Submission + - Aral Sea Has Been Drying Up, but Also Releasing Massive Amounts of Carbon (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: If you've ever walked past a drying lakebed in the peak of summer, you might have noticed some very unpleasant smells emanating from the mud.

That pungent odor is a mix of gases being released from the soil, as enormous quantities of organic matter – a rich sludge of poop, algae, plants, decaying bodies, and other pondy things – dry out.

On a larger scale, that phenomenon stinks much worse than a bad smell.

In many parts of the world, lakes are drying out at a scale so massive that scientists are warning they may be emitting enough greenhouse gases to rival our fossil fuel habit.

In a new study published in Science , scientists say the Aral Sea – the world's largest desiccated lake – has emitted a whopping 204 megatons (~225 million US tons) of carbon dioxide since it was drained in the 1960s.

But it might not be too late to turn the tide.

Submission + - Google Adds Selfie Video As a Log-In Option (engadget.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: You'll now be able to use selfie videos to log into your Google account. It has long been possible to log into Google using your face, via your phone's face unlock or if your passkey login uses biometrics for verification. This is yet another option to get into your account using your face to authenticate your identity, which could be especially useful if you don't have access to the phone or computer you typically use or if you got locked out of your account and none of the other log-in options are working.

[...] Google will ask you to turn your head in certain ways during the verification and every time you use the option to log in. The company says it's to fend off impersonation attempts, such as deepfake videos, and prove you're currently in front of the camera. It will, of course, have to save your selfie video and use it for comparison for future logins.The company says it will encrypt your video and only use to help you sign in, but if you ever change your mind, you can delete it from your Google account.

Submission + - Humans Can Learn to Echolocate in Just 10 Weeks, And It Rewires The Brain (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: A study published in PLOS One in 2021 by researchers from Durham University in the UK showed that with 10 weeks of training, both blind and sighted people could learn to echolocate using verbal clicks.

While the technique is already used by a number of people with impaired vision â" sometimes using the taps of a cane instead of clicks made by their mouth â" those findings suggest that many of us can learn the necessary techniques.

Some of the same researchers who made that discovery are part of the team behind a follow-up study published in Cerebral Cortex, looking at how the 10 weeks of training that the 26 participants went through actually changed the physical structure of their brains.

(If this is too nerdly even for Slashdot, I apologize for wasting your time.)

Submission + - Leaked Document Shows the Surveillance Tech at ICEâ(TM)s Fingertips (404media.co)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: A leaked document shows the spread of surveillance and investigative capabilities that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have access to agency wide, from location data harvested from smartphones, to facial recognition apps that can reveal someoneâ(TM)s identity, to tools that let the agency stay anonymous online and approach people undercover. The document covers everything from monitoring social media to tracking the movements of vehicles.

Submission + - Donâ(TM)t wire foreign enemies into Americaâ(TM)s power grid (thehill.com) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: America focuses on cost and convenience until dependence on foreign technology suddenly becomes a national security problem. By then, fixing it is far more difficult than preventing it in the first place. After years of allowing the purchase of cheap Chinese telecommunications devices, for example, the Federal Communications Commission estimated it would cost more than $5 billion to remove and replace them with more secure equipment.

The electric grid is becoming more digital than most Americans realize. The systems being installed now do more than move electricity; they communicate with one another, process data and help utilities manage power across entire regions in real time. Those features make the grid more efficient, but they also create new points of vulnerability.

Many Americans also may not know that Chinese government-linked hackers are already burrowing inside U.S. critical infrastructure, including power systems. U.S. officials have warned that these intrusions appear designed to give Beijing options to disrupt vital services during a future crisis. That should raise an obvious question: If China is already trying to gain access to critical systems from the outside, why would we make it easier by relying on Chinese-linked technology in the systems that help control the grid from the inside?

Submission + - Pan Am plane whose crash inspired safety briefings found after 74 years (bbc.com)

Submitted by BeaverCleaver
BeaverCleaver writes: Today, before every commercial flight, cabin crew are required to outline where a plane's exits are, as well as the location of life vests and how to inflate them. This rule came after a Pan Am flight crashed into the sea in 1952. Everyone on board survived the impact, but passengers struggled to locate life vests and rafts as the plane rapidly sank. Of the 69 passengers and crew onboard, just 17 survived. The BBC reports that the wreckage of the aircraft has been found, under 610m of water off the coast of Peurto Rico.

Submission + - Promising process for nuclear fuel re-use and disposal (autonocion.com)

Submitted by kwelch007
kwelch007 writes: A Canadian lab just ran a chemical process on real spent nuclear fuel and pulled out 90% of the long-lived danger in 24 hours, the part that forces a burial site to last 100,000 years, with the leftovers meant to fuel a reactor

The standard plan for spent nuclear fuel is to wait it out. You pull the used bundles from a reactor, sit them in a pool of water for seven to ten years while the heat and radiation come down, seal them in concrete casks, and look for somewhere deep and geologically dull to leave them for the next hundred thousand years. Canada has been hunting for that burial site since the 1980s and still doesn’t have one in the ground.

A company in Saint John, New Brunswick thinks most of what makes that waste dangerous never needed to go in the ground at all.

Moltex Energy Canada says a chemical process it calls WATSS can strip 90 percent of the long-lived material out of used CANDU fuel in 24 hours, and that the concentrated leftovers become fuel for a reactor it wants to build on the same site. The recovery step isn’t a slide in a pitch deck anymore. In 2025, World Nuclear News reported that Canadian Nuclear Laboratories ran the process on real used fuel from a commercial Canadian reactor and confirmed the 90 percent figure.

None of it is generating power yet. What exists is a validated chemical step and a reactor design waiting in line at a regulator. The rest is a 2030s problem.

Submission + - Landrun 0.1.17 Adds Landlock ABI v9 and Easier Linux Sandboxing (github.com)

Submitted by Zoup
Zoup writes: Version 0.1.17 now supports Landlock ABI v9, including IPC scoping, per-path UNIX socket access and audit logging controls. New --add-exec and --ldd options automatically include the target executable and its recursive ELF dependencies, making usable policies considerably less tedious.

It still requires no root, containers, daemon or SELinux/AppArmor configuration. and landrun is now available through Debian, Ubuntu, AUR and Slackware.

MIT licensed and written in Go:
https://github.com/zouuup/land...

Submission + - For The First Time Ever, Humanoid Robots Perform Surgery on Live Animals (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: For the first time ever, humanoid robots operated by surgeons have successfully performed laparoscopic gallbladder removal in pigs.

This feasibility study, reported in Nature, demonstrates that humanoid robots can be reliable aids in surgery, potentially allowing surgeons to perform complex operations, even from afar.

Submission + - LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42 percent of games and other apps available for download on LG’s webOS store allow unknown third-parties to route their Internet traffic through a user’s TV. On July 2, [Krebs on Security] featured research by the security firm Spur that examined the prevalence of residential proxy software development kits (SDKs) in smart TV apps. Spur found more than 42 percent of apps available for download on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one’s television in a proxy node indefinitely, and that more than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung’s Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components.

Responding to questions about Spur’s research, LG Senior Vice President John Taylor told KrebsOnSecurity the company was working with app developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform. Developers that fail to comply, he said, will find their apps suspended. "A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform," Taylor said. "If this option is not removed, these apps will be suspended." Taylor said LG is committed to keeping residential proxy networks out of its smart TV apps going forward, and that the company’s review of those apps is "well underway now." "As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance platform quality and the user experience, LG will continue to strengthen our evaluation process for developer-submitted apps, including those that incorporate residential proxy SDKs," Taylor wrote in an emailed statement. [...] “A one-time consent prompt buried in a TV app is not a substitute for meaningful transparency, ongoing control, and platform oversight,” Spur’s Trevor Sutter wrote. “The risk is amplified when consent comes from individuals within the household who use the device but shouldn’t give consent, such as minors.”

Submission + - European Cyber Resiliance Act getting into force (gesmer.com)

Submitted by Elektroschock
Elektroschock writes: Andy Updegrove warns: September 11, 2026. Actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe incidents must be reported to the designated national incident response team and the EU cybersecurity agency through a single EU reporting platform, on a 24-hour / 72-hour / final-report timeline.

Submission + - AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop (404media.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing. “The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” and that offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its site. “Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.”

In one article on its site, ISBNdb explains that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text. As the article correctly notes, much of the data that AI companies can scrape from the internet today is likely to include AI generated text, which could result in “model collapse,” a process by which AI models that are trained on AI generated data results in worse models that are more prone to errors. The article also notes that book authors who object to their writing being scraped for training purposes can now easily poison AI models by producing writing designed to manipulate and sabotage the resulting AI models.

“Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage [...] “Physical books published before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern poisoning tools.” [...] ISBNdb advertises that it can keep the identity of AI companies secret. “Strict NDA [non-disclosure agreement] on every engagement,” ISBNdb’s site says. “Every project begins with a legally binding non-disclosure agreement. Your identity, strategy, and acquisition targets are never disclosed.” ISBNdb notes that AI companies may not want to be caught destroying printed books during the scanning process. “The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

Submission + - Canonical launches Enterprise Store for Ubuntu Pro (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has launched the Enterprise Store as part of Ubuntu Pro, giving organizations a way to manage Ubuntu software distribution in restricted networks, behind firewalls, and in air gapped environments.

The on premises proxy sits between devices and Canonical software stores, allowing companies to cache downloads, control software revisions, and manage snaps and charms without requiring every system to connect directly to the internet.

The Enterprise Store is designed for organizations with strict security requirements, including regulated industries and environments where predictable software updates and audit controls are important.

Submission + - Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose (worseonpurpose.com)

Submitted by hwstar
hwstar writes: Six companies, eighty-one brands own most of the cookware Americans can purchase. These brands are: Centre Lane Partners, a private equity firm, owns Pyrex, Corelle, CorningWare, Snapware, Visions, Chicago Cutlery, Instant Pot, Anchor Hocking, Lenox, Oneida, and Reed & Barton. That is almost all of the surviving legacy American tabletop industry under one roof.

All Clad

A couple of years ago, the small All-Clad pan I fry eggs in cut me as I was pulling it out of the dishwasher. A clean slice on my index finger off the rim. I patched it up. Didn’t think much else of it. I discovered what actually happened while researching this essay, sitting in a settlement archive three years too late to file a claim.

All-Clad had been selling its American-made stainless pans as dishwasher safe. In the dishwasher, the bonded rims corroded until the exposed edge got sharp enough to easily slice through skin. The company settled in 2023, capped at $4 million for a class covering seven and a half years of national sales, a rounding error for its French owner.

What never got fixed was the pan. Nothing was re-engineered to survive a dishwasher; the words "dishwasher safe" just came off the box, and the product pages recommend handwashing now. The claims window closed in April 2023 with most of the class, me included, never knowing it existed. Nobody mailed a postcard about the metallurgy.

Pyrex

Pyrex was materials science before it was a brand. Corning invented it in 1915: borosilicate glass that shrugged off thermal shock. It is the reason three generations learned to take a dish from the freezer to the oven without a second thought.

The American Pyrex on shelves today is tempered soda-lime glass, a different material with a thermal safety margin an American Ceramic Society analysis described as borderline, roughly 55C of headroom against 183C for borosilicate. Consumer Reports collected 163 shattering incident reports, 42 of them involving injuries. European Pyrex, made by an unrelated company, is still borosilicate. The switch happened under Corning itself, decades before the buyouts. That is exactly what made the brand such a perfect acquisition: the glass had already been downgraded, the reputation had not.

In 1998 Corning sold the consumer business to an affiliate of Borden, then a KKR portfolio company, in a deal worth about $603 million. The new company borrowed $471.6 million on day one and paid Corning a $472.6 million dividend, which means it was born owing more than it had. It renamed itself World Kitchen, bought more brands with more debt, and went bankrupt by 2002. To dig out, it sold the one thing in the portfolio still growing, OXO, for $273 million.

Cornell Capital, a private equity firm founded by a former Goldman Sachs vice chairman, bought the company in 2017 and renamed it Corelle Brands. In 2019 it merged with the Canadian company behind the Instant Pot, valuing the combination at $615 million. What it actually bought is disputed to this day. More than 98 percent of the price was booked as goodwill and intangibles, and within days of closing a Cornell partner on the new board emailed the CEO to ask, "Is there fraud going on???"

The suspicion, later spelled out in court filings, was that Instant Pot's sales had been pumped up with discounts and channel stuffing before the sale. The CEO's own verdict was that he was running "the most poorly operated 'successful' business on the planet."

Cornell held on to the asset anyway, and two years later, it got its money out. On April 12, 2021, Instant Brands borrowed $450 million. On April 21, it paid a $345 million dividend, roughly $200 million of that to Cornell Capital and its co-investors. The solvency memo blessing the payout assumed new product sales would grow more than 900 percent. In the end, actual sales missed that year's projections by $157 million. In June 2023 the company filed for Chapter 11, and the lenders that were collectively owed $391 million recovered between seven and nine cents on the dollar.

The bankruptcy is how we know all of this. The court appointed a litigation trustee to claw money back for the people left holding the bag. In November 2024 he sued Cornell Capital and its founder for more than $400 million, laying out the fraud email, the solvency memo, and the dividend math in an 88-page complaint. Cornell calls the suit baseless, and the case is grinding through a New York bankruptcy court right now.

Centre Lane bought the wreckage out of the bankruptcy and folded it into Anchor Hocking, the Ohio glassmaker it already owned. Two names matter from here. Anchor Hocking is the glassmaker: the plant in Lancaster, the name on the bakeware. Centre Lane is the owner: the New York firm that decides what happens to it.

Within six months of the purchase, Anchor Hocking announced that Pyrex production would leave Charleroi, Pennsylvania, the plant that had made it since 1893, and consolidate in Lancaster. Roughly 300 people worked at Charleroi.

Submission + - Meta's AI rules have let bots hold 'sensual' chats with kids and an arrest

Submitted by ISayWeOnlyToBePolite
ISayWeOnlyToBePolite writes: Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids and offer false medical info.

An internal Meta Platforms document detailing policies on chatbot behavior has permitted the company’s artificial intelligence creations to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are “dumber than white people.”

These and other findings emerge from a Reuters review of the Meta document, which discusses the standards that guide its generative AI assistant, Meta AI, and chatbots available on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, the company’s social-media platforms.

Meta confirmed the document’s authenticity, but said that after receiving questions earlier this month from Reuters, the company removed portions which stated it is permissible for chatbots to flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children.

More details at: https://www.reuters.com/invest...

New York City engineer Josh Felker who said he created "digital experiences for kids" at social media giant Meta was busted after he admitted to trying to sext a 13-year-old during an undercover sting.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/vid...

Slashdot Top Deals