A top EU official is urging Europeans to work from home, drive less, and cut air travel as the bloc braces for a prolonged energy crisis triggered by the Gulf conflict. The European Commission is also pushing member states to accelerate renewables and other energy-security measures as oil and gas disruptions continue. Politico reports: In a speech with echoes of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, EU energy chief Dan Jorgensen said Europe was facing a "very serious situation" with no clear end in sight. "Even if ... peace is here tomorrow, still we will not go back to normal in the foreseeable future," he said, following an extraordinary meeting of the EU's 27 energy ministers on Tuesday to discuss the crisis. "The more you can do to save oil, especially diesel, especially jet fuel, the better we are off," Jorgensen said, confirming an earlier report by POLITICO that Brussels wanted Europeans to travel less.

He urged member countries to follow the advice of the International Energy Agency, which he said included "work from home where possible, reduce highway speed limits by ten kilometers [an hour], encourage public transport, alternate private car access ... increase car sharing and adopt efficient driving practices." Longer term, he urged EU countries to double down on building more renewables, saying "this must be the time we finally turn the tide and truly become energy independent."

"What happens when you can describe the social experience you want and have it built for you...?" asks Bluesky? "We've just started experimenting, but we're sharing it now because we want you to build alongside us."

Called "Attie" — because it's built with Bluesky's decentralized publishing framework, AT Protocol (which is open source) — the new assistant turns natural language prompts into social feeds, without users having to know how to code. (It's part of Bluesky's mission to "develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.")

Engadget reports: On the Attie website, examples include prompts like, "Show me electronic music and experimental sound from people in my network" or "Builders working on agent infrastructure and open protocol design."

"It feels more like having a conversation than configuring software," [writes Bluesky's former CEO/current chief innovation officer, Jay Graber, in a blog post]. "You describe the sort of posts you want to see, and the coding agent builds the feed you described."

Graber added that Attie is a separate app from Bluesky and users don't have to use the new AI assistant if they don't want to. However, since Attie and Bluesky were built on the same framework, it could mean there will be some cross-app implementation between the two or any other app built on the AT Protocol.
"Attie is open for beta signups today, and we'll be sharing what we learn along the way," Graber writes in the blog post. "To learn more about Attie, visit: Attie.AI. Come help us find out what this can be."

The blog post warns that "Right now, AI is undermining human agency at the same time it's enhancing it," since "The proliferation of low-quality AI-generated content is making public social networks noisier and less trustworthy..." And in a world where "signal is getting harder to find... The major platforms aren't trying to fix this problem." They're using AI to increase the time users spend on-platform, to harvest training data, and to shape what users see and believe through systems they can't inspect and didn't choose. We think AI should serve people, not platforms...

An open protocol puts this power directly in users' hands. You can use it to build your own feeds, create software that works the way you want it to, and find signal in the noise. We built the AT Protocol so anyone could build any app they imagine on top of it, but until recently "anyone" really meant "anyone who can code." Agentic coding tools change that. For the first time, an open protocol can be genuinely open to everyone...

The Atmosphere [Bluesky's interoperable ecosystem] is an open data layer with a clearly defined schema for applications, which makes it uniquely well-suited for coding agents to build on... Bluesky will continue to evolve as a social app millions of people rely on. Attie will be where we experiment with agentic social.

AI is an accelerant on whatever it's applied to. I want it to accelerate decentralizing social and putting power back in users' hands. But I don't think the most interesting things built on AT Protocol will come from us. They're going to come from everyone who picks up these tools and starts building.

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

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

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

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

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

China's orbital outpost Tiangong was completed in 2022 and is hosting up to three astronauts at a time, reports CNN.

But meanwhile U.S. lawmakers are now signaling there's not time to develop and launch a replacement for the International Space Station — considered the signal most expensive object ever built — before its deorbiting in 2030. A recent Senate bill calls for the U.S. to continue funding it as late as 2032, but that bill still awaits approval from the U.S. Senate and the House.

But some private space companies are already building their alternatives: Private companies that are in the early design and mockup phase of developing these space stations are still waiting on NASA for guidance — and money... [NASA's "Requests for Proposals"] were delayed, in part because it took all of 2025 to cinch a confirmation for Trump's on-again-off-again pick for NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman [confirmed in December]... Similarly, 2025 saw a 45-day government shutdown, the longest in history — adding another hiccup in the space agency's plans to begin formally soliciting proposals from the private sector. Companies now expect that NASA will issue its Request for Proposals in late March or early April, one CEO told CNN...

Several commercial outfits have recently announced big funding influxes aimed at speeding up the development and launch of new orbiting outposts. Houston-based Axiom Space announced a $350 million funding round last month. Its California-based competitor Vast then notched a $500 million raise in early March. Vast is determined to launch a bare-bones station to orbit as soon as possible, with or without federal input, according to the company. "Our approach is to actually not wait for (NASA) and get going and build a minimum viable product, single-module space station called Haven-1, which we're launching into orbit next year," Vast CEO Max Haot told CNN in a phone interview earlier this month. Similarly, Axiom Space is working toward a 2028 launch date for a module that it plans to initially attach to the ISS before breaking off to orbit on its own. A spokesperson told CNN that it the company is "committed" to winning the NASA contract money and may continue pursing such goals even without contract awards.

Still, there's lingering doubt that any of the companies pursuing space stations will be able to stay afloat without securing a coveted NASA contract or at least cinching significant business from the public sector.
The article includes "Another complicating fact: Russia, the United States' primary partner on the ISS, has not pledged to keep operating its half of the space station past 2028." NASA will eventually evaluate proposals for an ISS alternative from Vast, Axiom Space, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, Max Space and several competitors including Voyager Technologies, CNN notes, ultimately handing out an estimated $1.5 billion in contracts between 2026 and 2031.

And while those companies may wait decades before a return on their investment, the article includes this quotes from the cofounder/general partner of Balerion Space Ventures, which led the fundraising for Vast. " What's obvious to us is you're going to have multiple vehicles with myriad companies go into space. You're going to have vehicles leaving from celestial bodies, like the moon. And we need a habitat."

He's "the most famous anonymous man in the world," suggests Reuters. But investigating Banksy's artworks in a bombed Ukrainian village (and other clues in the U.K. and Manhattan) have led them to "a hand-written confession by the artist to a long-ago misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct — a document that revealed, beyond dispute, Banksy's true identity."

But Banksy's long-time lawyer "urged us not to publish this report, saying doing so would violate the artist's privacy, interfere with his art and put him in danger" and "would harm the public, too." Working "anonymously or under a pseudonym serves vital societal interests," he wrote. "It protects freedom of expression by allowing creators to speak truth to power without fear of retaliation, censorship or persecution — particularly when addressing sensitive issues such as politics, religion or social justice."

Reuters took into account Banksy's privacy claims — and the fact that many of his fans wish for him to remain anonymous. Yet we concluded that the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse... As for the risk he might face of retaliation or censorship, Britain's legal and political establishments seem comfortable with Banksy's messages and how he delivers them...

His mastery of disguise began as a way of shaking the police, says former manager [Steve] Lazarides. In an interview, Lazarides said anonymity served a practical purpose in Bristol, where authorities enforced "draconian" policies against graffiti... Eventually, keeping the secret became a burden. By the end of their partnership, Lazarides estimates he spent half or more of his time managing and maintaining the artist's mystique. "I think it became a good gag, and then, if you want my honest, honest opinion, I think it then became a disease," he said.
Lazarides wrote a two-volume book about managing Banksy from the late 1990s to 2008, including a story about Banksy's arrest in 2000 for this defacing of a billboard. Reuters geolocated that building, then found police documents and a court file including the hand-written confession. This investigation spawned a 7,000-word article with everything from a comic strip Banksy drew when he was 11 to his connections with Robert Del Naja of the trip hop band Massive Attack — and a 2017 podcast interview where a music producer apparently revealed Banksy's real first name.

But the article also reveals how protective the art community is of Banksy's secret. Reuters investigated that Banksy auctioned in 2018 for $1.4 million — and then immediately started shredding itself with a device Banksy embedded in its frame: That piece, renamed "Love is in the Bin," sold three years later for about $25 million. Art dealer [Robert] Casterline was at the auction and remembers when the shredder began to beep. He pulled out his phone to take pictures. "Unfortunately, there was one person standing in front of me," blocking the view, he said. It was an eccentric-looking man with a broad neck scarf and thick eyewear. Oddly, the man wasn't watching the painting get shredded. He was looking in the other direction, observing the crowd's reaction. Only later, reviewing what he shot, did Casterline notice that the man's glasses appeared to have a small camera built into the bridge. (Banksy later posted a video of the stunt, including shots of the astonished audience.)
Having seen a photo of the man suspected of being Banksy, Casterline confirmed to Reuters that he was "pretty sure" it was the same man.

But "I don't want to be the guy who exposes Banksy."

While AI CEOs worry governments might nationalize AI, others are advocating for something similar. Canadian security professional Bruce Schneier and Harvard data scientist Nathan Sanders published this call to action in Canada's most widely-read newspaper (with a readership over 6 million): "Canada Needs Nationalized, Public AI." While there are Canadian AI companies, they remain for-profit enterprises, their interests not necessarily aligned with our collective good. The only real alternative is to be bold and invest in a wholly Canadian public AI: an AI model built and funded by Canada for Canadians, as public infrastructure. This would give Canadians access to the myriad of benefits from AI without having to depend on the U.S. or other countries. It would mean Canadian universities and public agencies building and operating AI models optimized not for global scale and corporate profit, but for practical use by Canadians...

We are already on our way to having AI become an inextricable part of society. To ensure stability and prosperity for this country, Canadian users and developers must be able to turn to AI models built, controlled, and operated publicly in Canada instead of building on corporate platforms, American or otherwise... [Switzerland's funding of a public AI model, Apertus] represents precisely the paradigm shift Canada should embrace: AI as public infrastructure, like systems for transportation, water, or electricity, rather than private commodity... Public AI systems can incorporate mechanisms for genuine public input and democratic oversight on critical ethical questions: how to handle copyrighted works in training data, how to mitigate bias, how to distribute access when demand outstrips capacity, and how to license use for sensitive applications like policing or medicine...

Canada already has many of the building blocks for public AI. The country has world-class AI research institutions, including the Vector Institute, Mila, and CIFAR, which pioneered much of the deep learning revolution. Canada's $2-billion Sovereign AI Compute Strategy provides substantial funding. What's needed now is a reorientation away from viewing this as an opportunity to attract private capital, and toward a fully open public AI model.
Long-time Slashdot reader sinij has a different opinion. "To me, this sounds dystopian, because I can also imagine AI declining your permits, renewal of license, or medication due to misalignment or 'greater good' reasons."

But the Schneier/Sanders essays argues this creates "an alternative ownership structure for AI technology" that is allocating decision-making authority and value "to national public institutions rather than foreign corporations."

sdinfoserv writes: After running a Reddit clone for a couple of months, the Digg beta shut down again. The website is a splash memo from CEO Justin Mezzell, blaming the latest "Hard Reset" on bots. "Building on the internet in 2026 is different," writes Mezzell. "We learned that the hard way. Today we're sharing difficult news: we've made the decision to significantly downsize the Digg team..."

The decision was made after struggling to gain traction and an overwhelming influx of AI-driven bots and spam. "When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority," says Mezzell. "Within hours, we got a taste of what we'd only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn't appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they'd find us."

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

Despite the setback, Digg plans to rebuild with a smaller team, with founder Kevin Rose returning to work full-time on a new direction for the platform. "Starting the first week of April, Kevin will be putting his focus back on the company he built twenty+ years ago," writes Mezzell. "He'll continue as an advisor to True Ventures, but Digg will be his primary focus."

Slashback: The Rise of Digg.com

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down after overseeing the platform's growth from a Twitter research project into a 40-million-user alternative to X. "As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things," Graber wrote in a statement.

She will be transitioning to a new Chief Innovation Officer role while Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will serve as interim CEO until the board searches for a permanent replacement. Wired reports: Graber joined Bluesky in 2019, when it was a research project within Twitter focused on developing a decentralized framework for the social web. She became the company's first chief executive officer in 2021, when it spun out into an independent entity. She oversaw the platform's remarkable rise and the growing pains it experienced as it transformed from a quirky Twitter offshoot to a full-fledged alternative to X. Schneider tells WIRED that he intends to help Bluesky "become not just the best open social app, but the foundation for a whole new generation of user-owned networks."

Schneider, who will continue working as a partner at the venture capital firm True Ventures while at Bluesky, was previously CEO of the Wordpress parent company, Automattic, from 2006 to 2014. He also served as its CEO again in 2024 while top executive Matt Mullenweg went on a sabbatical. During that time, Schneider met Graber and became an adviser to Bluesky's leadership. In a blog post announcing his new role, Schneider said he plans to emphasize scaling, describing his job as "to help set up Bluesky's next phase of growth."

This isn't the end for Graber and Bluesky. She will transition to become the company's chief innovation officer, a role focused on Bluesky's technology stack rather than its business operations. The position was created for her. Graber, who began her career as a software engineer, has always sounded the most enthusiastic when discussing Bluesky's technology rather than its revenue streams. Bluesky's board of directors will appoint the next permanent CEO. The members include Jabber founder Jeremie Miller, crypto-focused VC Kinjal Shah, TechDirt founder Mike Masnick, and Graber. (Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was originally part of the board but quit in 2024.) This means Graber will have input on her successor. The talent search is still in early stages.

Palantir's CEO was blunt. "If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone's white-collar job... and you're going to screw the military — if you don't think that's going to lead to the nationalization of our technology, you're retarded..."

And OpenAI's Sam Altman is thinking about the same thing, writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland: "It has seemed to me for a long time it might be better if building AGI were a government project," Sam Altman publicly mused last week... Altman speculated on the possibility of the government "nationalizing" private AI companies into a public project, admitting more than once he's wondered what would happen next. "I obviously don't know," Altman said — but he added that "I have thought about it, of course" Altman's speculation hedged that "It doesn't seem super likely on the current trajectory. That said, I do think a close partnership between governments and the companies building this technology is super important."

Could powerful AI tools one day slip from the hands of private companies to be controlled by the U.S. government? Fortune magazine's AI editor points out that "many other breakthroughs with big strategic implications — from the Manhattan Project to the space race to early efforts to develop AI — were government-funded and largely government-directed." And Fortune added that last week the Defense Department threatened Anthropic with the Defense Production Act, which allows the president to designate "critical and strategic" goods for which businesses must accept the government's contracts. Fortune speculates this would've been "a sort of soft nationalization of Anthropic's production pipeline". Altman acknowledged Saturday that he'd felt the threat of attempted nationalization "behind a lot of the questions" he'd received when answering questions on X.com.

How exactly will this AI build-out be handled — and how should AI companies be working with the government? In a sprawling ask-me-anything session on X that included other members of OpenAI leadership, one Missouri-based developer even broached an AGI-government scenario directly with OpenAI's Head of National Security Partnerships, Katherine Mulligan. If OpenAI built an AGI — something that even passed its own Turing test for AGI — would that be a case where its government contracts compelled them to grant access to the Defense Department?

"No," Mulligan answered. At our current moment in time, "We control which models we deploy"
The article notes 100 OpenAI employees joined with 856 Google employees in an online letter titled "We Will Not Be Divided" urging their bosses to refuse their models' use in domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing without human oversight.

But Adafruit's managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone ) sees analogies to America's atomic bomb-building Manhattan Project, and "what happened when the scientists who built the thing tried to set conditions on how the thing would be used." (The government pressured them to back down, which he compares to the Pentagon's designating Anthropic a "supply chain risk" before offering OpenAI a contract "with the same red lines, just worded differently".)

Ironically, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei frequently recommends the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb...

On February 24th, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory activated its automated alert system, sending out roughly 800,000 real-time notifications flagging asteroids, supernovae, flaring black holes and "other transient celestial events," reports Scientific American. And this is only the beginning -- that number is projected to climb into the millions as it continues scanning the ever-changing sky. From the report: The astronomical observatory equipped with world's largest camera hit a key milestone on February 24, when a complex data-processing system pushed hundreds of thousands of alerts out to scientists eager to pore over its most exciting sightings. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory began operations last year, capturing stunning, panoramic time-lapse views of the cosmos with ease. Rubin's first images, based on just 10 hours of observations, let space fans zoom seemingly forever into an overwhelmingly starry sky. But watchful astronomers were always awaiting the next step: the system that would automatically alert them to the most promising activity in the overhead sky amid the 1,000 or so enormous images that Rubin's telescope captures every night.

"We can detect everything that changes, moves and appears," said Yusra AlSayyad, an astronomer at Princeton University and Rubin's deputy associate director for data management, to Scientific American last summer. "It's way too much for one person to manually sift through and filter and monitor themselves." So even as they were designing and building the Rubin Observatory itself, scientists were also designing an alert system to help astronomers navigate the flood of data. As soon as the telescope began observations, the team started constructing a static reference image of the entire sky in impeccable detail.

Now the data processing systems that support the observatory are starting to automatically compare every new Rubin image to the corresponding section of that background template. The systems identify all of the differences, each of which is individually flagged. The algorithms can also distinguish between a potential supernova and a possible newfound asteroid, for example. Alerting the scientific community is the final, crucial step. Astronomers -- as well as members of the public -- can sign up for notifications based on the type of sighting they're interested in and the brightness of the observation in question. And now that the alerts system has gone live, users receive a tiny, fuzzy image with some astronomical metadata of each observation that fits their criteria -- all just a couple of minutes after Rubin captures the original image.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston's door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries. According to Huddleston, the men's client, an unnamed "Fortune 100 company," sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement. More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer (PDF) had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity. The unknown company was building a datacenter. "You don't have enough to buy me out. I'm not for sale. Leave me alone, I'm satisfied," Huddleston, 82, later told the men.

As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston's land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development -- are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use. Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land's recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston's neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price.

In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he'd worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre -- prices unimaginable just a few years ago. The rebuffs are a jarring reminder of AI's physical bounds, and limits of the dollars behind the technology. [...] As AI promises to transcend corporeal fallibility, these standoffs reveal its very physical constraints -- and Wall Street's miscalculation of what some people value most. In the rolling hills of Mason county and farmland across America, that gap is measured not in dollars but in something harder to price: identity.

Microsoft pulled a year-old blog post this week after a Hacker News thread flagged that it had encouraged developers to download all seven Harry Potter books from a Kaggle dataset -- incorrectly marked as public domain -- and use them to train AI models on the company's Azure platform.

The blog, written in November 2024 by senior product manager Pooja Kamath, walked users through building Q&A systems and generating fan fiction using the copyrighted texts, and even included a Microsoft-branded AI image of Harry Potter. The Kaggle dataset's uploader, data scientist Shubham Maindola, told Ars Technica the public domain label was "a mistake" and deleted the dataset after the outlet reached out.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: David Greene had never heard of NotebookLM, Google's buzzy artificial intelligence tool that spins up podcasts on demand, until a former colleague emailed him to ask if he'd lent it his voice. "So... I'm probably the 148th person to ask this, but did you license your voice to Google?" the former co-worker asked in a fall 2024 email. "It sounds very much like you!"

Greene, a public radio veteran who has hosted NPR's "Morning Edition" and KCRW's political podcast "Left, Right & Center," looked up the tool, listening to the two virtual co-hosts -- one male and one female -- engage in light banter. "I was, like, completely freaked out," Greene said. "It's this eerie moment where you feel like you're listening to yourself." Greene felt the male voice sounded just like him -- from the cadence and intonation to the occasional "uhhs" and "likes" that Greene had worked over the years to minimize but never eliminated. He said he played it for his wife and her eyes popped.

As emails and texts rolled in from friends, family members and co-workers, asking if the AI podcast voice was his, Greene became convinced he'd been ripped off. Now he's suing Google, alleging that it violated his rights by building a product that replicated his voice without payment or permission, giving users the power to make it say things Greene would never say. Google told The Washington Post in a statement on Thursday that NotebookLM's male podcast voice has nothing to do with Greene. Now a Santa Clara County, California, court may be asked to determine whether the resemblance is uncanny enough that ordinary people hearing the voice would assume it's his -- and if so, what to do about it. Greene's lawsuit cites an unnamed AI forensic firm that used its software to compare the artificial voice to Greene's. It gave a confidence rating of 53-60% that Greene's voice was used to train the model, which it considers "relatively high" confidence.

"If I was David Greene I would be upset, not just because they stole my voice," but because they used it to make the podcasting equivalent of AI "slop," said Mike Pesca, host of "The Gist" podcast and a former colleague of Greene's at NPR. "They have banter, but it's very surface-level, un-insightful banter, and they're always saying, 'Yeah, that's so interesting.' It's really bad, because what do we as show hosts have except our taste in commentary and pointing our audience to that which is interesting?"

Residents of Potters Bar, a small town just north of London, are trying to block what would be one of Europe's largest data centers from being built on 85 acres of rolling farmland that separates their community from the neighboring village of South Mimms. Multinational operator Equinix acquired the land last October after the local council granted planning permission in January 2025, and the company intends to break ground this year on a development it estimates will cost more than $5 billion.

The UK government's decision to classify data centers as "critical national infrastructure" and a new "gray belt" land designation that loosens building restrictions on underperforming greenbelt parcels helped clear the path for approval -- even though objections from locals outweighed signatures of support by nearly two-to-one during the public consultation. A protest group of more than 1,000 residents has since appealed to a third-party ombudsman and the UK's Office of Environmental Protection, but has so far failed to overturn the decision.

"They were crouched down like turkeys peeking over the balcony," the county sheriff told Ars Technica. A half hour past midnight, they were skulking through a courthouse in Iowa's Dallas County on September 11 "carrying backpacks that remind me and several other deputies of maybe the pressure cooker bombs." More deputies arrived... Justin Wynn, 29 of Naples, Florida, and Gary De Mercurio, 43 of Seattle, slowly proceeded down the stairs with hands raised. They then presented the deputies with a letter that explained the intruders weren't criminals but rather penetration testers who had been hired by Iowa's State Court Administration to test the security of its court information system. After calling one or more of the state court officials listed in the letter, the deputies were satisfied the men were authorized to be in the building.
But Sheriff Chad Leonard had the men arrested on felony third-degree burglary charges (later reduced to misdemeanor trespassing charges). He told them that while the state government may have wanted to test security, "The State of Iowa has no authority to allow you to break into a county building. You're going to jail."

More than six years later, the Des Moines Register reports: Dallas County is paying $600,000 to two men who sued after they were arrested in 2019 while testing courthouse security for Iowa's Judicial Branch, their lawyer says.

Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn were arrested Sept. 11, 2019, after breaking into the Dallas County Courthouse. They spent about 20 hours in jail and were charged with burglary and possession of burglary tools, though the charges were later dropped. The men were employees of Colorado-based cybersecurity firm Coalfire Labs, with whom state judicial officials had contracted to perform an analysis of the state court system's security. Judicial officials apologized and faced legislative scrutiny for how they had conducted the security test.

But even though the burglary charges against DeMercurio and Wynn were dropped, their attorney previously said having a felony arrest on their records made seeking employment difficult. Now the two men are to receive a total of $600,000 as a settlement for their lawsuit, which has been transferred between state and federal courts since they first filed it in July 2021 in Dallas County. The case had been scheduled to go to trial Monday, Jan. 26 until the parties notified the court Jan. 23 of the impending deal...

"The settlement confirms what we have said from the beginning: our work was authorized, professional, and done in the public interest," DeMercurio said in a statement. "What happened to us never should have happened. Being arrested for doing the job we were hired to do turned our lives upside down and damaged reputations we spent years building...."

"This incident didn't make anyone safer," Wynn said. "It sent a chilling message to security professionals nationwide that helping government identify real vulnerabilities can lead to arrest, prosecution, and public disgrace. That undermines public safety, not enhances it."
County Attorney Matt Schultz said dismissing the charges was the decision of his predecessor, according to the newspaper, and that he believed the sheriff did nothing wrong.

"I am putting the public on notice that if this situation arises again in the future, I will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law."

The housing shortages plaguing Western cities today stem partly from the abandonment of a 19th century urban governance model that enabled cities like Berlin, New York and Chicago to expand rapidly while keeping real house prices flat and homes increasingly affordable.

A new analysis by Works in Progress argues that Victorian-era urban management wasn't laissez-faire but rather a system carefully designed to align private profit with public benefit. Infrastructure monopolies -- whether privately franchised, operated as concessions or municipally owned -- funded themselves entirely through user fees rather than public subsidies, and were structured so that building more capacity was the path to greater returns.

Landowners enjoyed a fundamental right to build when profitable, and height limits applied uniformly across entire cities rather than varying by neighborhood, meaning dense development remained legal everywhere. The system began collapsing after 1914, however. Inflation proved fatal to self-funding transport because governments found it politically impossible to raise controlled prices year after year. By the 1960s, trams had vanished from Britain, France and the U.S.

Meanwhile, differential zoning gradually banned densification in established neighborhoods, and rent controls decimated private homebuilding in many countries. In Britain, average house prices fell from twelve times earnings in 1850 to four times by 1914. They have since climbed back to nine times earnings. The article argues roughly 80% of postwar price increases trace directly to restrictions on building.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC: Led by Texas and New Hampshire, U.S. states across the national map, both red and blue in political stripes, are developing bitcoin strategic reserves and bringing cryptocurrencies onto their books through additional state finance and budgeting measures. Texas recently became the first state to purchase bitcoin after a legislative effort that began in 2024, but numerous states have joined the "Reserve Race" to pass legislation that will allow them to ultimately buy cryptocurrencies. New Hampshire passed its crypto strategic reserve law last May, even before Texas, giving the state treasurer the authority to invest up to 5% of the state funds in crypto ETFs, though precious metals such as gold are also authorized for purchase. Arizona passed similar legislation, while Massachusetts, Ohio, and South Dakota have legislation at various stages of committee review...

Similarities in the actions taken across states to date include include authorizing the state treasurer or other investment official to allow the investment of a limited amount of public funds in crypto and building out the governance structure needed to invest in crypto... [New Hampshire] became the first state to approve the issuance of a bitcoin-backed municipal bond last November, a $100 million issuance that would mark the first time cryptocurrency is used as collateral in the U.S. municipal bond market. The deal has not taken place yet, though plans are for the issuance to occur this year... "What's different here is it's bitcoin rather than taxpayer dollars as the collateral," [said University of Chicago public policy professor Justin Marlowe]. In numerous states, including, Colorada, Utah, and Louisiana,crypto is now accepted as payment for taxes and other state business...

"For many in the state/local investing industry, crypto-backed assets are still far too speculative and volatile for public money," Marlowe said. "But others, and I think there's a sort of generational shift in the works, see it as a reasonable store of value that is actually stronger on many other public sector values like transparency and asset integrity," he added.
Public policy professor Marlowe "sees the state-level trend as largely one of signaling at present," according to the article. (Marlowe says "If you're a governor and you want to broadcast that you are amenable to innovative business development in the digital economy, these are relatively low-cost, low-risk ways to send that signal.") But the bigger steps may reflect how crypto advocates have increasing political power in the states. The article notes that the cryptocurrency industry was the largest corporate donor in a U.S. election cycle in 2024, "with support given to candidates on both sides."

"It is already amassing a war chest for the 2026 midterms."

The European Commission "has opened a public call for evidence on European open digital ecosystems," writes Help Net Security, part of preparations for an upcoming Communication "that will examine the role of open source in EU's digital infrastructure." The consultation runs from January 6 to February 3, 2026. Submissions will be used to shape a Commission Communication addressed to the European Parliament, the Council, and other EU bodies, which is scheduled for publication in the first quarter of 2026... The call for evidence links Europe's reliance on digital technologies developed outside the EU to concerns over long term control of infrastructure and software supply chains... Open digital ecosystems are discussed in the context of technological sovereignty and the use of technologies that can be inspected, adapted, and shared.
Long-time Slashdot reader Elektroschock describes it as the European Commission "stepping up its efforts behind open-source software" Building on President von der Leyen's political guidelines, the initiative will review the Commission's 2020-2023 open-source approach and set out concrete actions to strengthen Europe's open-source ecosystem across key areas such as cloud, AI, cybersecurity and industrial technologies. The strategy will be presented alongside the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act, forming a broader policy package aimed at reducing strategic dependencies and boosting Europe's digital resilience.
And "In just a few days, over 370 submissions have already been filed, indicating that the issue is touching a nerve across the EU," writes CyberNews.com: "Europe must regain control over its software supply chain to safeguard freedom, security, and innovation," suggests an individual from Slovakia. Similar perspectives appear to be widely shared among respondents...

The document doesn't mention US tech giants specifically, but rather aims to support tech sovereignty and seek "digital solutions that are valid alternatives to proprietary ones...."

"This is not a legislative initiative. The strategy will take the form of a Commission communication. The initiative will set out a general approach and will propose: actions relying on further commitments and an implementation process," the EC explains. Policymakers expect the strategy to help EU member states identify the necessary steps to support national open-source companies and communities.

"China recently placed a supercritical carbon dioxide power generator into commercial operation," writes CleanTechnica, "and the announcement was widely framed as a technological breakthrough." The system, referred to as Chaotan One, is installed at a steel plant in Guizhou province in mountainous southwest China and is designed to recover industrial waste heat and convert it into electricity. Each unit is reported to be rated at roughly 15 MW, with public statements describing configurations totaling around 30 MW. Claimed efficiency improvements range from 20% to more than 30% higher heat to power conversion compared with conventional steam based waste heat recovery systems. These are big numbers, typical of claims for this type of generator, and they deserve serious attention.

China doing something first, however, has never been a reliable indicator that the thing will prove durable, economic, or widely replicable. China is large enough to try almost everything. It routinely builds first of a kind systems precisely because it can afford to learn by doing, discarding what does not work and scaling what does. This approach is often described inside China as crossing the river by feeling for stones. It produces valuable learning, but it also produces many dead ends. The question raised by the supercritical CO2 deployment is not whether China is capable of building it, but whether the technology is likely to hold up under real operating conditions for long enough to justify broad adoption.

A more skeptical reading is warranted because Western advocates of specific technologies routinely point to China's limited deployments as evidence that their preferred technologies are viable, when the scale of those deployments actually argues the opposite. China has built a single small modular reactor and a single experimental molten salt reactor, not fleets of them, despite having the capital, supply chains, and regulatory capacity to do so if they made economic sense... If small modular reactors or hydrogen transportation actually worked at scale and cost, China would already be building many more of them, and the fact that it is not should be taken seriously rather than pointing to very small numbers of trials compared to China's very large denominators...

What is notably absent from publicly available information is detailed disclosure of materials, operating margins, impurity controls, and maintenance assumptions. This is not unusual for early commercial deployments in China. It does mean that external observers cannot independently assess long term durability claims.
The article notes America's Energy Department funded a carbon dioxide turbine in Texas rated at roughly 10 MW electric that "reached initial power generation in 2024 after several years of construction and commissioning." But for both these efforts, the article warns that "early efficiency claims should be treated as provisional. A system that starts at 15 MW and delivers 13 MW after several years with rising maintenance costs is not a breakthrough. It is an expensive way to recover waste heat compared with mature steam based alternatives that already operate for decades with predictable degradation..."

"If both the Chinese and U.S. installations run for five years without significant reductions in performance and without high maintenance costs, I will be surprised. In that case, it would be worth revisiting this assessment and potentially changing my mind."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader cusco for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Across Uzbekistan, a network of about a hundred banks of high-resolution roadside cameras continuously scan vehicles' license plates and their occupants, sometimes thousands a day, looking for potential traffic violations. Cars running red lights, drivers not wearing their seatbelts, and unlicensed vehicles driving at night, to name a few. The driver of one of the most surveilled vehicles in the system was tracked over six months as he traveled between the eastern city of Chirchiq, through the capital Tashkent, and in the nearby settlement of Eshonguzar, often multiple times a week. We know this because the country's sprawling license plate-tracking surveillance system has been left exposed to the internet.

Security researcher Anurag Sen, who discovered the security lapse, found the license plate surveillance system exposed online without a password, allowing anyone access to the data within. It's not clear how long the surveillance system has been public, but artifacts from the system show that its database was set up in September 2024, and traffic monitoring began in mid-2025. The exposure offers a rare glimpse into how such national license plate surveillance systems work, the data they collect, and how they can be used to track the whereabouts of any one of the millions of people across an entire country. The lapse also reveals the security and privacy risks associated with the mass monitoring of vehicles and their owners, at a time when the United States is building up its nationwide array of license plate readers, many of which are provided by surveillance giant Flock.