Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the celestial-navigations department: Three space probes are leaving our solar system — yet are still functioning. After the two Voyager space probes, New Horizons "was launched in 2006, initially to study Pluto," remembers New Scientist. But "it has since travelled way beyond this point, ploughing on through the Kuiper belt, a vast, wide band of rocks and dust billions of miles from the sun. It is now speeding at tens of thousands of kilometres per hour..."
And it's just performed the first ever example of interstellar navigation...
As it hurtles out of our solar system, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is so far from Earth that the stars in the Milky Way appear in markedly different positions compared with our own view... due to the parallax effect. This was demonstrated in 2020 when the probe beamed back pictures of two nearby stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, to Earth.
Now, Tod Lauer at the US National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Arizona and his colleagues have used this effect to work out the position of New Horizons... Almost all spacecraft calculate their bearings to within tens of metres using NASA's Deep Space Network, a collection of radio transmitters on Earth that send regular signals out to space. In comparison, the parallax method was far less accurate, locating New Horizons within a sphere with a radius of 60 million kilometres, about half the distance between Earth and the sun. "We're not going to put the Deep Space Network out of business — this is only a demo proof of concept," says Lauer. However, with a better camera and equipment they could improve the accuracy by up to 100 times, he says.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the wrong-arm-of-the-law department: A Maine police department has now acknowledged "it inadvertently shared an AI-altered photo of drug evidence on social media," reports Boston.com:
The image from the Westbrook Police Department showed a collection of drug paraphernalia purportedly seized during a recent drug bust on Brackett Street, including a scale and white powder in plastic bags. According to Westbrook police, an officer involved in the arrests snapped the evidence photo and used a photo editing app to insert the department's patch. "The patch was added, and the photograph with the patch was sent to one of our Facebook administrators, who posted it," the department explained in a post. "Unbeknownst to anyone, when the app added the patch, it altered the packaging and some of the other attributes on the photograph. None of us caught it or realized it."
It wasn't long before the edited image's gibberish text and hazy edges drew criticism from social media users. According to the Portland Press Herald, Westbrook police initially denied AI had been used to generate the photo before eventually confirming its use of the AI chatbot ChatGPT. The department issued a public apology Tuesday, sharing a side-by-side comparison of the original and edited images.
"It was never our intent to alter the image of the evidence," the department's post read. "We never realized that using a photoshop app to add our logo would alter a photograph so substantially."
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the don't-play-with-your-food department: "Scientists have created the first lasers made entirely from edible materials," reports Science magazine "which could someday help monitor and track the properties of foods and medications with sensors that can be harmlessly swallowed."
[The researchers' report] shows that tiny droplets of everyday cooking oils can act like echo chambers of light, otherwise known as lasers. By providing the right amount of energy to an atom, the atom's electrons will excite to a higher energy level and then relax, releasing a photon of light in the process. Trap a cloud of atoms in a house of mirrors and blast them with the right amount of energy, and the light emitted by one excited atom will stimulate one of its neighbors, amplifying the atoms' collective glow...
[The researchers] shot purple light at droplets of olive oil, whose surfaces can keep photons of light bouncing around, trapping them in the process. This reflected light excited the electrons in the oil's chlorophyll molecules, causing them to emit photons that triggered the glow of other chlorophyll molecules — transforming the droplet into a laser. The energy of the chlorophyll's radiation depends on the oil droplets' size, density, and other properties. The study's authors suggest this sensitivity can be exploited to track different properties of food or pharmaceutical products.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the land-of-diffusion department: "Apple quietly dropped a new AI model on Hugging Face with an interesting twist," writes 9to5Mac. "Instead of writing code like traditional LLMs generate text (left to right, top to bottom), it can also write out of order, and improve multiple chunks at once."
"The result is faster code generation, at a performance that rivals top open-source coding models."
Traditionally, most LLMs have been autoregressive. This means that when you ask them something, they process your entire question, predict the first token of the answer, reprocess the entire question with the first token, predict the second token, and so on. This makes them generate text like most of us read: left to right, top to bottom... An alternative to autoregressive models is diffusion models, which have been more often used by image models like Stable Diffusion. In a nutshell, the model starts with a fuzzy, noisy image, and it iteratively removes the noise while keeping the user request in mind, steering it towards something that looks more and more like what the user requested...
Lately, some large language models have looked to the diffusion architecture to generate text, and the results have been pretty promising... This behavior is especially useful for programming, where global structure matters more than linear token prediction... [Apple] released an open-source model called DiffuCode-7B-cpGRPO, that builds on top of a paper called DiffuCoder: Understanding and Improving Masked Diffusion Models for Code Generation, released just last month... [W]ith an extra training step called coupled-GRPO, it learned to generate higher-quality code with fewer passes. The result? Code that's faster to generate, globally coherent, and competitive with some of the best open-source programming models out there.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the leader-bored department: An anonymous reader shared this report from the San Francisco Standard:
About an hour into my meeting with the undisputed hackathon king of San Francisco, Rene Turcios asked if I wanted to smoke a joint with him. I politely declined, but his offer hardly surprised me. Turcios has built a reputation as a cannabis-loving former professional Yu-Gi-Oh! player who resells Labubus out of his Tenderloin apartment when he's not busy attending nearly every hackathon happening in the city. Since 2023, Turcios, 29, has attended more than 200 events, where he's won cash, software credits, and clout. "I'm always hustling," he said.
The craziest part: he doesn't even know how to code.
"Rene is the original vibe coder," said RJ Moscardon, a friend and fellow hacker who watched Turcios win second place at his first-ever hackathon at the AGI House mansion in Hillsborough. "All the engineers with prestigious degrees scoffed at him at first. But now they're all doing exactly the same thing...." Turcios was vibe coding long before the technique had a name — and was looked down upon by longtime hackers for using AI. But as Tiger Woods once said, "Winning takes care of everything...."
Instead of vigorously coding until the deadline, he finished his projects hours early by getting AI to do the technical work for him. "I didn't write a single line of code," Turcios said of his first hackathon where he prompted ChatGPT using plain English to generate a program that can convert any song into a lo-fi version. When the organizers announced Turcios had won second place, he screamed in celebration.... "I realized that I could compete with people who have degrees and fancy jobs...."
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the powering-ahead department: "Tesla has launched its new Oasis Supercharger," reports Electrek, "the long-promised EV charging station of the future, with a solar farm and off-grid batteries."
Early in the deployment of the Supercharger network, Tesla promised to add solar arrays and batteries to the Supercharger stations, and CEO Elon Musk even said that most stations would be able to operate off-grid... Last year, Tesla announced a new project called 'Oasis', which consists of a new model Supercharger station with a solar farm and battery storage enabling off-grid operations in Lost Hills, California.
Tesla has now unveiled the project and turned on most of the Supercharger stalls. The project consists of 168 chargers, with half of them currently operational, making it one of the largest Supercharger stations in the world. However, that's not even the most notable aspect of it. The station is equipped with 11 MW of ground-mounted solar panels and canopies, spanning 30 acres of land, and 10 Tesla Megapacks with a total energy storage capacity of 39 MWh. It can be operated off-grid, which is the case right now, according to Tesla.
With off-grid operations, Tesla was about to bring 84 stalls online just in time for the Fourth of July travel weekend. The rest of the stalls and a lounge are going to open later this year.
The article makes that point that "This is what charging stations should be like: fully powered by renewable energy."
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the problem-sets department: "A computer science degree used to be a golden ticket to the promised land of jobs," a college senior tells the New York Times. But "That's no longer the case."
The article notes that in the last three years there's been a 65% drop from companies seeking workers with two years of experience or less (according to an analysis by technology research/education organization CompTIA), with tech companies "relying more on AI for some aspects of coding, eliminating some entry-level work."
So what do college professors teach when AI "is coming fastest and most forcefully to computer science"?
Computer science programs at universities across the country are now scrambling to understand the implications of the technological transformation, grappling with what to keep teaching in the AI era. Ideas range from less emphasis on mastering programming languages to focusing on hybrid courses designed to inject computing into every profession, as educators ponder what the tech jobs of the future will look like in an AI economy... Some educators now believe the discipline could broaden to become more like a liberal arts degree, with a greater emphasis on critical thinking and communication skills.
The National Science Foundation is funding a program, Level Up AI, to bring together university and community college educators and researchers to move toward a shared vision of the essentials of AI education. The 18-month project, run by the Computing Research Association, a research and education nonprofit, in partnership with New Mexico State University, is organising conferences and roundtables and producing white papers to share resources and best practices. The NSF-backed initiative was created because of "a sense of urgency that we need a lot more computing students — and more people — who know about AI in the workforce," said Mary Lou Maher, a computer scientist and a director of the Computing Research Association.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the breeding-success department: Interesting Engineering reports:
Astral Systems, a UK-based private commercial fusion company, has claimed to have become the first firm to successfully breed tritium, a vital fusion fuel, using its own operational fusion reactor. This achievement, made with the University of Bristol, addresses a significant hurdle in the development of fusion energy....
Scientists from Astral Systems and the University of Bristol produced and detected tritium in real-time from an experimental lithium breeder blanket within Astral's multi-state fusion reactors. "There's a global race to find new ways to develop more tritium than what exists in today's world — a huge barrier is bringing fusion energy to reality," said Talmon Firestone, CEO and co-founder of Astral Systems. "This collaboration with the University of Bristol marks a leap forward in the search for viable, greater-than-replacement tritium breeding technologies. Using our multi-state fusion technology, we are the first private fusion company to use our reactors as a neutron source to produce fusion fuel."
Astral Systems' approach uses its Multi-State Fusion (MSF) technology. The company states this will commercialize fusion power with better performance, efficiency, and lower costs than traditional reactors. Their reactor design, the result of 25 years of engineering and over 15 years of runtime, incorporates recent understandings of stellar physics. A core innovation is lattice confinement fusion (LCF), a concept first discovered by NASA in 2020. This allows Astral's reactor to achieve solid-state fuel densities 400 million times higher than those in plasma. The company's reactors are designed to induce two distinct fusion reactions simultaneously from a single power input, with fusion occurring in both plasma and a solid-state lattice.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the opening-AI department: "Microsoft has released the source code for the GitHub Copilot Chat extension for VS Code under the MIT license," reports BleepingComputer.
This provides the community access to the full implementation of the chat-based coding assistant, including the implementation of "agent mode," what contextual data is sent to large language models (LLMs), and the design of system prompts. The GitHub repository hosting the code also details telemetry collection mechanisms, addressing long-standing questions about data transparency in AI-assisted coding tools...
As the VS Code team explained previously, shifts in AI tooling landscape like the rapid growth of the open-source AI ecosystem and a more level playing field for all have reduced the need for secrecy around prompt engineering and UI design. At the same time, increased targeting of development tools by malicious actors has increased the need for crowdsourcing contributions to rapidly pinpoint problems and develop effective fixes. Essentially, openness is now considered superior from a security perspective.
"If you've been hesitant to adopt AI tools because you don't trust the black box behind them, this move opensources-github-copilot-chat-vscode/offers something rare these days: transparency," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli"
Now that the extension is open source, developers can audit how agent mode actually works. You can also dig into how it manages your data, customize its behavior, or build entirely new tools on top of it. This could be especially useful in enterprise environments where compliance and control are non negotiable.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the inflammaging department: "Some of our basic assumptions about the biological process of aging might be wrong," reports the New York Times — citing new research on a small Indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon. [Alternate URL here.]
Scientists have long believed that long-term, low-grade inflammation — also known as "inflammaging" — is a universal hallmark of getting older. But this new data raises the question of whether inflammation is directly linked to aging at all, or if it's linked to a person's lifestyle or environment instead. The study, which was published Monday, found that people in two nonindustrialized areas experienced a different kind of inflammation throughout their lives than more urban people — likely tied to infections from bacteria, viruses and parasites rather than the precursors of chronic disease. Their inflammation also didn't appear to increase with age.
Scientists compared inflammation signals in existing data sets from four distinct populations in Italy, Singapore, Bolivia and Malaysia; because they didn't collect the blood samples directly, they couldn't make exact apples-to-apples comparisons. But if validated in larger studies, the findings could suggest that diet, lifestyle and environment influence inflammation more than aging itself, said Alan Cohen, an author of the paper and an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. "Inflammaging may not be a direct product of aging, but rather a response to industrialized conditions," he said, adding that this was a warning to experts like him that they might be overestimating its pervasiveness globally.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the robo-rooter department: We're living in a new world now — one where it's an AI-powered penetration tester that "now tops an eminent US security industry leaderboard that ranks red teamers based on reputation." CSO Online reports:
On HackerOne, which connects organizations with ethical hackers to participate in their bug bounty programs, "Xbow" scored notably higher than 99 other hackers in identifying and reporting enterprise software vulnerabilities. It's a first in bug bounty history, according to the company that operates the eponymous bot...
Xbow is a fully autonomous AI-driven penetration tester (pentester) that requires no human input, but, its creators said, "operates much like a human pentester" that can scale rapidly and complete comprehensive penetration tests in just a few hours. According to its website, it passes 75% of web security benchmarks, accurately finding and exploiting vulnerabilities.
Xbow submitted nearly 1,060 vulnerabilities to HackerOne, including remote code execution, information disclosures, cache poisoning, SQL injection, XML external entities, path traversal, server-side request forgery (SSRF), cross-site scripting, and secret exposure. The company said it also identified a previously unknown vulnerability in Palo Alto's GlobalProtect VPN platform that impacted more than 2,000 hosts. Of the vulnerabilities Xbow submitted over the last 90 days, 54 were classified as critical, 242 as high and 524 as medium in severity. The company's bug bounty programs have resolved 130 vulnerabilities, and 303 are classified as triaged.
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the network-effects department: This week Hewlett-Packard Enterprise settled its antitrust case with America's Justice Department, "paving the way for its acquisition of rival kit maker Juniper Networks," reported Telecoms.com:
Under the agreement, HPE has agreed to divest its Instant On unit, which sells a range of enterprise-grade Wi-Fi networking equipment for campus and branch deployments. It has also agreed to license Juniper's Mist AIOps source code — a software suite that enables AI-based network automation and management. HPE can live with that, since its primary motivation for buying Juniper is to improve its prospects in an IT networking market dominated by Cisco, where others like Arista and increasingly Nokia and Nvidia are also trying to make inroads.
And after receiving regulatory clearance, HPE "very quickly closed the deal..." reports The Motley Fool. "In the press release heralding the news, the buyer wrote that it "doubles the size of HPE's networking business and provides customers with a comprehensive portfolio of networking solutions."
Investors were obviously happy about this, as according to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence the company's stock price ballooned by nearly 16% across the week, largely on the news.... The Justice Department had alleged, in a lawsuit filed in January, that an HPE/Juniper tie-up would essentially result in a duopoly in networking equipment. It claimed that a beefed-up HPE and networking incumbent Cisco would hold more than 70% combined of the domestic market.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the I-said-face department: Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Apple news blog 9to5Mac:
iOS 26 is a packed update for iPhone users thanks to the new Liquid Glass design and major updates for Messages, Wallet, CarPlay, and more. But another new feature was just discovered in the iOS 26 beta: FaceTime will now freeze your call's video and audio if someone starts undressing.
When Apple unveiled iOS 26 last month, it mentioned a variety of new family tools... "Communication Safety expands to intervene when nudity is detected in FaceTime video calls, and to blur out nudity in Shared Albums in Photos." However, at least in the iOS 26 beta, it seems that a similar feature may be in place for all users — adults included.
That's the claim of an X.com user named iDeviceHelp, who says FaceTime in iOS 26 swaps in a warning message that says "Audio and video are paused because you may be showing something sensitive," giving users a choice of ending the call or resuming it.
9to5Mac says "It's unclear whether this is an intended behavior, or just a bug in the beta that's applying the feature to adults... [E]verything happens on-device so Apple has no idea about the contents of your call."
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the superuser-don't department: In April researchers responsibly disclosed two security flaws found in Sudo "that could enable local attackers to escalate their privileges to root on susceptible machines," reports The Hacker News. "The vulnerabilities have been addressed in Sudo version 1.9.17p1 released late last month."
Stratascale researcher Rich Mirch, who is credited with discovering and reporting the flaws, said CVE-2025-32462 has managed to slip through the cracks for over 12 years. It is rooted in the Sudo's "-h" (host) option that makes it possible to list a user's sudo privileges for a different host. The feature was enabled in September 2013. However, the identified bug made it possible to execute any command allowed by the remote host to be run on the local machine as well when running the Sudo command with the host option referencing an unrelated remote host. "This primarily affects sites that use a common sudoers file that is distributed to multiple machines," Sudo project maintainer Todd C. Miller said in an advisory. "Sites that use LDAP-based sudoers (including SSSD) are similarly impacted."
CVE-2025-32463, on the other hand, leverages Sudo's "-R" (chroot) option to run arbitrary commands as root, even if they are not listed in the sudoers file. It's also a critical-severity flaw. "The default Sudo configuration is vulnerable," Mirch said. "Although the vulnerability involves the Sudo chroot feature, it does not require any Sudo rules to be defined for the user. As a result, any local unprivileged user could potentially escalate privileges to root if a vulnerable version is installed...."
Miller said the chroot option will be removed completely from a future release of Sudo and that supporting a user-specified root directory is "error-prone."
