Google will take firmer action against British businesses that use fake reviews to boost their star ratings on the search giant's reviews platform. From a report: The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Friday that Google has agreed to improve its processes for detecting and removing fake reviews, and will take action against the businesses and reviewers that post them. This includes deactivating the ability to add new reviews for businesses found to be using fake reviews, and deleting all existing reviews for at least six months if they repeatedly engage in suspicious review activity. Google will also place prominent "warning alerts" on the Google profiles of businesses using fake reviews to help consumers be more aware of potentially misleading feedback. Individuals who repeatedly post fake or misleading reviews on UK business pages will be banned and have their review history deleted, even if they're located in another country.

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Chinese venture capital and private equity firm HongShan, formerly part of Sequoia, said on Friday it has struck a deal to acquire a majority stake in Marshall in a deal valuing the audio equipment maker at $1.15 billion.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can't be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what's known in the business as a "magic packet." On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network's Junos OS has been doing just that. J-Magic, the tracking name for the backdoor, goes one step further to prevent unauthorized access. After receiving a magic packet hidden in the normal flow of TCP traffic, it relays a challenge to the device that sent it. The challenge comes in the form of a string of text that's encrypted using the public portion of an RSA key. The initiating party must then respond with the corresponding plaintext, proving it has access to the secret key. The lightweight backdoor is also notable because it resided only in memory, a trait that makes detection harder for defenders. The combination prompted researchers at Lumin Technology's Black Lotus Lab to sit up and take notice. "While this is not the first discovery of magic packet malware, there have only been a handful of campaigns in recent years," the researchers wrote. "The combination of targeting Junos OS routers that serve as a VPN gateway and deploying a passive listening in-memory only agent, makes this an interesting confluence of tradecraft worthy of further observation." The researchers found J-Magic on VirusTotal and determined that it had run inside the networks of 36 organizations. They still don't know how the backdoor got installed.

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The U.S. may have led China in the AI race for the past decade, according to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, but on Christmas Day, everything changed. From a report: Wang, whose company provides training data to key AI players including OpenAI, Google and Meta , said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that DeepSeek, the leading Chinese AI lab, released an "earth-shattering model" on Christmas Day, then followed it up with a powerful reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek-R1, which competes with OpenAI's recently released o1 model. "What we've found is that DeepSeek ... is the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models," Wang said. In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the artificial intelligence race between the U.S. and China as an "AI war," adding that he believes China has significantly more Nvidia H100 GPUs -- AI chips that are widely used to build leading powerful AI models -- than people may think, especially considering U.S. export controls. [...] "The United States is going to need a huge amount of computational capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure," Wang said, later adding, "We need to unleash U.S. energy to enable this AI boom." DeepSeek's holding company is a quant firm, which happened to have a lot of GPUs for trading and mining. DeepSeek is their "side project."

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Longtime Slashdot readers smooth wombat and AmiMoJo shares a fusion energy breakthrough from China. Charming Science reports: China's "artificial sun," officially known as the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), has achieved a groundbreaking milestone in fusion energy research. According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), EAST recently sustained high-confinement plasma operation for an unprecedented 1,066 seconds, shattering the previous world record of 403 seconds, also set by EAST in 2023. [...] The 1,000-second mark is considered a critical threshold in fusion research. Sustaining plasma for such extended durations is essential for demonstrating the feasibility of operating fusion reactors. This breakthrough, accomplished by the Institute of Plasma Physics under the CAS, signifies a major leap towards realizing the potential of fusion energy. [...] The success of EAST's recent experiment can be attributed to several key advancements. Researchers have made significant strides in improving the stability of the heating system, enhancing the accuracy of the control system, and refining the precision of the diagnostic systems. Warning: the source originates from China Daily, an English-language daily newspaper owned by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party. It's rated "questionable" by Media Bias/Fact Check because of its association with the CCP.

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President Donald Trump signed an executive order on AI Thursday that will revoke past government policies his order says "act as barriers to American AI innovation." From a report: To maintain global leadership in AI technology, "we must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas," Trump's order says. The new order doesn't name which existing policies are hindering AI development but sets out to track down and review "all policies, directives, regulations, orders, and other actions taken" as a result of former President Joe Biden's sweeping AI executive order of 2023, which Trump rescinded Monday. Any of those Biden-era actions must be suspended if they don't fit Trump's new directive that AI should "promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security." Last year, the Biden administration issued a policy directive that said U.S. federal agencies must show their artificial intelligence tools aren't harming the public, or stop using them. Trump's order directs the White House to revise and reissue those directives, which affect how agencies acquire AI tools and use them.

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Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from MotorTrend: A coming ground-fault circuit-interrupter revision could make slow-charging your car nearly impossible. The National Fire Protection Agency (NFPA) publishes a new National Electric Code every three years, and we almost never notice or care. But the next one, NFPA 70 2026, has the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) electric-vehicle charging subcommittee, OEMs, and companies in the EV Supply Equipment (EVSE, or charger) biz mightily concerned. That's because it proposes to require the same exact ground-fault circuit-interrupter protection that makes you push that little button on your bathroom outlet every time the curling iron won't heat up. Only now, that reset button will often be down in an electric panel, maybe locked in a room where you can't reset it. If EV drivers can't reliably plug in and expect their cars to charge overnight at home or while at work, those cars will become far less practical. [...] The national code doesn't care what you're plugging in, but vehicle chargers deserve their own carve-out. That's because no current ever flows until the charger has verified a solid ground connection from car to charger and from charger to electrical panel. They also include their own GFPE (Ground Fault Protection of Equipment), which is intended to protect equipment and is permitted to trip at values larger than 5mA, often in the 15-20mA range. That's why this new code REALLY needs to set a higher supply-side cutout (like what is allowed for marine vehicle shore power, which is up to 30mA). Because even if the Special Purpose GFCI with its 15-20mA trip level were allowed, it would be a 50/50 chance that any fault would trip the electrical-supply breaker or the device's internal breaker. But while the device is programmed to automatically reset and try again, the panel requires a manual reset. There is one EV-charger carve-out: Bi-directional chargers are exempt. This problematic application of 5 mA trip to most 240-volt equipment was added into this regulation late, during a second draft, and now the only way to head it off is for interested parties (SAE, OEMs, and EVSE manufacturers) to register their notice of motion in February for consideration in March. This isn't a government regulation, so it's utterly unaffected by the change in federal administration. These are functionary folks with minimal experience of EV charging, so the arguments must aim to convince the NFPA that implementing this code as is could grossly embarrass the Agency. (Understanding that any such embarrassment will only arise after buildings and projects are completed under the new code.)

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: TerraPower, a nuclear energy startup founded by Bill Gates, struck a deal this week with one of the largest data center developers in the US to deploy advanced nuclear reactors. TerraPower and Sabey Data Centers (SDC) are working together on a plan to run existing and future facilities on nuclear energy from small reactors. A memorandum of understanding signed by the two companies establishes a "strategic collaboration" that'll initially look into the potential for new nuclear power plants in Texas and the Rocky Mountain region that would power SDC's data centers. [...] There's still a long road ahead before that can become a reality. The technology TerraPower and similar nuclear energy startups are developing still have to make it through regulatory hurdles and prove that they can be commercially viable. Compared to older, larger nuclear power plants, the next generation of reactors are supposed to be smaller and easier to site. Nuclear energy is seen as an alternative to fossil fuels that are causing climate change. But it still faces opposition from some advocates concerned about the impact of uranium mining and storing radioactive waste near communities. TerraPower's reactor design for this collaboration, Natrium, is the only advanced technology of its kind with a construction permit application for a commercial reactor pending with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to the company. The company just broke ground on a demonstration project in Wyoming last year, and expects it to come online in 2030.

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The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2025 (PDF) highlights misinformation as the top global risk due to generative AI tools and state-sponsored campaigns undermining democratic systems, while cyberespionage ranks as a persistent threat with inadequate cyber resilience, especially among small organizations. From a report: The manipulation of information through gen AI and state-sponsored campaigns is disrupting democratic systems and undermining public trust in critical institutions. Efforts to combat this risk have a "formidable opponent" in gen AI-created false or misleading content that can be produced and distributed at scale, the report warned. Misinformation campaigns in the form of deepfakes, synthetic voice recordings or fabricated news stories are now a leading mechanism for foreign entities to influence "voter intentions, sow doubt among the general public about what is happening in conflict zones, or tarnish the image of products or services from another country." This is especially acute in India, Germany, Brazil and the United States. Concern remains especially high following a year of the so-called "super elections," which saw heightened state-sponsored campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion. But while it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish AI-generated fake content from human-generated one, AI technologies, in itself, is low in WEF's risk ranking. In fact, it has declined in the two-year outlook, from 29 in last year's report to 31 this year. Cyberespionage and warfare continue to be a reason for unease for most organizations, ranked fifth in the global risk landscape. According to the report, one in three CEOs cited cyberespionage and intellectual property theft as their top concerns in 2024. Seventy-one percent of chief risk officers say cyber risk and criminal activity such as money laundering and cybercrime could severely impact their organizations, while 45% of cyber leaders are concerned about disruption of operations and business processes, according to WEF's Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 report. The rising likelihood of threat actor activity and sophisticated technological disruption is listed as immediate concerns among security leaders.

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Epic Games is expanding its mobile app store to include nearly 20 third-party games on Android and EU iOS, launching a free games program, and temporarily covering Apple's Core Technology Fee for participating developers to counter platform restrictions. "Our aim here isn't just to launch a bunch of different stores in different places, but to build a single, cross-platform store in which, within the era of multi-platform games, if you buy a game or digital items in one place, you have the ability to own them everywhere," Epic CEO Tim Sweeney told reporters during a press briefing. The Verge reports: Under the program, Epic will offer new free games in the store each month before eventually switching to a weekly schedule. However, the games aren't actually in the store yet -- Epic said on Thursday that it "ran into a few bugs that we're working through now" and "we'll provide an update once the games are live and ready to play!" To sweeten the deal for developers that participate in the free games program on iOS, Epic will help defray the cost of using third-party marketplaces. For one year, it will pay these developers' Core Technology Fee (CTF): a 50 euro cent fee levied on every install of an iOS app that uses third-party stores after it exceeds 1 million annual downloads. (Apple gives developers with less than 10 million euros in global revenue a three-year on-ramp.) [...] Epic writes in its blog post that covering the fee "is not financially viable for every third party app store or for Epic long term, but we'll do it while the European Commission investigates Apple's non-compliance with the law."

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The Linux 6.14 kernel now maps out support for Microsoft's "Copilot" key "so that user-space software can determine the behavior for handling that key's action on the Linux desktop," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel. From the report: A change made to the atkbd keyboard driver on Linux now maps the F23 key to support the default copilot shortcut action. The patch authored by Lenovo engineer Mark Pearson explains [...]. Now it's up to the Linux desktop environments for determining what to do if the new Copilot key is pressed. The patch was part of the input updates now merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: The same morning that JetBlue Airways announced that it was the first airline partnering with Venmo to begin accepting payments for booking flights, an account on the popular payment platform was already raking in money. A Venmo user named Owen Miller paid the JetBlue Checkpoint Store for a drink on Wednesday morning, which is a typical transaction between a traveler and airline, except for the fact that JetBlue doesn't operate that account. "At this time, JetBlue does not accept Venmo payment for inflight purchases such as food and beverages," a representative for the airline told SFGATE in an email. "Unfortunately, we have seen accounts falsely representing themselves as JetBlue to deceive and defraud customers." To stay safe from scammers when booking JetBlue flights with Venmo, the airline recommends customers only use verified JetBlue channels, such as their official website or app, and follow their secure payment process using the provided QR code. JetBlue said it plans to fold Venmo payments into its mobile app later this year.

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Intel is advocating for modular PC designs to improve repairability, reduce e-waste, and align with the right-to-repair movement. A trio of executives makes their case for such designs in a recent blog post. The Register reports: Intel's approach to the problem is to draft three proposals targeting different market segments, saying that a one-size-fits-all approach would not be able to address the nuanced demands of these varied segments. Those three segments comprise "Premium Modular PC" (actually a laptop design); "Entry/Mainstream Modular PC" (another laptop); and "Desktop Modular PC." The first envisages a three-board system, comprising a core motherboard plus universal left and right I/O boards, the latter engineered to be common across fan-less Thin & Light designs with a 10W power envelope, and premium fanned designs for up to 20W or 30W. The Entry/Mainstream Modular PC is similar, with a core motherboard and left and right I/O boards, although in this segment, Intel says these can be redesigned to allow multiple SKUs of the design. The circuit boards are also cost-optimized here to cater to the mainstream segment, it says. The Desktop Modular PC design appears from Intel's diagram to use a midplane that has the Platform Controller Hub (PCH) silicon, with other modules connecting to this. These include CPU, memory, and GPU modules, removable using slide rails, along with hot-swappable storage, all designed to fit inside a 5 liter desktop chassis. Intel also said it is introducing subsystem-level replaceable modules. In practice, this means something like a Type-C connector on a flexible printed circuit (FPC) or an M.2 circuit board. The idea is that the module can easily be swapped out if the port or connector is damaged.

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President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that "sets a federal agenda meant to move U.S. digital assets businesses into friendly oversight," reports CoinDesk. The order creates a cryptocurrency working group tasked with proposing a new regulatory framework for digital assets. It will be "made up of the Treasury secretary, attorney general and chairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, along with other agency heads," notes Reuters. The directive also explores the creation of a "national digital asset stockpile," orders protections for banking services for crypto companies, and bans the creation of central bank digital currencies which could compete with existing cryptocurrencies.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source "tar pit" to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed "offensively" as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies' resources. "It's less like flypaper and more an infinite maze holding a minotaur, except the crawler is the minotaur that cannot get out. The typical web crawler doesn't appear to have a lot of logic. It downloads a URL, and if it sees links to other URLs, it downloads those too. Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself -- the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself," Aaron B, the creator of Nepenthes, told 404 Media. "Of course, these crawlers are massively scaled, and are downloading links from large swathes of the internet at any given time," they added. "But they are still consuming resources, spinning around doing nothing helpful, unless they find a way to detect that they are stuck in this loop." You can try Nepenthes via this link (it loads slowly and links endlessly on purpose).

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Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Ian Tregillis and Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin have published a physics paper deriving a mathematical model for the Wild Cards virus, a fictional pathogen that kills 90% of those infected while granting survivors either mutations ("Jokers") or superpowers ("Aces"). Published in the American Journal of Physics (February 2025), their paper develops a Lagrangian formulation to explain how the virus maintains its consistent "90:9:1" statistical distribution. The model accounts for both observable cases and hypothetical "crypto" carriers with undetectable effects. The authors propose treating viral outcomes as a dynamical system, using concepts from ergodic theory and classical mechanics. The resulting model combines Lagrangian mechanics, functional analysis, and probability theory to distill the complex viral behavior into a single mathematical expression.

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US President Donald Trump blasted European Union regulators for targeting Apple, Alphabet's Google and Meta, describing theircases against American companies as "a form of taxation." From a report: The EU has established a reputation globally for its aggressive regulation of major technology companies, often sparring with major social media platforms, such as Facebook and X, over content moderation, and the likes of Apple and Google over antitrust concerns. "These are American companies whether you like it or not," Trump said in comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "They shouldn't be doing that. That's, as far as I'm concerned, a form of taxation. We have some very big complaints with the EU." Trump specifically referenced a court case that Apple lost last year over a $14.4 billion Irish tax bill. The EU's Court of Justice in Luxembourg backed a landmark 2016 decision that Ireland broke state-aid law by giving Apple an unfair advantage, requiring Ireland to claw back the money that had been sitting in an escrow account pending the final ruling.

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The rumors are true: OpenAI today launched Operator, an AI agent capable of performing web-based tasks through its own browser, as a research preview for U.S. subscribers of its $200 monthly ChatGPT Pro tier. The agent uses GPT-4's vision capabilities and reinforcement learning to interact with websites through mouse and keyboard actions without requiring API integration, OpenAI said in a blog post. Operator can self-correct and defer to users for sensitive information though there are some limitations with complex interfaces. OpenAI said it's partnering with DoorDash, Instacart, OpenTable and others to develop real-world applications, with plans to expand access to Plus, Team and Enterprise users.

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Google will remove URL breadcrumbs from mobile search results globally, displaying only domain names instead of the full hierarchical path marked by ">" symbols, the company said. The change affects all smartphone and tablet searches while desktop results remain unchanged. The company said it made the change because of limited screen space, noting breadcrumbs often get cut off on smaller displays.

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A Tanzanian entrepreneur is transforming cement bags into solar-powered backpacks, helping students study after dark in areas without electricity. Innocent James's company, Soma Bags, sold 36,000 solar backpacks across Africa last year, with prices ranging from 12,000 to 22,500 Tanzanian shillings ($4-8), according to CNN. The innovation comes as 600 million Africans lack electricity access. In Tanzania, fewer than half of mainland households have power, forcing families to rely on expensive kerosene lamps. The backpacks, manufactured in James's Bulale factory employing 65 staff, feature flexible solar panels that charge during students' walks to school. One day of sunlight provides six to eight hours of reading light, making them more cost-effective than kerosene lamps commonly used in Tanzania, where fewer than half of mainland households have electricity access.

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