An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A Florida bill, which would have required social media companies to provide an encryption backdoor for allowing police to access user accounts and private messages, has failed to pass into law. The Social Media Use by Minors bill was "indefinitely postponed" and "withdrawn from consideration" in the Florida House of Representatives earlier this week. Lawmakers in the Florida Senate had already voted to advance the legislation, but a bill requires both legislative chambers to pass before it can become law. The bill would have required social media firms to "provide a mechanism to decrypt end-to-end encryption when law enforcement obtains a subpoena," which are typically issued by law enforcement agencies and without judicial oversight. Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation called the bill "dangerous and dumb." Security professionals have long argued that it is impossible to create a secure backdoor that cannot also be maliciously abused, and encryption backdoors put user data at risk of data breaches.

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Just days after a radar and communications outage at Newark Liberty International Airport, the FAA confirmed a second incident on May 9 that disrupted radar and radio contact for 90 seconds due to a telecom failure at Philadelphia TRACON. "As of 12:30PM ET, FlightAware stats showed 292 total delays for flights into or out of Newark, which is also experiencing delays due to runway construction," reports The Verge. From the report: After the first outage on April 28th, an air traffic controller who had been on duty that day told CNN it "...was the most dangerous situation you could have." CNN reports that after a change made last July, the airport's radar and radio communication flows over a single data feed from a facility in New York, where controllers used to manage Newark's flights, to Philadelphia. The FAA has announced a plan to replace the current copper connection with fiber, as well as adding "three new, high-bandwidth telecommunications connections between the New York-based STARS and the Philadelphia TRACON," and more air traffic controllers. Until those and other changes are made, the agency also said a new backup system is being deployed in Philadelphia, but it's unclear when that will be available. NBC News reports the Friday outage affected a limited number of sectors, but it's another incident in the string of issues that have highlighted the problems with the airport's aging control system and lack of staffing. [...] A statement from the FAA said, "Frequent equipment and telecommunications outages can be stressful for controllers. Some controllers at the Philadelphia TRACON who work Newark arrivals and departures have taken time off to recover from the stress of multiple recent outages."

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Wearable startup Whoop just announced its new Whoop 5.0 fitness tracker yesterday, but some existing users are already calling foul. From a report: Previously, Whoop said people who had been members for at least six months would get free upgrades to next-generation hardware. Now, the company says that members hoping to upgrade from a Whoop 4.0 to 5.0 will have to pay up. Whoop is a bit different from other fitness trackers in that it runs entirely on a subscription membership model. Most wearable makers that have subscriptions will charge you for the hardware, and then customers have the option of subscribing to get extra data or features. A good example is the Oura Ring, where you buy the ring and then have the option of paying a monthly $6 subscription. Whoop, however, has until now said that you get the hardware for "free" while paying a heftier annual subscription. Previously, Whoop promised users that whenever new hardware was released, existing members would be able to upgrade free of charge so long as they'd been a member for at least six months.

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A U.S. senator introduced a bill on Friday that would direct the Commerce Department to require location verification mechanisms for export-controlled AI chips, in an effort to curb China's access to advanced semiconductor technology. From a report: Called the "Chip Security Act," the bill calls for AI chips under export regulations, and products containing those chips, to be fitted with location-tracking systems to help detect diversion, smuggling or other unauthorized use of the product. "With these enhanced security measures, we can continue to expand access to U.S. technology without compromising our national security," Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas said. The bill also calls for companies exporting the AI chips to report to the Bureau of Industry and Security if their products have been diverted away from their intended location or subject to tampering attempts.

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Software firm 37signals is completing its migration from AWS to on-premises infrastructure, expecting to save $1.3 million annually on storage costs alone. CTO David Heinemeier Hansson announced the company has begun migrating 18 petabytes of data from Amazon S3 to Pure Storage arrays costing $1.5 million upfront but only $200,000 yearly to operate. AWS waived $250,000 in data egress fees for the transition, which will allow 37signals to completely delete its AWS account this summer. The company has already slashed $2 million in annual costs after replacing cloud compute with $700,000 worth of Dell servers in 2024. "Cloud can be a good choice in certain circumstances, but the industry pulled a fast one convincing everyone it's the only way," wrote Hansson, who began the repatriation effort in 2022 after discovering their annual AWS bill exceeded $3.2 million.

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A comprehensive analysis in Science Advances reveals that humans have explored less than 0.001% of the deep seafloor -- an area equivalent to merely one-tenth the size of Belgium. Oceanographer Katherine Bell and colleagues at the Ocean Discovery League compiled data from approximately 44,000 deep-sea dives conducted between 1958 and 2024, finding that expeditions have concentrated overwhelmingly around waters near the United States, Japan, and New Zealand. The study exposes significant gaps in ocean exploration, with vast regions -- particularly the Indian Ocean -- remaining virtually untouched by direct observation. Much of the existing dive data remains inaccessible to scientists, locked away by private companies.

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CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that became a household name after causing a massive global IT outage last year, has announced it will cut 5% of its workforce in part due to "AI efficiency." From a report: In a note to staff earlier this week, released in stock market filings in the US, CrowdStrike's chief executive, George Kurtz, announced that 500 positions, or 5% of its workforce, would be cut globally, citing AI efficiencies created in the business. "We're operating in a market and technology inflection point, with AI reshaping every industry, accelerating threats, and evolving customer needs," he said. Kurtz said AI "flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster," adding it "drives efficiencies across both the front and back office. AI is a force multiplier throughout the business," he said. Other reasons for the cuts included market demand for sustained growth and expanding the product offering.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Panasonic will undertake a major restructuring across a range of its business, including consumer electronics, cutting 10,000 jobs globally, as the Japanese company plans to streamline, spinning out struggling divisions in hopes of reversing its dwindling market share and fending off fierce Chinese competition. Panasonic did not say which businesses it intended to shrink. The company expects to book structural reform costs of roughly $900 million this business year. Panasonic ended the fiscal year

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Major tech companies lobbying to salvage a tax deduction for research and development are warning they may pull back from high-profile pledges of new US investments if Congress doesn't fully reinstate the break. Big tech companies have pledged more than $1.6 trillion in investments in the US since Donald Trump took office, promising to build factories and data centers in alignment with Trump's push to build in America. But industry representatives are signaling those promises will be imperiled if Congress doesn't fully reinstate the R&D tax deduction, which was pared back to help offset the massive cost of President Donald Trump's 2017 bill. At the time, it was estimated that limiting the provision would temporarily raise about $120 billion from 2018 to 2027. "A lot of those announcements are predicated on an expectation the administration and Congress will partner together on reinstating those R&D provisions," said Jason Oxman, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, a trade group that includes among its members Amazon, Apple, Anthropic, Alphabet, and IBM. Lobbyists representing tech companies that announced US investments have made similar claims to congressional aides and lawmakers, according to people familiar with the conversations.

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The specialized role of prompt engineering, not long ago heralded as a promising new career path in AI, has virtually disappeared just two years after its emergence. Many companies are now considering strong AI prompting a standard skill rather than a dedicated position, Fast Company reports, with some firms even deploying AI systems to generate optimal prompts for other AI tools. "AI is already eating its own," Malcolm Frank, CEO of TalentGenius, told the publication. "Prompt engineering has become something that's embedded in almost every role, and people know how to do it. It's turned from a job into a task very, very quickly." The prompt engineer's decline serves as a case study for the broader AI job market, where evidence suggests AI is primarily reshaping existing careers rather than creating entirely new ones. Further reading: 'AI Prompt Engineering Is Dead.'

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Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang has served up another blunt take on the job market as AI permeates society. From a report: "You will not lose your job to AI, but will lose it to someone who uses it," Huang said at the Milken Institute Conference. Added Huang, "I recommend 100% take advantage of AI, don't be that person."

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Researchers are sounding alarms about the proliferation of AI-generated content -- dubbed "slop" -- that may be overwhelming the internet's human-created material. Fil Menczer, distinguished professor of informatics at Indiana University, who has studied social bots since the early 2010s, is now expressing serious concern about generative AI's impact. "Am I worried? Yes, I'm very worried," he told Bloomberg. Another research from Georgetown University found over 100 Facebook pages with millions of followers using AI-generated images for scams. According to Tollbit, a company that helps publishers get compensated when their sites are scraped, web scraping volume doubled from Q3 to Q4 2024, causing significant strain on sites like Wikipedia during high-traffic events. The situation creates a dangerous feedback loop where AI content is generated to please AI recommendation systems, potentially marginalizing human creators. Jeff Allen of the Integrity Institute told Bloomberg this resembles "the algae bloom that can blow up and suffocate the life you would want to have in a healthy ecosystem."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Education giant Pearson suffered a cyberattack, allowing threat actors to steal corporate data and customer information, BleepingComputer has learned. Pearson is a UK-based education company and one of the world's largest providers of academic publishing, digital learning tools, and standardized assessments. The company works with schools, universities, and individuals in over 70 countries through its print and online services. In a statement to BleepingComputer, Pearson confirmed they suffered a cyberattack and that data was stolen, but stated it was mostly "legacy data." "We recently discovered that an unauthorized actor gained access to a portion of our systems," a Pearson representative confirmed to BleepingComputer. "Once we identified the activity, we took steps to stop it and investigate what happened and what data was affected with forensics experts. We also supported law enforcement's investigation. We have taken steps to deploy additional safeguards onto our systems, including enhancing security monitoring and authentication. We are continuing to investigate, but at this time we believe the actor downloaded largely legacy data. We will be sharing additional information directly with customers and partners as appropriate." Pearson also confirmed that the stolen data did not include employee information. The education company previously disclosed in January that they were investigating a breach of one of their subsidiaries, PDRI, which is believed to be related to this attack. BleepingComputer also notes that threat actors breached Pearson's developer environment in January 2025 using an exposed GitLab access token, gaining access to source code and hard-coded credentials. Terabytes of sensitive data was stolen from cloud platforms and internal systems. Despite the potential impact on millions of individuals, Pearson has declined to answer key questions about the breach or its response.

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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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