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Submission + - Christians are turning to AI for spiritual guidance (nerds.xyz)

BrianFagioli writes: A new study from Barna Group and Gloo suggests artificial intelligence is becoming a surprisingly influential spiritual tool for many Americans, including practicing Christians. According to the research, one in three adults now believes AI-generated spiritual guidance can be just as trustworthy as advice from a pastor. Among Millennials, that number climbs to 44 percent. The study also found many Christians are already using AI for Bible study, prayer assistance, personal growth, and finding meaning or purpose in life.

At the same time, many respondents expressed concern about where this trend could lead. Large majorities worried AI could misinterpret scripture, weaken religious faith, replace pastors, or even act as a substitute for God. Critics argue that while AI may be useful for studying religious texts or organizing information, it lacks wisdom, morality, lived experience, and genuine understanding. The findings raise uncomfortable questions about whether society is beginning to hand increasingly personal and spiritual responsibilities over to algorithms created by tech companies.

Submission + - Trump on Iran war's cost: "I don't think about American financial situation." (the-independent.com)

fjo3 writes: President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the plight of Americans finding it harder and harder to make ends meet and rising gas and consumer prices simply aren’t on his mind as the months-long Iran war and impasse over the Strait of Hormuz continue to fuel surging inflation in the United States.

Trump made the stunning brush-off statement as he departed the White House for Beijing, where he will be feted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a state visit, including a lavish Thursday night banquet at the Great Hall of the People.

Submission + - Russian Ship Carrying Nuclear Reactors Was Heading To North Korea When It Sank (artvoice.com)

schwit1 writes: A Russian cargo ship carrying what its own captain later admitted were components for two submarine nuclear reactors sank off the coast of Spain in December 2024, and a CNN investigation published Monday May 12, 2026 reveals the full picture of where those reactors were likely headed, what they were for and what may have caused the ship to go down.

The vessel, the Ursa Major, also known as Sparta 3, sank approximately 100 kilometers off the Spanish coast on December 23-24, 2024, after a series of explosions killed two crew members.

The Russian state-linked owner called it a terrorist attack. But a Spanish investigation obtained by CNN suggests the hull may have been pierced by a Barracuda supercavitating torpedo, a high-speed weapon possessed by only a handful of the world’s most elite militaries, including the United States.

The suspected destination was not Vladivostok, as the public shipping manifest claimed.

Russian captain Igor Anisimov, per sources familiar with the Spanish investigation, believed he was taking the reactors to the port of Rason in North Korea.

Submission + - There's an Unhinged New Video Game About Trump and the Iran War (wired.com) 1

joshuark writes: A new video game about President Donald Trump’s war in Iran features fights with the pope and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. It’s impossible to win, and that’s the point.

The game, Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell, was developed by Secret Handshake, an anonymous group of artists behind a handful of satirical works mocking the Trump administration. The game is available to play online, but three fully functional arcade cabinets are currently installed at the Washington, DC, War Memorial. The games will remain there for the next few days.

In the game, Trump is the playable character, on a quest to collect barrels of oil and ideas for Truth Social posts, to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and win the war. During the game, Trump’s social media posts do little to move the needle, creating an endless cycle of tasks and threats that ultimately lead nowhere. Even if the game is unwinnable, players can lose, and do so abruptly.

Submission + - MAGAs Are Fuming After Email Confirms They Will Never Get Their $500 Trump Phone (ibtimes.co.uk)

ArchieBunker writes: Nearly 600,000 Trump supporters paid £74 ($100) each towards a gold smartphone that, nearly a year on, does not exist.

The Trump Mobile T1 phone was announced in June 2025 by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump as a patriotic alternative to Apple and Samsung, retailing at £370 ($499) and promising a 'Made in the USA' build.

An estimated 590,000 buyers paid a £74 ($100) deposit to secure one, collectively handing the venture roughly £43.7 million ($59 million). As of May 2026, not a single confirmed customer has received the device. Now, a fresh wave of anger is spreading across MAGA forums after buyers received communication making clear that their money is, for all practical purposes, gone.

Trump Mobile launched on 16 June 2025 at an announcement at Trump Tower, headlined by the president's two eldest sons and timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign launch. The T1 was marketed as a gold-coloured Android handset bearing an American flag on its back and bundled with a monthly service plan at £37.50 ($47.45) per month. Initial delivery was promised for late summer 2025.

That deadline slipped to November 2025, then December, then the first quarter of 2026. A mid-March 2026 T-Mobile carrier certification deadline also passed without resolution. By April 2026, Trump Mobile quietly redesigned its website, removing the release date entirely rather than replacing it with a new one.

NBC News, which placed its own £74 ($100) deposit in August 2025 to track the story, called Trump Mobile's support line five times between September and November 2025 and received inconsistent answers each time. A representative said in October that the phone would ship on 13 November, but it did not.

In January 2026, a call centre operator said the T1 was 'in the final stages of certification and field testing,' with a ship date 'sometime in Q1 2026.' That quarter has now passed. At one point, customer service representatives blamed a 43-day federal government shutdown for the delay, an explanation analysts quickly dismissed as irrelevant to a private-sector hardware company.

The clearest signal yet that buyers may never see either a phone or their money came with a revised terms of service published on 6 April 2026. The updated document states explicitly that paying a deposit 'does not constitute a completed purchase and does not create a binding legal contract.' The payment is described as 'a conditional opportunity to buy the device if Trump Mobile eventually chooses to sell it,' with the company retaining all control over whether a phone is produced at all.

The terms confirm that deposits will not accrue interest, are non-transferable and carry no independent cash value. Buyers who wish to cancel must submit a request through customer support before any final sale is completed. If Trump Mobile cancels the project outright, it says it will issue refunds of the original deposit amount. The fine print adds, however, that the company bears no liability for delays caused by 'parts shortages or hold-ups with regulators,' and that buyers waive any right to pursue claims beyond the original deposit figure.

Investigative journalist Joseph Cox of 404 Media, who attempted to place a deposit when pre-orders opened, found the process immediately chaotic. His card was charged the wrong amount, no shipping address was ever collected, and a confirmation email arrived promising delivery notifications that never came. Cox called it 'the worst experience I've ever faced buying a consumer electronic product.' He subsequently reported unauthorised recurring charges being levied against customers' cards.

Android Authority, which placed its own deposit in 2025 and has tracked the story since, wrote in January 2026 that it fully expected to 'never get a phone' and 'never see the $100 deposit again.'

The T1 was sold from day one on the strength of a single, politically loaded promise: it would be built in America. Within days of the June 2025 launch, that language vanished from the Trump Mobile website. 'MADE IN THE USA' became 'American-proud design,' then 'Brought to life right here in the USA,' language that supply chain experts noted was legally and commercially meaningless.

By February 2026, company executives confirmed to reporters that the T1 would not be manufactured in the United States. Final assembly of roughly the last ten components would take place in Miami, while bulk production would happen overseas. In the meantime, Trump Mobile began selling refurbished iPhones, made in China, and Samsung devices, made by a South Korean company, under the same 'American' branding umbrella.

In January 2026, Senator Elizabeth Warren and ten other Democratic lawmakers wrote formally to the Federal Trade Commission, asking the agency to investigate 'bait-and-switch tactics involving deposits for products never delivered' and to determine whether Trump Mobile's 'Made in the USA' advertising constituted false claims. The letter, co-led by Representative Robert Garcia of California, also asked the FTC to confirm whether the White House had communicated with the agency about the venture. 'The American people deserve to know that consumer protection laws apply equally to all businesses, regardless of political connections,' the lawmakers wrote.

As of May 2026, the FTC has not publicly confirmed whether a formal investigation has been opened. Trump Mobile has not responded to multiple press inquiries. California Governor Gavin Newsom's office weighed in publicly, describing the T1 project as appearing to be 'FRAUD.'

For nearly 600,000 Americans who trusted a brand built on the Trump name, the gold phone has become the latest entry in a long record of ventures that took their money and delivered nothing.

Submission + - Micron ships gigantic 245TB SSD (nerds.xyz)

BrianFagioli writes: Micron says it is now shipping the worldâ(TM)s highest-capacity commercially available SSD, and the numbers are honestly hard to wrap your head around. The new Micron 6600 ION packs 245TB into a single drive and is aimed squarely at AI infrastructure, hyperscalers, and cloud providers dealing with exploding data growth. According to the company, the SSD can reduce rack counts by 82 percent compared to HDD deployments offering similar raw capacity, while also cutting power usage and cooling requirements. Micron says the drive tops out at roughly 30W, which it claims is about half the power draw of comparable hard drive setups.

The announcement also feels like another warning sign for spinning disks in the enterprise. Hard drives still dominate bulk storage because of lower cost per terabyte, but SSD capacities keep climbing into territory that used to belong exclusively to HDDs. Micron is also touting major performance gains, claiming up to 84 times better energy efficiency for AI workloads and dramatically lower latency versus HDD-based systems. While nobody is dropping one of these into a home NAS anytime soon, the idea of a quarter petabyte on a single SSD no longer sounds like science fiction.

Submission + - New "Dirty Frag" Linux Kernel Vulnerability Could Lead to Root Escalation

hcs_$reboot writes: Linux administrators had barely caught their breath from Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431) which was patched just days ago when researcher Hyunwoo Kim (@v4bel) dropped another one.
The disclosure went public on May 8, 2026, after a third party broke the coordinated embargo, forcing Kim to release the full exploit before any distribution had issued a patch. There are currently no CVE identifiers and no fixes for any affected distribution.

Submission + - Microsoft Edge Stores Passwords in Plaintext in RAM (pcmag.com)

UnknowingFool writes: Security researcher Tom Jøran Sønstebyseter Rønning has found that Microsoft Edge stores passwords in plain text in RAM. After creating a password and storing it using Edge's password manager, Rønning found that he could dump the RAM and recover his password which was stored in plain text. Part of the issue is Edge loads all passwords to all sites upon a single verification check even if the user was not visiting a specific site. This is very different from Chrome which only loads passwords for specific websites when challenged for the site's password. Also Chrome will delete the password from memory once the password has been filled. Edge does not delete the passwords from memory once they are used.

Microsoft downplayed the risk noting access would require control over a user's PC like a malware infection: “Access to browser data as described in the reported scenario would require the device to already be compromised,” Microsoft said. Rønning countered that it was possible to dump passwords for multiple users using administrative privileges for one user to view the passwords for other logged-on users.

Submission + - US government ramps up mass surveillance (theconversation.com) 2

sinij writes:

People have little choice when buying devices, using apps or opening accounts but to agree to lengthy terms that include consent for companies to collect and sell their personal data. This “consent” allows their data to end up in the largely unregulated commercial data market. The government claims it can lawfully purchase this data from data brokers. But in buying your data in bulk on the commercial market, the government is circumventing the Constitution, Supreme Court decisions and federal laws designed to protect your privacy from unwarranted government overreach.

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