"Following months of public debate and protests against American IT giant Kyndryl's proposed acquisition of Solvinity, a Dutch cloud provider that hosts the Netherlands' online identity platform, the Dutch government has decided to block the acquisition," writes longtime Slashdot reader rastakid. "The deal triggered fears that it would mean that 'DigiD' data would fall under foreign control, and could be demanded by U.S. authorities." Politico reports: In a letter to the national parliament published on Tuesday, State Secretary for Digital Economy Willemijn Aerdts said the national authority charged with screening investments had advised the government to block the acquisition. The purchase was seen as posing "a possible risk to the public interest."

The government on Monday decided to adopt the advice and block the acquisition, Aerdts said. "The Netherlands attaches great value to the presence of foreign, especially U.S.-based tech companies, and their added value to the Dutch economy and digital infrastructure, but it maintains, at the same time, an independent investment screening framework aimed at protecting the public interest and which applies equally to all investors, independent of their country of origin," the letter read. Kyndryl said in a statement it was "extremely disappointed" about the decision. "The politicization of this process has overshadowed the clear and important benefits this transaction would have brought to Solvinity's customers and Dutch citizens."

Further reading: Challenges Face European Governments Pursuing 'Digital Sovereignty'

California lawmakers are moving to exempt most open-source operating systems from the state's upcoming age-verification law after backlash from Linux and privacy advocates who warned that the original rules could force decentralized projects to collect users' ages. The amendment would likely shield major Linux distributions, though SteamOS and other Linux-based platforms tied to proprietary app stores may still face compliance questions. Tom's Hardware reports: Assembly Bill 1856 (AB 1856), currently moving through California's legislature ahead of committee reviews in June, would amend the state's earlier age-assurance law by excluding software distributed under licenses that allow users to "copy, redistribute, and modify the software." The proposed amendment specifically states: "Operating system provider" does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.

The amendment follows months of backlash after California passed the original Assembly Bill 1043 (AB 1043), formally known as the Digital Age Assurance Act, in late 2025. The law sought to shift online age verification away from individual websites and apps and down to the operating-system level instead. Under the original law, operating systems would be required to request a user's age or birth date during device setup, then expose an "age bracket signal" to apps and app stores. The law, which defined brackets such as "under 13," "13-15," "16-17," and "18+," immediately raised questions about how such requirements would apply to decentralized, open-source software ecosystems. [...]

AB 1856 does not repeal the original Digital Age Assurance Act. Instead, it narrows the definition of who qualifies as an "operating system provider" under the law. Commercial platforms with proprietary app ecosystems could remain subject to California's age-assurance requirements even if most open-source Linux distributions are ultimately exempted. California Assembly Member Buffy Wicks introduced the amendment on February 11, 2026. However, the open-source exemption language appeared in later revisions that began drawing attention across Linux and privacy communities. The latest version is dated May 18, 2026, and as of May 19, 2026, the bill was read a second time and ordered to third reading.

Thursday California's governor issued an executive order "directing state agencies to prepare workers and businesses for AI-driven workforce disruption," reports San Francisco's KQED. In a statement the governor said "This moment demands that we reimagine the entire system — how we work, how we govern, how we prepare people for the future." The order mandates agencies to explore a range of policy options, including severance standards, expanded unemployment insurance, job retraining programs aimed specifically at white-collar workers, worker ownership models and a concept the governor called "universal basic capital," giving all residents a stake in assets such as corporate stocks, bonds or wealth funds...

Tom Kemp, executive director of the California Privacy Protection Agency, applauded the fact that the order named data privacy as a consumer protection concern and highlighted the CPPA's automated decision-making technology regulations, which he called "the nation's most comprehensive." Others are more skeptical. "Catastrophic job loss from AI is not inevitable, it's a political choice," Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO, wrote in a statement. However, Gonzalez noted one area of genuine agreement: the order's emphasis on collective bargaining as a tool for protecting workers from AI displacement...

According to Stanford HAI's 2026 AI Index, software developers ages 22 to 25 are among those most likely to see their skills made redundant earliest. This year, U.S. employment fell nearly 20% from 2024, even as headcount for older developers continued to grow. Following the job cuts announced at Meta, a union of Alphabet workers in the U.S. and Canada released a statement that suggests Silicon Valley's own labor force may seek to organize... "It's undeniable that our whole industry is being transformed by the corporate push to adopt new AI tools," [Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Local 9009 said in a statement]. "It's hard not to feel anxiety and fear when we can see more and more tech companies cutting huge portions of their workforce both in anticipation of replacing them with AI, and to fund their multi-billion-dollar bets on AI as the future of the industry..."

In February, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Gonzalez delivered what amounted to an ultimatum to Newsom: regulate AI or lose labor's support for any future presidential run. Shuler called a potential AI-driven economic collapse a coming "crisis." In August 2025, Newsom announced a partnership with Google, Microsoft, IBM and Adobe to expand AI education in California schools and community colleges, a workforce preparation push that now looks like a precursor to Thursday's more sweeping order.
The article notes that after signing the bill the governor shared this comment on X.com. "California will pursue new policies that make sure working Californians — not just Big Tech — benefit from the wealth and breakthroughs coming out of this space."

Newsom telegraphed Thursday's order earlier this week, when he appeared at the Center for American Progress IDEAS Conference in Washington. "Businesses are going to make a fortune, and that's why you cannot continue to have a payroll tax system that taxes jobs and then subsidizes automation."

A proposal to make daylight saving time permanent has advanced in the U.S. House of Representative, reports California news station KCRA: A proposal to make daylight saving time permanent has advanced in the House, reigniting an age-old American debate around the twice-annual clock changes. And this time, the proposal has the president's backing. President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will work "very hard" to sign the so-called Sunshine Protection Act into law after the House Energy and Commerce Committee overwhelmingly approved the bill by a 48-1 vote.

The bill still needs to pass the full U.S. House, and then the U.S. Senate would consider taking up the measure.
The bill would allow U.S states to decide whether to "exempt themselves" from Daylight Saving Time, according to the article.

The bill's sponsor described the annual clock-switching as "inconvenient, unnecessary, and out of step with the needs of today's families and economy," while finally creating a permanent Daylight Saving would bring "more usable daylight hours throughout the year."

The Washington Post looks at arguments that "AI's coming upheaval may demand massive infusions of cash to everyday Americans". But they also look at some of the alternatives: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for similar public-relief measures, including, potentially, universal basic income, or UBI. Eventually "our current economic setup will no longer make sense," he wrote in a blog post, adding that "there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized."

Though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once championed universal basic income, he has since embraced a new structure where the public has "collective ownership" of aspects of AI, according to Business Insider. "I think any version of the future that I can get really excited about means that everybody's got to participate in the upside," he said in a recent podcast interview. In April, OpenAI laid out a set of policy proposals aiming to address the coming upheaval, referencing the transition to the industrial age and the New Deal as points of comparison for what's on the horizon...

But some experts question whether tech billionaires, who spent decades resisting regulation, unions and higher taxes, would support the kind of massive redistribution such programs would require. "The only way to pay for UBI is to massively tax those enormously rich people who own the UBI machines," said Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California at Berkeley who served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. "It's a nice surprise to hear Elon Musk advocating for that...." Rothstein co-authored a study in 2019 that estimated granting a small income to the entire country would cost a massive amount — nearly double the total spending of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. To issue payments of $12,000 a year to U.S. adults, for example, "would require nearly doubling federal tax revenues," according to the paper...

Economists appear to broadly support other solutions beyond redistribution, such as job retraining. A working paper published this spring by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago showed economists support more narrowly tailored solutions to the economic disruption. In late April, Meta appeared to embrace that path, announcing "a multi-year initiative that provides free, rapid training to turn thousands of Americans with no prior experience into high-paid fiber technicians" for projects including data centers.
Key quotes from the article:

• Elon Musk said in an X post that "Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI."

• "I think it's a marketing tactic" responded Scott Santens, a universal basic income advocate and is CEO of the nonprofit Income to Support All Foundation. He argued to the Washington Post that Musk's comment is "trying to thread this needle of, 'I want to solve this stuff that will potentially put a lot of people out of work.' And how do you avoid people getting really [angry] at that? Okay, well, you're still going to get money, everything will be great it's just you won't have to work anymore...."

• The article also cites a recent commentary from Jay W. Richards, a senior research fellow and VP of social and domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation. "The new AI prophets of doom suffer from a failure of imagination. They simply cannot envision what work the future will bring, so they conclude it will bring none,"

The NTSB temporarily closed public access to nearly all investigation dockets after people used a spectrogram image from a PDF in the UPS flight 2976 crash file to reconstruct approximate cockpit voice recorder audio and post it online. "We show our work and we've been doing this type of thing for years. Nobody was aware that you can recreate audio from a picture," a spokesperson for the board said. "NTSB is looking to make sure there's nothing else in the docket that could compromise anybody's privacy... now that we understand the possibility of a digital recreation." CNN reports: Cockpit voice recordings, often referred to as the CVR, capture everything commercial pilots say and are valuable during NTSB investigations, but are almost never released out of respect for the victims and their families. UPS flight 2976 crashed on November 4, when an engine separated from the wing while it was taking off from Louisville, Kentucky. The three crew members onboard were killed along with 12 people on the ground. During a two-day investigative hearing this week, the board released a docket full of details about the crash. Besides thousands of pages of reports and video showing the engine separating, it included a transcript of the CVR and a PDF file showing an analysis of the spectrogram of the audio it recorded.

A spectrogram is a still image that is a visual representation of the audio, showing the ups and downs of the frequencies. Using that still image, members of the public were able to recreate the voices of the pilots in the moments before the plane crashed and post the results online. The clip, which included background noise and echoes, covered the last 30 seconds of the flight as the pilots struggled with the disabled aircraft as well as recordings of testing the NTSB did on another aircraft.

In a statement on Thursday, the board made clear it "does not release cockpit voice recordings" due to federal law and because of the highly sensitive nature of what they include, but it was "aware that advances in image recognition and computational methods have enabled individuals to reconstruct approximations of cockpit voice recorder audio from sound spectrum imagery." Investigation dockets are made public for transparency, but this week, the board took the rare step of closing public access to all dockets, including the one for the UPS crash. [...] The NTSB is urging platforms like X and Reddit to remove posts with the audio.

Trump Mobile confirmed that a third-party platform exposed customers' personal data to the open internet. The data included names, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and order IDs. TechCrunch reports: Chris Walker, a spokesperson for the Trump-branded phone maker, told TechCrunch that the company is investigating the exposure and has not found evidence that content or financial information spilled online. The company said there was no breach of Trump Mobile's network, systems, or infrastructure. Walker said that the exposure was linked to a third-party platform provider that supports "certain Trump Mobile operations." He did not name the provider.

[...] On Wednesday, two YouTubers who ordered Trump Mobile's phone said a researcher alerted them that their personal information was exposed online. The YouTubers Coffeezilla and penguinz0 said they tried to alert Trump Mobile of the exposure after the researcher also tried but to no avail. Walker said Trump Mobile is evaluating whether it needs to notify customers of the exposure of their personal data. Further reading: Trump Phones Start Shipping - But Were There Really 600,000 Preorders?

Venmo is testing a major redesign that will make new users' payment posts viewable by their friends by default instead of being public. The Verge reports: It's a notable update for a platform that has struggled with privacy in the past. In 2021, BuzzFeed News tracked down President Joe Biden's Venmo account and the accounts of people in his inner circle because Venmo, at the time, had no way to keep your Venmo contacts private. It fixed that soon after.

As part of the redesign, if you're a new user and you do want your posts to be public (or private just to you), you'll be able to set that as part of the new onboarding flow. You can also change your preference in settings after the fact; an updated screen for sending money will also show if that post is private, visible just to friends, or is visible publicly before you make the transaction.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: US lawmakers plan to introduce an amendment Thursday at a House committee markup hearing that would prohibit any recipient of federal highway funding from using automated license plate readers for any purpose other than tolling -- a sweeping restriction that, if adopted, would bring an immediate end to state and local ALPR programs across the United States. The amendment, obtained first by WIRED, is sponsored by Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican and Freedom Caucus member, and Representative Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, an Illinois progressive whose state has become a flash point in the national fight over ALPR misuse.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will mark up the underlying bill -- a $580 billion, five-year reauthorization of federal surface transportation programs -- at 10 am ET on Thursday. The amendment runs a single sentence: "A recipient of assistance under Title 23, United States Code, may not use automated license plate readers for any purpose other than tolling." The amendment is brief, but its reach would be vast. Title 23 funds roughly a quarter of all public road mileage in the US, including most state and county arteries and many city streets where ALPR cameras are becoming ubiquitous. Conditioning that funding on a ban of the technology would, in practical effect, force any state, county, or municipality that takes federal highway money (essentially all of them) to either remove the cameras or restructure their use around tolling alone.

The amendment's cosponsors, Perry and Garcia, represent opposite ends of the House's ideological spectrum but converge on a surveillance concern that has gathered momentum in legislatures and city halls across the US as ALPR networks have quietly become a pervasive layer of American road infrastructure. ALPR cameras -- mounted on poles, overpasses, traffic signals, and police cruisers -- photograph every passing license plate, log times and locations, and feed data into searchable databases shared across agencies and jurisdictions. [...] Privacy advocates have long warned that the aggregation of license plate data amounts to a de facto warrantless tracking system. New York University School of Law's Brennan Center for Justice has documented the integration of ALPR feeds into police data-fusion systems that combine plate data with surveillance and social media monitoring. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, has documented a range of police misuse, including the past targeting of mosques and the disproportionate deployment of the technology in low-income neighborhoods. Earlier this week, 404 Media reviewed FBI procurement records that reveal the agency is seeking up to $36 million for nationwide access to ALPR data, which could let it query vehicle movements across the U.S. and its territories through a commercial database.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: AT&T on Wednesday filed suit (PDF) against California officials seeking a court order declaring it does not have to continue offering traditional copper wire phone service to new customers as it vowed to spend $19 billion on modern telecom services. California requires the U.S. wireless carrier to spend $1 billion annually to maintain a century-old telephone network that few use, AT&T said, saying the network now serves just 3% of households in AT&T's California territory.

AT&T's suit named the California Public Utilities Commission and the state attorney general. AT&T said it is committing to investing $19 billion in California as it works to connect more than 4 million additional households and businesses across California by 2030 and added IP-based networks are far more reliable and efficient. AT&T also Wednesday asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to discontinue traditional phone service in parts of California where it has faster, more reliable service available. It also filed a petition with the FCC to declare that California's rules that effectively require AT&T to power, repair and sell traditional phone service, even after the FCC has authorized the service to be phased out, are preempted by federal standards.

AT&T added that transitioning from copper will save an estimated 300 million kilowatt-hours annually by 2030 or the equivalent of eliminating emissions from 17 million gallons of gasoline. The company added that California has already suffered about 2,000 outages from copper thefts this year and it struggles to find replacement parts. The federal government and virtually all states where AT&T historically offered copper-wire service "have now eliminated outdated regulatory obstacles" allowing AT&T to begin powering down its old network and increasing its investments in modern communication technologies, the company said in its lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in southern California.

Trump called off a planned AI executive order just hours before a signing ceremony because he said he was worried the framework could slow America's lead over China. "We're leading China, we're leading everybody, and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead," Trump told reporters. The Associated Press reports: The order would have established a framework for the government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems before their public release, according to a person familiar with the White House's deliberations with the tech industry but not authorized to speak about it publicly. The directive was being characterized as a voluntary collaboration with participating U.S.-based tech companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, the person said.

There are competing factions within the administration, said Serena Booth, a computer science professor at Brown University and former AI policy fellow in a Democratic-led Senate committee. "We do see this kind of public fighting," she said. "'We will release an executive order. No, we won't. We're going to sign it this afternoon. Oh, the signing is canceled.' I think this whiplash is because we're seeing these fractures.'"

Some of those divides are balancing what Booth said is a "reasonable idea" to test the most capable AI models before their public release, with a concern that government scrutiny, if it takes too long, could burden AI developers. "It does come at a potential very large cost to innovation and speed of development," she said. "There is, I think, a real risk here and I do see both sides." [...]

"They don't want to do it because it's politically risky in a million different ways," said Dean Ball, now at the Foundation for American Innovation. Ball said he would welcome an executive order that would get those companies working more closely with the government on cybersecurity but "ultimately, I'm fine with them taking time to get this right."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Quantum Insider: The Trump administration is preparing a new round of industrial policy aimed at quantum computing, with roughly $2 billion in grants expected to go to nine companies developing quantum hardware and related technologies. According to Reuters, citing a Wall Street Journal report, the U.S. Department of Commerce plans to distribute the funding through deals that also give the federal government equity stakes in the companies receiving the awards. The approach would expand Washington's increasingly direct involvement in sectors viewed as strategically important to national security, advanced manufacturing and competition with China.

Reuters reported that IBM is expected to receive the largest share of the package at about $1 billion. Semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries is slated to receive approximately $375 million, according to the report. Other recipients are expected to include D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, Quantinuum and Infleqtion, with each company potentially receiving around $100 million, Reuters reported. Australian quantum startup Diraq could receive about $38 million, according to the Wall Street Journal report cited by Reuters. Fast Company notes in its reporting that IBM will invest the funds it receives into a new IBM company called Anderon. It will also match the grant with another $1 billion in cash.

"Anderon will operate as a state-of-the-art 300-millimeter quantum wafer foundry," IBM stated in an announcement. "It will help the nation solidify its leadership at the center of a thriving new quantum industry that is estimated to generate up to $850 billion in economic value by 2040 and spur American economic growth while also bolstering national security."

Quantum computing stocks soared after the news. As of publication, IBM is up about 9.7%, D-Wave is up about 28.1%, and Rigetti is up about 26.7%. Meanwhile, Global Foundries rose about 13.8% and Infleqtion jumped about 30.9%.

Longtime Slashdot reader Himmy32 writes: GitHub has announced on X that their internal repositories have been breached through a compromised VS Code Extension on an employee's workstation. Bleeping Computer reported that the attack is linked to TeamPCP who have been in the news for a recent campaign affecting Checkmarx, Trivy, SAP, TanStack, and Bitwarden. The group appears to be attempting to sell the stolen code on cybercrime forums. "Yesterday we detected and contained a compromise of an employee device involving a poisoned VS Code extension. We removed the malicious extension version, isolated the endpoint, and began incident response immediately," the company said. "Our current assessment is that the activity involved exfiltration of GitHub-internal repositories only. The attacker's current claims of ~3,800 repositories are directionally consistent with our investigation so far."

Although the investigation remains ongoing, GitHub says it has "no evidence of impact to customer information stored outside of GitHub's internal repositories." The company has also not said whether it's in contact with the hackers or if it's received a ransom demand.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A coalition of thirteen major publishers has won a massive $19.5 million default judgment against shadow library Anna's Archive. A New York federal judge fully approved the publishers' requests, issuing a broad permanent injunction that orders more than twenty specific global registries, hosts, and service providers to immediately disable the site's remaining domains. [...] At first glance, the damages award is the headline figure. Judge Rakoff granted the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each of the 130 "Works in Suit." This brings the final damages bill amount to a staggering $19,500,000. However, as with the $322 million judgment won by the music industry against Anna's Archive in the related Spotify case, it's highly unlikely that this money will be recouped.

For now, the operators of Anna's Archive remain strictly anonymous, which doesn't help either. The default judgment (PDF) addresses this and requires the operators to unmask their identities and provide a sworn statement with valid contact information to the court within 10 days. However, since the operators have previously stated they hide their identities to avoid "decades of prison time," it is safe to assume that the operators will simply ignore this request. The true power of this default judgment lies in the permanent injunction. Anna's Archive is known to evade enforcement and change domain names when needed, so the injunction targets the technical intermediaries that keep the site online.

Specifically, the injunction orders "all domain name registries and registrars of record" to permanently disable access to Anna's Archive's domains and prevent their transfer to anyone other than the publishers or the music industry plaintiffs in the related case. In addition to domain name services, the order also extends to international hosting providers, who are also ordered to stop working with the site. Leaving no room for interpretation, the order specifically names more than twenty companies and organizations. This includes familiar names like Cloudflare, Njalla, and DDOS-Guard, as well as the domain name registries of the site's current active domains [...]. The names include some intermediaries that were already listed in the Spotify default judgment, as well as new ones.

A long-running lawsuit over Vizio's Linux-based smart TV software is headed to trial in August, with the Software Freedom Conservancy arguing that GPL rules require Vizio to release complete source code owners could use to modify, maintain, or strip ads and tracking from their TVs. Ars Technica reports: The outcome could reverberate across the industry. Because many of today's popular smart TV operating systems are Linux-based, the case may help determine how much control many owners have over their sets. Access to the full code would allow users to make meaningful changes to how their TVs work, including limiting ads or deactivating automatic content recognition.

[...] The Software Freedom Conservancy argues it has the right to Vizio OS's source code because it owns several Vizio TVs and because the operating system is based on Ubuntu, a Linux distribution. (SFC employees bought seven Vizio TVs from 2018 to 2021 after getting complaints about Vizio not sharing its TVs' source code, according to the complaint.) In general, the Linux kernel is provided under the terms of GPLv2, as noted by kernel.org, which is run by the Linux Kernel Organization.

SFC's lawsuit alleges that Vizio breached GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 by failing to make available the complete source code for Vizio OS. The case is currently in the Orange County Superior Court of the State of California. The lawsuit targets Vizio specifically, but the impact could extend to other Linux-based smart TV OSes such as LG's webOS, Samsung's Tizen, and Roku's Roku OS. "We expect all companies who distribute Linux and other software using right-to-repair agreements like the GPL in their products would comply with these agreements," Denver Gingerich, the director of compliance at SFC, told Ars. [...] SFC expects a ruling within three to six months of the conclusion of the trial, which is currently scheduled for August 10.