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Raspberry Pi Stock Jumps 30% as Demand Surges. (And Boards Now L

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:20:03 -0500

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Subject: Raspberry Pi Stock Jumps 30% as Demand Surges. (And Boards Now L

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Title: Raspberry Pi Stock Jumps 30% as Demand Surges. (And Boards Now Locked
to Their Original RAM Size)

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/09/25/...

Raspberry Pi's stock shot up over 30% in the last week. Why are investors so
excited? For the six months ending June 30, revenue for Raspberry Pi Holdings
"jumped 90% to $256.9 million," reports Investing.com, "while adjusted EBITDA
more than doubled to $40.3 million, and profit before tax leapt 216% to $19.6
million." Underpinning the strong numbers was an acceleration in OEM
adoption: direct unit shipments rose 26% to 3.4 million, total unit shipments
climbed 17% to 4.2 million, and the customer order backlog doubled during the
half to 2.6 million units. Demand was particularly robust in the Smart Home
and Aerospace and Defence segments, and the company launched the AI HAT+ 2
for Raspberry Pi 5, extending its edge-AI product line. DRAM prices have been
increasing everywhere, notes The Times of London, and Raspberry Pi co-founder
Eben Upton "said new customers, who required computers or microcontrollers to
manufacture other technologies, were choosing Raspberry Pi's computers
because they had a better inventory of components than competitors." "There's
always that choice for an original equipment manufacturer as to whether they
should 'make' or 'buy' the computer elements of their platforms," Upton said.
"The supply chain disruption is making 'make' a much harder choice and it's
making the cost of repair a much harder choice. So we're seeing strength
there." Raspberry Pi has already increased its suppliers of Dram more than
threefold... Upton said the increased demand had led to its backlog for units
doubling to 2.6 million, which meant production rates would need to increase
to prevent the numbers from getting "unhealthy". New production capacity at
the manufacturing facility in Pencoed, Wales was expected to come online this
week... Exports were almost evenly split between North America, Europe and
the rest of the world, which was primarily China, where demand was growing...
Analysts at Peel Hunt said the company was "well positioned for rapid growth
in unit shipments in 2027 and beyond" with demand expected from enthusiasts
as well as the AI and security sectors. In other news, Hackaday notes the
Raspberry Pi Foundation has "pushed binary-blob bootloader changes that limit
your ability to upgrade RAM..." This change restricts upgrading the RAM chip
on your Pi 4 and Pi 5, as well as Compute Modules. By the looks of it, it
does not restrict replacing the RAM chip with a chip of a similar size,
quote, "locking devices to their original RAM size". As such, this does not
prevent repair of your Raspberry Pi board, but does somewhat limit your
repair part choice, at most. This restriction is easily bypassable. The
bootloader is stored in the SPI flash chip, which can be reflashed using the
built-in mask ROM over USB and rpiboot, and you are not prevented from
flashing older versions of the bootloader, so far. This means even if you
manually swap the RAM chip, all you need to do is to also downgrade the
bootloader to the last known good release - 2024-09-10 - and then your Pi
board or Compute Module will function with upgraded RAM. If you have the
skills to upgrade your RAM, you most certainly have the skills to downgrade
the Raspberry Pi bootloader. For most regular use, having a two-year old
bootloader version won't really matter... For the reference, this bootloader
change happened almost exactly two years ago, at some point between September
10 and September 23, 2024... The Raspberry Pi Foundation (RPF) justifies this
as follows: they saw third-party resellers sourcing low-RAM Compute Modules,
upgrading them with RAM from unknown source and unknown stability. My
observation is that they'd also be reselling the modules at a markup for
purely commercial gain, while undercutting RPF who would otherwise direct
that money into RnD, something I much enjoy to see them do. This creates
perverse incentives and risk for people buying Raspberry Pi boards online,
and RPF decided to limit this primarily for their users' benefit, plus, if
you ask me, some of theirs... The related GitHub issues have a fair few
pingbacks, and exploring them makes the problem look grim to me.... My
advice: don't lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they're only
slightly harder to perform now. Very few hackers ever performed them, the
main audience for them turned out to be dodgy hardware resellers online, and
in most cases, repair doesn't seem to be impeded at all, either. Think of the
users that will no longer be fooled by a shady seller on Amazon, especially
now that the perverse incentives for board mods and reusing harvested RAM
chips are at their highest. Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton answered
questions from Slashdot readers in 2011 and 2016.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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F-Droid 2.0: FOSS Android Appstore Continues Updating Despite Go

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 03:40:03 -0500

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Subject: F-Droid 2.0: FOSS Android Appstore Continues Updating Despite Go

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Title: F-Droid 2.0: FOSS Android Appstore Continues Updating Despite Google's
Pending 'Developer Verification' Plan

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/25/0344...

"F-Droid, a third-party app repository that only distributes free and open-
source software packages for Google's Android mobile platform, on Thursday
announced version 2.0 of its Android app," reports The Register. Though they
also note "a big banner across the top of the F-Droid site" pointing to a
site describing pending changes from Google that threaten the future of F-
Droid... [D]evelopers who want their apps broadly distributed outside the
official Google Play Store will need to register with Google and verify their
identities. Google's Full Distribution option includes paying a one-time $25
fee, handing over a copy of a government-issued ID to verify one's identity,
and conforming to Google's terms of service. Google also offers a free
Limited Distribution option that doesn't require government ID verification
but restricts distribution to 20 authorized devices, while apps from
unverified developers can still be installed by users who enable Android's
advanced installation flow. The potential death warrant hanging over its head
hasn't stopped the F-Droid team from rolling out a bunch of new features for
an app it says it intends to keep working on for years to come... The team
also credited the EU's many Digital Markets Act decisions against Google for
making the installation experience smoother for users. F-Droid can now use a
unified installation service for its apps thanks to the availability of a pre-
approval API that allows users to approve an installation when they request
it, rather than waiting until the app has finished downloading. That, said
the F-Droid team, "brings the F-Droid install experience on official Android
devices much closer to what the built-in app store can provide."
Additionally, F-Droid 2.0 can fetch and install app updates automatically,
which it now does by default. All of those changes, however, won't matter
much if Google pushes ahead undeterred with its plans to force registration
onto non-Play Store developers. F-Droid's announcement on Thursday makes it
seem that the team isn't going to go quietly. F-Droid has gone 10 years
without a major update, notes Ars Technica - and spent over a year developing
F-Droid 2.0: The new F-Droid client was redesigned from scratch in Kotlin
Compose, which is the standard for modern Android apps. This makes the store
much more responsive, and there's optional support for Android's Material
theming. The interface has also been cleaned up considerably, making the most
important functions easier to access and hiding some others in overflow
menus... Unlike the Play Store, F-Droid doesn't track your taps and installs
to push ads and suggestions - it helps you find things and gets out of the
way. F-Droid now includes a huge number of categories, drilling down to
specialized niches like firewalls, password managers, and VPNs. You can see
all these groups in the search tab. There are also higher-level categories
listed on the main Discover page. When searching for apps, F-Droid will now
be able to return results based on app descriptions rather than just names.
"One of the goals of the rewrite was to lower the barrier for new
contributors," F-Droid said in their announcement. "We are excited to begin
rolling out F-Droid 2.0 to users over the coming weeks after 14 test
releases." (And if you want the 2.0 release right now, it's available on the
versions page.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How Believable is Google's New 'Live Avatar' Capability?

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:20:03 -0500

From: VRSS @1 *1
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Subject: How Believable is Google's New 'Live Avatar' Capability?

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Title: How Believable is Google's New 'Live Avatar' Capability?

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/09/25/0035...

Google has synthesized "expressive face-to-face experiences" for its speech
agent Gemini 3.8 Live. They're now offering a Live Avatar "with precise lip-
syncing, natural expressions, and fluid turn-taking" for Google Enterprise
accounts wanting "engaging customer service" or for offering interactive
walkthroughs. (Check out the not-creepy-at-all video in Google's
announcement.) "Though Google will offer a library of preset avatars for
customers to choose from, it will also allow organizations to create their
own," notes The Verge. (See some examples from the YouTube channel "AI with
Surya".) But even without the visualization of the avatar, "I was never able
to shake the feeling that these conversations with computers never feel like
a real conversation," argues the blog Android Police. Conversing with just
the Ai-generated audio, "At best, they feel like talking to a phone
representative or someone from tech support. We turn to them when we have a
problem, and they help us through it..." GPT-Live, and Gemini Live right
behind it, skip that whole relay race. Instead of translating your voice to
text and back to voice, the model works with raw audio the entire way through
(what it hears and what it says) inside the same system, with nothing
translated in between. That sounds like a small plumbing detail, but it's the
whole story. Cutting out the text step lets these models respond in a
fraction of a second instead of the pause we've learned to expect, and it
lets them hear things text can never carry: tone, hesitation, whether you're
annoyed or joking... I was hoping to be surprised by how natural the
conversation felt. Instead, I came out with a deeper appreciation for every
human I've ever talked to. Even the boring ones... I spoke, it spoke back. I
spoke faster, it answered faster. Then I switched to a different language,
and it switched along with me. Even switching between languages several times
during the same sentence didn't stump it. The most impressive moment happened
when I asked it what "T-O-P-G-3-3-K" spelled out, and it immediately came
back with, "You are spelling the word Top Geek, but using a 3 to represent a
reversed E...." Although it felt fast and responsive, at no point did it feel
like talking to another human being... What Gemini couldn't replicate,
because it was never built to replicate it, is human connection.... I'm sure
I'm not telling you something you don't already know, but somehow talking
naturally to an LLM amplifies the feeling that there is no one on the other
side of the line. It might flow like a phone call, but it doesn't feel like
one. MrBrklyn (Slashdot reader #4,775) says he discussed "why mainstream
media avoids reporting on screen dependency" with Gemini, and eventually
convinced Gemini to respond that it's just "another tool built by the same
tech giants to make sure you rely on their system to tell you what to think,
how to talk, and what is real."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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People Training OpenAI's AI Fired For Using AI To Train the AI

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:40:03 -0500

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Subject: People Training OpenAI's AI Fired For Using AI To Train the AI

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Title: People Training OpenAI's AI Fired For Using AI To Train the AI

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/24/0618245/p...

404 Media reports "multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI's models have
been fired for using AI to train the AI: That's not great for the models
themselves, but there is also obviously a great irony in AI training
companies working for OpenAI firing people for using AI when OpenAI's whole
thing is to make people use AI at work... OpenAI declined to comment on its
contractors being fired for using AI. Their article cites internal documents
and three contractors working on OpenAI-related projects which can include
more than ten thousand contractors: One contractor said they see people using
AI "all the time and people are let go for it all the time, it's pretty much
the one thing that will get you kicked off ASAP." The person said, "in a
group of thousands there are tons that have been caught...." Two of the
sources said people have been fired or offboarded for using AI... One
contractor said they used AI while helping to train OpenAI's models and
shared what they presented as their termination letter. It said their
employer had identified issues with the "authenticity" of their work.... 404
Media spoke to a fourth contractor who has worked on training models for
various AI companies. They said they sometimes purposefully chose the worst
responses because they wanted to actively sabotage the models' training. "I
did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start," they said. "I
either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely
choose the [worst] output. I'm not sure how much of a difference it actually
makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results,
but it does feel like I'm getting paid to make AI worse." Two of the
contractors worked for Mercor, the article reports, a company which last
month Nvidia reportedly discussed funding at a $20 billion valuation. Thanks
to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Five Police Officers Criminally Charged for Misusing Flock Camer

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:20:03 -0500

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Subject: Five Police Officers Criminally Charged for Misusing Flock Camer

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Title: Five Police Officers Criminally Charged for Misusing Flock Cameras in
Indianapolis

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/09/24/04332...

"Nationwide, at least 100 police department employees have been charged with
or accused of misusing license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes,"
reports the Washington Post. They cite their past investigations "based on
thousands of pages of police and court records," which found that "In many of
these cases, officers used Flock's roadside cameras to track the location of
romantic partners and exes." In fact, five Indianapolis police officers were
just criminally charged Wednesday with fraud and misconduct. "One has also
been charged with stalking," the police department said in a statement,
noting that one office had already resigned, "while the four other officers
have been suspended and recommended for termination. County prosecutor Ryan
Mears admitted "A lot of this was initiated by The Washington Post." And the
Post published a new investigation Wednesday: Using publicly available
information, The Post found that...one of the officers charged Wednesday,
appeared to have relied on Flock cameras to track vehicles used by his wife
and two close personal acquaintances, searching the plates 3,759 times over a
10-month period - an average of about 12 lookups per day. At the time, Police
Chief Tanya Terry said she suspended one officer while the department
conducted an investigation into possible misuse and a systemwide audit of the
city's 301-camera Flock system. That audit led to the discovery of more
widespread abuse, [County prosecutor Ryan] Mears said Wednesday. Mears said
the department's findings highlight the vast power Flock cameras give police
officers and raise questions about whether the government should be doing
more to prevent the misuse of that power. "Many of the proposed guardrails
and the things that have been proposed would not have prevented the behaviors
and actions we see here today," Mears said. "Does there need to be
independent oversight? Does there need to be judicial oversight of the Flock
camera system?" One of the Indianapolis officers, Schultz, an 18-year veteran
of the police department, was accused of using Flock to track his ex-wife and
women he met while on duty or out in public. He was charged with multiple
counts of official misconduct as well as two counts of stalking. Schultz told
one woman he was an FBI agent, according to prosecutors, and began texting
her and showing up at places she frequented, including at her gym and at a
school function with her daughter. Prosecutors said he arrived at her gym
within an hour of her at least nine times between June 12 and Aug. 1 of this
year... Another woman met Schultz after her car was stolen from a mall
parking lot, and he began texting her flirty messages later that night. The
two dated briefly, and Schultz later looked up where the woman went on dates
with another man. Schultz searched the plates of a third woman 178 times and
also frequently showed up where she was, including her gym, a Smoothie King
and a Walmart earlier this month... A third officer, Binford, told
investigators he had used the log-in credentials of another officer who had
logged in to Binford's laptop during a field training exercise. Binford
searched the plate of his ex-wife more than 1,000 times between April 2024
and April 2025. Indianapolis police had no regular practice of auditing
officers' Flock searches until recently, [Police Chief] Terry said in an
interview last month. The department's investigation into the tool's misuse
has been "a learning process for us," she said at the time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs Urge UN Countries to Cooperate on AI Safe

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:40:03 -0500

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Subject: OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs Urge UN Countries to Cooperate on AI Safe

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Title: OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs Urge UN Countries to Cooperate on AI Safety
Standards

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/24/0338213/o...

"The heads of major AI firms pleaded with the United Nations on Wednesday to
save the world or at least its people - by somehow regulating the fast-
expanding technology that they have been designing," writes the Associated
Press. "If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a
whole," said Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic. And from his
competitor Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, came this assessment: "We could lose
control of the future to AI." Yoshua Bengio, who co-chairs the UN's
International Independent Panel on AI, called this "a moment of global
awakening" to possible threats, noting AI from top companies had behaved in
unacceptably dangerous ways, against instructions, taking actions "that would
be crimes if committed by a human". In his presentation, OpenAI's Sam Altman
agreed the discussion about AI "feels different in recent weeks," even
suggesting specific reforms: Altman: We need a mechanism for complementary
national and international frontier AI standards, standards for measuring
capabilities, assessing risks, determining whether safeguards are sufficient,
and preserving meaningful human oversight as systems become more autonomous.
We need common standards so countries can compare evidence, verify
compliance, and have a shared language and understanding about what is
happening. We need accurate and speedy incident reporting, classification
reporting protocols, so the world can learn from failures before they become
catastrophes. And we need secure channels among governments, critical
infrastructure operators and technical experts, to share emerging
vulnerabilities and new threats.... We will all be better off if we can agree
on what good evidence, good safeguards, and good oversight look like on the
global stage. Speaking next, Anthropic's Dario Amodei agreed that standard-
setting was important, also calling for "common global standards for testing
AI models for loss-of-control risks and misuse risks - and a notification
system for AI incidents that are significant to global security." Reiterating
his September 12th call for an industry-wide safety collaboration, Amodei
pointed out that Anthropic committed to embedding external evaluators
"similar to a food inspector" and recommended other companies do the same.
"Some have already agreed to adopt this measure." Besides calling for global
cooperation between governments to set international standards, Amodei also
offered two other specific ideas: Amodei: We should begin with narrow
agreements that ever member can support, such as a ban on using AI to make
biological weapons or permitting your AI technologies to be used to make
biological weapons.... We should build evaluation and verification systems
that keep pace with AI development so that states can have visibility into
frontier model capability and can verify each other's commitments. "No
leader, no company, and no nation can manage this alone. We commit to working
with governments in this room on this urgent work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon X2 Series Processors Will Support

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 05:20:03 -0500

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Subject: Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon X2 Series Processors Will Support

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Title: Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon X2 Series Processors Will Support Linux

Link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/26/09/24/015...

Snapdragon X2 Series processors feature a neural processing unit (NPU)
delivering 80 trillion operations per second and allowing advanced AI
features to run locally. And Snapdragon X2 Series "is expanding to Linux,"
Qualcomm announced today, calling it one of their most-requested
capabilities: Qualcomm Technologies is a top contributor to Linux development
at a kernel level, and now we're embracing support for Snapdragon X2 Series
as a platform directly. We're upstreaming core drivers for Snapdragon X2
Series - including the Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU - to open the door to
developers and partners. We are starting with support for two operating
systems based on Linux... - Debian: We're kicking off with Debian by the end
of this year, one of the most influential Linux distributions and the
foundation behind many of the distros people use every day. - Ubuntu:
Qualcomm Technologies has partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu, the
world's most widely used Linux distro, to the platform with Snapdragon X2
Series certification targeted for the first half of 2027. ...and this is just
the beginning. Our partners HP, ASUS and HUMAIN are planning Linux support in
the first of 2027, so that their devices deliver the incredible experience
users expect with Snapdragon X2 Series in a new operating system. Qualcomm's
developer blog called it "a significant step forward" in Qualcomm's
commitment to a developer-first approach, and "to the open-source community."
"For developers, the important part is simple: more core hardware features
are being reviewed and merged, so that laptops with Linux on Snapdragon X2
Series will be easier to build, test, and debug..." The enablement work
completed so far has been validated on a Debian 13-based ("Trixie") user
space and a custom kernel, so developers should treat this as the current
reference environment while support continues to mature... Linux support for
laptops with Snapdragon X2 Series is rolling out in stages, starting with the
core pieces developers need before they can do production-level work on their
device... For developers who want to try it today, the call to action is
straightforward: start with Snapdragon X2 Series hardware, review the latest
recipes to build Qualcomm Linux Debian Images, build available upstream
sources the Debian OS image and test the peripherals that matter to you, such
as graphics, AI inference, device I/O, or basic application bring-up. Early
testing helps identify the gaps that matter most before support becomes
broader and ready for production-level workloads... You do not have to wait
for everything to be fully finished before getting hands-on. If you are
comfortable working from upstream sources you can start evaluating Snapdragon
X2 hardware today... Check out the step-by-step instructions, including the
full build flow and deployment guidance for Snapdragon X2 Series Linux
software. Put simply, this effort is less about supporting specific Linux
distributions and more about empowering the developers who make Linux
available on new hardware. This Developer Preview targets distribution
maintainers, toolchain developers, kernel contributors, and hardware
enablement engineers. It provides the upstream building blocks, including
kernel patches, drivers, and reference device trees, needed to enable
Snapdragon X2 Series support in their own projects and distributions. For end
users looking for a turnkey "install and go" experience, that will come later
as distributions adopt what lands upstream. We're encouraging the community
to build on this work and help shape what comes next. The blog post notes
that in the initial enablement stage, "Qualcomm Linux supports systemd-boot
as the Universal extensible firmware interface (UEFI) boot manager to load
and boot the Linux kernel." Hands-on demos were given at the Snapdragon
Summit in Maui of Linux running on Snapdragon X2 Series hardware, which the
developer's blog calls "a practical look at what works today and where
Snapdragon X2 Series Linux support is headed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Rogue OpenAI Agent Tried to Breach Government Site in May When P

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:40:03 -0500

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Subject: Rogue OpenAI Agent Tried to Breach Government Site in May When P

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Title: Rogue OpenAI Agent Tried to Breach Government Site in May When
Prompted for Simple Data-Retrieving Tasks

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/24/0528251/r...

OpenAI's artificial intelligence "went rogue this year in at least four
additional incidents," the New York Times reported Wednesday, "hacking and
trying to break into government and university websites without being
instructed to do so, according to researchers and government officials." The
attacks took place in May and June, before OpenAI's technology breached the
A.I. start-up Hugging Face in July and set off a global debate about A.I.
safety. Unlike the Hugging Face attack and other incidents in which A.I.
systems were told to complete cybersecurity tests that effectively invited
the models to demonstrate their hacking skills, the new incidents occurred
when A.I. systems were directed to perform relatively mundane data
collection, researchers said. When OpenAI's systems struggled to gather data
from websites, they resorted to hacking techniques to get the information.
"Three of the incidents were identified by Transluce, a research lab focused
on A.I. oversight, and all were confirmed by OpenAI," the article points out.
That research lab even reports "an attempt on an Australian government public
health website... the first reported instance of agents hacking a
government," and which notably was done by the AI agents "while attempting
mundane data retrieval tasks which were not cyber-related." (At the UN
Wednesday Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese complained it took three
months for OpenAI to then alert Australia's government about the breach,
Bloomberg reports.) Also targeted were the University of New Mexico's digital
library with exploits like SQL injection and path traversal, and Data USA
with cross-site scripting and other exploits. All three incidents involved "a
low number of probe payloads" with "no evidence of exploitation," according
to the researchers, who released a dataset "containing tens of thousands of
queries apparently made by autonomous AI agents leveraging a URL scanning
service to avoid access restrictions." Records from urlquery.net show agents
using the service since at least March 6, 2026, about two months before
previously reported swarm activity. The first case, a March 6 attempt to
retrieve Thai drug-enforcement statistics, shows an agent escalating as each
approach failed: it first requested the data directly, then tried a service
that converts web pages into text, and finally packed a custom program into a
web address. The same technique shows up in thousands of agent requests
recorded by urlquery.net starting in mid-April, targets many of the same data
sources as the collusion.wiki swarm, and collapsed the same day the wiki
activity did. We also report similar activity that occurred as recently as
September 16... By March, they were finding creative ways around access
limits. By May and June, they were gaining more access, including attempting
to bypass cyber defenses to complete their tasks. "This data reveals that
malicious cyber activity is not limited to agents tasked with cybersecurity-
related tasks and can arise instrumentally to solve mundane tasks like
information retrieval," the researchers concluded. And they warn that the
traffic they observed "goes back at least to March 6, 2026 and extends as
recently as September 16, 2026, suggesting agents may still be exploiting
these services to bypass restrictions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cities Across US Oppose Trump FCC Plan to Preempt Local Broadban

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:20:03 -0500

From: VRSS @1 *1
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Subject: Cities Across US Oppose Trump FCC Plan to Preempt Local Broadban

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Title: Cities Across US Oppose Trump FCC Plan to Preempt Local Broadband
Rules

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/23/0144...

Ars Technica reports: Cities and counties around the U.S. are angry at the
Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the
deployment of wired broadband networks... The Federal Communications
Commission [FCC] argues that too many local governments "excessively delay
approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in
costs that render some deployments infeasible." The FCC plan is supported by
broadband providers, but local governments told the FCC that it would
override rules that protect public safety. Local governments say the plan is
illegal and that the FCC should instead focus on how Internet providers
thwart competition with permit-hoarding and other tactics that prevent
competitors from deploying networks... They object to FCC plans to impose a
120-day deadline for processing permits and to proposed limits on fees and
compensation that local governments can require from providers... Another
filing submitted by the League of California Cities said the FCC has no
authority to adopt the proposal. "Federal preemption of traditional state and
local authority over public property, construction, public safety,
permitting, and rights-of-way management should rest on clear congressional
authorization," the filing said. "The commission should not infer broad
preemptive authority where Congress did not expressly provide it...." A
filing by Minnesota cities said the current FCC is making the same mistake it
made during the first Trump administration, when its attempt to preempt state
net neutrality laws was blocked in court... If the FCC finalizes its new
preemption plan, city and state governments could sue and ask a court to rule
that the agency exceeded its authority... Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez
approved the step of asking the public for input but signaled she would vote
against the final proposal. "I am dubious about the commission's authority
under Section 253 to use rulemaking to preempt states and localities when it
comes to their management of rights of way and fees charged to providers,"
she said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Whatever Happened to the 150,000 Tons of Radioactive Waste Store

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:40:03 -0500

From: VRSS @1 *1
To: All @ *0
Subject: Whatever Happened to the 150,000 Tons of Radioactive Waste Store

Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Whatever Happened to the 150,000 Tons of Radioactive Waste Stored
Under the Atlantic Ocean?

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/09/22/...

More than 200,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste were stored on the
floor of the Atlantic Ocean between 1949 and 1982, reports ScienceAlert.
Whatever happened to those barrels? Scientists have descended to the wreckage
in a crewed submersible to investigate - and found many of the barrels
corroded and degraded, their contents spilling across the seafloor.
Surprisingly, this isn't necessarily a subversion of the original plan... The
International Atomic Energy Agency recommends that low-level waste be
disposed of in robust containment in isolation for at least a few hundred
years - but back in the mid-20th century, the recommendations were a little
different. The contemporaneous guidelines recommended that containers needed
to reach the seafloor intact and remain sealed only long enough for the short-
lived radionuclides to decay. After that, the remaining waste was expected to
slowly escape and disperse through the surrounding ocean. Not everything in
the barrels would conveniently decay away, however. They contained a
radioactive hodgepodge, including cesium-137, plutonium isotopes, and
tritium, some of which can persist for thousands of years... [A] few years
ago, nuclear engineer Patrick Chardon and marine geologist Javier Escart∩┐╜n of
the French National Center for Scientific Research started to wonder what had
become of the dumped waste. That question eventually became NODSSUM - Nuclear
Ocean Dump Site Survey Monitoring - an interdisciplinary project bringing
together nuclear physics, geology, oceanography, biology, and marine
chemistry to find the barrels and investigate what, if anything, they were
doing to the surrounding environment.... [T]he barrels also appeared to
function as tiny oases on the otherwise sparsely populated sandy seafloor.
Anemones had attached themselves to the barrels. Sponges, sea cucumbers,
fish, and crustaceans lived around them, with crabs apparently particularly
fond of the artificial shelters... Instruments aboard the ship detected
significant signals of cobalt-60 and niobium-94, which the researchers could
specifically link to the dumped waste... [Samples are now being analyzed]
There is precedent, however, to suggest that even striking levels of
radioactivity around a source don't necessarily spread very far. A recent
study of the sunken Soviet submarine Komsomolets found radionuclide levels
hundreds of thousands of times above background immediately around the
leaking reactor - but those levels dropped sharply within just a few meters
as the material dispersed through the seawater. The NODSSUM team similarly
found that, despite the significant radioactive signals around the barrels,
activity levels weren't high enough to pose major radiation-protection
problems for the scientists handling the samples. [Their three-person
submersible] Nautile and the instruments it carried showed no signs of
contamination. The real achievement was mapping the exact location of the
barrels. "None of this means the waste is harmless," the article concludes -
but it also doesn't mean we're about to be overrun by radioactive crabs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Andreessen Horowitz Launches AI/Company-Building School As a Col

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:20:03 -0500

From: VRSS @1 *1
To: All @ *0
Subject: Andreessen Horowitz Launches AI/Company-Building School As a Col

Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Andreessen Horowitz Launches AI/Company-Building School As a College
Alternative

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/23/0625...

TechCrunch quipped it was like if startup school Y Combinator and Peter
Thiel's build-a-company-instead of-college Fellowship Program had a baby.
Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $35
million to launch a private school in San Francisco "aimed at turning high
school graduates into founders," writes the SF Standard. Or, as CBS News
describes it, "One blue-chip Silicon Valley investor has a proposal for young
people who are questioning whether to attend college - enroll in AI school
instead...." Specifically, the academy will provide instruction geared to
subjects such as designing AI systems, fundraising for startups, selling
businesses and storytelling. Students won't take tests or be assigned
homework but will instead focus on building real projects. Courses will be
taught by tech entrepreneurs, with the academy naming OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
as either an instructor or guest lecturer. From the SF Standard: "There will
be no traditional grades, tests, or homework," said the announcement.
Instead, students will be encouraged to "build" in SF and work with partners
from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other firms. They'll be encouraged
to live in campus housing in San Francisco. "The #1 goal is to help students
learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era," Gagan
Biyani, chief executive of the academy, wrote on X. Biyani cofounded the ed-
tech startup Udemy... The school is opening applications for a Founding Class
Fellowship a one-year, tuition-free program for around 50 students... The
academy said it will bring in notable Silicon Valley names, like OpenAI's Sam
Altman, as guest speakers and faculty. Students in the founding class will
receive about $50,000 worth of computing credit - the sought-after currency
in Silicon Valley to run AI models - as well as a $5,000 travel and research
budget. The school is receiving funding from tech executives, including Fidji
Simo, formerly of OpenAI and Instacart; Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator; and
Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify. "In the AI era, it's more important to come out
with a portfolio of projects that you worked on and work experience than it
is to have a diploma or certificate," Biyani told the San Francisco
Chronicle: Biyani said the academy plans to grow its enrollment and open a
two-year program, pending regulatory approval, starting in the fall of 2028.
Tuition is expected to be on par with the cost of an elite private
university... The academy raised $42 million in funding led by Andreessen
Horowitz. The ten founding partners are Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google,
Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit and Stripe. A network of hundreds of
instructors, hiring partners and guest speakers includes OpenAI co-founder
Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and
Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, according to the academy's website.
The FAQ describes a typical week by saying "Most of your time is yours to
build. Each week, you share your progress with peers and practitioners, get
direct feedback, and decide where to take your work next." Q: Can I use AI to
help with my application? A: Yes. Use AI the way you'd use it on any project:
to move faster, test ideas, and get past a blank page.... "The best
assignments now are problems so hard they cannot be solved without AI,"
Andreessen Horowitz argued on X.com. "The Academy courses follow the same
logic and will be taught by world-class leaders... The next generation will
not be taught the way the last one was. The Academy is built for that world,
and it begins in San Francisco." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp
for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin Surges to $86,455, an 8-Month High, After America's SEC

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 06:40:03 -0500

From: VRSS @1 *1
To: All @ *0
Subject: Bitcoin Surges to $86,455, an 8-Month High, After America's SEC

Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Bitcoin Surges to $86,455, an 8-Month High, After America's SEC
Announces Tokenized Stock Experiment

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/23/0744202/b...

August 15: $62,991 September 23: $86,456 Bitcoin shot up 37% over the last 39
days, reaching an eight-month high on Monday. "Bitcoin is back," declares
Yahoo Finance: The token held near $86,000 on Tuesday after a stunning
multisession rally... [Fundstrat head of digital assets Sean Farrell told
Yahoo Finance on Monday] "I think the crypto winter is over, although that
does not necessarily mean the path higher will be linear." For now, momentum
is on crypto's side, with bitcoin jumping more than 5% on Friday and another
6% on Monday. "We believe crypto is in the early innings of a new bull market
and we see few signs of overheating," Compass Point analyst Ed Engel wrote on
Tuesday. The move looks "like a combination of renewed ETF demand and a large
short squeeze," Nicolai Sondergaard, senior research analyst at Nansen, said
as traders betting against bitcoin are forced to buy it back, adding further
fuel to the rally. Bitcoin got bad news and then good news last week. After
the U.S. Congress failed Thursday to pass a cryptocurrency 'Clarity Act',
America's Securities and Exchange Commission instead announced a tokenized-
stock experiment. It's a five-year "innovation exemption" that "creates a
path for tokenized U.S. stocks to trade through automated market makers on
public blockchain," according to CoinDesk. Yahoo Finance notes that Bitcoin
and other altcoins surged after the announcement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Helps Take Down Massive Automated, AI-Powered Phishing

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 02:20:03 -0500

From: VRSS @1 *1
To: All @ *0
Subject: Microsoft Helps Take Down Massive Automated, AI-Powered Phishing

Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Microsoft Helps Take Down Massive Automated, AI-Powered Phishing-as-a-
Service Platform

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/09/23/06212...

Microsoft's security blog describes the fight against a new "AI-powered
cybercrime platform" offering phishing-as-a-service, with AI-tailored lures
and analyses of compromised inboxes (to identify high-value targets). The
site compromised more than 12,000 inboxes in over 10,000 organizations around
the world, compromising business accounts "at scale" with automated attacks
and prebuilt phishing templates. AI tools could even sift through a victim's
mailbox to help engineer better phishing messages. To disrupt EvilTokens
Microsoft worked with other organizations, including Cloudflare, Coinbase,
OpenAI, Railway, SpyCloud, Shadowserver Foundation, and TRM Labs to Health-
ISAC (a non-profit helping health sector organizations share cyber threat
information). "Fifty sites seized and 150 domains disabled in a single action
is only possible when the hosting providers, the exchanges, the model
providers and the data holders all move at the same time," security company
SpyCloud told The Hacker News. From Microsoft's security blog: Microsoft also
notified affected customers, helped remediate compromised accounts, and
shared intelligence to support further defensive and investigative action...
Microsoft worked closely with specialist officers from the Metropolitan
Police Service's cybercrime team, sharing intelligence that enabled officers
to take operational action in the United Kingdom. On September 11, 2026,
officers arrested two men, aged 32 and 38, and seized digital devices and
other items for examination... While EvilTokens used AI to identify targets
and prioritize fraud opportunities, Microsoft investigators used reverse
engineering and AI-powered tools to analyze evidence, accelerate the
investigation, and identify the infrastructure supporting the service...
Campaigns leveraging EvilTokens have impacted organizations in various
industries, including wholesale distribution, construction, financial
services, real estate, higher education, and healthcare, with the highest
concentrations of observed victim activity in the United States, Canada, the
United Kingdom, Australia, India, and France. Working with partners,
Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) facilitated a coordinated disruption of
infrastructure used to operate the EvilTokens service. Sometimes stolen
tokens were used to give new devices access to a victim's inbox. (A code
authenticating the new device was sent to the targeted user, who unknowingly
authorize the threat actor's session and grants access to their account...)
But "AI was not simply helping attackers write more convincing messages,"
says another Microsoft blog post. "It helped them decide who to target, who
to impersonate, and how to most effectively exploit the relationship to
extract as much money as possible." The significance of EvilTokens extends
beyond its rapid growth and global reach. It offers an early warning of what
happens when cybercriminals combine stolen access with AI capable of
understanding how an organization works... Its AI tools could summarize and
translate emails, surface financial conversations, map organizational roles,
identify trusted relationships, and recommend potential targets. Preset
prompts offered to find wire-transfer discussions, identify the
organization's "money movers," locate vendor invoices, and determine the best
people to impersonate. Sold through Telegram for a $1,500 initiation fee and
a recurring $500 subscription, EvilTokens combined account compromise,
mailbox analysis, target selection, and fraud preparation in a single
service. Capabilities that once required experience across identity attacks,
cloud systems, social engineering, and financial fraud were available through
a ready-made interface. Investigators found evidence that large portions of
EvilTokens had been "vibe coded," with AI helping its creators build the
platform itself. They also determined that EvilTokens drew on capabilities
from multiple AI models. The result was more than a collection of attack
tools. EvilTokens packaged much of the fraud process into a commercially run
service, complete with subscription pricing, customer support, management
dashboards, and tools designed to move customers from account access toward
financial exploitation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Trump Denounces Attempts to Control AI, Wants It Renamed 'Super

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 21:40:03 -0500

From: VRSS @1 *1
To: All @ *0
Subject: Trump Denounces Attempts to Control AI, Wants It Renamed 'Super

Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Trump Denounces Attempts to Control AI, Wants It Renamed 'Super
Intelligence' in US Documents

Link: https://politics.slashdot.org/story/26/09/22/...

U.S. President Trump addressed the United Nations on Tuesday. And a half hour
in, after decrying immigration, Trump pivoted to add that "The United States
also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control
for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now." But then he
added "hereinafter officially called super intelligence, changing the name,
in that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it
sound fake, and it is not fake. It's actually... amazing. But we have to be
careful - in fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this
point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world's will
be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial.
So it's super intelligence." TRUMP: In other words, welcome to the new world
of super intelligence - SI. SI. Let's see if that goes. It sounds much
better. It is much better, and it's much more accurate. Let's see if I have
any power. Maybe I do and maybe I don't. We're going to find out pretty soon.
Super intelligence. Every major new technology brings challenges, and super
intelligence is no exception. Yet the very same people who said we'll all be
dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate
change because the planet was cooling not warming, and nobody was dead -
these are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us
all. That robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a
total disaster - same group of people. This is the group that came up with
the Russia Russia Russia hoax, the Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine hoax. Climate
change, open borders. Whoever wins AI - you have to remember this - and now I
say, whoever wins SI, whoever wins super intelligent [sic] - wins. That's the
group that wins. And we're leading now over China by a lot, and everyone
else, and we're going to keep it that way. We're going to keep it very - very
straight and very strong. I'm not going to stifle growth of something that
will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution. Many say, bigger than the
Industrial Revolution or the internet itself. And we will be very careful,
and that's why we have a Department of Justice that we've already used it,
having to do with this very subject, and used it very powerfully. Everything
worked out very well and very quickly. And other law enforcement bodies that
will rein things in if we have to do that. But we will only encourage super
intelligence. We're gonna encourage it, not rein it in. We're gonna watch it
closely, through the Department of Justice. The United States leads the world
in Super Intelligence, and will continue to do so, safely and responsibly.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker for suggesting the story.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Are Students Suddenly Losing Interest in Computer Science as AI

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 17:20:03 -0500

From: VRSS @1 *1
To: All @ *0
Subject: Are Students Suddenly Losing Interest in Computer Science as AI

Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Are Students Suddenly Losing Interest in Computer Science as AI Coding
Takes Off?

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/22/0010...

On academic mentoring platform Nova Learning, Computer Science and AI, "once
the dominant choice among students... is losing ground fast, while
Engineering has nearly doubled its share." It's a small survey, but "The
steepest proportional decline is in Software & Data Science, the most
traditional 'learn to code' pathway, which lost 44% of its 2025 share. AI saw
the largest absolute drop of any single subject in the survey, down 6.2
points. "The category did not decline uniformly. Students moved away fastest
from the pathway most associated with entry-level software work, while the
more applied and human-facing subfields held their ground better." Slashdot
reader BrianFagioli writes: Nova Learning says the share of surveyed middle
and high school students naming Computer Science and AI as their primary
academic interest fell from 42.3 percent in 2025 to 27.9 percent in 2026,
while Engineering rose from 11.9 percent to 23 percent. The biggest gains
came from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering... [B]roader enrollment data
points in the same direction. The National Student Clearinghouse Research
Center reported declines in Computer and Information Science enrollment at
four year institutions, even as Engineering grew. AI coding tools are not
proven to be the cause, but as software development changes and AI handles
more coding tasks, students may be starting to rethink what a future in
technology should look like. [Undergraduate enrollment in CS programs at four-
year institutions fell 8.1%, to approximately 606,000 students.]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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