Intuit Claims Security Concerns In Dropping Windows 10 For TurboTax
Longtime Slashdot reader Xesdeeni writes: I received an email indicating Intuit will not support Windows 10 for the desktop versions of TurboTax starting this tax year. Laughably, they say "security is a top priority for us" before adding: "To use TurboTax Desktop software for tax year 2025, your computer will need to run on Microsoft Windows 11 [or] TurboTax Online."
I'm just paranoid enough to use the desktop version, since at least it limits what they see to the forms they send to the IRS -- rather than everything. Even if I was willing to endure the added burden of printing and mailing the forms, this would be the end of that, since I'm out on Windows 11 for the reasons you already know.
Here's what they sent:
Hi there,
We're reaching out to provide an update on TurboTax Desktop software for tax year 2025. After October 14, 2025, Microsoft will no longer provide software updates, technical assistance, or security fixes for Windows 10 operating system. Because security is a top priority for us, TurboTax Desktop software for tax year 2025 onwards will not be compatible with Windows 10 operating system.
To use TurboTax Desktop software for tax year 2025, your computer will need to run on Microsoft Windows 11 operating system. You can also consider switching to TurboTax Online, which will work on any supported browser (available December 2025).
For more resources and additional information about this change, go to this help article: How does the end of support for Windows 10 affect my TurboTax Desktop experience?
Thanks for being part of the TurboTax family.
Warm regards,
The TurboTax Team
Xesdeeni comments: "I've wanted a Linux offering for years now and only kept Windows for such limited products as this. I guess I can completely punt it now."
at Slashdot.
Google Plans Advanced Nuclear Reactor Project For Tennessee
Google, TVA, and Kairos Power are teaming up to power data centers with advanced nuclear energy through a collaboration in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The project aims to deliver 50 MW of nuclear energy by 2030. From a blog post: Today we announced the first deployment of Kairos Power's advanced nuclear reactor -- the Hermes 2 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee -- through a new power purchase agreement (PPA) between Kairos Power and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Marking the first purchase of electricity from an advanced GEN IV reactor by a U.S. utility, this agreement will enable 50 megawatts (MW) of nuclear energy on TVA's grid that powers our data centers in Montgomery County, Tennessee and Jackson County, Alabama.
Last October, we began a long-term collaboration with Kairos Power to unlock up to 500 MW of nuclear power for the U.S. electricity system through multiple deployments of their small modular reactor. With this next step, we are creating a three-party solution where energy customers, utilities, and technology developers work together to advance new technologies that can help meet the world's growing energy needs with reliable, affordable capacity.
Here's how it works: TVA will purchase electricity from Kairos Power's Hermes 2 plant, scheduled to begin operations in 2030. In this initial phase of the collaboration, we will procure clean energy attributes from the plant through TVA to help power our data centers in the region with locally sourced clean energy, every hour of every day.
at Slashdot.
Serbian Scientists Experiment With Mealworms To Degrade Polystyrene
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Serbian scientists have been experimenting with mealworms as a way to break down polystyrene. Larisa Ilijin, a principal research fellow at Belgrade's Institute for Biology, said the scientists had discovered that mealworms can digest various plastics, including polystyrene, which is used in packaging, insulation and food containers. In the project endorsed by the government and the United Nations' agency for international development, UNDP, and other international donors, they have been including the polystyrene in the regular food of the larval form of the yellow mealworm beetle, or Tenebrio molitor.
They habitually eat more or less anything, but need the training to eat the plastic products. "We have larvae that have been adapted over a long time to biodegrade plastic, to be as efficient as possible in the process," Ilijin told Reuters. She said the bacteria living in their guts break down the plastic into carbon dioxide and water, and showed no evidence of leaving microplastic residue in their innards or faeces. The work builds on similar research projects in the U.S. and Africa. [...]
The institute has given Belgrade-based Belinda Animals several containers of the mealworms. It is now breeding them and hoping to attract a network of similar farms. "When breaking down 1 kg of Styrofoam, larvae emit one to two grams of carbon dioxide ... If we incinerate it ... (Styrofoam) emits over 4,000 times more," owner Boris Vasiljev said. He also envisages the larvae being used as animal feed, should it reach a large commercial scale.
The use of mealworms is still in its infancy, Ilijin said, as Serbia still needs to adopt regulations that would allow the use and sale of insect products for animal fodder. "Styrofoam takes over 500 years to decompose in nature ... this would be one of the good ways for solving the problem of plastic waste in nature," Ilijin said.
at Slashdot.
Meta Freezes AI Hiring
According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta has paused hiring in its artificial intelligence division after bringing on more than 50 researchers and engineers. "All that's happening here is some basic organizational planning: creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises," a spokesperson for Meta said in an emailed statement to Reuters.
Over the last few months, Meta has been offering AI researchers salaries that dwarf those of the Manhattan Project and the Space Race. The company recently offered AI researcher Matt Deitke $250 million over four years (an average of $62.5 million per year) -- with potentially $100 million in the first year alone. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly also offered an unnamed AI engineer $1 billion in compensation to be paid out over several years.]
at Slashdot.
Oregon Man Accused of Operating One of Most Powerful Attack 'Botnets' Ever Seen
A 22-year-old Oregon man has been charged with operating one of the most powerful botnets ever recorded. The network, known as Rapper Bot, launched over 370,000 DDoS attacks worldwide, including against X, DeepSeek, U.S. tech firms, and even Defense Department systems. It was allegedly operated by Ethan Foltz of Eugene, Oregon. The Wall Street Journal reports: Foltz faces a maximum of 10 years in prison on a charge of abetting computer intrusions, the Justice Department said in a news release. Rapper Bot was made up of tens of thousands of hacked devices and was capable of flooding victims' websites with enough junk internet traffic to knock them offline, an attack known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS.
In February, the networking company Nokia measured a Rapper Bot attack against a gaming platform at 6.5 trillion bits per second, well above the several hundred million bits a second of the average high-speed internet connection. "This would place Rapper Bot among the most powerful DDoS botnets to have ever existed," said a criminal complaint that the prosecutors filed Tuesday in a federal court in Alaska. Investigators said Rapper Bot's attacks were so powerful that they were able to overwhelm all but the most robust networks.
Foltz allegedly rented out Rapper Bot to paying customers, including gambling website operators who would use the network in extortion attempts, according to the complaint. The botnet was used to launch more than 370,000 attacks in 80 countries, including China, Japan and the U.S., prosecutors said. It launched its attacks from hacked routers, digital video recorders and cameras, not from computers. [...] "At its height, it mobilized tens of thousands of devices, many with no prior role in DDoS," said Jerome Meyer, a researcher with Nokia's Deepfield network-analysis division. "Taking it down removes a major source of the largest attacks we see."
at Slashdot.
Harvard Dropouts To Launch 'Always On' AI Smart Glasses That Listen, Record Every Conversation
Two Harvard dropouts are launching Halo X, a $249 pair of AI-powered smart glasses that continuously listen, record, and transcribe conversations while displaying real-time information to the wearer. "Our goal is to make glasses that make you super intelligent the moment you put them on," said AnhPhu Nguyen, co-founder of Halo. Co-founder Caine Ardayfio said the glasses "give you infinite memory."
"The AI listens to every conversation you have and uses that knowledge to tell you what to say ... kinda like IRL Cluely," Ardayfio told TechCrunch. "If somebody says a complex word or asks you a question, like, 'What's 37 to the third power?' or something like that, then it'll pop up on the glasses." From the report: Ardayfio and Nguyen have raised $1 million to develop the glasses, led by Pillar VC, with support from Soma Capital, Village Global, and Morningside Venture. The glasses will be priced at $249 and will be available for preorder starting Wednesday. Ardayfio called the glasses "the first real step towards vibe thinking."
The two Ivy League dropouts, who have since moved into their own version of the Hacker Hostel in the San Francisco Bay Area, recently caused a stir after developing a facial-recognition app for Meta's smart Ray-Ban glasses to prove that the tech could be used to dox people. As a potential early competitor to Meta's smart glasses, Ardayfio said Meta, given its history of security and privacy scandals, had to rein in its product in ways that Halo can ultimately capitalize on. [...]
For now, Halo X glasses only have a display and a microphone, but no camera, although the two are exploring the possibility of adding it to a future model. Users still need to have their smartphones handy to help power the glasses and get "real time info prompts and answers to questions," per Nguyen. The glasses, which are manufactured by another company that the startup didn't name, are tethered to an accompanying app on the owner's phone, where the glasses essentially outsource the computing since they don't have enough power to do it on the device itself. Under the hood, the smart glasses use Google's Gemini and Perplexity as its chatbot engine, according to the two co-founders. Gemini is better for math and reasoning, whereas they use Perplexity to scrape the internet, they said.
at Slashdot.
Trump Confirms US Is Seeking 10% Stake In Intel
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After the Trump administration confirmed a rumor that the US is planning to buy a 10 percent stake in Intel, US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) came forward Wednesday to voice support for the highly unusual plan, finding rare common ground with Donald Trump. According to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the plan would see the US disbursing approved CHIPS Act grants only after acquiring non-voting shares of Intel and likely other chipmakers. That would allow the US to profit off its investment in chipmakers, Lutnick suggested, and Sanders told Reuters that he agreed American taxpayers could benefit from the potential deals.
"If microchip companies make a profit from the generous grants they receive from the federal government, the taxpayers of America have a right to a reasonable return on that investment," Sanders said. While Lutnick gave Trump credit for coming up with what White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described as a "creative idea that has never been done before" to protect US national and economic security, it appears that Lutnick is driving the initiative. "Lutnick has been pushing the equity idea," insiders granted anonymity previously told Reuters, "adding that Trump likes the idea."
So far, Intel has engaged in talks, while the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and other major CHIPS grant recipients like Samsung and Micron have yet to comment on the potential arrangement the Trump administration seems likely to pursue. They may possibly risk clawbacks of grants if such deals aren't made. On Wednesday, Taiwan Economy Minister Kuo Jyh-huei said his ministry would be consulting with TSMC soon, while noting that as yet, it's hard to "thoroughly understand the underlying meaning" of Lutnick's public comments. So far, Lutnick has only specified that "any potential arrangement wouldn't provide the government with voting or governance rights in Intel," dispelling fears that the US would use its ownership stake to try to control the world's most important chipmakers. Further reading: Intel is Getting a $2 Billion Investment From SoftBank
at Slashdot.
Gemini For Home Is Google's Biggest Smart Home Play In Years
Google announced Gemini for Home, a new AI-powered voice assistant that will replace Google Assistant on Nest smart speakers and displays starting in October. Powered by Gemini's advanced reasoning and conversational capabilities, it promises more natural interactions, complex task handling, and features like Gemini Live for back-and-forth conversations. The Verge reports: According to a blog post by Anish Kattukaran, chief product officer of Google Home and Nest, using Gemini for Home will "feel fundamentally new." He says the new voice assistant leverages the "advanced reasoning, inference and search capabilities" of Google's AI models, along with adaptations for the home that allow for more natural interactions to complete more complex tasks. In short, it should be an assistant that can better understand context, nuance, and intention -- a complete change from its predecessor.
For example, Kattukaran says Gemini for Home can accurately respond to requests like "turn off the lights everywhere except my bedroom," "play that song from this year's summer blockbuster about race cars," or "set a timer for perfectly blanched broccoli." It will also create lists, calendar entries, and reminders more easily than before, he says.
Another big upgrade is that Gemini Live will be part of Gemini for Home, bringing more conversational back-and-forth voice interactions to Google Home without needing to repeatedly say "Hey Google." Kattukaran says this will allow for more detailed and personalized help -- from cooking ("I have spinach, eggs, cream cheese, and smoked salmon in the fridge. Help me make a delicious meal") to brainstorming how to buy a new car or figuring out how to fix your dishwasher, as well as more creative tasks like generating bedtime stories. [...] Google hasn't announced pricing for the paid tier of Gemini for Home, but Gemini Live, with its more advanced capabilities, is a likely candidate for a premium plan.
at Slashdot.
Amazon Looks To Ditch Homegrown Software For Android in Fire Tablet Revamp
Amazon is plotting a big change to its Fire tablet lineup following years of escalating gripes from consumers and app developers over the company's homegrown operating system. Reuters: As part of a project known internally as Kittyhawk, Amazon plans to release a higher-end tablet as soon as next year offering the Android operating system software for the first time, according to six people familiar with the matter. Since the Fire tablet's introduction in 2011, Amazon has used what is known as a "forked" version of Android with custom modifications that make it work like a unique operating system.
[...] The first Amazon Android tablet, slated for next year, will be pricier than current models, the people said. One of them said Amazon had discussed a $400 price tag, nearly double the cost of its current higher-end $230 Fire Max 11 tablet. IPads, by comparison, range from $350 to $1,200. Reuters could not learn additional specifications for the planned Amazon tablet, such as screen size and speaker quality or memory capacity. Amazon historically has avoided using software or other products from third parties, preferring to develop the services in-house or, barring that, to acquire a competitor.
at Slashdot.
UAE Adds Newborns To Major Genome Project
Abu Dhabi is gathering the DNA of Emirati newborns in a significant expansion of a national genomic sequencing project that aims to put the UAE on the cutting-edge of health care. From a report: The UAE capital has so far mapped the genomes of 68% of Emirati citizens, a spokesperson for M42, the firm running the program, told Semafor, while at-birth sequencing is being offered to parents on a voluntary basis across several hospitals, and aims to detect over 800 treatable childhood genetic conditions. Only around 1% of the world's mapped genomes are of Arab descent. The UAE is looking to address the gap while tackling public health issues and expanding personalized health care offerings.
at Slashdot.
Chinese 'Virtual Human' Salespeople Are Outperforming Their Real Human Counterparts
AI-powered salespeople are outperforming their human counterparts on Chinese e-commerce platforms, working around the clock without fatigue to sell products ranging from printers to wet wipes. Shanghai marketing firm PLTFRM has deployed 30 virtual avatars across Taobao and Pinduoduo using Baidu video models and DeepSeek language models. Brother's AI avatar generated $2,500 in printer sales within two hours and increased livestream revenue 30 percent. The company now checks overnight AI sales data each morning as routine.
Livestreaming drives over one-third of China's e-commerce sales, with half the population shopping via broadcast in 2024. Baidu's June livestream featuring an AI version of influencer Luo Yonghao drew 13 million views and generated $7.7 million in sales. American and European companies have expressed interest, Wired reports, after PLTFRM successfully tested English-language avatars on YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook.
at Slashdot.
FTC Sues LA Fitness For Making it Difficult for Consumers To Cancel Gym Memberships
FTC, in a press release Wednesday: The Federal Trade Commission today sued the operators of LA Fitness and other gyms over allegations they make it exceedingly difficult for consumers to cancel their gym memberships and related services that continued indefinitely unless cancelled. The agency is seeking a court order prohibiting the allegedly unfair conduct and money back for consumers harmed by the difficulty in cancelling memberships.
"The FTC's complaint describes a scenario that too many Americans have experienced -- a gym membership that seems impossible to cancel," said Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection. "Tens of thousands of LA Fitness customers reported difficulties -- cancellation was often restricted to specific times or required speaking to specific managers who were often not present or available. The FTC will not hesitate to act on behalf of consumers when it believes companies are stifling consumers' ability to choose which recurring charges they want to keep."
at Slashdot.
Google Refreshes Pixel Lineup With Tensor G5 and Qi2 Charging Across Four Models
Google announced its Pixel 10 smartphone lineup today, introducing the Tensor G5 processor and Qi2 magnetic wireless charging across four models priced from $799 to $1,799. The base Pixel 10 adds a 5x telephoto lens for the first time at $799. The Pixel 10 Pro maintains its $999 starting price in a 6.3-inch size while the Pro XL starts at $1,199 for the 6.8-inch variant.
The $1,799 Pixel 10 Pro Fold becomes the first foldable phone to achieve IP68 water and dust resistance through a redesigned gearless hinge. All models feature 3,000-nit peak brightness displays, Android 16, and Google's Material 3 Expressive interface redesign. The Tensor G5 enables on-device AI features including Magic Cue for contextual information retrieval and Camera Coach for photography guidance. Pro models gain 100x hybrid zoom capabilities through computational photography. Preorders begin today for August 28 availability, except the Pro Fold which ships October 9.
at Slashdot.
Sony Raises PS5 Prices by $50 Across All Models in US
Sony will increase PlayStation 5 console prices by $50 across all models in the United States starting August 21. The standard PS5 rises to $550, the Digital Edition to $500, and the PS5 Pro to $750. The company cited navigating a challenging economic environment for the increases.
at Slashdot.
Microsoft Warns Excel's New AI Function 'Can Give Incorrect Responses' in High-Stakes Scenarios
Microsoft is testing a COPILOT function in Excel that uses OpenAI's gpt-4.1-mini model to automatically fill spreadsheet cells through natural language prompts. The function can classify feedback, generate summaries, and create tables based on specified cell ranges. Microsoft warns against using the AI function for numerical calculations or scenarios involving legal, regulatory, and compliance implications because COPILOT "can give incorrect responses." The feature processes up to 100 functions every 10 minutes and cannot access information outside the spreadsheet.
at Slashdot.
Dramatic Slowdown in Melting of Arctic Sea Ice Surprises Scientists
The melting of sea ice in the Arctic has slowed dramatically in the past 20 years, scientists have reported, with no statistically significant decline in its extent since 2005. From a report: The finding is surprising, the researchers say, given that carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning have continued to rise and trap ever more heat over that time. They said natural variations in ocean currents that limit ice melting had probably balanced out the continuing rise in global temperatures. However, they said this was only a temporary reprieve and melting was highly likely to start again at about double the long-term rate at some point in the next five to 10 years.
The findings do not mean Arctic sea ice is rebounding. Sea ice area in September, when it reaches its annual minimum, has halved since 1979, when satellite measurements began. The climate crisis remains "unequivocally real," the scientists said, and the need for urgent action to avoid the worst impacts remains unchanged. The natural variation causing the slowdown is probably the multi-decadal fluctuations in currents in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which change the amount of warmed water flowing into the Arctic. The Arctic is still expected to see ice-free conditions later in the century, harming people and wildlife in the region and boosting global heating by exposing the dark, heat-absorbing ocean.
at Slashdot.
US Tech Stocks Hit By Concerns Over Future of AI Boom
US tech stocks sold off as warnings that the hype surrounding AI could be overdone hit some of the year's best-performing shares. From a report: Nvidia, the chips group that has surged to become the world's first $4tn company on the back of AI, fell 3.5 per cent on Tuesday, while software group Palantir dropped 9.4 per cent and chip designer Arm shed 5 per cent.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite closed down 1.4 per cent, the biggest one-day drop for the index since August 1. The blue-chip S&P 500 fell 0.7 per cent. European and Asian markets largely followed Wall Street lower on Wednesday. [...] Japan's Nikkei 225 index fell 1.5 per cent and South Korea's Kospi slipped 0.6 per cent. Futures price indicated moderate declines when Wall Street opens.
Traders pinned some of the declines in the US on a critical report on Monday authored by a branch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Researchers said "95 per cent of organisations are getting zero return" from their investments in generative AI, the technology that has sent US stocks soaring to record highs in recent months.
at Slashdot.
India's Got Time
India Dispatch: The strongest case for India is not merely that it is young, but that it still has time, and it may be the only continental-scale economy that still has it in abundance. India won't cross the demographic threshold for an "old" country -- a median age of 41 -- until the late 2050s, while China reaches that point now. India requires 10.4% sustained GDP growth over 35 years to become rich before aging, compared to China's needed 32% annual growth rate. India's working-age population will increase from 67.5% in 2021 to 69.2% by 2031, with the median age remaining at 34.5 in 2036. The report adds: China's compressed dilemma mirrors what is gripping the developed world, where Europe's share of population over 65 is on track to hit 30% by 2050, up from 8% in 1950. Raising retirement ages -- what economists describe as the closest thing to a silver bullet -- faces older voting blocs, who now make up roughly 40% of those who turn up at the polls in European elections. In the U.S., what J.P. Morgan analysts term a "Social Security cliff" looms by 2033, when the system's trust funds are projected to be exhausted, and hopes that productivity miracles (powered by, hopefully AI) will quietly square this circle look optimistic, leaving much of the rich world and North Asia out of time.
at Slashdot.
Apple is Reportedly Making More of Its New iPhones in India Instead of China
An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is manufacturing more of its iPhone 17 phones for the US in India instead of in China, and for the first time, the full lineup of new models will ship from India at launch, according to Bloomberg. The company is also working on a successor to the iPhone 16E that it plans to make in India, Bloomberg says.
Apple has increasingly been moving iPhone production to India to reduce its dependence on manufacturing in China. The company already expects to pay $1.1 billion in tariffs for the current quarter, but Bloomberg reports that currently, Apple's exports of iPhones to the US from India are exempted from tariffs. That's despite the Trump administration's 50 percent tariff on many imports from India, and while analyst Patrick Moorhead says the move "does dodge some tariffs," he noted that iPhone subassemblies are still mostly produced in China then shipped to India for final assembly.
at Slashdot.
Electricity Prices Are Climbing More Than Twice as Fast as Inflation
Electricity prices have increased at more than double the inflation rate over the past year, according to NPR reporting. Florida Power & Light customers face monthly bills exceeding $400 during summer months, prompting the utility to seek a 13% rate increase over four years that drew tens of thousands of petition signatures in opposition.
The Energy Department projects data centers will consume more electricity than residential customers for the first time in 2026. Natural gas costs for power generation rose 40% in the first half of 2025 compared to 2024, and the department expects another 17% increase next year. Natural gas generates more than 40% of U.S. electricity. One in six households currently struggles to pay electric bills. The federal government provides $4 billion annually in energy assistance for low-income families.
Further reading: Big Tech's AI Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone.
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Mark Zuckerberg Plans To Shake Up Meta's AI Efforts, Again
Meta announced today that it is splitting its Meta Superintelligence Labs into four divisions focused on AI research, superintelligence development, products, and infrastructure. The reorganization accompanies potential downsizing of the AI division's thousands of employees and executive departures, according to New York Times.
Vice President of Generative AI Loredana Crisan is expected to announce her departure Tuesday. The company is exploring third-party AI models for its products rather than relying solely on internal technology. Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang's team has abandoned Meta's previous frontier model Behemoth and is developing a new model from scratch, the report added.
at Slashdot.
OpenAI Launches $4.6 Budget AI Subscription Tier in India
OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Go, a $4.57 monthly subscription tier initially available only in India. The service provides, compared to the free tier, extended access to GPT-5, image generation, file uploads, advanced data analysis, longer conversation memory, and custom GPTs at Rs 399 per month. ChatGPT Go excludes features found in the $20 ChatGPT Plus tier including legacy models like 4o, Sora video generation, deep research, agent mode, and connectors. OpenAI said "other countries and regions may be eligible in the future" for ChatGPT Go.
India has emerged as a key market for American technology firms looking for users. In the past 15 years, firms like Amazon, Google, and Meta, alongside venture capitalists and private equity, have poured more than $200 billion into the country, all chasing its vast pool of users and the businesses serving this population. Perplexity partnered with Indian telecoms giant Bharti Airtel last month to provide its premium Pro service to 360 million customers for free for an entire year.
at Slashdot.
AI 'Business Agents' Will Kill SaaS by 2030, Says Microsoft
Traditional business applications will become the mainframes of the 2030s - functioning but obsolete systems replaced by AI agents, predicts Microsoft corporate vice president Charles Lamanna. AI agents featuring generative AI interfaces, goal-oriented processing, and vector databases will supplant today's form-driven, workflow-based enterprise software within five years, said Lamanna, who leads Microsoft's business applications and platforms division.
The executive projects industry patterns for agent-based systems will solidify within 6-18 months. Microsoft MVP Rocky Lhotka called the 2030 timeline "very forward-looking and optimistic," noting that capital-intensive industries cannot readily replace existing infrastructure with virtual agents.
at Slashdot.
$81M 'Trade Secrets' Verdict Against Boeing Was Overturned - and Then Reinstated
14 months ago a jury ruled against Boeing, awarding $81 million in damages to failed electric airplane startup Zunum. "Zunum alleged that Boeing, while ostensibly investing seed money to get the startup off the ground, stole Zunum's technology and actively undermined its attempts to build a business," the Seattle Times reported at the time.
But two months later that verdict was overturned, Reuters reports, with U.S. district judge James Robart deciding that Zunum "did not adequately identify its secrets or show that they derived their value from being kept secret."
And then three days ago a U.S. appeals court reinstated the original $81 million award, reversing that district judge's decision and "rejecting his finding that the information Boeing allegedly stole was not entitled to trade-secret protection."
[T]he district court erred in concluding that "Zunum failed to identify any of its alleged trade secrets with sufficient particularity"... Here, the court rejected Zunum's repeated attempts to introduce comprehensive trade secret definitions into evidence and instead provided the jury with a court-created exhibit enumerating Zunum's alleged trade secrets with a short description of each. Zunum's witnesses identified the trade secrets by number, provided a basic explanation of each, and used exhibits and demonstratives to exemplify information comprising specific trade secrets.
"internal Boeing communications introduced at trial suggesting that Boeing intended to modify its own in-house designs, methods, and strategies to incorporate information from certain Zunum trade secrets..." according to the new ruling. "Under the parties' agreement, Boeing was not permitted to use Zunum's confidential information for any reason other than to manage its investment in Zunum."
Reuters adds that "A spokesperson for Boeing declined to comment on the appeals court's decision"
One final note:
The appeals court also ordered the case to be assigned to a new judge after Robart revealed that his wife had acquired Boeing stock through a retirement savings account during the litigation.
Judge Robart had called that an "error". (And judicial ethics experts interviewed by Business Insider in 2024 "characterized Robart's trades and delayed disclosure to the parties as a minor issue," they reported Thursday.)
But Thursday's ruling notes that the delayed disclosure "taken together with the district court's consistent rulings in Boeing's favor during and after trial, could give an objective observer reason to question the district judge's impartiality in further proceedings."
at Slashdot.
In Barcelona, Certain Buses Run On Biomethane Produced From Human Waste
From the French newspaper Le Monde:
Odorless, quiet, sustainable. On the last day of July, passengers boarded Barcelona's V3 bus line with no idea where its fuel came from. Written in large letters on the bus facade, just below its name "Nimbus," a sign clearly stated: "This bus runs on biomethane produced from eco-factory sludge." Still, the explanation was likely too vague for most to grasp its full meaning. The moist matter from wastewater treated at the Baix Llobregat treatment plant was used to produce the biomethane. In other words: the human waste of more than 1.5 million residents of the Catalan city.
at Slashdot.
OpenAI's GPT-5 Sees a Big Surge in Enterprise Use
ChatGPT now has nearly 700 million weekly users, OpenAI says. But after launching GPT-5 last week, critics bashed its less-intuitive feel, reports CNBC, "ultimately leading the company to restore its legacy GPT-4 to paying chatbot customers."
Yet GPT-5 was always about cracking the enterprise market "where rival Anthropic has enjoyed a head start," they write. And one week in, "startups like Cursor, Vercel, and Factory say they've already made GPT-5 the default model in certain key products and tools, touting its faster setup, better results on complex tasks, and a lower price."
Some companies said GPT-5 now matches or beats Claude on code and interface design, a space Anthropic once dominated. Box, another enterprise customer, has been testing GPT-5 on long, logic-heavy documents. CEO Aaron Levie told CNBC the model is a "breakthrough," saying it performs with a level of reasoning that prior systems couldn't match...
Still, the economics are brutal. The models are expensive to run, and both OpenAI and Anthropic are spending big to lock in customers, with OpenAI on track to burn $8 billion this year. That's part of why both Anthropic and OpenAI are courting new capital... GPT-5 is significantly cheaper than Anthropic's top-end Claude Opus 4.1 — by a factor of seven and a half, in some cases — but OpenAI is spending huge amounts on infrastructure to sustain that edge. For OpenAI, it's a push to win customers now, get them locked in and build a real business on the back of that loyalty...
GPT-5 API usage has surged since launch, with the model now processing more than twice as much coding and agent-building work, and reasoning use cases jumping more than eightfold, said a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity in order to discuss company data. Enterprise demand is rising sharply, particularly for planning and multi-step reasoning tasks.
GPT-5âs traction over the past week shows how quickly loyalties can shift when performance and price tip in OpenAI's favor. AI-powered coding platform Qodo recently tested GPT-5 against top-tier models including Gemini 2.5, Claude Sonnet 4, and Grok 4, and said in a blog post that it led in catching coding mistakes. The model was often the only one to catch critical issues, such as security bugs or broken code, suggesting clean, focused fixes and skipping over code that didn't need changing, the company said. Weaknesses included occasional false positives and some redundancy.
JetBrains has also adopted GPT-5 as the default for its AI Assistant and for its new no-code tool Kineto, according to the article.
But Anthropic is still enjoying a great year too, with its annualized revenue growing 17x year-over-year (according to "a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity")
at Slashdot.
Google and IBM Believe First Workable Quantum Computer is in Sight
IBM and Google report they will build industrial-scale quantum computers containing one million or more qubits by 2030, following IBM's June publication of a quantum computer blueprint addressing previous design gaps and Google's late-2023 breakthrough in scaling error correction.
Current experimental systems contain fewer than 200 qubits. IBM encountered crosstalk interference when scaling its Condor chip to 433 qubits and subsequently adopted low-density parity-check code requiring 90% fewer qubits than Google's surface code method, though this requires longer connections between distant qubits.
Google plans to reduce component costs tenfold to achieve its $1 billion target price for a full-scale machine. Amazon Web Services quantum hardware executive Oskar Painter told FT he estimates useful quantum computers remain 15-30 years away, citing engineering challenges in scaling despite resolved fundamental physics problems.
at Slashdot.
Microsoft Sued Over Plans to Discontinue Windows 10 Support
xA California man sued Microsoft Thursday over its plan to stop supporting Windows 10 on October 14th, reports Courthouse News
Though Windows 11 was launched nearly four years ago, many of its billion or so worldwide users are clinging to the decade-old Windows 10... According to StatCounter, nearly 43% of Windows users still use the old version on their desktop computers....
"With only three months until support ends for Windows 10, it is likely that many millions of users will not buy new devices or pay for extended support," Klein writes in his complaint. "These users — some of whom are businesses storing sensitive consumer data — will be at a heightened risk of a cyberattack or other data security incident, a reality of which Microsoft is well aware...." According to one market analyst writing in 2023, Microsoft's shift away from Windows 10 will lead millions of customers to buy new devices and thrown out their old ones, consigning as many as 240 million PCs to the landfill....
Klein is asking a judge to order Microsoft to continue supporting Windows 10 without additional charge, until the number of devices running the older operating system falls bellow 10% of total Windows users. He says nothing about any money he seeking for himself, though it does ask for attorneys' fees.
Microsoft did not respond to an email requesting a comment.
The complaint also requests an order requiring Microsoft's advertising "to disclose clearly and prominently the approximate end-of-support date for the Windows operating system purchased with the device at the time of purchase" or at least "disclose that support is only guaranteed for a certain delineated period of time without additional cost, and to disclose the potential consequences of such end-of-support for device security and functionality."
at Slashdot.
AOL Finally Discontinues Its Dial-Up Internet Access - After 34 Years
AOL (now a Yahoo subsidiary) just announced its dial-up internet service will be discontinued at the end of September.
"The change also means the retirement of the AOL Dialer software and the AOL Shield browser, both designed for older operating systems and slow connections that relied on the familiar screech of a modem handshake," remembers Slashdot reader BrianFagioli (noting that dial-up Internet "was once the gateway to the web for millions of households, back when speeds were measured in kilobits and waiting for a picture to load could feel like an eternity.")
AOL's dial-up service "has been publicly available for 34 years," writes Tom's Hardware. But AppleInsider notes the move comes more than 40 years after AOL started "as a very early Apple service."
AOL itself started back in 1983 under the name Control Video Corporation, offering online services for the Atari 2600 console. After failing, it became Quantum Computer Services in 1985, eventually launching AppleLink in 1988 to connect Macintosh computers together... With the launch of PC Link for IBM-compatible PCs in 1988 and parting from Apple in October 1989, the company rebranded itself as America Online, or AOL... Even at its height, dial-up connections could get up to 56 kilobits per second under ideal conditions, while modern connections are measured in megabits and gigabits. Most of the service was also what's considered a "walled garden," with features that were only available through AOL itself and that it wasn't the actual, untamed Internet.
In the 1990s AOL "was how millions of people were introduced to the Internet," the article remembers, adding that "Even after the AOL Time Warner acquisition and the 2015 acquisition by Verizon, AOL was still a popular service. Astoundingly, it counted about two million dial-up subscribers at the time."
In the 2021 acquisition of assets from Verizon by Apollo Global Management, AOL was said to have 1.5 million people paying for services. However, this was more for technical support and software, rather than for actual Internet access. A CNBC report at the time reports that the dial-up user count was "in the low thousands".... While it dies off, not with a bang but a whimper, AOL's dial-up is still remembered as one of the most transformative services in the Internet age.
"This change does not impact the numerous other valued products and services that these subscribers are able to access and enjoy as part of their plans," a Yahoo spokesperson told PC Magazine this week. "There is also no impact to our users' free AOL email accounts."
AOL's disastrous 2001 merger with Time Warner and ongoing inability to deliver broadband to its customers... left it on a path to decline that acquiring such widely read sites as Engadget [2005] and TechCrunch [2010] did not stem. By 2014, the number of dial-up AOL customers had collapsed to 2.34 million. A year later, Verizon bought the company for $4.4 billion in an internet-content play that turned out to be as doomed as the Time Warner transaction. In 2021, Verizon unloaded both AOL and Yahoo, which it had separately purchased in 2017, to the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management....
The demise of AOL's dial-up service does not mean the extinction of the oldest form of consumer online access. Estimates from the Census Bureau's 2023 American Community Survey show 163,401 Americans connected to the internet via dial-up that year.
That was by far the smallest segment of the internet-using population, dwarfed by 100,166,949 subscribing to such forms of broadband as "cable, fiber optic, or DSL"; 8,628,648 using satellite; 3,318,901 using "Internet access without a subscription" (which suggests Wi-Fi from coffee shops or public libraries); and 1,445,135 via "other service."
The remaining AOL dial-up subscribers will need to find some sort of replacement, which in rural areas may be limited to fixed wireless or SpaceX's considerably more expensive Starlink. Or they may wind up joining the ranks of Americans with no internet access: 6,866,059, in those 2023 estimates.
at Slashdot.
Spacecraft Designed That Could Carry 2,400 People on a 400-Year Trip to Alpha Centauri
They haven't built a spacecraft for travelling to our nearest star system. But "Engineers have designed a spacecraft that could take up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri," reports LiveScience:
The craft, called Chrysalis, could make the 25 trillion mile (40 trillion kilometer) journey in around 400 years, the engineers say in their project brief, meaning many of its potential passengers would only know life on the craft. Chrysalis is designed to house several generations of people until it enters the star system, where it could shuttle them to the surface of the planet Proxima Centuri b — an Earth-size exoplanet that is thought to be potentially habitable.
The project won first place in the Project Hyperion Design Competition, a challenge that requires teams to design hypothetical multigenerational ships for interstellar travel.
Before boarding the ship, the Chrysalis project would require initial generations of ship inhabitants to live in and adapt to an isolated environment in Antarctica for 70 to 80 years to ensure psychological wellbeing. The ship could theoretically be constructed in 20 to 25 years and retains gravity through constant rotation. The vessel, which would measure 36 miles (58 km) in length, would be constructed like a Russian nesting doll, with several layers encompassing each other around a central core. The layers include communal spaces, farms, gardens, homes, warehouses and other shared facilities, each powered by nuclear fusion reactors....
This plan is purely hypothetical, as some of the required technology, like commercial nuclear fusion reactors, don't yet exist.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the article — and for sharing this observation...
"My first thought was that someone read Arthur C. Clarke's book, Rendezvous with Rama and used it as a model design!"
at Slashdot.
Millions Flock To Grow Virtual Gardens In Viral Roblox Game
Grow a Garden, a Roblox game created by a 16-year-old in just a few days, has shattered records for the most concurrent players in gaming history, surpassing Fortnite with over 21.6 million concurrent players at once. The Associated Press reports: Grow a Garden is as simple as its name suggests -- players can fill a plot of land with plants and animals, harvest and sell, trade or steal each others' bounty. The game is low stress, with an aesthetic reminiscent of Minecraft and a soundtrack of soothing classical tunes such as Mozart's Rondo Alla Turca playing in the background. Its popularity has further cemented Roblox' place not just in the gaming world but in popular culture -- for better or for worse, it's where the kids hang out.
Coincidence or not, Grow a Garden soared to popularity around the same time that Take-Two Interactive announced it would delay the launch of its wildly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 until next year. In late June, the gardening game logged 21.6 million concurrent players, surpassing Fortnite's previous record of 15.2 million according to Roblox. Analysts who follow Roblox's stock say Grow a Garden is helping boost the company's revenue and will push the company's quarterly earnings numbers above Wall Street's expectations.
While it's not clear if the GTA audience flocked to this simple gardening game to pass the time until then, the timing reignited the age-old debate about who gamers are and what titles are taken seriously by the video game establishment. It happened with Candy Crush, with puzzle games, with Animal Crossing. Are people who play cozy games true gamers? Or is the title reserved for the folks who shoot enemies in Call of Duty or drive around creating mayhem in GTA?
at Slashdot.
The FCC Will Review Emergency Alert Systems in the US
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Federal Communications Commission is planning a review of the US emergency alert systems. Both the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WAS) will be subject to a "re-examination" by the agency. "We want to ensure that these programs deliver the results that Americans want and need," FCC Chairman Brendan Carr posted on X.
The announcement of this plan notes that the infrastructure underlying the EAS -- which includes radio, television, satellite and cable systems -- is 31 years old, while the framework underpinning the WAS mobile device alerts is 13 years old. The FCC review will also assess what entities should be able to send alerts on those systems, as well as topics such as geographic targeting and security.
at Slashdot.
ThinkPad Designer David Hill Spills Secrets, Designs That Never Made It
alternative_right shares an interview from The Register with David W. Hill, who served as lead designer for ThinkPad from 1995 to 2017. Here are some excerpts from the wide-ranging interview: Hill revealed that he tried several times to introduce additional laptops that had the famous "butterfly keyboard" found on the ThinkPad 701C. [...] Hill told The Register that he had wanted to make more ThinkPads with butterfly keyboards and had tried at least three times to make it happen -- in one case there was a prototype where only half of the keyboard moved -- but was never able to get there. Eventually, screens became big enough that there was no need to have a keyboard that expanded. However, Hill said, he thought about putting a butterfly keyboard on a netbook when they were a viable product category in the late aughts. [...]
One of the features Hill is most proud of developing is the ThinkLight, an overhead light located above the screen that lit up the entire keyboard and deck. Though the advent of keyboard backlights has made the ThinkLight redundant -- Lenovo discontinued it in 2013 -- it offers capabilities that backlights do not. If you want to place a paper on top of your keyboard, the LED will light it up, allowing you to see more than just your key legends. ... When designing the 25th anniversary ThinkPad, which came out in 2017, Hill brought back the ThinkLight, but he actually wanted to have -- for the first time -- two LEDs instead of one. The dual lights would have eliminated shadows and provided even better illumination, but unfortunately, this effort proved too costly to make it into the final product. [...]
When I asked Hill about products he wanted to come out with but never got to, he talked about an idea for portable workstations that would fold up like a laptop but have a separate keyboard and screen like a desktop when you put them on your desk. He collaborated with butterfly keyboard creator John Karidis on this concept, but couldn't make it ready for market. "We did a lot of experimentation with laptops that sort of unfolded to be more like a desktop: things where the display elevated or the keyboard would remove so you could use them like a workstation, rather than just being a clamshell with a hinge, you open and close," Hill recalled. "We did a lot of experimentation with that and got close a few times, but never could completely sell it. I always thought it was an opportunity to create a new category."
at Slashdot.
'Facial Recognition Tech Mistook Me For Wanted Man'
Bruce66423 shares a report from the BBC: A man who is bringing a High Court challenge against the Metropolitan Police after live facial recognition technology wrongly identified him as a suspect has described it as "stop and search on steroids." Shaun Thompson, 39, was stopped by police in February last year outside London Bridge Tube station. Privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch said the judicial review, due to be heard in January, was the first legal case of its kind against the "intrusive technology." The Met, which announced last week that it would double its live facial recognition technology (LFR) deployments, said it was removing hundreds of dangerous offenders and remained confident its use is lawful. LFR maps a person's unique facial features, and matches them against faces on watch-lists. [...]
Mr Thompson said his experience of being stopped had been "intimidating" and "aggressive." "Every time I come past London Bridge, I think about that moment. Every single time." He described how he had been returning home from a shift in Croydon, south London, with the community group Street Fathers, which aims to protect young people from knife crime. As he passed a white van, he said police approached him and told him he was a wanted man. "When I asked what I was wanted for, they said, 'that's what we're here to find out'." He said officers asked him for his fingerprints, but he refused, and he was let go only after about 30 minutes, after showing them a photo of his passport.
Mr Thompson says he is bringing the legal challenge because he is worried about the impact LFR could have on others, particularly if young people are misidentified. "I want structural change. This is not the way forward. This is like living in Minority Report," he said, referring to the science fiction film where technology is used to predict crimes before they're committed. "This is not the life I know. It's stop and search on steroids. "I can only imagine the kind of damage it could do to other people if it's making mistakes with me, someone who's doing work with the community." Bruce66423 comments: "I suspect a payout of 10,000 pounds for each false match that is acted on would probably encourage more careful use, perhaps with a second payout of 100,000 pounds if the same person is victimized again."
at Slashdot.
Astronomers Cannot Agree On How Fast the Universe is Expanding
Two fundamentally different methods for measuring the universe's expansion rate continue to produce incompatible results -- with direct observations of receding galaxies yielding approximately 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec and cosmic microwave background radiation analysis producing closer to 67 km/s/mpc.
The discrepancy, known as the Hubble tension, has strengthened annually for the past decadem, according to Duke University astronomer Dan Scolnic. The persistent disagreement prevents calculation of the universe's precise age or size. The Lambda-CDM model, which holds that dark energy and dark matter comprise 95% of the universe while visible matter constitutes just 5%, assumes dark energy's nature has remained constant since the Big Bang.
Some theorists propose dark energy's potency changes over time, while others suggest the Milky Way sits within a comparatively empty region of space. A June study using gravitational lensing of quasar light, bypassing traditional distance measurements, matched the higher value. New telescopes including the Vera Rubin Observatory and Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope may provide additional data. Past improvements in measurement precision have only reinforced rather than resolved the tension.
at Slashdot.
Swedish PM Under Fire For Using AI In Role
Sweden's Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has come under fire after admitting that he frequently uses AI tools like ChatGPT for second opinions on political matters. The Guardian reports: ... Kristersson, whose Moderate party leads Sweden's center-right coalition government, said he used tools including ChatGPT and the French service LeChat. His colleagues also used AI in their daily work, he said. Kristersson told the Swedish business newspaper Dagens industri: "I use it myself quite often. If for nothing else than for a second opinion. What have others done? And should we think the complete opposite? Those types of questions."
Tech experts, however, have raised concerns about politicians using AI tools in such a way, and the Aftonbladet newspaper accused Kristersson in a editorial of having "fallen for the oligarchs' AI psychosis." Kristersson's spokesperson, Tom Samuelsson, later said the prime minister did not take risks in his use of AI. "Naturally it is not security sensitive information that ends up there. It is used more as a ballpark," he said.
But Virginia Dignum, a professor of responsible artificial intelligence at Umea University, said AI was not capable of giving a meaningful opinion on political ideas, and that it simply reflects the views of those who built it. "The more he relies on AI for simple things, the bigger the risk of an overconfidence in the system. It is a slippery slope," she told the Dagens Nyheter newspaper. "We must demand that reliability can be guaranteed. We didn't vote for ChatGPT."
at Slashdot.
'No One Cares' About Elite Degrees at Palantir, CEO Tells Investors
Palantir chief executive Alex Karp has told analysts and investors that the company treats Harvard, Princeton and Yale graduates the same as those without college degrees, calling employment at the data analytics firm "a new credential independent of class and background."
During the earnings call Monday where Palantir reported its first billion-dollar revenue quarter, Karp said university graduates come to the company after being "engaged in platitudes" and claimed workers without college degrees sometimes create more value than degree holders using Palantir products. The company launched its Meritocracy Fellowship this spring to recruit talent outside traditional university pathways.
at Slashdot.
CrowdStrike Investigated 320 North Korean IT Worker Cases In the Past Year
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CyberScoop: North Korean operatives seeking and gaining technical jobs with foreign companies kept CrowdStrike busy, accounting for almost one incident response case or investigation per day in the past year, the company said in its annual threat hunting report released Monday. "We saw a 220% year-over-year increase in the last 12 months of Famous Chollima activity," Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations, said during a media briefing about the report. "We see them almost every day now," he said, referring to the North Korean state-sponsored group of North Korean technical specialists that has crept into the workforce of Fortune 500 companies and small-to-midsized organizations across the globe.
CrowdStrike's threat-hunting team investigated more than 320 incidents involving North Korean operatives gaining remote employment as IT workers during the one-year period ending June 30. CrowdStrike researchers found that Famous Chollima fueled that pace of activity with an assist from generative artificial intelligence tools that helped North Korean operatives maneuver workflows and evade detection during the hiring process. "They use generative AI across all stages of their operation," Meyers said. The insider threat group used generative AI to draft resumes, create false identities, build tools for job research, mask their identity during video interviews and answer questions or complete technical coding assignments, the report found. CrowdStrike said North Korean tech workers also used generative AI on the job to help with daily tasks and manage various communications across multiple jobs -- sometimes three to four -- they worked simultaneously.
Threat hunters observed other significant shifts in malicious activity during the past year, including a 27% year-over-year increase in hands-on-keyboard intrusions -- 81% of which involved no malware. Cybercrime accounted for 73% of all interactive intrusions during the one-year period. CrowdStrike continues to find and add more threat groups and clusters of activity to its matrix of cybercriminals, nation-state attackers and hacktivists. The company identified 14 new threat groups or individuals in the past six months, Meyers said. "We're up to over 265 named adversary groups that we track, and then 150 what we call malicious activity clusters," otherwise unnamed threat groups or individuals under development, Meyers said.
at Slashdot.
First Australian-Made Rocket Crashes After 14 Seconds of Flight
Australia's first domestically built rocket to attempt orbital launch crashed just 14 seconds after liftoff, though the company still declared the mission a success for igniting all engines and leaving the launch pad. The Associated Press reports: The rocket Eris, launched by Gilmour Space Technologies, was the first Australian-designed and manufactured orbital launch vehicle to lift off from the country and was designed to carry small satellites to orbit. It launched Wednesday morning local time in a test flight from a spaceport near the small town of Bowen in the north of Queensland state. In videos published by Australian news outlets, the 23-meter (75-foot) rocket appeared to clear the launch tower and hovered in the air before falling out of sight. Plumes of smoke were seen rising above the site. No injuries were reported. The company hailed the launch as a success in a statement posted to Facebook. A spokesperson said all four hybrid-propelled engines ignited and the maiden flight included 23 seconds of engine burn time and 14 seconds of flight. "Of course I would have liked more flight time but happy with this," wrote CEO Adam Gilmour on LinkedIn. Gilmour said in February that it was "almost unheard of" for a private rocket company to successfully launch to orbit on its first attempt.
"This is an important first step towards the giant leap of a future commercial space industry right here in our region," added Mayor Ry Collins of the local Whitsunday Regional Council.
at Slashdot.
UK To Ban Public Sector Orgs From Paying Ransomware Gangs
The United Kingdom's government is planning to ban public sector and critical infrastructure organizations from paying ransoms after ransomware attacks. From a report: The list of entities that would have to follow the new proposed legislation includes local councils, schools, and the publicly funded National Health Service (NHS).
"Ransomware is estimated to cost the UK economy millions of pounds each year, with recent high-profile ransomware attacks highlighting the severe operational, financial, and even life-threatening risks. The ban would target the business model that fuels cyber criminals' activities and makes the vital services the public rely on a less attractive target for ransomware groups," the UK government said.
"We're determined to smash the cyber criminal business model and protect the services we all rely on as we deliver our Plan for Change. By working in partnership with industry to advance these measures, we are sending a clear signal that the UK is united in the fight against ransomware," Security Minister Dan Jarvis added.
at Slashdot.
Dictionary.com 'Devastated' Paid Users By Abruptly Deleting Saved Word Lists
Dictionary.com abruptly deleted all user accounts and saved word lists from its premium apps without notice or refunds, leaving long-time logophiles "devastated." "The company deleted all accounts, as well as the only ways to use Dictionary.com without seeing ads -- even if you previously paid for an ad-free experience," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Dictionary.com offers a free dictionary through its website and free Android and iOS apps. It used to offer paid-for mobile apps, called Dictionary.com Pro, that let users set up accounts, use the app without ads, and enabled other features (like grammar tips and science and rhyming dictionaries) that are gone now. Dictionary.com's premium apps also let people download an offline dictionary (its free apps used to let you buy a downloadable dictionary as a one-time purchase), but offline the dictionaries aren't available anymore.
About a year ago, claims of Dictionary.com's apps being buggy surfaced online. We also found at least one person claiming that they were unable to buy an ad-free upgrade at that time. Reports of Dictionary.com accounts being deleted and the apps not working as expected, and with much of its content removed, started appearing online about two months ago. Users reported being unable to log in and access premium features, like saved words. Soon after, Dictionary.com's premium apps were removed from Google Play and Apple's App Store. The premium version was available for download for $6 as recently as March 23, per the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
at Slashdot.
'The Year of the EU Linux Desktop May Finally Arrive'
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes in an opinion piece for The Register: Microsoft, tactically admitting it has failed at talking all the Windows 10 PC users into moving to Windows 11 after all, is -- sort of, kind of -- extending Windows 10 support for another year. For most users, that means they'll need to subscribe to Microsoft 365. This, in turn, means their data and meta-information will be kept in a US-based datacenter. That isn't sitting so well with many European Union (EU) organizations and companies. It doesn't sit that well with me or a lot of other people either.
A few years back, I wrote in these very pages that Microsoft didn't want you so much to buy Windows as subscribe to its cloud services and keep your data on its servers. If you wanted a real desktop operating system, Linux would be almost your only choice. Nothing has changed since then, except that folks are getting a wee bit more concerned about their privacy now that President Donald Trump is in charge of the US. You may have noticed that he and his regime love getting their hands on other people's data.
Privacy isn't the only issue. Can you trust Microsoft to deliver on its service promises under American political pressure? Ask the EU-based International Criminal Court (ICC) which after it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes, Trump imposed sanctions on the ICC. Soon afterward, ICC's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, was reportedly locked out of his Microsoft email accounts. Coincidence? Some think not. Microsoft denies they had anything to do with this.
Peter Ganten, chairman of the German-based Open-Source Business Alliance (OSBA), opined that these sanctions ordered by the US which he alleged had been implemented by Microsoft "must be a wake-up call for all those responsible for the secure availability of state and private IT and communication infrastructures." Microsoft chairman and general counsel, Brad Smith, had promised that it would stand behind its EU customers against political pressure. In the aftermath of the ICC reports, Smith declared Microsoft had not been "in any way [involved in] the cessation of services to the ICC." In the meantime, if you want to reach Khan, you'll find him on the privacy-first Swiss email provider, ProtonMail.
In short, besides all the other good reasons for people switching to the Linux desktop - security, Linux is now easy to use, and, thanks to Steam, you can do serious gaming on Linux - privacy has become much more critical. That's why several EU governments have decided that moving to the Linux desktop makes a lot of sense... Besides, all these governments know that switching from Windows 10 to 11 isn't cheap. While finances also play a role, and I always believe in "following the money" when it comes to such software decisions, there's no question that Europe is worried about just how trustworthy America and its companies are these days. Do you blame them? I don't. The shift to the Linux desktop is "nothing new," as Vaughan-Nichols notes. Munich launched its LiMux project back in 2004 and, despite ending it in 2017, reignited its open-source commitment by establishing a dedicated program office in 2024. In France, the gendarmerie now operates over 100,000 computers on a custom Ubuntu-based OS (GendBuntu), while the city of Lyon is transitioning to Linux and PostgreSQL.
More recently, Denmark announced it is dropping Windows and Office in favor of Linux and LibreOffice, citing digital sovereignty. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is following suit, also moving away from Microsoft software. Meanwhile, a pan-European Linux OS (EU OS) based on Fedora Kinoite is being explored, with Linux Mint and openSUSE among the alternatives under consideration.
at Slashdot.
As AI Kills Search Traffic, Google Launches Offerwall To Boost Publisher Revenue
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google's AI search features are killing traffic to publishers, so now the company is proposing a possible solution. On Thursday, the tech giant officially launched Offerwall, a new tool that allows publishers to generate revenue beyond the more traffic-dependent options, like ads.
Offerwall lets publishers give their sites' readers a variety of ways to access their content, including through options like micropayments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more. In addition, Google says that publishers can add their own options to the Offerwall, like signing up for newsletters. The new feature is available for free in Google Ad Manager after earlier tests with 1,000 publishers that spanned over a year. While no broad case studies were shared, India's Sakal Media Group implemented Google Ad Manager's Offerwall feature and saw a 20% revenue boost and up to 2 million more impressions in three months. Overall, publishers testing Offerwall experienced an average 9% revenue lift, with some seeing between 5% and 15%.
at Slashdot.
One Shot To Stop HIV: MIT's Bold Vaccine Breakthrough
ScienceDaily reports:
Researchers from MIT and Scripps have unveiled a promising new HIV vaccine approach that generates a powerful immune response with just one dose. By combining two immune-boosting adjuvants alum and SMNP the vaccine lingers in lymph nodes for nearly a month, encouraging the body to produce a vast array of antibodies. This one-shot strategy could revolutionize how we fight not just HIV, but many infectious diseases. It mimics the natural infection process and opens the door to broadly neutralizing antibody responses, a holy grail in vaccine design. And best of all, it's built on components already known to medicine.
Thanks to Slashdot reader alternative_right for sharing the news.
at Slashdot.
Social Media Now Main Source of News In US, Research Suggests
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Social media and video networks have become the main source of news in the US, overtaking traditional TV channels and news websites, research suggests. More than half (54%) of people get news from networks like Facebook, X and YouTube -- overtaking TV (50%) and news sites and apps (48%), according to the Reuters Institute. "The rise of social media and personality-based news is not unique to the United States, but changes seem to be happening faster -- and with more impact -- than in other countries," a report found. Podcaster Joe Rogan was the most widely-seen personality, with almost a quarter (22%) of the population saying they had come across news or commentary from him in the previous week. The report's author Nic Newman said the rise of social video and personality-driven news "represents another significant challenge for traditional publishers." Other key findings from the report include:
- TikTok is the fastest-growing social and video platform, now used for news by 17% globally (up 4% from last year).
- AI chatbot use for news is increasing, especially among under-25s, where it's twice as popular as in the general population.
- Most people believe AI will reduce transparency, accuracy, and trust in news.
- Across all age groups, trusted news brands with proven accuracy remain valued, even if used less frequently.
at Slashdot.
Major US Grocery Distributor Warns of Disruption After Cyberattack
United Natural Foods (UNFI), a major distributor of groceries to Whole Foods and other retailers, said on Monday that it was hit by a cyberattack, warning of disruptions to its ability to fulfill and distribute customer orders. From a report: UNFI said in a Monday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it became aware of unauthorized access to its IT systems last Thursday, and began shutting down portions of its network. The filing added that the company has "implemented workarounds for certain operations in order to continue servicing its customers where possible," but noted that the intrusion has caused ongoing disruptions to its business operations.
The Providence, Rhode Island-based company is one of the largest grocery distributors in North America, selling fresh produce, goods, and food products to more than 30,000 stores and supermarket locations across the U.S. and Canada. UNFI also serves as the "primary distributor" to Whole Foods, the Amazon-owned grocery chain. Last year, the two companies extended their long-running contract until May 2032.
at Slashdot.
Fake IT Support Calls Hit 20 Orgs, End in Stolen Salesforce Data and Extortion, Google Warns
A group of financially motivated cyberscammers who specialize in Scattered-Spider-like fake IT support phone calls managed to trick employees at about 20 organizations into installing a modified version of Salesforce's Data Loader that allows the criminals to steal sensitive data. From a report: Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) tracks this crew as UNC6040, and in research published today said they specialize in voice-phishing campaigns targeting Salesforce instances for large-scale data theft and extortion.
These attacks began around the beginning of the year, GTIG principal threat analyst Austin Larsen told The Register. "Our current assessment indicates that a limited number of organizations were affected as part of this campaign, approximately 20," he said. "We've seen UNC6040 targeting hospitality, retail, education and various other sectors in the Americas and Europe." The criminals are really good at impersonating IT support personnel and convincing employees at English-speaking branches of multinational corporations into downloading a modified version of Data Loader, a Salesforce app that allows users to export and update large amounts of data.
at Slashdot.
Six More Humans Successfully Carried to the Edge of Space by Blue Origin
An anonymous reader shared this report from Space.com:
Three world travelers, two Space Camp alums and an aerospace executive whose last name aptly matched their shared adventure traveled into space and back Saturday, becoming the latest six people to fly with Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos.
Mark Rocket joined Jaime Alemán, Jesse Williams, Paul Jeris, Gretchen Green and Amy Medina Jorge on board the RSS First Step — Blue Origin's first of two human-rated New Shepard capsules — for a trip above the Kármán Line, the 62-mile-high (100-kilometer) internationally recognized boundary between Earth and space...
Mark Rocket became the first New Zealander to reach space on the mission. His connection to aerospace goes beyond his apt name and today's flight; he's currently the CEO of Kea Aerospace and previously helped lead Rocket Lab, a competing space launch company to Blue Origin that sends most of its rockets up from New Zealand. Alemán, Williams and Jeris each traveled the world extensively before briefly leaving the planet today. An attorney from Panama, Alemán is now the first person to have visited all 193 countries recognized by the United Nations, traveled to the North and South Poles, and now, have been into space. For Williams, an entrepreneur from Canada, Saturday's flight continued his record of achieving high altitudes; he has summitted Mt. Everest and five of the other six other highest mountains across the globe.
"For about three minutes, the six NS-32 crewmates experienced weightlessness," the article points out, "and had an astronaut's-eye view of the planet..."
On social media Blue Origin notes it's their 12th human spaceflight, "and the 32nd flight of the New Shepard program."
at Slashdot.
Amid Turmoil, Stack Overflow Asks About AI, Salary, Remote Work in 15th Annual Developer Survey
Stack Overflow remains in the midst of big changes to counter an AI-fueled drop in engagement. So "We're wondering what kind of online communities Stack Overflow users continue to support in the age of AI," writes their senior analyst, "and whether AI is becoming a closer companion than ever before."
For their 15th year of their annual reader survey, this means "we're not just collecting data; we're reflecting on the last year of questions, answers, hallucinations, job changes, tech stacks, memory allocations, models, systems and agents — together..."
Is it an AI agent revolution yet? Are you building or utilizing AI agents? We want to know how these intelligent assistants are changing your daily workflow and if developers are really using them as much as these keynote speeches assume. We're asking if you are using these tools and where humans are still needed for common developer tasks.
Career shifts: We're keen to understand if you've considered a career change or transitioned roles and if AI is impacting your approach to learning or using existing tools. Did we make up the difference in salaries globally for tech workers...?
They're also re-visiting "a key finding from recent surveys highlighted a significant statistic: 80% of developers reported being unhappy or complacent in their jobs."
This raised questions about changing office (and return-to-office) culture and the pressures of the industry, along with whether there were any insights into what could help developers feel more satisfied at work. Prior research confirmed that flexibility at work used to contribute more than salary to job satisfaction, but 2024's results show us that remote work is not more impactful than salary when it comes to overall satisfaction... [For some positions job satisfaction stayed consistent regardless of salary, though it increased with salary for other positions. And embedded developers said their happiness increased when they worked with top-quality hardware, while desktop developers cited "contributing to open source" and engineering managers were happier when "driving strategy".]
In 2024, our data showed that many developers experienced a pay cut in various roles and programming specialties. In an industry often seen as highly lucrative, this was a notable shift of around 7% lower salaries across the top ten reporting countries for the same roles. This year, we're interested in whether this trend has continued, reversed, or stabilized. Salary dynamics is an indicator for job satisfaction in recent surveys of Stack Overflow users and understanding trends for these roles can perhaps improve the process for finding the most useful factors contributing to role satisfaction outside of salary.
And of course they're asking about AI — while noting last year's survey uncovered this paradox. "While AI usage is growing (70% in 2023 vs. 76% in 2024 planning to or currently using AI tools), developer sentiment isn't necessarily following suit, as 77% in of all respondents in 2023 are favorable or very favorable of AI tools for development compared to 72% of all respondents in 2024."
Concerns about accuracy and misinformation were prevalent among some key groups. More developers learning to code are using or are interested in using AI tools than professional developers (84% vs. 77%)... Developers with 10 — 19 years experience were most likely (84%) to name "increase in productivity" as a benefit of AI tools, higher than developers with less experience (<80%)...
Is it an AI agent revolution yet? Are you building or utilizing AI agents? We want to know how these intelligent assistants are changing your daily workflow and if developers are really using them as much as these keynote speeches assume. We're asking if you are using these tools and where humans are still needed for common developer tasks.
at Slashdot.
Football and Other Premium TV Being Pirated At 'Industrial Scale'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A lack of action by big tech firms is enabling the "industrial scale theft" of premium video services, especially live sport, a new report says. The research by Enders Analysis accuses Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft of "ambivalence and inertia" over a problem it says costs broadcasters revenue and puts users at an increased risk of cyber-crime. Gareth Sutcliffe and Ollie Meir, who authored the research, described the Amazon Fire Stick -- which they argue is the device many people use to access illegal streams -- as "a piracy enabler." [...] The device plugs into TVs and gives the viewer thousands of options to watch programs from legitimate services including the BBC iPlayer and Netflix. They are also being used to access illegal streams, particularly of live sport.
In November last year, a Liverpool man who sold Fire Stick devices he reconfigured to allow people to illegally stream Premier League football matches was jailed. After uploading the unauthorized services on the Amazon product, he advertised them on Facebook. Another man from Liverpool was given a two-year suspended sentence last year after modifying fire sticks and selling them on Facebook and WhatsApp. According to data for the first quarter of this year, provided to Enders by Sky, 59% of people in UK who said they had watched pirated material in the last year while using a physical device said they had used a Amazon fire product. The Enders report says the fire stick enables "billions of dollars in piracy" overall. [...]
The researchers also pointed to the role played by the "continued depreciation" of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems, particularly those from Google and Microsoft. This technology enables high quality streaming of premium content to devices. Two of the big players are Microsoft's PlayReady and Google's Widevine. The authors argue the architecture of the DRM is largely unchanged, and due to a lack of maintenance by the big tech companies, PlayReady and Widevine "are now compromised across various security levels." Mr Sutcliffe and Mr Meir said this has had "a seismic impact across the industry, and ultimately given piracy the upper hand by enabling theft of the highest quality content." They added: "Over twenty years since launch, the DRM solutions provided by Google and Microsoft are in steep decline. A complete overhaul of the technology architecture, licensing, and support model is needed. Lack of engagement with content owners indicates this a low priority."
at Slashdot.
Robot Industry Split Over That Humanoid Look
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Advanced robots don't necessarily need to look like C3PO from "Star Wars" or George Jetson's maid Rosie, despite all the hype over humanoids from Wall Street and Big Tech. In fact, some of the biggest skeptics about human-shaped robots come from within the robotics industry itself. [...] The most productive -- and profitable -- bots are the ones that can do single tasks cheaply and efficiently. "If you look at where robots are really bringing value in a manufacturing environment, it is combining industrial or collaborative robots with mobility," ABB managing director Ali Raja tells Axios. "I don't see that there are any real practical applications where humanoids are bringing in a lot of value."
"The reason we have two legs is because whether Darwin or God or whoever made us, we have to figure out how to traverse an infinite number of things," like climbing a mountain or riding a bike, explains Michael Cicco, CEO of Fanuc America Corp. "When you get into the factory, even if it's a million things, it's still a finite number of things that you need to do." Human-shaped robots are over-engineered solutions to most factory chores that could be better solved by putting a robot arm on a wheeled base, he said.
"The thing about humanoids is not that it's a human factor. It's that it's more dynamically stable," counters Melonee Wise, chief product officer at Agility Robotics, which is developing a humanoid robot called Digit. When humans grab something heavy, they can shift their weight for better balance. The same is true for a humanoid, she said. Using a robotic arm on a mobile base to pick up something heavy, "it's like I'm a little teapot and you become very unstable," she said, bending at the waist.
at Slashdot.
Pakistan Allocates 2,000 Megawatts of Electricity To Bitcoin Mining, AI Data Centres
Pakistan will allocate 2,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity in the first phase of a national initiative to power bitcoin mining and AI data centres, its finance ministry said on Sunday. The allocation is part of Islamabad's plans to use its surplus electricity to bitcoin mining and AI data centres.
at Slashdot.
Is AI Turning Coders Into Bystanders in Their Own Jobs?
AI's downside for software engineers for now seems to be a change in the quality of their work," reports the New York Times. "Some say it is becoming more routine, less thoughtful and, crucially, much faster paced... The new approach to coding at many companies has, in effect, eliminated much of the time the developer spends reflecting on his or her work."
And Amazon CEO Andy Jassy even recently told shareholders Amazon would "change the norms" for programming by how they used AI.
Those changing norms have not always been eagerly embraced. Three Amazon engineers said managers had increasingly pushed them to use AI in their work over the past year. The engineers said the company had raised output goals [which affect performance reviews] and had become less forgiving about deadlines. It has even encouraged coders to gin up new AI productivity tools at an upcoming hackathon, an internal coding competition. One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it was last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using AI.
Other tech companies are moving in the same direction. In a memo to employees in April, the CEO of Shopify, a company that helps entrepreneurs build and manage e-commerce websites, announced that "AI usage is now a baseline expectation" and that the company would "add AI usage questions" to performance reviews. Google recently told employees that it would soon hold a companywide hackathon in which one category would be creating AI tools that could "enhance their overall daily productivity," according to an internal announcement. Winning teams will receive $10,000.
The shift has not been all negative for workers. At Amazon and other companies, managers argue that AI can relieve employees of tedious tasks and enable them to perform more interesting work. Jassy wrote last year that the company had saved "the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years" by using AI to do the thankless work of upgrading old software... As at Microsoft, many Amazon engineers use an AI assistant that suggests lines of code. But the company has more recently rolled out AI tools that can generate large portions of a program on its own. One engineer called the tools "scarily good." The engineers said that many colleagues have been reluctant to use these new tools because they require a lot of double-checking and because the engineers want more control.
"It's more fun to write code than to read code," said Simon Willison, an AI fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channelling the objections of other programmers. "If you're told you have to do a code review, it's never a fun part of the job. When you're working with these tools, it's most of the job."
"This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel like bystanders in their own jobs," the article points out (adding "The automation of coding has special resonance for Amazon engineers, who have watched their blue-collar counterparts undergo a similar transition..."
"While there is no rush to form a union for coders at Amazon, such a move would not be unheard of. When General Motors workers went on strike in 1936 to demand recognition of their union, the United Auto Workers, it was the dreaded speedup that spurred them on."
at Slashdot.
Apple's Bad News Keeps Coming. Can They Still Turn It Around?
Besides pressure on Apple to make iPhones in the U.S., CEO Tim Cook "is facing off against two U.S. judges, European and worldwide regulators, state and federal lawmakers, and even a creator of the iPhone," writes the Wall Street Journal, "to say nothing of the cast of rivals outrunning Apple in artificial intelligence."
Each is a threat to Apple's hefty profit margins, long the company's trademark and the reason investors drove its valuation above $3 trillion before any other company. Shareholders are still Cook's most important constituency. The stock's 25% fall from its peak shows their concern about whether he — or anyone — can navigate the choppy 2025 waters.
What can be said for Apple is that the company is patient, and that has often paid off in the past.
They also note OpenAI's purchase of Jony Ive's company, with Sam Altman saying internally they hope to make 100 million AI "companion" devices:
It is hard to gauge the potential for a brand-new computing device from a company that has never made one. Yet the fact that it is coming from the man who led design of the iPhone and other hit Apple products means it can't be dismissed. Apple sees the threat coming: "You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now, as crazy as that sounds," an Apple executive, Eddy Cue, testified in a court case this month...
The company might not need to be first in AI. It didn't make the first music player, smartphone or tablet. It waited, and then conquered each market with the best. A question is whether a strategy that has been successful in devices will work for AI.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
at Slashdot.
Microsoft Says Its Aurora AI Can Accurately Predict Air Quality, Typhoons
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: One of Microsoft's latest AI models can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena, the company claims. In a paper published in the journal Nature and an accompanying blog post this week, Microsoft detailed Aurora, which the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological approaches. Aurora, which has been trained on more than a million hours of data from satellites, radar and weather stations, simulations, and forecasts, can be fine-tuned with additional data to make predictions for particular weather events.
AI weather models are nothing new. Google DeepMind has released a handful over the past several years, including WeatherNext, which the lab claims beats some of the world's best forecasting systems. Microsoft is positioning Aurora as one of the field's top performers -- and a potential boon for labs studying weather science. In experiments, Aurora predicted Typhoon Doksuri's landfall in the Philippines four days in advance of the actual event, beating some expert predictions, Microsoft says. The model also bested the National Hurricane Center in forecasting five-day tropical cyclone tracks for the 2022-2023 season, and successfully predicted the 2022 Iraq sandstorm.
While Aurora required substantial computing infrastructure to train, Microsoft says the model is highly efficient to run. It generates forecasts in seconds compared to the hours traditional systems take using supercomputer hardware. Microsoft, which has made the source code and model weights publicly available, says that it's incorporating Aurora's AI modeling into its MSN Weather app via a specialized version of the model that produces hourly forecasts, including for clouds.
at Slashdot.
America's Leading Alien Hunters Depend on AI to Speed Their Search
Harvard University's Galileo Project is using AI to automate the search for unidentified anomalous phenomena, marking a significant shift in how academics approach what was once considered fringe research. The project operates a Massachusetts observatory equipped with infrared cameras, acoustic sensors, and radio-frequency analyzers that continuously scan the sky for unusual objects.
Researchers Laura Domine and Richard Cloete are training machine learning algorithms to recognize all normal aerial phenomena -- planes, birds, drones, weather balloons -- so the system can flag genuine anomalies for human analysis. The team uses computer vision software called YOLO (You Only Look Once) and has generated hundreds of thousands of synthetic images to train their models, though the software currently identifies only 36% of aircraft captured by infrared cameras.
The Pentagon is pursuing parallel efforts through its All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which has examined over 1,800 UAP reports and identified 50 to 60 cases as "true anomalies" that government scientists cannot explain. AARO has developed its own sensor suite called Gremlin, using similar technology to Harvard's observatory. Both programs represent the growing legitimization of UAP research following 2017 Defense Department disclosures about military encounters with unexplained aerial phenomena.
at Slashdot.
Infrared Contact Lenses Allow People To See In the Dark, Even With Eyes Closed
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Neuroscientists and materials scientists have created contact lenses that enable infrared vision in both humans and mice by converting infrared light into visible light. Unlike infrared night vision goggles, the contact lenses, described in the journal Cell, do not require a power source -- and they enable the wearer to perceive multiple infrared wavelengths. Because they're transparent, users can see both infrared and visible light simultaneously, though infrared vision was enhanced when participants had their eyes closed. [...] The contact lens technology uses nanoparticles that absorb infrared light and convert it into wavelengths that are visible to mammalian eyes (e.g., electromagnetic radiation in the 400-700 nm range). The nanoparticles specifically enable the detection of "near-infrared light," which is infrared light in the 800-1600 nm range, just beyond what humans can already see.
The team previously showed that these nanoparticles enable infrared vision in mice when injected into the retina, but they wanted to design a less invasive option. To create the contact lenses, the team combined the nanoparticles with flexible, nontoxic polymers that are used in standard soft contact lenses. After showing that the contact lenses were nontoxic, they tested their function in both humans and mice. They found that contact lens-wearing mice displayed behaviors suggesting that they could see infrared wavelengths. For example, when the mice were given the choice of a dark box and an infrared-illuminated box, contact-wearing mice chose the dark box whereas contact-less mice showed no preference. The mice also showed physiological signals of infrared vision: the pupils of contact-wearing mice constricted in the presence of infrared light, and brain imaging revealed that infrared light caused their visual processing centers to light up. In humans, the infrared contact lenses enabled participants to accurately detect flashing morse code-like signals and to perceive the direction of incoming infrared light.
An additional tweak to the contact lenses allows users to differentiate between different spectra of infrared light by engineering the nanoparticles to color-code different infrared wavelengths. For example, infrared wavelengths of 980 nm were converted to blue light, wavelengths of 808 nm were converted to green light, and wavelengths of 1,532 nm were converted to red light. In addition to enabling wearers to perceive more detail within the infrared spectrum, these color-coding nanoparticles could be modified to help color-blind people see wavelengths that they would otherwise be unable to detect. [...] Because the contact lenses have limited ability to capture fine details (due to their close proximity to the retina, which causes the converted light particles to scatter), the team also developed a wearable glass system using the same nanoparticle technology, which enabled participants to perceive higher-resolution infrared information. Currently, the contact lenses are only able to detect infrared radiation projected from an LED light source, but the researchers are working to increase the nanoparticles' sensitivity so that they can detect lower levels of infrared light.
at Slashdot.