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Many GNOME projects have adopted a policy banning all contributions generated by LLMs. This policy was originally developed by Sophie for Loupe, but is now used in many other notable places:

This project does not allow contributions generated by large languages models (LLMs) and chatbots. This ban includes, but is not limited to, tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, DeepSeek, and Devin AI. We are taking these steps as precaution due to the potential negative influence of AI generated content on quality, as well as likely copyright violations.

This ban of AI generated content applies to all parts of the projects, including, but not limited to, code, documentation, issues, and artworks. An exception applies for purely translating texts for issues and comments to English.

AI tools can be used to answer questions and find information. However, we encourage contributors to avoid them in favor of using existing documentation and our chats and forums. Since AI generated information is frequently misleading or false, we cannot supply support on anything referencing AI output.

I won’t attempt to argue that you should allow use of AI for writing code. If you wish to ban LLM-generated code, fine. That’s probably inadvisable, but I am not going to object.

But this policy is far stricter than that. Notably, it strictly prohibits AI-generated content in issue reports (except to translate text). Don’t do this! Prohibiting bug reports is stupid and just makes your software worse. Please make sure your project’s AI policy allows for at least AI-generated static analysis results and AI-generated vulnerability reports. Otherwise, you prohibit entirely unobjectionable problem reports.

It’s hard to imagine what could possibly be the value of prohibiting valid bug reports. AI-generated static analysis works well: the AI is able to think about your code, follow execution paths, and automatically discard most false positives to avoid bothering you with them, and the quality of reports is generally pretty high. They are far from perfect, but the same is true of humans.

Here is a typical example of an AI-generated static analysis finding:

2. Resource leak in update_credentials_cb on gnutls_credentials_set failure

File: tls/gnutls/gtlsconnection-gnutls.c:169-172

When gnutls_credentials_set() fails, the function returns without calling g_gnutls_certificate_credentials_unref(credentials). The credentials was either freshly allocated or ref-bumped, so it leaks.

Pasting this into an issue report clearly violates the ban on AI-generated content. And yet, why would you not want to receive a clear and concrete bug report for memory leak?

I understand not all maintainers are fond of AI, but is your dislike really so extreme that you would choose to ignore valid problems and intentionally make your software worse? If not, then your AI policy should thoughtfully consider how to handle AI-generated content in issue reports. Certainly do not adopt a policy that outright bans all AI-generated content in issue reports.

As an issue reporter, you could theoretically take the problem found by the AI and rephrase all the words, then claim that it is no longer AI-generated content because it is rewritten it. This is a waste of time and usually results in a lower-quality, less-detailed result, but you could plausibly do that. Or, if you want to go above and beyond, you could just jump ahead to creating a merge request. But realistically, if your project does not allow any use of AI in issue reports, it’s more likely that either (a) you won’t receive the issue report in the first place, or (b) you won’t receive such issue reports from experienced developers who read and respect your policy, while users who do not read your policy will continue to submit them.

What about security vulnerability reports? Since the start of this year, I have reviewed well over 100 vulnerability reports that I strongly suspect were generated by AI. To reach the “over 100” claim, I sadly only considered vulnerability reports submitted during a particularly heavy four week period, so this is an extremely loose lower bound. Suffice to say, I have seen a lot of them. The quality varies dramatically. Vulnerability reports are now often better or worse than before: better because an experienced human working with a good AI is able to find vulnerabilities that would have surely gone unnoticed without AI, and worse because an inexperienced human with a bad AI might create some pretty terrible issue reports, a significant proportion of which are just outright spam. Low-quality reports remain a problem, but nowadays most AI-generated issue reports are quite good.

Maintainers do not need to tolerate spammy vulnerability reports. If an issue report is bad, of course go ahead and close it. If it’s really bad, then I sometimes don’t even bother replying. But banning good vulnerability reports solely because some portion of the report was generated by AI is unacceptable. AI-assisted vulnerability reports are the new industry standard, and this is not likely to change. Prohibiting issue reports reduces the quality and safety of your software, punishing your users. This is too extreme.

Fibers are always a nice way to keep your async C code clean while using Libdex. However, occasionally you may want a lighter option which doesn’t require a stack or saving registers for work doing little more than coordinating futures.

I’ve added Stackless Coroutines for this which still allows writing future-coordinating code. Though this will suspend/resume your coroutine by re-entering the function and jumping to the next position. Your threads stack is reused. State is saved in your closure state.

This isn’t a new concept. It is really old just like fibers. What is useful is that this style of continuation passing may still be represented as a DexFuture and therefore composed like the others.

You can place these stackless coroutines in DexTaskGroup alongside fibers, threadpool work, and others. Cancellation will propagate to a clean exit point of the coroutine just like it would with a fiber.

Overhead is a bit lower than fibers in synthetic benchmarks depending on use. I was actually impressed our fiber implementation performed as well as it did head-to-head.

To make building your coroutine continuation easier, libdex provides a handy macro to create your typedef struct, _new(), and _free() helpers in a single macro expansion using DEX_DEFINE_CLOSURE_TYPE().

You use it like this:

DEX_DEFINE_CLOSURE_TYPE (MyTaskState, my_task_state, DEX_DEFINE_CLOSURE_VALUE (gsize, bytes), DEX_DEFINE_CLOSURE_POINTER (GBytes *, bytes_obj, g_bytes_unref), DEX_DEFINE_CLOSURE_OBJECT (GSocketConnection, conn))

Coroutines cannot use the exact syntax that fibers do for awaiting, which is a bummer, but a side-effect of trying to make something that works across Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris, macOS, etc. Particularly because the implementation must use switch/case to stay portable without address-of-label support on MSVC nor clang-cl.exe.

So awaiting is a bit more clear you’re suspending/resuming the stackless coroutine.

DEX_DEFINE_CLOSURE_TYPE (LoadState, load_state, DEX_DEFINE_CLOSURE_OBJECT (GFile, file), DEX_DEFINE_CLOSURE_OBJECT (GFileInputStream, input), DEX_DEFINE_CLOSURE_OBJECT (GFileInfo, info), DEX_DEFINE_CLOSURE_VALUE (int, io_priority)) static DexFuture * do_something (DexCoroutineContext *context, gpointer user_data) { LoadState *state = user_data; g_autoptr(GError) error = NULL; DEX_COROUTINE_BEGIN (context); DEX_COROUTINE_SUSPEND_OBJECT ( &state->input, &error, dex_file_read (state->file, state->io_priority)); if (error != NULL) return dex_future_new_for_error (g_steal_pointer (&error)); DEX_COROUTINE_SUSPEND_OBJECT ( &state->info, &error, dex_file_input_stream_query_info ( state->input, G_FILE_ATTRIBUTE_STANDARD_SIZE, state->io_priority)); if (error != NULL) return dex_future_new_for_error (g_steal_pointer (&error)); /* maybe do something useful here */ return dex_future_new_int64 (g_file_info_get_size (state->info)); DEX_COROUTINE_END; }

You do need to be careful about placing things on the stack, because they wont be there on the other side of that DEX_COROUTINE_SUSPEND_* macro expansion. That is because when the scheduler jumps back into your stackless coroutine, it will use a switch/case to jump to the next bit of code. Don’t fear though, just add your state to your continuation which we’ve established is easy to do now.

If you don’t like these macros, you can do things the manual way using dex_coroutine_context_suspend() and dex_coroutine_context_resume() who’s APIs are not terrible either. They do require you make up your own program-counter regime though which for the macro case is basically just __COUNTER__.

You can spawn your coroutine using dex_scheduler_spawn_coroutine() or as part of a work-queue in DexLimiter with dex_limiter_run_coroutine().

dex_scheduler_spawn_coroutine ( dex_thread_pool_scheduler_get_default (), my_coroutine, my_coroutine_new (), (GDestroyNotify) my_coroutine_free);

I hope you've enjoyed this attempt to make another 1970s technology useful in a modern world.

One of the many nice language features in Python are keyword arguments. They make some types of APIs  concise and readable. Like so:

Unfortunately C does not have keyword arguments and, by extension, neither does C++. Adding them as a language feature would take 15-20 years of effort, most of which would consist of trying to convince people via email that such a feature is important and should be added.

There have been attempts to implement this via macros and template magic (link), but they have not seen widespread usage probably because they are using macros and template magic. However it turns out that with modern language features you can fake keyword arguments fairly convincingly. Like so:

The add_argument method takes a single argument which is a struct. The extra curly braces inside the parentheses boil down to "whatever the underlying argument is, construct it in place with these parameters". The dotted names are designated initializers, so those fields get the specified value whereas other fields get their default values.

And there you go, keyword arguments in C++. You just have to squint a bit and pretend not to see the extra curly braces.

Reuters reports: Several large data centers and crypto facilities planning to connect to the Texas power grid ahead of peak summer demand have failed key reliability tests, raising the risk of power outages just as electricity use hits its seasonal high, according to the state grid operator... Unlike traditional industrial customers, which tend to draw electricity steadily and predictably, data centers are engineered to cut their connection to the grid at the first sign of trouble to protect their equipment and keep services running. That makes them an unpredictable and potentially destabilizing force on grids already under pressure from rising demand. Four groups of unnamed large electricity users, including data centers, abruptly disconnected from the Texas grid during a test of how they would handle routine voltage disturbances, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said in a report dated May 21. When large customers abruptly cut their power use, it can knock the grid off balance and trigger wider outages. ERCOT, which manages electricity for most of Texas, said it reviewed about 20 gigawatts of large customers seeking to connect to the system, including eight projects totaling roughly 3.9 gigawatts aiming to start up before July 1. It said it identified four groups of large power users that could each trigger more than 5,000 megawatts of demand tripping under certain fault conditions, based on simulations of transmission system disturbances. Those abrupt drops in demand were equivalent to the electricity consumption of a large city such as Boston.

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"When Hugo Parra was arrested last year on felony charges, his pleas of innocence fell on deaf ears," reports the Times of San Diego: San Diego police had a description of the Alfa Romeo car he was riding in [but no license plate number] and a witness who identified him during a curbside lineup as the man who brandished a handgun in Golden Hill. They had also checked the city's automatic license plate camera system, run by the private company Flock, and got a "hit," substantiating the claim. The problem, says attorney Alex Coolman, was that Parra was five miles away from Golden Hill at the time of the crime, and the so-called hit from the license plate reader was captured before any police pursuit began. "This Flock hit was obviously the wrong car, as it could not have been in both places simultaneously," said Coolman, who represents Parra and the driver, 23-year-old Ariel Beltran. Despite the signs pointing to it being a different Alfa Romeo, police arrested Beltran and Parra... [An officer had informed dispatch that one of the men "matched the victim's description, other than having a different-colored hooded sweatshirt."] Parra spent nearly one month behind bars, missing Thanksgiving and other special events with his family, before the assault with a firearm and evasion charges were dropped. Parras says he was incarcerated with actual murderers, according to the article, and Parra and Beltran are now preparing to sue the city, seeking $1.5 million each in damages for civil rights violations and negligence. Their claim notes they'd driven past several other Flock cameras which officers could've used to corroborate their story (not to mention location data on their cell phones). Meanwhile, the article also notes that last month the Institute for Justice "identified at least 17 cases in the United States of officers allegedly using Automated License Plate Reader technology to keep tabs on partners, exes, and strangers who had caught their eye..."

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Italian fashion house Prada "unveiled on Sunday the inner-layer garment set to be worn by NASA astronauts heading to the moon," reports Reuters. "The body-hugging suit, created in collaboration with Houston-based space infrastructure developer Axiom Space, features ventilation tubes knitted into the garment." Expertise for developing space exploration products "can come from lots of seemingly unrelated industries," said Jonathan Cirtain, CEO of Axiom Space... The new product follows Prada's splashy foray into space fashion in 2024 with the unveiling of a spacesuit that is expected to be used for NASA's anticipated Artemis 4 moon landing in 2028... Other fashion and apparel companies have jumped on the space bandwagon. Under Armour has partnered with spaceflight company Virgin Galactic to create space apparel, while Columbia Sportswear has worked with space exploration company Intuitive Machines on space fabric technology. The new "Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment" was displayed on a mannequin at an event at Prada's Manhattan store.

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Version:7.1-rc7 (mainline) Released:2026-06-07 Source:linux-7.1-rc7.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)

People are disabling the "recording light" on Meta's Ray-Ban smartglasses — "by my count, thousands of people," says tech journalist Joanna Stern in a new video report: STERN: "They're hiring people on Facebook Marketplace to drill out the light for as much as $100. According to our reporting, folks are offering this service in at least 30 states — despite Meta's attempts to stop it... In most states, we found multiple listings. In the New York and New Jersey area alone there were 23 listings." Stern watched a man in New Jersey disable and then conceal the light with a drill and dental probe in a New Jersey garage (a skill he learned watching YouTube and TikTok videos). He said the same day he'd already been contacted by eight more interested customers, and Stern also found at least 10 other people willing to do the same thing, just in New Jersey. "But what we found is they're all over the country." Meta sold 7 million smartglasses in 2025, but a Meta spokesperson insisted to the videomaker that a "majority" of their smartglasses owners aren't blocking the recording light. And furthermore, they added "We aggressively target anyone advertising tampering tools, have removed thousands of violating ads and Marketplace listings for these services, and pursue legal action when appropriate." (The reporter acknowledges "many" of the Marketplace ads disappeared after they brought them to Meta's attention — and Meta also said they were working with other retailers and sellers to take down listings for smartglasses-tampering parts.) The reporter also heard from one journalist who said they'd used it so they could record the activities of federal immigration agents without being targeted. "Others told me they just don't want people asking questions when they're recording." (There's video of one young man saying "It's already difficult enough to film in public. I don't want to have a blinking light on my face.") Tampering with smartglasses isn't illegal — though it is against Meta's Terms of Service, and could void your warranty. But a lawyer in the report says recording others without consent may be illegal, depending on a wide range of "jurisdictional nuances" like whether you live in an all-party consent state or a one-party consent state. "This seems to be our new reality," the report concludes: "more cameras, more microphones everywhere, and less certainty about who and what is recording." (Tech blogger John Gruber offered this assessment. "Using a Meta platform to find people to hack a Meta device so you can surreptitiously record strangers. So perfectly Meta.") Stern's report points out that "People are trying to fight back. Apps have popped up that use Bluetooth to scan for nearby camera glasses." (In the video one app-maker wonders why Meta isn't offering the same service themselves. "There are technical solutions to these problems.") Ironically, when I watched the report on YouTube, it was preceded by... an ad for Meta's Ray-Ban AI smartglasses.

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"Texas has dethroned California as the state with the most Fortune 500 companies," reports the Los Angeles Times: The Fortune 500 list ranks the largest U.S. companies by revenue. This year, 57 of the top companies are headquartered in Texas, compared with California's 56. It's a reversal from two years ago when the Golden State had the pole position... California's corporate haters say they try to avoid the state's high costs, income taxes and strict regulations, but the western state is still a top money maker. "California dominates on nearly every other measure: its Fortune 500 companies are the most profitable ($647 billion), most valuable ($20 trillion), and employ more people than any other state (2.8 million workers)," Fortune said in a news release. Indeed, despite the naysayers, Californian companies have been leading the world in developing artificial intelligence technology as well as the latest in space and defense tech. The state is home to nearly 400 "unicorns," or billion-dollar startups — more than any other state, according to CB Insights. It also gobbled up nearly two-thirds of U.S. venture capital last year, with San Francisco Bay Area startups such as OpenAI leading the way, according to the business information platform Crunchbase. Texas and California have been in a tug-of-war for the crown. In 2024, after a decade, California bagged the top spot with 57 companies on the list, while Texas and New York tied in second with 52 companies each... The fourth spot was tied between Illinois and Ohio, with 29 companies each. Amazon was the top company on the list, ending Walmart's 13-year reign at the top of the annual Fortune 500 companies list. Amazon's 2025 revenue was $716.9 billion, compared with Walmart's $713.2 billion. Seattle-headquartered Amazon joined Exxon Mobil, General Motors, and Walmart as the only four companies to have ever held the top position since Fortune began publishing the data in 1955.

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"Can a company take away something you've already paid for?" asks the BBC. "In the world of online video games, some already do." Publishers can decide to switch off a game's servers, often leaving it effectively unplayable. Stop Killing Games, a growing consumer rights campaign started by American YouTuber Ross Scott in 2024, is challenging that practice. In January, the group submitted a petition featuring nearly 1.3 million signatures to the European Commission, triggering a public hearing in the European Parliament in April. What began as an online campaign is now awaiting a decision from one of the EU's most powerful institutions... Scott's campaign began following an announcement from the major studio Ubisoft, saying it would shut down the online-only racing game The Crew in 2024... Ubisoft has already defended its position in court. Responding to a proposed class-action lawsuit brought by two The Crew players in California, the studio argued that customers had purchased a licence to use the game, not unlimited ownership rights, and that players had been warned online services would not be available forever. The lawsuit was dismissed without prejudice in June 2025, after the plaintiffs voluntarily withdrew the case. The wider games industry has also pushed back against the campaign. Video Games Europe, which represents many of the industry's largest publishers, said shutting down online services "must be an option" when games are no longer commercially viable. It also warned that some of the campaign's proposals could make online-only games significantly more expensive to develop. "In no way are we asking companies to keep servers running or services going, they can end it any time they want," said Scott. Instead, he and his fellow campaigners argue that when a game is shut down it should be done "responsibly", with publishers considering "end-of-life plans" such as updating the game to work offline or releasing software that allows players to continue running it. Two key points from the article: "In March, French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir launched legal action against Ubisoft over the shutdown of The Crew, arguing that players were misled about the permanence of their purchase and that some of the company's contract terms were unfair." "The European Commission must respond to the European Citizens' Initiative — the petition brought by the group — by 27 July." Thanks to Alain Williams — Slashdot reader #2,972 — for sharing the article.

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Yesterday 2026's International Obfuscated C Code Contest concluded, with 22 new winners announced in a special three-hour livestreamed ceremony! Started 42 years ago, it's been described as the internet's longest-running contest, with entrants concocting convoluted programs glorying in the C programming language's subtleties, all while having some fun. And "For IOCCC29, the volume and quality of submissions were at near-historic heights," explains its home page. There's a "Tetris-optimized" GameBoy emulator with source code that looks like a GameBoy, as well as a quasi-Rogue-like game voted "most likely to teleport." Awards were also given for the best imaginary emulator (a virtual machine in 366 bytes of C) and the best fractional emulator (a maze generator for the Commodore 64). But every one of the 22 winning programs seems wildly creative... Quine Pong. "Running the program produces the source code to generate the next frame, formatted to display the current frame. By repeatedly compiling and running each successive frame, you can play the game. To move, pass either "w" (up) or "e" (down) as an argument..." A winning Taiwanese programmer formatted their source code in the shape of a Tardis from Doctor Who — code that displays an intricate ASCII animation of Doctor Who's 1963 opening title sequence. One winning entry emulates an IBM 7040 mainframe, first converting a program (encoded in whitespace) into ASCII-character drawings of punchcards for a FORTRAN program — and then executing that program to calculate the light visible to an observer looking at black hole, ultimately creating an image. It's all recreating what astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet had to do in 1978 to generate the first-ever simulated photograph of a black hole (on an IBM 7040 mainframe). "The entry can also run other FORTRAN programs — but "they must be provided as a deck of punch cards... Tools have been provided to convert to/from decks and to interpret..." "We have added fun challenges to this year's winning entries competition..." the web site notes. "After you figure out what a given winning entry does, we encourage you to attempt the fun challenge!" Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader achowe for bringing the news (who has submitted winning entries in four different decades, starting in 1991 and continuing through 2025) — and who won again this year for a program simulating the Space Invaders-like game from Casio's 1980 MG-880 calculator. Follow the IOCCC on Mastodon.

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The new James Bond-themed videogame 007 First Light had a budget of 1.3 billion Danish krone — a little more than USD $202 million, reports IGN, citing a report from Denmark's public service broadcaster. "Denmark's TV 2 said that makes 007 First Light the most expensive entertainment product in the country's history" — and the game "still has some way to go before breaking even." 007 First Light is estimated to have sold 2.2 million copies, generating $150 million in revenue... [Saturday IGM reported sales had jumped to 3 million copies.] The only official sales data we have comes from developer IO Interactive, which said that 007 First Light had become the fastest-selling game in the company's history, shifting 1.5 million copies in its first 24 hours... The impressive sales milestone was achieved without the aid of the Nintendo Switch 2 version, which is due out this summer. The James Bond adventure is also the highest rated IOI game ever, with an 87 on Metacritic... The developer has said it wants to make a trilogy of James Bond games. Game-tracking company Alinea Analytics tweeted their estimates that 55.1% of sales were on PS5, 33.1% on Steam, and 11.8% on Xbox (Xbox console, Windows, and cloud combined). And Polygon reports that new downloadable game content was announced Friday.

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Science magazine reports: For decades, string theory promised a "theory of everything" that described all particles and forces as tiny vibrating strings. Physicists hoped it could also solve one of the field's deepest problems: reconciling quantum mechanics with gravity. But as string theory grew increasingly elaborate — and experimentally unreachable — many physicists lost hope. Now, some researchers are revisiting the theory from first principles. In a paper in press at Physical Review Letters, Clifford Cheung, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and colleagues lay out a small set of assumptions about the universe and show that they inevitably give rise to string theory.... Cheung's study, along with another one posted to arXiv in January, starts with two reasonably conservative assumptions: that the probabilities of all possible outcomes of an event add up to 100%, and that the laws of physics are consistent for observers moving at different speeds. Each group then posits additional assumptions that have not been borne out by observations. Cheung's analysis invokes "ultrasoftness," the idea that the probability of certain particle interactions drops off at a particular rate at high energies. The second study, led by University of Michigan physicist Henriette Elvang, instead assumes "supersymmetry," a maximal coupling between matter and forces. Both groups conclude the only theory that can satisfy their assumptions is one that looks like string theory... Cheung and Elvang stress that their aim is not to prove the inevitability of string theory. "I don't have a dog in the fight; I just work here," Cheung says. Rather, the goal is to explore the space of possible theories under rigid constraints — regardless of whether they reflect reality... The one thing the researchers all agree on is that the field would benefit from more alternative models to string theory. Cheung sees the agnostic, bottom-up exploration as a step in that direction. "You can either give up on the problem because it's too culturally toxic, or you can ask: If you want to find an alternative, what do you need?" he says. "Now, we know exactly what to do." Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.

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A "growing wave" of Reddit's "promoted posts" are sending U.S. and European audiences to money-stealing scams that impersonate major news organizations including the BBC, the Financial Times, and The Guardian, according to new findings from Bitdefender Labs. "Domains are short-lived and rapidly rotated to evade detection," they write, noting that the impersonating sites apparently even use language "to falsely imply that the investment platform had been reviewed, approved, or vetted" by the legitimate site they're impersonating: The campaign promotes fake AI-powered investment platforms such as Wencoin STX, Warrior Coin AI, and Nevo Coin, using fabricated celebrity endorsements, cloned news websites, fake interviews, and invented financial success stories to lure victims into depositing money. Researchers Andrea Olariu and Emanuel Puscasu have identified multiple promoted Reddit posts masquerading as legitimate financial or breaking news stories. Some ads claimed that: — NVIDIA and OpenAI were "creating the future" — Heathrow police discovered hundreds of thousands of pounds in cash — Governments and banks were allegedly trying to "hide" a revolutionary AI investment platform — European regulators were "silencing" articles about AI trading systems Some Reddit ads delivered in video format, including what appeared to be a deepfake BBC news segment featuring a news anchor presenting fabricated financial headlines... Examples observed by researchers included: — Fake BBC pages discussing "$20 billion conversations" tied to AI investments — Fraudulent Financial Times articles about Heathrow airport cash seizures — Fake Guardian stories claiming governments were trying to suppress coverage of Wencoin STX or Nevo Coin The pages featured fabricated interviews, fake profit screenshots, manipulated banking documents, false testimonials, and even fictional journalists or business editors designed to make the scam look legitimate. In many cases, the content sought to create a sense of exclusivity or conspiracy, suggesting that banks, regulators, or governments were trying to suppress public access to the investment platform... Our researchers found that after users clicked links embedded within the fake Guardian articles, they were redirected to a registration form allegedly used to create a "Nevo Coin" investment account. The form requested personal contact information, including the victim's name, email address, and phone number. To increase pressure and encourage immediate action, the page warned that registration availability was limited, claiming that once all spots were filled, new user registrations would be suspended. And in the final stage, they're asked to deposit money...

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U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders announced a plan for the public to take a 50% ownership stake in AI companies, remembers the Associated Press. And then OpenAI's Sam Altman "told Sanders that he, too, wants the public to have equity in AI companies." Though the CEO said he couldn't support Sanders' threshold of 50%, he nonetheless wanted to work with him to advocate for the general idea, according to people with knowledge of the conversation. The nearly hourlong meeting in Sanders' Senate office this week, held at Altman's request, highlighted the inherent tension between AI powerhouses and policymakers as Americans are increasingly asked to accept the costs of the AI boom even as they remain unconvinced of its direct benefits. Yet it's also creating odd political bedfellows fueled by populism as politicians from Sanders to President Donald Trump embrace giving the public a stake in AI's growth. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday, Trump described a potential partnership "where the American people can benefit from the success of AI" and said executives from leading AI companies will visit the White House, "probably next week," to discuss the idea. The article points out that Altman also met with congressional leaders from both of America's political parties.

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Ars Technica shares some anecdotes from Steve Jobs in Exile, a new book released last month: [Author Geoffrey] Cain reminds us, in stunning detail, that Jobs' "exile" era at NeXT was not only critical to his evolution as a man and an entrepreneur, but that it mattered for the rest of us, too. The technological innovations that came out of NeXT — notably, the NeXTSTEP OS — continue to live on in what we now call both macOS and iOS. As Cain puts it, "NeXTSTEP was Steve's attempt to make Unix taste sweet...." [W]hile many tech nerds know that Tim Berners-Lee created the first World Wide Web server on a NeXT machine while working in Switzerland in 1990, few know that NeXT employees were wary of bringing the news to Jobs. Why? They feared his wrath "and that he would dismiss [the web] as 'shit.'" (In another timeline, NeXT might itself have capitalized on this world-changing innovation....) Perhaps one of the wildest anecdotes that Cain uncovered was how one voicemail changed computer history forever. In 1996, when Apple was solidly in its mediocre Performa era — and considering buying BeOS as the basis for its new operating system — a mid-level NeXT product manager asked aloud, "Why don't we just frickin' call Apple?" (NeXT was also struggling during this period.) And so someone did. As Cain writes: Garrett left the group of managers, walked back to his office, and took a risk. He picked up his designer phone and called the head of software at Apple. He left what he described as "one of my more inspired sales pitches" on the man's voicemail, explaining why Apple should be looking at NeXT instead of Be... In any other universe, Garrett's call might have gotten him fired. But in this timeline, it worked out. And thanks to him, Steve [Jobs] was about to enter Apple's airspace once again. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.

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"A DNA-editing feat involving editing the genes of early stage embryos was announced this week," reports the Wall Street Journal. They describe the feat as "a far cry from designer babies, but nevertheless a step in that direction." Dieter Egli, an associate professor of developmental cell biology at Columbia University and his co-authors, including Nathan Treff of Nucleus Genomics, a New York-based DNA-testing startup, say the technology could help fix disease-causing mutations in embryos. "We're not throwing the final 'OK, you will have gene-edited babies tomorrow' at the public," said Egli. "That is a process that can occur through discussion matched with scientific progress...." Previous gene-editing efforts have often used Crispr, which can cut out parts of the DNA sequence, but the technology can also cause damage if the wrong DNA is targeted or cut out. In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jianku said he used Crispr to tweak DNA in human embryos and was imprisoned for the work. The technology Egli's group used, called base editing, allows them to target individual DNA letters in sequences more precisely with fewer adverse effects... Egli's group focused on altering two genes, one that can raise the risk of heart disease and one that is tied to blood disorders like sickle cell disease, and the research showed they were sometimes able to do so successfully, in the same embryo, without damage. "I am generally supportive of the concept of embryo editing to prevent genetic disease," said Dr. Paula Amato, a fertility expert at Oregon Health & Science University who wasn't involved in the research... Base editing has been used in human embryos before, according to peer-reviewed studies. The technology was used to correct a disease-causing mutation and an Alzheimer's disease-risk gene variant, said Alexis Komor, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn't involved in the work. "There really is not any unmet medical or clinical need for this, especially from an in vitro fertilization perspective," Komor said. "Usually what you'll hear is that they're doing it just so that you know we can prevent genetic diseases, but there are so many other better ways to do that." Using embryo editing to create babies is illegal in the U.S. and many other countries. Scientists have long worried that it is a slippery slope and that the technology could ultimately be used to promote eugenics. Her worry is that "they're basically building a blueprint" for more ethically problematic forms of embryo editing. "In my opinion, I think this is a huge no-no," Komor said. "There's just no ethical way to use this...." Nucleus Genomics Chief Executive Kian Sadeghi said his company plans to fund Egli's further research, building on the new findings. His company sells a polygenic embryo-screening product, which screens prospective parents' embryos and produces risk scores for their likelihood of developing disease, as well as factors like height, IQ and eye color. The company has said the IQ predictions are limited in accuracy. The research was published online Monday on a preprint server.

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The University of California at Berkeley discovered the percentage of failing grades in multiple CS classes this spring "is significantly higher than past semesters," reports the campus's student newspaper. "Instructors point to students' increased reliance on AI, lack of mathematical preparedness and understaffing as potential contributing factors." According to [coursework platform] Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 students and 10.6% of CS 61A students received F's in spring 2026. In spring 2025 and spring 2024, the percentage of F's did not exceed 10% for either class. The electrical engineering and computer sciences department's grading guidelines state that 7% of students in lower division courses, including CS 10 and CS 61A, should receive D's and F's... [UC Berkeley teaching professor Dan Garcia, who taught both classes] believes the "primary driver" of these abnormally high failing rates is due to a "vast increase in academic dishonesty" due to students' usage of large language models, such as Claude, ChatGPT and Google Gemini. "Some of the numbers that you saw from the number of students who receive failing grades were because we caught them (cheating) and prosecuted them and are sending their cases to the Center for Student Conduct," Garcia said. "But in other cases, it's students who are leaning a little too hard on LLMs to do their work for them, and then at exam time just really aren't ready." According to Garcia, nearly 30 students in CS 10 were "caught cheating on take-home exams" in spring 2026... In addition to overreliance on AI, Garcia also pointed out that many students are underprepared mathematically, a concern echoed by campus associate teaching professor Gireeja Ranade. Ranade noticed a similar lack of prerequisite mathematical skills in her spring 2026 EECS 127 class, "Optimization Models in Engineering," which she described as "differently challenging" to teach this semester. The class saw a 16.8% F rate, far higher than the 5% of D's and F's that the EECS department describes as "typical" for an upper division course... Both Garcia and Ranade have joined more than 1,300 UC faculty in signing a petition calling for the reinstatement of ACT and SAT standardized testing scores for STEM admissions in the UC system. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

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Sales have increased for Hyundai's under-$35,000 IONIQ 5, totalling 18,395 for the first five months of 2026, reports Electrek, "up 16% from the same period last year." But meanwhile BYD's overseas sales surpassed 160,000 for the first time last month, "up 80% from May 2025 and 19% from the previous record of 135,098 set in April." Through the first five months of 2026, BYD sold 616,263 vehicles overseas. In May, overseas sales accounted for over 41% of BYD's total sales. In several major markets, including the UK, BYD surpassed Tesla and Kia to become the best-selling EV brand through April. "With fuel prices remaining high, more drivers are turning to electric vehicles as a smarter and more economical choice," Bono Ge, BYD UK's Country Manager, said last month. Elsewhere Electrek notes that Toyota's bZ (starting at under $35,000) was the third-best-selling EV in the U.S. in the first three months of 2026, behind only the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y. "Last month, bZ sales doubled from May 2025, with 2,646 units sold." And meanwhile the first Volkswagen ID. Polo and Cupra Raval models "rolled off the production line at the Group's Martorell plant in Spain, the first of several new affordable, mass-market EVs." Starting at €24,995 ($29,000) and €26,000 ($30,100), the ID. Polo and Cupra Raval are the first models from the Group's Electric Urban Car Family... [T]he first customer deliveries are scheduled to begin later this summer and into the fall. Following the ID. Polo and Cupra Raval, Volkswagen will introduce new members to the Electric Urban Car Family, including the ID. Cross, an electric version of the T-Cross, later this year. According to Volkswagen, the ID. Cross will start at around €28,000 ($32,500).

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Version:next-20260605 (linux-next) Released:2026-06-05