Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky has warned that the company's revived smartwatch line will face significant functionality limitations when paired with iPhones, blaming Apple's restrictive policies that favor its own Apple Watch. "It's impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things," Migicovsky wrote in a blog post, adding that the situation has "actually gotten worse over the last 8 years."

A 2024 class action lawsuit cited in the post claims Apple has added further restrictions since iOS 13, including requiring users to display full content previews on their lock screens for notifications to reach third-party watches. Pebble is still developing an iOS app because 40% of potential customers use iPhones, he said. Migicovsky warned that the watch will "always appear to have less developed functionality on iOS than Android" and some features will arrive on Android first.

Sony has removed more than 75,000 AI-generated deepfake songs mimicking artists including Harry Styles and Beyonce from online platforms, the company revealed in a submission to the UK government, adding this likely represents just a fraction of fake songs circulating online.

The proliferation of these unauthorized AI replicas has caused "direct commercial harm to legitimate recording artists, including UK artists," Sony stated. The company's intervention comes as Britain considers new copyright legislation that would permit AI companies to train models using artist material, a proposal that would require rights holders to opt out rather than requiring permission.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: DuckDuckGo has big plans for embedding AI into its search engine. The privacy-focused company just announced that its AI-generated answers, which appear for certain queries on its search engine, have exited beta and now source information from across the web -- not just Wikipedia. It will soon integrate web search within its AI chatbot, which has also exited beta. DuckDuckGo first launched AI-assisted answers -- originally called DuckAssist -- in 2023. The feature is billed as a less obnoxious version of tools like Google's AI Overviews, designed to offer more concise responses and let you adjust how often you see them, including turning the responses off entirely. If you have DuckDuckGo's AI-generated answers set to "often," you'll still only see them around 20 percent of the time, though the company plans on increasing the frequency eventually.

Some of DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers bring up a box for follow-up questions, redirecting you to a conversation with its Duck.ai chatbot. As is the case with its AI-assisted answers, you don't need an account to use Duck.ai, and it comes with the same emphasis on privacy. It lets you toggle between GPT-4o mini, o3-mini, Llama 3.3, Mistral Small 3, and Claude 3 Haiku, with the advantage being that you can interact with each model anonymously by hiding your IP address. DuckDuckGo also has agreements with the AI company behind each model to ensure your data isn't used for training.

Duck.ai also rolled out a feature called Recent Chats, which stores your previous conversations locally on your device rather than on DuckDuckGo's servers. Though Duck.ai is also leaving beta, that doesn't mean the flow of new features will stop. In the next few weeks, Duck.ai will add support for web search, which should enhance its ability to respond to questions. The company is also working on adding voice interaction on iPhone and Android, along with the ability to upload images and ask questions about them. ... [W]hile Duck.ai will always remain free, the company is considering including access to more advanced AI models with its $9.99 per month subscription.

A U.S. congressional committee has urged Americans to remove Chinese-made wireless routers from their homes, including those made by TP-Link, calling them a security threat that opened the door for China to hack U.S. critical infrastructure. From a report: The House of Representatives Select Committee on China has pushed the Commerce Department to investigate China's TP-Link Technology Co, which according to research firm IDC is the top seller of WiFi routers internationally by unit volume. U.S. authorities are considering a ban on the sale of the company's routers, according to media reports.

Rob Joyce, former director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, told Wednesday's committee hearing that TP-Link devices exposed individuals to cyber intrusion that hackers could use to gain leverage to attack critical infrastructure. "We need to all take action and replace those devices so they don't become the tools that are used in the attacks on the U.S.," Joyce said, adding that he understood the Commerce Department was considering a ban.

Google announced Wednesday it is expanding its AI Overviews to more query types and users worldwide, including those not logged into Google accounts, while introducing a new "AI Mode" chatbot feature. AI Mode, which resembles competitors like Perplexity or ChatGPT Search, will initially be limited to Google One AI Premium subscribers who enable it through the Labs section of Search.

The feature delivers AI-generated answers with supporting links interspersed throughout, powered by Google's search index. "What we're finding from people who are using AI Overviews is that they're really bringing different kinds of questions to Google," said Robby Stein, VP of product on the Search team. "They're more complex questions, that may have been a little bit harder before." Google is also upgrading AI Overviews with its Gemini 2.0 model, which Stein says will improve responses for math, coding and reasoning-based queries.

NBC News reports that Utah could make history as America's first state to ban fluoride in public water systems — even though major medical associations supporting water fluoridation: If signed into law [by the governor], HB0081 would prevent any individual or political subdivision from adding fluoride "to water in or intended for public water systems..." A report published recently in JAMA Pediatrics found a statistically significant association between higher fluoride exposure and lower children's IQ scores — but the researchers did not suggest that fluoride should be removed from drinking water. According to the report's authors, most of the 74 studies they reviewed were low-quality and done in countries other than the United States, such as China, where fluoride levels tend to be much higher, the researchers noted.

An Australian study published last year found no link between early childhood exposure to fluoride and negative cognitive neurodevelopment. Researchers actually found a slightly higher IQ in kids who consistently drank fluoridated water. The levels in Australia are consistent with U.S. recommendations.

Major public health groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Dental Association and the CDC — which says drinking fluoridated water keeps teeth strong and reduces cavities — support adding fluoride to water.
The article notes that since 2010 over 150 U.S. towns or counties have voted to keep fluoride out of public water systems or to stop adding it to their water (according to the anti-fluoride group "Fluoride Action Network"). But this week the American Dental Association (representing 159,000 members) urged Utah's governor not to become " the only state to end this preventive health practice that has been in place for over three quarters of a century."

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

Memory safety bugs are "eroding trust in technology and costing billions," argues a new post on Google's security blog — adding that "traditional approaches, like code auditing, fuzzing, and exploit mitigations — while helpful — haven't been enough to stem the tide."

So the blog post calls for a "common framework" for "defining specific, measurable criteria for achieving different levels of memory safety assurance." The hope is this gives policy makers "the technical foundation to craft effective policy initiatives and incentives promoting memory safety" leading to "a market in which vendors are incentivized to invest in memory safety." ("Customers will be empowered to recognize, demand, and reward safety.")

In January the same Google security researchers helped co-write an article noting there are now strong memory-safety "research technologies" that are sufficiently mature: memory-safe languages (including "safer language subsets like Safe Buffers for C++"), mathematically rigorous formal verification, software compartmentalization, and hardware and software protections. (With hardware protections including things like ARM's Memory Tagging Extension and the (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions, or "CHERI", architecture.) Google's security researchers are now calling for "a blueprint for a memory-safe future" — though Importantly, the idea is "defining the desired outcomes rather than locking ourselves into specific technologies."

Their blog post this week again urges a practical/actionable framework that's commonly understood, but one that supports different approaches (and allowing tailoring to specific needs) while enabling objective assessment: At Google, we're not just advocating for standardization and a memory-safe future, we're actively working to build it. We are collaborating with industry and academic partners to develop potential standards, and our joint authorship of the recent CACM call-to-action marks an important first step in this process... This commitment is also reflected in our internal efforts. We are prioritizing memory-safe languages, and have already seen significant reductions in vulnerabilities by adopting languages like Rust in combination with existing, wide-spread usage of Java, Kotlin, and Go where performance constraints permit. We recognize that a complete transition to those languages will take time. That's why we're also investing in techniques to improve the safety of our existing C++ codebase by design, such as deploying hardened libc++.

This effort isn't about picking winners or dictating solutions. It's about creating a level playing field, empowering informed decision-making, and driving a virtuous cycle of security improvement... The journey towards memory safety requires a collective commitment to standardization. We need to build a future where memory safety is not an afterthought but a foundational principle, a future where the next generation inherits a digital world that is secure by design.
The security researchers' post calls for "a collective commitment" to eliminate memory-safety bugs, "anchored on secure-by-design practices..." One of the blog post's subheadings? "Let's build a memory-safe future together."

And they're urging changes "not just for ourselves but for the generations that follow."

In an interview with CNBC's Jon Fortt on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said next-gen AI will need 100 times more compute than older models as a result of new reasoning approaches that think "about how best to answer" questions step by step. From a report: "The amount of computation necessary to do that reasoning process is 100 times more than what we used to do," Huang told CNBC's Jon Fortt in an interview on Wednesday following the chipmaker's fourth-quarter earnings report. He cited models including DeepSeek's R1, OpenAI's GPT-4 and xAI's Grok 3 as models that use a reasoning process.

Huang pushed back on that idea in the interview on Wednesday, saying DeepSeek popularized reasoning models that will need more chips. "DeepSeek was fantastic," Huang said. "It was fantastic because it open sourced a reasoning model that's absolutely world class." Huang said that company's percentage of revenue in China has fallen by about half due to the export restrictions, adding that there are other competitive pressures in the country, including from Huawei.

Developers will likely search for ways around export controls through software, whether it be for a supercomputer, a personal computer, a phone or a game console, Huang said. "Ultimately, software finds a way," he said. "You ultimately make that software work on whatever system that you're targeting, and you create great software." Huang said that Nvidia's GB200, which is sold in the United States, can generate AI content 60 times faster than the versions of the company's chips that it sells to China under export controls.

"Elizabeth Holmes' fraud conviction has been upheld by a federal appellate panel," writes Slashdot reader ClickOnThis. MSNBC reports: A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday affirmed the convictions, sentences and nine-figure restitution ordered against both Holmes and Theranos president, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani. [...] Theranos was supposedly going to revolutionize medical laboratory testing with the ability to run fast, accurate and affordable tests with just a drop of blood from a finger prick. "But the vision sold by Holmes and Balwani was nothing more than a mirage," 9th Circuit Judge Jacqueline H. Nguyen wrote (PDF) for the panel, adding that the "grandiose achievements touted by Holmes and Balwani were half-truths and outright lies."

Holmes was convicted of crimes related to fraud against investors while the jury acquitted her or hung on other counts. Balwani was convicted on all counts at his trial. The federal panel rejected a slew of arguments from both defendants, including that their trials featured improper testimony from Theranos employees. While the ruling is a major setback for the defendants, they can further appeal to a fuller panel of 9th Circuit judges and the Supreme Court, which generally has broad discretion over whether to accept cases for review.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from Phoronix: Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman has also been a big proponent of Rust kernel code. He's crafted another Linux kernel mailing list post [Wednesdsay] outlining the benefits of Rust and encouraging new kernel code/drivers to be in Rust rather than C. Greg KH makes the case that the majority of the kernel bugs are due to "stupid little corner cases in C that are totally gone in Rust."
"As someone who has seen almost EVERY kernel bugfix and security issue for the past 15+ years... and who sees EVERY kernel CVE issued, I think I can speak on this topic," Kroah-Hartman began. Here's some excerpts from his remarks. Citing corner cases like overwrites of memory, error path cleanups, use-after-free mistakes and forgetting to check error values, Kroah-Hartman says he's "all for... making these types of problems impossible to hit." That's why I'm wanting to see Rust get into the kernel, these types of issues just go away, allowing developers and maintainers more time to focus on the REAL bugs that happen (i.e. logic issues, race conditions, etc.)... [F]or new code / drivers, writing them in Rust where these types of bugs just can't happen (or happen much much less) is a win for all of us, why wouldn't we do this...? Rust isn't a "silver bullet" that will solve all of our problems, but it sure will help in a huge number of places, so for new stuff going forward, why wouldn't we want that...?

Yes, mixed language codebases are rough, and hard to maintain, but we are kernel developers dammit, we've been maintaining and strengthening Linux for longer than anyone ever thought was going to be possible. We've turned our development model into a well-oiled engineering marvel creating something that no one else has ever been able to accomplish. Adding another language really shouldn't be a problem, we've handled much worse things in the past and we shouldn't give up now on wanting to ensure that our project succeeds for the next 20+ years. We've got to keep pushing forward when confronted with new good ideas, and embrace the people offering to join us in actually doing the work to help make sure that we all succeed together.
Kroah-Hartman emphasized later that "a huge majority of the stupid things we do in C just don't happen in the same code implemented in Rust (i.e. memory leaks, error path cleanups, return value checking, etc.) "

The complete thread contains over 140 messages — including Linus Torvalds' observation that " #pragma is complete garbage and should never be used."

California sued to fine a data-harvesting company, reports the Washington Post, calling it "a rare step to put muscle behind one of the strongest online privacy laws in the United States." Even when states have tried to restrict data brokers, it has been tough to make those laws stick. That has generally been a problem for the 19 states that have passed broad laws to protect personal information, said Matt Schwartz, a policy analyst for Consumer Reports. He said there has been only 15 or so public enforcement actions by regulators overseeing all those laws. Partly because companies aren't held accountable, they're empowered to ignore the privacy standards. "Noncompliance is fairly widespread," Schwartz said. "It's a major problem."

That's why California is unusual with a data broker law that seems to have teeth. To make sure state residents can order all data brokers operating in the state to delete their personal records [with a single request], California is now requiring brokers to register with the state or face a fine of $200 a day. The state's privacy watchdog said Thursday that it filed litigation to force one data broker, National Public Data, to pay $46,000 for failing to comply with that initial phase of the data broker law. NPD declined to comment through an attorney... This first lawsuit for noncompliance, Schwartz said, shows that California is serious about making companies live up to their privacy obligations... "If they can successfully build it and show it works, it will create a blueprint for other states interested in this idea," he said.
Last summer NPD "spilled hundreds of millions of Americans' Social Security Numbers, addresses, and phone numbers online," according to the blog Krebs on Security, adding that another NPD data broker sharing access to the same consumer records "inadvertently published the passwords to its back-end database in a file that was freely available from its homepage..."

California's attempt to regulate the industry inspired the nonprofit Consumer Reports to create an app called Permission Slip that reveals what data companies collect and, for people in U.S. states, will "work with you to file a request, telling companies to stop selling your personal information."

Other data-protecting options suggested by The Washington Post:

• Use Firefox, Brave or DuckDuckGo, "which can automatically tell websites not to sell or share your data. Those demands from the web browsers are legally binding or will be soon in at least nine states."

• Use Privacy Badger, an EFF browser extension which the EFF says "automatically tells websites not to sell or share your data including where it's required by state law."

Google's Threat Intelligence Group notes "the growing threat to secure messaging applications." While specifically acknowledging "wide ranging efforts to compromise Signal accounts," they add that the threat "also extends to other popular messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram, which are also being actively targeted by Russian-aligned threat groups using similar techniques.

"In anticipation of a wider adoption of similar tradecraft by other threat actors, we are issuing a public warning regarding the tactics and methods used to date to help build public awareness and help communities better safeguard themselves from similar threats."

Computer Weekly reports: Analysts predict it is only a matter of time before Russia starts deploying hacking techniques against non-military Signal users and users of other encrypted messaging services, including WhatsApp and Telegram. Dan Black, principal analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said he would be "absolutely shocked" if he did not see attacks against Signal expand beyond the war in Ukraine and to other encrypted messaging platforms...

Russia-backed hackers are attempting to compromise Signal's "linked devices" capability, which allows Signal users to link their messaging account to multiple devices, including phones and laptops, using a quick response (QR) code. Google threat analysts report that Russia-linked threat actors have developed malicious QR codes that, when scanned, will give the threat actor real-time access to the victim's messages without having to compromise the victim's phone or computer. In one case, according to Black, a compromised Signal account led Russia to launch an artillery strike against a Ukrainian army brigade, resulting in a number of casualties... Google also warned that multiple threat actors have been observed using exploits to steal Signal database files from compromised Android and Windows devices.
The article notes that the attacks "are difficult to detect and when successful there is a high risk that compromised Signal accounts can go unnoticed for a long time." And it adds that "The warning follows disclosures that Russian intelligence created a spoof website for the Davos World Economic Forum in January 2025 to surreptitiously attempt to gain access to WhatsApp accounts used by Ukrainian government officials, diplomats and a former investigative journalist at Bellingcat."

Google's Threat Intelligence Group notes there's a variety of attack methods, though the "linked devices" technique is the most widely used. "We are grateful to the team at Signal for their close partnership in investigating this activity," Google's group says in their blog post, adding that "the latest Signal releases on Android and iOS contain hardened features designed to help protect against similar phishing campaigns in the future. Update to the latest version to enable these features."

Leveraging AI tools like RFDiffusion and PLACER, researchers were able to design a novel enzyme capable of breaking down plastic by targeting ester bonds, a key component in polyester. Ars Technica reports: The researchers started out by using the standard tools they developed to handle protein design, including an AI tool named RFDiffusion, which uses a random seed to generate a variety of protein backgrounds. In this case, the researchers asked RFDiffusion to match the average positions of the amino acids in a family of ester-breaking enzymes. The results were fed to another neural network, which chose the amino acids such that they'd form a pocket that would hold an ester that breaks down into a fluorescent molecule so they could follow the enzyme's activity using its glow.

Of the 129 proteins designed by this software, only two of them resulted in any fluorescence. So the team decided they needed yet another AI. Called PLACER, the software was trained by taking all the known structures of proteins latched on to small molecules and randomizing some of their structure, forcing the AI to learn how to shift things back into a functional state (making it a generative AI). The hope was that PLACER would be trained to capture some of the structural details that allow enzymes to adopt more than one specific configuration over the course of the reaction they were catalyzing. And it worked. Repeating the same process with an added PLACER screening step boosted the number of enzymes with catalytic activity by over three-fold.

Unfortunately, all of these enzymes stalled after a single reaction. It turns out they were much better at cleaving the ester, but they left one part of it chemically bonded to the enzyme. In other words, the enzymes acted like part of the reaction, not a catalyst. So the researchers started using PLACER to screen for structures that could adopt a key intermediate state of the reaction. This produced a much higher rate of reactive enzymes (18 percent of them cleaved the ester bond), and two -- named "super" and "win" -- could actually cycle through multiple rounds of reactions. The team had finally made an enzyme.

By adding additional rounds alternating between structure suggestions using RFDiffusion and screening using PLACER, the team saw the frequency of functional enzymes increase and eventually designed one that had an activity similar to some produced by actual living things. They also showed they could use the same process to design an esterase capable of digesting the bonds in PET, a common plastic. The research has been published in the journal Science.

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: Monday brought chilling news reports of the all-count trial convictions of three individuals for a conspiracy to rob and drug people outside of LGBTQ+ nightclubs in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, which led to the deaths of two of their victims. The defendants were found guilty on all 24 counts, which included murder, robbery, burglary, and conspiracy. "As proven at trial," explained the Manhattan District Attorney's Office in a press release, "the defendants lurked outside of nightclubs to exploit intoxicated individuals. They would give them drugs, laced with fentanyl, to incapacitate their victims so they could take the victims' phones and drain their online financial accounts [including unauthorized charges and transfers using Cash App, Apple Cash, Apple Pay]." District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. added, "My Office will continue to take every measure possible to protect New Yorkers from this type of criminal conduct. That includes ensuring accountability for those who commit this harm, while also working with financial companies to enhance security measures on their phone apps."

In 2024, D.A. Bragg called on financial companies to better protect consumers from fraud, including: adding a second and separate password for accessing the app on a smartphone as a default security option; imposing lower default limits on the monetary amount of total daily transfers; requiring wait times of up to a day and secondary verification for large monetary transactions; better monitoring of accounts for unusual transfer activities; and asking for confirmation when suspicious transactions occur. "No longer is the smartphone itself the most lucrative target for scammers and robbers -- it's the financial apps contained within," said Bragg as he released letters (PDF) sent to the companies that own Venmo, Zelle, and Cash App. "Thousands or even tens of thousands can be drained from financial accounts in a matter of seconds with just a few taps. Without additional protections, customers' financial and physical safety is being put at risk. I hope these companies accept our request to discuss commonsense solutions to deter scammers and protect New Yorkers' hard-earned money."

"Our cellphones aren't safe," warned the EFF's Cooper Quintin in a 2018 New York Times op-ed. "So why aren't we fixing them?" Any thoughts on what can and should be done with software, hardware, and procedures to stop "bank jackings"?

The US company v-Fluence secretly compiled profiles on over 500 food and environmental health advocates, scientists, and politicians in a private web portal to discredit critics of pesticides and GM crops. Following public backlash and corporate cancellations after its actions were revealed by the Guardian, the company announced it was shutting down the profiling service. The Guardian reports: The profiles -- part of an effort that was financed, in part, by US taxpayer dollars -- often provided derogatory information about the industry opponents and included home addresses and phone numbers and details about family members, including children. They were provided to members of an invite-only web portal where v-Fluence also offered a range of other information to its roster of more than 1,000 members. The membership included staffers of US regulatory and policy agencies, executives from the world's largest agrochemical companies and their lobbyists, academics and others.

The profiling was one element of a push to downplay pesticide dangers, discredit opponents and undermine international policymaking, according to court records, emails and other documents obtained by the non-profit newsroom Lighthouse Reports. Lighthouse collaborated with the Guardian, the New Lede, Le Monde, Africa Uncensored, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and other international media partners on the September 2024 publication of the investigation. News of the profiling and the private web portal sparked outrage and threats of litigation by some of the people and organizations profiled. [...]

v-Fluence says it not only has eliminated the profiling, but also has made "significant staff cuts" after the public exposure, according to Jay Byrne, the former Monsanto public relations executive who founded and heads the company. Byrne blamed the company's struggles on "rising costs from continued litigator and activist harassment of our staff, partners, and clients with threats and misrepresentations." He said the articles published about the company's profiling and private web portal were part of a "smear campaign" which was based on "false and misleading misrepresentations" that were "not supported by any facts or evidence." Adding to the company's troubles, several corporate backers and industry organizations have cancelled contracts with v-Fluence, according a post in a publication for agriculture professionals.

Chinese automaker BYD is offering its advanced "God's Eye" autonomous technology in mass-market EVs like the $9,500 Seagull, while expanding globally with government-backed EV initiatives. Gizmodo reports: Previously, BYD had limited its driver assistance features to higher-end models that cost more than $28,000, according to BYD CEO Wang Chuanfu. In expanding the technology to the Seagull and other cars for no extra charge, Chuanfu said "good technology should be available to everyone." Other BYD vehicles getting the addition of the technology including cars from its Ocean, Han, Song, and Yuan lineups, as well as its hybrid vehicles. "God's Eye was developed in-house by BYD and will equip the automaker's mass-market models with features commonly only found on upscale EVs such as remote parking via smartphones and autonomous overtaking on roads," the company said.

BYD says the level of autonomy present in each car will vary depending on which sensors are equipped in the cars. Some of its pricier cars, for instance, include LiDAR sensors like those found in Waymos, which can offer faster and more precise object detection than cameras alone, particularly in low-light conditions or when a roadway is obstructed by rain or fog. [...] China's government has heavily prioritized the transition to electric vehicles with strong incentives, and BYD has managed to turn a profit on its electric vehicles, a feat that has heretofore only been accomplished by Tesla. The importance to China is clear: As the world continues transitioning to EVs, the likes of BYD have been able to push into markets including Europe and South America as Western brands lose share.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Fortune: More than 14 million job seekers' applications went completely ignored in a single quarter last year, according to one hiring platform. Now, sites like Greenhouse and LinkedIn are experimenting with new ways to hold companies accountable for making the hiring process so miserable for applicants. Three of the biggest job search sites — LinkedIn, Indeed and Greenhouse — have put tools in place to highlight which companies frequently respond to applicants in a timely manner... According to Greenhouse, half of applicants say they've been ghosted after an interview.

Meanwhile, new artificial intelligence tools have made it easier for candidates to play a numbers game, generating tailored resumes for hundreds of roles. But that's led to an increasingly overwhelming flood of applications for companies, making it nearly impossible to process the deluge and respond to every hopeful in a timely manner — let alone find their perfect match... [LinkedIn is] refining its "job match" feature that uses AI to see how well qualified a candidate is for a given listing. The feature is designed to help cut down on the flood of applications companies are receiving by nudging users to focus their efforts on jobs where they actually have a good shot at hearing back. That, in theory, should make the hiring process more efficient for both parties...

Indeed chose to focus on encouraging employer responsiveness after the issue showed up as the biggest pain point for job seekers in a recent survey. While the platform has issued "responsive employer" badges since 2018 to recognize companies that consistently reply to more than half of all messages, it started releasing even more detail in 2023, including labels that share the employer's median response time with candidates... Greenhouse, meanwhile, is testing a set of four badges that would verify an employer meets the platform's respectful, communicative, prepared and fair hiring process standards for a given job posting... For "communicative," they're expected to clear out active candidates on closed jobs and send out rejection emails.
LinkedIn is also adding "responsiveness insights," according to the article, which "show applicants which listings are being actively reviewed by employers.

"It's testing the insights on a small number of job postings before rolling them out sitewide in the coming months."

Keynotes at this year's FOSDEM included free AI models and systemd, reports Heise.de — and also a progress report from Miguel Ojeda, supervisor of the Rust integration in the Linux kernel. Only eight people remain in the core team around Rust for Linux... Miguel Ojeda therefore launched a survey among kernel developers, including those outside the Rust community, and presented some of the more important voices in his FOSDEM talk. The overall mood towards Rust remains favorable, especially as Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman are convinced of the necessity of Rust integration. This is less about rapid progress and more about finding new talent for kernel development in the future.
The reaction was mostly positive, judging by Ojeda's slides:

- "2025 will be the year of Rust GPU drivers..." — Daniel Almedia

- "I think the introduction of Rust in the kernel is one of the most exciting development experiments we've seen in a long time." — Andrea Righi

- "[T]he project faces unique challenges. Rust's biggest weakness, as a language, is that relatively few people speak it. Indeed, Rust is not a language for beginners, and systems-level development complicates things even more. That said, the Linux kernel project has historically attracted developers who love challenging software — if there's an open source group willing to put the extra effort for a better OS, it's the kernel devs." — Carlos Bilbao

- "I played a little with [Rust] in user space, and I just absolutely hate the cargo concept... I hate having to pull down other code that I do not trust. At least with shared libraries, I can trust a third party to have done the build and all that... [While Rust should continue to grow in the kernel], if a subset of C becomes as safe as Rust, it may make Rust obsolete..." Steven Rostedt

Rostedt wasn't sure if Rust would attract more kernel contributors, but did venture this opinion. "I feel Rust is more of a language that younger developers want to learn, and C is their dad's language."

But still "contention exists within the kernel development community between those pro-Rust and -C camps," argues The New Stack, citing the latest remarks from kernel maintainer Christoph Hellwig (who had earlier likened the mixing of Rust and C to cancer). Three days later Hellwig reiterated his position again on the Linux kernel mailing list: "Every additional bit that another language creeps in drastically reduces the maintainability of the kernel as an integrated project. The only reason Linux managed to survive so long is by not having internal boundaries, and adding another language completely breaks this. You might not like my answer, but I will do everything I can do to stop this. This is NOT because I hate Rust. While not my favourite language it's definitively one of the best new ones and I encourage people to use it for new projects where it fits. I do not want it anywhere near a huge C code base that I need to maintain."
But the article also notes that Google "has been a staunch supporter of adding Rust to the kernel for Linux running in its Android phones." The use of Rust in the kernel is seen as a way to avoid memory vulnerabilities associated with C and C++ code and to add more stability to the Android OS. "Google's wanting to replace C code with Rust represents a small piece of the kernel but it would have a huge impact since we are talking about billions of phones," Ojeda told me after his talk.

In addition to Google, Rust adoption and enthusiasm for it is increasing as Rust gets more architectural support and as "maintainers become more comfortable with it," Ojeda told me. "Maintainers have already told me that if they could, then they would start writing Rust now," Ojeda said. "If they could drop C, they would do it...."

Amid the controversy, there has been a steady stream of vocal support for Ojeda. Much of his discussion also covered statements given by advocates for Rust in the kernel, ranging from lead developers of the kernel and including Linux creator Linus Torvalds himself to technology leads from Red Hat, Samsung, Google, Microsoft and others.

Tom Blomfield, founder of Monzo, challenges the notion that Americans work harder than Europeans, attributing the U.S.'s economic edge to a culture of "positivity, optimism, and ambition" rather than sheer work ethic. He argues that the "know your place, don't get too big for your boots" mindset stifles innovation, whereas the U.S.' "American Dream" fosters a more dynamic start-up culture, making it easier for entrepreneurs to bounce back from failure. Fortune reports: Blomfield said the American dream wasn't a reality that a lot of people in the U.S. get to live, but it was one that a lot of them experience. "That idea that anyone can create anything if they try hard enough is so deeply American, and it's so antithetical to the British culture," he said. Blomfield was 28 when he co-founded Monzo in 2015. While he said people in the U.K. "looked at me like I was crazy" as he tried to get a banking license, he had a much more supportive reaction in the States. The Brit said his fellow countrymen were more inclined toward a "know your place, don't get too big for your boots" attitude that stifles innovation.

In Blomfield's view, this filters down to the career decisions made by the country's most promising university students. In the U.K., Blomfield says the most ambitious thing for students to do is work at a trading firm like James Street or a consultancy like McKinsey. Indeed, he suggests the default choice for PhD students in computer science is to join Goldman Sachs. In the U.S., meanwhile, Blomfield says he'll often get pitched start-up ideas by students from unexpected backgrounds, including English Literature undergrads. [...]

In April, Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norway's $1.6 trillion sovereign wealth fund, sparked a debate with his comments that there was a difference in the "general level of ambition" between U.S. and European workers, adding that Americans work harder. Blomfield said he had read data suggesting that the latter wasn't the case. But his thoughts do align with another of Tangen's points, namely that it is easier to start again in the U.S. if a business fails than in the U.K. Backed by the "American dream" ideal that Blomfield mentioned in his interview, the U.S. has long been more closely associated with entrepreneurialism and disruption than Britain, and Europe more widely. Since these comments were made last May (reprinted yesterday via Fortune), we'd like to open this up for a "Slashdot Asks" discussion. Do you think the "know your place" mindset Blomfield cited stifles innovation? How does it compare to the mindset in the United States or elsewhere? Any insights or examples to support your point are appreciated and will contribute to a more meaningful discussion.

The Register's Thomas Claburn reports: Oracle this week asked the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to partially dismiss a challenge to its JavaScript trademark. The move has been criticized as an attempt to either stall or water down legal action against the database goliath over the programming language's name. Deno Land, the outfit behind the Deno JavaScript runtime, filed a petition with the USPTO back in November in an effort to make the trademarked term available to the JavaScript community. This legal effort is led by Node.js creator and Deno Land CEO Ryan Dahl, summarized on the JavaScript.tm website, and supported by more than 16,000 members of the JavaScript community. It aims to remove the fear of an Oracle lawsuit for using the term "JavaScript" in a conference title or business venture.

"Programmers working with JavaScript have formed innumerable community organizations," the website explains. "These organizations, like the standards bodies, have been forced to painstakingly avoid naming the programming language they are built around -- for example, JSConf. Sadly, without risking a legal trademark challenge against Oracle, there can be no 'JavaScript Conference' nor a 'JavaScript Specification.' The world's most popular programming language cannot even have a conference in its name." [...] In the initial trademark complaint, Deno Land makes three arguments to invalidate Oracle's ownership of "JavaScript." The biz claims that JavaScript has become a generic term; that Oracle committed fraud in 2019 when it applied to renew its trademark; and that Oracle has abandoned its trademark because it does not offer JavaScript products or services.

Oracle's motion on Monday focuses on the dismissal of the fraud claim, while arguing that it expects to prevail on the other two claims, citing corporate use of the trademarked term "in connection with a variety of offerings, including its JavaScript Extension Toolkit as well as developer's guides and educational resources, and also that relevant consumers do not perceive JavaScript as a generic term." The fraud claim follows from Deno Land's assertion that the material Oracle submitted in support of its trademark renewal application has nothing to do with any Oracle product. "Oracle, through its attorney, submitted specimens showing screen captures of the Node.js website, a project created by Ryan Dahl, Petitioner's Chief Executive Officer," the trademark cancellation petition says. "Node.js is not affiliated with Oracle, and the use of screen captures of the 'nodejs.org' website as a specimen did not show any use of the mark by Oracle or on behalf of Oracle."

Oracle contends that in fact it submitted two specimens to the USPTO -- a screenshot from the Node.js website and another from its own Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit. And this, among other reasons, invalidates the fraud claim, Big Red's attorneys contend. "Where, as here, Registrant 'provided the USPTO with [two specimens]' at least one of which shows use of the mark in commerce, Petitioner cannot plausibly allege that the inclusion of a second, purportedly defective specimen, was material," Oracle's motion argues, adding that no evidence of fraudulent intent has been presented. Beyond asking the court to toss the fraud claim, Oracle has requested an additional thirty days to respond to the other two claims.