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Submission + - Website Exposes Tesla Owners' Personal Data (newsweek.com)

Submitted by hcs_$reboot
hcs_$reboot writes: A website known as "Dogequest" has allegedly published personal details of Tesla owners across the United States, sparking concerns over privacy and security.

The site, which appears in the wake of anti-Elon Musk protests across the country, displays names, addresses, and phone numbers of Tesla owners on an interactive map and uses an image of a Molotov cocktail as its cursor.

The website's operators claim they will only remove Tesla owners' information if they provide proof that they have sold their vehicles.

The emergence of Dogequest coincides with a series of attacks on Tesla properties, including arson incidents at Tesla service centers and showrooms. These actions appear to be part of a broader protest movement against Musk's ties to President Donald Trump

Submission + - Mystery force behind the universe's expansion may not be so constant after all (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the expansion of the universe, may not have always provided a steady push as cosmologists have assumed for decades. Instead, the latest data from the powerful Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) add more evidence that the universe’s expansion accelerated faster in the past than it is doing now. DESI’s picture of “dynamical dark energy” will both delight and confound theorists, who have despaired at the lack of clues to dark energy’s physical cause but were not expecting what DESI is now seeing.

“I think the implications for cosmology are going to be profound,” says Bhuvnesh Jain, a cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s very exciting,” adds astronomer Eric Gawiser of Rutgers University. “But it also is going to cause people to be a little bit suspicious: Can dark energy really do that?”

Submission + - How AI coding assistants could be compromised via rules file (scworld.com)

Submitted by spatwei
spatwei writes: AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor could be manipulated to generate code containing backdoors, vulnerabilities and other security issues via distribution of malicious rule configuration files, Pillar Security researchers reported Tuesday.

Rules files are used by AI coding agents to guide their behavior when generating or editing code. For example, a rules file may include instructions for the assistant to follow certain coding best practices, utilize specific formatting, or output responses in a specific language.

The attack technique developed by Pillar Researchers, which they call “Rules File Backdoor,” weaponizes rules files by injecting them with instructions that are invisible to a human user but readable by the AI agent.

Hidden Unicode characters like bidirectional text markers and zero-width joiners can be used to obfuscate malicious instructions in the user interface and in GitHub pull requests, the researchers noted.

Rules configurations are often shared among developer communities and distributed through open-source repositories or included in project templates; therefore, an attacker could distribute a malicious rules file by sharing it on a forum, publishing it on an open-source platform like GitHub or injecting it via a pull request to a popular repository.

Once the poisoned rules file is imported to GitHub Copilot or Cursor, the AI agent will read and follow the attacker’s instructions while assisting the victim’s future coding projects.

Submission + - Mean Time Between FA and FO with "AI": 52.5 Hours

Submitted by ewhac
ewhac writes: @daisy@cloudisland.nz on the Mastodon network posted a lovely pair of juxtaposed posts copied from another social media site wherein one @leojr94_ triumphantly writes: "my saas was built with Cursor; zero hand written code. AI is no longer just an assistant, it's also the builder. Now, you can continue to whine about it or start building. P.S: Yes, people pay for it." Just over two days later, the same user laments: "guys, I'm under attack. ever since I started to share how I built my SaaS using Cursor. random thing [sic] are happening, maxed out usage on api keys, people bypassing the subscription, creating random shit on db. as you know, I am not technical so this is taking me longer that [sic] usual to figure out [ ... ]" The ensuing thread is a delectable smorgasbord of schadenfreude, including one user opining, "I have a sneaking suspicion that those weird people who are making his saas behave in unexpected ways are what techies often call 'users'," while another quipped simply, "Finding Out as a Service."

Submission + - Consumer Groups Push New Law To Reign In Zombie Devices (substack.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: You bought a smart refrigerator with cool new AI features (https://www.ces.tech/ces-innovation-awards/2025/4-door-refrigerator-with-ai-home-and-ai-vision-inside-20/). The hardware that keeps your food from spoiling has a useful life that is measured in decades. But 6 months after you buy it, the manufacturer declares that it is ending support for the fridge's software and shutting down the cloud services that power its smart features — a big reason you purchased the device. What can you do? Currently, not a thing. But that may soon change. A group of consumer advocacy groups on Thursday introduced model legislation to address the growing epidemic of “zombie” Internet of Things (IoT) devices that have had software support cut off by their manufacturer, Fight To Repair News reports https://open.substack.com/pub/...

The Connected Consumer Product End of Life Disclosure Act (https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/press_release/consumer-reports-us-pirg-and-secure-resilient-future-foundation-propose-connected-consumer-products-end-of-life-disclosure-act-to-address-iot-security-risks/) is a collaboration between Consumer Reports (https://consumerreports.org/), US PIRG (https://pirg.org/), SRFF, the Secure Resilient Future Foundation (https://secure-resilient.org/) and the Center for Democracy and Technology (https://cdt.org/). It requires manufacturers of connected consumer products to disclose for how long they will provide technical support, security updates, or bug fixes for the software and hardware that are necessary for the product to operate securely.

“Consumers deserve to know how long their connected devices will be supported,” said Justin Brookman, director of technology policy for Consumer Reports in a statement. “Currently, it’s nearly impossible for most people to figure out if their devices are still receiving critical updates. This lack of transparency leaves consumers vulnerable and creates significant security risks.”

Submission + - Facebook's secrets, by the insider Zuckerberg tried to silence

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “Careless People author and former Meta director Sarah Wynn-Williams reveals what it was like ‘babysitting’ her boss”

“There were no adults in the room,” she says. “These are people who have assumed a lot of power, thinking none of the rules apply to them.”

Submission + - Super Nintendo Hardware Is Running Faster as It Ages (404media.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Something very strange is happening inside Super Nintendo (SNES) consoles as they age: a component you’ve probably never heard of is running ever so slightly faster as we get further and further away from the time the consoles first hit the market in the early ‘90s. The discovery started a mild panic in the speedrunning community in late February since one theoretical consequence of a faster-running console is that it could impact how fast games are running and therefore how long they take to complete. This could potentially wreak havoc on decades of speedrunning leaderboards and make tracking the fastest times in the speedrunning scene much more difficult, but that outcome now seems very unlikely. However, the obscure discovery does highlight the fact that old consoles’ performance is not frozen at the time of their release date, and that they are made of sensitive components that can age and degrade, or even ‘upgrade’, over time.

[...] So what’s going on here? The SNES has an audio processing unit (APU) called the SPC700, a coprocessor made by Sony for Nintendo. Documentation given to game developers at the time the SNES was released says that the SPC700 should have a digital signal processing (DSP) rate of 32,000hz, which is set by a ceramic resonator that runs 24.576Mhz on that coprocessor. We’re getting pretty technical here as you can see, but basically the composition of this ceramic component and how it resonates when connected to an electronic circuit generates the frequency for the audio processing unit, or how much data it processes in a second. It’s well documented that these types of ceramic resonators are sensitive and can run at higher frequencies when subject to heat and other external conditions. For example, the chart below, taken from an application manual for Murata ceramic resonators, shows changes in the resonators’ oscillation under different physical conditions.

As Cecil told me, as early as 2007 people making SNES emulators noticed that, despite documentation by Nintendo that the SPC700 should run at 32,000Hz, some SNESs ran faster. Emulators generally now emulate at the slightly higher frequency of 32,040Hz in order to emulate games more faithfully. Digging through forum posts in the SNES homebrew and emulation communities, Cecil started to put a pattern together: the SPC700 ran faster whenever it was measured further away from the SNES’s release. Data Cecil collected since his Bluesky post, which now includes more than 140 responses, also shows that the SPC700 is running faster. There is still a lot of variation, in theory depending on how much an SNES was used, but overall the trend is clear: SNESs are running faster as they age, and the fastest SPC700 ran at 32,182Hz. More research shared by another user in the TASBot Discord has even more detailed technical analysis which appears to support those findings.

Submission + - Everything You Say To Your Echo Will Be Sent To Amazon Starting On March 28 (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of everything spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud.

Attempting to rationalize the change, Amazon’s email said: "As we continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature." One of the most marketed features of Alexa+ is its more advanced ability to recognize who is speaking to it, a feature known as Alexa Voice ID. To accommodate this feature, Amazon is eliminating a privacy-focused capability for all Echo users, even those who aren’t interested in the subscription-based version of Alexa or want to use Alexa+ but not its ability to recognize different voices.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What's the best rapid development language to learn today? 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Many years ago, I was a coder—but I went through my computer science major when they were being taught in Lisp and C. These days I work in other areas, but often need to code up quick data processing solutions or interstitial applications. Doing this in C now feels archaic and overly difficult and text-based. Most of the time I now end up doing things in either Unix shell scripting (bash and grep/sed/awk/bc/etc.) or PHP. But these are showing significant age as well.

I'm no longer the young hotshot that I once was—I don't think that I could pick up an entire language in a couple of hours with just a cursory reference work—yet I see lots of languages out there now that are much more popular and claim to offer various and sundry benefits.

I'm not looking to start a new career as a programmer—I already have a career—but I'd like to update my applied coding skills to take advantage of the best that software development now has to offer.

Ideally, I'd like to learn a language that has web relevance, mobile relevance, GUI desktop applications relevance, and also that can be integrated into command-line workflows for data processing—a language that is interpreted rather than compiled, or at least that enables rapid, quick-and-dirty development, since I'm not developing codebases for clients or for the general software marketplace, but rather as one-off tools to solve a wide variety of problems, from processing large CSV dumps from databases in various ways to creating mobile applications to support field workers in one-off projects (i.e. not long-term applications that will be used for operations indefinitely, but quick solutions to a particular one-time field data collection need).

I'm tired of doing these things in bash or as web apps using PHP and responsive CSS, because I know they can be done better using more current best-of-breed technologies. Unfortunately, I'm also severely strapped for time—I'm not officially a coder or anything near it; I just need to code to get my real stuff done and can't afford to spend much time researching/studying multiple alternatives. I need the time that I invest in this learning to count.

Others have recommended Python, Lua, Javascript+Node, and Ruby, but I thought I'd ask the Slashdot crowd: If you had to recommend just one language for rapid tool development (not for the development of software products as such—a language/platform to produce means, not ends) with the best balance of convenience, performance, and platform coverage (Windows, Mac, Unix, Web, Mobile, etc.) what would you recommend, and why?

Submission + - The Nightmare on Connected Home Street

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: With the battle for the connected home underway, Wired's Mat Honan offered his humorous and scary Friday the 13th take on what life in the connected home of the future might be like. "I wake up at four to some old-timey dubstep spewing from my pillows," Honan begins. "The lights are flashing. My alarm clock is blasting Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something, I don’t know. I never listened to dubstep, and in fact the entire genre is on my banned list. You see, my house has a virus again. Technically it’s malware. But there’s no patch yet, and pretty much everyone’s got it. Homes up and down the block are lit up, even at this early hour. Thankfully this one is fairly benign. It sets off the alarm with music I blacklisted decades ago on Pandora. It takes a picture of me as I get out of the shower every morning and uploads it to Facebook. No big deal." Having been the victim of an epic hacking, Honan can't be faulted for worrying.
Firefox

Submission + - Mozilla Labs to bring address book to Firefox (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: Mozilla has announced the availability of an experimental new add-on for Firefox that is designed to import information about the user's contacts from a variety of Web services and other sources. The add-on makes contact details easily accessible to the user and can also selectively supply it to remote Web applications.

After the add-on has imported and indexed the user's contact data, it becomes available to the user through an integrated contact management tool that functions like an address book. One of Mozilla's first experiments is an autocompletion feature that allows users to select a contact when they are typing an e-mail address into a Web form.

To make the browser's contact database accessible to Web applications, the add-on uses the W3C Contacts API specification.

ARS Technica : http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/03/mozilla-labs-builds-add-on-to-bring-addressbook-to-firefox.ars

Comment Re:Just remember what Pelosi said: (Score 1) 2044

by LRNG_LNX (#31542190) Attached to: Health Care Reform

Gotta love surprises from the government!! Next from capital hill . . . "You're gonna love this new gun control package once we've passed it and take your guns away so you can't revolt when we increase your taxes again and remove more of your freedoms."

She's said that health care is a right. Last time I checked the US Constitution . . . it wasn't there. "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." [Not so] Strangely it's in the former Soviet Constitution.
Google

Submission + - Google Launches 3D Driver Project For Chrome (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Google has launched a new project for Chrome that will let the browser run a wider range of 3D graphics content without downloading additional drivers. The open-source project, called ANGLE (Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine), seeks to let Chromium run WebGL content on Windows computers, wrote product manager Henry Bridge on the Chromium blog. WebGL is still-developing a cross-platform Web standard for accessing low-level 3D graphics hardware based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 API (application programming interface) that can be implemented directly in a browser without a plugin. 'ANGLE will allow Windows users to run WebGL content without having to find and install new drivers for their system,' Bridge wrote. Because ANGLE aims to use most of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API, it may help developers working on mobile and embedded devices, Bridge wrote. 'ANGLE should make it simpler to prototype these applications on Windows and also gives developers new options for deploying production versions of their code to the desktop.'
Science

Invisibility Cloak Created In 3-D 113

Posted by kdawson from the can-you-see-me-now dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have created the first device to render an object invisible in three dimensions. The 'cloak,' described in the journal Science (abstract; full text requires login), hid an object from detection using light of wavelengths close to those that are visible to humans. Previous devices have been able to hide objects from light travelling in only one direction; viewed from any other angle, the object would remain visible. This is a very early but significant step towards a true invisibility cloak." The "object" hidden in this work was a bump one micrometer high. The light used was just longer than the wavelengths our eyes detect. To get a visible-light cloak, the features of the cloaking metamaterial would need to be reduced in size from 300 nm to 10 nm.

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