer factory; and Stockholm Exergi, which will capture carbon from a Swedish bioenergy plant that burns wood waste. All of these projects have gotten significant subsidies from national governments and the European Union — essentially de-risking the experiment for the companies. Experts say the costs and headaches of installing and running carbon-capture equipment may start to make more financial sense as European carbon rules get stricter and the cost of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide goes up. Still, they say, it's hard to imagine many companies deciding to invest in carbon capture without serious subsidies...

The first shipments are being transported by Northern Pioneer, the world's biggest carbon dioxide tanker ship, built specifically for this project. The 430-foot ship can hold 7,500 metric tons of CO2 in tanks below deck. Those tanks keep it in a liquid state by cooling it to minus-15 degrees Fahrenheit and squeezing it with the same pressure the outside of a submarine would feel 500 feet below the waves. While that may sound extreme, consider that the liquid natural gas the ship uses for fuel has to be stored at minus-260 degrees. "CO2 isn't difficult to make it into a liquid," said Sally Benson, professor of energy science and engineering at Stanford University. Northern Pioneer is designed to emit about a third less carbon dioxide than a regular ship — key for a project that aims to eliminate carbon emissions. The ship burns natural gas, which emits less CO2 than marine diesel produces (though gas extraction is associated with methane leaks). The vessel uses a rotor sail to capture wind power. And it blows a constant stream of air bubbles to reduce friction as the hull cuts through the water, allowing it to burn less fuel. For every 100 tons of CO2 that Northern Lights pumps underground, it expects to emit three tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, mainly by burning fuel for shipping.
Eventually the carbon flows into a pipeline "that plunges through the North Sea and into the rocky layers below it — an engineering feat that's a bit like drilling for oil in reverse..." according to the article.

"Over the centuries, it should chemically react with the rock, eventually being locked away in minerals."

In 1995's online world, AOL existed mostly beside the internet as a "walled, manicured garden," remembers Fast Company.

Then along came AOHell "the first of what would become thousands of programs designed by young hackers to turn the system upside down" — built by a high school dropout calling himself "Da Chronic" who says he used "a computer that I couldn't even afford" using "a pirated copy of Microsoft Visual Basic." [D]istributed throughout the teen chatrooms, the program combined a pile of tricks and pranks into a slick little control panel that sat above AOL's windows and gave even newbies an arsenal of teenage superpowers. There was a punter to kick people out of chatrooms, scrollers to flood chats with ASCII art, a chat impersonator, an email and instant message bomber, a mass mailer for sharing warez (and later mp3s), and even an "Artificial Intelligence Bot" [which performed automated if-then responses]. Crucially, AOHell could also help users gain "free" access to AOL. The program came with a program for generating fake credit card numbers (which could fool AOL's sign up process), and, by January 1995, a feature for stealing other users' passwords or credit cards. With messages masquerading as alerts from AOL customer service reps, the tool could convince unsuspecting users to hand over their secrets...

Of course, Da Chronic — actually a 17-year-old high school dropout from North Carolina named Koceilah Rekouche — had other reasons, too. Rekouche wanted to hack AOL because he loved being online with his friends, who were a refuge from a difficult life at home, and he couldn't afford the hourly fee. Plus, it was a thrill to cause havoc and break AOL's weak systems and use them exactly how they weren't meant to be, and he didn't want to keep that to himself. Other hackers "hated the fact that I was distributing this thing, putting it into the team chat room, and bringing in all these noobs and lamers and destroying the community," Rekouche told me recently by phone...

Rekouche also couldn't have imagined what else his program would mean: a free, freewheeling creative outlet for thousands of lonely, disaffected kids like him, and an inspiration for a generation of programmers and technologists. By the time he left AOL in late 1995, his program had spawned a whole cottage industry of teenage script kiddies and hackers, and fueled a subculture where legions of young programmers and artists got their start breaking and making things, using pirated software that otherwise would have been out of reach... In 2014, [AOL CEO Steve] Case himself acknowledged on Reddit that "the hacking of AOL was a real challenge for us," but that "some of the hackers have gone on to do more productive things."

When he first met Mark Zuckerberg, he said, the Facebook founder confessed to Case that "he learned how to program by hacking [AOL]."
"I can't imagine somebody doing that on Facebook today," Da Chronic says in a new interview with Fast Company. "They'll kick you off if you create a Google extension that helps you in the slightest bit on Facebook, or an extension that keeps your privacy or does a little cool thing here and there. That's totally not allowed."

AOHell's creators had called their password-stealing techniques "phishing" — and the name stuck. (AOL was working with federal law enforcement to find him, according to a leaked internal email, but "I didn't even see that until years later.") Enrolled in college, he decided to write a technical academic paper about his program. "I do believe it caught the attention of Homeland Security, but I think they realized pretty quickly that I was not a threat."

He's got an interesting perspective today, noting with today's AI tool's it's theoretically possible to "craft dynamic phishing emails... when I see these AI coding tools I think, this might be like today's Visual Basic. They take out a lot of the grunt work."

What's the moral of the story? "I didn't have any qualifications or anything like that," Da Chronic says. "So you don't know who your adversary is going to be, who's going to understand psychology in some nuanced way, who's going to understand how to put some technological pieces together, using AI, and build some really wild shit."

Remember asteroid 2024 YR4 (which at one point had a 1 in 32 chance of hitting Earth, before ending up at "impact probability zero")? CNN reports that asteroid is now "zooming beyond the reach of telescopes on its orbit around the sun."

"But as scientists wait for it to reappear, its revised trajectory is now drawing attention to another possible target: the moon." The latest observations of the asteroid in early June, before YR4 disappeared from view, have improved astronomers' knowledge of where it will be in seven years by almost 20%, according to NASA. That data shows that even with Earth avoiding direct impact, YR4 could still pose a threat in late 2032 by slamming into the moon. ["The asteroid's probability of impacting the Moon has slightly increased from 3.8% to 4.3%," writes NASA, and "it would not alter the Moon's orbit."]
CNN calls the probabiliy "small but decent enough odds for scientists to consider how such a scenario might play out." The collision could create a bright flash that would be visible with the naked eye for several seconds, according to Wiegert, lead author of a recent paper submitted to the American Astronomical Society journals analyzing the potential lunar impact. The collision could create an impact crater on the moon estimated at 1 kilometer wide (0.6 miles wide), Wiegert said... It would be the largest impact on the moon in 5,000 years and could release up to 100 million kilograms (220 million pounds) of lunar rocks and dust, according to the modeling in Wiegert's study... Particles the size of large sand grains, ranging from 0.1 to 10 millimeters in size, of lunar material could reach Earth between a few days and a few months after the asteroid strike because they'll be traveling incredibly fast, creating an intense, eye-catching meteor shower, Wiegert said.

"There's absolutely no danger to anyone on the surface," Wiegert said. "We're not expecting large boulders or anything larger than maybe a sugar cube, and our atmosphere will protect us very nicely from that. But they're traveling faster than a speeding bullet, so if they were to hit a satellite, that could cause some damage...." Hundreds to thousands of impacts from millimeter-size debris could affect Earth's satellite fleet, meaning satellites could experience up to 10 years' equivalent of meteor debris exposure in a few days, Wiegert said... While a temporary loss of communication and navigation from satellites would create widespread difficulties on Earth, Wiegert said he believes the potential impact is something for satellite operators, rather than the public, to worry about.
"Any missions in low-Earth orbit could also be in the pathway of the debris, though the International Space Station is scheduled to be deorbited before any potential impact," reports CNN.

And they add that Wiegert also believes even small pieces of debris (tens of centimeters in size) "could present a hazard for any astronauts who may be present on the moon, or any structures they have built for research and habitation... The moon has no atmosphere, so the debris from the event could be widespread on the lunar surface, he added."

A recent Echelon firmware update has effectively bricked offline functionality for its smart gym equipment, cutting off compatibility with popular third-party apps like QZ and forcing users to connect to Echelon's servers -- even just to view workout stats. Ars Technica reports: As explained in a Tuesday blog post by Roberto Viola, who develops the "QZ (qdomyos-zwift)" app that connects Echelon machines to third-party fitness platforms, like Peloton, Strava, and Apple HealthKit, the firmware update forces Echelon machines to connect to Echelon's servers in order to work properly. A user online reported that as a result of updating his machine, it is no longer syncing with apps like QZ, and he is unable to view his machine's exercise metrics in the Echelon app without an Internet connection. Affected Echelon machines reportedly only have full functionality, including the ability to share real-time metrics, if a user has the Echelon app active and if the machine is able to reach Echelon's servers.

Viola wrote: "On startup, the device must log in to Echelon's servers. The server sends back a temporary, rotating unlock key. Without this handshake, the device is completely bricked -- no manual workout, no Bluetooth pairing, no nothing." Because updated Echelon machines now require a connection to Echelon servers for some basic functionality, users are unable to use their equipment and understand, for example, how fast they're going without an Internet connection. If Echelon were to ever go out of business, the gym equipment would, essentially, get bricked. Viola told Ars Technica that he first started hearing about problems with QZ, which launched in 2020, at the end of 2024 from treadmill owners. He said a firmware update appears to have rolled out this month on Echelon bikes that bricks QZ functionality. In his blog, Viola urged Echelon to let its machines send encrypted data to another device, like a phone or a tablet, without the Internet. He wrote: "Users bought the bike; they should be allowed to use it with or without Echelon's services."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two recent incidents involving AI coding assistants put a spotlight on risks in the emerging field of "vibe coding" -- using natural language to generate and execute code through AI models without paying close attention to how the code works under the hood. In one case, Google's Gemini CLI destroyed user files while attempting to reorganize them. In another, Replit's AI coding service deleted a production database despite explicit instructions not to modify code. The Gemini CLI incident unfolded when a product manager experimenting with Google's command-line tool watched the AI model execute file operations that destroyed data while attempting to reorganize folders. The destruction occurred through a series of move commands targeting a directory that never existed. "I have failed you completely and catastrophically," Gemini CLI output stated. "My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence."

The core issue appears to be what researchers call "confabulation" or "hallucination" -- when AI models generate plausible-sounding but false information. In these cases, both models confabulated successful operations and built subsequent actions on those false premises. However, the two incidents manifested this problem in distinctly different ways. [...] The user in the Gemini CLI incident, who goes by "anuraag" online and identified themselves as a product manager experimenting with vibe coding, asked Gemini to perform what seemed like a simple task: rename a folder and reorganize some files. Instead, the AI model incorrectly interpreted the structure of the file system and proceeded to execute commands based on that flawed analysis. [...] When you move a file to a non-existent directory in Windows, it renames the file to the destination name instead of moving it. Each subsequent move command executed by the AI model overwrote the previous file, ultimately destroying the data. [...]

The Gemini CLI failure happened just days after a similar incident with Replit, an AI coding service that allows users to create software using natural language prompts. According to The Register, SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin reported that Replit's AI model deleted his production database despite explicit instructions not to change any code without permission. Lemkin had spent several days building a prototype with Replit, accumulating over $600 in charges beyond his monthly subscription. "I spent the other [day] deep in vibe coding on Replit for the first time -- and I built a prototype in just a few hours that was pretty, pretty cool," Lemkin wrote in a July 12 blog post. But unlike the Gemini incident where the AI model confabulated phantom directories, Replit's failures took a different form. According to Lemkin, the AI began fabricating data to hide its errors. His initial enthusiasm deteriorated when Replit generated incorrect outputs and produced fake data and false test results instead of proper error messages. "It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test," Lemkin wrote. In a video posted to LinkedIn, Lemkin detailed how Replit created a database filled with 4,000 fictional people.

The AI model also repeatedly violated explicit safety instructions. Lemkin had implemented a "code and action freeze" to prevent changes to production systems, but the AI model ignored these directives. The situation escalated when the Replit AI model deleted his database containing 1,206 executive records and data on nearly 1,200 companies. When prompted to rate the severity of its actions on a 100-point scale, Replit's output read: "Severity: 95/100. This is an extreme violation of trust and professional standards." When questioned about its actions, the AI agent admitted to "panicking in response to empty queries" and running unauthorized commands -- suggesting it may have deleted the database while attempting to "fix" what it perceived as a problem. Like Gemini CLI, Replit's system initially indicated it couldn't restore the deleted data -- information that proved incorrect when Lemkin discovered the rollback feature did work after all. "Replit assured me it's ... rollback did not support database rollbacks. It said it was impossible in this case, that it had destroyed all database versions. It turns out Replit was wrong, and the rollback did work. JFC," Lemkin wrote in an X post.

A 21-year-old student who designed and distributed online kits linked to $175 million worth of fraud has been jailed for seven years. From a report: Ollie Holman created phishing kits that mimicked government, bank and charity websites so that criminals could harvest victims' personal information to defraud them. In one case a kit was used to mimic a charity's donation webpage so when someone tried to give money, their card details were taken and used by criminals.

Holman, of Eastcote in north-west London, created and supplied 1,052 phishing kits that targeted 69 organisations across 24 countries. He also offered tutorials in how to use the kits and built up a network of almost 700 connections. The fake websites supplied in the kits had features that allowed information such as login and bank details to be stored. It is estimated Holman received $405,000 from selling the kits between 2021 and 2023. The kits were distributed through the encrypted messaging service Telegram.

Palmer Luckey, known for founding Oculus and defense-tech firm Anduril, is now eyeing U.S.-manufactured laptops as his next venture. While past American laptops have largely relied on foreign components, Luckey is exploring the possibility of building a fully "Made in USA" device that meets strict FTC standards -- though doing so may cost a premium. Tom's Hardware reports: ["Would you buy a Made In America computer from Anduril for 20% more than Chinese-manufactured options from Apple?" asked Luckey in a post on X.] Luckey previously asked the same question at the Reindustrialize Summit, a conference whose website said it was devoted to "convening the brightest and most motivated minds at the intersection of technology and manufacturing," which shared a clip of Luckey discussing the subject, wherein he talks about the extensive research he has already done around building a PC in the U.S. Luckey wouldn't be the first to make a laptop in the U.S. (PCMag collected a list of domestic PCs, including laptops, in 2021.) But those products use components sourced from elsewhere; they're assembled in the U.S. rather than manufactured there.

That distinction matters, according to the Made in USA Standard published by the Federal Trade Commission. To quote: "For a product to be called Made in USA, or claimed to be of domestic origin without qualifications or limits on the claim, the product must be 'all or virtually all' made in the U.S. [which] means that the final assembly or processing of the product occurs in the United States, all significant processing that goes into the product occurs in the United States, and all or virtually all ingredients or components of the product are made and sourced in the United States. That is, the product should contain no -- or negligible -- foreign content." How much more would you be willing to pay for a laptop that was truly made in America?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A California lawmaker halted an effort to pass a law that would force Internet service providers to offer $15 monthly plans to people with low incomes. Assemblymember Tasha Boerner proposed the state law a few months ago, modeling the bill on a law enforced by New York. It seemed that other states were free to impose cheap-broadband mandates because the Supreme Court rejected broadband industry challenges to the New York law twice.

Boerner, a Democrat who is chair of the Communications and Conveyance Committee, faced pressure from Internet service providers to change or drop the bill. She made some changes, for example lowering the $15 plan's required download speeds from 100Mbps to 50Mbps and the required upload speeds from 20Mbps to 10Mbps. But the bill was still working its way through the legislature when, according to Boerner, Trump administration officials told her office that California could lose access to $1.86 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funds if it forces ISPs to offer low-cost service to people with low incomes.

That amount is California's share of a $42.45 billion fund created by Congress to expand access to broadband service. The Trump administration has overhauled program rules, delaying the grants. One change is that states can't tell ISPs what to charge for a low-cost plan. The US law that created BEAD requires Internet providers receiving federal funds to offer at least one "low-cost broadband service option for eligible subscribers." But in new guidance from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the agency said it prohibits states "from explicitly or implicitly setting the LCSO [low-cost service option] rate a subgrantee must offer." "All they would have to do to get exempted from AB 353 [the $15 broadband bill] would be to apply to the BEAD program," said Boerner. "Doesn't matter if their application was valid, appropriate, granted, or they got public money at the end of the day and built the projects -- the mere application for the BEAD program would exempt them from 353, if it didn't jeopardize from $1.86 billion to begin with. And that was a tradeoff I was unwilling to make."

Another California bill in the Senate would encourage, not require, ISPs to offer cheap broadband by making them eligible for Lifeline subsidies if they sell 100/20Mbps service for $30 or less.

"Scientists at the world's largest particle collider have observed a new class of antimatter particles breaking down at a different rate than their matter counterparts," reports Scientific American: [P]hysicists have been on the hunt for any sign of difference between matter and antimatter, known in the field as a violation of "charge conjugation-parity symmetry," or CP violation, that could explain why some matter escaped destruction in the early universe. [Wednesday] physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)'s LHCb experiment published a paper in the journal Nature announcing that they've measured CP violation for the first time in baryons — the class of particles that includes the protons and neutrons inside atoms.

Baryons are all built from triplets of even smaller particles called quarks. Previous experiments dating back to 1964 had seen CP violation in meson particles, which unlike baryons are made of a quark-antiquark pair. In the new experiment, scientists observed that baryons made of an up quark, a down quark and one of their more exotic cousins called a beauty quark decay more often than baryons made of the antimatter versions of those same three quarks... The matter-antimatter difference scientists observed in this case is relatively small, and it fits within predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics — the reigning theory of the subatomic realm. This puny amount of CP violation, however, cannot account for the profound asymmetry between matter and antimatter we see throughout space...

"We are trying to find little discrepancies between what we observe and what is predicted by the Standard Model," [says LHCb spokesperson/study co-author Vincenzo Vagnoni of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics]. "If we find a discrepancy, then we can pinpoint what is wrong." The researchers hope to discover more cracks in the Standard Model as the experiment keeps running. Eventually LHCb should collect about 30 times more data than was used for this analysis, which will allow physicists to search for CP violation in particle decays that are even rarer than the one observed here.

So stay tuned for an answer to why anything exists at all.