New submitter haroldbasset writes: Canada's Immigration Department rejected an applicant because the duties of her current job did not match the Canadian work experience she had claimed, but the Department's AI assistant had invented that work experience. She has been working in Canada as a health scientist -- she has a Ph.D. in the immunology of aging -- but the AI genius instead described her as "wiring and assembling control circuits, building control and robot panels, programming and troubleshooting." "It's believed to be the first time that the department explicitly referred to the use of generative AI to support application processing in immigration refusals," reports the Toronto Star. "The disclaimer also noted that all generated content was verified by an officer and that generative AI was not used to make or recommend a decision."

The applicant's lawyer was shocked "how any human being could make this decision." "Somehow, it hallucinated my client's job description," he said. "I would love to see what the officer saw. Something seriously went wrong here."

The applicant's refusal came just as Canada's Immigration Department released its first AI strategy, which frames artificial intelligence as a way to improve efficiency, service delivery, and program integrity. The department says it has long used digital tools like analytics and automation to flag fraud risks and triage applications, and is now also experimenting with generative AI for tasks such as research, summarizing, and analysis. In this case, however, the department insisted the decision was made by a human officer and that generative AI was not involved in the final decision.

Meta lost a child safety trial in New Mexico after a court found that its platforms failed to adequately protect children from exploitation and misled parents about app safety. According to Ars Technica, the jury on Tuesday "deliberated for only one day before agreeing that Meta should pay $375 million in civil damages..." While the jury declined to impose the maximum penalty New Mexico sought, which could have cost the company $2.2 billion, Meta may still face additional financial penalties and could be forced to make changes to its apps. From the report: The trial followed a 2023 lawsuit filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez after The Guardian published a two-year investigation exposing child sex trafficking markets on Facebook and Instagram. Torrez's office then conducted an undercover investigation codenamed "Operation MetaPhile," in which officers posed as children on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The jury heard that these fake profiles were "simply inundated with images and targeted solicitations" from child abusers, Torrez told CNBC in 2024. Ultimately, three men were arrested amid the sting for attempting to use Meta's social networks to prey on children. At trial, Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri testified that "harms to children, such as sexual exploitation and detriments to mental health, were inevitable on the company's platforms due to their vast user bases," The Guardian reported. Internal messages and documents, as well as testimony from child safety experts within and outside the company, showed that Meta repeatedly ignored warnings and failed to fix platforms to protect kids, New Mexico's AG successfully argued.

Perhaps most troubling to the jury, law enforcement and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children also testified that Meta's reporting of crimes to children on its apps -- including child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) -- was "deficient," The Guardian reported. Rather than make it easy to trace harms on its platforms, the jury learned from frustrated cops that Meta "generated high volumes of 'junk' reports by overly relying on AI to moderate its platforms." This made its reporting "useless" and "meant crimes could not be investigated," The Guardian reported.

Celebrating the win as a "historic victory," Torrez told CNBC that families had previously paid the price for "Meta's choice to put profits over kids' safety." "Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew," Torrez said. "Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough." Meta said the company plans to appeal the verdict. "We respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal," Meta's spokesperson said. "We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and are clear about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors or harmful content. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vanity Fair: Focus Features is releasing The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist in theaters on March 27. If you're even slightly interested in what's going on with AI, it's required viewing: The film touches on all aspects of the technology, from how it's currently being used to how it will be used in the near future, when we potentially reach the age of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. AGI is a theoretical form of AI that supposedly would be able to perform complex tasks without each step being prompted by a human user -- the point at which machines become autonomous, like Skynet in the Terminator franchise. [...]

[Director Daniel Roher] interviews nearly all the major players in the AI space: Sam Altman of OpenAI; the Amodei siblings of Anthropic; Demis Hassabis of DeepMind (Google's AI arm); theorists and reporters covering the subject. Notably absent are Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. "Have you seen that guy speak? He's like a lizard man," Roher says regarding Zuckerberg. "Musk said yes initially, but it was right when he was doing all the stuff with Trump, and we just got ghosted after a while," adds [codirector Charlie Tyrell]. Altman, arguably AI's greatest mascot, is prominently featured in the documentary. But Roher wasn't buying it. "That guy doesn't know what genuine means," he says. "Every single thing he says and does is calculated. He is a machine. He's like AI, and it's in the service of growth, growth, growth. You can be disingenuous and media savvy." [...]

How, exactly, is Roher an apocaloptimist? "We are preaching a worldview," he says, "in a world that's asking you to either see this as the apocalypse or embrace it with this unbridled optimism." He and his film are taking a stance that rests between those two poles. "It's both at the same time. We have to try and embrace a middle ground so this technology doesn't consume us, so we can stay in the driver's seat," says Roher -- meaning, it's up to all of us to chart the course. "You have to speak up," says Tyrell. "Things like AI should disclose themselves. If your doctor's office is using an AI bot, you have to say, I don't like that." The driving message behind the film is that resistance starts with the people. That position is shared by The AI Doc producer Daniel Kwan, who won an Oscar for directing Everything Everywhere All at Once and has been at the forefront of discussions about AI in the entertainment industry. [...]

Roher and Tyrell both use AI in their everyday lives and openly admit to it being a helpful tool. They also agree that this technology can make daily tasks easier for the average consumer. But at the end of our conversation, we get into the economics of AI and how Wall Street is propping up the industry through huge evaluations of these companies -- and Roher gets going yet again. "This is all smoke and mirrors. The entire economy of AI is being propped up by a Ponzi scheme. The hype of this technology is unlike any hype we've seen," he says. "I feel like I could announce in a press release that Academy Award winner Daniel Roher is starting an AI film company, and I could sell it the next day for $20 million. It's fucking crazy." [...] "These people are prospectors, and they are going up to the Yukon because it's the gold rush."

Linux gamers are seeing massive performance gains with Wine's new NTSYNC support, "which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming," reports XDA Developers. Not every game will see a night-and-day difference, but for the games that do benefit from these changes, "the improvements range from noticeable to absurd." Combined with improvements to Wayland, graphics, and compatibility, as well as a major WoW64 architecture overhaul, the release looks less like an incremental update and more like one of Wine's most important upgrades in years. From the report: The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too. Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games.

The games that benefit most from NTSYNC are the ones that were struggling before, such as titles with heavy multi-threaded workloads where the synchronization overhead was a genuine bottleneck. For those games, the difference is night and day. And unlike fsync, NTSYNC is in the mainline kernel, meaning you don't need any custom patches or out-of-tree modules for it work. Any distro shipping kernel 6.14 or later, which at this point includes Fedora 42, Ubuntu 25.04, and more recent releases, will support it. Valve has already added the NTSYNC kernel driver to SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, loading the module by default, and an unofficial Proton fork, Proton GE, already has it enabled. When Valve's official Proton rebases on Wine 11, every Steam Deck owner gets this for free.

All of this is what makes NTSYNC such a big deal, as it's not simply a run-of-the-mill performance patch. Instead, it's something much bigger: this is the first time Wine's synchronization has been correct at the kernel level, implemented in the mainline Linux kernel, and available to everyone without jumping through hoops.

BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has joined the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member, signaling a deeper investment in the Rust programming language and its role in modern infrastructure. The company already maintains an up-to-date Rust toolchain for Ubuntu and has begun integrating Rust into parts of its stack, citing memory safety and reliability as key drivers. By joining at a higher tier, Canonical is not just adopting Rust but also stepping closer to its governance and long-term direction.

The move also highlights ongoing tensions in Rust's ecosystem. While Rust can reduce entire classes of bugs, it often depends heavily on external crates, which can introduce complexity and auditing challenges, especially in enterprise environments. Canonical appears aware of that tradeoff and is positioning itself to influence how the ecosystem evolves, as Rust continues to gain traction across Linux and beyond. "As the publisher of Ubuntu, we understand the critical role systems software plays in modern infrastructure, and we see Rust as one of the most important tools for building it securely and reliably. Joining the Rust Foundation at the Gold level allows us to engage more directly in language and ecosystem governance, while continuing to improve the developer experience for Rust on Ubuntu," said Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical. "Of particular interest to Canonical is the security story behind the Rust package registry, crates.io, and minimizing the number of potentially unknown dependencies required to implement core concerns such as async support, HTTP handling, and cryptography -- especially in regulated environments."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he understands the concerns about "AI slop" with DLSS 5 but insists the feature preserves a game's underlying geometry and artistic intent. "I think their perspective makes sense, " said Huang during a recent appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast. "And I could see where they're coming from because I don't love AI slop myself. You know, all of the AI-generated content increasingly looks similar, and they're all beautiful... so I'm empathic toward what they're thinking. That's just not what DLSS 5 is trying to do." Tom's Hardware reports: Although Huang is striking a more conciliatory tone, much of his response is similar to what we heard at GTC [where Huang said gamers were "completely wrong."] The artist determines the geometry, we are completely truthful to the geometry... so every single frame, it enhances, but it doesn't change anything." There was some confusion about how DLSS 5 worked when it was first announced, and although the inner workings of it still aren't clear on a technical level, Huang has said that it isn't a general-purpose generative AI model. He describes it as "content-controlled generative AI." On the other end of the spectrum, Huang also said that it isn't a post-processing filter. The technical details of DLSS 5 live somewhere between that space, and we likely won't know them until later this year when the feature is set to release.

"The question about enhancing, DLSS 5... in the future, you could even prompt it. You know, I want it to be a toon shader. I want it to look like this, kind of. You could even give it an example and it would generate in the style of that, all consistent with the artistry, the style, the intent of the artist," Huang continued. "All of that is done for the artist so they can create something that is more beautiful but still in the style that they want." Although the talking points about DLSS 5 remain unchanged, it seems that Huang has at least heard the criticism. "I think that they got the impression that the games are going to come out the way the games are... and then we're going to post-process it. That's not what DLSS is intended to do."

Huang also made assertions that DLSS is "integrated" with the artist, and suggested that it would put the power of generative AI in the hands of artists working in game development [...]. Although DLSS 5 looks like it's doing a lot, Huang said that it's just another tool, not an essential feature. "The gamers might also appreciate that, in the last couple of years, we introduced skin shaders to game developers, and many of those games have skin shaders that include sub-surface scattering that makes skin look more skin-like... [DLSS 5] is just one more tool. They can decide what to use," Huang ended the conversation about DLSS 5. Immediately after, without missing a beat, he said 1993's Doom was the most influential video game ever made.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: There could be one more step required before creating an account and posting on Reddit in the future. According to Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, the social media platform is exploring different ways to verify a user is human and not a bot. When asked by the TBPN podcast how to confirm that it's a human using Reddit, Huffman responded with several verification methods with varying degrees of heavy-handedness.

"The most lightweight way is with something like Face ID or Touch ID," Huffman said during the interview. "They actually require a human presence, like a human has to touch, or do or look at something, so that actually just proves there's a person there or gets you pretty far." Besides these passkey methods that use biometrics data, Huffman said there are other options like relying on third-party services that are decentralized or don't require ID. On the other end of the spectrum, Huffman also mentioned more burdensome options, like ID-checking services.

[...] "Part of our promise for our users is we don't know your name but we do want to know you're a person," Huffman said. "It'll be an evolution for us for a while, and probably every platform to find the right middle ground here." Reddit co-founder and former executive chair, Alexis Ohanian, said on X that Reddit requiring Face ID wasn't something he expected but agreed that something had to be done about the fake content from bots, adding that, "I just don't know how to sell face-scanning to Redditors or even lurkers." We reached out to Reddit's communications team and will update the story when we hear back. The Digg beta shut down earlier this month after failing to fight the overwhelming influx of AI-driven bots and spam. "The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts," said CEO Justin Mezzell. "We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn't appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they'd find us."

"We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on."

Will there be an AI-optimized programming language at the expense of human readability? There's now been experiments with minimizing tokens for "LLM efficiency, without any concern for how it would serve human developers."

This new article asks if AI will force source code to evolve — or make it extinct, noting that Stephen Cass, the special projects editor at IEEE Spectrum, has even been asking the ultimate question about our future. "Could we get our AIs to go straight from prompt to an intermediate language that could be fed into the interpreter or compiler of our choice? Do we need high-level languages at all in that future?" Cass acknowledged the obvious downsides. ("True, this would turn programs into inscrutable black boxes, but they could still be divided into modular testable units for sanity and quality checks.") But "instead of trying to read or maintain source code, programmers would just tweak their prompts and generate software afresh." This leads to some mind-boggling hypotheticals, like "What's the role of the programmer in a future without source code?" Cass asked the question and announced "an emergency interactive session" in October to discuss whether AI is signaling the end of distinct programming languages as we know them.

In that webinar, Cass said he believes programmers in this future would still suggest interfaces, select algorithms, and make other architecture design choices. And obviously the resulting code would need to pass tests, Cass said, and "has to be able to explain what it's doing." But what kind of abstractions could go away? And then "What happens when we really let AIs off the hook on this?" Cass asked — when we "stop bothering" to have them code in high-level languages. (Since, after all, high-level languages "are a tool for human beings.") "What if we let the machines go directly into creating intermediate code?" (Cass thinks the machine-language level would be too far down the stack, "because you do want a compile layer too for different architecture....")

In this future, the question might become 'What if you make fewer mistakes, but they're different mistakes?'" Cass said he's keeping an eye out for research papers on designing languages for AI, although he agreed that it's not a "tomorrow" thing — since, after all, we're still digesting "vibe coding" right now. But "I can see this becoming an area of active research."
The article also quotes Andrea Griffiths, a senior developer advocate at GitHub and a writer for the newsletter Main Branch, who's seen the attempts at an "AI-first" languages, but nothing yet with meaningful adoption. So maybe AI coding agents will just make it easier to use our existing languages — especially typed languages with built-in safety advantages.

And Scott Hanselman's podcast recently dubbed Chris Lattner's Mojo "a programming language for an AI world," just in the way it's designed to harness the computing power of today's multi-core chips.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the tech-news blog Neowin: Apple appears to have temporarily prevented apps, including Replit and Vibecode, from pushing new updates. Apple seems bothered by how apps like Replit present vibe-coded apps in a web view within the original app. This process virtually allows the app to become something else. And the new app isn't distributed via the App Store, but it still runs on the user's device... [S]uch apps would also bypass the App Store Review process that ensures that apps are safe to use and meet Apple's design and performance standards...

According to the publication (via MacRumors), Apple was close to approving pending updates for such apps if they changed how they work. For instance, Replit would get the green light if its developers configure the app to open vibe-coded apps in an external browser rather than the in-app web view.

Vibecode is also close to being approved if it removes features, such as the ability to develop apps specifically for the App Store.

CNN looks at "the Magic AI fitness mirror," a new product "watching you, and giving you feedback automatically," while sometimes playing footage of a recorded personal trainer.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland describes CNN's video report: CNN says the device "tracks form, counts reps, and corrects technique in real-time — and it doesn't go easy on you." (Although the company's CEO/cofounder, Varun Bhanot, says "we're not trying to completely replace personal trainers. What we are providing is a more accessible alternative.")

CNN call the company "more a computer-vision firm than a fitness company, building the tech for this mirror from the ground up." CEO Bhanot tells CNN he'd hired a personal trainer in his 20s to get fit, but "Going through that journey, I realized how old-fashioned personal training was. Dumbbells were still dumb. There was no data or augmentation for the whole process!"

"The AI fitness and wellness market is already huge — and it's growing," CNN adds. "In 2025 the global market was worth $11 billion, according to [market research firm] Insightace Analytic. By 2035, this market is expected to reach just shy of $58 billion. And Magic AI is far from alone. Form, Total, Speediance, and Echelon, to name a few, are all brands vying for a slice of this market.
Even the most purely physical of activities — exercising your body — now gets "enhanced" with AI accessories...

"Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated," reports the Verge: After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it's starting to mess with headlines in the traditional "10 blue links," too. We've found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process. For example, Google reduced our headline "I used the 'cheat on everything' AI tool and it didn't help me cheat on anything" to just five words: "'Cheat on everything' AI tool." It almost sounds like we're endorsing a product we do not recommend at all.

What we are seeing is a "small" and "narrow" experiment, one that's not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how "small" that experiment actually is. Over the past few months, multiple Verge staffers have seen examples of headlines that we never wrote appear in Google Search results — headlines that do not follow our editorial style, and without any indication that Google replaced the words we chose. And Google says it's tweaking how other websites show up in search, too, not just news.

The good news, for now, is that these changed headlines seem to be few and far between, and they're not yet the kind of tripe we've seen in Google Discover. (For example, Google Discover told me this week that the PlayStation Portal was getting a 1080p streaming mode, when it actually got a higher bitrate mode instead.) Compared to that and other lying Google Discover headlines like "US reverses foreign drone ban" — on a story reporting the opposite — the nonsense headlines we're seeing in Google Search are downright tame.
The article points out that Google "originally told us its AI headlines in Google Discover were an experiment too. A month later, it told us those AI headlines are now a feature..."

"Google confirmed that the test uses generative AI, but claimed that 'if we were to actually launch something based on this experiment, it would not be using a generative model and we would not be creating headlines with gen AI'..."

CNBC reports: Amazon has acquired Rivr, a Swiss robotics company developing machines for "doorstep delivery," the company confirmed Thursday... It announced the deal in a notice sent to third-party delivery contractors... "We believe this technology, when working alongside your [delivery associates], has the potential to further improve safety outcomes and the overall customer experience, particularly in the last steps of the delivery process...." In its notice to delivery service partner owners, Amazon said Rivr's technology, which includes a four-legged robot on wheels, will allow it to research and test how the devices can be integrated into delivery operations, including "helping [delivery associates] carry packages from delivery vehicles to customer doorsteps."

America's cable TV industry "is undergoing its most dramatic collapse in history," reports Cord Cutters News, "with operators large and small waving the white flag on traditional TV service and pointing their customers toward streaming platforms instead." Just in 2025 Comcast lost 1.25 million pay-TV subscribers (ending the year with just 11.3 million), while Charter Spectrum also lost hundreds of thousands of customers each quarter.

But "for smaller regional operators, who lack the scale and diversified revenue streams of giants like Comcast, those kinds of losses are simply unsurvivable," they write. And "the companies that once delivered hundreds of channels through coaxial cables are now either shutting down entirely or reinventing themselves as internet providers." Pay-TV subscriptions have plummeted from nearly 90% of U.S. households in the mid-2010s to roughly half by the end of 2025, resulting in billions in lost revenue and forcing many smaller operators to conclude that continuing linear TV services is no longer viable... [This year over U.S. 50 cable TV companies — primarily smaller and midsize providers — are "expected to cease operations entirely or shut down their television services," Cord Cutters News reported earlier.] YouTube TV's pricing is so competitive that the platform is projected to have close to 12.6 million subscribers by the end of 2026, positioning it to become the largest paid TV distributor in the United States. Exclusive content deals, such as YouTube TV's acquisition of NFL Sunday Ticket rights, have further eroded the value proposition of traditional cable at every level of the market... As older cable subscribers age out of the market, there is no new generation of customers waiting to replace them...

[Cable TV] operators like WOW! are betting that their physical infrastructure — now increasingly upgraded to fiber — is more valuable as an internet delivery system than as a cable TV platform. [WOW! serves customers across Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Alabama — but is "phasing out its proprietary streaming live TV service and directing all customers toward YouTube TV," the article notes.] Industry observers see this as part of a broader trend: operators shedding unprofitable video segments to focus on broadband, where returns and network investments are prioritized.

By the end of 2026, non-pay-TV households are expected to surge to 80.7 million, outnumbering traditional pay-TV subscribers at 54.3 million — a milestone that would have seemed unthinkable just a decade ago. For the cable companies still standing, the math is now inescapable: the era of the cable bundle is ending, and the only real question left is how gracefully each operator manages its exit.

"Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper," writes EFF senior policy analyst Joe Mullin.

"That's effectively what's begun happening online in the last few months." The Internet Archive — the world's largest digital library — has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s... But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web's traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit...

The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several — including the Times — are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There's a strong case that such training is fair use. Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response.

Organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems. They are preserving a record of our history. Turning off that preservation in an effort to control AI access could essentially torch decades of historical documentation over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn't start, and didn't ask for. If publishers shut the Archive out, they aren't just limiting bots. They're erasing the historical record...

Even if courts place limits on AI training, the law protecting search and web archiving is already well established... There are real disputes over AI training that must be resolved in courts. But sacrificing the public record to fight those battles would be a profound, and possibly irreversible, mistake.

CBS News is shutting down its nearly 100-year-old radio news service due to economic pressures and the shift toward digital media and podcasts. Longtime CBS News anchor Dan Rather said: "It's another piece of America that is gone." The Associated Press reports: When it went on the air in September 1927, the service was the precursor to the entire network, giving a youthful William S. Paley a start in the business. Famed broadcaster Edward R. Murrow's rooftop reports during the Nazi bombing of London during World War II kept Americans listening anxiously. Today, CBS News Radio provides material to an estimated 700 stations across the country and is known best for its top-of-the-hour news roundups. The service will end on May 22, the network said Friday.

"Radio is woven into the fabric of CBS News and that's always going to be part of our history," CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss said in delivering the news to the staff. "I want you to know that we did everything we could, including before I joined the company, to try and find a viable solution to sustain the radio operation." But with the radical changes in the media industry, she said, "we just could not find a way to make that possible."

It was unclear how many people will lose their jobs because of the radio shutdown. CBS News was cutting about 6% of its workforce, or more than 60 people, on Friday. It's not the end of turmoil at the network, as parent company Paramount Global is likely to absorb CNN as part of its announced purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery.

An anonymous reader quotes a repot from the Portland Tribune: There was plenty of uncertainty and debate about the effectiveness of a cell phone ban decreed (PDF) by executive order last summer. But at least in Estacada, the policy has earned two thumbs up, including approval from a "grumpy old teacher." Jeff Mellema is a language arts teacher at Estacada High School. He has worked in the building for 24 years, and he said the new policy that prohibits students from using their phones during the day has been a breath of fresh air.

"There is so much better discourse in my classroom, be it personal or academic," Mellema said. "Students can't avoid those conversations anymore with their phones." "This ban has brought joy back to this old, grumpy teacher," he added with a smile. That is the kind of feedback Gov. Tina Kotek was hoping for as she visited Estacada High School on Wednesday afternoon, March 18. Her goal was to visit classrooms, speak with administrators, and meet with students one-on-one to hear about the effectiveness of her phone policy. [...] In the classrooms, she was able to take a straw poll around the cell phone ban and then get specific, direct feedback from the kids. Overall, it was positive.

The Rangers said they noticed changes in how they interact with teachers and peers. They don't feel that "siren's song" tug of their phones as often, and the changes are bleeding into everyday life as well -- think less reminders to put phones away during family dinners. Phones also led to issues around bullying and online toxicity during the school day. There are some hiccups. The students spoke about difficulties in tracking busy schedules. Many athletes relied on their phones for practice times and locations. Some advanced placement kids said the overzealous programs monitoring school laptops blocked access to needed resources for studying/researching schoolwork. There is even a strange quirk with school-provided tech that prevents them from accessing their calculators. "Maybe the filters are too strong right now," Gov. Kotek said. "That is why we are working with the districts to best implement the policy."

The kids also weighed in on the debate around the extent of the ban. The two options bandied in Salem were a "bell-to-bell" policy or just inside classrooms. The latter would allow kids to use their phones during passing period and lunch. Several advocated for that change. That mirrored the debate within the Oregon legislature. It ultimately led to a stalemate and the need for Gov. Kotek's executive ruling. "When you make a decision like this, you don't know how it will ultimately work," Kotek told the students. "I appreciate you adapting to the situation and making it work for you." While things could change in the future, the governor is pleased with the early results. The phone ban is here to stay.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Fan Xinquan, a retired electronics worker in Beijing, has recently started raising a "lobster," hoping that the AI agent he has been training can help organize his specialized industry knowledge better than chatbots like DeepSeek. "OpenClaw can actually help you accomplish many practical things," the 60-year-old said at a recent event hosted by AI startup Zhipu to teach people how to use and train the AI agent, which has gone viral in China, with its various local versions earning the "lobster" nickname.

In the past month, OpenClaw, which can connect several hardware and software tools and learn from the data produced with much less human intervention than a chatbot, has captured the imaginations of many in China, from retirees looking for side income to AI firms hoping to generate new revenue streams. [...]

Huang Rongsheng, chief architect at Baidu's smart device unit Xiaodu, said at an event on Tuesday that parent group chats for his daughter's primary school class have become overwhelmed by OpenClaw discussions. "My daughter came to me and asked: Dad, I see you raising a lobster every day," he said. "Can I have one too?" Bai Yiyun, another attendee at the Zhipu event, said she hopes to use the agent to start a side hustle during her retirement. "If DeepSeek marked a milestone for open-source large language models, then OpenClaw represents a similar turning point for open-source "agents," said Wei Sun, chief AI analyst at Counterpoint Research.

Cloudflare's CEO predicts AI-driven bot traffic will surpass human internet traffic by 2027, as AI agents generate vastly more web requests than people. "If a human were doing a task -- let's say you were shopping for a digital camera -- and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that's doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in an interview at SXSW this week. "So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that's real traffic, and that's real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account." TechCrunch reports: Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google's web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and security company is used by one-fifth of all websites. But beyond some other reputable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by scammers and bad actors. "With the rise of generative AI, and its just insatiable need for data, we're seeing a rise where we suspect that, in 2027, the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that's online," Prince said.

The executive also noted that this change to the web would require the development of new technologies, like sandboxes for AI agents that can be spun up on the fly and then torn down when their task has finished. These could come into play when consumers ask AI agents to perform certain tasks on their behalf, like planning a vacation. "What we're trying to think about is, how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure where you can -- as easily as you open a new tab in your browser -- you can actually spin up new code, which can then run and service the agents that are out there," Prince said. He imagines there will soon be a time when millions of these "sandboxes" for agents would be created every second. "I think the thing that people don't appreciate about AI is it's a platform shift," Prince said. "AI is another platform shift ... the way that you're going to consume information is completely different."

The UK regulator Ofcom fined 4chan nearly $700,000 (520,000 pounds) for failing to implement age checks and address illegal content risks under the Online Safety Act, but the platform mocked the penalty and signaled it won't pay. A lawyer representing the company responded with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster, writing in a follow-up post on X: "In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment." The BBC reports: The fines also include 50,000 pounds for failing to assess the risk of illegal material being published and a further 20,000 pounds for failing to set out how it protects users from criminal content. 4Chan has refused to pay all previous fines from Ofcom. "Companies -- wherever they're based -- are not allowed to sell unsafe toys to children in the UK. And society has long protected youngsters from things like alcohol, smoking and gambling. The digital world should be no different," said Ofcom's Suzanne Cater. "The UK is setting new standards for online safety. Age checks and risk assessments are cornerstones of our laws, and we'll take robust enforcement action against firms that fall short."

BrianFagioli writes: A new iOS exploit chain called DarkSword shows how attackers can break into certain iPhones, grab sensitive data like messages, credentials, and even crypto wallets, and then disappear without leaving obvious traces. It targets older iOS 18 builds using Safari and WebGPU flaws to escape Apple's sandbox, which is pretty wild on its own, but what really stands out is how fast it works and how financially motivated these attacks have become. The takeaway is simple but important, update your iPhone ASAP and don't assume mobile devices are somehow safer than desktops anymore.