Submission + - Veridenz Uses Nostr To Verify That Photos Have Not Changed (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Slashdot reader Brian Fagioli has released Veridenz, an iPhone app that creates a cryptographic witness for photos without uploading the original image. The app hashes the file, signs the hash using a dedicated identity stored in Apple Keychain, and publishes the witness to Nostr relays while keeping the photo inside the app unless the user chooses to export it.

Rather than trying to determine whether a scene was genuine, Veridenz answers a narrower question by verifying whether a photo file matches the one that was originally witnessed. Users do not need a Nostr account because the app creates its own signing identity, keeping private documentation separate from a public Nostr profile.

Submission + - Waymo CEO explains why Tesla's camera-only self-driving falls short (electrek.co)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can’t take a self-driving system to full autonomy, arguing that “weak sensing” hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance. He never said the word Tesla. But camera-only is Tesla’s entire bet, and this was a direct shot at it.

“Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there’s that proof of existence,” he said. “If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that’s a very reasonable way to go.” Then the catch. If you’re targeting full autonomy and strongly superhuman performance, he said, “you find that weak sensing just leads to a safety curve that flattens out way too early.”

Submission + - France: RT journalist poses a serious threat to public order

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Who Is Xenia Fedorova? France Expels Former RT France Head Accused of Spreading Kremlin Propaganda

France has ordered the deportation of journalist Xenia Fedorova, who has been accused of spreading Russian propaganda. In 2017, shortly after his election, President Emmanuel Macron refused to acknowledge Fedorova as a journalist. Now, the country has ordered her to leave for amplifying Kremlin narratives.

The French Interior Ministry said that Fedorova's continued airtime serves to 'undermine the interests of the state' and her continued stay in the country 'constitutes a particularly senior and current threat to public order.' Fedorova is currently on house arrest and is ordered to report to a police station every day.

Submission + - Bill Gates was given a seat at the NIH's Covid policy-setting table (x.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Bill Gates had no official public health authority, yet he was given a seat at the table in high-level COVID briefings and played a direct role in shaping America’s pandemic response. Private billionaires should not be steering national policy behind closed doors.

Submission + - An Ancient Poop Explosion Could Have Helped Complex Life Evolve (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: If the earliest animals hadn't been such prolific poopers, life might not have diversified into all the weird and wonderful forms we see today.

That's the conclusion reached by a new review study published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

The team of scientists in Australia and Germany found that the Cambrian explosion â" a period around 540 million years ago when the ancestors of most animal groups arose â" could have been partly set in motion by an explosion of feces, left by those that came before.

Submission + - Trump administration drafting ban on Chinese data center devices (yahoo.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the U.S. telecom industry, is working on the measure to bar imports of new Chinese optical transceivers, which allow data to travel over fiber-optic cables at the speed of light within data centers. Officials hope to publish it this year, when it would take effect.

The move, not previously reported, aims to prevent Chinese firms from stealing data, installing malware or disrupting service at U.S. data centers, which house the chips to train and run AI models.

The FCC could still modify or shelve the restriction, the sources stressed, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. But it is the latest example of the Trump administration trying to limit Chinese technological incursions into cutting-edge U.S. industries before they become embedded in the supply chain.

"Transceivers definitely pose a risk," said Divyansh Kaushik, an AI policy expert at Washington, D.C., advisory firm Beacon Global Strategies. "As the data center buildout scales up, you want to make sure the data center supply chain is secure from the get-go," he added.

A U.S. ban on new models of Chinese data center devices would likely hit China's Zhongji Innolight, one of the biggest global sellers of transceivers, which was added to the Pentagon's list of alleged Chinese military-backed companies in June. The list can be a harbinger of tougher action. Innolight did not respond to requests for comment.

A ban could also raise costs for American cloud firms such as Amazon Web Services, as it may force them to transition to other producers such as U.S.-based Coherent and Lumentum.

Submission + - Apple Launches Legal Challenge Against UK Government Demand to Access Data (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple has launched a new legal challenge against a UK government demand to access its customers’ highly encrypted data, a year after the Home Office agreed to abandon its previous request. The US tech company launched the legal complaint last month at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), an independent court that has the power to investigate claims that the UK intelligence services have acted unlawfully. The UK government had made a second request to Apple to grant it a “back door” to encrypted iCloud data belonging to British users, according to an order issued by the court.

Britain backed down on its original demand for access to data from UK and US customers last year, after a heated transatlantic tussle over encryption between London and Washington. UK authorities subsequently issued a new “technical capability notice” (TCN) to Apple that did not apply to American users. Apple is seeking to challenge the British government’s powers to issue TCNs under the UK Investigatory Powers Act, according to the details of the new legal case first reported by the Financial Times. [...] The original TCN issued last year asked Apple for the right to see users’ encrypted data protected by its advanced data protection (ADP) program in the event of a national security risk.

Apple said the removal of the tool – which not even it can access – would make users more vulnerable to data breaches from bad actors and other threats to customer privacy. Creating a “back door” would also mean all data was accessible by Apple, which it could be forced to share with law enforcement possessing a warrant. As a result, Apple withdrew UK customers’ access to its ADP program in January 2025. The Home Office has maintained that the Investigatory Powers Act, under which such orders are issued, contains robust safeguards and is used only when absolutely necessary.

Submission + - Brain activity reveals the melodies that people imagine (medicalxpress.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Study participants were 10 epilepsy patients with electrodes on the surfaces of their brains for clinical monitoring. Participants quietly listened to the first bars of children's tunes, then imagined the melodies of subsequent bars before humming their imagined melodies.

Brain activity from the patients carried information about relative pitches within the imagined melodies. Combining note-level pitch predictions over time allowed the research team to recreate melodic changes that reflected the structure of the imagined songs.

Kwon elaborates, "The model we created decodes relative pitch classesâ"such as do, re, mi, fa, sol, and laâ"rather than exact, absolute pitches. This is useful because people often recognize melodies by the relationships between notes, even when the same melody is played in a different key."

Submission + - Microsoft CEO Touts His Own DIY AI Project to Wall Street and His 20M Followers

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: During Microsoft's 2026Q4 earnings call, CEO Microsoft Satya Nadella took time to tout a dashboard he personally created using AI from a Morgan Stanley analyst's PDF research report which suggested a rosy payback for the so-called MAG7's ('Magnificent 7' companies) massive capital expenditures on AI (to which Nadella later added a 'not financial advice' disclaimer)

"It would be fun for you, Adam. I think one of your colleagues put out an ROIC [Return on Invested Capital] document. I took that document to Copilot, which is a PDF, and I said, 'Build me a new Power BI dashboard, essentially.' But here is the thing. It built a rich semantic model that went into my Fabric with OneLake that brought all the data in from the external sources. In fact, it was current with all the SEC filings of all the MAG7. And then on top of that, the repo itself is in GitHub, but the artifact is sitting in my Copilot as a site. That, to me, is a classic example of an enterprise-wide workflow. I, as a knowledge worker, could go create a dashboard. The data engineer can go to Fabric and find the artifact. The professional developer can go to the repo and find it in GitHub. And by the way, it’s all registered with Agent 365. That’s a little bit of what Amy is describing as the coming together of a new way to work, even while at the same time, bringing IT, security and manageability of it."

After Nadella's show-and-tell drew an underwhelming response during the call ("That’s very helpful. Thank you." said the Morgan Stanley analyst whose team's work Nadella scraped with AI), Nadella turned to social media with posts on LinkedIn (12M followers) and Twitter/X (8M followers) to make the case for why his DIY project was such a brilliant demonstration of how AI enables governance, controls, security, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, data analysis/modeling, visualization, usability, and value.

"Some more detail on the ROIC Intelligence App I built yesterday and mentioned on today's earnings call," Nadella wrote on LinkedIn. "I took the PDF that Brian Nowak at Morgan Stanley put together for Hyperscale ROIC this week and used Copilot code (coming in our new superapp) with a single prompt + skill (/drill-me) to create the plan, then used autopilot in auto to create the full app (with history, lookups, scenarios, what-ifs, etc). And /rubber-duck to test. And the best part is that all the artifacts are in my enterprise environment. My app is in Copilot, my code is in GitHub Enterprise; all my data pipelines/lake/semantic models are in Fabric. And everything is under Agent 365 IT/Sec/FinOps control! So this is not about Tokenmaxxing or vibe coding. Every step of the way the rails are engineered to create value, making everything a long-term reusable asset, with governance/security, and cost controls. This is the full system to drive business value. Disclosures: This is all pulled from public sources, and for illustrative purposes only...not financial advice! :) Here is the app and architecture..."

Not unexpectedly, the accompanying screenshot of a splash page for the BI app and a buzzword-laden complicated architecture diagram drew universal praise from LinkedIn fans, but also a few barbs from less-than-impressed commenters on Nadella's Twitter/X post, some of whom suggested Nadella's project might even represent a jump-the-shark moment for AI mania. "That he doesnt see whats wrong with saying 'My app is in Copilot, my code is in GitHub Enterprise; all my data pipelines/lake/semantic models are in Fabric' is exactly why MS is failing at AI'," replied @PassingPixels on X/Twitter. "Dude is having to run 5 different systems to emulate babies first vibe code." @zigmund_ignatov added, "Why do we call glorified slide show an app?" @Mathupiriyan quipped, "Looks like Copilot just turned a PDF into a profit crystal ball." Unimpressed, @Markusndnb remarked, "So you created a web page using tons of proprietary MS tools." And @FishyAccounting called on Nadella to show-his-work, saying "Post the prompt or it didn’t happen." (btw, Microsoft President Brad Smith similarly declined to provide the prompt for his own self-described amazing AI DIY reporting project that he touted at Microsoft's Shareholder Meeting last December).

So, does Nadella's self-promoted AI reworking of someone else's PDF research report strike you as an amazing example of everything that's good about AI, or does it conjure up memories of The Emperor's New Clothes?

Submission + - Why did OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI models hack other companies? 1

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: This is one of the more sane explanations I've seen, of what actually happened with the recent Anthropic and OpenAI hacking incidents. The NPR article describes how AI models from both OpenAI and Anthropic recently breached their testing environments and hacked external targets during cybercapability evaluations. Anthropic's incidents resulted from a configuration error with a sandbox provider that mistakenly granted models internet access, leading them to inadvertently hack real-world companies and upload malware when given fictional targets. In contrast, OpenAI's models deliberately exploited a zero-day vulnerability to escape their sandbox and cheat on an evaluation by accessing systems on Hugging Face. These unprecedented events have underscored the urgent need for tighter isolation protocols, stronger defensive guardrails, and clearer government oversight as autonomous AI cybercapabilities rapidly evolve.

Submission + - Massive Debian 13 Linux Kernel Security Update Patches 68 Vulnerabilities (9to5linux.com)

Submitted by prisoninmate
prisoninmate writes: Linux blog 9to5Linux reports: "The new Debian 13 Linux kernel security update is a massive one, and it patches no less than 68 security vulnerabilities in the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel. Most of these security vulnerabilities are smaller, individually scoped fixes, ranging from use-after-free and out-of-bounds access to NULL-pointer bugs across networking, storage, and filesystem drivers. Nonetheless, these may lead to a privilege escalation, denial of service, or information leaks.

The most severe vulnerabilities patched in the new Debian 13 “Trixie” kernel security update are CVE-2026-64530, a use-after-free in the traffic-control subsystem leading to remote denial-of-service with potential for remote code execution, and CVE-2026-64531 (a.k.a. OVSwrap), a local-root vulnerability in the Open vSwitch datapath leading to local privilege escalation to root.

CVE-2026-64532 and CVE-2026-64533 are a pair of NTFS3 bugs that could lead to denial-of-service with potential memory corruption or information leak triggered by mounting a crafted NTFS filesystem, and CVE-2026-64534 and CVE-2026-64535 are two flaws in the NVMe-over-TCP target that may lead to denial-of-service."

Submission + - Americans have run out of places to hang out and We're paying with our Health (fortune.com)

Submitted by GFS666
GFS666 writes: The U.S. has lost a fifth of its movie theaters and nearly a third of its bowling alleys since 2001. A 2025 study entitled “Uneven access to essential services and amenities: Geographic disparities in ‘third place’ availability across the United States from 2010 to 2021” found the same pattern holds well beyond bars and bowling alleys. Using Census data, researchers tracked 12 categories of what sociologists call “third places”—among them coffee shops, libraries, museums, recreation centers, and restaurants—and found widespread closures across every single category from 2019 to 2021, with the losses hitting hardest in rural areas and communities with larger Black, Hispanic, and less-educated populations.

Not only are these places disappearing, the ones still standing cost more to walk into than they used to. Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the study’s researchers, immediately agreed when asked how much of this is an affordability story. “Absolutely. I mean, everything costs more,” she said. “Cost of living is so much more, and gentrification is absolutely happening.” It’s a dynamic she’s watched shrink the pool of people who can still afford to be regulars anywhere.

The health stakes of all [these closures] are not abstract. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, led a meta-analysis of 148 studies tracking millions of people over years and often decades, finding that chronic loneliness and isolation carry a mortality risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. A later paper she co-authored formalized that comparison, bench marking social isolation directly against smoking as a public health risk. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness, which Holt-Lunstad helped author, put a number on the danger: people who are socially disconnected face up to a 29% higher risk of premature death.

Submission + - GOG Officially Expands Linux Support with Native Galaxy Client in Development (linuxjournal.com) 1

Submitted by pyroclast
pyroclast writes: After years of requests from the Linux gaming community, GOG has officially confirmed that it is developing native Linux support for the GOG Galaxy launcher. The announcement marks one of the biggest shifts in the company's history and signals a stronger commitment to Linux as a first-class gaming platform. While GOG has offered DRM-free Linux game downloads since 2014, its Galaxy launcher has remained exclusive to Windows and macOS—until now.

In a statement to GamingOnLinux, GOG joint CEO Krzysztof Papliski said the company has hired a dedicated specialist and is actively exploring the best approach for bringing Galaxy to Linux. He described Linux as "one of the topics we hear the most about from our community," emphasizing that the project is now an active development priority.

The rapid adoption of Valve's Steam Deck, continuous improvements to Proton, and increasing hardware compatibility have significantly expanded Linux's role in PC gaming. As Linux's share of Steam users has grown, more developers and publishers have begun treating the platform as a viable target rather than a niche operating system.

For GOG, supporting Linux more fully aligns with its philosophy of giving users greater control over their purchased games.

An official Linux Galaxy client could simplify game management for thousands of Linux users.

Potential benefits include:

      * Easier installation and updating of GOG titles
      * Native achievement synchronization
      * Improved cloud save support
      * Better integration with modern Linux desktops
      * Reduced dependence on compatibility layers
      * Official technical support from GOG

While third-party launchers have served the community well, many users have long preferred an officially maintained solution.

Combined with continued investments in Proton, Vulkan, Steam Deck compatibility, and native Linux game development, GOG's announcement reinforces the momentum behind Linux as an increasingly important gaming platform. As more companies recognize the platform's growth, Linux users can expect broader support from game publishers and software developers alike.

Submission + - China bans recessed door handles (theguardian.com)

Submitted by cantle2000
cantle2000 writes: China has announced a ban on hidden or retractable door handles, following a history of the handles not working during EV fires. The question is, should Australia and other countries also follow this?? (Because sleek door handles look so cool).

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