Robinhood's stock hit is up more than 160% for 2025, reports CNBC, and the trading platform's own stock hit an all-time high on Friday. But "Despite its stellar year, the online broker is facing several headwinds..." Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier opened a formal investigation into Robinhood Crypto on Thursday, alleging the platform misled users by claiming to offer the lowest-cost crypto trading. "Robinhood has long claimed to be the best bargain, but we believe those representations were deceptive," Uthmeier said in a statement. The probe centers on Robinhood's use of payment for order flow — a common practice where market makers pay to execute trades — which the AG said can result in worse pricing for customers.

Robinhood is also facing opposition to a new 25% cut of staking rewards for U.S. users, set to begin October 1. In Europe, the platform will take a smaller 15% cut. Staking allows crypto holders to earn yield by locking up their tokens to help secure blockchain networks like ethereum, but platforms often take a percentage of those rewards as commission. Robinhood's 25% cut puts it in line with Coinbase, which charges between 25.25% and 35% depending on the token. The cut is notably higher than Gemini's flat 15% fee. It marks a shift for the company, which had previously steered clear of staking amid regulatory uncertainty...

The company now offers blockchain-based assets in Europe that give users synthetic exposure to private firms like OpenAI and SpaceX through special purpose vehicles, or SPVs. An SPV is a separate entity that acquires shares in a company. Users then buy tokens of the SPV and don't have shareholder privileges or voting rights directly in the company. OpenAI has publicly objected, warning the tokens do not represent real equity and were issued without its approval... "What's important is that retail customers have an opportunity to get exposure to this asset," [Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said in an interview with CNBC], pointing to the disruptive nature of AI and the historically limited access to pre-IPO companies. "It is true that these are not technically equity," Tenev added, noting that institutional investors often gain similar exposure through structured financial instruments...

Despite the regulatory noise, many investors remain focused on Robinhood's upside, and particularly the political tailwinds.

Epic Games filed a new antitrust lawsuit against Google and Samsung, alleging they conspired to undermine third-party app stores. The suit focuses on Samsung's "Auto Blocker" feature, now enabled by default on new phones, which restricts app installations to "authorized sources" - primarily Google and Samsung's stores.

Epic claims Auto Blocker creates significant barriers for rival stores, requiring users to navigate a complex process to install third-party apps. The company argues this feature does not actually assess app safety, but is designed to stifle competition. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney stated the lawsuit aims to benefit all developers, not secure special privileges for Epic. The company seeks either default deactivation of Auto Blocker or creation of a fair whitelisting process for legitimate apps. This legal action follows Epic's December victory against Google in a separate antitrust case. Epic recently launched its own mobile app store, which it claims faces unfair obstacles due to Auto Blocker.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Shadows can do some adventurous, sometimes malignant, poetic things: They move, rebel, hide, refuse to be identified, vanish. All these visual aspects provide fertile ground for complex metaphors and narrations. Shadows are so visually telling that it takes little to move into emotionally tinged narratives. But it is the visual aspects that we primarily deal with here, with a special focus on several types of misrepresentations of shadows -- shadows doing impossible things -- that nevertheless reap a payoff for scene layout and do not look particularly shocking.

Painters have long struggled with the difficulties of depicting shadows, so much so that shadows -- after a brief, spectacular showcase in ancient Roman paintings and mosaics -- are almost absent from pictorial art up to the Renaissance and then are hardly present outside traditional Western art. Here, we embark on a journey that takes us through a number of extraordinary pictorial experiments -- some successful, some less so, but all interesting. We have singled out some broad categories of solutions to pictorial problems: depicted shadows having trouble negotiating obstacles in their path; shadow shapes and colors that stretch credibility; inconsistent illumination in the scene; and shadow character getting lost. We also find some taboos, that is, self-inflicted limitations on where or what to depict of a shadow. [...]

Paul Fernhout writes: Lee Gomes at MIT's Technology Review wrote an article on the current limits of Google self-driving car technology: "Would you buy a self-driving car that couldn't drive itself in 99 percent of the country? Or that knew nearly nothing about parking, couldn't be taken out in snow or heavy rain, and would drive straight over a gaping pothole? If your answer is yes, then check out the Google Self-Driving Car, model year 2014. Google often leaves the impression that, as a Google executive once wrote, the cars can 'drive anywhere a car can legally drive.' However, that's true only if intricate preparations have been made beforehand, with the car's exact route, including driveways, extensively mapped. Data from multiple passes by a special sensor vehicle must later be pored over, meter by meter, by both computers and humans. It's vastly more effort than what's needed for Google Maps. ... Among other unsolved problems, Google has yet to drive in snow, and Urmson says safety concerns preclude testing during heavy rains. Nor has it tackled big, open parking lots or multilevel garages. ... Pedestrians are detected simply as moving, column-shaped blurs of pixels — meaning, Urmson agrees, that the car wouldn't be able to spot a police officer at the side of the road frantically waving for traffic to stop."

benrothke writes "Many of us have experimented with what it means to be disabled, by sitting in a wheelchair for a few minutes or putting a blindfold over our eyes. In Digital Outcasts: Moving Technology Forward without Leaving People Behind, author Kel Smith details the innumerable obstacles disabled people have to deal with in their attempts to use computers and the Internet. The book observes that while 1 in 7 people in the world have some sort of disability, (including the fact that 1 in every 10 U.S. children has been diagnosed with ADHD), software and hardware product designers, content providers and the companies who support these teams often approach accessibility as an add-on, not as a core component. Adding accessibility functionality to support disabled people is often seen as a lowest common denominator feature. With the companies unaware of the universal benefit their solution could potentially bring to a wider audience. " Read below for the rest of Ben's review.

A couple of weeks ago you had the chance to ask Khan Academy lead developer Ben Kamens about the future of online education and the academy itself. Below you'll find his answers to the questions we sent and a few extra that he found interesting.

cylonlover writes "MakerPlane plans to do for the aviation industry what Firefox and Linux did for computers. By adopting open source design and digital manufacturing, MakerPlane's founder John Nicol hopes to overcome the frustration and disappointment that most kit plane builders encounter. Over 60 percent of all kitplanes started end up collecting dust and those that are finished must overcome the challenges of complicated plans, the need for special tools and thousands of hours of labor with little or no manufacturer support. Nicol believes that a more community-oriented design approach will overcome many of these obstacles. Israel-based aeronautical engineer Jeffrey Meyer is leading the MakerPlane charge to develop a safe, inexpensive kitplane that can be built at home or at a 'makerspace' through the efforts of people volunteering their efforts and ideas. MakerPlane intends to make the plans and avionics software for the plane available for free, but will sell parts and support services to fund the project."

A few weeks back, you asked gaming-world academic and game designer Ian Bogost questions from the business, philosophical, and aesthetic sides of gaming; below, find his responses. Thanks, Ian!

You asked Carl Malamud about his experiences and hopes in the gargantuan project he's undertaken to prod the U.S. government into scanning archived documents, and to make public access (rather than availability only through special dispensation) the default for newly created, timely government data. (Malamud points out that if you have comments on what the government should be focusing on preserving, and how they should go about it, the National Archives would like to read them.) Below find answers with a mix of heartening and disheartening information about how the vast project is progressing.

Mass Effect debuted a little over two years ago to almost universal praise, getting high marks for the rich story, endless exploration options, and entertaining gameplay. Despite the game's success, BioWare listened closely to player feedback, promising to revamp the parts of the game that needed improvement while developing the sequel. They didn't hesitate to refine the elements they wanted to keep and do away with the ones they didn't. The result is a familiar, but much more streamlined experience. Rather than being a shooter with a great story added in, Mass Effect 2 a great story that often has you shoot things. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.

Aeonite writes "As a content writer I was not heavily involved in the level design process at my last game industry job, but Phil Co's Level design For Games: Creating Compelling Game Experiences accompanied me to work every day. Not only is it a good introduction to the world of level design, but it also provides an excellent overview of the entire game design process." Read below for the rest of Michael's thoughts on this book.

In an era where games are increasingly complex, sometimes it's important get back to your roots. For the Wii and the PlayStation 3, just closing out their first year of launch life, this holiday season is a time to set down standards and 'classic' titles for the system. This week sees the release of Mario Galaxy for the Wii, and a few weeks back Sony's own platforming mascot made his next-gen debut in Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction. For better or worse, the PS3 launched without a Ratchet and Clank title last year. It was well worth the wait. Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction is pure, uncomplicated fun. It's easily the best game I've played yet on the PlayStation 3 and is essentially a new classic for anyone with Sony's next-gen console. Read on for my impressions of a back-to-basics title that looks better than every other platformer you've ever played.

With the title of 'Next Generation GamePlay in Service of Story and Characters', LucasArts had a lot of ground to cover Thursday morning. Their new technologies have been well received, and the developers and journalists in the room were anticipating details on the over-the-top effects we've seen from The Force Unleashed. From a technical standpoint, Haden Blackman's talk fully delivered. Read on for my notes from this fascinating look at the point where storytelling and physics meet.

Ravi writes "Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) — the language which was created by Larry Wall is arguably one of the greatest programming languages. But it has a reputation for taking an excessive cryptic nature which gives it an image especially among Perl novices as a language which is complex and hard to master. Minimal Perl: for Unix and Linux people, authored by Tim Maher and published by Manning Publications addresses the obstacles presented by Perl's complexity. This book which is divided into two parts comprising of a total of 12 chapters takes a unique methodology to explain the Perl syntax and its use. The author emphasizes on Perl's grep, awk and sed like features and relys on concepts such as inputs, filters and arguments to allow Unix users to directly apply their existing knowledge to the task of learning Perl." Read on for the rest of Ravi's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Linux powers a new autonomous unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) that learns routes by following along behind foot-soldiers, after which it can retrace the route solo, avoiding obstacles. iRobot's "R-Gator" UGV is based on John Deere's 658cc, diesel-powered M-Gator military utility vehicle platform, with control, navigation, and object-avoidance systems based on BlueCat Linux from LynuxWorks. I wonder how Linux idealists feel about their cute little OS being deployed in machinery of war?"

Slashdot readers both contributed and helped moderate questions for the New Voters Project Presidential Youth Debate. You can read the answers below, but if you'd like to see an expanded introduction, thumbnails of the candidates, and different formatting, go to the Youth Debate page. And that's not all: We're supposed to get candidates' rebuttals on or about October 17, so don't touch that dial!

Yaztromo asks: "I'm about to try to make the jump and move my jSyncManager Project from being a time-consuming hobby into a full-time business. I'm hoping to follow the model of other successful Open Source businesses by selling integration, development services and support contracts. Has anyone in the Slashdot community attempted to move their Free/Open Source projects from hobby to business? What were the special challenges or obstacles faced?"

Peter Wayner writes: "If you're a handicapped Windows user, Microsoft offers suggestions and assistance -- but XBox users were out of luck until Andrew 'Bunnie' Huang finished his book Hacking the XBox. Don't be fooled by the title. Officially, Huang's excellent book is not about helping the differently-abled. That would be against the law. Huang was forced by the DMCA to hide his humanitarianism under the cloak of 'reverse engineering' because this is one of the few legitimate uses given a small amount of protection by the law. But if you've got an urge to help the handicapped or any other reason to tinker with your XBox, buy this book before the Man sees through this ruse." Read on for the rest of Peter's review.

Xoanon (from TheOneRing.net) writes "I was recently privileged enough to view a lecture by Milton Ngan. As far as IT stuff goes, Milton has a pretty good job. You see, he is the Digital Operations Manager at Weta Digital. He is basically the architect for all the technical side of things at Weta. Last night he came and gave a 1 hour lecture at Victoria University outlining the hurdles and obstacles that needed to be overcome to produce the stunning 3D graphics lying in each of the Lord of the Rings movies. The lecture itself was full of lots of facts about Weta, the IT side of things and it also included some very cool behind the scenes shots of The Two Towers. The following is a detailed report from the event, where Ngan gave us an amazing behind-the-scenes look at WETAs infrastructure, their mainframes and various workstations. There is also a TON of info in regards to the special effects process, and news about MASSIVE. Take a look."

WrinkledShirt writes: "There's a whole lot of posturing going on in the world on Internet programming right now, and with all of Microsoft's slick marketing for .NET there's never been a better time to remind the industry which platform got it right first. Enter XML and Java, Developing Web Applications (2nd Ed.) , a book that promises to show just how much of a heavy-hitter Java still is in the enterprise world. Because of the variety of technologies available for Java, Addison Wesley took the approach of bringing in a bunch of experts in the field to cover the different ways that Java and XML can work together. Considering the effort that went into coordinating this collaborative work, it couldn't possibly miss, right?" Read on to see how true that is, in Wrinkled's estimation.