Submission + - WriterAgent Week 8-9: Adding NumPy to LibreOffice

Submitted by KeithCu
KeithCu writes: It was exciting to have my Libreoffice extension writeup get picked up by Slashdot.org, but at the time I was working on features even more compelling. This update discusses adding capabilities LibreOffice probably should have added many years ago: real scientific Python.

LibreOffice has lagged behind Excel in data science workflows. With my recent work in WriterAgent, you can now leverage the full Python ecosystem: Run NumPy in Calc, generate pandas DataFrames from Writer, or let AI agents create scripts and insert results into your document.

Submission + - A New California Proposal Could Effectively Ban All Aftermarket Tires (caranddriver.com)

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

California's proposed "Replacement Tire Efficiency Program" would set standards requiring all aftermarket tires to be at least as efficient as the tires sold on new cars. The proposal posits that OE tires are more energy or fuel-efficient than their replacement counterparts, and that by improving the efficiency of replacement tires, California could cut back on the state's CO2 emissions, and California drivers could save on fuel costs.

California comes up with yet another bad idea.

Submission + - Fedora Linux 43 exposes 20-year-old Microsoft Outlook security failure (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Fedora Linux 43 users upgrading to the latest Dovecot mail server discovered something rather unsettling: some older Microsoft Outlook configurations may have been silently ignoring SSL/TLS settings for POP3 email connections for years. According to a Fedora community blog post, affected Outlook clients reportedly continued using insecure port 110 connections even when encryption was enabled in the application settings. The issue surfaced after Dovecot 2.4 disabled plaintext authentication on non secure connections by default, causing Outlook users to suddenly lose mailbox access after the Fedora 43 upgrade.

The report suggests the behavior may date back as far as Outlook 2007, although modern Outlook builds were not fully tested. Fedora admins stress that the problem could be limited to legacy account configurations rather than current versions of Outlook itself. Still, the discovery has sparked discussion among Linux admins and security folks because many users likely assumed their email traffic was encrypted simply because Outlook claimed SSL/TLS was enabled. The incident also highlights how stricter defaults in modern open source infrastructure can expose ancient assumptions and questionable behaviors that quietly survived for decades.

Submission + - Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search (404media.co)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: The moderators of the biohacking subreddit say that peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots. The strategy is an effort to systematically manipulate the answers provided by chatbots by manipulating the underlying source material that those chatbots will scrapeâ"in this case, a popular Reddit community.

Submission + - EU working to abandon US tech (politico.eu)

Submitted by whitroth
whitroth writes: Shutting down Office for the ICC was clearly a wake-up call.
"The EU is moving to counter American dominance in technology by reaching for one of the oldest tools in its arsenal: industrial strategy.

As the European Commission unveiled a plan Wednesday to reduce Europeâ(TM)s reliance on the foreign technology providers that underpin the modern economy, it was careful to stress that it was not picking a fight with U.S. digital giants.

Instead, the tech sovereignty package â" motivated in no small part by U.S. President Donald Trumpâ(TM)s weaponization of Europeâ(TM)s dependence on American firms â" takes a longer-term view: boost the continentâ(TM)s players so they can eventually challenge their U.S. rivals."

Submission + - Big Tech hide data centres' environmental toll

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: How Big Tech wrote secrecy into EU law to hide data centres’ environmental toll

“DATA CENTRE OPERATORS successfully lobbied the European Commission to amend legislation intended to bring transparency to the continent’s booming data centre industry, a new investigation has revealed.”

“The investigation, led by Investigate Europe, has uncovered how Microsoft and DigitalEurope, a lobby group whose members include Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, led the charge to amend these new transparency rules.”

‘A Microsoft spokesperson said they “support greater transparency around data centres”, adding that they are “taking further steps to increase openness, while protecting confidential business information.”’

Submission + - Plex keeps turning into social media and users are getting fed up (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Plex used to be the app self hosting nerds loved because it stayed focused on organizing and streaming personal media libraries. Now the company is adding discussions, emoji reactions, compatibility scores, social following features, and community conversations tied to movies and TV shows. Coming right after the controversial Plex Pass price increase, many longtime users are questioning whether Plex still understands why people liked the platform in the first place.

Some of the new tools could be useful, especially shared watchlists across streaming services, but a growing number of users seem far more interested in reliability, playback improvements, and core media server features than turning Plex into another engagement driven social platform. The bigger Plex gets, the more it risks becoming exactly the kind of bloated streaming ecosystem many users were trying to escape.

Submission + - T2 Linux 26.6 with PowerVR Mesa 3D on RISCV-64 RV23 Framework laptop module (t2linux.com)

Submitted by ReneR
ReneR writes: The T2 SDE project has released T2 Linux 26.6 "Mythos", delivering a fully reproducible KDE Plasma Wayland desktop across an unusually broad range of architectures. Beyond x86-64 and ARM64, the release now provides reproducible KDE Plasma Wayland builds on Musl/Clang builds and vintage RISC platforms including DEC Alpha, Sgi MIPS64, SPARC64, HPPA, and IA-64.
Version 26.6 includes Flatpak integration with KDE Discover, Linux 7.0, Mesa 26.1, GCC 16.1, LLVM/Clang 22.1, and improved ARM64 Panfrost and RISC-V PowerVR graphics support, and more than 3,200 changesets comprising nearly 4,000 package updates and 260 bug fixes.

Submission + - AI security's cost bottleneck isn't tokens – it's validation (scworld.com)

Submitted by spatwei
spatwei writes: A recent report by Axios claims a company accidentally spent $500 million in one month on Claude usage after failing to implement usage limits for employees. This extreme anecdote punctuates growing uncertainty about how token usage and API bills could become a major bottleneck for companies seeking to reap the productivity benefits of AI tools.

Even major tech companies are reportedly seeking to reel in their AI spending, with The Verge reporting that Microsoft is canceling its Claude Code licenses to steer employees toward its own GitHub Copilot and Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga telling The Information the company used up its entire AI coding budget for 2026 within four months.

How does this fit into cybersecurity? With the landmark moment of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos’ release under Project Glasswing, AI-driven code review and vulnerability discovery are gaining interest, but an analysis by Contrast Security offers a sobering look at the “hidden cost of AI security scanners.”

Contrast’s research found that the biggest spend for organizations seeking to use AI to scan their code for vulnerabilities isn’t the API bill, but the cost of triaging and validating thousands of findings, including a huge number of false positives and inconsistent findings between runs and models.
For example, a simple scan of 1.8 million lines of code using Claude Sonnet 4.6 surfaced 3,560 findings and cost just $315 in token usage, but those 3,560 findings don’t triage and validate themselves. Contrast calculated that if a security engineer making $150,000 per year spent half an hour triaging each finding, the labor cost would come out to $128,000.

Submission + - AI is pushing workers away from college and toward trade schools (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: A new survey from AI career transition company Pelgo suggests AI may already be reshaping how unemployed Americans think about higher education. Only 20 percent of respondents said they would choose a four-year college degree again if given the chance to start over, while growing numbers said they would instead pursue trade school, entrepreneurship, or faster entry into the workforce through two-year programs.

The findings raise an uncomfortable question for universities: what happens when white collar jobs increasingly look vulnerable to automation while skilled trades still require humans physically showing up somewhere? As AI continues creeping into office work, many workers appear to be questioning whether massive student loan debt still makes sense in 2026.

Submission + - Scientists charged with bringing deactivated mpox virus to US, lying about it (abcnews.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Two scientists at a U.S. government lab were charged with smuggling vials of deactivated mpox virus into the country from Africa and lying about it during interviews with investigators at a Detroit airport, authorities said Tuesday.

Vincent Munster, who is chief of the virus ecology section at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, and Claude Kwe, who works with him. Both were stopped at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in January after a flight from Paris and nine days in the Republic of Congo.

Munster “adamantly denied” returning to the U.S. with biological materials or samples, the FBI said in a court filing. But tests subsequently revealed that Munster and Kwe were traveling with vials of deactivated mpox, the FBI said, yet they had failed to declare them or obtain the necessary permission.

Munster told investigators at the Detroit-area airport that any necessary documents were in his laptop, “but you don't need them. I do this all the time,” the FBI quoted him as saying.

“It is reasonable to believe that Munster's statements regarding the possession of the required documentation to (customs officers) were materially false,” the FBI said.

"Any deliberate effort to conceal and smuggle biological materials into the United States without proper authorization is a breach of the public’s trust and could have placed the public at risk,” said Marcus Sykes of the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services.

In 2022, the mpox virus was confirmed to spread via sex for the first time and triggered outbreaks in more than 70 countries that had not previously reported mpox.

Submission + - Android Gets Fake Call Detection That Uses RCS (9to5google.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Phone by Google wants to combat the “growing threat of impersonation scams” and protect Android users against “sophisticated, AI-powered deepfake attacks” with fake call detection.

Fake call detection requires that both parties are on Android and use the Phone by Google app, while Google Messages and Google Contacts also have to be installed. When a contact calls, their phone “sends a silent confirmation signal in real time to your device to verify the call is legitimate and truly coming from the contact’s device.”

This digital handshake uses end-to-end encrypted RCS (Rich Communication Services). If you’re being scammed by an impersonator, your phone will notice that the “initial confirmation signal will be missing,” and ping the contact’s real device to double-check. If their real device says, “I’m not making a call right now,” you’ll get a warning on your screen advising you to hang up immediately.

Submission + - Physicists Just Achieved 'Perfect Randomness' For The First Time Ever (sciencealert.com) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: To try to find a solution to this problem, the researchers turned to a quantum experiment known as the Bell test.

They created a pair of entangled quantum bits, or qubits, separated by 30 meters (98 feet) and cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero.

The ETH Zurich team instead demonstrated something called randomness amplification, deliberately starting with imperfect randomness â" taking randomness that may contain subtle flaws or biases and transforming it into randomness that can be certified as perfectly unpredictable.

Submission + - Thanks to robots, Ukraine is now talking about winning, not just surviving (defenseone.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: A small but growing number of European officials and analysts are saying what four years ago was unthinkable: Ukraine isn’t just surviving its grueling war with Russia, it is in some ways thriving and may even be on a path to victory.

This isn’t yet captured in headlines—for example, about last weekend’s barrage of Russian drones and missiles around Ukraine—but in the details, like how some 90 percent were intercepted.

Several long-term trends have shifted in Ukraine’s favor, and the core reason is its fierce focus on AI and robotics.

Submission + - AWS quietly drops 160 TB of monthly multicloud data to fend off regulators (www.thestack.technology)

Submitted by NakNak
NakNak writes: Regulators are very worried about cloud competition between the hyperscalers. AWS said it would make multicloud solutions easier to adopt, so that there would be – in theory – price competition at a service level.

Last week, it dropped what it will probably hold up as proof: a free tier on its Interconnect that let's its customers run 500 Mbps worth of workloads elsewhere. As long as the other side doesn't charge data fees, of course. So far, Oracle Cloud isn't.

Submission + - Trump Signs AI Executive Order Asking Companies To Give Government Early Access (cnbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order asking artificial intelligence companies to provide models to the federal government to assess their capabilities ahead of a full release. The order asks companies, on a voluntary basis, to participate in a benchmarking process to assess a model’s “advanced cyber capabilities” and determine whether it should be considered a “covered frontier model.” It then asks for access to those models up to 30 days before the companies plan to release them more broadly, and enables the government to help select the “trusted partners” that will receive early access.

“Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize the creation of a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement for the development, publication, release, or distribution of new AI models, including frontier models,” the order said. Trump signed the order in private, just weeks after he postponed a signing ceremony with prominent tech CEOs because he “didn’t like certain aspects of it,” he told reporters at the time. [...] Trump’s AI order outlines several timeframes to develop directives and other guidance, specifically calling on the Department of Defense to prioritize the cyber defense of its information systems.

Submission + - University of California Math Professors Push for Return of SAT/ACT Math Testing (kpbs.org)

Submitted by Koreantoast
Koreantoast writes: News sources are reporting that faculty members in the University of California system are calling for a return to standardized testing for applications to STEM majors. From KPBS:

Hundreds of University of California faculty members are calling on the university system to require standardized math test scores from applicants to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) majors.

Nearly 1,000 faculty members have signed the open letter. More than 200 of them are from UC San Diego.

The UC Board of Regents voted to eliminate the requirement in 2020. In their letter, the faculty call it “a temporary measure that has now become a permanent vulnerability...”

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the letter reads.

Faculty have reported that students being admitted are unprepared for even basic classes: one faculty report last year saying that the number of students placed in classes to remediate elementary and middle-school math before they could take precalculus increased to 8.5% from 0.5% between 2020 and 2025. Several universities which dropped testing requirements in 2020 have already reinstituted testing over the last several years including MIT, Dartmouth, and Yale.

Submission + - Adafruit Receives Demand Letter from Fenwick Legal Counsel on Behalf of Flux.ai (reddit.com)

Submitted by Matt_Bennett
Matt_Bennett writes: Adafruit received at 10:38 p.m. ET on May 22, 2026 a letter from former FBI chief of staff, Jonathan F. Lenzner, and partner at Fenwick & West LLP, counsel for Flux, demanding, among other things, that Adafruit refrain from publishing an article addressing what the letter characterizes as false and potentially defamatory claims about Flux, including statements about Flux’s intellectual property, commercial traction and user base.

Submission + - Microsoft Deliberately Bricking All Office for Mac 2019/2021 Installations (osnews.com) 2

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: MacOS users who opted to buy a copy of Microsoft Office for macOS back in 2019 or 2021, eschewing the Office 365 subscription, so you could keep on using Office 2019/2021 forever if you wanted to. Just like in the old days.

Consumer Rights Wiki reports:

"Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion (2026) is a scheduled remote degradation of perpetually-licensed Microsoft Office software for macOS and iOS, set for July 13, 2026 when a license-validation certificate used by the Office apps expires.[1] After Office 2019 for Mac reached end of support in October 2023, Microsoft assured customers their installed apps would "continue to function."[2] The July 13, 2026 conversion instead drops the apps into a Microsoft-defined "reduced functionality mode," in which files can be opened and viewed but not edited or saved.[1][3] By May 30, 2026, the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the "continue to function" clause was removed.[4][2]" https://consumerrights.wiki/w/...

Microsoft’s advice to the users they’re stealing from is to keep using the applications as mere viewers, switch to the free Office 365 web applications, pay for a 365 subscription, or buy a brand new regular copy of Office 2024. None of these make any sense, and clearly, all of this should be illegal, but it’s not because the software industry is a clown show.

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