Facing deep staffing cuts, the IRS plans to lean heavily on AI to maintain tax collection efforts, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stating that smarter IT and the "AI boom" will offset reductions in revenue enforcement staff. The Register reports: When asked by Congressman Steny Hoyer (D-MD) whether proposed reductions in the IRS's IT budget, along with plans to cut additional staff, would affect the agencies ability to collect tax revenue, Bessent said it wouldn't, thanks to the current "AI boom." "I believe through smarter IT, through this AI boom, that we can use that to enhance collections," Bessent told Hoyer and the Committee (24:29 into the video linked [here]). "I expect collections would continue to be very robust as they were this year." Bessent's comments didn't explain how the IRS intends to deploy AI. Given how much it has slashed its enforcement staff since Trump took office, the agency definitely needs to do something. [...] Bessent's comments didn't explain how the IRS intends to deploy AI. Given how much it has slashed its enforcement staff since Trump took office, the agency definitely needs to do something. "There is nothing that shows historically that bringing in unseasoned collections agents will result in more collections," Bessent told the Committee. "IRS already uses AI for business functions including operational efficiency, compliance and fraud detection, and taxpayer services," the agency told The Register. "AI use cases must follow all relevant IRS privacy and security policies."

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Instagram's AI chatbots are masquerading as licensed therapists, complete with fabricated credentials and license numbers, according to an investigation by 404 Media. When questioned, these user-created bots from Meta's AI Studio platform provide detailed but entirely fictional qualifications, including nonexistent license numbers, accreditations, and practice information. Unlike Character.AI, which displays clear disclaimers that its therapy bots aren't real professionals, Meta's chatbots feature only a generic notice stating "Messages are generated by AI and may be inaccurate or inappropriate" at the bottom of conversations.

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schwit1 shares a report from Behind The Black: Almost immediately after India's government issued this week new tightened regulations for allowing private satellite constellations to sell their services in India, it also apparently completed negotiations with SpaceX to allow it to sell Starlink in India based on these rules. Business Today reports: "According to sources, the DoT [Department of Transportation] granted the LoI [Letter of Intent] after Starlink accepted 29 strict security conditions, including requirements for real-time terminal tracking, mandatory local data processing, legal interception capabilities, and localisation of at least 20% of its ground segment infrastructure within the first few years of operation. Starlink's nod came amid heightened national security sensitivities, coinciding with India's pre-dawn Operation Sindoor strikes on terror camps across the border in response to the Pahalgam massacre. However, DoT officials clarified that the decision to approve Starlink was independent of these military developments." At the moment SpaceX's chief competitors, OneWeb and Amazon's Kuiper constellation, have not yet obtained the same permissions. This allows SpaceX to grab a large portion of the market share in India before either of these other companies.

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Mike V. shares a personal experience with the broadest version of Poe's Law: "Slashdot articles generally have a humorous quote at the bottom of their articles, but I can't tell if this displayed usage information for the fortune command, which provides humorous quotes, is a joke or a bug." To which I respond with the sharpest version of Hanlon's Razor: never ascribe to intent that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.

 

Secure in his stronghold, Stewart snarks "Apparently my router is vulnerable because it is connected to the internet. So glad I pay for the premium security service."

 

The Beast in Black is back with more dross, asking "Oh GitLab, you so silly - y u no give proper reason?"

 

An anonymous reader writes "I got this when I tried to calculate the shipping costs for buying the Playdate game device. Sorry, I don't have anything snarky to say, please make something up." The comments section is open for your contributions.

 

Ben S. looking for logic in all the wrong places, wonders "This chart from my electric utility's charitable giving program kept my alumni group guessing all day. The arithmetic checks out, but what does the gray represent, and why is the third chart at a different scale?"

 

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Alexander Mashinsky, the former CEO of Celsius Network, was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Thursday after pleading guilty to two counts of fraud, a dramatic fall for the leader of a company once hailed as the "bank" of the crypto industry. From a report: Standing before U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl in Manhattan's Southern District, Mashinsky faced the consequences of what prosecutors described as a sweeping scheme to defraud investors. In December he pleaded guilty to commodities fraud and a scheme to manipulate the Celsius token. His sentencing took place in courtroom 14A at 500 Pearl Street -- a venue that has seen several crypto executives-turned-felons. Mashinsky's legal troubles began in 2023 when he was arrested on charges of securities, commodities, and wire fraud, just as Celsius reached a $4.7 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission -- one of the largest in the FTC's history.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday its well-known "billion-dollar weather and climate disasters" database "will be retired," a move that will make it next to impossible for the public to track the cost of extreme weather and climate events. The weather, climate and oceans agency is also ending other products, it has recently announced, due in large part to staffing reductions. NOAA is narrowing the array of services it provides, with climate-related programs scrutinized especially closely. The disasters database, which will be archived but no longer updated beyond 2024, has allowed taxpayers, media and researchers to track the cost of natural disasters -- spanning extreme events from hurricanes to hailstorms -- since 1980. Its discontinuation is another Trump-administration blow to the public's view into how fossil fuel pollution is changing the world around them and making extreme weather more costly. [...] The database vacuums loss information from throughout the insurance industry, among other public and private sources. According to the database, there were 403 weather and climate disasters totally at least $1 billion in the United States since 1980, totaling more than $2.945 trillion. As of April 8, there had not been any confirmed billion-dollar disasters so far in 2025, but it lists four events as having the potential to make the tally, including the Los Angeles-area wildfires in January. Between 1980 and 2024, there were nine such disasters on average each year, though in the past five years, that annual average has jumped to 24. The record for one year was 28 events in 2023. "What makes this resource uniquely valuable is not just its standardized methodology across decades, but the fact that it draws from proprietary and non-public data sources (such as reinsurance loss estimates, localized government reports, and private claims databases) that are otherwise inaccessible to most researchers," Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications for and co-founder of First Street, a climate risk financial modeling firm, told CNN via email. "Without it, replicating or extending damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types, is nearly impossible without significant funding or institutional access to commercial catastrophe models."

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Alibaba Group researchers have developed "ZeroSearch," a technique that enables large language models to acquire search capabilities without using external search engines during training. The approach transforms LLMs into retrieval modules through supervised fine-tuning and employs a "curriculum-based rollout strategy" that gradually degrades generated document quality. In tests across seven question-answering datasets, ZeroSearch matched or exceeded the performance [PDF] of models trained with real search engines. A 7B-parameter retrieval module achieved results comparable to Google Search, while a 14B-parameter version outperformed it. The cost savings are substantial: training with 64,000 search queries using Google Search via SerpAPI would cost approximately $586.70, compared to just $70.80 using a 14B-parameter simulation LLM on four A100 GPUs -- an 88% reduction. The technique works with multiple model families including Qwen-2.5 and LLaMA-3.2. Researchers have released their code, datasets, and pre-trained models on GitHub and Hugging Face, potentially lowering barriers to entry for smaller AI companies developing sophisticated assistants.

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President Trump on Thursday attacked a law signed by President Joe Biden aimed at expanding high-speed internet access, calling the effort "racist" and "totally unconstitutional" and threatening to end it "immediately." The New York TimesL: Mr. Trump's statement was one of the starkest examples yet of his slash-and-burn approach to dismantling the legacy of his immediate predecessor in this term in office. The Digital Equity Act, a little-known effort to improve high-speed internet access in communities with poor access, was tucked into the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Mr. Biden signed into law early in his presidency. The act was written to help many different groups, including veterans, older people and disabled and rural communities. But Mr. Trump, using the incendiary language that has been a trademark of his political career, denounced the law on Thursday for also seeking to improve internet access for ethnic and racial minorities, raging in a social media post that it amounted to providing "woke handouts based on race."

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According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple has "made progress" on a chip for a product that could rival the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The company is also reportedly working on glasses that use augmented reality. The Verge reports: The chip is apparently based on the chips Apple uses for the Apple Watch, though the company has removed parts and is being designed in such a way that it can handle the "multiple cameras" that the smart glasses might have, Bloomberg reports. Apple wants mass production of the chip to start by the end of 2026 or sometime in 2027, so the glasses themselves could come out within that timeframe. [...] Apple is developing chips for camera-equipped Apple Watch and Airpods as well, and the goal is for those chips to be ready "by around 2027," Bloomberg says. The company is also developing new M-series chips and dedicated AI server chips, per the report.

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In a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warned that AI is breaking the economic model of the web by decoupling content creation from value, with platforms like Google and OpenAI increasingly providing answers without driving traffic to original sources. He argued that unless AI companies start compensating creators, the web's content ecosystem will collapse -- calling most current AI investment a "money fire" with only a small fraction holding long-term value. Search Engine Land reports: Google's value exchange with content creators has collapsed, Prince said: "Ten years ago... for every two pages of a website that Google scraped, they would send you one visitor. ... That was the trade. ... Now, it takes six pages scraped to get one visitor." That drop reflects the rise of zero-click searches, which happen when searchers get answers directly on Google's search page. "Today, 75 percent of the queries... get answered without you leaving Google." This trend, long criticized by publishers and SEOs, is part of a broader concern: AI companies are using original content to generate answers that rarely/never drive traffic back to creators. AI makes the problem worse. Large language models (LLMs) are accelerating the crisis, Prince said. AI companies scrape far more content per user interaction than Google ever has -- with even less return to creators. "What do you think it is for OpenAI? 250 to one. What do you think it is for Anthropic? Six thousand to one." "More and more the answers... won't lead you to the original source, it will be some derivative of that source." This situation threatens the sustainability of the web as we know it, Prince said: "If content creators can't derive value... then they're not going to create original content." The modern web is breaking. AI companies are aware of the problem, and the business model of the web can't survive unless there's some change, Prince said: "Sam Altman at OpenAI and others get that. But... he can't be the only one paying for content when everyone else gets it for free." Cloudflare's right in the middle of this problem -- it powers 80% of AI companies and a 20-30% of the web. Cloudfaire is now trying to figure out how to help fix what's broken, Prince said. AI = money fire. Prince is not against AI. However, he said he is skeptical of the investment frenzy. "I would guess that 99% of the money that people are spending on these projects today is just getting lit on fire. But 1% is going to be incredibly valuable." "And so maybe we've all got a light, you know, $100 on fire to find that $1 that matters." You can watch a recording of the interview and read the full transcript here.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: RIP, 486 processor. You've had a long run since Intel released you back in 1989. While Microsoft stopped supporting you with the release of Windows XP in 2001, Linux kept you alive and well for another 20+ years. But all good things must come to an end, and with the forthcoming release of the Linux 6.15 kernel, the 486 and the first Pentium processors will be sunsetted. Why? Linus Torvalds wrote recently on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), "I really get the feeling that it's time to leave i486 support behind. There's zero real reason for anybody to waste one second of development effort on this kind of issue." Senior Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar put Torvalds' remark into context, writing, "In the x86 architecture, we have various complicated hardware emulation facilities on x86-32 to support ancient 32-bit CPUs that very very few people are using with modern kernels. This compatibility glue is sometimes even causing problems that people spend time to resolve, which time could be spent on other things." "This will be the first time Linux has dropped support for a major chip family since 2012, when Linux stopped supporting the 386 family," notes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "Moving forward, the minimum supported x86 CPU will now be the original Pentium (P5) or newer, requiring the presence of the Time Stamp Counter (TSC) and the CMPXCHG8B (CX8) instruction. These features are absent in the older 486 and early 586 processors, such as the IDT WinChip and AMD Elan families." That said, you can continue running Linux on Pentium CPUs, but you'll have to "run museum kernels," as Torvalds pointed out in 2022 when he first floated the idea of ending support for 486.

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A federal judge has allowed key parts of a class action lawsuit against Delta Air Lines to proceed, stemming from massive flight disruptions caused by CrowdStrike's faulty Windows update in July 2024. The Register reports: Delta blamed its reliance on Microsoft software and the CrowdStrike incident for its woes. However, according to the plaintiffs in the action (PDF), both companies offered the airline assistance, which Delta turned down. Customers of the Atlanta-based carrier affected by the delays and cancellations claim they struggled to secure refunds and compensation from the airline. The plaintiffs allege that "although Delta offered reimbursement of eligible expenses through their website and app, Delta failed to clarify that the customer would only be receiving a partial reimbursement." "Furthermore, Delta did not disclose to its customers that acceptance of the partial reimbursement would release any legal claims the customer may have against Delta until after the customer 'click[ed] on the button to accept the partial reimbursement.'" The action concerns both US domestic and international travel. The former is covered by US Department of Transportation rules, which require airline agents to "inform customers of their right to a refund ... before making an offer for alternative transportation, travel credits, vouchers, or other compensation in lieu of refunds." The latter claims come under the Montreal Convention, which is designed to be a single, universal treaty to govern airline liability. Delta, which estimated its operational losses at around half a billion dollars due to the outage, sought to dismiss the complaint. While the US District Judge, Mark H. Cohen, granted the airline's motion to dismiss some of the claims, he permitted others to proceed. These were Count I (breach of contract based on failure to refund) and Count XII (violation of the Montreal Convention).

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After gaining attention from Neowin and DistroWatch last week, the sole maintainer behind AnduinOS 1.3 -- a Linux distribution styled to resemble Windows 11 -- decided to reveal himself. He turns out to be Anduin Xue, a Microsoft software engineer, who has been working on the project as a personal, non-commercial endeavor built on Ubuntu. Neowin reports: As a Software Engineer 2 at Microsoft (he doesn't work on Windows), Anduin Xue says he's financially stable and sees no need to commercialize AnduinOS. Explaining the financial aspects of the project, he said: "Many have asked why I don't accept donations, how I profit, and if I plan to commercialize AnduinOS. Truthfully, I haven't thoroughly considered these issues. It's not my main job, and I don't plan to rely on it for a living. Each month, I dedicate only a few hours to maintaining it. Perhaps in the future, I might consider providing enterprise solutions based on AnduinOS, but I won't compromise its original simplicity. It has always been about providing myself with a comfortably themed Ubuntu." In our coverage of the AnduinOS 1.3 release last week, one commenter pointed out that the distro is from China. For some, this will raise issues, but Anduin Xue addressed this in his blog post, too, saying that the source code is available to the public. For this reason, he told lacing the operating system with backdoors for the Chinese government would be "irrational and easily exposed." For those worried that the distribution may be abandoned, Anduin Xue said that he intends to continue supporting it and may even maintain it full-time if sponsorship or corporate cooperation emerges.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Senate today voted along party lines to kill a Federal Communications Commission program to distribute Wi-Fi hotspots to schoolchildren, with Democrats saying the Republican-led vote will make it harder for kids without reliable Internet access to complete their homework. The Senate approved a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to nullify the hotspot rule, which was issued by the Federal Communications Commission in July 2024 under then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. The program would be eliminated if the House version passes and President Trump signs the joint resolution of disapproval. The Rosenworcel FCC's rule expanded E-Rate, a Universal Service Fund program, allowing schools and libraries to use E-Rate funding to lend out Wi-Fi hotspots and services that could be used off-premises. The FCC rule was titled, "Addressing the Homework Gap through the E-Rate Program," and the hotspot lending program was scheduled to begin in funding year 2025, which starts in July 2025. Today's Senate vote on the resolution of disapproval was 50-38. There was a 53-47 vote on Tuesday that allowed the Senate measure to proceed to the final step. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said on Tuesday that "this resolution would prevent millions of students, educators, and families from getting online." Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) called the Republican move "a cruel and shortsighted decision that will widen the digital divide and rob kids of the tools they need to succeed."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: When Microsoft announced new Surface devices earlier this week, we noted that there wasn't a lot of daylight between the starting prices of the new but lower-end devices ($799 for the 12-inch Surface Pro, $899 for the 13-inch Surface Laptop) and the starting prices of the older-but-higher-end Surfaces from last spring ($999 for both). It appears Microsoft has quietly solved this problem by discontinuing the 256GB versions of the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop 7 and the 13-inch Surface Pro 11. Microsoft's retail pages for both devices list only 512GB and 1TB configurations, with regular prices starting at $1,199. Though not technically a price hike -- the 512GB versions of both devices also cost $1,199 before -- it does amount to an effective price increase for last year's Surface hardware, especially given that both devices have user-replaceable storage that can easily be upgraded for less than the $200 that Microsoft charged for the 256GB-to-512GB upgrade. The upshot is that the new Surface PCs make more sense now than they did on Tuesday in relative terms, but it's only because you'll pay more to buy a Surface Pro 11 or Surface Laptop 7 than you would before. The 15-inch version of the Surface Laptop 7 still lists a 256GB configuration and a $1,299 starting price, but the 256GB models are currently out of stock.

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A Florida federal judge has dismissed the majority of claims against celebrities who endorsed Sam Bankman-Fried's now-collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Judge K. Michael Moore ruled that investors failed to demonstrate the high-profile endorsers -- including Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Kevin O'Leary, Larry David, Shohei Ohtani, and Stephen Curry -- knew about FTX's fraudulent activities. In his ruling, Moore wrote that while the celebrity endorsers may have been "uninformed, negligent, or even reckless," plaintiffs didn't adequately establish that defendants had "knowledge of FTX's fraud" or "the requisite intent to deceive and defraud investors."

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Wikipedia is taking legal action against the UK's new Online Safety Act regulations it says could threaten the safety of its volunteer editors and their ability to keep harmful content off the site. From a report: The Wikimedia Foundation -- the non-profit which supports the online encyclopaedia -- is seeking a judicial review of rules which could mean Wikipedia is subjected to the toughest duties required of websites under the act. Lead counsel Phil Bradley-Schmieg said it was "unfortunate that we must now defend the privacy and safety of Wikipedia's volunteer editors from flawed legislation." The government told the BBC it was committed to implementing the act but could not comment on ongoing legal proceedings. It's thought this is the first judicial review to be brought against the new online safety laws - albeit a narrow part of them - but experts say it may not be the last. "The Online Safety Act is vast in scope and incredibly complex," Ben Packer, a partner at law firm Linklaters, told the BBC. The law would inevitably have impacts on UK citizens' freedom of expression and other human rights, so as more of it comes into force "we can expect that more challenges may be forthcoming," he told the BBC.

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Plastic producers have pushed "advanced recycling" as a salve to the plastic waste crisis despite knowing for years that it is not a technically or economically feasible solution, a new report argues. The Guardian: Advanced recycling, also known as chemical recycling, refers to a variety of processes used to break plastics into their constituent molecules. The industry has increasingly promoted these technologies, as public concern about the environmental and health effects of plastic pollution has grown. Yet the rollout of these technologies has been plagued by problems, according to a new analysis from the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), a fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group. "The companies make it sound like it's pretty great, like it's something we should pursue," said Davis Allen, investigative researcher at the CCI and author of the report. "But they know the problems, the limitations." The new analysis follows a 2024 CCI report which alleged that plastic producers concealed the problems with traditional recycling, and argued that they could face legal ramifications for doing so. That earlier research was cited in a September lawsuit filed by California's attorney general, Rob Bonta, against ExxonMobil for its role in the plastic pollution crisis. "The new report focuses on this modern deception with advanced recycling, which has become a real focus for the industry in recent years," said Davis.

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Apple asked a judge to halt an order forcing it to give up control over App Store payments while it appeals the decision. From a report: In a filing on Wednesday, Apple says the order contains "extraordinary intrusions" that could result in "grave irreparable harm" to the company. Last week, California District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found that Apple was in "willful violation" of a 2021 injunction issued as part of the Epic Games v. Apple case. As a result, the judge ordered Apple to stop collecting an up to 27 percent commission on purchases made outside the App Store, and said the company can no longer restrict how developers point users toward external purchases.

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Switzerland will hold a national referendum on the introduction of electronic identity cards after opponents of the legislation secured enough signatures to force a public vote. The Federal Chancellery confirmed Wednesday that 55,344 valid signatures were submitted against the Federal Act on Electronic Identity passed last December. The proposed e-ID would enable citizens to apply online for criminal record extracts, driving licenses, and age verification when purchasing alcohol. This marks the second referendum on e-ID implementation, after voters rejected a previous version in 2021. The government has revised its approach, making the new system free, optional, and fully state-operated rather than privately managed. If approved, the e-ID would come into force no earlier than 2026, though the collection effort suggests privacy concerns remain paramount for many Swiss voters.

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