Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the war-of-the-machines department: An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters:

The secretive Russian satellite in space that U.S. officials believe is connected to a nuclear anti-satellite weapon program has appeared to be spinning uncontrollably, suggesting it may no longer be functioning in what could be a setback for Moscow's space weapon efforts, according to U.S. analysts... [The Cosmos 2553 satellite launched in 2022] has had various bouts of what appears to be errant spinning over the past year, according to Doppler radar data from space-tracking firm LeoLabs and optical data from Slingshot Aerospace shared with Reuters.

Believed to be a radar satellite for Russian intelligence as well as a radiation testing platform, the satellite last year became the center of U.S. allegations that Russia for years has been developing a nuclear weapon capable of destroying entire satellite networks, such as SpaceX's vast Starlink internet system that Ukrainian troops have been using. U.S. officials assess Cosmos 2553's purpose, though not itself a weapon, is to aid Russia's development of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon. Russia has denied it is developing such a weapon and says Cosmos 2553 is for research purposes....

"This observation strongly suggests the satellite is no longer operational," the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, said of LeoLabs' analysis in its annual Space Threat Assessment published on Friday.

Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the fast-food-restaurants department: What can you build with a 3D printer? Starbucks just printed itself a new store — a drive-through location in the southern tip of Texas.

Fast Company says it's a store that "looks more like the future of construction than your average café."

Built with layers of concrete piped out by a giant robotic printer, the 1,400-square-foot structure is part of the company's ongoing effort to modernize operations and trim costs... Peri-3D, a German company, used a giant 3D printer to pump out layers of concrete mixture to create the structure. According to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, the cost for building the small scale coffee shop was about $1.2 million...

Of course, the new method is a first for the brand. And builders say, the more they use the technology, the more efficient they are at it. In Georgetown, Texas, an entire community of 100 homes was recently built using 3D-printing. The company who built the community, Lennar, says they're seeing costs drop with each build. Stuart Miller, chairman and co-CEO of Lennar, told CNBC earlier this year that the construction company says their costs and cycle time go down "by half" by adopting 3D-printing. "This is significant improvement in evolving a housing market that has the ability to change over time and being more adaptable and more functional in providing affordable and attainable housing for a broader swath of the market," said Miller...

3D-printing is also much faster, meaning that projects can be completed in a fraction of the time, potentially drastically cutting labor costs. According to the World Economic Forum, 3D-printing can cost just 30% of what building structures the old-fashioned way costs.

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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the don't-be-a-tool department: Microsoft Copilot "isn't doing as well as the company would like," reports XDA-Developers.com (citing a report from startup/VC industry site Newcomer).

The Redmond giant has invested billions of dollars and a lot of manpower into making it happen, but as a recent report claims, people just don't care. In fact, if the report is to be believed, Microsoft's rise in the AI scene has already come to a screeching halt:

At Microsoft's annual executive huddle last month, the company's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool over the past year. It was essentially a flat line, showing around 20 million weekly users. On the same slide was another line showing ChatGPT's growth over the same period, arching ever upward toward 400 million weekly users. OpenAI's iconic chatbot was soaring, while Microsoft's best hope for a mass-adoption AI tool was idling. It was a sobering chart for Microsoft's consumer AI team...
That's right; Microsoft Copilot's weekly user base is only 5% of the number of people who use ChatGPT, and it's not increasing. It's also worth noting that there are approximately 1.5 billion Windows users worldwide, which means just over 1% of them are using Copilot, a tool that's now a Windows default app....
It's not a huge surprise that Copilot is faltering. Despite Microsoft's CEO claiming that Copilot will become "the next Start button", the company has had to backtrack on the Copilot key and allow people to customise it to do something else, including giving back its original feature of the Menu key.
They also note earlier reports that Intel's AI PC chips aren't selling well.

Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the union-sets department: "Google's DeepMind UK team reportedly seeks to unionize," reports TechCrunch:

Around 300 London-based members of Google's AI-focused DeepMind team are seeking to unionize with the Communication Workers Union, according to a Financial Times report that cites three people involved with the unionization effort.

These DeepMind employees are reportedly unhappy about Google's decision to remove a pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance from its website. They're also concerned about the company's work with the Israeli military, including a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract that has prompted protests elsewhere at Google.
At least five DeepMind employees quit, according to the report (out of a 2,000 total U.K. staff members).

"A small group of around 200 employees of Google and its parent company Alphabet previously announced that they were unionizing," the article adds, "though as a union representing just a tiny slice of the total Google workforce, it lacked the ability to collectively bargain."

Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the misery-loves-company department: "Not so long ago, working in tech meant job security, extravagant perks and a bring-your-whole-self-to-the-office ethos rare in other industries," writes the Wall Street Journal.

But now tech work "looks like a regular job," with workers "contending with the constant fear of layoffs, longer hours and an ever-growing list of responsibilities for the same pay."

Now employees find themselves doing the work of multiple laid-off colleagues. Some have lost jobs only to be rehired into positions that aren't eligible for raises or stock grants. Changing jobs used to be a surefire way to secure a raise; these days, asking for more money can lead to a job offer being withdrawn.

The shift in tech has been building slowly. For years, demand for workers outstripped supply, a dynamic that peaked during the Covid-19 pandemic. Big tech companies like Meta and Salesforce admitted they brought on too many employees. The ensuing downturn included mass layoffs that started in 2022...

[S]ome longtime tech employees say they no longer recognize the companies they work for. Management has become more focused on delivering the results Wall Street expects. Revenue remains strong for tech giants, but they're pouring resources into costly AI infrastructure, putting pressure on cash flow. With the industry all grown up, a heads-down, keep-quiet mentality has taken root, workers say... Tech workers are still well-paid compared with other sectors, but currently there's a split in the industry. Those working in AI — and especially those with Ph.D.s — are seeing their compensation packages soar. But those without AI experience are finding they're better off staying where they are, because companies aren't paying what they were a few years ago.

Other excepts from the Wall Street Journal's article:

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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the halt-and-catch-fire department: The university blamed it on "the significant number of students" who violated their coding competition's rules.
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp quotes this report from The Logic: Finding that many students violated rules and submitted code not written by themselves, the University of Waterloo's Centre for Computing and Math decided not to release results from its annual Canadian Computing Competition (CCC), which many students rely on to bolster their chances of being accepted into Waterloo's prestigious computing and engineering programs, or land a spot on teams to represent Canada in international competitions. "It is clear that many students submitted code that they did not write themselves, relying instead on forbidden external help," the CCC co-chairs explained in a statement. "As such, the reliability of 'ranking' students would neither be equitable, fair, or accurate."

"It is disappointing that the students who violated the CCC Rules will impact those students who are deserving of recognition," the univeresity said in its statement. They added that they are "considering possible ways to address this problem for future contests."

Posted by Black Convoy from TFW2005


Dr. Wu have revealed images of the gray prototype of their upcoming MS-37 Giant Axe (Legends Scale Broadside) via their Weibo account. This is another collaboration between Mechanic Toy and Dr. Wu, and now they bring us an impressive G1 triple changer Broadside for the Legends Scale. He will stand 13 cm tall in robot mode. Five little 1-cm sized planes will be included as a pre-order bonus gift for the firt 500 pre-orders. They have also revealed two color variants: MS-37D in his pre-final deco and head, and MS-37M in his first pre-final deco and head. See the images after the break and then let » Continue Reading.

The post Dr Wu x Mechanic Toy MS-37 Giant Axe (Legends Scale Broadside) Color Prototype appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.

Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the Windows-refund-day department: "The U.S. and Canadian websites for Lenovo offered U.S. $140 and CAD $211 off on the same ThinkPad X1 Carbon model when choosing any one of the Linux-based alternatives," reports It's FOSS News:

This was brought to my attention thanks to a Reddit post... Others then chimed in, saying that Lenovo has been doing this since at least 2020 and that the big price difference shows how ridiculous Windows' pricing is...
Not all models from their laptop lineup, like ThinkPad, Yoga, Legion, LOQ, etc., feature an option to get Linux pre-installed during the checkout process. Luckily, there is an easy way to filter through the numerous laptops. Just go to the laptops section (U.S.) on the Lenovo website and turn on the "Operating System" filter under the Filter by specs sidebar menu.

The article end with an embedded YouTube video showing a VCR playing a videotape of a 1999 local TV news report... about the legendary "Windows Refund Day" protests.

Slashdot ran numerous stories about the event — including one by Jon Katz...

Posted by Kotaku Staff from Kotaku
This week saw the release of both Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, and we’ve got tips for getting you started on the right foot regardless of which one you might be playing. We’ll also help you master the meta for Marvel Rivals season 2 and make the most of your hideout in Assa…

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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the do-or-do-not-do department: 80-year-old George Lucas appeared this week at a 45th anniversary screening of The Empire Strikes Back, reports CNN — and finally gave a good explanation for why Yoda speaks the way he does. "He explained that it came about in order to ensure that the little alien's usually profound messages really landed with audiences."
"Because if you speak regular English, people won't listen that much," Lucas said at the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival, per Variety. "But if he had an accent, or it's really hard to understand what he's saying, they focus on what he's saying." Yoda was "basically the philosopher of the movie," the filmmaker added. "I had to figure out a way to get people to actually listen — especially 12-year-olds."

Also this week, the verified Instagram accounts for Disney+, Star Wars and LucasFilm — Lucas' film and television production company — posted clips of Yoda doing bloopers on the set of "Star Wars" films, with [Frank] Oz continuing to do the voice and manipulate the heavy Yoda puppet even on takes that were unusable. Suffice it to say: One for the ages, Yoda is.

Lucas also remembered how he'd "mounted a guerilla campaign to generate excitement" for the first Star Wars movie, reports Variety. ("I got the kids walking around Disneyland and the Comic Cons and all that kind of stuff... that's why Fox was so shocked when the first day the lines were all around the block.") And Variety says Lucas described a condition in his contract for Star Wars "that would again be life-changing, both for him and the entertainment industry as a whole."

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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the insensitivity-training department: Some patches for Linux 6.15-rc4 (updating the kernel driver for the Bcachefs file system) triggered some "straight-to-the-point wisdom" from Linus Torvalds about case-insensitive filesystems, reports Phoronix.

Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet started the conversation, explaining how some buggy patches for their case-insensitive file and folder support were upstreamed into the Bcachefs kernel driver nearly two years ago:

When I was discussing with the developer who did the implementation, I noted that fstests should already have tests. However, it seems I neglected to tell him to make sure the tests actually run... It is _not_ enough to simply rely on the automated tests. You have to have eyes on what your code is doing.
Overstreet added "There's a story behind the case insensitive directory fixes, and lessons to be learned." To which Torvalds replied.... "No."
"The only lesson to be learned is that filesystem people never learn."

Torvalds: Case-insensitive names are horribly wrong, and you shouldn't have done them at all. The problem wasn't the lack of testing, the problem was implementing it in the first place. The problem is then compounded by "trying to do it right", and in the process doing it horrible wrong indeed, because "right" doesn't exist, but trying to will make random bytes have very magical meaning.

And btw, the tests are all completely broken anyway. Last I saw, they didn't actually test for all the really interesting cases — the ones that cause security issues in user land. Security issues like "user space checked that the filename didn't match some security-sensitive pattern". And then the shit-for-brains filesystem ends up matching that pattern *anyway*, because the people who do case insensitivity *INVARIABLY* do things like ignore non-printing characters, so now "case insensitive" also means "insensitive to other things too"....
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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the artistic-works-of-fiction department: "4chan, down for more than a week after hackers got in through an insecure script that handled PDFs, is back online," notes BoingBoing. (They add that Thursday saw 4chan's first blog postin years — just the words "Testing testing 123 123...") But 4chan posted a much longer explanation on Friday," confirming their servers were compromised by a malicious PDF upload from "a hacker using a UK IP address," granting access to their databases and administrative dashboard.

The attacker "spent several hours exfiltrating database tables and much of 4chan's source code. When they had finished downloading what they wanted, they began to vandalize 4chan at which point moderators became aware and 4chan's servers were halted, preventing further access."

While not all of our servers were breached, the most important one was, and it was due to simply not updating old operating systems and code in a timely fashion. Ultimately this problem was caused by having insufficient skilled man-hours available to update our code and infrastructure, and being starved of money for years by advertisers, payment providers, and service providers who had succumbed to external pressure campaigns. We had begun a process of speccing new servers in late 2023. As many have suspected, until that time 4chan had been running on a set of servers purchased second-hand by moot a few weeks before his final Q&A [in 2015], as prior to then we simply were not in a financial position to consider such a large purchase. Advertisers and payment providers willing to work with 4chan are rare, and are quickly pressured by activists into cancelling their services. Putting together the money for new equipment took nearly a decade...

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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the battery-low department: An anonymous reader shared this report from Business Insider:

A Lufthansa flight carrying 461 passengers had to divert after someone's tablet became "jammed" in a business-class seat.

The Airbus A380 took off from Los Angeles on Wednesday, bound for Munich, and had been flying for around three hours when the pilots diverted to Boston Logan International Airport. In a statement to Business Insider, an airline spokesperson said the tablet had become "jammed in a Business Class seat" and had "already shown visible signs of deformation due to the seat's movements" when the flight diverted. [The aviation site] Simply Flying, which first reported the news, said the device was an iPad.

The decision to divert was taken "to eliminate any potential risk, particularly with regard to possible overheating," the spokesperson added, saying that it was the joint decision of the crew and air traffic control. Lithium batteries pose a safety risk if damaged, punctured, or crushed... In a confined space like an aircraft cabin, a lithium battery fire poses a serious hazard to the passengers onboard. Last year, a Breeze Airways flight from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh had to make an emergency landing in Albuquerque after a passenger's laptop caught fire.

Posted by Black Convoy from TFW2005


Thanks to 2005 Boards member Automorpher we have our first world sighting of the new Yolopark AMK Transformers G1 Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Starscream & IDW Tarn. These are re-releases of the previous AMK PRO Optimus Prime and Starscream (Megatron was also revealed previously) model kits but now under the AMK line plus two new molds: Bumblebee and Tarn. These are made of only plastic parts, with simple painting and no extra accessories, so they are a more accessible alternative compared to the AMK PRO line. These were spotted at Takashiyama, giving us a clear look at the packaging. It’s good to notice that Optimus » Continue Reading.

The post Yolopark AMK G1 Transformers Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Starscream & Tarn Out In Singapore appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.

Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the moonshining department: "Future moon astronauts may find water more accessible than previously thought," writes Space.com, citing a new NASA-led experiment:

Because the moon lacks a magnetic field like Earth's, the barren lunar surface is constantly bombarded by energetic particles from the sun... Li Hsia Yeo, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, led a lab experiment observing the effects of simulated solar wind on two samples of loose regolith brought to Earth by the Apollo 17 mission... To mimic conditions on the moon, the researchers built a custom apparatus that included a vacuum chamber, where the samples were placed, and a tiny particle accelerator, which the scientists used to bombard the samples with hydrogen ions for several days.

"The exciting thing here is that with only lunar soil and a basic ingredient from the sun — which is always spitting out hydrogen — there's a possibility of creating water," Yeo said in a statement. "That's incredible to think about." Supporting this idea, observations from previous moon missions have revealed an abundance of hydrogen gas in the moon's tenuous atmosphere. Scientists suspect that solar-wind-driven heating facilitates the combination of hydrogen atoms on the surface into hydrogen gas, which then escapes into space. This process also has a surprising upside, the new study suggests. Leftover oxygen atoms are free to bond with new hydrogen atoms formed by repeated bombardment of the solar wind, prepping the moon for more water formation on a renewable basis.

The findings could help assess how sustainable water on the moon is, as the sought-after resource is crucial for both life support and as propellant for rockets. The team's study was published in March in the journal JGR Planets.

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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the feeling-insecure department: Slashdot reader itwbennett writes: Personal health information on 4.7 million Blue Shield California subscribers was unintentionally shared between Google Analytics and Google Ads between April 2021 and January 2025 due to a misconfiguration error. Security consultant and SANS Institute instructor Brandon Evans points to two lessons to take from this debacle:

Read the documentation of any third party service you sign up for, to understand the security and privacy controls;Know what data is being collected from your organization, and what you don't want shared.

"If there is a concern by the organization that Google Ads would use this information, they should really consider whether or not they should be using a platform like Google Analytics in the first place," Evans says in the article. "Because from a technical perspective, there is nothing stopping Google from sharing the information across its platform...

"Google definitely gives you a great bunch of controls, but technically speaking, that data is within the walls of that organization, and it's impossible to know from the outside how that data is being used."

Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the video-killed-the-radio-star department: "Google-owned YouTube's revenue last year was estimated to be $54.2 billion," reports the Los Angeles Times, "which would make it the second-largest media company behind Walt Disney Co., according to a recent report from research firm MoffettNathanson, which called YouTube 'the new king of all media.'"

YouTube, run by Chief Executive Neal Mohan since 2023, accounted for 12% of U.S. TV viewing in March, more than other rival streaming platforms including Netflix and Tubi, according to Nielsen... More people are watching YouTube on TV sets rather than on smartphones and computer screens, consuming more than 1 billion hours on average of YouTube content on TV daily, the company said on its website.

When YouTube first started its founders envisioned it as a dating site, according to the article, "where people would upload videos and score them. When that didn't work, the founders decided to open up the platform for all sorts of videos." And since this was 20 years ago, "Users drove traffic to YouTube by sharing videos on MySpace."

But the article includes stories of people getting rich through YouTube's sharing of ad revenue:

Patrick Starrr, who produces makeup tutorial videos, said he made his first $1 million through YouTube at the age of 25. He left his job at retailer MAC Cosmetics in Florida and moved to L.A...

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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the phoning-it-in department: ZDNet's reviewer says "I tested this affordable E Ink phone for two weeks, and it rewired my brain (for the better)."

It's Mudita's new Kompakt smartphone with a two-color E Ink display — which ZDNet calls "an affordable choice" for those "considering investing in a so-called 'dumbphone'..."

Compared to modern smartphones, the Mudita Kompakt is a bit chunky at half an inch thick and five inches long. It's still rather light, though, weighing just 164 grams and covered in soft touch material, so it feels good in the hand. The bezels around the 4.3-inch display are rather large, with three touch-sensitive buttons for back, home, and quick settings, so navigating to key elements is intuitive, whether you're coming from Android or iOS.
The phone features a fingerprint sensor to lock and unlock, and it's housed on the power button in the middle of the right side. I'm a huge fan of consolidating these two purposes to the same button, and it works flawlessly.... You can charge via the USB-C, but surprisingly, it also supports wireless charging. All in all, the battery is quite good. Mudita says it can last for up to six days on standby, with around two days of standard use. In my testing, I found this to be about accurate.

On the left side of the device is a button that houses one of its key features: offline mode. Switching to this mode disables all wireless connectivity and support for the camera, so it truly becomes distraction-free.. [T]here is undoubtedly some lag in certain apps — such as the camera — due to the E Ink display technology and processor/RAM specifications. You will also likely notice some lag in text messaging if you tap quickly on the keyboard, often resulting in getting ahead of the spell-checking feature. As far as apps go, in addition to phone calls and text messages, the Kompakt includes an alarm, calculator, chess game, maps, meditation, weather, and a voice recorder.

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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the gold-rush department: "Only the United States, China and Germany have larger economies than California," reports CNN.

In fact, they add that California "outpaced all three countries with growth of 6% last year," according to the California governor's office (which cites new data from the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis):

In 2024, California's growth rate of 6% outpaced the top three economies: U.S. (5.3%), China (2.6%) and Germany (2.9%)...

With an increasing state population and recent record-high tourism spending, California is the nation's top state for new business starts, access to venture capital funding, and manufacturing, high-tech, and agriculture. The state drives national economic growth and also sends over $83 billion more to the federal government than it receives in federal funding. California is the leading agricultural producer in the country and is also the center for manufacturing output in the United States, with over 36,000 manufacturing firms employing over 1.1 million Californians.

The data shows that last year California accounted for 14% of America's GDP, CNN points out, "driven by Silicon Valley and its real estate and finance sectors."

Posted by Black Convoy from TFW2005


Courtesy of 2005 Boards member optimall we can share for you images and videos of the gamplay of the new Transformers: Eternal War Mobile Game. This new mobile game started its closed beta  for Australia & New Zealand recently. This is a new RPG adventure game featuring a plethora of G1 characters. Your team have to face hordes of clone cassette-bots and troops, similar to other RPG games. The game features classic G1 ost tunes and some other nostalgia references. Keep in mind that this is still a test version and does not represent the final quality of the game. See all the images and » Continue Reading.

The post Transformers: Eternal War Mobile Game Closed Beta Gameplay Images & Videos appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.