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Comment Re:Standing? (Score 1) 105

"protect against renegade AI"

This is a fundamentally unsolvable problem. It's like: "How do we stop humans from being humans?"

Saying that's your objective is fundamentally dishonest. You can't protect against the unknown. You can't protect against anything without covering all the corner cases, and AI, by it's very nature, is almost exclusively corner cases.

Submission + - No Warrant, No Suspicion, No Problem (reason.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Part of the bedrock of American civil liberties is the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches. There is no right to privacy, and no due process in the justice system, without that. But immigration authorities, cops, and courts keep deciding that, for some reason, the Fourth Amendment just doesn't apply where new technology is concerned.

Submission + - Students are suddenly losing interest in computer science as AI coding takes off (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: For years, students were told that learning to code was one of the safest paths into a lucrative technology career. New data suggests that message may be losing some of its pull. Nova Learning says the share of surveyed middle and high school students naming Computer Science and AI as their primary academic interest fell from 42.3 percent in 2025 to 27.9 percent in 2026, while Engineering rose from 11.9 percent to 23 percent. The biggest gains came from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, while Software and Data Science saw a steep drop.

The survey is not nationally representative, but broader enrollment data points in the same direction. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported declines in Computer and Information Science enrollment at four year institutions, even as Engineering grew. AI coding tools are not proven to be the cause, but as software development changes and AI handles more coding tasks, students may be starting to rethink what a future in technology should look like.

Submission + - New tin-based solar cells trap heat 1,000 times longer, could beat 33% limit. (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Interesting Engineering is reporting that researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that tin-based perovskite solar cells can slow heat loss from high-energy “hot electrons” by a factor of 1,000 and could push solar cell efficiency beyond the theoretical 33 percent limit.

When sunlight strikes a panel, photons jump-start electrons into action. The most energetic photons create super-charged hot electrons. Theoretically, these high-voltage powerhouses should generate far more electricity, but, in practice, they are fleeting. In fractions of a trillionth of a second, these high-energy particles rapidly cool, dumping their bonus energy as waste heat before ever leaving the solar cell.

“This means that the energy is lost before the hot electron exits the solar cell material,” said Jan Anton Koster, Professor of Physics of Novel Semiconductors and Devices at the University of Groningen.

Using a specialized solar cell material called tin-based perovskite, Loi’s lab performed a feat many thought impossible: she slowed the heat loss down by a factor of 1,000. Suddenly, the extra energy lingered for nanoseconds instead of vanishing in picoseconds.

The study findings were published in the journal ACS Energy Letters.

Comment Eisenhower sent 101st Airborne to Little Rock (Score 1) 101

by couchslug (#66344988) Attached to: Fake AI Intelligence Almost Made the US Military Start a War With China

Eisenhower sent 101st Airborne to Little Rock in 1957 to enforce integration with weapons in hand in case they took fire. He also Federalized the Arkansas National Guard.

One segregationist got butt stroked in the face for trying to grab a rifle and another got a bayonet wound to the arm. Eisenhower knew his military options precisely (note his WWII command record). While his orders to deploy were legal, "firing on citizens" was of course an option and may well be used illegally though we're not quite in Weimar mode yet.

Submission + - America PAC's VoteSafe.org is nothing but a honeypot (cybernews.com)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: Elon Musk’s bogus voter registration website is collecting extensive user data and selling it.

The website was funded by Musk and is operated by America PAC, a conservative political action committee founded in 2024 to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

The VoteSafe.org website has been promoted as a way for Americans to register to vote and check their registration ahead of the November midterm elections.

But MeidasTouch and Snopes found that despite presenting itself as a voter-registration resource, the site doesn’t actually register users to vote.

The site's privacy policy says America PAC can collect information, including:

        Users' names
        Dates of birth
        Addresses
        Email addresses
        Phone numbers
        IP addresses
        Location
        Information about how they interact with the site

It also permits the collection of "inferences" about users, including their preferences, characteristics, behavior, attitudes, and psychological tendencies.

The policy says the information may be shared with or sold to business partners for targeted marketing.
 

Submission + - The brain is actually two completely separate organs (stanford.edu)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: From Stanford Medicine:

"For centuries, scientists have thought of the brain as a single, unified organ. But new research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years."

The adult brain has three main regions: the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. Scientists could never create hindbrain neurons.

"Previous attempts to make hindbrain neurons likely tried to coax forebrain and midbrain progenitors into hindbrain cells, which our study shows is not possible,” said researcher Rayyan Jokhai.

"The researchers’ breakthrough came from studying the earliest moments of embryonic development, during a stage called gastrulation when the body first takes shape. Jokhai and Dundes discovered that the hindbrain follows a separate developmental path, running in parallel to — rather than branching off from — the pathway that creates the forebrain and midbrain."

With this knowledge, researchers were able to create hindbrain neurons.

Submission + - FCC lets Paramount sell 49.5% equity stake to foreign powers (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Local ID10T
Local ID10T writes: The Federal Communications Commission yesterday approved Paramount Skydance's plan to sell large equity stakes to the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.

Under US law, companies with licenses to run broadcast stations need FCC approval to have direct or indirect foreign ownership exceeding 25 percent of the company's stock. Paramount says its indirect foreign ownership will reach 49.5 percent after it receives investments from the sovereign wealth funds and filed a petition asking the FCC to waive the foreign ownership limit.

Paramount, the owner of CBS, holds FCC licenses for the 28 local CBS stations that it owns and operates. Paramount is buying Warner Bros. Discovery in a $111 billion deal that is being partially financed with foreign investment but hasn't completed the acquisition because US states filed a lawsuit that aims to block the merger. Trump's Department of Justice approved the merger.

The FCC is letting Paramount sell indirect ownership stakes to "some of the most repressive governments in the world," FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the commission, said yesterday. "An investment this large in one of America's biggest media companies doesn't just buy equity, it secures influence over what gets said and what gets made."

Submission + - Upgrading a 29y old debian install from spinning rust to rPi5 and N355 mini PC

Submitted by marcmerlin
marcmerlin writes: If you are interested in the story of upgrading a 28 year old debian install with raids of spinning rust drives from 2TB with 26 SCSI SCA drives to 60TB of SATA spinning rust to 18 4TB SSDs to save power and move off randomly failing drives, this first upgrade story shows a failed attempt with a raspberry pi5 which could not sustain a 4way M2 PCI splitter and 18 SSDs: https://marc.merlins.org/perso...

But this second attempt with a 4 M2 NVME CWWK N355 mini server, worked. Amazing how small those servers are now and what they can do with barely more power use: https://marc.merlins.org/perso...

Also, hat to debian for having allowed me to run the same Linux install for 29 years without any re-install

Submission + - Pentagon Acknowledges Weapons in Space, Must Prepare for War in Cislunar Space (defenseone.com)

Submitted by Koreantoast
Koreantoast writes: During the annual Air Force Association Air, Space, and Cyber Conference outside Washington D.C., senior U.S. military officials publicly acknowledged on-orbit weapons in orbit and laid out the need to be prepared for conflict out to cislunar space. In a speech to senior US Air Force and US Space Force officers, allied officers, and senior defense industry officials, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink acknowledged the orbital weapons in a speech, saying “Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist... This is why the United States now has, on orbit, space-control weapons, capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversaries.” In a separate speech, General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged the expanding battlefield the U.S. military must be prepared to fight in: “Our task, my friends, is to adapt right now, so the Joint Force is prepared to fight, endure, and win, in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space."

One article notes that "while top Space Force officials have provided few details about how U.S. forces would fight between the Earth and its moon, they have been vocal about adding sensors and capabilities to watch adversary movements there." Aaron Brynildson, a professor of space law at the University of Mississippi notes that US military officials are motivated by peer competitor activities, particularly China. “There’s a fear that recent Chinese activity on the moon and in cislunar space might outpace the United States,” Brynildson said. “China has a relay satellite in cislunar space and is performing robotic missions on the far side of the moon.” Lt. Gen. Gregory Gagnon, the head of Combat Forces Command at US Space Force, acknowledges that concern, saying “Our adversaries, our potential adversaries, such as the PRC, are actively pursuing activities in the cislunar parts of space. So that's sort of the expansion, if you will, of I would say the end zone, if you will, in the football game..."

Brynildson raises concerns about the current ambiguity around the lack of laws and policy governing space weapons. “It’s unclear what the legal restraints on the use of kinetic or non-kinetic weapons in space might be. The Outer Space Treaty doesn’t give us great answers to what factors a military action must consider,” he said. “The DoD Law of War Manual is also non-committal on the unique aspects of the space domain. At a minimum, general principles from the law of armed conflict would apply, such as only striking military-related satellites, avoiding collateral damage to civilians, etc... Ultimately, I think the first space conflict might be the time when most of these rules get written."

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