An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Beyond AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google is working on "Web Guide" to better organize Search results into categories with additional context and insights. Simply, "Web Guide groups web links in helpful ways." There are headers and summaries before you see two or so links, with the ability to load "More." The goal is to make it "easier to find information and web pages," with this AI organization better surfacing pages "that you may not have previously discovered."

It leverages a "custom version of Gemini to better understand both a search query and content on the web." It uses a query fan-out technique, like AI Mode, to perform "multiple related searches to identify the most relevant results." Google says Web Guide is ideal for both open-ended searches ("how to solo travel in Japan"), and detailed queries in multiple sentences: "My family is spread across multiple time zones. What are the best tools for staying connected and maintaining close relationships despite the distance?"

In the latter example, grouping will see "pages related to specific aspects of your query." This is available in Search Labs (Web Guide) by going to the "Web" tab/filter. As such, you can switch to "All" for the usual experience. However, Google will experiment with showing AI-organized results in the All tab and other parts of Search over time. Further reading: Google Users Are Less Likely To Click on Links When an AI Summary Appears in the Results, Pew Research Finds

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In addition to sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system and public health, the Romans also produced a lot of inscriptions. Making sense of the ancient texts can be a slog for scholars, but a new artificial intelligence tool from Google DeepMind aims to ease the process. Named Aeneas after the mythical Trojan hero, the program predicts where and when inscriptions were made and makes suggestions where words are missing. Historians who put the program through its paces said it transformed their work by helping them identify similar inscriptions to those they were studying, a crucial step for setting the texts in context, and proposing words to fill the inevitable gaps in worn and damaged artefacts. [...]

The Google team led by Yannis Assael worked with historians to create an AI tool that would aid the research process. The program is trained on an enormous database of nearly 200,000 known inscriptions, amounting to 16m characters. Aeneas takes text, and in some cases images, from the inscription being studied and draws on its training to build a list of related inscriptions from 7th century BC to 8th century BC. Rather than merely searching for similar words, the AI identifies and links inscriptions through deeper historical connections. Having trained on the rich collection of inscriptions, the AI can assign study texts to one of 62 Roman provinces and estimate when it was written to within 13 years. It also provides potential words to fill in any gaps, though this has only been tested on known inscriptions where text is blocked out.

In a test run, researchers set Aeneas loose on a vast inscription carved into monuments around the Roman empire. The self-congratulatory Res Gestae Divi Augusti describes the life achievements of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. Aeneas came up with two potential dates for the work, either the first decade BC or between 10 and 20AD. The hedging echoes the debate among scholars who argue over the same dates. In another test, Aeneas analysed inscriptions on a votive altar from Mogontiacum, now Mainz in Germany, and revealed through subtle linguistic similarities how it had been influenced by an older votive altar in the region. "Those were jaw-dropping moments for us," said [Dr Thea Sommerschield, a historian at the University of Nottingham who developed Aeneas with the tech firm]. Details are published in Nature and Aeneas is available to researchers online.

Microsoft has recruited more than 20 AI employees from Google's DeepMind research division, the newest front in a talent war being waged by Silicon Valley's tech giants as they jostle to gain an edge in the nascent technology. From a report: Amar Subramanya, the former head of engineering for Google's Gemini chatbot, is the latest to move to Microsoft from its rival, according to a post on his LinkedIn profile on Tuesday. "The culture here is refreshingly low ego yet bursting with ambition," he wrote, confirming his appointment as corporate vice-president of AI.

Subramanya will join other DeepMind staff including engineering lead Sonal Gupta, software engineer Adam Sadovsky and product manager Tim Frank, according to people familiar with Microsoft's recruiting. The Seattle-based company has persuaded at least 24 staff to join in the past six months, they added.

Google users click on fewer website links when the search engine displays AI-generated summaries at the top of results pages, according to new research from the Pew Research Center. The study analyzed browsing data from 900 U.S. adults and found users clicked on traditional search result links during 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared to 15% of visits without summaries.

Users also rarely clicked on sources cited within the AI summaries themselves, doing so in just 1% of visits. The research found that 58% of respondents conducted at least one Google search in March 2025 that produced an AI summary, and users were more likely to end their browsing session entirely after encountering pages with AI summaries compared to traditional search results.

Google has announced OSS Rebuild, a new project designed to detect supply chain attacks in open source software by independently reproducing and verifying package builds across major repositories. The initiative, unveiled by the company's Open Source Security Team, targets PyPI (Python), npm (JavaScript/TypeScript), and Crates.io (Rust) packages.

The system, the company said, automatically creates standardized build environments to rebuild packages and compare them against published versions. OSS Rebuild generates SLSA Provenance attestations for thousands of packages, meeting SLSA Build Level 3 requirements without requiring publisher intervention. The project can identify three classes of compromise: unsubmitted source code not present in public repositories, build environment tampering, and sophisticated backdoors that exhibit unusual execution patterns during builds.

Google cited recent real-world attacks including solana/webjs (2024), tj-actions/changed-files (2025), and xz-utils (2024) as examples of threats the system addresses. Open source components now account for 77% of modern applications with an estimated value exceeding $12 trillion. The project builds on Google's hosted infrastructure model previously used for OSS Fuzz memory issue detection.

ChatGPT now handles 2.5 billion prompts daily, with 330 million from U.S. users. This surge marks a doubling in usage since December when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that users send over 1 billion queries to ChatGPT each day. TechCrunch reports: These numbers show just how ubiquitous OpenAI's flagship product is becoming. Google's parent company, Alphabet, does not release daily search data, but recently revealed that Google receives 5 trillion queries per year, which averages to just under 14 billion daily searches. Independent researchers have found similar trends. Neil Patel of NP Digital estimates that Google receives 13.7 billion searches daily, while research from SparkToro and Datos -- two digital marketing companies -- estimates that the figure is around 16.4 billion per day.

An anonymous reader shares a blog post: The International Mathematical Olympiad is the world's most prestigious competition for young mathematicians, and has been held annually since 1959. Each country taking part is represented by six elite, pre-university mathematicians who compete to solve six exceptionally difficult problems in algebra, combinatorics, geometry, and number theory. Medals are awarded to the top half of contestants, with approximately 8% receiving a prestigious gold medal.

Recently, the IMO has also become an aspirational challenge for AI systems as a test of their advanced mathematical problem-solving and reasoning capabilities. Last year, Google DeepMind's combined AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 systems achieved the silver-medal standard, solving four out of the six problems and scoring 28 points. Making use of specialist formal languages, this breakthrough demonstrated that AI was beginning to approach elite human mathematical reasoning.

This year, we were amongst an inaugural cohort to have our model results officially graded and certified by IMO coordinators using the same criteria as for student solutions. Recognizing the significant accomplishments of this year's student-participants, we're now excited to share the news of Gemini's breakthrough performance. An advanced version of Gemini Deep Think solved five out of the six IMO problems perfectly, earning 35 total points, and achieving gold-medal level performance.

Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, has a simple suggestion for young workers struggling to focus at work or relax: turn off your phone. Schmidt told the "Moonshots" podcast that researchers "can't think deeply" when their phones keep buzzing with notifications.

The tech veteran, who spent 10 years running Google and helped build Android's notification system, admitted the industry has worked to "monetize your attention" through constant ads and alerts.

Long-time Slashdot reader wattersa is a lawyer in Redwood City, California, and a Slashdot reader since 1998. In 2022 he shared the remarkable story of a three-year missing person investigation that was ultimately solved with a subpoena to Google. A murder victim appeared to have sent an email at a time which would exonerate the chief suspect. But a closer inspection of that email's IP addresses revealed it was actually sent from a hotel where the suspect was staying. ("Although Google does not include the originating IP address in the email headers, it turns out that they retain the IP address for some unknown length of time...")

Today wattersa brings this update: The case finally went to trial in July 2025, where I testified about the investigation along with an expert witness on computer networking. The jury took three hours to return a verdict against the victim's husband for wrongful death in the amount of $23.2 million, with a special finding that he caused the death of his wife.

The defendant is a successful mechanical engineer at an energy company, but is walking as a free man because he is Canadian and no one can prosecute him in the U.S., since Taiwan and the U.S. don't have extradition with each other.

It was an interesting case and I look forward to using it as a model in other missing person cases.

The Independent notes a remarkable-if-true figure that's being bandied around this week.

Meta "started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told his brother Jack on his podcast. "You know, like, $100 million signing bonuses, more than that [in] compensation per year... I'm really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that."

Previous reports have also suggested that Meta is targeting employees at Google DeepMind, offering similar levels of compensation. Some of these efforts appear to have been successful, with DeepMind researcher Jack Rae joining Meta's 'Superintelligence' team earlier this month...

During the podcast, which was published on Tuesday, Mr Altman also gave details about future AI products that OpenAI is hoping to build, claiming that they will enable "crazy new social experiences" and "virtual employees". The most important breakthrough over the next decade, he said, would involve radical new discoveries powered by AI. "The thing that I think will be the most impactful in that five-to-10 year timeframe is AI will actually discover new science," he said.
The Washington Post notes that Zuckerberg "responded to recent reports of his compensation offers in an interview posted by the Information on YouTube on Tuesday, saying that 'a lot of the numbers specifically have been inaccurate" but acknowledging there is "an absolute premium for the best and most talented people." Zuckerberg's recent hires and other comments this week suggest he's not taking any chances of being left behind. He announced plans for a giant data center campus large enough to obscure Manhattan to power future AI projects by his superintelligence team.

Felix Baumgartner has died. He was 56.

In 2012 Slashdot extensively covered the skydiver's "leap from the edge of space." ABC News remembers it as a Red Bull-financed stunt that involved "diving 24 miles from the edge of space, in a plummet that reached a speed of more than 500 mph." Baumgartner recalled the legendary jump in the documentary, "Space Jump," and said, "I was the first human being outside of an aircraft breaking the speed of sound and the history books. Nobody remembers the second one...."

Baumgartner, also known as "Fearless Felix," accomplished many records in his career, including setting the world record for highest parachute jump atop the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, flying across the English Channel in a wingsuit in 2003, and base jumping from the 85-foot arm of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil in 2007.
"Baumgartner's altitude record stood for two years," remembers the Los Angeles Times, "until Google executive Alan Eustace set new marks for the highest free-fall jump and greatest free-fall distance."

They report that Baumgartner died Thursday "while engaged in a far less intense activity, crashing into the side of a hotel swimming pool while paragliding in Porto Sant Elpidio, a town on central Italy's eastern coast." More details from the Associated Press: "It is a destiny that is very hard to comprehend for a man who has broke all kinds of records, who has been an icon of flight, and who traveled through space," Mayor Massimiliano Ciarpella told The Associated Press.Ciarpella said that Baumgartner had been in the area on vacation, and that investigators believed he may have fallen ill during the fatal flight... Baumgartner, a former Austrian military parachutist, made thousands of jumps from planes, bridges, skyscrapers and famed landmarks...
ABC News remembers that in 2022 Baumgartner wrote in Newsweek that "Since I was a little kid, I've always looked up to people who left a footprint on this planet... now I think I have left a footprint...

"I believe big dreamers always win."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Live Science: In a world first, scientists have demonstrated an enigmatic phenomenon in quantum computing that could pave the way for fault-tolerant machines that are far more powerful than any supercomputer. The process, called "magic state distillation," was first proposed 20 years ago, but its use in logical qubits has eluded scientists ever since. It has long been considered crucial for producing the high-quality resources, known as "magic states," needed to fulfill the full potential of quantum computers. [...] Now, however, scientists with QuEra say they have demonstrated magic state distillation in practice for the first time on logical qubits. They outlined their findings in a new study published July 14 in the journal Nature.

In the study, using the Gemini neutral-atom quantum computer, the scientists distilled five imperfect magic states into a single, cleaner magic state. They performed this separately on a Distance-3 and a Distance-5 logical qubit, demonstrating that it scales with the quality of the logical qubit. "A greater distance means better logical qubits. A Distance-2, for instance, means that you can detect an error but not correct it. Distance-3 means that you can detect and correct a single error. Distance-5 would mean that you can detect and correct up to two errors, and so on, and so on," [explained Yuval Boger, chief commercial officer at QuEra who was not personally involved in the research]. "So the greater the distance, the higher fidelity of the qubit is -- and we liken it to distilling crude oil into a jet fuel."

As a result of the distillation process, the fidelity of the final magic state exceeded that of any input. This proved that fault-tolerant magic state distillation worked in practice, the scientists said. This means that a quantum computer that uses both logical qubits and high-quality magic states to run non-Clifford gates is now possible. "We're seeing sort of a shift from a few years ago," Boger said. "The challenge was: can quantum computers be built at all? Then it was: can errors be detected and corrected? Us and Google and others have shown that, yes, that can be done. Now it's about: can we make these computers truly useful? And to make one computer truly useful, other than making them larger, you want them to be able to run programs that cannot be simulated on classical computers."

Google has filed a lawsuit to dismantle the sprawling Badbox 2.0 botnet, which infected over 10 million Android devices with pre-installed malware. Badbox 2.0 "is already the largest known botnet of internet-connected TV devices, and it grows each day. It has harmed millions of victims in the United States and around the world and threatens many more," Google said in its complaint. SecurityWeek reports: The internet giant cautions that, while it has been used mainly for fraud, the botnet could be used for more harmful types of cybercrime, such as ransomware or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In addition to pre-installing the malware on devices, Badbox 2.0's operators also tricked users into installing infected applications that provided them with further access to their personal devices, Google says. As part of their operation, the individuals behind Badbox 2.0 sold access to the infected devices to be used as residential proxies, and conducted ad fraud schemes by abusing these devices to create fake ad views or to exploit pay-per-click compensation models, the company continues. The internet giant also points out that this is the second global botnet the perpetrators have built, after the initial Badbox botnet was disrupted by German law enforcement in 2023.

According to Google, Badbox 2.0 is operated by multiple cybercrime groups from China, each having a different role in maintaining the botnet, such as establishing infrastructure, developing and pre-installing the malware on devices, and conducting fraud. "The BadBox 2.0 Enterprise includes several connected threat actor groups that design and implement complex criminal schemes targeting internet-connected devices both before and after the consumer receives the device," Google says. "While each member of the Enterprise plays a distinct role, they all collaborate to execute the BadBox 2.0 Scheme. All of the threat actor groups are connected to one another through the BadBox 2.0 shared C2 infrastructure and historical and current business ties," the company continues.

The computer science major needs a rebrand, Google's head of Android Sameer Samat said, arguing that the discipline is widely misunderstood as simply learning to code. "It is thought of as, 'go learn how to do Java coding,'" Samat said of the major, adding that if that's what students want to do, "you don't need a degree."

Samat, who studied computer science at UC San Diego, views the field differently: "It's definitely not learning to code. It is the science, in my opinion, of solving problems." The major should focus on breaking down problems, learning system design, and collaboration rather than just coding skills, Samat said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: How many Google AI researchers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A recent research paper detailing the technical core behind Google's Gemini AI assistant may suggest an answer, listing an eye-popping 3,295 authors. It's a number that recently caught the attention of machine learning researcher David Ha (known as "hardmaru" online), who revealed on X that the first 43 names also contain a hidden message. "There's a secret code if you observe the authors' first initials in the order of authorship," Ha wrote, relaying the Easter egg: "GEMINI MODELS CAN THINK AND GET BACK TO YOU IN A FLASH."

The paper, titled "Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities," describes Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash AI models, which were released in March. These large language models, which power Google's chatbot AI assistant, feature simulated reasoning capabilities that produce a string of "thinking out loud" text before generating responses in an attempt to help them solve more difficult problems. That explains "think" and "flash" in the hidden text. But clever Easter egg aside, the sheer scale of authorship tells its own story about modern AI development. Just seeing the massive list made us wonder: Is 3,295 authors unprecedented? Why so many? Ars' Benj Edwards notes that this collaborative effort within Google doesn't quite break the record for academic authorship.

"According to Guinness World Records, a 2021 paper by the COVIDSurg and GlobalSurg Collaboratives holds that distinction, with 15,025 authors from 116 countries. In physics, a 2015 paper from CERN's Large Hadron Collider teams featured 5,154 authors across 33 pages -- with 24 pages devoted solely to listing names and institutions."

Ukrainian hacker group BO Team, with help from the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance and possibly Ukraine's military, claims to have wiped out one of Russia's largest military drone manufacturers, destroying 47TB of production data and even disabling the doors in the facility. "Or, as described by the hacking collective (per Google translate), they 'deeply penetrated' the drone manufacturer 'to the very tonsils of demilitarization and denazification,'" reports The Register. From the report: BO Team (also known as Black Owl) announced the breach on its Telegram channel, and claimed to have carried out the operation alongside fellow hackers the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance "and one very well-known organization, the mention of which makes Vanya's bottle receivers explode," according to a Google translation of the Russian text. While the "very well-known organization" isn't named, BO Team included a link to Ukraine's Ministry of Defence.

The military intelligence agency, working alongside the attackers, "carried out large-scale work to capture the entire network and server infrastructure of Gaskar Group, collect valuable information about the UAVs being produced and prospective, and then destroy the information and disable this infrastructure," the Telegram post continued. This reportedly included 47TB of technical information about the production of Russian drones, and BO Team claims to have destroyed all of the information on Gaskar's servers, including 10TB of backup files. "By the way, from the information we received, China is providing assistance in the production and training of specialists of Gaskar Group," the hackers added via Telegram. BO Team also posted what they claim to be confidential employee questionnaires [PDF].

On their own Telegram channel, the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance said they also stole "all the source code" before destroying everything. "The network went down so thoroughly that the doors in the building were blocked," the pro-Ukraine crew wrote, per Google translate. "To open them, the administration had to turn on the fire alarm. Most likely, the defense order is on the verge of failure, and thousands of drones will not get to the front in the near future."

Dictionary.com abruptly deleted all user accounts and saved word lists from its premium apps without notice or refunds, leaving long-time logophiles "devastated." "The company deleted all accounts, as well as the only ways to use Dictionary.com without seeing ads -- even if you previously paid for an ad-free experience," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Dictionary.com offers a free dictionary through its website and free Android and iOS apps. It used to offer paid-for mobile apps, called Dictionary.com Pro, that let users set up accounts, use the app without ads, and enabled other features (like grammar tips and science and rhyming dictionaries) that are gone now. Dictionary.com's premium apps also let people download an offline dictionary (its free apps used to let you buy a downloadable dictionary as a one-time purchase), but offline the dictionaries aren't available anymore.

About a year ago, claims of Dictionary.com's apps being buggy surfaced online. We also found at least one person claiming that they were unable to buy an ad-free upgrade at that time. Reports of Dictionary.com accounts being deleted and the apps not working as expected, and with much of its content removed, started appearing online about two months ago. Users reported being unable to log in and access premium features, like saved words. Soon after, Dictionary.com's premium apps were removed from Google Play and Apple's App Store. The premium version was available for download for $6 as recently as March 23, per the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: Threat actors are stealing sensitive data from organizations by breaching end-of-life appliances made by cybersecurity company SonicWall. Incident responders from Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant said on Wednesday that they have uncovered an ongoing campaign by an unidentified threat group that leverages credentials and one-time password (OTP) seeds stolen during previous intrusions -- allowing the hackers to regain access to organizations even after security updates are installed. [...]

The campaign is targeting fully patched end-of-life SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 100 series appliances. Google explained that the malware the hackers are using removes log entries, making it difficult to figure out how they initially gained access to a system. Google said the campaign extends beyond the incidents they investigated directly and added that SonicWall has "confirmed reports of other impacted organizations." The company noted that SonicWall updated an advisory for a bug tracked as CVE-2024-38475 in light of Google's findings. "As an added security measure, we strongly advise customers to reset the OTP (One-Time Password) binding for all users. This step ensures that any potentially compromised or stale OTP secrets are invalidated, thereby mitigating unauthorized access risks," SonicWall said in the update to the advisory..

One novel aspect of the campaign is the use of a backdoor called OVERSTEP, which modifies the SonicWall appliance's boot process to maintain persistent access, steal sensitive credentials and conceal the malware's own components. Incident responders struggled to track other activities by the hackers because OVERSTEP allowed them to delete logs and largely cover their tracks. OVERSTEP is specifically designed for SonicWall SMA 100 series appliances, according to Google. In addition to CVE-2024-38475, Google and Mandiant experts floated several potential vulnerabilities the hackers may have used to gain initial access, including CVE-2021-20038, CVE-2024-38475, CVE-2021-20035, CVE-2021-20039 and, CVE-2025-32819. Beyond those, Google theorized that the hackers may have used an unknown zero-day vulnerability to deploy the malware on targeted SonicWall SMA appliances.

The Verge's Emma Roth reports: The News/Media Alliance, a trade association behind major news publishers, announced that it has "successfully secured" the removal of 12ft.io, a website that helped users bypass paywalls online. The trade association says 12ft.io's webhost took down the site on July 14th "following the News/Media Alliance's efforts." 12ft.io -- or 12 Foot Ladder -- also allowed users to view webpages without ads, trackers, or pop-ups by disguising a user's browser as a web crawler, giving them unfettered access to a webpage's contents. Software engineer Thomas Millar says he created the site when he realized "8 of the top 10 links on Google were paywalled" when doing research during the pandemic. [...]

In its announcement, News/Media Alliance says 12ft.io "offered illegal circumvention technology" that allowed users to access copyrighted content without paying for it. The organization adds that it will take "similar actions" against other sites that let users get around paywalls. The News Media Alliance recently called Google's AI Mode "theft." (Like many chatbots, Google's AI Mode eliminates the need to visit a website, starving publishers of the pageviews they need to be compensated for their work.) "Publishers commit significant resources to creating the best and most informative content for consumers, and illegal tools like 12ft.io undermine their ability to financially support that work through subscriptions and ad revenue," News/Media Alliance president and CEO Danielle Coffey said in the press release. "Taking down paywall bypassers is an essential part of ensuring we have a healthy and sustainable information ecosystem."

Longtime Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: Heise, a German IT news publisher, reports (English version via Google Translate) that the German state of Brandenburg is getting the world's tallest wind turbine, with an overall height of 300 meters (approximately 365 meters including rotor blades), designed to capture so-called third-level winds at higher altitudes. The article also includes a short 3D animation illustrating the construction and its size relative to standard modern wind turbines. The wind turbine uses a dual-framework base instead of a traditional closed tower to access stronger high-altitude winds, aiming to match offshore energy output while keeping onshore operating costs.

According to Heise, the prototype could lead to the installation of up to 1,000 units across Germany -- fitting seamlessly between existing wind farms without needing extra land.