Slashdot: Texas Adopts Online Child-Safety Bill Opposed by Apple's CEO

Texas Adopts Online Child-Safety Bill Opposed by Apple's CEO
Published on May 28, 2025 at 12:50AM
Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed an online child safety bill, bucking a lobbying push from big tech companies that included a personal phone call from from Apple CEO Tim Cook. From a report: The measure requires app stores to verify users' ages and secure parental approval before minors can download most apps or make in-app purchases. The bill drew fire from app store operators such as Google and Apple, which has argued that the legislation threatens the privacy of all users. The bill was a big enough priority for Apple that Cook called Abbott to emphasize the company's opposition to it, said a person familiar with their discussion, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

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Slashdot: Spain-Backed Fund Joins FOSSA's Sovereign Satellite Communications Push

Spain-Backed Fund Joins FOSSA's Sovereign Satellite Communications Push Published on 2026-06-28T22:05:00Z Spanish startup FOSSA Systems "has raised about $10.5 million to expand its connectivity constellation," reports Space News, noting some funding is backed by Spain's government: The support from the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETT) comes a year after the fund injected 14 million euros into Spain's Sateliot , which is also developing a satellite connectivity network with security and defense applications. Spanish private investment firm Kibo Ventures led FOSSA's funding round, the six-year-old venture announced June 24, bringing its total raised to date to nearly 20 million euros. The proceeds will help fuel FOSSA's push beyond the tiny picosatellites it once used to connect low-power monitoring devices toward larger cubesats in low Earth orbit, enabling additional sovereign communications and space-based intelligence capab...

Slashdot: How the FSF Sysadmins are Blocking Botnets with reaction

How the FSF Sysadmins are Blocking Botnets with reaction Published on 2026-07-11T21:47:00Z For nearly two years the Free Software Foundation has been fighting web crawlers (including many aggressively scraping training data for AI models). A botnet controlling about five million IPs hit one system for six months in 2025. Their systems administrator wrote this week that they view these as distributed denial-of-service attacks. How are they fighting back? We noticed patterns in the scrapers that were abnormal, which gave us material for writing regular expressions. Searching for the regular expression then gave us a large lists of IP addresses. Looking up the origin of those IP addresses revealed that some of the crawlers were using botnets of residential IP addresses to scrape faster and avoid detection. We looked for what kinds of botnets might be generating the kind of traffic that we were seeing, and one that we suspected was called the "Vo1d" botnet, comprised of sma...

Slashdot: AT&T Outlines $250 Billion US Investment Plan To Boost Infrastructure In AI Age

AT&T Outlines $250 Billion US Investment Plan To Boost Infrastructure In AI Age Published on 2026-03-10T20:00:00Z AT&T plans to invest more than $250 billion over the next five years to expand U.S. telecom infrastructure for the AI age. The company says it will also hire thousands of technicians while partnering with AST SpaceMobile to extend coverage to remote areas. Reuters reports: Rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and connected devices has prompted telecom operators to invest heavily in fiber and 5G networks as they also seek to fend off intensifying competition from cable broadband providers. AT&T, which has about 110,000 employees in the U.S., said the new hires will help build and maintain its infrastructure. The outlay includes capital expenditure and other spending, the company said. The spending will focus on expanding its fiber and wireless networks, including accelerating deployment of fiber broadband, 5G home internet and satellite co...

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