185735894
submission
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.
185734670
submission
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.
185731952
submission
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.
185729266
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Google has been fined more than €400m (£345m) over the way it processed users’ location data, following claims that the tech giant had manipulated users into agreeing to be constantly tracked on their mobile phones. The fine, imposed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), comes after complaints from multiple European consumer organisations that Google was following every step users took.
The DPC launched its inquiry six years ago and set out to find out whether Google had a valid legal basis for its use of location data. It found that Google users could have been unaware that their location was being used to influence them with adverts or to gather details about their health and interests.
185718346
submission
fahrbot-bot writes:
The Guardian is reporting, along with others, that President Donald Trump is proferring a new argument for building his triumphal arch in Washington DC: it will be converted into a “top grade military complex” replete with drone and ammunition storage space and customized sniper facilities on the roof and plaza.
In a post on his Truth Social platform on Sunday morning, Trump claimed that his new plan came at the “strong request” of the US military. He said the 250ft structure would be able to “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage”. The president added, “There will be no facility like this anywhere in the world.”
This seems like a ploy to get around courts holding up the project by re-framing the project as a National Security matter, as he did with the East Wing of the White House. (Can the Kennedy Center be far behind?)
185714080
submission
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.
185707887
submission
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."
185706819
submission
alternative_right writes:
The lowly fruit fly just beat one of the worldâ(TM)s most advanced AI models at chess.
Thatâ(TM)s just one of dozens of wild experiments that have gone viral since scientists fully mapped the neural pathways of an adult male fruit fly â" whose entire brain fits on the head of a pin â" and posted the data online.
The threshold-crossing technology, achieved by HHMI Janelia Research in Virginia and Google Research, catalogued all 166,000 individual neurons and 25.6 million connections in the flyâ(TM)s brain and made it downloadable on Sept 3.
Inventive nerds then used the digitized neural network to power and navigate a wide variety of contraptions, apps and games.
Creator Maxime Labonne hooked the mapped pathways up to a chess engine and pitted it against Claude Opus 5, which is one of the most advanced AI models on the market.
The fly delivered a checkmate in just 11 moves.
185700650
submission
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
185696612
submission
fahrbot-bot writes:
CNN is reporting that an AI hallucination of Chinese nuclear components almost led to US military attack on a Chinese ship.
The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.
The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said.
It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.
The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false.” But it also “almost started a war,” the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.
The kind of “hallucination” that the tool used by the analyst in this case conjured has not been an isolated incident across the intelligence community since these tools began proliferating across government, according to one of the sources.
185681306
submission
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."
185680278
submission
ElectricVs writes:
In its move to cut back or "modernize" regulations, the NRC is proposing rules that relax drug or alcohol testing. More than 1,100 nuclear plant works failed those tests last year while hundreds more were caught trying to cheat.
185679158
submission
Bruce66423 writes:
'Scientists have solved the mystery of when black holes “burp” – when the astronomical bodies launch jets after feeding on stars, blasting material enormous distances in space.
'Scientists know from rare observations of stars being torn apart by black holes – a process that involves a stretching effect known as “spaghettification” – that “only about half of the star that gets too close to the back hole will end up eventually being swallowed by that black hole”, Goodwin said.
'The other material is launched back into space in powerful jets and outflows, sometimes so large they “can influence the entire evolution of a galaxy”, she said. “You can think of it as a black hole burp.”'
185671624
submission
wiredmikey writes:
Spain’s data protection regulator is investigating what may be the first reported personal-data breach executed through an AI agent. According to the filing, the agent allegedly chained together a successful login, vulnerability discovery, modification of personal data, and access to invoices.
Details remain limited, and researchers caution against assuming a “rogue AI” scenario. Still, the incident raises a consequential question for defenders: as attackers use agents to plan, execute, and adapt at machine speed, will traditional human-led detection and response remain fast enough?
185670266
submission
golem100 writes:
A couple weeks ago PCMag, and others, wrote articles along the lines of: "Microsoft Finally Backs Down: The Windows 11 Taskbar Update You've Been Waiting For". This is currently implemented with CU KB5120998 and since M$ has elected to defer "activation" of this feature--some two weeks later for most users it still needs to be enabled by the ViVe tool: vivetool /enable /id:59213768,61090762
Um, No...
The fundamental set of [lost] attributes that this "We brought Movable TaskBar back" lacks:
You can not control the position of the TaskBar on each desktop monitor--example: I have four displays on my desktop, three Landscape & one of which is in a Portrait orientation for reading documents.
With Windows7/8/10 you could position the TaskBar so that it was "Out of the way" and each display--on the right side of the right-most Landscape, on the left for the left-most Landscape display, & on the top/bottom for the Portrait. [same as my desktop on my Linux workstation]
Now you still get the same Taskbar alignment on all desktops.
You can not "resize" the taskbar. (well, you can--it has three sizes: too big, too small, and really way too small) For the previous three generations of the OS you could "Drag-Select" and resize the TaskBar to be the correct size for your needs on your desktop. [...just as I can on my KDE Desktop!]
With this implementation, 1/3 of the Taskbar real estate is consumed with "TaskBar-Tray Notification Icons."
Nobody asked for a partial, broken, re-implementation. The ask was: "Put it Back as it was!"
Dealing with M$ is pretty much like getting your 15 year old to do their chores on garbage night.
