If we could remove the 50 most concerning pieces of space debris in low-Earth orbit, there'd be a 50% reduction in the overall debris-generating potential, reports Ars Technica. That's according to Darren McKnight, lead author of a paper presented Friday at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney, which calculated the objects most likely to collide with other fragments and create more debris. (Russia and the Soviet Union lead with 34 objects, followed by China with 10, the U.S. with three, Europe with two, and Japan with one.) Even just the top 10 were removed, the debris-generating potential drops by 30%. "The things left before 2000 are still the majority of the problem," he points out, and "76% of the objects in the top 50 were deposited last century." 88% of the objects are post-mission rocket bodies left behind to hurtle through space. "The bad news is, since January 1, 2024, we've had 26 rocket bodies abandoned in low-Earth orbit that will stay in orbit for more than 25 years," McKnight told Ars... China launched 21 of the 26 hazardous new rocket bodies over the last 21 months, each averaging more than 4 metric tons (8,800 pounds). Two more came from US launchers, one from Russia, one from India, and one from Iran. This trend is likely to continue as China steps up deployment of two megaconstellations — Guowang and Thousand Sails — with thousands of communications satellites in low-Earth orbit. Launches of these constellations began last year. The Guowang and Thousand Sails satellites are relatively small and likely capable of maneuvering out of the way of space debris, although China has not disclosed their exact capabilities. However, most of the rockets used for Guowang and Thousand Sails launches have left their upper stages in orbit. McKnight said nine upper stages China has abandoned after launching Guowang and Thousand Sails satellites will stay in orbit for more than 25 years, violating the international guidelines. It will take hundreds of rockets to fully populate China's two major megaconstellations. The prospect of so much new space debris is worrisome, McKnight said. "In the next few years, if they continue the same trend, they're going to leave well over 100 rocket bodies over the 25-year rule if they continue to deploy these constellations," he said. "So, the trend is not good...." Since 2000, China has accumulated more dead rocket mass in long-lived orbits than the rest of the world combined, according to McKnight. "But now we're at a point where it's actually kind of accelerating in the last two years as these constellations are getting deployed." A deputy head of China's national space agency recently said China is "currently researching" how to remove space debris from orbit, according to the article. ("One of the missions China claims is testing space debris mitigation techniques has docked with multiple spacecraft in orbit, but U.S. officials see it as a military threat. The same basic technologies needed for space debris cleanup — rendezvous and docking systems, robotic arms, and onboard automation — could be used to latch on to an adversary's satellite.")

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"Recent attacks show that hackers keep using the same tricks to sneak bad code into popular software registries," writes long-time Slashdot reader selinux geek, suggesting that "the real problem is how these registries are built, making these attacks likely to keep happening." After all, npm wasn't the only software library hit by a supply chain attack, argues the Linux Security blog. "PyPI and Docker Hub both faced their own compromises in 2025, and the overlaps are impossible to ignore." Phishing has always been the low-hanging fruit. In 2025, it wasn't just effective once — it was the entry point for multiple registry breaches, all occurring close together in different ecosystems... The real problem isn't that phishing happened. It's that there weren't enough safeguards to blunt the impact. One stolen password shouldn't be all it takes to poison an entire ecosystem. Yet in 2025, that's exactly how it played out... Even if every maintainer spotted every lure, registries left gaps that attackers could walk through without much effort. The problem wasn't social engineering this time. It was how little verification stood between an attacker and the "publish" button. Weak authentication and missing provenance were the quiet enablers in 2025... Sometimes the registry itself offers the path in. When the failure is at the registry level, admins don't get an alert, a log entry, or any hint that something went wrong. That's what makes it so dangerous. The compromise appears to be a normal update until it reaches the downstream system... It shifts the risk from human error to systemic design. And once that weakly authenticated code gets in, it doesn't always go away quickly, which leads straight into the persistence problem... Once an artifact is published, it spreads into mirrors, caches, and derivative builds. Removing the original upload doesn't erase all the copies... From our perspective at LinuxSecurity, this isn't about slow cleanup; it's about architecture. Registries have no universally reliable kill switch once trust is broken. Even after removal, poisoned base images replicate across mirrors, caches, and derivative builds, meaning developers may keep pulling them in long after the registry itself is "clean." The article condlues that "To us at LinuxSecurity, the real vulnerability isn't phishing emails or stolen tokens — it's the way registries are built. They distribute code without embedding security guarantees. That design ensures supply chain attacks won't be rare anomalies, but recurring events."BR> So in a world where "the only safe assumption is that the code you consume may already be compromised," they argue, developers should look to controls they can enforce themselves: Verify artifacts with signatures or provenance tools. Pin dependencies to specific, trusted versions. Generate and track SBOMs so you know exactly what's in your stack. Scan continuously, not just at the point of install.

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A computer-generated actress appearing in Instagram shorts now has a talent agent, reports the Los Angeles Times. The massive screen actors union SAG-AFTRA "weighed in with a withering response." SAG-AFTRA believes creativity is, and should remain, human-centered. The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics. To be clear, "Tilly Norwood" is not an actor, it's a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation. It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we've seen, audiences aren't interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience. It doesn't solve any "problem" — it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry. Additionally, signatory producers should be aware that they may not use synthetic performers without complying with our contractual obligations, which require notice and bargaining whenever a synthetic performer is going to be used. "They are taking our professional members' work that has been created, sometimes over generations, without permission, without compensation and without acknowledgment, building something new," SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin told the Los Angeles Times in an interview: "But the truth is, it's not new. It manipulates something that already exists, so the conceit that it isn't harming actors — because it is its own new thing — ignores the fundamental truth that it is taking something that doesn't belong to them," Astin said. "We want to allow our members to benefit from new technologies," Astin said. "They just need to know that it's happening. They need to give permission for it, and they need to be bargained with...." Some actors called for a boycott of any agents who decide to represent Norwood. "Read the room, how gross," In the Heights actor Melissa Barrera wrote on Instagram. "Our members reserve the right to not be in business with representatives who are operating in an unfair conflict of interest, who are operating in bad faith," Astin said. But this week the head of a new studio from startup Luma AI "said all the big companies and studios were working on AI assisted projects," writes Deadline — and then claimed "being under NDA, she was not in a position to announce any of the details."

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"A group of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, have developed a way to use the sensors in high-quality optical mice to capture subtle vibrations and convert them into audible data," reports Tom's Hardware: [T]he high polling rate and sensitivity of high-performance optical mice pick up acoustic vibrations from the surface where they sit. By running the raw data through signal processing and machine learning techniques, the team could hear what the user was saying through their desk. Mouse sensors with a 20,000 DPI or higher are vulnerable to this attack. And with the best gaming mice becoming more affordable annually, even relatively affordable peripherals are at risk.... [T]his compromise does not necessarily mean a complicated virus installed through a backdoor — it can be as simple as an infected FOSS that requires high-frequency mouse data, like creative apps or video games. This means it's not unusual for the software to gather this data. From there, the collected raw data can be extracted from the target computer and processed off-site. "With only a vulnerable mouse, and a victim's computer running compromised or even benign software (in the case of a web-based attack surface), we show that it is possible to collect mouse packet data and extract audio waveforms," the researchers state. The researchers created a video with raw audio samples from various stages in their pipeline on an accompanying web site where they calculate that "the majority of human speech" falls in a frequency range detectable by their pipeline. While the collected signal "is low-quality and suffers from non-uniform sampling, a non-linear frequency response, and extreme quantization," the researchers augment it with "successive signal processing and machine learning techniques to overcome these challenges and achieve intelligible reconstruction of user speech." They've titled their paper Invisible Ears at Your Fingertips: Acoustic Eavesdropping via Mouse Sensors. The paper's conclusion? "The increasing precision of optical mouse sensors has enhanced user interface performance but also made them vulnerable to side-channel attacks exploiting their sensitivity." Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the article.

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"More than 800,000 drivers for ride-hailing companies in California will soon be able to join a union," reports the Associated Press, "and bargain collectively for better wages and benefits under a measure signed Friday by Gov. Gavin Newsom." Supporters said the new law will open a path for the largest expansion of private sector collective bargaining rights in the state's history. The legislation is a significant compromise in the yearslong battle between labor unions and tech companies. California is the second state where Uber and Lyft drivers can unionize as independent contractors. Massachusetts voters passed a ballot referendum in November allowing unionization, while drivers in Illinois and Minnesota are pushing for similar rights... The collective bargaining measure now allows rideshare workers in California to join a union while still being classified as independent contractors and requires gig companies to bargain in good faith. "The new law doesn't apply to drivers for delivery apps like DoorDash."

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ScienceAlert writes that some of the tiny nanoplastic fragments present in soil "can make their way into the edible parts of vegetables, research has found." A team of scientists from the University of Plymouth in the UK placed radishes into a hydroponic (water-based) system containing polystyrene nanoparticles. After five days, almost 5% of the nanoplastics had made their way into the radish roots. A quarter of those were in the edible, fleshy roots, while a tenth had traveled up to the higher leafy shoots, despite anatomical features within the plants that typically screen harmful material from the soil. "Plants have a layer within their roots called the Casparian strip, which should act as a form of filter against particles, many of which can be harmful," says physiologist Nathaniel Clark. "This is the first time a study has demonstrated nanoplastic particles could get beyond that barrier, with the potential for them to accumulate within plants and be passed on to anything that consumes them...." There are some limitations to the study, as it didn't use a real-world farming setup. The concentration of plastics in the liquid solution is higher than estimated for soil, and only one type of plastic and one kind of vegetable were tested. Nevertheless, the basic principle stands: the smallest plastic nanoparticles can apparently sneak past protective barriers in plants, and from there into the food we eat... "There is no reason to believe this is unique to this vegetable, with the clear possibility that nanoplastics are being absorbed into various types of produce being grown all over the world," says Clark. The research has been published in Environmental Research.

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"It's not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast," writes Cory Doctorow. Sunday he shared an excerpt from his upcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. He succinctly explains "this moment we're living through, this Great Enshittening" using Amazon as an example. Platforms amass users, but then abuse them to make things better for their business customers. And then they abuse those business customers too, abusing everybody while claiming all the value for themselves. "And become a giant pile of shit." So first Amazon subsidized prices and shipping, then locked in customers with Prime shipping subscriptions (while adding the chains of DRM to its ebooks and audiobooks)... These tactics — Prime, DRM and predatory pricing — make it very hard not to shop at Amazon. With users locked in, to proceed with the enshittification playbook, Amazon needed to get its business customers locked in, too... [M]erchants' dependence on those customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more users, which makes the platform even more indispensable for merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts... [Amazon] uses its overview of merchants' sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants' contracting factories, to cream off its merchants' bestselling items and clone them, relegating the original seller to page umpty-million of its search results. Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don't use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist. Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a "service" in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon's own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings. All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that its own shipping is fully subsidised. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants' goods.... Add all the junk fees together and an Amazon seller is being screwed out of 45-51 cents on every dollar it earns there. Even if it wanted to absorb the "Amazon tax" on your behalf, it couldn't. Merchants just don't make 51% margins. So merchants must jack up prices, which they do. A lot... [W]hen merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required to raise their prices everywhere else, even on their own direct-sales stores. This arrangement is called most-favoured-nation status, and it's key to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon... If Amazon is taxing merchants 45-51 cents on every dollar they make, and if merchants are hiking their prices everywhere their goods are sold, then it follows you're paying the Amazon tax no matter where you shop — even the corner mom-and-pop hardware store. It gets worse. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen and you'll pay an average of 25% more than you would for your best match — which, on average, is located 17 places down in an Amazon search result. Doctorow knows what we need to do: Ban predatory pricing — "selling goods below cost to keep competitors out of the market (and then jacking them up again)." Impose structural separation, "so it can either be a platform, or compete with the sellers that rely on it as a platform." Curb junk fees, "which suck 45-51 cents on every dollar merchants take in." End its most favoured nation deal, which forces merchants "to raise their prices everywhere else, too. Unionise drivers and warehouse workers. Treat rigged search results as the fraud they are. These are policy solutions. (Because "You can't shop your way out of a monopoly," Doctorow warns.) And otherwise, as Doctorow says earlier, "Once a company is too big to fail, it becomes too big to jail, and then too big to care." In the mean time, Doctorow also makes up a new word — "the enshitternet" — calling it "a source of pain, precarity and immiseration for the people we love. "The indignities of harassment, scams, disinformation, surveillance, wage theft, extraction and rent-seeking have always been with us, but they were a minor sideshow on the old, good internet and they are the everything and all of the enshitternet." Thanks to long-time Slashdot readers mspohr and fjo3 for sharing the article.

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Friday OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced two changes coming "soon" to Sora: First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls... Second, we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation. People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences. We are going to try sharing some of this revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by users. The exact model will take some trial and error to figure out, but we plan to start very soon. Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, but of course we we want both to be valuable. "We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of 'interactive fan fiction'," Altman wrote, "and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all)."

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There's an 85-second ad (starring a humanoid robot) that argues "Technology promised to save us time. Instead it stole our focus. Opera Neon gives you both back." Or, as BleepingComputer describes it, Opera Neon "is a new browser that puts AI in control of your tabs and browsing activities, but it'll cost $19.90 per month." It'll do tasks for you, open websites for you, manage tabs for you, and listen to you. The idea behind these agentic browsers is to put AI in control. "Neon acts at your command, opening tabs, conducting research, finding the best prices, assessing security, whatever you need. It delivers outcomes you can use, share, and build on," Opera noted... As spotted on X, Opera Neon, the premium AI browser for Windows & macOS, costs $59.90 for nine months. Opera neon invite. This is an early bird offer, but when the offer expires, Opera Neon will cost $19.90 per month. The browser's web page says Opera Neon "can handle everyday tasks for you, like filling in forms, placing orders, replying to emails, or tidying up files. Reusable cards turn repeated chores into single-step tasks, letting you focus on the work that matters most to you." Opera describes itself as "the company that gave you tabs..."

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The Washington Post notes AI's "increasingly outsize role" in propping up America's economic fortunes. "Last week, the United States reported that the economy expanded at a rate of 1.6 percent in the first half of the year, with most of that growth driven by AI spending. Without AI investment, growth would have been at about a third of that rate, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis." The huge economic influence of AI spending illustrates how Silicon Valley is placing a bet of unprecedented scale that the technology will revolutionize every aspect of life and work. Its sway suggests there will be economic damage far beyond Silicon Valley if that bet doesn't work out or companies pull back. Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are on track to spend nearly $400 billion this year on data centers... Concern about a potential bubble in AI investment has recently grown in technology and financial circles. ChatGPT and other AI tools are hugely popular with companies and consumers, and hundreds of billions of dollars has been sunk into AI ventures over the past three years. But few of the new initiatives are profitable, and huge profits will be needed for the immense investments to pay off... "I'm getting more and more skeptical and more and more concerned with what's happening" with artificial intelligence, said Andrew Odlyzko, an economic historian and University of Minnesota emeritus professor who has studied financial bubbles closely, including the telecom bubble that collapsed in 2001 as part of the dot-com crash. Some industry insiders have expressed concern that the latest AI releases have fallen short of expectations, suggesting the technology may not advance enough to pay back the huge investments being made, he said. "AI is a craze," Odlyzko said... [The Federal Reserve's August "beige book" summarizes interviews with business owners across the country, according to the article — and it found surging investments in AI data centers, which could tie their fortunes to other sectors.] That's boosting demand for electricity and trucking in the Atlanta region, a hot spot for the facilities, and creating new projects for commercial real estate developers in the Philadelphia region. Because tech companies now dominate public markets, any change in their fortunes and share prices can also have a powerful influence on stock indexes, 401(k)s and the wider economy... Stock market slumps can have knock-on effects by undercutting the confidence of American businesses and consumers, leading them to spend less, said Gregory Daco [chief economist at strategy consulting firm EY-Parthenon]... "That directly affects economic activity," he said, potentially widening the economic fallout... Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a Sept. 4 note to clients that even if AI investment works out for companies like Google, there will be an "inevitable slowdown" in data center construction. That will cut revenue to companies providing the projects with chips and electricity, the note said. In a more extreme scenario where Big Tech pulls back spending to 2022 levels, the entire S&P 500 would lose 30 percent of the revenue growth Wall Street currently expects next year, the analysts wrote. The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy — and four times the subprime bubble, according to estimates in a recent note from independent research firm the MacroStrategy Partnership (as reported by MarketWatch). And "never before has so much money been spent so rapidly on a technology that, for all its potential, remains somewhat unproven as a profit-making business model," writes Bloomberg, adding that OpenAI and other large tech companies are "relying increasingly on debt to support their unprecedented spending." (Although Bloomberg also notes that ChatGPT alone has roughly 700 million weekly users, and that last month Anthropic reported roughly three quarters of companies are using Claude to automate work.)

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The book Life 3.0 remembers a 2017 conversation where Alphabet CEO Larry Page "made a 'passionate' argument for the idea that 'digital life is the natural and desirable next step' in 'cosmic evolution'," remembers an essay in the Wall Street Journal. "Restraining the rise of digital minds would be wrong, Page contended. Leave them off the leash and let the best minds win..." "As it turns out, Larry Page isn't the only top industry figure untroubled by the possibility that AIs might eventually push humanity aside. It is a niche position in the AI world but includes influential believers. Call them the Cheerful Apocalyptics... " I first encountered such views a couple of years ago through my X feed, when I saw a retweet of a post from Richard Sutton. He's an eminent AI researcher at the University of Alberta who in March received the Turing Award, the highest award in computer science... [Sutton had said if AI becomes smarter than people — and then can be more powerful — why shouldn't it be?] Sutton told me AIs are different from other human inventions in that they're analogous to children. "When you have a child," Sutton said, "would you want a button that if they do the wrong thing, you can turn them off? That's much of the discussion about AI. It's just assumed we want to be able to control them." But suppose a time came when they didn't like having humans around? If the AIs decided to wipe out humanity, would he be at peace with that? "I don't think there's anything sacred about human DNA," Sutton said. "There are many species — most of them go extinct eventually. We are the most interesting part of the universe right now. But might there come a time when we're no longer the most interesting part? I can imagine that.... If it was really true that we were holding the universe back from being the best universe that it could, I think it would be OK..." I wondered, how common is this idea among AI people? I caught up with Jaron Lanier, a polymathic musician, computer scientist and pioneer of virtual reality. In an essay in the New Yorker in March, he mentioned in passing that he had been hearing a "crazy" idea at AI conferences: that people who have children become excessively committed to the human species. He told me that in his experience, such sentiments were staples of conversation among AI researchers at dinners, parties and anyplace else they might get together. (Lanier is a senior interdisciplinary researcher at Microsoft but does not speak for the company.)"There's a feeling that people can't be trusted on this topic because they are infested with a reprehensible mind virus, which causes them to favor people over AI when clearly what we should do is get out of the way." We should get out of the way, that is, because it's unjust to favor humans — and because consciousness in the universe will be superior if AIs supplant us. "The number of people who hold that belief is small," Lanier said, "but they happen to be positioned in stations of great influence. So it's not something one can ignore...." You may be thinking to yourself: If killing someone is bad, and if mass murder is very bad, then the extinction of humanity must be very, very bad — right? What this fails to understand, according to the Cheerful Apocalyptics, is that when it comes to consciousness, silicon and biology are merely different substrates. Biological consciousness is of no greater worth than the future digital variety, their theory goes... While the Cheerful Apocalyptics sometimes write and talk in purely descriptive terms about humankind's future doom, two value judgments in their doctrines are unmissable.The first is a distaste, at least in the abstract, for the human body. Rather than seeing its workings as awesome, in the original sense of inspiring awe, they view it as a slow, fragile vessel, ripe for obsolescence... The Cheerful Apocalyptics' larger judgment is a version of the age-old maxim that "might makes right"...

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Currently DNA synthesis companies "deploy biosecurity software designed to guard against nefarious activity," reports the Washington Post, "by flagging proteins of concern — for example, known toxins or components of pathogens." But Microsoft researchers discovered "up to 100 percent" of AI-generated ricin-like proteins evaded detection — and worked with a group of leading industry scientists and biosecurity experts to design a patch. Microsoft's chief science officer called it "a Windows update model for the planet. "We will continue to stay on it and send out patches as needed, and also define the research processes and best practices moving forward to stay ahead of the curve as best we can." But is that enough? Outside biosecurity experts applauded the study and the patch, but said that this is not an area where one single approach to biosecurity is sufficient. "What's happening with AI-related science is that the front edge of the technology is accelerating much faster than the back end ... in managing the risks," said David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University School of Medicine. "It's not just that we have a gap — we have a rapidly widening gap, as we speak. Every minute we sit here talking about what we need to do about the things that were just released, we're already getting further behind." The Washington Post notes not every company deploys biosecurity software. But "A different approach, biosecurity experts say, is to ensure AI software itself is imbued with safeguards before digital ideas are at the cusp of being brought into labs for research and experimentation." "The only surefire way to avoid problems is to log all DNA synthesis, so if there is a worrisome new virus or other biological agent, the sequence can be cross-referenced with the logged DNA database to see where it came from," David Baker, who shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on proteins, said in an email.

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"When someone searches for 'James Bond' on Prime Video now, all of the classic films will show up..." notes Parade. But recently Amazon's streaming service had tried new thumbnails with "matching minimalist backgrounds," so every Bond actor — from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig — "had a stylish image with '007' emblazoned over a color background." But in most of those "stylized" images, James Bond's guns were edited out. It looks like Amazon backed off. On my TV and on my tablet, selecting Dr. No now brings up a page where Bond is holding his gun. (Just like in the original publicity photo.) And there's also guns in the key art for The Spy Who Loved Me, A View to a Kill, and License to Kill. "Perhaps feeling shame for the terrible botch job on the artwork, not to mention the idea in the first place, Amazon Prime has now reinstated the previous key art across its streaming service," notes the unofficial James Bond fan site MI6. (In most cases guns still aren't shown, but they seem to achieve this by showing a photo from the movie.) That blog post includes a gallery preserving copies of Amazon's original "stylized" images. They'd written Thursday that Amazon didn't just use cropping. "In some cases the images have been digitally manipulated to varying levels of success."

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If you upload an image to serve as the inspiration for a Sora video, "the app will reject your image if it detects a face — any face," writes Mashable." (Unless that person has agreed to participate.) All Sora videos also include a watermark, notes PC Magazine, and Sora banned the creation of AI-generated videos showing public figures. "But it turns out the policy doesn't apply to dead celebrities..." Unlike lower-quality deepfakes, many of the Sora videos appear disturbingly realistic and accurately mimic the voices and facial expressions of deceased celebrities. Some of the clips even contain licensed music... [A]ccording to OpenAI, the videos are fair game. "We don't have a comment to add, but we do allow the generation of historical figures," the company tells PCMag. CNBC reported Saturday that Sora users have also "flooded the platform with artificial intelligence-generated clips of popular brands and animated characters." They noted Sora generated videos with clearly-copyrighted characters like Ronald McDonald, Simpsons characters, Pikachu, Patrick Star from "SpongeBob SquarePants," and Pikachu. (as Cracked.com puts it, "Ever wish 'South Park' was two minutes long and not funny?") OpenAI's "opt-out" policy for copyright holders was unusual, CNBC writes, since "Typically, third parties have to get explicit permission to use someone's work under copyright law"" (as explained by Jason Bloom, partner/chair of the intellectual property litigation practice group at law firm Haynes Boone). "You can't just post a notice to the public saying we're going to use everybody's works, unless you tell us not to," he said. "That's not how copyright works." "A lot of the videos that people are going to generate of these cartoon characters are going to infringe copyright," Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School, said in an interview. "OpenAI is opening itself up to quite a lot of copyright lawsuits by doing this..."

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Toyota sold just 61 BZ models in September, reports Electrek. "Including the Lexus RZ, which managed 86 sales, Toyota sold just 147 all-electric vehicles in the US last month, over 90% less than the 1,847 it sold in September 2024." Toyota's total sales were up 14% with over 185,700 vehicles sold, meaning EVs accounted for less than 0.1%... So, why is Toyota struggling to sell EVs when the market is booming? For one, Toyota recalled over 95,000 electric vehicles last month, including the bZ4X, Lexus RZ, and Subaru Solterra, all of which are built on the same platform. The recall was due to a faulty defroster, but Toyota instructed its dealers to halt sales of the bZ4X, Lexus RZ, and Subaru Solterra. Toyota hopes to turn things around with a new and improved lineup. The 2026 Toyota BZ (formerly the bZ4X) is arriving at US dealerships, promising to fix some of the biggest complaints with the outgoing electric SUV. Powered by a larger 74.7 kWh battery, the 2026 Toyota BZ offers up to 314 miles of driving range, a 25% improvement from the 2025 bZ4X... Toyota's new electric SUV also features a built-in NACS charge port, allowing for recharging at Tesla Superchargers. It also features a new thermal management system and battery preconditioning, which improves charge times from 10% to 80% in about 30 minutes... It's not just the US that Toyota's EV sales crashed last month, either. In its home market of Japan, Toyota (including Lexus) sold just 18 EVs in September. The Japanese auto giant is betting on new models to drive growth.

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"Microsoft buys a lot of GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD," writes the Register. "But moving forward, Redmond's leaders want to shift the majority of its AI workloads from GPUs to its own homegrown accelerators..." Driving the transition is a focus on performance per dollar, which for a hyperscale cloud provider is arguably the only metric that really matters. Speaking during a fireside chat moderated by CNBC on Wednesday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said that up to this point, Nvidia has offered the best price-performance, but he's willing to entertain anything in order to meet demand. Going forward, Scott suggested Microsoft hopes to use its homegrown chips for the majority of its datacenter workloads. When asked, "Is the longer term idea to have mainly Microsoft silicon in the data center?" Scott responded, "Yeah, absolutely... Microsoft is reportedly in the process of bringing a second-generation Maia accelerator to market next year that will no doubt offer more competitive compute, memory, and interconnect performance... It should be noted that AI accelerators aren't the only custom chips Microsoft has been working on. Redmond also has its own CPU called Cobalt and a whole host of platform security silicon designed to accelerate cryptography and safeguard key exchanges across its vast datacenter domains.

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The Greater Manchester Police force has 12,677 employees. But they've now suspended work-from-home privileges, reports the BBC, "following an investigation into so-called 'key-jamming', which can allow people to falsely appear to be working. "Twenty-six police officers, staff and contractors are facing misconduct proceedings following the probe, the force said." One constable told a hearing that a police detective working from home had made it look like his computer was in use on 38 different occasions over 12 days, according to an earlier BBC article. The evidence "showed lengthy periods where the only activity is single keystrokes, pressing the 'H' key about 30 times, between 10:28 and 11:56 GMT on 3 December, and then the 'I' key more than 16,000 times." The detective "used key jamming for 45 hours out of a total of 85 he was logged in for and was frequently away from the keyboard for half of his working day." The constable said the detective's motivation was "laziness" — and the detective has already resigned. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

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From 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. today (EDT), the Free Software Foundation celebrates its 40th anniversary with an online and in-person event. "We will broadcast the talks and workshops via a fully free software livestream on fsf.org/live," according to the FSF's official "FSF40 Celebration" page. "Everyone will be able to join the discussion via the #fsf40 IRC channel on Libera.Chat." "4 decades, 4 freedoms, 4 all users" is the event's slogan. And during the ceremony, a 40th-anniversary cake was sliced by newly-elected FSF president Ian Kelling (who was unanimously confirmed by FSF board members): Kelling, age 43, has held the role of a board member and a voting member since March 2021. The board said of Kelling's confirmation: "His hands-on technical experience resulting from his position as the organization's senior systems administrator proved invaluable for his work on the board of directors... He has the technical knowledge to speak with authority on most free software issues, and he has a strong connection with the community as an active speaker and blogger." Kelling earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and is a continuous user, developer, and advocate for free software. His personal commitment to complete software freedom has been shaped by his past experiences working as a software developer for proprietary software companies while using, learning, and contributing to GNU/Linux on his own time. "Ian has shown good judgment on the board, and a firm commitment to the free software movement," FSF founder and Chief GNUisance Richard Stallman said. Outgoing FSF President and long-time board member Geoff Knauth added: "Since joining the board in 2021, Ian has shown a clear understanding of the free software philosophy in today's technology, and a strong vision. He recognizes threats in upcoming technologies, promotes transparency, has played a significant role in designing and implementing the new board recruitment processes, and has always adhered to ethical principles. He has also given me valuable advice at critical moments, for which I am very grateful..." Kelling will continue to fill the role of senior systems administrator for the FSF, which he has held since 2017, where he leads the FSF's tech team under the direction of Zoë Kooyman, executive director of the FSF. True to the FSF's tradition for this role, he takes on the governance role as a volunteer. Upcoming on the livestream: Free Software Foundation triviaLibreLocal group lightning talksA panel with the FSF, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) , F-Droid, and Sugar Labs

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Women tend to live longer than men. There are traditional explanations: Men smoke more. They drink more. They tend to engage in riskier behavior. But the fact that this lifespan gap holds true regardless of country or century indicates something deeper is also at play. A growing body of evidence suggests that women's relative longevity may derive, in part, from having double X chromosomes, a redundancy that protects them against harmful mutations. That theory was further bolstered Wednesday with the publication of the most sweeping analysis to date of the lifespan differences between males and females in more than 1,000 mammal and bird species... If a baby has a pair of X chromosomes, she's a girl. If the baby inherits an X chromosome and a Y chromosome, he's a boy. In birds, however, the situation is reversed. Female birds have a pair of unlike sex chromosomes while males have the like pair... For their study, Colchero, Staerk and their colleagues collected data on the lifespans of 528 mammal species and 648 bird species kept in zoos. The team found that most other mammals are like humans, with the females of nearly three-fourths of mammal species outliving their male counterparts. But in birds, 68 percent of species studied showed a bias toward male longevity, as expected from their chromosomal makeup.

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: CBS News has a TL;DR video report, but Jeremy Stern's earlier epic Class Dismissed [at Collosus.com] offers a deep dive into Alpha School, "the teacherless, homeworkless, K-12 private school in Austin, Texas, where students have been testing in the top 0.1% nationally by self-directing coursework with AI tutoring apps for two hours a day. Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to "mastery-level" (i.e., scoring over 90%) in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in 'workshops,' learning things like how to run an Airbnb or food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production, or build a business or drone." Founder MacKenzie Larson's dream that "kids must love school so much they don't want to go on vacation" drew the attention of — and investments of money and time from — mysterious tech billionaire Joe Liemandt, who sent his own kids to Larson's school and now aims to bring the experience to rest of the world. "When GenAI hit in 2022," Liemandt said, "I took a billion dollars out of my software company. I said, 'Okay, we're going to be able to take MacKenzie's 2x in 2 hours groundwork and get it out to a billion kids.' It's going to cost more than that, but I could start to figure it out. It's going to happen. There's going to be a tablet that costs less than $1,000 that is going to teach every kid on this planet everything they need to know in two hours a day and they're going to love it. "I really do think we can transform education for everybody in the world. So that's my next 20 years. I literally wake up now and I'm like, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I will work 7 by 24 for the next 20 years to fricking do this. The greatest 20 years of my life are right ahead of me. I don't think I'm going to lose. We're going to win." Of course, Stern writes at Collosus.com, there will be questions about this model of schooling, but asks: "Suppose that from kindergarten through 12th grade, your child's teachers were, in essence, stacks of machines. Suppose those machines unlocked more of your child's academic potential than you knew was possible, and made them love school. Suppose the schooling they loved involved vision monitoring and personal data capture. Suppose that surveillance architecture enabled them to outperform your wildest expectations on standardized tests, and in turn gave them self-confidence and self-esteem, and made their own innate potential seem limitless.... Suppose poor kids had a reason to believe and a way to show they're just as academically capable as rich kids, and that every student on Earth could test in what we now consider the top 10%. Suppose it allowed them to spend two-thirds of their school day on their own interests and passions. Suppose your child's deep love of school minted a new class of education billionaires. "If you shrink from such a future, by which principle would you justify stifling it?"

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