Shameless Plug

Google Pulls the Plug On Tenor API, Killing GIF Pickers Around the Web Published on 2026-06-30T22:00:00Z Google has shut down the Tenor API, breaking GIF pickers in services that still relied on it and forcing platforms such as X to migrate elsewhere. 9to5Google notes that the library itself remains available at Tenor.com and "integrations within Google products are also still active, including Gboard, Google Messages, and more." From the report: The Tenor API has been rejecting new API sign-ups in January of this year, but existing integrations remained in place. This week, though, they're shutting down, and any integrations that remain in place will stop working on July 1. The support page adds details that "any API or Ads Distribution Agreements" with Tenor will be terminated on June 30, while "current integrations" will be "fully decommissioned" as of June 30. One of the most notable examples here is Twitter/X, which has relied on Ten...

California Bill To Preserve Online Games Fails Committee Vote Published on 2026-06-30T21:00:00Z California's Protect Our Games Act, which would require publishers to warn players before shutting down paid online games and offer refunds or continued access, failed to advance after a state Senate committee vote. Four state senators voted in favor, three voted against, and four abstained. Engadget reports: The committee unanimously voted in favor of granting the bill reconsideration, meaning it could come back before this group of state senators. Assemblymember Chris Ward introduced the bill in February and it passed the California State Assembly 43-16 in late May. That said, the abstentions prevented the bill's progression for now. "Not enough yeses means the bill stops here for this session," a volunteer with the Stop Killing Games campaign (which supported the bill) noted on Reddit. "That is the loss." The volunteer also claimed this was the movement...

Apple iPhone 18 Details Leaked In Tata Data Breach Published on 2026-06-30T20:00:00Z "Another breach at Tata has leaked details about Apple's iPhone 18, along with documents belonging to several other Tata clients," writes Longtime Slashdot reader Ritz_Just_Ritz. "It's becoming a recurring theme for the company." Reuters reports: Reuters has previously reported the Tata Electronics leak of more than 200,000 files on the dark web by World Leaks had files with purported component design papers of older iPhones and some parts of Tesla -- both Tata clients. They also included documents of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Qualcomm, both of which make parts used in iPhones. New documents reviewed by Reuters show there are at least six files that map many components in the iPhone 18 Pro models to the specific company that supplies them. These include details of chips on its main circuit board and parts of the battery and cameras. Apple considers this d...

Claude Science is Here, Antibiotics Designed by Text Prompt Among Applications Published on 2026-06-30T19:00:00Z Anthropic has launched Claude Science, an AI workbench that connects more than 60 scientific databases and tools through a single interface. Through the platform, Basecamp Research is making its EDEN models available for tasks such as designing antibiotic peptides and predicting vaccine targets from simple text prompts, though the results still require laboratory testing before clinical use. Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News reports: In a Claude Science demo, Oliver Vince, PhD, co-founder at Basecamp, uploaded a sample patient microbiology report. When given a simple natural language prompt, the platform designed peptides, predicted their efficacy, and provided a shortlist of candidates most likely to succeed in experiments in minutes. While generating human-ready antibiotics at the click of a button is still a step away, Vince said democratizing these tools is a ...

Remembering How Microsoft's Fake Windows Error Ended In a $280 Million Secret Settlement Published on 2026-06-30T10:34:00Z Slashdot reader joshuark summarizes this walk down memory lane from the tech site MakeUseOf: Facing real competition from Digital Research's DR DOS, Microsoft secretly embedded a sabotaging mechanism known as "AARD code" into beta versions of Windows 3.1 to prevent it from running on Digital Research's competing DR DOS operating system.This code triggered fake, alarming error messages to convince developers that DR DOS was unstable... Although Microsoft disabled the feature in the final retail release, the California-based firm Caldera, Inc., which had acquired DR DOS assets, sued Microsoft for anti-competitive practices.Microsoft settled the lawsuit out of court in 2000 for $280 million, a figure that remained sealed until it was unsealed in 2009. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ford Rehires 'Gray Beard' Engineers After AI Falls Short Published on 2026-06-30T05:34:00Z Ford executives said they've hired 350 veteran engineers — some of them former employees — after AI and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality, reports TechCrunch: Bloomberg reports the company's chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told journalists that Ford had been "relying more and more on automated quality systems" with disappointing results. So the company "brought back technical specialists," and those specialists "hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor." Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, added, "Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product." The article points out that Ford is using the rehired gray beard engineers to ...

South Korea Plans To Train Entire Military As 'Drone Warriors' Published on 2026-06-30T00:34:00Z "South Korea plans to train every single member of its nearly half-million-strong military to operate drones as easily as they handle personal firearms," reports Ars Technica: The goal is to make drones a "universal combat tool" for all troops by training them to use drones like a "second personal weapon," said Ahn Gyu-back, South Korea's Minister of National Defense, in a June 26 briefing reported by Reuters and other media outlets. The announcement coincides with broader plans to equip individual military units with more cheap and expendable drones for surveillance and strike missions, along with deploying more counter-drone lasers and microwave weapons. Meanwhile, South Korea's former drone operations command headquarters that used to have direct command authority over combat units will be reorganized to focus on collaborating with Sout...

Ex-Governors, Big Tech Launch Coalition To Help Workers 'Navigate the AI Economy' Published on 2026-06-29T19:34:00Z "Amid growing public anger over A.I. and a debate over how to regulate it, a group of employers, state governors and foundations has raised $500 million to try to answer some of those questions themselves," reports the New York Times. "Just how many jobs will AI upend?" asks the Wall Street Journal, reporting that the new coalition says it's time to ready the U.S. workforce for a "major" disruption — no matter how large it turns out to be. The coalition "has so far raised more than $500 million — about half of its multiyear goal — from companies and nonprofit groups. It will initially work with state governments in Arkansas, Maryland, Utah and Connecticut. OpenAI and Anthropic are also involved, and academics including MIT economist David Autor sit on an advisory board." [The new "RAISE US" coalition] wil...

Microsoft Slammed for Building Copyright-Infringing Supercomputer for OpenAI in New Court Filing Published on 2026-06-28T23:34:00Z The New York Times alleges Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal its copyrighted work, reports Ars Technica, citing a new (and heavily redacted) court filing Thursday: NYT's motion comes after the [U.S.] Supreme Court sided with Cox Communications in a case where Sony tried and failed to claim that Cox was contributing to music piracy as an Internet service provider, which set a new standard for contributory infringement. Moving forward, plaintiffs will have to prove that parties intentionally acted to induce illegal conduct. Recognizing that the legal precedent has changed, the NYT now wants to amend its complaint to align its contributory infringement claim against Microsoft with that new standard... A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars that the company views the amended complaint as "a last-ditch effort by the plaintiff to save its claim...

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...

China's AI Matches Anthropic in Cybersecurity, Causing Worry Over US Restrictions Published on 2026-06-28T21:04:00Z Chinese AI systems "have matched the performance of Anthropic's powerful model Mythos in some cybersecurity scenarios," reports the Wall Street Journal. They call it "a development poised to reset the global tech race and pressure the White House in its overhaul of U.S. AI policy." Security researchers said that a new AI model, released this month by China's Zhipu AI, also known as Z.ai, can match the latest U.S. models when it comes to finding security bugs, although it still lags behind Anthropic's and OpenAI's products in other tasks. Overall, the capability gap between top U.S. models and those built by Chinese companies has narrowed significantly, and use of Chinese AI systems has surged as businesses seek to rein in runaway costs. A host of companies, including Microsoft, are weighing how they can offer Chinese models on ...

Are Checks Sent Through the Mail Vulnerable to Theft? Published on 2026-06-28T19:34:00Z The New York Times tells the story of a 63-year-old retiree who wrote a check for several thousand dollaras to pay her taxes. But she discovered much later that her taxes were never paid because that check had been intercepted and then altered to be payable to someone else: In some cases, thieves may pilfer one or more checks from local mailboxes. Adam Rust, director of financial services for the Consumer Federation of America, said thieves sometimes "fish" for checks at free-standing drop boxes, using long tools with sticky pads on the ends to grab letters. In other cases, more sophisticated criminals may steal large batches of checks, copy them and then sell them on the internet. Often, the purloined checks are chemically altered in what's known as "check washing" to remove the name of the recipient. The thief replaces it with a fraudulent name, and often increases the ...

How a Seemingly Harmless Image Can Jailbreak Vision-Language AI Models Published on 2026-06-27T22:52:00Z Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: Florida International University researchers have developed a technique called JaiLIP (Jailbreaking with Loss-guided Image Perturbation) that uses subtle image modifications to bypass AI safety guardrails. Unlike traditional jailbreaks that rely on carefully crafted prompts, the attack works through images that appear normal to human viewers. The researchers tested the technique against BLIP-2, a multimodal AI model, and found that manipulated images significantly increased the likelihood of harmful responses. According to the study, the approach outperformed previous image-based jailbreak methods and nearly doubled the number of unsafe outputs generated during testing. The findings highlight a potential security risk for businesses deploying AI systems that process both images and text. While most discussions about AI safety focus on prompts, ...

France's Heat This Week Was Worse Than a Dire Scenario Imagined For 2050 Published on 2026-06-27T21:48:00Z There's a deadly, record-breaking heat wave spreading east across Europe, reports the Washington Post — and it's even worse than a dire earlier forecast: The forecast was recorded in 2014 as part of a campaign coordinated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that invited about 60 presenters worldwide to imagine a weather report from the year 2050. In one clip, Ãvelyne Dhéliat from French television network TF1 presented a hypothetical scenario of high temperatures 36 years into the future — during a heat wave in a warmer climate in 2050... One of the maps that Dhéliat shared was lit up in shades of orange, filled with temperature predictions of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), reaching as high as 43 degrees Celsius (109.4 degrees Fahrenheit). But it turns out, it didn't take 36 years for those imagined temperatures to be reac...

Max Planck Slapped With Two Paper Retractions By Suspected Rogue Algorithm Published on 2026-06-27T20:43:00Z Max Planck won 1918's Nobel Prize for physics. Yet two of his papers were retracted — a move now being criticized by Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec and Mahdi Khelfaoui, a fellow historian of science at UQ Trois-Rivières. Science reports: The papers, both quietly retracted in 2011, originally appeared in the early 1940s in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal now owned by publishing giant Springer Nature. After some sleuthing, Khelfaoui determined one of the Planck pieces, a philosophical essay from 1942 titled "Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft" ("Meaning and Limits of Exact Science"), about how to achieve certainty in scientific knowledge, had also appeared in two other journals and been reprinted twice in books. Repackaging the same work multiple times is considered "self-plagiarism" and frowned up...

Scroll Burned in 79 AD Volcanic Eruption Finally Deciphered Using AI Published on 2026-06-27T19:34:00Z When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., it buried hundreds of papyrus scrolls. They were rediscovered in the mid-1700s, remembers Smithsonian magazine, "the only surviving collection of its kind from the Greco-Roman world..." "But when scholars tried to unroll them, the carbonized manuscripts crumbled to dust." Every generation that followed faced the same dilemma: They could wait for technology to advance, abandoning hope of reading the ancient texts in their own lifetime. Or they could try to open the scrolls themselves — and risk destroying them. In recent years, researchers have settled on a third option. Using advanced imaging and artificial intelligence, they're deciphering the scrolls without needing to unroll them at all. The Vesuvius Challenge has accelerated the process by turning it into a public competition, complete with cash pri...

Bitcoin Drops Again. Skeptical Investment Strategist Calls It 'Useless' Published on 2026-06-27T08:00:00Z Friday Bitcoin closed at just $59,948 — dropping 19% just for June and more than 50% lower than its record high in October of $124,310. To commemorate the occasion CNBC interviewed long-time bitcoin skeptic Jeremy Grantham, reporting that the 87-year-old cofounder/chief investment strategist of the massive asset-management firm GMO is "predicting it will gradually fade into irrelevance over decades." [The] longtime market commentator known for his calls on asset bubbles said bitcoin is a "useless, speculative" asset without intrinsic value, speaking on CNBC's "Squawk Box" Friday. He also said bitcoin hasn't outperformed during a bull market and questioned its practical use. "[Over] years and years, decades and decades, it will dwindle away, I suspect — not with a bang, but a whimper," he said. "It's not a stable ...

Astronomers Find Biggest Super-Puff Planets Yet That Are Lighter Than Cotton Candy Published on 2026-06-27T05:00:00Z Astronomers have discovered two Jupiter-sized exoplanets with densities lower than cotton candy, making them the lightest known worlds of their size. The rare "super-puffs," located about 1,110 light-years away, are likely composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, with follow-up observations by the James Webb Space Telescope expected to probe their atmospheres. The Associated Press reports: [University of Oxford's George Dransfield] suspects these fluffy, wispy worlds are probably white or blue, depending on whether the skies there are cloudy -- no shades of cotton-candy pink. The planets are probably mostly hydrogen and helium, although it will take follow-up observations by NASA's Webb Space Telescope to confirm their chemical makeup. Detected by NASA's Tess satellite over the past decade, these two especially puffy-puffs orbit a star in the sou...

US Government Allows Anthropic Limited Release of 'Mythos' AI Model, Saying 'Appropriate Safeguards are in Place" Published on 2026-06-27T02:09:00Z "The US government has allowed Anthropic to release its powerful Mythos AI model to select companies and organizations," reports CNN, "revising license requirements after ordering an export block earlier this month in the wake of national security fears." Since the export ban earlier in June, "Anthropic has worked with the US government to address risks associated with the Covered Models," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to the company in a letter dated Friday. In light of progress in that work, Lutnick wrote, "I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model." The letter does not include permission for Anthropic to release Fable, a less powerful version of Mythos. "We received notice f...

Microsoft Adds Another Year To Windows 10 Extended Update Program Published on 2026-06-26T20:00:00Z Microsoft has quietly extended free Windows 10 security updates for consumers by another year, pushing the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program's end date from October 12, 2026, to October 12, 2027. "The ESU support page was updated with that date, and Microsoft's blog post on the program has a new editor's note confirming the change," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The prevalence of Windows across so many devices and form factors has given Microsoft a massive customer base for decades, but it has also stymied the company's efforts to roll out new operating systems. Microsoft famously extended the support window for Windows XP numerous times throughout the 2010s as it became apparent that millions of PCs would never be updated. Windows 10 isn't quite as entrenched as XP was, but it has still been a slog getting people to upgrade to Windows 11 ev...

Polestar Banned From Selling Cars In US From Model Year 2027 Published on 2026-06-25T23:00:00Z Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from autoevolution: The U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security denied Polestar an authorization under the Connected Vehicle Rule. Polestar will continue to sell its existing inventory of Polestar 3 and 4 crossovers in the United States and will continue to offer support to customers and access to its service network. But no new 2027 models will set wheels on American soil. The Connected Vehicle Rule is a regulation that restricts the import and sale of vehicles equipped with Vehicle Connectivity Systems (VCS) and Automated Driving Systems (ADS) tied to foreign adversaries, primarily from China and Russia. Polestar is owned by Chinese auto giant Geely, which has also been the parent company of Swedish brand Volvo since 2010. However, Volvo has recently been granted authorization to sell connected vehicles in the Un...

Trump Administration Asks OpenAI To Stagger Release of New Model Published on 2026-06-25T22:00:00Z The Trump administration has reportedly asked OpenAI to stagger the release of GPT-5.6 over security concerns. The model will initially be offered to a small group of partners, with the government "approving access customer by customer during this preview period," reports The Information. The request came from conversations with the Office of the National Cyber Director and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the report said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Raises Prices On Macs, iPads, and More By Hundreds of Dollars Published on 2026-06-25T20:00:00Z Apple has sharply raised prices across its Mac, iPad, HomePod, and Apple TV lineups as surging AI-driven demand creates a global memory and storage shortage. Increases range from $30 for the HomePod mini to $1,300 for the M3 Ultra Mac Studio, with Apple CEO Tim Cook saying efforts to shield customers from higher costs had become "unsustainable." The Verge reports: On Thursday, the company adjusted the price of its new MacBook Neo, which will now start at $699 instead of $599, while the base MacBook Air will jump to $1,299 from $1,099, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. The 14-inch MacBook Pro is getting an increase as well, going from $1,699 to $1,999. Meanwhile, the iPad Air will now start at $749 instead of $599, while the iPad Pro is increasing to $1,199 from $999. As spotted by MacRumors, the M4 Max Mac Studio will now cost $2,499, a big jump from $1,999. The M3 Ultra ...

LastPass Says Hackers Stole Customer Support Case Data During Klue Breach Published on 2026-06-25T19:00:00Z LastPass says hackers stole customers' personal information, support case records, and sales data by breaching market research partner Klue. The password manager told TechCrunch that its own systems and password vaults were unaffected. However, the hackers used their access to obtain "reams of data about LastPass customers," the report says. From the report: In a blog post that shared information about the incident, LastPass said the hackers took customers' names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as customer support case data and sales-related data. It's not yet known what was in the contents of customer support tickets, although they likely contain fragments of potentially private or sensitive information. Customers typically contact customer service when they are having a billing issue or need assistance in gaining access t...

Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak Published on 2026-06-24T22:00:00Z Meta has paused its Model Compatibility Initiative that tracked employee mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and screen content to train AI agents, after some of its collected data became accessible to more employees than intended. Meta says it has no evidence the information was improperly accessed and will not restart the program until it is confident in its safeguards. Wired reports: Meta rolled out the Model Compatibility Initiative (MCI) tool in April to US employees. The tool "collects computer inputs such as mouse movements, click locations and keystrokes, as well as screen content," according to workers who have been petitioning against it over privacy, security, and personal liberty concerns. When MCI launched, employees couldn't opt out, but that changed to a limited degree after workers protested. Meta executives have repeatedly defended the data-gathering pr...