Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the Start-buttons department: The BBC visits "the strange, stubborn world of obsolete Windows machines."
Even if you're a diehard Apple user, you're probably interacting with Windows systems on a regular basis. When you're pulling cash out, for example, chances are you're using a computer that's downright geriatric by technology standards. (Microsoft declined to comment for this article.) "Many ATMs still operate on legacy Windows systems, including Windows XP and even Windows NT," which launched in 1993, says Elvis Montiero, an ATM field technician based in Newark, New Jersey in the US. "The challenge with upgrading these machines lies in the high costs associated with hardware compatibility, regulatory compliance and the need to rewrite proprietary ATM software," he says. Microsoft ended official support for Windows XP in 2014, but Montiero says many ATMs still rely on these primordial systems thanks to their reliability, stability and integration with banking infrastructure.
And a job listing for an IT systems administrator for Germany's railway service "were expected to have expertise with Windows 3.11 and MS-DOS — systems released 32 and 44 years ago, respectively. In certain parts of Germany, commuting depends on operating systems that are older than many passengers."
It's not just German transit, either. The trains in San Francisco's Muni Metro light railway, for example, won't start up in the morning until someone sticks a floppy disk into the computer that loads DOS software on the railway's Automatic Train Control System (ATCS). Last year, the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA) announced its plans to retire this system over the coming decade, but today the floppy disks live on.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the droning-on department: While Amazon won FAA approval to fly beyond an operators' visual line of sight, "the program remains a work in progress," reports Bloomberg:
A pair of Amazon.com Inc. package delivery drones were flying through a light rain in mid-December when, within minutes of one another, they both committed robot suicide... [S]ome 217 feet (66 meters) in the air [at a drone testing facility], the aircraft cut power to its six propellers, fell to the ground and was destroyed. Four minutes later and 183 feet over the taxiway, a second Prime Air drone did the same thing.
Not long after the incidents, Amazon paused its experimental drone flights to tweak the aircraft software but said the crashes weren't the "primary reason" for halting the program. Now, five months after the twin crashes, a more detailed explanation of what happened is starting to emerge. Faulty readings from lidar sensors made the drones think they had landed, prompting the software to shut down the propellers, according to National Transportation Safety Board documents reviewed by Bloomberg. The sensors failed after a software update made them more susceptible to being confused by rain, the NTSB said.
Amazon also removed a backup sensor present that had been present on earlier iterations, according to the article — though an Amazon spokesperson said the company had found ways to replicate the removed sensors.
But Bloomberg notes Amazon's drone efforts has faced "technical challenges and crashes, including one in 2021 that set a field ablaze at the company's testing facility in Pendleton, Oregon."
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the AI-IT department: IBM laid off "a couple hundred" HR workers and replaced them with AI agents. "It's becoming a huge thing," says Mike Peditto, a Chicago-area consultant with 15 years of experience advising companies on hiring practices. He tells Slate "I do think we're heading to where this will be pretty commonplace."
Although A.I. job interviews have been happening since at least 2023, the trend has received a surge of attention in recent weeks thanks to several viral TikTok videos in which users share videos of their A.I. bots glitching. Although some of the videos were fakes posted by a creator whose bio warns that his content is "all satire," some are authentic — like that of Kendiana Colin, a 20-year-old student at Ohio State University who had to interact with an A.I. bot after she applied for a summer job at a stretching studio outside Columbus. In a clip she posted online earlier this month, Colin can be seen conducting a video interview with a smiling white brunette named Alex, who can't seem to stop saying the phrase "vertical-bar Pilates" in an endless loop...
Representatives at Apriora, the startup company founded in 2023 whose software Colin was forced to engage with, did not respond to a request for comment. But founder Aaron Wang told Forbes last year that the software allowed companies to screen more talent for less money... (Apriora's website claims that the technology can help companies "hire 87 percent faster" and "interview 93 percent cheaper," but it's not clear where those stats come from or what they actually mean.)
Colin (first interviewed by 404 Media) calls the experience dehumanizing — wondering why they were told dress professionally, since "They had me going the extra mile just to talk to a robot." And after the interview, the robot — and the company — then ghosted them with no future contact. "It was very disrespectful and a waste of time."
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the performance-issues department: The Prossimo project (funded by the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group) seeks to "move the Internet's security-sensitive software infrastructure to memory safe code." Two years ago the Prossimo project made an announcement: they'd begun work on rav1d, a safer high performance AV1 decoder written in Rust, according to a new update:
We partnered with Immunant to do the engineering work. By September of 2024 rav1d was basically complete and we learned a lot during the process. Today rav1d works well — it passes all the same tests as the dav1d decoder it is based on, which is written in C. It's possible to build and run Chromium with it.
There's just one problem — it's not quite as fast as the C version...
Our Rust-based rav1d decoder is currently about 5% slower than the C-based dav1d decoder (the exact amount differs a bit depending on the benchmark, input, and platform). This is enough of a difference to be a problem for potential adopters, and, frankly, it just bothers us. The development team worked hard to get it to performance parity. We brought in a couple of other contractors who have experience with optimizing things like this. We wrote about the optimization work we did. However, we were still unable to get to performance parity and, to be frank again, we aren't really sure what to do next.
After racking our brains for options, we decided to offer a bounty pool of $20,000 for getting rav1d to performance parity with dav1d. Hopefully folks out there can help get rav1d performance advanced to where it needs to be, and ideally we and the Rust community will also learn something about how Rust performance stacks up against C.
This drew a snarky response from FFmpeg, the framework that powers audio and video processing for everyone from VLC to Twitch. "Rust is so good you can get paid $20k to make it as fast as C," they posted to their 68,300 followers on X.com.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the power's-out department: The only nuclear power plant still operating in Taiwan was shut down on Saturday, reports Japan's public media organization NHK:
People in Taiwan have grown increasingly concerned about nuclear safety in recent years, especially after the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, northeastern Japan... Taiwan's energy authorities plan to focus more on thermoelectricity fueled by liquefied natural gas. They aim to source 20 percent of all electricity from renewables such as wind and solar power next year.
AFP notes that nuclear power once provided more than half of Taiwan's energy, with three plants operating six reactors across an island that's 394 km (245 mi) long and 144 km (89 mi) wide.
So the new move to close Taiwan's last reactor is "fuelling concerns over the self-ruled island's reliance on imported energy and vulnerability to a Chinese blockade," — though Taiwan's president insists the missing nucelar energy can be replace by new units in LNG and coal-fired plants:
The island, which targets net-zero emissions by 2050, depends almost entirely on imported fossil fuel to power its homes, factories and critical semiconductor chip industry. President Lai Ching-te's Democratic Progressive Party has long vowed to phase out nuclear power, while the main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party says continued supply is needed for energy security... [The Ma'anshan Nuclear Power Plant] has operated for 40 years in a region popular with tourists and which is now dotted with wind turbines and solar panels. More renewable energy is planned at the site, where state-owned Taipower plans to build a solar power station capable of supplying an estimated 15,000 households annually. But while nuclear only accounted for 4.2 percent of Taiwan's power supply last year, some fear Ma'anshan's closure risks an energy crunch....
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the quick-as-a-fox department: During this year's annual Pwn2Own contest, two researchers from Palo Alto Networks demonstrated an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in Mozilla Firefox, reports Cyber Security News, "earning $50,000 and 5 Master of Pwn points." And the next day another participant used an integer overflow to exploit Mozilla Firefox (renderer only).
But Mozilla's security blog reminds users that a sandbox escape would be required to break out from a tab to gain wider system access "due to Firefox's robust security architecture" — and that "neither participating group was able to escape our sandbox..."
We have verbal confirmation that this is attributed to the recent architectural improvements to our Firefox sandbox which have neutered a wide range of such attacks. This continues to build confidence in Firefox's strong security posture.
Even though neither attack could escape their sandbox, "Out of abundance of caution, we just released new Firefox versions... all within the same day of the second exploit announcement." (Last year Mozilla responded to an exploitable security bug within 21 hours, they point out, even winning an award as the fastest to patch.)
The new updated versions are Firefox 138.0.4, Firefox ESR 128.10.1, Firefox ESR 115.23.1 and Firefox for Android. "Despite the limited impact of these attacks, all users and administrators are advised to update Firefox as soon as possible...."
To review and fix the reported exploits a diverse team of people from all across the world and in various roles (engineering, QA, release management, security and many more) rushed to work. We tested and released a new version of Firefox for all of our supported platforms, operating systems, and configurations with rapid speed....
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the hundreds-of-beavers department: It's a nonprofit that's provide hosting for the Linux Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, Firefox, and 160 other projects — delivering nearly 430 terabytes of information every month. (It's currently hosting Debian, Fedora, and Gentoo Linux.) But hosting only provides about 20% of its income, with the rest coming from individual and corporate donors (including Google and IBM). "Over the past several years, we have been operating at a deficit due to a decline in corporate donations," the Open Source Lab's director announced in late April.
It's part of the CS/electrical engineering department at Oregon State University, and while the department "has generously filled this gap, recent changes in university funding makes our current funding model no longer sustainable. Unless we secure $250,000 in committed funds, the OSL will shut down later this year."
But "Thankfully, the call for support worked, paving the way for the OSU Open Source Lab to look ahead, into what the future holds for them," reports the blog It's FOSS.
"Following our OSL Future post, the community response has been incredible!" posted director Lance Albertson. "Thanks to your amazing support, our team is funded for the next year. This is a huge relief and lets us focus on building a truly self-sustaining OSL."
To get there, we're tackling two big interconnected goals:
1. Finding a new, cost-effective physical home for our core infrastructure, ideally with more modern hardware.
2. Securing multi-year funding commitments to cover all our operations, including potential new infrastructure costs and hardware refreshes.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the plays-well-with-others department: Last August a Microsoft security update broke dual-booting Windows 11 and Linux systems, remembers the blog Neowin. Distros like Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin OS, and Puppy Linux were all affected, and "a couple of days later, Microsoft provided a slightly lengthy workaround that involved tweaking around with policies and the Registry in order to fix the problem."
The update "was meant to address a GRUB bootloader vulnerability that allowed malicious actors to bypass Secure Boot's safety mechanisms," notes the It's FOSS blog. "Luckily, there's now a proper fix for this, as Microsoft has quietly released a new patch on May 13, 2025, addressing the issue nine months after it was first reported... Meanwhile, many dual-boot users were left with borked setups, having to use workarounds or disable Secure Boot altogether."
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the (L)ow-(L)atency-(R)un(T)ime department: Amazon's AWS Labs has created LLRT an experimental, lightweight JavaScript runtime designed to address the growing demand for fast and efficient serverless applications.
Slashdot reader BitterEpic wants to know what you think of it:
Traditional JavaScript runtimes like Node.js rely on garbage collection, which can introduce unpredictable pauses and slow down performance, especially during cold starts in serverless environments like AWS Lambda. LLRT's manual memory management, courtesy of Rust, eliminates this issue, leading to smoother, more predictable performance. LLRT also has a runtime under 2MB, a huge reduction compared to the 100MB+ typically required by Node.js. This lightweight design means lower memory usage, better scalability, and reduced operational costs. Without the overhead of garbage collection, LLRT has faster cold start times and can initialize in milliseconds—perfect for latency-sensitive applications where every millisecond counts. For JavaScript developers, LLRT offers the best of both worlds: rapid development with JavaScript's flexibility, combined with Rust's performance. This means faster, more scalable applications without the usual memory bloat and cold start issues. Still in beta, LLRT promises to be a major step forward for serverless JavaScript applications. By combining Rust's performance with JavaScript's flexibility, it opens new possibilities for building high-performance, low-latency applications. If it continues to evolve, LLRT could become a core offering in AWS Lambda, potentially changing how we approach serverless JavaScript development. Would you consider Javascript as the core of your future workflow? Or maybe you would prefer to go lower level with quckjs?
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the I'm-feeling-lucky department: An anonymous reader shared this report from Ars Technica:
Nextcloud, a host-your-own cloud platform that wants to help you "regain control over your data," has had to tell its Android-using customers for months now that they cannot upload files from their phone to their own servers. Months of emails and explanations to Google's Play Store representatives have yielded no changes, Nextcloud .
That blog post — and media coverage of it — seem to have moved the needle. In an update to the post, Nextcloud wrote that as of May 15, Google has offered to restore full file access permissions. "We are preparing a test release first (expected tonight) and a final update with all functionality restored. If no issues occur, the update will hopefully be out early next week," the Nextcloud team wrote....
[Nextcloud] told The Register that it had more than 800,000 Android users. The company's blog post goes further than pinpointing technical and support hurdles. "It is a clear example of Big Tech gatekeeping smaller software vendors, making the products of their competitors worse or unable to provide the same services as the giants themselves sell," Nextcloud's post states. "Big Tech is scared that small players like Nextcloud will disrupt them, like they once disrupted other companies. So they try to shut the door." Nextcloud is one of the leaders of an antitrust-minded movement against Microsoft's various integrated apps and services, having filed a complaint against the firm in 2021.
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the sign-of-the-times department: "The world has changed," writes Stack Overflow's blog. "Fast. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we build, learn, and solve problems. Software development looks dramatically different than it did even a few years ago — and the pace of change is only accelerating."
And they believe their brand "at times" lost "fidelity and clarity. It's very much been always added to and not been thought of holistically. So, it's time for our brand to evolve too," they write, hoping to articulate a perspective "forged in the fires of community, powered by collaboration, shaped by AI, and driven by people."
The developer news site DevClass notes the change happens "as the number of posts to its site continues a dramatic decline thanks to AI-driven alternatives."
According to a quick query on the official data explorer, the sum of questions and answers posted in April 2025 was down by over 64 percent from the same month in 2024, and plunged more than 90 percent from April 2020, when traffic was near its peak...
Although declining traffic is a sign of Stack Overflow's reduced significance in the developer community, the company's business is not equally affected so far. Stack Exchange is a business owned by investment company Prosus, and the Stack Exchange products include private versions of its site (Stack Overflow for Teams) as well as advertising and recruitment. According to the Prosus financial results, in the six months ended September 2024, Stack Overflow increased its revenue and reduced its losses. The company's search for a new direction though confirms that the fast-disappearing developer engagement with Stack Overflow poses an existential challenge to the organization.
DevClass says Stack Overflow's parent company "is casting about for new ways to provide value (and drive business) in this context..."
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the in-the-chips department: An anonymous reader shared this report from CRN:
CPU-tracking firm Mercury Research reported on Thursday that Intel's x86 CPU market share grew 0.3 points sequentially to 75.6 percent against AMD's 24.4 percent in the first quarter. However, AMD managed to increase its market share by 3.6 points year over year. These figures only captured the server, laptop and desktop CPU segments. When including IoT and semicustom products, AMD grew its x86 market share sequentially by 1.5 points and year over year by 0.9 points to 27.1 percent against Intel's 72.9 percent... AMD managed to gain ground on Intel in the desktop and server segments sequentially and year over year. But it was in the laptop segment where Intel eked out a sequential share gain, even though rival AMD ended up finishing the first quarter with a higher share of shipments than what it had a year ago...
While AMD mostly came out on top in the first quarter, [Mercury Research President Dean] McCarron said ARM's estimated CPU share against x86 products crossed into the double digits for the first time, growing 2.3 points sequentially to 11.9 percent. This was mainly due to a "surge" of Nvidia's Grace CPUs for servers and a large increase of Arm CPU shipments for Chromebooks.
Meanwhile, PC Gamer reports that ARM's share of the PC processor market "grew to 13.6% in the first quarter of 2025 from 10.8% in the fourth quarter of 2024." And they note the still-only-rumors that an Arm-based chip from AMD will be available as soon next year.
[I]f one of the two big players in x86 does release a mainstream Arm chip for the PC, that will very significant. If it comes at about the same time as Nvidia's rumoured Arm chip for the PC, well, momentum really will be building and questioning x86's dominance will be wholly justified.
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the rise-of-the-machines department: "The altruistic OpenAI is gone, if it ever existed," argues a new article in the Atlantic, based on interviews with more than 90 current and former employees, including executives. It notes that shortly before Altman's ouster (and rehiring) he was "seemingly trying to circumvent safety processes for expediency," with OpenAI co-founder/chief scientist Ilya telling three board members "I don't think Sam is the guy who should have the finger on the button for AGI." (The board had already discovered Altman "had not been forthcoming with them about a range of issues" including a breach in the Deployment Safety Board's protocols.)
Adapted from the upcoming book, Empire of AI, the article first revisits the summer of 2023, when Sutskever ("the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT") met with a group of new researchers:
Sutskever had long believed that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, was inevitable — now, as things accelerated in the generative-AI industry, he believed AGI's arrival was imminent, according to Geoff Hinton, an AI pioneer who was his Ph.D. adviser and mentor, and another person familiar with Sutskever's thinking.... To people around him, Sutskever seemed consumed by thoughts of this impending civilizational transformation. What would the world look like when a supreme AGI emerged and surpassed humanity? And what responsibility did OpenAI have to ensure an end state of extraordinary prosperity, not extraordinary suffering?
By then, Sutskever, who had previously dedicated most of his time to advancing AI capabilities, had started to focus half of his time on AI safety. He appeared to people around him as both boomer and doomer: more excited and afraid than ever before of what was to come. That day, during the meeting with the new researchers, he laid out a plan. "Once we all get into the bunker — " he began, according to a researcher who was present.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the nothing-lasts-forever department: "Researchers are seeking a breakthrough in technologies to tackle PFAS contamination," reports the Washington Post — including experiments with ultraviolet light, plasma and sound waves:
"We're in a good spot," said Christopher Higgins, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines who researches PFAS. "There's a lot of things being tested. ... Around the world, everyone is trying to work on this topic...." PFAS destruction technologies are beginning to show potential. Some methods have been licensed by companies that are rolling out the systems in real-world settings. "There's been a lot of research happening over the past few years looking at advanced destruction technologies, and there's been a lot of improvements and advancements, and we're now starting to see some of them actually at scale," said Anna Reade [a senior scientist and director of PFAS advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council].
An approach known as supercritical water oxidation is one of the more developed technologies, Reade and other experts said. It involves heating and pressurizing water to a specific point that creates the ideal conditions to break every carbon fluorine bond, said Amy Dindal [a PFAS expert with Battelle, a science and technology nonprofit that has developed a PFAS destruction technology]. The process used in a patented technology created by Battelle produces carbon dioxide and a form of fluorine that can be quickly neutralized to become a harmless salt. "It's a complete destruction and mineralization technology, because we're actually breaking all of the carbon fluorine bonds," Dindal said, adding that the technology is "PFAS agnostic...."
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the alternative-spelling department: A Curl contributor replaced an ASCII letter with a Unicode alternative in a pull request, writes Curl lead developer/founder Daniel Stenberg. And not a single human reviewer on the team (or any of their CI jobs) noticed.
The change "looked identical to the ASCII version, so it was not possible to visually spot this..."
The impact of changing one or more letters in a URL can of course be devastating depending on conditions... [W]e have implemented checks to help us poor humans spot things like this. To detect malicious Unicode. We have added a CI job that scans all files and validates every UTF-8 sequence in the git repository.
In the curl git repository most files and most content are plain old ASCII so we can "easily" whitelist a small set of UTF-8 sequences and some specific files, the rest of the files are simply not allowed to use UTF-8 at all as they will then fail the CI job and turn up red. In order to drive this change home, we went through all the test files in the curl repository and made sure that all the UTF-8 occurrences were instead replaced by other kind of escape sequences and similar. Some of them were also used more or less by mistake and could easily be replaced by their ASCII counterparts.
The next time someone tries this stunt on us it could be someone with less good intentions, but now ideally our CI will tell us... We want and strive to be proactive and tighten everything before malicious people exploit some weakness somewhere but security remains this never-ending race where we can only do the best we can and while the other side is working in silence and might at some future point attack us in new creative ways we had not anticipated. That future unknown attack is a tricky thing.
< This article continues on their website >
This week we’ll tell you how to which upgrades to grab early in Doom: The Dark Ages as you strive to become the best Doom Slayer you can be. We’ll also help you master Sciel in Clair Obscur, find the right home for you in Oblivion Remastered, and more.
