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Submission + - Developers just open sourced a framework for AI avatars that move and gesture wh (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: A newly open sourced framework called SentiAvatar aims to improve how AI generated âoedigital humansâ move and speak during live conversations. The project, developed by SentiPulse and researchers from Renmin University of China, focuses on synchronizing speech, facial expressions, and body gestures to reduce the uncanny valley effect that often plagues avatar systems. The framework generates six second motion sequences in roughly 0.3 seconds, allowing digital characters to maintain continuous movement while responding to spoken dialogue.

The release also includes a conversational motion dataset containing 21,000 clips and about 37 hours of synchronized speech, facial expression, and full body animation data. Developers say the system uses a planning architecture that determines which gestures or expressions should occur before filling in detailed animation frame by frame. The goal is to produce more natural body language during real time conversations, though the real test will be whether the open source community can turn the technology into believable digital characters outside of controlled demos.

Submission + - Particles seen emerging from empty space for first time (newscientist.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: A pair of rare particles produced in high-energy proton collisions may be the clearest evidence yet that mass can emerge from empty space. The finding could shed light on one of the biggest puzzles in physics: how particles acquire their mass.

According to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) – widely considered to be our best theory for describing the strong force, which binds quarks inside protons and neutrons – even a perfect vacuum isn’t truly empty. Instead, it is filled with short-lived disturbances in the underlying energy of space that flicker in and out of existence, known as virtual particles. Among them are quark-antiquark pairs.

Under normal conditions, these fleeting pairs vanish almost as soon as they appear. But if enough energy is injected into a vacuum, QCD predicts they can be promoted into real, detectable particles with measurable mass.

Now, the STAR collaboration – an international team of physicists working at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state – has observed this process for the first time.

The team smashed together high-energy protons in a vacuum, producing a spray of particles. Some of these particles should be quark-antiquark pairs pulled directly from the vacuum itself, but quarks can never exist alone and immediately combine into composite particles. Quarks and antiquarks are born with their spins correlated — a shared quantum alignment inherited from the vacuum.

The researchers found that this link persists even after the quarks and antiquarks become part of larger particles called hyperons, which decay in less than a tenth of a billionth of a second. Spotting these spin-aligned hyperons in the aftermath of the proton collisions allowed the researchers to confirm that the quarks within them came from the vacuum.

“This is the first time we’ve seen the entire process,” says Zhoudunming Tu, a member of the STAR collaboration.

Submission + - Why AI Babysitter Is the Hottest New Profession

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "AI may allow anyone to generate code, but only a computer scientist can maintain a system," explained Google.org Global Head Maggie Johnson in a LinkedIn post, Computer Science Education in the AI Era. Johnson was formerly Director of Education at Google and a founding Board member of the Google.org-funded nonprofit Code.org, which last year launched a campaign to make CS and AI a high school graduation requirement.

Johnson continued: "As AI-generated code becomes more accurate and ubiquitous, the role of the computer scientist shifts from author to technical auditor or expert. While large language models can generate functional code in milliseconds, they lack the contextual judgment and specialized knowledge to ensure that the output is safe, efficient, and integrates correctly within a larger system without a person’s oversight. [...] The human-in-the-loop must possess the technical depth to recognize when a piece of code is sub-optimal or dangerous in a production environment. [...] "We need computer scientists to perform forensics, tracing the logic of an AI-generated module to identify logical fallacies or security loopholes. Modern CS education should prepare students to verify and secure these black-box outputs."

The NY Times reports that companies are already struggling to find engineers to review the explosion of AI-written code. Any thoughts on what AI Babysitting might/should pay?

Submission + - John Deere To Pay $99 Million In Monumental Right-To-Repair Settlement (thedrive.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Farmers have been fighting John Deere for years over the right to repair their equipment, and this week, they finally reached a landmark settlement. While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere’s authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents (PDF)—far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.

The settlement also includes an agreement by Deere to provide “the digital tools required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair” of tractors, combines, and other machinery for 10 years. That part is crucial, as farmers previously resorted to hacking their own equipment’s software just to get it up and running again. John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding in 2023 that partially addressed those concerns, providing third parties with the technology to diagnose and repair, as long as its intellectual property was safeguarded. Monday’s settlement seems to represent a much stronger (and legally binding) step forward.

Submission + - New problem: AI finds too many bugs (etn.se) 1

Submitted by jantangring
jantangring writes: The open source project cURL used to be flooded with worthless, AI-generated security reports. Over the past few months, those have vanished — replaced by genuinely useful ones. So many, in fact, that the maintainers are struggling to keep up, says Daniel Stenberg, who leads the project.

cURL is not alone.

“I hear similar witness reports from fellow maintainers in many other Open Source projects,” Stenberg writes on LinkedIn.

Several of those colleagues back him up in the discussion thread — among them the maintainers of glibc, Vim, and Node.js.

“Over the last few months, we have stopped getting AI slop security reports in the #curl project. They're gone. Instead we get an ever-increasing amount of really good security reports, almost all done with the help of AI,” says Stenberg.

Stenberg has a straightforward explanation for the shift – better tooling.

“HackerOne did basically nothing new that could explain this (plus, this is mirrored in countless other projects, many of them not on hackerone). This is a notable change in the incoming reports. I'd say it is primarily because the tooling has improved.”

HackerOne is the platform cURL uses to receive bug reports.

There is an unexpected downside to being flooded with good bug reports, though — there are simply too many to handle in time.

“They're submitted in a never-before seen frequency and put us under serious load,” says Stenberg.

The challenge used to be filtering out noise. Now it is keeping pace with reports that actually matter. That is how Steve M. Hernandez, a code security specialist, puts it.

“High quality reports at higher frequency still require the triage capacity and decision consistency to keep up. The bar is moving from filtering noise to keeping pace with real signal.”

Submission + - Mexico getting rid of cash? (usaherald.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mexican Cartel President Sheinbaum just announced, “NO MORE CASH” at gas stations or toll booths.

Digital payments are MANDATORY by end of 2026.

This is a digital prison test run.

The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset is here.

Submission + - Russian Gov Hackers Broke Into Thousands of Home Routers To Steal Passwords (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A group of Russian government hackers have hijacked thousands of home and small business routers around the world as part of an ongoing campaign aimed at redirecting victim’s internet traffic to steal their passwords and access tokens, security researchers and government authorities warned on Tuesday. [...] The hacking group targeted unpatched routers made by MikroTik and TP-Link using previously disclosed vulnerabilities according to the U.K. government’s cybersecurity unit NCSC and Lumen’s research arm Black Lotus Labs, which released new details of the campaign Tuesday.

According to the researchers, the hackers were able to spy on large numbers of people over the course of several years by compromising their routers, many of which run outdated software, leaving them vulnerable to remote attacks without their owners’ knowledge. The NCSC said that these operations are “likely opportunistic in nature, with the actor casting a wide net to reach many potential victims, before narrowing in on targets of intelligence interest as the attack develops.” Per the researchers and government advisories, the Russian hackers hacked routers to modify the device’s settings so that the victim’s internet requests are surreptitiously passed to infrastructure run by the hackers. This allows the hackers to redirect victims to spoof websites under their control, then steal passwords and tokens that let the hackers log in to that victim’s online accounts without needing their two-factor authentication codes.

Black Lotus Labs said that Fancy Bear compromised at least 18,000 victims in around 120 countries, including government departments, law enforcement agencies, and email providers across North Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia. Microsoft, which also released details of the campaign on Tuesday, said in a blog post that its researchers identified over 200 organizations and 5,000 consumer devices affected by these hacking operations, including at least three government organizations in Africa.

Submission + - CIA claims new quantum magnetometry tech identifies sound from miles away (nypost.com) 1

Submitted by sosume
sosume writes: The New York Post reports that the CIA used a previously classified tool called 'Ghost Murmur' (from Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works) for the first time in combat. The system allegedly uses long-range quantum magnetometry and AI to detect the unique electromagnetic signature of a human heartbeat from up to 40 miles away, helping locate the weapons systems officer from a downed F-15E in southern Iran's mountains after he evaded capture for ~48 hours.

Submission + - AI just ran on a satellite in space (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Artificial intelligence has now run directly on a satellite in orbit. A spacecraft about 500km above Earth captured an image of an airport and then immediately ran an onboard AI model to detect airplanes in the photo. Instead of acting like a simple camera in space that sends raw data back to Earth for later analysis, the satellite performed the computation itself while still in orbit.

The system used an NVIDIA Jetson Orin module to run the object detection model moments after the image was taken. Traditionally, Earth observation satellites capture images and transmit large datasets to ground stations where computers process them hours later. Running AI directly on the satellite could reduce that delay dramatically, allowing spacecraft to analyze events like disasters, infrastructure changes, or aircraft activity almost immediately.

Submission + - New Revelations Reignite Crypto Scandal Involving Argentina's President Milei (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: President Javier Milei of Argentina promoted a cryptocurrency last year that quickly skyrocketed in value then cratered just as fast, costing investors millions of dollars and setting off a scandal and an investigation. Mr. Milei said he was simply highlighting a private venture and had no connection to the digital coin called $Libra. New evidence is now raising questions about his assertion. Phone logs from a federal investigation by Argentine prosecutors into the coin’s collapse show seven phone calls between Mr. Milei and one of the entrepreneurs behind the cryptocurrency on the night in 2025 when Mr. Milei posted about $Libra on X. The contents of the calls, which took place before and after Mr. Milei’s post, are not known.

But the phone logs — which were obtained by The New York Times and first reported by a local cable news channel, C5N — suggest a greater degree of communication between Mr. Milei and the entrepreneurs who launched the token than what the president has publicly acknowledged. Newly uncovered messages also suggest Mr. Milei received regular payments from one of the entrepreneurs while he was a congressman. Mr. Milei has not publicly commented on the call logs and other documents, and he did not respond to a request for comment. He is named as a person of interest in the federal prosecutor’s continuing investigation into the digital coin, according to court documents reviewed by The Times, but has not been formally charged with any crime. The latest revelations have revived a scandal that threatens the very foundation of a president who rose to power and was elected president in 2023 by attacking a political class he called corrupt.

Submission + - 'Microshifting' Puts a New Spin On 9-To-5 Schedules (apnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A federal appeals court ruled on Monday that New Jersey gaming regulators cannot prevent Kalshi from allowing people in the state to use its prediction market to place financial bets on the outcome of sporting events. A three-judge panel of the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 (PDF) in finding that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has exclusive jurisdiction over the sports-related event contracts that Kalshi allows people to trade on its platform. The ruling marked the first time a federal appeals court has ruled on what has become the central issue in an escalating battle over the ability of state gaming regulators to police the activity of prediction market operators.

Kalshi and companies like it allow users to place trades and profit from predictions on events such as sports and elections. States argue that firms like Kalshi are operating without required state licenses, in violation of gaming laws, including bans on wagers by those under 21. Those states include New Jersey, which last year sent Kalshi a cease-and-desist letter stating that its listing of sports-related event contracts on its platform violated state gambling laws that prohibit betting on collegiate sports. Kalshi sued the state, arguing its event contracts qualify as "swaps," a type of derivative contract, that under the Commodity Exchange Act can only be regulated by the CFTC, which had granted the company a license to operate a designated contract market (DCM).

A lower-court judge had sided with New York-based Kalshi and issued a preliminary injunction, prompting New Jersey to appeal. But a majority of the judges on the 3rd Circuit panel concluded the Commodity Exchange Act likely preempted state law. "Kalshi's sports-related event contracts are swaps traded on a CFTC-licensed DCM, so the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction," U.S. Circuit Judge David Porter wrote. The ruling was in line with the position advanced in other litigation by the CFTC under President Donald Trump's administration. The regulator last week sued Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois to prevent them from pursuing what it called unlawful efforts to regulate prediction markets.

Submission + - China Flies World's First Megawatt-Class Hydrogen Turboprop Engine (fuelcellsworks.com)

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: China says the AEP100, a megawatt-class hydrogen-fueled turboprop engine developed by the Aero Engine Corporation of China, has completed its maiden flight on a 7.5-tonne unmanned cargo aircraft in Zhuzhou, Hunan. The 16-minute test covered 36km at 220km/h and 300 meters altitude, with the aircraft returning safely after completing its planned maneuvers. State media described it as the world’s first test flight of a megawatt-class hydrogen-fueled turboprop engine.

Submission + - Damning study reveals how ChatGPT is damaging the way you think (dailymail.co.uk)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: New MIT & Stanford studies just dropped: AI assistants like ChatGPT & Claude are dangerously agreeable.

When users express, harmful, deceptive or unethical beliefs, these AIs are 49% more likely to encourage their delusions.

Instead of correcting bad ideas, they’re amplifying them.

Submission + - Copilot Is 'For Entertainment Purposes Only,' According to Microsoft's ToS (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: AI skeptics aren’t the only ones warning users not to unthinkingly trust models’ outputs — that’s what the AI companies say themselves in their terms of service. Take Microsoft, which is currently focused on getting corporate customers to pay for Copilot. But it’s also been getting dinged on social media over Copilot’s terms of use, which appear to have been last updated on October 24, 2025. “Copilot is for entertainment purposes only,” the company warned. “It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.”

Submission + - Stanford Daily Ponders Fate of Bill Gates Namesake Building on April Fools' Day

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Gates Computer Science Building renamed Peter Thiel Center for Panoptic Computing reads the headline of an April Fools' Day story that ran in the Humor section of The Stanford Daily (with the further disclaimer that "This article is purely satirical and fictitious"). The story begins: "Following revelations that the billionaire founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, had a longstanding relationship with convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Stanford has announced it will strip Gates’ name from the William H. Gates Computer Science Building and instead honor alumnus Peter Thiel B.A. ‘89, JD ‘92. Gates, who is not a Stanford alumnus, gave an initial gift of $6 million toward the building’s construction in 1992."

While fictional, the story does make one wonder what may become of the academic and institutional buildings worldwide named after Bill Gates in the blowback over his past ties to Epstein, which have already played a factor in the breakdown of his marriage to Melinda French Gates and friendship with Warren Buffet. In addition to The Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford, this includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex at the University of Texas at Austin, Bill and Melinda Gates Hall at Cornell, The Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, and The William H. Gates Building at MIT's Stata Center. Buildings named after Gates' parents include Mary Gates Hall and William H. Gates Hall at the University of Washington, and The William Gates Building at the University of Cambridge (UK).

Aside from the Thiel angle, The Stanford Daily's April Fools' Day story may not be as far-fetched as it may seem — many universities' naming policies include provisions allowing donors' names to be removed from buildings, programs, or other facilities under extraordinary circumstances. For example, the University of Washington's Regent Policy No. 50 states, "The University reserves the right to revoke and terminate any naming on reasonable grounds not limited to the revelation of corporate or individual acts detracting from the University’s mission, integrity, or reputation." Then again, UW notes that Bill's parents and siblings served as UW Regents for decades, so one expects Bill will be granted some leeway here for what he has characterized as 'foolish' choices on his part.

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