Many trains in the U.S. are vulnerable to a hack that can remotely lock a train's brakes, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the researcher who discovered the vulnerability. From a report:The railroad industry has known about the vulnerability for more than a decade but only recently began to fix it. Independent researcher Neil Smith first discovered the vulnerability, which can be exploited over radio frequencies, in 2012. "All of the knowledge to generate the exploit already exists on the internet. AI could even build it for you," Smith told 404 Media. "The physical aspect really only means that you could not exploit this over the internet from another country, you would need to be some physical distance from the train [so] that your signal is still received."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas warned young entrepreneurs that tech giants will "copy anything that's good" during a talk at Y Combinator's AI Startup School, telling founders they must "live with that fear." Srinivas said that companies raising tens of billions need to justify capital expenditures and search for new revenue streams. Perplexity pioneered web-crawling chatbots when it launched its answer engine in December 2022, but Google's Bard added internet-crawling three months later, followed by ChatGPT in May 2023 and Anthropic's Claude in March 2025. The competition has extended to browsers, with Perplexity launching its Comet browser on July 9 and Reuters reporting that OpenAI is developing a web browser to challenge Google Chrome. Perplexity's communications head Jesse Dwyer said larger companies will "drown your voice."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NIST: There's a new record holder for the most accurate clock in the world. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have improved their atomic clock based on a trapped aluminum ion. Part of the latest wave of optical atomic clocks, it can perform timekeeping with 19 decimal places of accuracy. Optical clocks are typically evaluated on two levels -- accuracy (how close a clock comes to measuring the ideal "true" time, also known as systematic uncertainty) and stability (how efficiently a clock can measure time, related to statistical uncertainty). This new record in accuracy comes out of 20 years of continuous improvement of the aluminum ion clock. Beyond its world-best accuracy, 41% greater than the previous record, this new clock is also 2.6 times more stable than any other ion clock. Reaching these levels has meant carefully improving every aspect of the clock, from the laser to the trap and the vacuum chamber. The team published its results in Physical Review Letters. "It's exciting to work on the most accurate clock ever," said Mason Marshall, NIST researcher and first author on the paper. "At NIST we get to carry out these long-term plans in precision measurement that can push the field of physics and our understanding of the world around us."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A survey of 500 IT asset managers in organizations that use Oracle Java has found that 73% have been audited in the last three years. From a report: At the same time, nearly eight out of 10 Oracle Java users said they had migrated, or planned to shift, to open source Java to try to avoid the risk and high costs of the dominant vendor's development and runtime environments. Oracle introduced a paid subscription for Java in September 2018, and in January 2023, it decided to switch its pricing model to per employee rather than per user, creating a steep price hike for many users. In July 2023, Gartner recorded users experiencing price increases of between two and five times when they switched to the new licensing model. Two years later, the survey conducted by market research firm Dimensional Research showed only 14% of Oracle Java users intended to stick with the vendor's subscription model.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nearly half of young Americans feel unprepared for future jobs as AI reshapes the workforce faster than career guidance can adapt, according to a new study from the Schultz Family Foundation and HarrisX. The survey of thousands of workers aged 16-24, along with parents, counselors and employers, revealed differences between generations about job availability and requirements. While 71% of employers say sufficient opportunities exist, only 43% of young people agree. Parents rely on outdated personal experiences when advising children, with 79% drawing from their own career paths despite 66% believing their children should pursue different directions. Employers require at least one year of experience for 77% of entry-level positions while offering internships for just 38% of roles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Hugging Face, a company with a multi-billion dollar valuation and one of the most commonly used platforms for sharing AI tools and resources, is hosting over 5,000 AI image generation models that are designed to recreate the likeness of real people. These models were all previously hosted on Civitai, an AI model sharing platform 404 Media reporting has shown was used for creating nonconsensual pornography, until Civitai banned them due to pressure from payment processors. Users downloaded the models from Civitai and reuploaded them to Hugging Face as part of a concerted community effort to archive the models after Civitai announced in May it will ban them. In that announcement, Civitai said it will give the people who originally uploaded them "a short period of time" before they were removed. Civitai users began organizing an archiving effort on Discord earlier in May after Civitai indicated it had to make content policy changes due to pressure from payment processors, and the effort kicked into high gear when Civitai announced the new "real people" model policy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Candy Crush-maker King is cutting approximately 200 employees, with many positions filled by AI tools the departing workers helped develop, according to multiple sources who spoke anonymously to industry publication MobileGamer.biz. The layoffs heavily target level designers, user research staff, and UX and narrative writers across King's London, Barcelona, Stockholm, and Berlin studios. The London-based Farm Heroes Saga team faces cuts of roughly 50 people, including key leadership positions. "Most of level design has been wiped, which is crazy since they've spent months building tools to craft levels quicker," one staffer said. "Now those AI tools are basically replacing the teams."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft employs engineers in China to help maintain Defense Department computer systems, with U.S. citizens serving as "digital escorts" to oversee the foreign workers, according to a ProPublica investigation. The escorts often lack advanced technical expertise to police engineers with far more sophisticated skills, and some are former military personnel paid barely above minimum wage. "We're trusting that what they're doing isn't malicious, but we really can't tell," one current escort told the publication. The arrangement, critical to Microsoft winning federal cloud computing contracts a decade ago, handles sensitive but unclassified government data including materials that directly support military operations. Former CIA and NSA executive Harry Coker called the system a natural opportunity for spies, saying "If I were an operative, I would look at that as an avenue for extremely valuable access."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: CoreWeave is expanding a data center that is projected to double the electricity needs of a city near Dallas, another example of the strains that artificial intelligence workloads are placing on the US power supply. Local officials have grappled with how to handle the increased stress on the electricity grid from the project, according to a late 2024 presentation and emails seen by Bloomberg. The site is being developed by Core Scientific and will be used by OpenAI in Denton, Texas. Last week, CoreWeave announced it would acquire Core Scientific for about $9 billion, in part, to gain direct control of its data centers aimed at supplying AI work. Denton, about 50 miles northwest of Dallas, has almost doubled its population in the last 25 years to about 166,000 residents. To meet the spike in AI-related power demand, the city is passing on any extra costs to the data center operator and constructing additional grid infrastructure, Antonio Puente, general manager of local utility Denton Municipal Electric, said in an interview. "To serve the entire load from Core Scientific, we do have some transmission challenges," Puente said. "We will have to make some additional transmission investments." [...] Like some other large AI data center projects, the site in Denton was focused on cryptocurrency mining before pivoting to AI workloads in December. This transition means unrelenting power consumption -- the site will no longer curtail operations when power prices are high -- which will increase grid strain. "Now you're talking about a facility that has to have energy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," Puente said. That challenge will be mitigated by the addition of backup generators and batteries, he added. Unlike many large projects, the Denton data center didn't receive local tax exemptions. Officials expect more than $600 million in property and sales tax from the data center expansion, more than double the costs it plans to incur, according to an analysis document seen by Bloomberg. It also anticipates that 135 new jobs will be created, according to the document. The Denton site, which is already being rented by CoreWeave, is Core Scientific's largest planned project at about 390 megawatts of power. It's "utilizing the majority of extra system capacity" in the city, wrote a utility executive in a January email seen by Bloomberg. Any additional large power users will exacerbate overloads on the grid, the executive added. "When fully built out, it will host one of the largest GPU clusters in North America," Core Scientific Chief Executive Officer Adam Sullivan said of the site during a May call. "Denton is a flagship facility." The report notes that Texas could face electricity shortages as soon as 2026 due to surging power demand from data centers, oil and gas operations, and crypto mining.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A team of Japanese researchers has set a new world record for internet speed, transmitting data at 125,000 gigabytes per second over 1,120 miles using a new type of 19-core optical fiber. "That's about 4 million times the average internet speed in the U.S. and would allow you to download the entire Internet Archive in less than four minutes," notes Live Science. It's also "more than twice the previous world record of 50,250 Gbps, previously set by a different team of scientists in 2024." From the report: To achieve this new speed -- which has not been independently verified -- the team developed a new form of optical fiber to send information at groundbreaking speeds over roughly the distance between New York and Florida. Details about this achievement were presented April 3 at the 48th Optical Fiber Communication Conference in San Francisco, according to a statement from Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. The new type of optical fiber is equivalent to 19 standard optical fibers in its data transmission capacity. The new optical fiber is better suited to long-haul transmission than existing cables because the centers of all 19 fibers interact with light in the same way, so they encounter less light fluctuation, which results in less data loss. The new cable squeezes 19 separate fibers into a diameter of five-thousandths of an inch (0.127 millimeters), which is the same thickness as most existing single-fiber cables already in use. This effort means the new cable can transmit more data using existing infrastructure. [...] For this demonstration, the data ran through a transmission system 21 times, finally reaching a data receiver after traveling the equivalent of 1,120 miles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration has detected the most massive black hole merger to date, forming a final black hole around 225 times the Sun's mass. Caltech reports: Before now, the most massive black hole merger -- produced by an event that took place in 2021 called GW190521 -- had a total mass of 140 times that of the Sun. In the more recent GW231123 event, the 225-solar-mass black hole was created by the coalescence of black holes each approximately 100 and 140 times the mass of the Sun. In addition to their high masses, the black holes are also rapidly spinning. "The black holes appear to be spinning very rapidly -- near the limit allowed by Einstein's theory of general relativity," explains Charlie Hoy of the University of Portsmouth and a member of the LVK. "That makes the signal difficult to model and interpret. It's an excellent case study for pushing forward the development of our theoretical tools." Researchers are continuing to refine their analysis and improve the models used to interpret such extreme events. "It will take years for the community to fully unravel this intricate signal pattern and all its implications," says Gregorio Carullo of the University of Birmingham and a member of the LVK. "Despite the most likely explanation remaining a black hole merger, more complex scenarios could be the key to deciphering its unexpected features. Exciting times ahead!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alistair sends us a pretty big blob of code, but it's a blob which touches upon everyone's favorite design pattern: the singleton. It's a lot of Java code, so we're going to take this as chunks. Let's start with the two methods responsible for constructing the object.

The purpose of this code is to parse an XML file, and construct a mapping from a "name" field in the XML to a "batch descriptor".

/** * Instantiates a new batch manager. */ private BatchManager() { try { final XMLReader xmlReader = XMLReaderFactory.createXMLReader(); xmlReader.setContentHandler(this); xmlReader.parse(new InputSource(this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("templates/" + DOCUMENT))); } catch (final Exception e) { logger.error("Error parsing Batch XML.", e); } } /* * (non-Javadoc) * * @see nz.this.is.absolute.crap.sax.XMLEntity#initChild(java.lang.String, * java.lang.String, java.lang.String, org.xml.sax.Attributes) */ @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { final BatchDescriptor batchDescriptor = new BatchDescriptor(); // put it in the map batchMap.put(attributes.getValue("name"), batchDescriptor); return batchDescriptor; }

Here we see a private constructor, which is reasonable for a singleton. It creates a SAX based reader. SAX is event driven- instead of loading the whole document into a DOM, it emits an event as it encounters each new key element in the XML document. It's cumbersome to use, but far more memory efficient, and I'd hardly say this.is.absolute.crap, but whatever.

This code is perfectly reasonable. But do you know what's unreasonable? There's a lot more code, and these are the only things not marked as static. So let's keep going.

// singleton instance so that static batch map can be initialised using // xml /** The Constant singleton. */ @SuppressWarnings("unused") private static final Object singleton = new BatchManager();

Wait… why is the singleton object throwing warnings about being unused? And wait a second, what is that comment saying, "so the static batch map can be initalalised"? I saw a batchMap up in the initChild method above, but it can't be…

private static Map<String, BatchDescriptor> batchMap = new HashMap<String, BatchDescriptor>();

Oh. Oh no.

/** * Gets the. * * @param batchName * the batch name * * @return the batch descriptor */ public static BatchDescriptor get(String batchName) { return batchMap.get(batchName); } /** * Gets the post to selector name. * * @param batchName * the batch name * * @return the post to selector name */ public static String getPostToSelectorName(String batchName) { final BatchDescriptor batchDescriptor = batchMap.get(batchName); if (batchDescriptor == null) { return null; } return batchDescriptor.getPostTo(); }

There are more methods, and I'll share the whole code at the end, but this gives us a taste. Here's what this code is actually doing.

It creates a static Map. static, in this context, means that this instance is shared across all instances of BatchManager.They also create a static instance of BatchManager inside of itself. The constructor of that instance then executes, populating that static Map. Now, when anyone invokes BatchManager.get it will use that static Map to resolve that.

This certainly works, and it offers a certain degree of cleanness in its implementation. A more conventional singleton would have the Map being owned by an instance, and it's just using the singleton convention to ensure there's only a single instance. This version's calling convention is certainly nicer than doing something like BatchManager.getInstance().get(…), but there's just something unholy about this that sticks into me.

I can't say for certain if it's because I just hate Singletons, or if it's this specific abuse of constructors and static members.

This is certainly one of the cases of misusing a singleton- it does not represent something there can be only one of, it's ensuring that an expensive computation is only allowed to be done once. There are better ways to handle that lifecycle. This approach also forces that expensive operation to happen at application startup, instead of being something flexible that can be evaluated lazily. It's not wrong to do this eagerly, but building something that can only do it eagerly is a mistake.

In any case, the full code submission follows:

package nz.this.is.absolute.crap.server.template; import java.io.IOException; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Collection; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Iterator; import java.util.Map; import java.util.ResourceBundle; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.KupengaException; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.SafeComparator; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.sax.XMLEntity; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.selector.Selector; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.selector.SelectorItem; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.server.BatchValidator; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.server.Validatable; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.server.ValidationException; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.server.business.BusinessObject; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.server.database.EntityHandler; import nz.this.is.absolute.crap.server.database.SQLEntityHandler; import org.apache.log4j.Logger; import org.xml.sax.Attributes; import org.xml.sax.ContentHandler; import org.xml.sax.InputSource; import org.xml.sax.SAXException; import org.xml.sax.XMLReader; import org.xml.sax.helpers.XMLReaderFactory; /** * The Class BatchManager. */ public class BatchManager extends XMLEntity { private static final Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(BatchManager.class); /** The Constant DOCUMENT. */ private final static String DOCUMENT = "Batches.xml"; /** * The Class BatchDescriptor. */ public class BatchDescriptor extends XMLEntity { /** The batchSelectors. */ private final Collection<String> batchSelectors = new ArrayList<String>(); /** The dependentCollections. */ private final Collection<String> dependentCollections = new ArrayList<String>(); /** The directSelectors. */ private final Collection<String> directSelectors = new ArrayList<String>(); /** The postTo. */ private String postTo; /** The properties. */ private final Collection<String> properties = new ArrayList<String>(); /** * Gets the batch selectors iterator. * * @return the batch selectors iterator */ public Iterator<String> getBatchSelectorsIterator() { return this.batchSelectors.iterator(); } /** * Gets the dependent collections iterator. * * @return the dependent collections iterator */ public Iterator<String> getDependentCollectionsIterator() { return this.dependentCollections.iterator(); } /** * Gets the post to. * * @return the post to */ public String getPostTo() { return this.postTo; } /** * Gets the post to business object. * * @param businessObject * the business object * @param postHandler * the post handler * * @return the post to business object * * @throws ValidationException * the validation exception */ private BusinessObject getPostToBusinessObject( BusinessObject businessObject, EntityHandler postHandler) throws ValidationException { if (this.postTo == null) { return null; } final BusinessObject postToBusinessObject = businessObject .getBusinessObjectFromMap(this.postTo, postHandler); // copy properties for (final String propertyName : this.properties) { String postToPropertyName; if ("postToStatus".equals(propertyName)) { // status field on batch entity refers to the batch entity // itself // so postToStatus is used for updating the status property // of the postToBusinessObject itself postToPropertyName = "status"; } else { postToPropertyName = propertyName; } final SelectorItem destinationItem = postToBusinessObject .find(postToPropertyName); if (destinationItem != null) { final Object oldValue = destinationItem.getValue(); final Object newValue = businessObject.get(propertyName); if (SafeComparator.areDifferent(oldValue, newValue)) { destinationItem.setValue(newValue); } } } // copy direct selectors for (final String selectorName : this.directSelectors) { final SelectorItem destinationItem = postToBusinessObject .find(selectorName); if (destinationItem != null) { // get the old and new values for the selectors Selector oldSelector = (Selector) destinationItem .getValue(); Selector newSelector = (Selector) businessObject .get(selectorName); // strip them down to bare identifiers for comparison if (oldSelector != null) { oldSelector = oldSelector.getAsIdentifier(); } if (newSelector != null) { newSelector = newSelector.getAsIdentifier(); } // if they're different then update if (SafeComparator.areDifferent(oldSelector, newSelector)) { destinationItem.setValue(newSelector); } } } // copy batch selectors for (final String batchSelectorName : this.batchSelectors) { final Selector batchSelector = (Selector) businessObject .get(batchSelectorName); if (batchSelector == null) { throw new ValidationException( "\"PostTo\" selector missing."); } final BusinessObject batchObject = postHandler .find(batchSelector); if (batchObject != null) { // get the postTo selector for the batch object we depend on final BatchDescriptor batchDescriptor = batchMap .get(batchObject.getName()); if (batchDescriptor.postTo != null && postToBusinessObject .containsKey(batchDescriptor.postTo)) { final Selector realSelector = batchObject .getBusinessObjectFromMap( batchDescriptor.postTo, postHandler); postToBusinessObject.put(batchDescriptor.postTo, realSelector); } } } businessObject.put(this.postTo, postToBusinessObject); return postToBusinessObject; } /* * (non-Javadoc) * * @see * nz.this.is.absolute.crap.sax.XMLEntity#initChild(java.lang.String, * java.lang.String, java.lang.String, org.xml.sax.Attributes) */ @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { if ("Properties".equals(qName)) { return new XMLEntity() { @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { BatchDescriptor.this.properties.add(attributes .getValue("name")); return null; } }; } else if ("DirectSelectors".equals(qName)) { return new XMLEntity() { @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { BatchDescriptor.this.directSelectors.add(attributes .getValue("name")); return null; } }; } else if ("BatchSelectors".equals(qName)) { return new XMLEntity() { @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { BatchDescriptor.this.batchSelectors.add(attributes .getValue("name")); return null; } }; } else if ("PostTo".equals(qName)) { return new XMLEntity() { @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { BatchDescriptor.this.postTo = attributes .getValue("name"); return null; } }; } else if ("DependentCollections".equals(qName)) { return new XMLEntity() { @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { BatchDescriptor.this.dependentCollections .add(attributes.getValue("name")); return null; } }; } return null; } } /** The batchMap. */ private static Map<String, BatchDescriptor> batchMap = new HashMap<String, BatchDescriptor>(); /** * Gets the. * * @param batchName * the batch name * * @return the batch descriptor */ public static BatchDescriptor get(String batchName) { return batchMap.get(batchName); } /** * Gets the post to selector name. * * @param batchName * the batch name * * @return the post to selector name */ public static String getPostToSelectorName(String batchName) { final BatchDescriptor batchDescriptor = batchMap.get(batchName); if (batchDescriptor == null) { return null; } return batchDescriptor.getPostTo(); } // singleton instance so that static batch map can be initialised using // xml /** The Constant singleton. */ @SuppressWarnings("unused") private static final Object singleton = new BatchManager(); /** * Post. * * @param businessObject * the business object * * @throws Exception * the exception */ public static void post(BusinessObject businessObject) throws Exception { // validate the batch root object only - it can validate the rest if it // needs to if (businessObject instanceof Validatable) { if (!BatchValidator.validate(businessObject)) { logger.warn(String.format("Validating %s failed", businessObject.getClass().getSimpleName())); throw new ValidationException( "Batch did not validate - it was not posted"); } ((Validatable) businessObject).validator().prepareToPost(); } final SQLEntityHandler postHandler = new SQLEntityHandler(true); final Iterator<BusinessObject> batchIterator = new BatchIterator( businessObject, null, postHandler); // iterate through batch again posting each object try { while (batchIterator.hasNext()) { post(batchIterator.next(), postHandler); } postHandler.commit(); } catch (final Exception e) { logger.error("Exception occurred while posting batches", e); // something went wrong postHandler.rollback(); throw e; } return; } /** * Post. * * @param businessObject * the business object * @param postHandler * the post handler * * @throws KupengaException * the kupenga exception */ private static void post(BusinessObject businessObject, EntityHandler postHandler) throws KupengaException { if (businessObject == null) { return; } if (Boolean.TRUE.equals(businessObject.get("posted"))) { return; } final BatchDescriptor batchDescriptor = batchMap.get(businessObject .getName()); final BusinessObject postToBusinessObject = batchDescriptor .getPostToBusinessObject(businessObject, postHandler); if (postToBusinessObject != null) { postToBusinessObject.save(postHandler); } businessObject.setItemValue("posted", Boolean.TRUE); businessObject.save(postHandler); } /** * Instantiates a new batch manager. */ private BatchManager() { try { final XMLReader xmlReader = XMLReaderFactory.createXMLReader(); xmlReader.setContentHandler(this); xmlReader.parse(new InputSource(this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("templates/" + DOCUMENT))); } catch (final Exception e) { logger.error("Error parsing Batch XML.", e); } } /* * (non-Javadoc) * * @see nz.this.is.absolute.crap.sax.XMLEntity#initChild(java.lang.String, * java.lang.String, java.lang.String, org.xml.sax.Attributes) */ @Override protected ContentHandler initChild(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException { final BatchDescriptor batchDescriptor = new BatchDescriptor(); // put it in the map batchMap.put(attributes.getValue("name"), batchDescriptor); return batchDescriptor; } } .comment { border: none; } [Advertisement] Keep all your packages and Docker containers in one place, scan for vulnerabilities, and control who can access different feeds. ProGet installs in minutes and has a powerful free version with a lot of great features that you can upgrade when ready.Learn more.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: California's statewide power grid operator is poised to become the first in North America to deploy artificial intelligence to manage outages, MIT Technology Review has learned. "We wanted to modernize our grid operations. This fits in perfectly with that," says Gopakumar Gopinathan, a senior advisor on power system technologies at the California Independent System Operator -- known as the CAISO and pronounced KAI-so. "AI is already transforming different industries. But we haven't seen many examples of it being used in our industry." At the DTECH Midwest utility industry summit in Minneapolis on July 15, CAISO is set to announce a deal to run a pilot program using new AI software called Genie, from the energy-services giant OATI. The software uses generative AI to analyze and carry out real-time analyses for grid operators and comes with the potential to autonomously make decisions about key functions on the grid, a switch that might resemble going from uniformed traffic officers to sensor-equipped stoplights. But while CAISO may deliver electrons to cutting-edge Silicon Valley companies and laboratories, the actual task of managing the state's electrical system is surprisingly analog. Today, CAISO engineers scan outage reports for keywords about maintenance that's planned or in the works, read through the notes, and then load each item into the grid software system to run calculations on how a downed line or transformer might affect power supply. "Even if it takes you less than a minute to scan one on average, when you amplify that over 200 or 300 outages, it adds up," says Abhimanyu Thakur, OATI's vice president of platforms, visualization, and analytics. "Then different departments are doing it for their own respective keywords. Now we consolidate all of that into a single dictionary of keywords and AI can do this scan and generate a report proactively." If CAISO finds that Genie produces reliable, more efficient data analyses for managing outages, Gopinathan says, the operator may consider automating more functions on the grid. "After a few rounds of testing, I think we'll have an idea about what is the right time to call it successful or not," he says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Saudi Arabia has asked consultants to reassess the feasibility of The Line, its ambitious 170km linear city project and centerpiece of the Neom initiative, as rising costs and falling oil prices force the kingdom to scale back its megaprojects. Middle East Eye reports: In April, The Financial Times reported that the CEO of Neom had launched a "comprehensive review" of the kingdom's megaproject. Neom, along with luxury Red Sea hotels and a ski resort, is the flagship project of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 plan to transform the kingdom's economy and reduce its dependence on oil revenue. Bloomberg reported in 2024 that Saudi Arabia was cutting back plans for The Line. Instead of 1.5 million people living there by 2030, Saudi officials were said to anticipate fewer than 300,000 residents. Meanwhile, only 2.4km of the city is expected to be completed by 2030. In April, Goldman Sachs painted a bleak picture for Saudi Arabia's projects in a note to clients, projecting "pretty significant" budget deficits and more scaling back of megaprojects. Neom has already faced internal challenges. Nadhmi al-Nasr, who managed Neom's construction from 2018 to 2024, departed from his post in November. Nasr earned a chilling reputation managing Neom. He bragged that he put everyone to work "like a slave," adding, "When they drop down dead, I celebrate. That's how I do my projects." Two other foreign executives also left Neom at the end of 2024, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is testing a new adaptive energy saver mode in Windows 11 that automatically turns energy saver on or off based on system workload instead of battery percentage, aiming to extend laptop battery life without dimming screen brightness. The feature is currently available to Windows Insider testers and expected to roll out later this year. The Verge reports: The energy saver mode in Windows 11 typically dims a display brightness by 30 percent, disables transparency effects, and stop apps running in the background. Non-critical Windows update downloads are also paused, and certain apps like OneDrive, OneNote, and Phone Link may not sync fully while energy saver is enabled. This new adaptive energy saver mode, which will only be available on devices with a battery, will automatically enable or disable without affecting screen brightness. That will make it less noticeable on devices like laptops, tablets, and handhelds. "Adaptive energy saver is an opt-in feature that automatically enables and disables energy saver, without changing screen brightness, based on the power state of the device and the current system load," explains Microsoft's Windows Insider team.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Department of Defense has awarded contracts worth up to $200 million each to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI to scale adoption of advanced AI. "The contracts will enable the DoD to develop agentic AI workflows and use them to address critical national security challenges," reports Reuters, citing the department's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. From the report: Separately on Monday, xAI announced a suite of its products called "Grok for Government", making its advanced AI models -- including its latest flagship Grok 4 -- available to federal, local, state and national security customers. The Pentagon announced last month that OpenAI was awarded a $200 million contract, saying the ChatGPT maker would "develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains." The contracts announced on Monday deepen the ties between companies leading the AI race and U.S. government operations, while addressing concerns around the need for competitive contracts for AI use in federal agencies. "The adoption of AI is transforming the (DoD's) ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries," Chief Digital and AI Officer Doug Matty said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Investing.com: Meta's newly formed superintelligence lab is discussing potential changes to the company's artificial intelligence strategy that could represent a major shift for the social media giant. A small group of top members of the lab, including 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, Meta's new chief A.I. officer, talked last week about abandoning the company's most powerful open source A.I. model, called Behemoth, in favor of developing a closed model, according to a report in the New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter. Meta has traditionally open sourced its A.I. models, making the computer code public for other developers to build upon, and any shift toward a closed A.I. model would mark a significant philosophical change for Meta. Meta had completed training its Behemoth model by feeding in data to improve it, but delayed its release due to poor internal performance. After the company announced the formation of the superintelligence lab last month, teams working on the Behemoth model, which is considered a "frontier" model, stopped conducting new tests on it. The discussions within the superintelligence lab remain preliminary, and no decisions have been finalized. Any potential changes would require approval from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Greece will pilot an age verification app to better protect children online, as part of the EU's push to enforce its Digital Services Act. Reuters reports: The setup for the age verification app is built on the same technical specifications as the European Digital Identity Wallet which will be rolled out next year. The five countries can customize the model according to their requirements, integrate into a national app or keep it separately. The landmark legislation, which became applicable last year, requires Alphabet's Google, Meta, ByteDance's TikTok and other online companies to do more to tackle illegal and harmful online content. EU regulators said the new guidelines would help online platforms to tackle addictive design, cyberbullying, harmful content and unwanted contact from strangers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI has released Kimi K2, a trillion-parameter open-source language model that outperforms GPT-4 in key benchmarks with particularly strong performance on coding and autonomous agent tasks. VentureBeat reports: The new model, called Kimi K2, features 1 trillion total parameters with 32 billion activated parameters in a mixture-of-experts architecture. The company is releasing two versions: a foundation model for researchers and developers, and an instruction-tuned variant optimized for chat and autonomous agent applications. "Kimi K2 does not just answer; it acts," the company stated in its announcement blog. "With Kimi K2, advanced agentic intelligence is more open and accessible than ever. We can't wait to see what you build." The model's standout feature is its optimization for "agentic" capabilities -- the ability to autonomously use tools, write and execute code, and complete complex multi-step tasks without human intervention. In benchmark tests, Kimi K2 achieved 65.8% accuracy on SWE-bench Verified, a challenging software engineering benchmark, outperforming most open-source alternatives and matching some proprietary models. [...] On LiveCodeBench, arguably the most realistic coding benchmark available, Kimi K2 achieved 53.7% accuracy, decisively beating DeepSeek-V3's 46.9% and GPT-4.1's 44.7%. More striking still: it scored 97.4% on MATH-500 compared to GPT-4.1's 92.4%, suggesting Moonshot has cracked something fundamental about mathematical reasoning that has eluded larger, better-funded competitors. But here's what the benchmarks don't capture: Moonshot is achieving these results with a model that costs a fraction of what incumbents spend on training and inference. While OpenAI burns through hundreds of millions on compute for incremental improvements, Moonshot appears to have found a more efficient path to the same destination. It's a classic innovator's dilemma playing out in real time -- the scrappy outsider isn't just matching the incumbent's performance, they're doing it better, faster, and cheaper.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Samuel Herman and Alexander Baciu never liked using Comcast's cable broadband. Now, the residents of Saline, Michigan, operate a fiber Internet service provider that competes against Comcast in their neighborhoods and has ambitions to expand. "All throughout my life pretty much, I've had to deal with Xfinity's bullcrap, them not being able to handle the speeds that we need," Herman told Ars. "I lived in a house of 10. I have seven other brothers and sisters, and there's 10 of us in total with my parents." With all those kids using the Internet for school and other needs, "it just doesn't work out," he said. Herman was particularly frustrated with Comcast upload speeds, which are much slower than the cable service's download speeds. "Many times we would have to call Comcast and let them know our bandwidth was slowing down... then they would say, 'OK, we'll refresh the system.' So then it would work again for a week to two weeks, and then again we'd have the same issues," he said. Herman, now 25, got married in 2021 and started building his own house, and he tried to find another ISP to serve the property. He was familiar with local Internet service providers because he worked in construction for his father's company, which contracts with ISPs to build their networks. But no fiber ISP was looking to compete directly against Comcast where he lived, though Metronet and 123NET offer fiber elsewhere in the city, Herman said. He ended up paying Comcast $120 a month for gigabit download service with slower upload speeds. Baciu, who lives about a mile away from Herman, was also stuck with Comcast and was paying about the same amount for gigabit download speeds. Herman said he was the chief operating officer of his father's construction company and that he shifted the business "from doing just directional drilling to be a turnkey contractor for ISPs." Baciu, Herman's brother-in-law (having married Herman's oldest sister), was the chief construction officer. Fueled by their knowledge of the business and their dislike of Comcast, they founded a fiber ISP called Prime-One. Now, Herman is paying $80 a month to his own company for symmetrical gigabit service. Prime-One also offers 500Mbps for $75, 2Gbps for $95, and 5Gbps for $110. The first 30 days are free, and all plans have unlimited data and no contracts. "We are 100 percent fiber optic," Baciu told Ars. "Everything that we're doing is all underground. We're not doing aerial because we really want to protect the infrastructure and make sure we're having a reliable connection." Each customer's Optical Network Terminal (ONT) and other equipment is included in the service plan. Prime-One provides a modem and the ONT, plus a Wi-Fi router if the customer prefers not to use their own router. They don't charge equipment or installation fees, Herman and Baciu said. Prime-One began serving customers in January 2025, and Baciu said the network has been built to about 1,500 homes in Saline with about 75 miles of fiber installed. Prime-One intends to serve nearby towns as well, with the founders saying the plan is to serve 4,000 homes with the initial build and then expand further. [...] A bit more than 100 residents have bought service so far, they said. Herman said the company is looking to sign up about 30 percent of the homes in its network area to make a profit. "I feel fairly confident," Herman said, noting the number of customers who signed up with the initial construction not even halfway finished.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.