Submission + - Researchers identify people through ordinary Wi-Fi with 99 percent-accuracy (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Baron_Yam
Baron_Yam writes: Security researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany have published a paper demonstrating that unencrypted beamforming data broadcast by Wi-Fi devices during normal operation can be used to identify individuals walking through a room with 99.5% accuracy, regardless of whether the individuals are carrying Wi-Fi devices. The tactic leverages the router's beamforming tech to identify individuals with up to 99.5% accuracy, and it works with existing routers, too.

The system, called BFId, requires no specialized hardware, no access to the target Wi-Fi network, and works even if the person being tracked isn't carrying a wireless device. The team tested the attack on 197 participants, the largest dataset ever used in Wi-Fi-based identification works, and plans to present its findings at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in Taipei.

See GitHub — https://github.com/ruvnet/RuVi... — for your own personal implementation requiring a couple of APs and a couple of ESP32 nodes. You can get full-home per-zone motion and occupancy detection fairly reliably, with the potential for pose detection and in optimal areas even respiration rate. With the right hardware and configuration, you can theoretically get heart rate too.

Submission + - Teachers' Union Urges Schools to Curb AI Chatbots and Screen Time

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The New York Times reports the $22.5 million AI partnership to 'bring AI into the classroom' struck last July between the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, Microsoft, and OpenAI has hit a bump in the road as the AFT urges schools to curb AI chatbots and screen time, recommending 'no screens' at all for those in second grade or younger, and no AI chatbots for students in elementary school.

The union’s effort reflects a backlash among parents and educators against heavy use of school-issued laptops and apps. Some parents and nonprofit children’s groups are also pushing back against campaigns by tech giants like Google and OpenAI to spread their AI products in schools.

This week, AFT president Randi Weingarten said that the union was negotiating safety and privacy standards for AI use in schools with 'our partners in the AI academy,' and that Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic had agreed in principle to those standards. “We’re being transparent,” Weingarten said, adding that "We’re willing to walk away from the funding that we receive here if we don’t get the safety and privacy."

Submission + - The oral tradition that built software may not survive AI (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: Writing software is not just about knowing what to code. Verbally passing on knowledge of why something is done one way or the other, how to diagnose an issue, or what changes took place after implementation because no one documented those changes has been part of programming since day one. However, with the advent of AI, that institutional knowledge may be under threat.

It’s tempting therefore to imagine that generative AI will step into the breach and solve this for us. After all, even if you don’t want to turn a large language model (LLM) loose on a legacy code base—and there are plenty of reasons that you shouldn’t—having it generate documentation on the codebase itself might sound like a solution to the absence of other written information. LLMs can certainly summarize code back to you.

But hold up with that idea. Beyond hallucinations, there’s a deeper problem: Writing documentation is itself part of the thinking process. Whether I’m writing history or software, putting an approach into words helps refine it before I sink hours into implementation. Documentation also captures intent. An LLM may be able to summarize what a codebase does, but it cannot reliably explain why a developer chose one approach over another, or what trade-offs shaped that decision.

Moreover, it’s a chance for somebody else to understand why you did what you did. If they plan to change what I wrote (especially in a few years), they might understand why I needed to write it that way and what might be lost if you take it out. An LLM can read code that I’ve written. It might even scan a large codebase and accurately summarize what it’s doing. But it can’t assess authorial intent.

Submission + - Acer just announced a Debian Linux gaming handheld (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: announced a new handheld gaming device called the Nitro Blaze Link, but unlike devices such as the Steam Deck or ASUS ROG Ally, this one is not trying to run games locally. Instead, Acer describes it as a “streaming-first” handheld designed to stream games from an existing gaming PC using Sunshine and Moonlight. The company says the device runs Debian Linux, includes a 7-inch WUXGA touchscreen, Wi-Fi 6, and weighs just 464 grams. Curiously, Acer never disclosed the processor powering the device, while the published specs list only 1GB RAM and 8GB eMMC storage.

The idea here seems pretty simple: instead of cramming increasingly power-hungry GPUs into portable gaming PCs, Acer is betting some gamers would rather have a lightweight Linux streaming terminal for couch gaming around the house. The Nitro Blaze Link is expected to launch in North America during Q4 2026, although Acer has not announced pricing yet.

Submission + - Blue Origin rocket New Glenn 4 explodes during static fire (orlandosentinel.com)

Submitted by symbolset
symbolset writes: Many sources. Including Orlando Sentinel.

All personnel accounted for. The rocket, planned to launch Project Leo internet satellites for Amazon in the coming days is lost. The detonation was significant, likely destroying the launch pad and ground support equipment nearby. Speculation is it could be a year or more before Blue Origin can attempt another launch as this is their only launch facility. Another New Glenn booster was on a hangar nearby that appears damaged. No status on that booster yet.

Just days ago NASA announced the selection of New Glenn for launch of two rapid development rovers later this year.

Submission + - Yale Reinstates Mandatory Standardized Testing Admissions Policy (dailycaller.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Yale University is mandating standardized testing (SAT/ACT) scores for all first-year and transfer students after a 6-year test-optional hiatus, the university announced Wednesday.

Beginning in the fall admissions cycle, all undergraduate applicants must submit standardized testing scores from either the SAT or the ACT.

The office of undergraduate admissions dropped its mandatory requirement of scores in 2020 following the COVID-19 school shutdowns. Over a thousand other American universities did the same. (RELATED: Vast Majority Of Americans Say 4-Year College Just Not Worth It, Poll Shows)

Yale moved to a test-flexible admissions policy in 2024, allowing applicants to submit scores from either the SAT, ACT, Advanced Placement (AP), or International Baccalaureate. The university's reinstated policy marks a return to its pre-2020 requirements.

Submission + - Supreme Court Lets Meta Lawsuit Proceed, Opening Door To 50-State Legal Wave (fortune.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a push to avoid a lawsuit alleging that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users, a decision that comes as social media companies increasingly face legal scrutiny. Parent company Meta appealed after Vermont’s highest court allowed a suit filed by its attorney general in 2023 to move forward. The company is facing similar lawsuits from states across the country, accusing it of knowingly designing addictive features. Meta had argued that it can’t be sued in Vermont court because neither the company nor the app design has specific ties to the state. Vermont countered that the sites' large number of teen users gives its courts jurisdiction.

The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal in a brief, unexplained order, as is typical. The procedural decision comes after court losses for Meta and YouTube in social media addiction lawsuits in California and New Mexico. [...] Meta, for its part, has said that it has already introduced dozens of tools to support teens and their families and suggested it would have worked with the states on standards for youth social media use. Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark applauded the decision, saying it affirms “that companies that choose to do business in Vermont, like Meta, can be held accountable when they harm kids.”

Submission + - MIT Researchers Develop a Low-Cost Technique To Get Lithium Out of Rocks (mit.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Currently, lithium hard rock extraction involves baking the rock at over 1,000 Celsius and chemically leaching it to extract lithium. The rest of the rock is discarded. Now, a team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere has developed a low-temperature process for extracting battery-grade lithium from the most common type of lithium-bearing mineral. The process uses a liquid reagent to dissolve the rock into the useful forms of its constituent parts: not just battery-ready lithium salts, but also smelter-grade alumina and cement-ready silica. After the minerals are extracted, the solvent and reagent can be recovered and used again so waste levels approach zero. The researchers estimate the closed-loop process is half the cost of traditional lithium hard rock extraction and could make it cost-competitive with extracting lithium from brine water.

Submission + - Occupy Wall Street Co-Founder Built an AI App to Help Activists (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an era where Silicon Valley’s conservatism is both expressed openly and becoming more intense by the day, it’s strange to think that tech was once seen as a hive of liberalism. The right-wing nature of today’s tech industry means that its products tend to also be seen as serving right-wing interests, either in their actual operation (like X’s openly and unrepentantly right-wing chatbot Grok) or by the simple fact that their existence serves to enrich a small group of very powerful, very conservative people.

But does it have to be this way? Can LLMs and AI agents find a place in the toolkit of progressive activist groups? The conviction that they can is the idea behind a new app called Outcry, which provides a chatbot designed specifically as a “private, on-device AI mentor for activists, organizers and movement builders.” (There’s also a web version, although it obviously lacks the privacy benefits of being entirely offline.) It’s the brainchild of Occupy Wall Street co-creator Micah White, who recently wrote a blog post about the thinking behind the project.

[...] Outcry’s other distinguishing feature is that its dataset is entirely offline—it’s included with the download. According to the readme, the entire dataset is downloaded to your device at first launch, and stored in your library’s Application Support directory.

Submission + - Pentagon says US military personnel targeted using commercial location data (msn.com) 1

Submitted by JoeyRox
JoeyRox writes: U.S. forces deployed to war zones have been targeted using commercially available location data, according to reports fielded by military officials, an illustration of how the global surveillance economy is shaping the battlefield.

In a letter shared with Reuters by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, U.S. Central Command said it had "received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater." The message, sent on April 14, offered no further specifics, but Centcom's area of responsibility includes the Gulf, where U.S. forces are facing off against the Iranian military over the Strait of Hormuz.

Submission + - Microsoft Allegedly Leaked Dutch Civil Servants' Data To the US (cybernews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The technology giant Microsoft has been accused of leaking the data of civil servants working for the Netherlands' regulatory agencies to the US House of Representatives. The civil servants affected by the leak work at the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) and the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP), according to the NL Times. They are involved in implementing the Digital Services Act (DSA), the European Union regulation on online services, aimed at combating illegal content and protecting user rights.

NL Times reports that Microsoft shared emails, minutes, and invitations sent by the civil servants without redacting their names in the documents. Willemijn Aerdts, Dutch State Secretary for Digital Economy and Sovereignty, said she discussed the allegations with US Ambassador to the Netherlands Joe Popolo.

Submission + - IBM and Red Hat Commit $5 Billion to Redefine the Future of Open Source in the A (ibm.com)

Submitted by wiggles
wiggles writes: ARMONK, N.Y., May 28, 2026 â" IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Red Hat today announced Project Lightwell, a $5 billion commitment backed by new frontier AI capabilities and a global force of more than 20,000 engineers to help enterprises secure open source software. Together, these investments establish a new model for enterprise use of open source software, from upstream development through production environments.

Project Lightwell will establish a trusted enterprise clearinghouse combined with a global force of engineers to identify and fix vulnerabilities at scale. The clearinghouse will serve as a security coordination layer, using advanced AI capabilities to validate and test fixes across an unprecedented volume of open source code. These capabilities will be offered through commercial subscriptions, allowing enterprises to integrate secure patches directly into their existing software supply chains with enterprise-grade validation and lifecycle management.

IBM and Red Hat have already begun collaborating with a select group of early adopters on Project Lightwell, including Bank of America, BNY, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorganChase, Mastercard, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Canada, State Street, Visa and Wells Fargo. The real-world insights from these initial deployments will actively shape how vulnerabilities are identified, validated, and remediated at scale across complex software supply chains.

Submission + - I found a second vote.gov -- and it's registered to the White House

Submitted by As_I_Please
As_I_Please writes: The Drey Dossier reports that the National Design Studio, an office created by executive order and which reports only to the White House, has been building copies of federal agency websites like vote.gov, passports.gov, login.gov and others.

What [the National Design Studio] is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure. Vote.gov belongs to the Election Assistance Commission, and the studio built a copy. Passports belong to the State Department, and the studio is building a replacement this week. Login.gov belonged to GSA, and the studio’s guy runs it now.

Trump has said publicly that this infrastructure is for other presidents, and he is right about that. It is the one thing in this story I take him at his word on. The infrastructure outlasts him. Whoever wins in 2028 inherits the websites, the vendors, the data, and the hardware, sealed and waiting.

NDS Infrastructure Map — my live working github map of every National Design Studio subdomain I have found, filterable by status, registrant, and parent domain. If you want to retrace this investigation or watch new subdomains appear in real time, start here.

Submission + - LG Display thinks it solved one of OLEDâ(TM)s biggest monitor problems (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: LG Display says it has started mass production of what it calls the worldâ(TM)s first 240Hz RGB Stripe OLED panel, aiming to address one of the biggest complaints about OLED monitors: text clarity. Unlike many current OLED displays that use alternative subpixel layouts, the new panel uses a traditional RGB stripe arrangement that LG says improves readability for coding, spreadsheets, document editing, stock trading, and other desktop-heavy workloads. The 27-inch panel also combines a 160 PPI pixel density with support for switching between 4K at 240Hz and FHD at 480Hz using the companyâ(TM)s Dynamic Frequency & Resolution technology.

OLED monitors have traditionally been associated with gaming and media consumption, while many office users continued sticking with IPS LCD panels due to concerns over text rendering and burn-in. LG Display appears eager to change that perception by positioning OLED as a single display solution for both productivity and gaming. The company says it is beginning production alongside major monitor brands, although it did not name specific partners or products yet.

Submission + - DOJ Charges Google Employee With $1 Million Polymarket Bet On Search Term (cnbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Federal prosecutors charged a Google employee with fraud on Wednesday, alleging that he made $1.2 million off of bets using insider information on Polymarket. Prosecutors claim that Michele Spagnuolo, a staff information security engineer at Google, used confidential information to place trades correctly betting that singer d4vd would be Google’s most searched person in 2025. Spagnuolo has been charged with money laundering, commodities fraud and wire fraud. The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, was unsealed on Wednesday.

Spagnuolo was arrested Wednesday morning in New York, ABC reported. “Spagnuolo had access to Google’s internal data systems, including a particular Google internal software tool that provided him access to confidential, nonpublic Year in Search data,” the prosecutors said in their complaint. Some observers of the Polymarket platform flagged the user “AlphaRaccoon” back in December for suspicious trades on the most searched person contracts. The complaint Wednesday said that Spagnuolo was the person behind that account. “Google officially and publicly announced its Year in Search 2025 results on or about December 4, 2025. Soon after it did so, Spagnuolo’s AlphaRaccoon account, profited approximately $1.2 million on his Google Year in Search 2025-related bets,” the complaint said.

[...] Spagnuolo is also facing a civil case from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where he’s charged with insider trading. The complaint detailed that Spagnuolo correctly predicted the outcomes of a slew of other search markets, including contracts like “Will Zohran Mamdani rank in the Top 5 most searched” and “Will Squid Game be the #1 searched TV show.” “Spagnuolo misappropriated the material Confidential Information by knowingly or recklessly using it to trade the 2025 Year in Search List Contracts in breach of his duties of trust and confidentiality,” the CFTC complaint alleged.

Submission + - Joust 3 (Joust clone) using WebRTC (joust3.com)

Submitted by gordm
gordm writes: This is an experiment as to what is possible with web-browser LAN gaming. Joust is a particularly twitchy game... not a lot of mechanisms to cover for lag.

Currently hosted with a $5 /month Cloudflare plan, and I'm wondering if that can be saturated (slash-dotted). There's very little server overhead with WebRTC, actual gaming data (once LAN connections are established) bypass the server.

Submission + - China Is Testing Its State Surveillance Model Abroad (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: When a remote Pacific village asked for help with rowdy youth, the Chinese police arrived with a surveillance system. Then came the backlash.

Their solution was to introduce an obscure Mao-era community surveillance system: the Fengqiao Experience.

Named after Fengqiao, a town in eastern China, the system encouraged neighbors to spy and snitch on one another to root out political enemies. The system has been revived under Mr. Xi as part of a push to snuff out any challenges to the Chinese Communist Party.

In China, the system calls for the police to monitor individual households in sprawling apartment complexes, in one example assigning each unit a color code that denoted whether occupants presented a security risk. The police have also visited the homes of minority groups like Tibetans and Uyghurs to promote party policies. Government workers have visited churches to give “anti-cult” lectures. And companies are required to register their employees in police databases.

The idea of introducing such a heavy-handed style of state surveillance in the Solomon Islands alarmed local politicians and observers in nearby countries like Australia, who worried it could give the government the tools to stifle freedoms.

The Fengqiao pilot was suspended after an outcry. And the election this month of Matthew Wale, a prime minister who has historically been skeptical of Beijing, raises questions about China’s foothold in the country, and whether its ideas travel as easily as the party hopes.

Submission + - Websites Have a New Way To Spy On Visitors: Analyzing Their SSD Activity (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Now sites have a new way to spy on their visitors: measuring subtle interactions with their solid-state drives. The technique, named FROST (fingerprinting remotely using OPFS-based SSD timing), allows sites to monitor other sites a visitor is viewing and what apps are open on their devices. The technique, laid out in a research paper (PDF), exploits a side channel, a form of leak resulting from physical manifestations such as electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or the time required to complete a task. By measuring the manifestations, attackers can decrypt encrypted traffic and infer other confidential data.

The attack that FROST uses is known as a contention side channel, which measures the interaction of various processes all using (or competing for) a given resource. By measuring the timing of certain I/O (input-output) operations of the SSD a visitor is using, the researchers were able to determine the websites open in other tabs—even on other browsers—and the apps that were open on the visitor’s device. FROST requires no interaction from the visitor other than opening the site hosting the attack. [...] Unlike previous contention side-channel attacks on SSDs, FROST runs exclusively in the browser. It uses JavaScript that interacts with the OPFS (origin private file system), an allocated storage space that’s reserved for a specific site to run code needed to complete a given task. Websites can create one with no interaction required by the visitor.

While each file system is sandboxed, meaning it’s isolated from other websites and from the device system itself, the JavaScript can measure the I/O interactions. Then, by running those interactions through a pretrained convolutional neural network—a system that uses deep learning to analyze text, audio, and images—the attacker can deduce various apps and websites open on the device. “The attacker continuously measures SSD contention by performing random reads from a large OPFS file,” the researchers explained. “SSD contention caused by user activity causes measurable latency differences for these read operations. By training a convolutional neural network (CNN) on these traces, the attacker can fingerprint user activity on the host system by classifying new traces using the trained model.”

Submission + - The AI Fight Brewing Inside The New York Times (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: How newsrooms should use AI — or if they should at all — has been a recurrent debate within the media industry over the last several years. Increasingly, these rules are being hammered out at the bargaining table between unions and publishers. Right now, employees at The New York Times are gearing up for a fight. Unionized staff with the Tech Guild say Times management has refused to provide the union with information related to how the company has used AI, its plans for AI use in the future, and how it will affect employees’ jobs and workflow. (The union filed an unfair labor practice charge earlier this month.) The Tech Guild, a NewsGuild of New York unit of around 700 software engineers, designers, product and project managers, and data analysts, also filed grievances saying Times management violated their collective bargaining agreement when it started using two internal AI tools that track and evaluate employee performance and activity.

[...] Both the Tech Guild and the Times Guild (which represents 1,500 editorial, ad sales, and support staff at the Times) filed unfair labor practice charges against the Times, saying that company violated labor law by refusing to respond to their requests for information around AI use at the outlet. The Times did not respond to specific questions about how it uses DX and Glean, but spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in an email that the company disagrees with the characterizations made in grievances and that it would respond as part of its “normal contractual process.” “Likewise, we will respond to this Request for Information (RFI) in due course as we’ve done with 80+ other RFIs from the Guild in recent years,” Rhoades Ha said.

The Times Guild is currently bargaining a new contract, pushing for robust protections against AI, like requirements that a human is behind any AI tool being used, that any journalism utilizing AI is transparently labeled, and that staff are compensated for AI model training deals the company might make. The Times deploys artificial intelligence tools for some reporting, like using it to parse millions of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein or scan satellite images of Gaza to try to find where Israel had dropped a specific kind of bomb. [...] [Ben Harnett, a software engineer at the Times and chair of the unit’s generative AI committee] emphasizes that the unit’s position is not that AI shouldn’t ever be used, but that workers should have a say in how it’s deployed. Metrics like how many tokens an employee uses or how often they’re using AI to do their jobs create pressure to do more and incentives that don’t align with doing quality work. “It’s going to distract [you] from actually doing a good job, which is what we think the company should want,” he says.

Submission + - ChatGPT murdered common sense in the bedroom with the candlestick? (asahi.com) 2

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: Surprised to see this story has NOT been mentioned here. Maybe the lack of potential for funny? But I see it as yet another example of the harms of AI via unintended consequences. So here's a short summary, mostly rehashing the NHK versions of the story. The Giants are to Japanese baseball what the Yankees are to American baseball, except much more so (though I guess you could argue both teams are long past their prime glory days). A few days ago Abe, the manager of the Giants, resigned in disgrace. The incident that started it was a trivial argument with his older daughter, but she asked ChatGPT for advice, and the "intelligent" advice from ChatGPT caused the trivial family situation to escalate completely out of control. The firm adherence to rules, especially the silly ones, was important, too, but it's a pretty insane situation with gigantic consequences.

Not sure how to properly generalize the problem, but genAI is making people dependent and stupid. Yes, there are have been lots of previous technologies that have been accused of doing the same sort of thing, but I think genAI has crossed a threshold and we poor humans can't keep up now. By the time we learn what to do about the last crisis, genAI has already changed and caused two to five fresh crises. Or more.

I included a video link and a newspaper story (both in English), but my thinking on these problems is more influenced by some books about Facebook and TikTok that I have been reading recently. The AIs' fingerprints are all over the corpse of common sense even as they try to frame "everyday human idiocy" for the murder.

(Disclaimer needed? I'm currently working "with" Claude to replace a complicated PERL system. Is the genAI making me stupid? Or has it helped me find a more elegant solution to the problem? The code is much prettier than my own, and the webpage it designed looks better than any of the ones I did myself... But perhaps that's just because I tend to bleed between languages?)

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworl...

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