Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Chromebook Remorse: Tech Backlash at Schools Extends Beyond Phones

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In addition to student cell phone bans, the New York Times' Natasha Singer reports that some schools are also rethinking the wisdom of always-on-and-available school-issued laptops :

Inge Esping, the principal of McPherson Middle School, has spent years battling digital devices for children’s attention. Four years ago, her school in McPherson, Kan., banned student cellphones during the school day. But digital distractions continued. Many children watched YouTube videos or played video games on their school-issued Chromebook laptops. Some used school Gmail accounts to bully fellow students.

In December, the middle school asked all 480 students to return the Chromebooks they had freely used in class and at home. Now the school keeps the laptops, which run on Google’s Chrome operating system, in carts parked in classrooms. Children take notes mostly by hand, and laptops are used sparingly, for specific activities assigned by teachers. “We just felt we couldn’t have Chromebooks be that huge distraction,” said Ms. Esping, 43, Kansas’ 2025 middle school principal of the year. “This technology can be a tool. It is not the answer to education.”

McPherson Middle School no longer gives students their own Chromebooks to use in school and take home. The laptops are now kept in classroom carts and used only for specific activities assigned by teachers. McPherson Middle School, about an hour’s drive from Wichita, is at the forefront of a new tech backlash spreading in education: Chromebook remorse.

Elsewhere in the Times, an opinion piece by CS prof Cal Newport explains why Johnny — and his parents — can't concentrate and what to do about it.

Submission + - Using a VPN May Subject You to NSA Spying (stacker.news)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Lawmakersare pressing the nation's top intelligence official to publicly disclose whether Americans who use commercialVPN servicesrisk being treated as foreigners under United States surveillance law—a classification that would strip them of constitutional protections against warrantless government spying. Lawmakers pressed Tulsi Gabbard to reveal whether using a VPN can strip Americans of their constitutional protections against warrantless surveillance.

In a letter sent Thursday to Director of National IntelligenceTulsi Gabbard, the lawmakers say that because VPNs obscure a user's true location, and because intelligence agencies presume that communications of unknown origin are foreign, Americans may be inadvertently waiving the privacy protections they're entitled to under the law.

Several federal agencies, including the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Trade Commission, haverecommendedthat consumers use VPNs toprotect their privacy. But following that advice may inadvertently cost Americans the very protections they're seeking.

Submission + - All 11 xAI co-founders have now reportedly left Elon Musk's AI company (thenextweb.com)

Submitted by ZipNada
ZipNada writes: Every co-founder Elon Musk recruited to build xAI has now reportedly left the company. Manuel Kroiss, who led the pretraining team, told people this month that he was departing. Ross Nordeen, described by Business Insider as Musk’s “right-hand operator,” left on Friday. They were the last two of eleven co-founders, all of whom have exited a company that was valued at $250 billion when SpaceX acquired it in February and that Musk himself described two weeks ago as having been “not built right the first time around.”

The departures are not ordinary startup attrition. The researchers Musk assembled in 2023 were among the most accomplished in artificial intelligence. Jimmy Ba co-authored the 2014 Adam optimisation paper, the most-cited paper in AI with more than 95,000 citations. Igor Babuschkin, the chief engineer, came from Google DeepMind. Christian Szegedy came from Google. Tony Wu led the reasoning team. Greg Yang, Toby Pohlen, Zihang Dai, Guodong Zhang, and Kyle Kosic brought experience from DeepMind, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. That entire cohort is now gone, and the company they helped build is being, in Musk’s words, “rebuilt from the foundations up.”

Submission + - Why It's Good to [Masturbate] Frequently, According to Science (404media.co) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Regular ejaculation — for example, by masturbation — produces higher quality sperm, a finding that has implications for fertility science and assisted reproductive technologies, according to a comprehensive new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

It’s well-established that sperm quality in many animals can deteriorate as males age, but less is known about how the age of sperm cells independently impacts reproductive outcomes. To fill in this gap, scientists co-led by Krish Sanghvi and Rebecca Dean of the University of Oxford conducted a meta-analysis of more than 115 studies about human sperm storage that cumulatively involved nearly 55,000 men, as well as 56 studies of 30 non-human species.

Submission + - Transporting antimatter on a truck is tricky ...

Submitted by Qbertino
Qbertino writes: ... but the CERN Project "Antimatter in motion" just did it. For the first time in history researchers at CERN have transported 92 antiprotons on a truck in a specially designed magnetic enclosure. The test-drive went so well that the researchers spontaneously decided to go another round. One hard pothole could cause the antiprotons to exit their magnetic enclosure and be destroyed. The purpose of the experiment was to test the feasibility of transporting antimatter to other facilities in Europe to conduct further antimatter research. German news Tagesschau has a nice report.

Submission + - Time To Flash OpenWrt

Submitted by ptorrone
ptorrone writes: The FCC just added all foreign-made consumer routers to its Covered List, banning new models from receiving authorization for import or sale in the US. The agency cited Volt, Flax, and Salt Typhoon cyberattacks, but cybersecurity researchers note the same vulnerabilities existed on American-brand routers too (Salt Typhoon targeted Cisco hardware). No evidence of deliberate backdoors has been presented. Netgear stock jumped 16% after hours. There isn't a single router currently manufactured entirely in the USA. Existing models are grandfathered but firmware updates are only guaranteed through March 2027. If you're running a home network and don't want to wait for the government to pick winners, now's the time to flash OpenWrt, build a router from a Banana Pi or Raspberry Pi with pfSense, or support open-source networking projects like OPNsense. When proprietary supply chains get cut by policy, open-source firmware becomes the supply chain. Adafruit has a writeup with more actionable steps for makers and hackers.

Submission + - Chandra resolves why black holes hit the brakes on growth (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Astronomers have an answer for a long-running mystery in astrophysics: why is the growth of supermassive black holes so much lower today than in the past? A study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other X-ray telescopes found that supermassive black holes are unable to consume material as rapidly as they did in the distant past. The results appeared in the December 2025 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Submission + - The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent. (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: The U.S. government is insolvent. That’s not hyperbole — it’s the conclusion drawn directly from the Treasury Department’s own consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2025, released last week to near-total media silence. The numbers: $6.06 trillion in total assets against $47.78 trillion in total liabilities as of September 30, 2025.

Submission + - Peter Thiel just bet $2 billion on a collar that wraps around a cow's neck (x.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The company is called Halter and it has a proprietary algorithm that runs the entire operation.

They actually trademarked the name for it and called it the Cowgorithm and here's how it works.

A farmer opens an app, taps a button, and 600,000 cows across three countries start walking toward the milking station on their own.

No farm dogs, fences or physical labor, it's just a solar-powered GPS collar sending sound and vibration cues to each animal.

The collar does more than move cows around.

It monitors digestion, fertility cycles, and health patterns in real time, 24 hours a day, using machine learning trained on the behavior of hundreds of thousands of animals.

Submission + - How birds send heat into space (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: As human-caused climate change continues to raise temperatures across the globe, understanding how birds regulate their temperature is vital for their conservation. But how much heat birds emit—an invisible spectrum of radiation known as mid-infrared—has never been studied, until now.

Submission + - Cyberattack On Iowa Breathalyzer Company Impacts Devices In 45 States (kcrg.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A Des Moines-based breathalyzer test company is recovering after a cyberattack impacted drivers in 45 states, KCCI reports.

Intoxalock makes ignition devices that people use to start their vehicles after an OWI. People with the devices have to provide a breath sample to prove they have not been drinking before the car starts.

The company said many customers are locked out of their devices or that the device is giving misread calculations.

Submission + - Rapper Afroman wins defamation lawsuit against police officers about rap videos (billboard.com)

Submitted by UnknowingFool
UnknowingFool writes: Rapper Afroman, born Joseph Edgar Foreman, famous for his 2000 hit "Because I Got High", has won a defamation lawsuit that seven Ohio police offers filed against him. A jury found he did not defame the officers in music videos he made about a 2022 police raid of his home. In August 2022, Adams County Sheriff's Department raided Afroman's home on suspicion of drug trafficking and kidnapping. Neither drugs nor kidnapping victims were found, and charges were never filed. However local officials would not pay for damages occurred during the raid including a broken front door and a video surveillance camera. Afroman used his home security footage of the raid to create music rap videos criticizing the police over the incident; "Will You Help Me Repair My Door?", "Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera?", and "Lemon Pound Cake". He posted the videos on YouTube.

In March 2023, seven officers filed a lawsuit against Afroman for invasion of privacy and the unauthorized use of their images from the security footage in addition to defamation claims. The officers requested an injunction for Afroman to stop speaking about them or using their photos. The officers also wanted all proceeds from the videos, song sales, performances, and merchandise claiming they had suffered “emotional distress” due to the videos. Afroman's defense included Freedom of Speech rights to criticize public officials. The ACLU filed an amicus brief supporting the rapper arguing that the lawsuit was a SLAPP suit only meant to silence criticism. In October 2023, the court agreed and dismissed the invasion of privacy, "right of publicity”, and “unauthorized use of individual’s persona” claims but allowed the defamation case to proceed.

Defamation claims by the officers included the allegation Afroman repeatedly had sex with the wife of Randolph L. Walters, Jr. When Afroman's lawyer asked Walters “But we all know that’s not true, right?”, the officer replied he did not know. Defamation from emotional damages requires that harm arise from a false statement; however, if a statement is so outrageous that no one would believe it to be true, then reputational damage cannot be a result.

Submission + - 2026 Turing Award Goes to Inventors of Quantum Cryptography

Submitted by Dave Knott
Dave Knott writes: Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have won this year’s Turing Award for their work on quantum cryptography and related technologies. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the two scientists will share. Dr. Bennett, 82, is a researcher at an IBM computer science lab in Yorktown, N.Y., and Dr. Brassard, 70, is a professor at the University of Montreal.

The two met in 1979 while swimming in the Atlantic just off the north shore of Puerto Rico. They were taking a break while attending an academic conference in San Juan. Dr. Bennett swam up to Dr. Brassard and suggested they use quantum mechanics to create a bank note that could never be forged. Collaborating between Montreal and New York, they applied Dr. Bennett’s idea to subway tokens rather than bank notes. In a research paper published in 1983, they showed that their quantum subway tokens could never be forged, even if someone managed to steal the subway turnstile housing the elaborate hardware needed to read them. This led to quantum cryptography. After describing their new form of encryption in a research paper published in 1984, they demonstrated the technology with a physical experiment five years later. Called BB84, their system used photons — particles of light — to create encryption keys used to lock and unlock digital data. Thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics, the behavior of a photon changes if someone looks at it. This means that if anyone tries to steal the keys, he or she will leave a telltale sign of the attempted theft — a bit like breaking the seal on an aspirin bottle.

Submission + - Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft's Cloud Was "a Pile of Shit." (propublica.org)

Submitted by madbrain
madbrain writes: Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was “a Pile of Shit.” They approved it anyway.

To move federal agencies to the cloud, the government created a program known as FedRAMP, whose job was to ensure the security of new technology.

FedRAMP first raised questions about Microsoft's Government Community Cloud High s security in 2020 and asked Microsoft to provide detailed diagrams explaining its encryption practices. But when the company produced what FedRAMP considered to be only partial information in fits and starts, program officials did not reject Microsoft’s application. Instead, they repeatedly pulled punches and allowed the review to drag out for the better part of five years. And because federal agencies were allowed to deploy the product during the review, GCC High spread across the government as well as the defense industry. By late 2024, FedRAMP reviewers concluded that they had little choice but to authorize the technology — not because their questions had been answered or their review was complete, but largely on the grounds that Microsoft’s product was already being used across Washington.

Slashdot Top Deals

Harrison's Postulate: For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

Close