Submission + - Mozilla Firefox uses AI to hunt bugs and suddenly zero days do not feel so untou (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla says it used an AI model from Anthropic to comb through Firefoxâ(TM)s code, and the results were hard to ignore. In Firefox 150, the team fixed 271 vulnerabilities identified during this effort, a number that would have been unthinkable not long ago. Instead of relying only on fuzzing or human review, the AI was able to reason through code and surface issues that typically require highly specialized expertise.

The bigger implication is less about one release and more about where this is heading. Security has long favored attackers, since they only need to find a single flaw while defenders have to protect everything. If AI can scale vulnerability discovery for defenders, that dynamic could start to shift. It does not mean zero days disappear overnight, but it suggests a future where bugs are found and fixed faster than attackers can weaponize them.

Submission + - Sun sets on Japanese pacifism with lifting of military trade ban (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Japan has lifted a post-war ban on weapons exports as it moves away from a pacifist stance that has defined its defence policy since the end of the Second World War.

Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s prime minister, announced the plans after a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, writing on X that the change was necessary given the “increasingly challenging security environment”.

Submission + - Google's Internal Politics Leave It Playing Catch-Up on AI Coding (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At Google, leaders are anxious about falling behind in the race to offer AI coding tools, especially as rivals like Anthropic PBC offer more effective and popular tools to businesses, according to people familiar with the matter. The search giant is now working to unite some of its coding initiatives under one banner to speed progress and take advantage of a surge in customer interest. In some corners of Alphabet's Google, particularly AI lab DeepMind, concerns about the company’s position are mounting, according to current and former employees and executives, who declined to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

Businesses are just starting to realize that AI coding tools can enable anyone to build products by prompting a chatbot. But Google doesn’t have a clear solution for them. Its Gemini model’s capabilities are sprinkled across half a dozen different coding products with different branding, indicating how the company’s lack of focus and competing internal efforts have hampered success, the people said. Even internally, some Google engineers prefer to use Anthropic’s Claude Code, they said. More concerning, the people said, are the engineers who are struggling to adopt AI coding at all. [...] Google’s emphasis on its own technology has also complicated the push to catch up. Most employees are banned from using competing tools such as Claude Code or Codex due to security concerns, but Googlers can request exceptions if they can demonstrate they have a business case, one former employee said. Some teams at DeepMind, including those working on the Gemini model, internal applications, and open source models, use Claude Code, according to three former employees. “You want the best people to use the best tool, even inside Google,” one of the former employees said. [...]

In recent years, DeepMind has tried to tighten control over how its AI breakthroughs are woven into Google products. Last year, Google appointed Kavukcuoglu to a new position as chief AI architect, a role in which he is charged with folding generative AI into Google products. Yet confusion about who is leading the charge on AI coding persists. Along with DeepMind, Google Cloud, Google Core, Google Labs and Android are all pushing AI coding in different ways, one of the people said. [...] Within the Googleplex, there is a philosophical clash between AI researchers who want to move as quickly as possible and more traditional senior engineers who have exacting standards for code quality, former employees say. AI usage is factored into performance reviews, according to a former employee. But engineers who try to use internal AI coding tools often hit capacity constraints due to competition for computing power, the former employee said.

Submission + - California 'Lost' $425 BILLION, and the Audit Starts... Never

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While California lawmakers were busy pushing a totally unconstitutional "Stop Nick Shirley Act" to make his style of investigative journalism punishable by big fines and even jail time, you might have missed out on the story about the state's missing $425 billion that nobody will bother auditing.

Or as Barth's report put it: "Obando conceded that required audits are falling by the wayside because 'instead of funding us they cut us they keep cutting our auditing teams.' He added that agencies 'none of them want us to go in there.' When pressed on the Controller’s Office’s ability to perform its core oversight function, Obando stated plainly: 'We just can’t conduct the audits.'"

Watching where the money goes is literally Controller Cohen's only job. If she isn't allowed to do it, that means that the system is performing as designed. If she isn't screaming to high heaven about it, that means she's in on it. No other conclusion fits — particularly when the state's real concern seems to be stopping independent reporters like Nick Shirley from doing even part of Cohen's job for her.

Here's the unconstututional "Stop Nick Shirley Act" that Victoria Taft reported on last week:

California Attorney General Rob Bonta's wife, Mia, a leftist state assembly member, has introduced AB 2624. The bill would fulfill a need that no one needs or asked for except for the professional grifters receiving big dollars from their buddies in government who want to hide it from the media. They want to hide the identities of the people running the programs under the guise of protecting illegal immigrants.

Under the bill, the press would be prevented from any meaningful reporting on the grift through fines, jail time, and orders to remove the content from media outlets.

"It sounds like the actions of tyrants," Victoria added — or like thieves covering their tracks.

Submission + - Maryland Becomes First State To Pass Bill Banning 'Surveillance Pricing' (denver7.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Maryland is poised to become the first state in the country to ban "surveillance pricing." The practice refers to companies using a shopper’s personal data, such as browsing history, location, or purchasing behavior, to tailor prices to individual customers. The Protection From Predatory Pricing Act, passed this month and sent to the governor for a signature, would prohibit food retailers and third-party delivery services from using the practice. Violations would be treated as deceptive trade practices under state law, with potential fines and lawsuits.

Submission + - Chinese passive switch spying on you (pilulerouge.ca)

Submitted by antatack
antatack writes: Canadian company find affordable network hardware could secretly enable large-scale espionage, creating serious risks for privacy and national security.
From the original article in french.

Submission + - Mobile Phones To Be Banned In Schools In England Under New Plans (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A ban on mobile phones in schools in England is to be introduced by the government to ensure that “critical safeguarding legislation” is passed. The government will table an amendment to the children’s wellbeing and schools bill in the House of Lords after the bill was held up by peers on opposition benches. It will make existing guidance on mobile phone bans in schools statutory, a move that ministers have resisted until now.

The government had consistently argued that the vast majority of schools had already banned mobile phones, and that there was no need to add a legal requirement. They finally capitulated, however, describing it as “a pragmatic measure” to get the bill through. [...] The bill is regarded by many as the biggest piece of child protection legislation in decades and includes proposals for a compulsory register for children who are not in school, a crackdown on profiteering in children’s social care, and a “single unique identifier” to help agencies track a child’s welfare.

Submission + - Allbirds' Move to AI Has Echoes of the Dot-Com Frenzy (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Allbirds is pivoting to artificial intelligence. The San Francisco brand, whose wool running shoes were once the sneaker du jour among the tech crowd, announced last week that it was expanding into AI computing infrastructure. The bizarre strategic shift was immediately greeted with a surprising frenzy on Wall Street, where shares of Allbirds soared 582% last Wednesday before dropping the next day. [...] Of course, the absurdity of Allbirds’ situation echoed familiar Silicon Valley tropes — from the endless startup pivots of the 2010s to the more recent boom-and-bust cycles of arbitrarily valued crypto coins. But it immediately reminded me of the marketing ploys of the dot-com crash. After all, some of the more iconic fails ended up being retailers such as Pets.com, Webvan, etc., riding the web wave with little to show for it beyond terrible margins.

One particular comparison from that period stands out as relevant to Allbirds: Zap.com. The holding company behind it, Zapata Corp., had a long and convoluted history, but was essentially selling fish-oil products by the time it decided to reinvent itself as an internet portal. It amassed a variety of web properties — in media, e-commerce, gaming and so on — and even once tried to acquire the search engine Excite. Spoiler alert: Zap flopped.

Jen Heck, then a young employee at one of Zap’s up-and-coming portfolio entities, remembers how quickly the hype of that web 1.0 turned to hell. As absurd as Zapata’s pivot sounds today, it seemed feasible during the excitement of the internet revolution. “We went from like, ‘Wow, this life thing is just so easy,’ to it all ending so suddenly,” Heck recalls. The ones who survived that tech bubble, she says, actually had differentiated products and the right creative thinkers building them — and weren’t just cynically jumping on the latest hot trend. “‘Internet’ was the magic word then, and ‘AI’ is the magic word now,” Heck says.

Submission + - Finnish Air Force reprimands cadet pilots for penis-shaped flight patterns (yle.fi)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Flight data shows several aircrafts taking off from Tikkakoski in JyvÃskylà at around 7.30am. The subsequent radar images indicate that at least four of the flights went on routes that resembled the shape of a penis.

The Air Force confirmed to IL at the time that the pilots involved were students on the reserve officer course, adding that the cadets would be subject to "disciplinary" consequences.

Submission + - As measles takes toll on kids, anti-vaxxers have change of heart (msn.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Katie Jennings was scrolling on her phone last April when a headline stopped her cold. A second unvaccinated child had died of measles in her home state of Texas.

It was a tipping point for the 40-year-old stay-at-home mom who had grown up in a staunchly anti-vaccine, fundamentalist Christian community. “What are we doing? Why are we doing this?” she remembers thinking. “I wanted to protect my kids.”

She took all six of them to get the measles, mumps and rubella shot. Then she posted an emotional TikTok aimed at the anti-vax crowd she used to be a part of: “You can change your mind,” she said in the video that’s been watched more than 422,000 times.

Submission + - Palantir posts Bond villain manifesto on X

Submitted by DeanonymizedCoward
DeanonymizedCoward writes: Engadget reports that Palantir has posted to X a summary of CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska's 2025 book, The Technological Republic, which reads like a utopian idealist doodled on a Bond villain's whiteboard. While the post makes some decent points, it also highlights the Big-AI attitude that the AI surveillance state is in fact a good thing, and strongly implies that the Good Guys need to do war crimes before the Bad Guys get around to it.

Submission + - Trump Administration to Begin Refunding $166 Billion in Tariffs 1

Submitted by hcs_$reboot
hcs_$reboot writes: After a Supreme Court of the United States ruling in Feb. 2026, many tariffs imposed by the Trump administration were declared illegal, because the president overstepped his authority.
As a result, the U.S. government now has to refund a massive amount of money, around $160-170+ billion, paid mainly by importers.
On April 20, 2026, the administration launched a system/portal (run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection) so companies can start filing claims to get their money back.

Who gets the money?
— Primarily importers and companies, since they were the ones who directly paid the tariffs.
— Consumers generally won’t get refunds, even though they often bore the cost through higher prices.

How it will work
— Claims are submitted electronically.
— Refunds (with interest) could take 60–90 days per claim, but the overall process may take much longer due to scale and complexity.

Challenges and uncertainties
— The process is logistically huge (hundreds of thousands of importers, millions of shipments).
— There are legal disputes over whether companies must pass refunds on to consumers.
— Delays and administrative issues are expected, possibly stretching the process over years.

Submission + - Robots Beat Human Records At Beijing Half-Marathon (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The winning runner at a Beijing half-marathon for humanoid robots finished the race today in 50 minutes and 26 seconds — significantly faster than the human world record of 57 minutes recently set by Jacob Kiplimo. Comparing human and robot running times may seem unfair; one social media user observed, “my car can outrun a cheetah too.” Still, the winning time is a massive improvement over last year’s race, when the fastest robot finished in two hours and 40 minutes. (Back then, I scoffed that this “would not be an impressive time for a human.”)

The Associated Press reports that this year’s winner was built by Chinese smartphone maker Honor. It seems the winning robot wasn’t actually the fastest, as a different Honor robot finished in 48 minutes and 19 seconds. But that one was remote controlled — the 50:26 robot was autonomous and won due to weighted scoring. About 40% of participating robots competed autonomously, while the remaining 60% were remote controlled, according to Beijing’s E-Town tech hub. Not all of them did as well as Honor’s robots, with one robot falling at the starting line and another hitting a barrier.

Submission + - AST Spacemobile BlueBird 7 Satellite Lost (substack.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: "ASTS admits the satellite is too low and cannot be saved. Based on what the orbit appears to be. 20kg of fuel they can only raise it part of the way. During the New Glenn 3 mission, BlueBird 7 was placed into a lower than planned orbit by the upper stage of the launch vehicle. While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will de-orbited. The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy."

Submission + - Why Voyager 1 Matters and Why NASA Just Switched Part of It Off (npr.org)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: NRP reports on the history of Voyager 1 and its recent reconfiguration.

Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object ever built, is running out of power. And the engineers who tend to it, from offices at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, are doing everything they can to delay the inevitable.

This week, NASA announced it had shut down one of that spacecraft's remaining science instruments — not because the mission has failed, but to keep it alive a little longer.

On April 17, mission engineers sent a sequence of commands to deactivate the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, known as the LECP, which is one of Voyager 1's remaining science instruments. The LECP has measured ions, electrons, and cosmic rays originating from both our solar system and the galaxy beyond it, helping scientists map the structure of interstellar space in a way no other instrument could. Its counterpart on Voyager 2 was turned off in March 2025.

Years ago, the Voyager science and engineering teams jointly agreed on the order in which instruments would be switched off, to conserve power while preserving the most scientifically valuable capabilities. The LECP was next on that list. "While shutting down a science instrument is not anybody's preference, it is the best option available," said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at JPL, in a blog entry published by NASA Friday.

Voyager 1 now carries two operational science instruments: one that listens for plasma waves, and one that measures magnetic fields. Engineers believe the latest shutdown could buy the mission roughly another year of breathing room.

The team is also developing a more sweeping power conservation plan they informally call "the Big Bang" — a coordinated swap of several powered components all at once, trading older systems for lower-power alternatives. If testing on Voyager 2, planned for May and June 2026, goes well, the same procedure will be attempted on Voyager 1 no sooner than July. If it works, there is even a slim chance the LECP could once more continue to work.

The engineers say they hope to keep at least one instrument operating on each spacecraft into the 2030s. It would leave both still reporting from places no machine has ever gone before.

Submission + - Brave Origin asks users to pay to remove features, but Linux users get it free (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Brave has introduced Brave Origin, a stripped-down version of its browser that removes built-in monetization features like Rewards and other extras tied to its business model. It is available either as a separate browser download or as an upgrade to the existing Brave install, unlocked through a one-time purchase that can be activated across multiple devices. The idea is simple on paper: pay once, and you get a cleaner, more minimal browsing experience without the add-ons that fund Braveâ(TM)s ecosystem.

What makes the move unusual is the pricing model itself. While paying to support a browser is not controversial, charging users specifically to remove features raises questions about whether those additions are seen as value or clutter. The situation gets even stranger on Linux, where Brave Origin is reportedly available at no cost, creating an uneven experience across platforms and leaving some users wondering why they are being asked to pay for something others get for free.

Submission + - Can the 'Attention Liberation Movement' Foment a Rebellion Against Screens? (apnews.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science at Princeton University and one of the authors of “ Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement ,” making him a pillar of the growing backlash against the corporate harvesting of human attention. Along with MS NOW host Chris Hayes’ bestselling " The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource ,” his work is part of a growing body of literature calling for people to move away from screens and pay attention to life. Burnett says the “attention liberation movement” is about throwing off the yoke of time-sucking apps. People “need to rewild their attention. Their attention is the fullness of their relationship to the world"....

There are several dozen “attention activism” groups across the United States and Canada, and the movement has also cropped up in Spain, Italy, Croatia, France and England. Burnett said he expects it to spread further.

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