185836628
submission
BrianFagioli writes:
Canonical is changing how Ubuntu kernel security updates are delivered as the number of reported Linux vulnerabilities continues to grow. The company says AI tools including large language models and specialized agents are helping researchers discover bugs faster. The Linux kernel becoming a CVE Numbering Authority has also increased the number of assigned CVEs.
Ubuntu is moving from separate four week regular and two week security kernel update cycles to overlapping two week cycles. The result will be a kernel release every week. Canonical says it will retain hardware certification and regression testing while organizations willing to test release candidates themselves can access fixes earlier through the proposed pocket.
The shift highlights an interesting consequence of AI assisted security research. Finding vulnerabilities faster also puts pressure on Linux distributions to fix and deliver patches faster.
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.
185720204
submission
joshuark writes:
NFL teams are now restricted on what can be shown on stadium video boards during field-goal and extra-point attempts, per a directive from the league issued prior to the beginning of the 2026-27 season.
Teams must display a static image or a standard wide-angle, All-22 view on the jumbo-sized screens behind the end zone as kicks are taking place, the NFL mandated in a memo sent to each organization, according to ESPN.
NFL rules have always mandated that moving, flashing, blinking images and texts could not be shown on video boards during field-goal and extra-point tries. To prevent undue distractions or unfair advantages to home teams, only static images could be displayed on video boards.
However, those rules have been modified to more closely restrict even images that aren't moving on the screen, ESPN's Mike Reiss and Adam Schefter reported. The stricter regulations were implemented in response to a social-media post by a former NFL analytics coach that pointed out images displayed by the New England Patriots on the Gillette Stadium video board that presented an optical illusion to opposing place-kickers.
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.
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.
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.
185668710
submission
alternative_right writes:
While much of the automatic license plate readerâ(TM)s (ALPR) most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclistâ(TM)s saddlebag.
185647820
submission
schwit1 writes:
What we are seeing is a massive, pretty obviously coordinated campaign by AI researchers, companies, NGOs, and politicians to strangle competition in an industry and, as I will show, save the financial bacon of the top AI companies that are vastly overextended financially because they have made contractual commitments that they simply have no prospect of paying for.
185624766
submission
shanen writes:
Or should this be an AskSlashdot about how to avoid such problems? But mostly I think it's a funny story to build a rant around. Or it could be regarded as a kind of spinoff of the recent story about record numbers of patches from Microsoft. Is the AI fixing old bugs? Or have recent AI-driven patches created more bugs that need to be fixed in the next month's record-setting patch package?
But here's the background of my funny story. My smartphone contract has a price structure linked to data usage. The least expensive tier is for less data (of course) so I try to use Wi-Fi as much as possible. No recent problems on that front in terms of using too much data.
Often I wind up using municipal Wi-Fi systems, but they are divided up into fairly small regions here. The login procedures vary quite a bit. Yesterday I was in a memorial museum doing a bit of research and that particular municipality has a somewhat different login system for their Wi-Fi. One of the options was to use my google account... Usually a convenient and quick approach.
But this time something caused the google to go berserk. Leading to hours of password changes and account recoveries and battles between my various computers and my smartphone and I'm pert' shure there's still more to come. No idea what the google thinks it is protecting me from, but the "convenient and quick approach" led to a major nightmare. In the end it appears my SIM was my only salvation?
Slashdot wants a URL, so I linked to the google's page on the topic. Doubleplusungood on steroids.
