An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Samuel Herman and Alexander Baciu never liked using Comcast's cable broadband. Now, the residents of Saline, Michigan, operate a fiber Internet service provider that competes against Comcast in their neighborhoods and has ambitions to expand. "All throughout my life pretty much, I've had to deal with Xfinity's bullcrap, them not being able to handle the speeds that we need," Herman told Ars. "I lived in a house of 10. I have seven other brothers and sisters, and there's 10 of us in total with my parents." With all those kids using the Internet for school and other needs, "it just doesn't work out," he said. Herman was particularly frustrated with Comcast upload speeds, which are much slower than the cable service's download speeds. "Many times we would have to call Comcast and let them know our bandwidth was slowing down... then they would say, 'OK, we'll refresh the system.' So then it would work again for a week to two weeks, and then again we'd have the same issues," he said. Herman, now 25, got married in 2021 and started building his own house, and he tried to find another ISP to serve the property. He was familiar with local Internet service providers because he worked in construction for his father's company, which contracts with ISPs to build their networks. But no fiber ISP was looking to compete directly against Comcast where he lived, though Metronet and 123NET offer fiber elsewhere in the city, Herman said. He ended up paying Comcast $120 a month for gigabit download service with slower upload speeds. Baciu, who lives about a mile away from Herman, was also stuck with Comcast and was paying about the same amount for gigabit download speeds.

Herman said he was the chief operating officer of his father's construction company and that he shifted the business "from doing just directional drilling to be a turnkey contractor for ISPs." Baciu, Herman's brother-in-law (having married Herman's oldest sister), was the chief construction officer. Fueled by their knowledge of the business and their dislike of Comcast, they founded a fiber ISP called Prime-One. Now, Herman is paying $80 a month to his own company for symmetrical gigabit service. Prime-One also offers 500Mbps for $75, 2Gbps for $95, and 5Gbps for $110. The first 30 days are free, and all plans have unlimited data and no contracts. "We are 100 percent fiber optic," Baciu told Ars. "Everything that we're doing is all underground. We're not doing aerial because we really want to protect the infrastructure and make sure we're having a reliable connection." Each customer's Optical Network Terminal (ONT) and other equipment is included in the service plan. Prime-One provides a modem and the ONT, plus a Wi-Fi router if the customer prefers not to use their own router. They don't charge equipment or installation fees, Herman and Baciu said.

Prime-One began serving customers in January 2025, and Baciu said the network has been built to about 1,500 homes in Saline with about 75 miles of fiber installed. Prime-One intends to serve nearby towns as well, with the founders saying the plan is to serve 4,000 homes with the initial build and then expand further. [...] A bit more than 100 residents have bought service so far, they said. Herman said the company is looking to sign up about 30 percent of the homes in its network area to make a profit. "I feel fairly confident," Herman said, noting the number of customers who signed up with the initial construction not even halfway finished.

Air India's chief executive urged staff to avoid drawing premature conclusions about what caused one of the airline's Boeing triangle jets to crash last month, after a preliminary investigation ruled out mechanical or maintenance issues, turning attention to the pilots' actions. WSJ: Campbell Wilson told staff that the probe into the crash was "far from over," according to an internal memo, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, in which he set out some of the findings of a report issued by India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau at the end of last week.

Wilson's memo didn't mention one of the AAIB's findings: that the airplane's fuel-control switches had been turned off one by one, seconds after takeoff, starving both engines of fuel. The switches, which sit between the two seats in the cockpit, were turned back on about 10 seconds later, but the engines apparently couldn't fully restart and gain thrust fast enough, the report said.

The crash of the London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner killed all but one of the 242 passengers and crew on board, as well as 19 people on the ground, when the plane slammed into a residential area beyond the airport in the Indian city of Ahmedabad. In the memo, Wilson said "over the past 30 days, we've seen an ongoing cycle of theories, allegations, rumours and sensational headlines, many of which have later been disproven."

A scientific paper featuring an AI-generated image of a rat with an oversized penis was retracted three days after publication, highlighting broader problems plaguing academic publishing as researchers struggle with an explosion of scientific literature. The paper appeared in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology before widespread mockery forced its withdrawal.

Research studies indexed on Clarivate's Web of Science database increased 48% between 2015 and 2024, rising from 1.71 million to 2.53 million papers. Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan called the publishing system "broken and unsustainable," while University of Exeter researcher Mark Hanson described scientists as "increasingly overwhelmed" by the volume of articles. The Royal Society plans to release a major review of scientific publishing disruptions at summer's end, with former government chief scientist Mark Walport citing incentives that favor quantity over quality as a fundamental problem.

Google will merge ChromeOS and Android into a unified platform, according to Sameer Samat, President of Android Ecosystem at Google. "We're going to be combining ChromeOS and Android into a single platform, and I am very interested in how people are using their laptops these days and what they're getting done," Samat said during a recent interview.

"Steam quietly welcomed another indie game this week, but this one is distinctly different for a lot of reasons," writes Notebookcheck: Dogwalk, which debuted on July 11, is the kind of short, gentle experience that almost forces you to smile. Developed by Blender Studio, the game introduces players to a gorgeous winter landscape. You play as a cute, fluffy dog, with a small child in tow...

What's particularly interesting here is that Dogwalk is more than just another charming indie project. It's Blender Studio's showcase for what's possible using fully open-source tools. The entire project — assets, animations, and code — is made with Blender and the popular Godot Game Engine. Unlike industry giants such as Unity or Unreal, Godot is completely open source, meaning it doesn't require developers to pay royalties or follow strict licensing agreements. This should make it great for small studios and independent creators, as it lowers the entry barrier to game creation.

Dogwalk is 100% free, which fits neatly into its open-source philosophy

At an Amazon warehouse that employs 3,700 people, hundreds of workers recently lost their job, reports the New York Times.

"They are among thousands of foreign workers across the country who have been swept up in a quiet purge, pushed out of jobs in places where their labor was in high demand and at times won high praise." While raids to nab workers in the country without legal permission in fields and Home Depot parking lots have grabbed attention, the job dismissals at the Amazon warehouse are part of the Trump administration's effort to thin the ranks of immigrants who had legal authorization to work... Such dismissals are happening at many of Amazon's more than 1,000 facilities around the country, including in Massachusetts and the warehouse in Staten Island that fills orders for millions of New Yorkers. At one fulfillment center in Florida, hundreds were let go, a person familiar with the site said... "We're supporting employees impacted by the government's recent changes in immigration policy," Richard Rocha, an Amazon spokesperson, said in a statement. The company has pointed workers to various resources, including outside free or low-cost legal services...

The dismissals came with remarkable speed. On May 30, the Supreme Court granted temporary approval for the Trump administration to revoke a program known as "humanitarian parole," which had allowed more than 500,000 migrants feeling political turmoil in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to quickly get work permits if they had a fiscal sponsor... On June 12, the Department of Homeland Security said it had begun notifying enrollees that the program was ending, saying the immigrants had been poorly vetted and undercut American workers...

On June 22, Amazon told managers around the country in an email, which was obtained by The New York Times, that it had "received the first list from D.H.S. identifying impacted Amazon employees" from the parole program, as well as "some employees outside of this specific program whose work authorization is similarly affected." Amazon let the managers know that the next day, the affected workers would receive push notifications in the employee app about the change. Unless the workers could provide alternate work authorization documents in the next five days, they would be suspended without pay and ultimately dismissed.

An underwater turbine has been spinning for more than six years "to harness the power of ocean tides for electricity," reports the Associated Press. The long-running turbine (off the coast of Scotland) has now proven the commercial viability of the technology: Keeping a large, or grid-scale, turbine in place in the harsh sea environment that long is a record that helps pave the way for bigger tidal energy farms and makes it far more appealing to investors, according to the trade association Ocean Energy Europe. Tidal energy projects would be prohibitively expensive if the turbines had to be taken out of the water for maintenance every couple of years.

Tidal energy technologies are still in the early days of their commercial development, but their potential for generating clean energy is big. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, marine energy, a term researchers use to refer to power generated from tides, currents, waves or temperature changes, is the world's largest untapped renewable energy resource.
This long-running tidal energy project off the coast of Scotland has four 1.5-megawatt turbines — enough to power 7,000 homes for a year, according to the article. But they plan to add 20 turbines in 2030 ("after needed upgrades to the electricity grid are finished"), and the site "could eventually hold as many as 130 turbines that are more powerful than those at the site today."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the news.

"A Nintendo Switch 2 user reportedly got his brand-new console banned by Nintendo after buying used Switch 1 games and patching them on his console," reports Tom's Hardware: According to Reddit user dmanthey, they purchased four used titles off the Facebook marketplace, inserted them into the Switch 2, and had them all updated. When they turned on their handhelds the following day, they received a message saying that they were restricted from Nintendo's online services and that they couldn't even download the games they had already bought...

[T]hey were able to prove their innocence by pulling up the Facebook Marketplace listing for their games and sending the photos of their purchased cartridges. According to the Redditor, the process was painless and fast, and it was "so much easier than getting support from Microsoft or Sony...." Other users warned, though, that this isn't always a guaranteed resolution.

Nintendo is known for being protective of its intellectual property and delivers harsh penalties to anyone caught violating it. We've already had several reports of users getting banned for using Mig Flash, even on their own ROMs. And while it's not true that getting banned turns your Switch 2 into a brick, it will still prevent you from accessing the company's online services, which severely restricts its features and usability.
"Nintendo attaches unique codes to its Switch game cartridges to prevent piracy," notes Engadget. "However, bad actors can copy games onto a third-party device, like the MIG Flash, and then resell the physical game card. Once Nintendo detects two instances of its unique code being online at the same time, it will ban any accounts using it..." This anti-piracy policy isn't new — Nintendo has long had a reputation for fiercely combating any type of piracy — but it has become relevant again thanks to the recently released Switch 2, which offers backwards compatibility with original Switch titles. The company even recently amended its user agreement to allow itself the power to brick a Nintendo Switch that's caught running pirated games or mods.

Bitcoin "vaulted to a fresh all-time high Friday, breaking above $118,000," reports Yahoo Finance: Year to date, the token is up roughly 21%, buoyed in part by crypto-friendly policies from the Trump administration, including the establishment of a strategic bitcoin reserve and a broader digital asset stockpile... "At the heart of this rally lies sustained structural inflows from institutional players," wrote Dilin Wu, research strategist at Pepperstone. "Corporates are also ramping up participation," he added. The analyst noted companies like Strategy and GameStop have continued to add bitcoin to their balance sheets. Trump Media & Technology Group this week also filed for approval to launch a "Crypto Blue Chip ETF", which would include about 70% of its holdings in bitcoin.

The timing of bitcoin's breakout also comes days before Congress kicks off its highly anticipated "Crypto Week" on July 14. Lawmakers will debate a series of bills that could define the industry's regulatory framework... The GENIUS Act is among the regulations the House will consider. The bill, which recently passed through the Senate, proposes a federal framework for stablecoins.
"After jumping above $118,000 on Thursday, technical analyst Katie Stockton, founder and managing partner of research firm Fairlead Strategies, believes bitcoin is on track to reach $134,500, about 14% higher than current levels," writes Business Insider . It's not just bitcoin that's jumped this week. Other cryptos are surging as well. Ethereum has rallied over 16% in the past five days, and as DOGE rose 8% in the last day alone... Additionally, over $1 billion in short positions were liquidated in the last 24 hours as the price of bitcoin surged and traders were forced to close their positions, [said Thomas Perfumo, global economist at crypto Kraken].

An anonymous reader shares a report: This week has seen the shortest days of the year so far. According to data from the U.S. Naval Observatory and the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, Tuesday's rotation was about 1.34 milliseconds less than 24 hours. More quick spins are expected this week, later this month and in early August, according to predictions from the website Time and Date.

This isn't completely out of the ordinary: Our world's spins have been faster than usual lately. The average day has mostly shortened over the past decade, and within the past five years or so, the full rotation has clocked in at a hair less than 24 hours more often than not. Factors driving the change include movements at Earth's core, atmospheric changes and the moon's position.

But long-term trends do not suggest that the days will shorten in perpetuity. In fact, it is just the opposite. For many millenniums, the days have been growing longer. A Tyrannosaurus rex that lived 70 million years ago would have experienced an average daily rotation of about 23 1/2 hours, studies have found.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Straight Arrow News: Hollywood video game performers ended their nearly year-long strike Wednesday with new protections against the use of digital replicas of their voices or appearances. If those replicas are used, actors must be paid at rates comparable to in-person work. The SAG-AFTRA union demanded stronger pay and better working conditions. Among their top concerns was the potential for artificial intelligence to replace human actors without compensation or consent.

Under a deal announced in a media release, studios such as Activision and Electronic Arts are now required to obtain written consent from performers before creating digital replicas of their work. Actors have the right to suspend their consent for AI-generated material if another strike occurs. "This deal delivers historic wage increases, industry-leading AI protections and enhanced health and safety measures for performers," Audrey Cooling, a spokesperson for the video game producers, said in the release. The full list of studios includes Activision Productions, Blindlight, Disney Character Voices, Electronic Arts Productions, Formosa Interactive, Insomniac Games, Llama Productions, Take 2 Productions and WB Games.

SAG-AFTRA members approved the contract by a vote of 95.04% to 4.96%, according to the announcement. The agreement includes a wage increase of more than 15%, with additional 3% raises in November 2025, 2026 and 2027. The contract expires in October 2028. [...] The video game strike, which started in July 2024, did not shut down production like the SAG-AFTRA actors' strike in 2023. Hollywood actors went on strike for 118 days, from July 14 to November 9, 2023, halting nearly all scripted television and film work. That strike, which centered on streaming residuals and AI concerns, prevented actors from engaging in promotional work, such as attending premieres and posting on social media. In contrast, video game performers were allowed to work during their strike, but only with companies that had signed interim agreements addressing concerns related to AI. More than 160 companies signed on, according to The Associated Press. Still, the year took a toll.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: America's largest power grid is under strain as data centers and AI chatbots consume power faster than new plants can be built. Electricity bills are projected to surge by more than 20% this summer in some parts of PJM Interconnection's territory, which covers 13 states -- from Illinois to Tennessee, Virginia to New Jersey -- serving 67 million customers in a region with the most data centers in the world. The governor of Pennsylvania is threatening to abandon the grid, the CEO has announced his departure and the chair of PJM's board of managers and another board member were voted out.

The upheaval at PJM started a year ago with a more than 800% jump in prices at its annual capacity auction. Rising prices out of the auction trickle down to everyday people's power bills. Now PJM is barreling towards its next capacity auction on Wednesday, when prices may rise even further. The auction aims to avoid blackouts by establishing a rate at which generators agree to pump out electricity during the most extreme periods of stress on the grid, usually the hottest and coldest days of the year. High prices out of the auction should spur new power plant construction, but that hasn't happened quickly enough in PJM's region as aging power plants continue to retire and data center demand explodes. PJM has made the situation worse by delaying auctions and pausing the application process for new plants, according to more than a dozen power developers, regulators, energy attorneys and other experts interviewed by Reuters.

PJM says the supply and demand crunch has been caused largely by factors outside of its control, including state energy policies that closed fossil-fuel fired power plants prematurely and data center growth in "Data Center Alley" in Northern Virginia and other burgeoning hubs in the Mid-Atlantic. "Prices will remain high as long as demand growth is outstripping supply -- this is a basic economic policy," said PJM spokesman Jeffrey Shields. "Right now, we need every megawatt we can get." New projects totaling about 46 gigawatts -- enough capacity to power 40 million homes -- have been cleared in recent years, "but are not getting built because of local opposition, supply chain backups or financing issues that have nothing to do with PJM," Shields said.

PJM has lost more than 5.6 net gigawatts in the last decade as power plants shut faster than new ones enter service, according to a PJM presentation filed with regulators this year. PJM added about 5 gigawatts of power-generating capacity in 2024, fewer than smaller grids in California and Texas. Meanwhile, data center demand is surging. By 2030, PJM expects 32 gigawatts of increased demand on its system, with all but two of those gigawatts coming from data centers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) are one of the most serious contenders for dark matter -- the "missing" mass supposedly constituting 85% of our universe. Given its elusiveness, dark matter tests the patience and creativity of physicists. But the latest results from LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), the South Dakota-based detector, may have brought scientists a small step closer to catching WIMPs in action. In a recent Physical Review Letters paper, scientists analyzed 280 days' worth of data from LUX-ZEPLIN, reporting the tightest ever upper limit on the interaction strength of WIMPs. The result -- a near fivefold improvement -- demonstrates how physicists are increasingly getting better at circumventing the problem that dark matter is, well, dark; the elusive stuff evades any detection method that depends on materials interacting with visible light or other types of radiation.

The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, located one mile underground in a decommissioned South Dakota gold mine, employs nearly 15,000 pounds (7 tons) of liquid xenon. The chemical element's high atomic mass and density make it potentially easier for scientists to detect any unknown particles that may pass through the detector. Also, liquid xenon is transparent, preventing any unwanted noise -- usually arising from radioactive matter around the detector -- from spoiling an experiment. "These results firmly establish that LZ is the world's most sensitive search for dark matter heavier than 10 GeV, that's about 10 times heavier than a proton," explained Scott Haselschwart, a physicist at the University of Michigan and LZ physics coordinator, in an email to Gizmodo. "To put our result in perspective: we have ruled out dark matter that would interact only once in a single kilogram of xenon every four millennia!" "LZ is the most sensitive search for WIMP dark matter to date, but we still have another two years of data to collect," Haselschwart said. "This means that a discovery of dark matter in LZ could come anytime now. We are truly looking for dark matter where no one has ever looked before and that is extremely exciting!"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google announced on Tuesday that it's launching a new Gmail feature that is designed to help users easily manage their subscriptions and declutter their inboxes. The new "Manage subscriptions" tool is rolling out on the web, Android, and iOS in select countries. With the new feature, users can view and manage their subscription emails in one place and quickly unsubscribe from the ones they no longer want to receive.

Users can view their active subscriptions, organized by the most frequent senders, alongside the number of emails they've sent in the past few weeks. Clicking on a sender provides a direct view of all emails from them. If a user decides to unsubscribe, Gmail will send an unsubscribe request to the sender on their behalf. "It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of subscription emails clogging your inbox: Daily deal alerts that are basically spam, weekly newsletters from blogs you no longer read, promotional emails from retailers you haven't shopped in years can quickly pile up," Chris Doan, Gmail's Director of Product, wrote in a blog post.

Users can access the new feature by clicking the navigation bar in the top-left corner of their Gmail inbox and then selecting "Manage subscriptions." [...] Google says the new feature will begin rolling out on the web starting Tuesday, with Android and iOS users starting to receive it on July 14 and July 21, respectively. It may take up to 15 days from the start of the rollout for the feature to reach every user, the company says. The Manage subscriptions feature is available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual Subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts.

Corporate employees of Amazon have been asked to volunteer their time to the company's warehouses to assist with grocery delivery as it heads into its annual discount spree known as Prime Day. From a report: In a Slack message reviewed by the Guardian that went to thousands of white-collar workers in the New York City area from engineers to marketers, an Amazon area manager called for corporate "volunteers to help us out with Prime Day to deliver to customers on our biggest days yet." It is not clear how many took up the offer.

The ask came the day before Prime Day kicks off. The manager said volunteers are "needed" to work Tuesday through Friday this week, in two-hour shifts between 10am and 6pm in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, where the company operates a warehouse as part of its grocery delivery service, Amazon Fresh. Corporate employees seconded to the warehouse would be tasked with picking items, preparing carts and bags of groceries for delivery, packing boxes on receiving carts, and working to "boost morale with distribution of snacks," though they would be allowed to step into a conference room to take meetings and calls, according to the message. The manager noted such an effort would help "connect" warehouse and corporate teams. Further reading: Amazon Prime Day Spending Down 14% in Early Hours From 2024.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Epic Games, buoyed by the massive success of Fortnite, has spent the last few years throwing elbows in the mobile industry to get its app store on more phones. It scored an antitrust win against Google in late 2023, and the following year it went after Samsung for deploying "Auto Blocker" on its Android phones, which would make it harder for users to install the Epic Games Store. Now, the parties have settled the case just days before Samsung will unveil its latest phones.

The Epic Store drama began several years ago when the company defied Google and Apple rules about accepting outside payments in the mega-popular Fortnite. Both stores pulled the app, and Epic sued. Apple emerged victorious, with Fortnite only returning to the iPhone recently. Google, however, lost the case after Epic showed it worked behind the scenes to stymie the development of app stores like Epic's. Google is still working to avoid penalties in that long-running case, but Epic thought it smelled a conspiracy last year. It filed a similar lawsuit against Samsung, accusing it of implementing a feature to block third-party app stores. The issue comes down to the addition of a feature to Samsung phones called Auto Blocker, which is similar to Google's new Advanced Protection in Android 16. It protects against attacks over USB, disables link previews, and scans apps more often for malicious activity. Most importantly, it blocks app sideloading. Without sideloading, there's no way to install the Epic Games Store or any of the content inside it.

Auto Blocker is enabled by default on Samsung phones, but users can opt out during setup. Epic claimed in its suit that the sudden inclusion of this feature was a sign that Google was working with Samsung to stand in the way of alternative app stores again. Epic has apparently gotten what it wanted from Samsung -- CEO Tim Sweeney has announced that Epic is dropping the case in light of a new settlement. Sweeney said Samsung "will address Epic's concerns," without elaborating on the details. Samsung may stop making Auto Blocker the default or create a whitelist of apps, like the Epic Games Store, that can bypass Auto Blocker. Another possibility is that Epic and select third-party stores are granted special access while Auto Blocker remains on for others, balancing security and openness.

A "more interesting outcome," according to Ars, would be for Samsung to pre-install the Epic Games Store on its new phones.

An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI said it has no active plans to use Google's in-house chip to power its products, two days after Reuters and other news outlets reported on the AI lab's move to turn to its competitor's artificial intelligence chips to meet growing demand.

A spokesperson for OpenAI said on Sunday that while the AI lab is in early testing with some of Google's tensor processing units (TPUs), it has no plans to deploy them at scale right now.

"California residents who lit illegal fireworks over the July 4 holiday may be in for a nasty surprise in the mail thanks to covert fire department operations," reports SFGate.

"A number of California cities, including Sacramento, have begun using drones to locate people shooting off illegal fireworks." From Wednesday to Saturday night, the Sacramento Fire Department's special fireworks task force patrolled the streets with unmarked cars and drones, focusing on neighborhoods where they've had prior complaints. Task force officers and the drones took photos of the illegal activity, and within 30 days the property owner where the fireworks were used could receive a fine in the mail...

This year, Sacramento upped the fine to $1,000 for the first firework, $2,500 for the second and $5,000 per firework after that. If you lit a firework on city property, such as a park or a school, the fine goes up to $10,000 each. There's no limit to how many fines you can be issued... This year, a number of cities across the state announced they would be using drones to find scofflaws, among them Indio, Riverside, Hemet, Brea and towns in Tulare County...

Fox40 reported on Saturday that around 60 citations were being prepared in Sacramento, with more likely on the way as fire officials review surveillance footage.
Last year for illegal fireworks, one Sacramento-area resident received a $100,000 fine.

"Microsoft has released the source code for the GitHub Copilot Chat extension for VS Code under the MIT license," reports BleepingComputer. This provides the community access to the full implementation of the chat-based coding assistant, including the implementation of "agent mode," what contextual data is sent to large language models (LLMs), and the design of system prompts. The GitHub repository hosting the code also details telemetry collection mechanisms, addressing long-standing questions about data transparency in AI-assisted coding tools...

As the VS Code team explained previously, shifts in AI tooling landscape like the rapid growth of the open-source AI ecosystem and a more level playing field for all have reduced the need for secrecy around prompt engineering and UI design. At the same time, increased targeting of development tools by malicious actors has increased the need for crowdsourcing contributions to rapidly pinpoint problems and develop effective fixes. Essentially, openness is now considered superior from a security perspective.
"If you've been hesitant to adopt AI tools because you don't trust the black box behind them, this move opensources-github-copilot-chat-vscode/offers something rare these days: transparency," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli" Now that the extension is open source, developers can audit how agent mode actually works. You can also dig into how it manages your data, customize its behavior, or build entirely new tools on top of it. This could be especially useful in enterprise environments where compliance and control are non negotiable.

It is worth pointing out that the backend models powering Copilot remain closed source. So no, you won't be able to self host the whole experience or train your own Copilot. But everything running locally in VS Code is now fair game. Microsoft says it is planning to eventually merge inline code completions into the same open source package too, which would make Copilot Chat the new hub for both chat and suggestions.

We're living in a new world now — one where it's an AI-powered penetration tester that "now tops an eminent US security industry leaderboard that ranks red teamers based on reputation." CSO Online reports: On HackerOne, which connects organizations with ethical hackers to participate in their bug bounty programs, "Xbow" scored notably higher than 99 other hackers in identifying and reporting enterprise software vulnerabilities. It's a first in bug bounty history, according to the company that operates the eponymous bot...

Xbow is a fully autonomous AI-driven penetration tester (pentester) that requires no human input, but, its creators said, "operates much like a human pentester" that can scale rapidly and complete comprehensive penetration tests in just a few hours. According to its website, it passes 75% of web security benchmarks, accurately finding and exploiting vulnerabilities.

Xbow submitted nearly 1,060 vulnerabilities to HackerOne, including remote code execution, information disclosures, cache poisoning, SQL injection, XML external entities, path traversal, server-side request forgery (SSRF), cross-site scripting, and secret exposure. The company said it also identified a previously unknown vulnerability in Palo Alto's GlobalProtect VPN platform that impacted more than 2,000 hosts. Of the vulnerabilities Xbow submitted over the last 90 days, 54 were classified as critical, 242 as high and 524 as medium in severity. The company's bug bounty programs have resolved 130 vulnerabilities, and 303 are classified as triaged.

Notably, though, roughly 45% of the vulnerabilities it found are still awaiting resolution, highlighting the "volume and impact of the submissions across live targets," Nico Waisman, Xbow's head of security, wrote in a blog post this week... To further hone the technology, the company developed "validators," — automated peer reviewers that confirm each uncovered vulnerability, Waisman explained.
"As attackers adopt AI to automate and accelerate exploitation, defenders must meet them with even more capable systems," XBOW's CEO said this week, as the company raised $75 million in Series B funding to grow its platform, bringing its total funding to $117 million. Help Net Security reports: With the new funding, XBOW plans to grow its engineering team and expand its go-to-market efforts. The product is now generally available, and the company says it is working with large banks, tech firms, and other organizations that helped shape the platform during its early testing phase. XBOW's long-term goal is to help security teams stay ahead of adversaries using advanced automation. As attackers increasingly turn to AI, the company argues that defenders will need equally capable systems to match their speed and sophistication.