"More than 200 climate and weather scientists from across the U.S. are taking part in a marathon livestream on YouTube," according to this report from Space.com. For 100 hours (that started Wednesday) they're sharing their scientific work and answering questions from viewers, "to prove the value of climate science," according to the article. The event is being stated in protest of recent government funding cuts at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States Geological Survey, and the National Science Foundation. (The event began with "scientists documenting their last few hours at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies as the office was shuttered.") The marathon stream features mini-lectures, panels and question-and-answer sessions with hundreds of scientists, each speaking in their capacity as private citizens rather than on behalf of any institution. These include talks from former National Weather Service directors, Britney Schmidt, a groundbreaking glacier researcher, and legendary meteorologist John Morales. In its first 30 hours, the stream got over 77,000 views. Ultimately, the goal of the event is to give members of the public the chance to learn more about meteorology and climate science in an informal setting — and for free. "We really felt like the American public deserves to know what we do," Duffy said. However, many of the speakers and organizers also hope the transference of this knowledge will spur people to take action. The event's website features a link to 5 Calls, an organization that makes it easy for folks to contact their representatives in Congress about the importance of funding climate and weather research.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SiliconANGLE: Hugging Face has open-sourced the blueprints of two internally developed robots called HopeJR and Reachy Mini. The company debuted the machines on Thursday. Hugging Face is backed by more than $390 million in funding from Nvidia Corp., IBM Corp. and other investors. It operates a GitHub-like platform for sharing open-source artificial intelligence projects. It says its platform hosts more than 1 million AI models, hundreds of thousands of datasets and various other technical assets. The company started prioritizing robotics last year after launching LeRobot, a section of its platform dedicated to autonomous machines. The portal provides access to AI models for powering robots and datasets that can be used to train those models. Hugging Face released its first hardware blueprint, a robotic arm design called the SO-100, late last year. The SO-100 was developed in partnership with a startup called The Robot Studio. Hugging Face also collaborated with the company on the HopeJR, the first new robot that debuted this week. According to TechCrunch, it's a humanoid robot that can perform 66 movements including walking. HopeJR is equipped with a pair of robotic arms that can be remotely controlled by a human using a pair of specialized, chip-equipped gloves. HopeJR's arms replicate the movements made by the wearer of the gloves. A demo video shared by Hugging Face showed that the robot can shake hands, point to a specific text snippet on a piece of paper and perform other tasks. Hugging Face's other new robot, the Reachy Mini, likewise features an open-source design. It's based on technology that the company obtained through the acquisition of a venture-backed startup called Pollen Robotics earlier this year. Reachy Mini is a turtle-like robot that comes in a rectangular case. Its main mechanical feature is a retractable neck that allows it to follow the user with its head or withdraw into the case. This case, which is stationary, is compact and lightweight enough to be placed on a desk. Hugging Face will offer pre-assembled versions of its open-source Reach Mini and HopeJR robots for $250 and $3,000, with the first units starting to ship by the end of the year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A five-year study by Wageningen University and the German Primate Research Center found that wild chimpanzees in Guinea-Bissau repeatedly strike stones against trees, presumably as a form of communication. Phys.Org reports: Over the course of a five-year field study, the research team collected video footage at five distinct locations within a nature reserve in Guinea-Bissau. This was made possible through the use of camera traps and with essential support from local field guides. In specific areas, a striking behavioral pattern was observed: adult male chimpanzees repeatedly struck stones against tree trunks, resulting in characteristic piles of stones at the base of these trees. [...] The observations point to cultural transmission. Young chimpanzees adopt the behavior from older group members, indicating that it is learned socially rather than genetically inherited. Marc Naguib, Professor of Behavioral Ecology, underscores the broader significance of the discovery: "It illustrates that culture is not unique to humans and that such behaviors need to be considered also in nature conservation." The study is published in the journal Biology Letters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artificial intelligence could soon outpace Bitcoin mining in energy consumption, according to Alex de Vries-Gao, a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam's Institute for Environmental Studies. His research estimates that by the end of 2025, AI could account for nearly half of all electricity used by data centers worldwide -- raising significant concerns about its impact on global climate goals. "While companies like Google and Microsoft disclose total emissions, few provide transparency on how much of that is driven specifically by AI," notes DIGIT. To fill this gap, de Vries-Gao employed a triangulation method combining chip production data, corporate disclosures, and industry analyst estimates to map AI's growing energy footprint. His analysis suggests that specialized AI hardware could consume between 46 and 82 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025 -- comparable to the annual energy usage of countries like Switzerland. Drawing on supply chain data, the study estimates that millions of AI accelerators from NVIDIA and AMD were produced between 2023 and 2024, with a potential combined power demand exceeding 12 gigawatts (GW). A detailed explanation of his methodology is available in his commentary published in Joule.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A lack of action by big tech firms is enabling the "industrial scale theft" of premium video services, especially live sport, a new report says. The research by Enders Analysis accuses Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft of "ambivalence and inertia" over a problem it says costs broadcasters revenue and puts users at an increased risk of cyber-crime. Gareth Sutcliffe and Ollie Meir, who authored the research, described the Amazon Fire Stick -- which they argue is the device many people use to access illegal streams -- as "a piracy enabler." [...] The device plugs into TVs and gives the viewer thousands of options to watch programs from legitimate services including the BBC iPlayer and Netflix. They are also being used to access illegal streams, particularly of live sport. In November last year, a Liverpool man who sold Fire Stick devices he reconfigured to allow people to illegally stream Premier League football matches was jailed. After uploading the unauthorized services on the Amazon product, he advertised them on Facebook. Another man from Liverpool was given a two-year suspended sentence last year after modifying fire sticks and selling them on Facebook and WhatsApp. According to data for the first quarter of this year, provided to Enders by Sky, 59% of people in UK who said they had watched pirated material in the last year while using a physical device said they had used a Amazon fire product. The Enders report says the fire stick enables "billions of dollars in piracy" overall. [...] The researchers also pointed to the role played by the "continued depreciation" of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems, particularly those from Google and Microsoft. This technology enables high quality streaming of premium content to devices. Two of the big players are Microsoft's PlayReady and Google's Widevine. The authors argue the architecture of the DRM is largely unchanged, and due to a lack of maintenance by the big tech companies, PlayReady and Widevine "are now compromised across various security levels." Mr Sutcliffe and Mr Meir said this has had "a seismic impact across the industry, and ultimately given piracy the upper hand by enabling theft of the highest quality content." They added: "Over twenty years since launch, the DRM solutions provided by Google and Microsoft are in steep decline. A complete overhaul of the technology architecture, licensing, and support model is needed. Lack of engagement with content owners indicates this a low priority."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Billions of stolen cookies are being sold on the dark web and Telegram, with over 1.2 billion containing session data that can grant cybercriminals access to accounts and systems without login credentials, bypassing MFA. The Register reports: More than 93.7 billion of them are currently available for criminals to buy online and of those, between 7-9 percent are active, on average, according to NordVPN's breakdown of stolen cookies by country. Adrianus Warmenhoven, cybersecurity advisor at NordVPN, said: "Cookies may seem harmless, but in the wrong hands, they're digital keys to our most private information. What was designed to enhance convenience is now a growing vulnerability exploited by cybercriminals worldwide. Most people don't realize that a stolen cookie can be just as dangerous as a password, despite being so willing to accept cookies when visiting websites, just to get rid of the prompt at the bottom of the screen. However, once these are intercepted, a cookie can give hackers direct access to all sorts of accounts containing sensitive data, without any login required." The vast majority of stolen cookies (90.25 percent) contain ID data, used to uniquely identify users and deliver targeted ads. They can also contain data such as names, home and email addresses, locations, passwords, phone numbers, and genders, although these data points are only present in around 0.5 percent of all stolen cookies. The risk of ruinous personal data exposure as a result of cookie theft is therefore pretty slim. Aside from ID cookies, the other statistically significant type of data that these can contain are details of users' sessions. Over 1.2 billion of these are still up for grabs (roughly 6 percent of the total), and these are generally seen as more of a concern.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a full-circle moment for Palmer Luckey, Meta and his defense tech company Anduril are teaming up to develop mixed reality headsets for the U.S. military under the Army's revamped SBMC Next program. The collaboration will merge Meta's Reality Labs hardware and Llama AI with Anduril's battlefield software, marking Meta's entry into military XR through the very company founded by Luckey after his controversial departure from Facebook. "I am glad to be working with Meta once again," Luckey said in a blog post. "My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that." TechCrunch reports: This partnership stems from the Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) Next program, formerly called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) Next. IVAS was a massive military contract, with a total $22 billion budget, originally awarded to Microsoft in 2018 intended to develop HoloLens-like AR glasses for soldiers. But after endless problems, in February the Army stripped management of the program from Microsoft and awarded it to Anduril, with Microsoft staying on as a cloud provider. The intent is to eventually have multiple suppliers of mixed reality glasses for soldiers. All of this meant that if Luckey's former employer, Meta, wanted to tap into the potentially lucrative world of military VR/AR/XR headsets, it would need to go through Anduril. The devices will be based on tech out of Meta's AR/VR research center Reality Labs, the post says. They'll use Meta's Llama AI model, and they will tap into Anduril's command and control software known as Lattice. The idea is to provide soldiers with a heads-up display of battlefield intelligence in real time. [...] An Anduril spokesperson tells TechCrunch that the product family Meta and Anduril are building is even called EagleEye, which will be an ecosystem of devices. EagleEye is what Luckey named Anduril's first imagined headset in Anduril's pitch deck draft, before his investors convinced him to focus on building software first. After the announcement, Luckey said on X: "It is pretty cool to have everything at our fingertips for this joint effort -- everything I made before Meta acquired Oculus, everything we made together, and everything we did on our own after I was fired."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The U.S. government today imposed economic sanctions on Funnull Technology Inc., a Philippines-based company that provides computer infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams known as "pig butchering." In January 2025, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Funnull was being used as a content delivery network that catered to cybercriminals seeking to route their traffic through U.S.-based cloud providers. "Americans lose billions of dollars annually to these cyber scams, with revenues generated from these crimes rising to record levels in 2024," reads a statement from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which sanctioned Funnull and its 40-year-old Chinese administrator Liu Lizhi. "Funnull has directly facilitated several of these schemes, resulting in over $200 million in U.S. victim-reported losses." The Treasury Department said Funnull's operations are linked to the majority of virtual currency investment scam websites reported to the FBI. The agency said Funnull directly facilitated pig butchering and other schemes that resulted in more than $200 million in financial losses by Americans. Pig butchering is a rampant form of fraud wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in fraudulent cryptocurrency trading platforms. Victims are coached to invest more and more money into what appears to be an extremely profitable trading platform, only to find their money is gone when they wish to cash out. The scammers often insist that investors pay additional "taxes" on their crypto "earnings" before they can see their invested funds again (spoiler: they never do), and a shocking number of people have lost six figures or more through these pig butchering scams. KrebsOnSecurity's January story on Funnull was based on research from the security firm Silent Push, which discovered in October 2024 that a vast number of domains hosted via Funnull were promoting gambling sites that bore the logo of the Suncity Group, a Chinese entity named in a 2024 UN report (PDF) for laundering millions of dollars for the North Korean state-sponsored hacking group Lazarus. Silent Push found Funnull was a criminal content delivery network (CDN) that carried a great deal of traffic tied to scam websites, funneling the traffic through a dizzying chain of auto-generated domain names and U.S.-based cloud providers before redirecting to malicious or phishous websites. The FBI has released a technical writeup (PDF) of the infrastructure used to manage the malicious Funnull domains between October 2023 and April 2025.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instagram now supports 3:4 aspect ratio photos, allowing users to upload images that "appear just exactly as you shot it." Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the update in a Threads post, noting that "almost every phone camera defaults to" that format. The Verge reports: An image from Instagram's broadcast channel shows how the change makes a difference. You can already post images with a rectangular aspect ratio of 4:5, but with 3:4, your photo won't be cropped at the ends. 3:4 photos are supported with single-photo uploads and with carousels, according to the channel. If you want, you can still post photos with a square or 4:5 aspect ratio.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: Microsoft just can't leave well enough alone. The company is now injecting formatting features into Notepad, a program that has long been appreciated for one thing -- its simplicity. You see, starting with version 11.2504.50.0, this update is rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels, and it adds bold text, italics, hyperlinks, lists, and even headers. Sadly, this isn't a joke. Notepad is actually being turned into a watered-down word processor, complete with a formatting toolbar and Markdown support. Users can even toggle between styled content and raw Markdown syntax. And while Microsoft is giving you the option to disable formatting or strip it all out, it's clear the direction of the app is changing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: If you've left a comment on a YouTube video, a new website claims it might be able to find every comment you've ever left on any video you've ever watched. Then an AI can build a profile of the commenter and guess where you live, what languages you speak, and what your politics might be. The service is called YouTube-Tools and is just the latest in a suite of web-based tools that started life as a site to investigate League of Legends usernames. Now it uses a modified large language model created by the company Mistral to generate a background report on YouTube commenters based on their conversations. Its developer claims it's meant to be used by the cops, but anyone can sign up. It costs about $20 a month to use and all you need to get started is a credit card and an email address. The tool presents a significant privacy risk, and shows that people may not be as anonymous in the YouTube comments sections as they may think. The site's report is ready in seconds and provides enough data for an AI to flag identifying details about a commenter. The tool could be a boon for harassers attempting to build profiles of their targets, and 404 Media has seen evidence that harassment-focused communities have used the developers' other tools. YouTube-Tools also appears to be a violation of YouTube's privacy policies, and raises questions about what YouTube is doing to stop the scraping and repurposing of peoples' data like this. "Public search engines may scrape data only in accordance with YouTube's robots.txt file or with YouTube's prior written permission," it says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has quietly removed billions of product listings through a confidential initiative called "Bend the Curve," according to Business Insider. The project planned to eliminate at least 24 billion ASINs -- unique product identifiers -- from Amazon's marketplace, reducing the total from a projected 74 billion to under 50 billion by December 2024. The purge targets "unproductive selection" including poor-selling items, listings without actual inventory, and product pages inactive for over two years. The initiative represents a shift for the company that built its reputation as "The Everything Store" through three decades of relentless catalog expansion. Bend the Curve forms part of CEO Andy Jassy's broader cost-cutting strategy, saving Amazon's retail division over $22 million in AWS server costs during 2024 by reducing the number of hosted product pages.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has harsh words for budget carriers, calling their business model "dead." "It's dead. Look, it's a crappy model. Sorry," he said when asked about the budget airline approach. Kirby argued that budget carriers like Southwest, Spirit, and Frontier built their operations around what he characterized as customer-hostile practices, saying "The model was, screw the customer ... Trick people, get them to buy, get them to come, and then charge them a whole bunch of fees that they aren't expecting." He said he believes that these airlines struggle to retain customers once they reach sufficient scale to require repeat business.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WordPress.com parent company Automattic is changing direction... again. From a report: In a blog post titled "Returning to Core" published Thursday evening, Automattic announced it will unpause its contributions to the WordPress project. This is despite having said only last month that the 6.8 WordPress release would be the final major release for all of 2025. "After pausing our contributions to regroup, rethink, and plan strategically, we're ready to press play again and return fully to the WordPress project," the new blog post states. "Expect to find our contributions across all of the greatest hits -- WordPress Core, Gutenberg, Playground, Openverse, and WordPress.org. This return is a moment of excitement for us as it's about continuing the mission we've always believed in: democratizing publishing for everyone, everywhere," it reads. Automattic says it's learned a lot from the pause in terms of the many ways WordPress is used, and that it's now committed to helping it "grow and thrive." The post also notes that WordPress today powers 43% of the web.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major broadband lobby groups have asked the Trump administration to sue states that require internet service providers to offer low-cost plans to low-income residents, following their unsuccessful court challenges against such laws. The cable, telecom, and mobile industry associations filed the request this week with the Justice Department's new Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force, specifically targeting New York's law that mandates $15 and $20 monthly broadband options for eligible customers. The industry groups suffered a significant legal defeat when the Supreme Court refused to hear their challenge to New York's affordability mandate in December 2024, after losing in federal appeals court. Now they face a potential wave of similar legislation, with California proposing $15 plans offering 100 Mbps speeds and ten other states considering comparable requirements.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lovable, a Swedish startup that allows users to create websites and apps through natural language prompts, failed to address a critical security vulnerability for months after being notified, according to a new report. A study by Replit employees found that 170 of 1,645 Lovable-created applications exposed sensitive user information including names, email addresses, financial data, and API keys that could allow hackers to run up charges on customers' accounts. The vulnerability, published this week in the National Vulnerabilities Database, stems from misconfigured Supabase databases that Lovable's AI-generated code connects to for storing user data. Despite being alerted to the problem in March, Lovable initially dismissed concerns and only later implemented a limited security scan that checks whether database access controls are enabled but cannot determine if they are properly configured.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a landmark ruling advancing efforts to hold major polluters accountable for transnational climate-related harms, on May 28 a German court concluded that a corporation can be held liable under civil law for its proportional contribution to global climate change, Climate Rights International said today. Filed in 2015, the case against German energy giant RWE AG challenged the corporation to pay for its proportional share of adaptation costs needed to protect the Andean city of Huaraz, Peru, from a flood from a glacial lake exacerbated by global warming. RWE AG, one of Europe's largest emitters, is estimated to be responsible for approximately 0.47% of global historical global greenhouse gas emissions. "This groundbreaking ruling confirms that corporate emitters can no longer hide behind borders, politics, or scale to escape responsibility," said Lotte Leicht, Advocacy Director at Climate Rights International. "The court's message is clear: major carbon polluters can be held legally responsible for their role in driving the climate crisis and the resulting human rights and economic harms. If the reasoning of this decision is adopted by other courts, it could lay the foundation for ending the era of impunity for fossil fuel giants and other big greenhouse gas emitters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House's sweeping "MAHA Report" appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence [non-paywalled source], resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday. Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post. Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all, a fact first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS on Thursday morning. Some references include "oaicite" attached to URLs -- a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of "oaicite" is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company. A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate -- as well as the tendency to "hallucinate" studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The three largest U.S. airlines are charging solo travelers higher fares than passengers booking for two or more people on select domestic routes, a pricing strategy analysts believe targets business travelers, according to fare analysis by travel publication Thrifty Traveler. American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines implement the practice by opening different fare categories based on passenger count. United charges $269 for a solo traveler flying from Chicago O'Hare to Peoria, while two passengers pay $181 each for identical seats. American's Charlotte-to-Fort Myers route costs solo travelers $422 versus $266 per person for pairs. The airlines appear to be "segmenting" customers by charging business travelers paying with corporate cards more while offering better deals to families booking together. Solo travelers are more likely to be business flyers using employer funds and "less likely to care about paying another $80 or more," according to the analysis.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Almost 40% of glaciers in existence today are already doomed to melt due to climate-heating emissions from fossil fuels, a study has found. The Guardian: The loss will soar to 75% if global heating reaches the 2.7C rise for which the world is currently on track. The massive loss of glaciers would push up sea levels, endangering millions of people and driving mass migration, profoundly affecting the billions reliant on glaciers to regulate the water used to grow food, the researchers said. However, slashing carbon emissions and limiting heating to the internationally agreed 1.5C target would save half of glacier ice. That goal is looking increasingly out of reach as emissions continue to rise, but the scientists said that every tenth-of-a-degree rise that was avoided would save 2.7tn tonnes of ice.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.