"California, Colorado, Minnesota, New York, Connecticut, Oregon and Washington have all passed comprehensive right-to-repair regulations," reports CNBC, "covering everything from consumer electronics and farm equipment to wheelchairs and automobiles."

And the consumer movement "continues to gain political momentum" across America... As of this year, advocates are tracking 57 right-to-repair bills across 22 states. In Maine, the state senate just advanced a bill that would bring the right to repair to electronics in the state. Texas's new right-to-repair law kicks in on Sept. 1 and covers phones, laptops, and tablets, but excludes medical and farm equipment, and game consoles.... [U.S.] Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) are unlikely political bedfellows but have joined together to sponsor the REPAIR Act... The REPAIR Act would require automakers to give vehicle owners, independent repair shops, and aftermarket manufacturers secure access to vehicle repair and maintenance data, preventing manufacturers from funneling consumers into their own exclusive and more expensive dealership repair networks... Hawley criticized big corporations in his arguments in favor of right-to-repair legislation.

"Big corporations have a history of gatekeeping basic information that belongs to car owners, effectively forcing consumers to pay a fixed price whenever their car is in the shop," Hawley told CNBC. "The bipartisan REPAIR Act would end corporations' control over diagnostics and service information and give consumers the right to repair their own equipment at a price most feasible for them." The largest small business lobby in the U.S., the NFIB, says 89% of its members support right-to-repair legislation, making it a top legislative priority for 2026.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Pres: Okello Chatrie's cellphone gave him away. Chatrie made off with $195,000 from the bank he robbed in suburban Richmond, Virginia, and eluded the police until they turned to a powerful technological tool that erected a virtual fence and allowed them collect the location history of cellphone users near the crime scene... Now the Supreme Court will decide whether geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches... Chatrie's appeal is one of two cases being argued Monday...

Civil libertarians say that geofences amount to fishing expeditions that subject many innocent people to searches of private records merely because their cellphones happened to be in the vicinity of a crime. A Supreme Court ruling in favor of the technique could "unleash a much broader wave of similar reverse searches," law professors who study digital surveillance wrote the court... In Chatrie's case, the geofence warrant invigorated an investigation that had stalled. After determining that Chatrie was near the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian around the time it was robbed in May 2019, police obtained a search warrant for his home. They found nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in bands signed by the bank teller. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison. Chatrie's lawyers argued on appeal that none of the evidence should have been used against him. They challenged the warrant as a violation of his privacy because it allowed authorities to gather the location history of people near the bank without having any evidence they had anything to do with the robbery.

Prosecutors argued that Chatrie had no expectation of privacy because he voluntarily opted into Google's location history. A federal judge agreed that the search violated Chatrie's rights, but allowed the evidence to be used because the officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly.

The Conversation published this warning from privacy/tech law/electronic surveillance attorney Anne Toomey McKenna (also an affiliated faculty member at Penn State's Institute for Computational and Data Sciences). The U.S. government "is able to purchase Americans' sensitive data because the information it buys is not subject to the same restrictions as information it collects directly. The federal government is also ramping up its abilities to directly collect data through partnerships with private tech companies. These surveillance tech partnerships are becoming entrenched, domestically and abroad, as advances in AI take surveillance to unprecedented levels... " Congressional funding is supercharging huge government investments in surveillance tech and data analytics driven by AI, which automates analysis of very large amounts of data. The massive 2025 tax-and-spending law netted the Department of Homeland Security an unprecedented US$165 billion in yearly funding. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of DHS, got about $86 billion. Disclosure of documents allegedly hacked from Homeland Security reveal a massive surveillance web that has all Americans in its scope. DHS is expanding its AI surveillance capabilities with a surge in contracts to private companies. It is reportedly funding companies that provide more AI-automated surveillance in airports; adapters to convert agents' phones into biometric scanners; and an AI platform that acquires all 911 call center data to build geospatial heat maps to predict incident trends. Predicting incident trends can be a form of predictive policing, which uses data to anticipate where, when and how crime may occur...

Meanwhile, the Trump administration's national policy framework for artificial intelligence, released on March 20, 2026, urges Congress to use grants and tax incentives to fund "wider deployment of AI tools across American industry" and to allow industry and academia to use federal datasets to train AI. Using federal datasets this way raises privacy law concerns because they contain a lifetime of sensitive details about you, including biographical, employment and tax information....
The author argues that it's now critical for Americans to know "why the laws you might think are protecting your data do not apply or are ignored." On March 18, 2026, FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed to Congress that the FBI is buying Americans' data from data brokers, including location histories, to track American citizens.... But in buying your data in bulk on the commercial market, the government is circumventing the Constitution, Supreme Court decisions and federal laws designed to protect your privacy from unwarranted government overreach... Supreme Court cases require police to get a warrant to search a phone or use cellular or GPS location information to track someone. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act's Wiretap Act prohibits unauthorized interception of wire, oral and electronic communications.

Despite some efforts, Congress has failed to enact legislation to protect data privacy, the use of sensitive data by AI systems or to restore the intent of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Courts have allowed the broad electronic privacy protections in the federal Wiretap Act to be eviscerated by companies claiming consent. In my opinion, the way to begin to address these problems is to restore the Wiretap Act and related laws to their intended purposes of protecting Americans' privacy in communications, and for Congress to follow through on its promises and efforts by passing legislation that secures Americans' data privacy and protects them from AI harms.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: The 1986 Chernobyl disaster fueled global fears about nuclear power and slowed its development in Europe and elsewhere. Four decades later, however, there's a revival around the world, a trend that has been given a big boost by war in the Middle East. Over 400 nuclear reactors are operational in 31 countries, while about 70 more are under construction. Nuclear power accounts for producing about 10% of the world's electricity, equivalent to about a quarter of all sources of low-carbon power.

Nuclear reactors have seen steady improvements, adding more safety features and making them cheaper to build and operate. While Chernobyl and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan diminished the appetite for such power sources, it was clear years ago that there probably would be a revival, said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. With the war in the Middle East, "I am 100% sure nuclear is coming back," he added...

The United States is the world's largest producer of nuclear power, with 94 operational reactors accounting for about 30% of global generation of nuclear electricity. And it is increasing efforts to develop nuclear energy capacity with a goal to quadruple it by 2050... China operates 61 nuclear reactors and is leading the world in building new units, with nearly 40 under construction with a goal to surpass the U.S. and become the global leader in nuclear capacity. European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen has acknowledged that it was Europe's "strategic mistake" to cut nuclear energy and outlined new initiatives to encourage building power plants. [In 1990, nuclear energy accounted for roughly a third of Europe's electricity, the article points out, but it's now only about 15%.] Russia, meanwhile, has taken a strong lead in exporting its nuclear know-how, building 20 reactors worldwide...

Japan has restarted 15 reactors after reviewing the lessons of the earthquake and tsunami that damaged the Fukushima plant, and 10 more are in the process of getting approval to restart. South Africa has the only nuclear power plant on the African continent, although Russia is building one in Egypt, and several other African nations are exploring the technology... With 57 reactors at 19 plants, France relies on nuclear power for nearly 70% of its electricity.
The article includes an interactive graphic that shows the growth in the world's nuclear capacity slowing down soon after the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown — with that capacity broken down by country. But it's still increased by roughly 50%.

Even Ukraine — the site of the accident — now "still relies heavily on nuclear plants to generate about half of its electricity," the article points out. But Germany "switched off its last three nuclear reactors in 2023."

America's National Science Board (NSB) "was established in 1950 to guide the governance of the National Science Foundation," writes the Washington Post, "in an unusual structure within the federal government that echoes the setup of a company board in the private sector. It helps guide an agency that operates Antarctic research stations, telescopes, a fleet of research vessels and supports basic science research in laboratories across the United States." (NSF research has helped evolve the technology used in MRIs, cellphones and LASIK eye surgery.)

But yesterday President Trump fired all 24 members of the National Science Board (NSB), the body that oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF), reports Science magazine: In addition to advising the administration and Congress on national science policy, it has statutory authority to oversee the actions of the $9-billion NSF, setting policy and approving large expenditures. Its presidentially appointed members, typically prominent academics and industry leaders, serve 6-year terms, with eight members chosen every 2 years....

Keivan Stassun, one of the dismissed board members, says the mass firing is the latest indication that the White House is ignoring the board's authority and dictating policies at NSF, which has been without a permanent director since Sethuraman Panchanathan resigned exactly one year ago. Stassun, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University who was appointed to the board in 2022, thinks the board's public criticism in May 2025 of Trump's proposed 55% cut to NSF's current budget — which Congress ultimately ignored — antagonized the administration. "Maybe one way to say it from the administration's perspective," Stassun says, "is that this group of presidential appointees was advising the Congress to not follow the president's wishes."
The Washington Post adds that "The White House did not immediately respond to inquiries about why the members were terminated."

After Australia banned social media for users younger than 16, teenagers "immediately worked to circumvent the restrictions," reports Fortune: 14-year-old in New South Wales, told The Washington Post in December 2025, just before the implementation of the ban, she planned to use her mother's face ID to log in to Snapchat and . In a Reddit thread on ways to bypass the ban, one user suggested using a printed mesh face mask from Temu to outsmart apps' facial recognition tools. Others still have tried VPNs that obscure their locations.

A new report suggests these efforts are working. In a survey of 1,050 Australians ages 12 to 15 conducted last month, the UK-based suicide prevention organization the Molly Rose Foundation found more than 60% of teens who had social media accounts before the ban still had access to at least one of those platforms. Social media sites including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, have retained more than half of their users under 16. About two-thirds of young users say these platforms have taken "no action" to remove or reactive accounts that existed before the restrictions.

The survey comes at the heels of the Australian internet regulator calling for an investigation into the five largest social media platforms over potential breaches of the ban.
The article points out that "Greece, France, Indonesia, Austria, Spain, and the UK have or are considering similar action, and eight U.S. states are weighing legislation that would put guardrails or ban social media use for minors.

Colorado's "age-attestation" bill left the House committee with new exemptions for open-source operating systems, applications, code repositories, and containerized software distribution, reports the blog Linuxiac: [The bill] focuses on operating system providers and application stores. Its main requirement is that these providers supply an age-related signal via an interface, so applications can determine whether a user is a minor... System76 founder Carl Richell shared on Fosstodon that the updated bill now includes "a strong exemption for open source distros and apps" and has passed in the House committee. He also quoted the key part, which says Article 30 does not apply to an operating system provider or developer that distributes software under license terms that let recipients copy, redistribute, and modify the software without restrictions from the provider or developer... This wording covers Linux distributions and many open-source applications without linking the exemption to any specific project, company, or ecosystem.

The amendment also excludes applications from free, public code repositories from being considered covered applications. It also excludes code repository providers and containerized software distribution from being defined as covered application stores. This is meant to prevent platforms like GitHub, GitLab, Docker, or Podman-based distributions from being treated like commercial app stores under the bill.
"There are more steps but we're on our way to protecting the open source community," Richell posted on Fosstodon, "at least in Colorado."

It's the U.S. government's main link to the AI industry, reports The Washington Post, working to assess national security risks of new models like Anthropic's "Mythos".

To run it they'd hired Collin Burns, who'd worked at OpenAI and then Anthropic. But Burns started work Monday at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation — and then "was pushed out Thursday by the White House, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations." Officials were concerned about Burns having worked at the AI company, which has fought bitterly with the Trump administration in recent months, according to one of the people and another person. That person said some senior figures at the White House had not been briefed on Burns's selection in advance... The new pick was Chris Fall, a scientist with a long career spanning the federal government and academia. Burns had been asked to resign that afternoon, according to one of the people familiar with the situation...

Dean Ball, a former Trump administration AI adviser, said on social media that Burns had given up valuable Anthropic stock and moved across the country to take the government position, and had been "rewarded by his country with a punch in the face." "Obviously what happened is Burns was bumped because of his association with Anthropic," Ball wrote. "A dumb but predictable own goal."

Maine Gov. Janet Mills vetoed a bill that would have imposed the nation's first statewide moratorium on new data centers, saying she supported the idea in principle but would not block a major redevelopment project tied to jobs and local investment. Instead, she said she will create a council to study data centers' effects while also signing a separate measure to deny them certain state tax incentives. Politico reports: "After prior redevelopment efforts failed, the Town of Jay worked for two years on a $550 million data center redevelopment project to finally bring jobs and investment back to the mill site," Mills wrote, adding that she would issue an executive order establishing a council to examine the impact of data centers in Maine.

The legislation would have made Maine the first state to block the construction of new data centers, as both political parties grapple with how voters view them ahead of the midterm elections. In a statement accompanying the letter, the governor said she had signed a separate bill that would prohibit data center projects from receiving Maine's business development tax incentive programs

South Korean police arrested a man accused of spreading an AI-generated image of an escaped wolf, after the fake photo reportedly misled authorities and disrupted the real search operation. The BBC reports: South Korean police have arrested a man for sharing an AI-generated image that misled authorities who were searching for a wolf that had broken out of a zoo in Daejeon city. The 40-year-old unnamed man is accused of disrupting the search by creating and distributing a fake photo purporting to show Neukgu, the wolf, trotting down a road intersection. The photo, circulated hours after Neukgu went missing on April 8, prompted authorities to urgently relocate their search operation, sending them on a wild wolf chase.

The hunt for two-year-old Neukgu gripped the nation before he was finally caught near an expressway last week, nine days after his escape. The AI-generated image of Neukgu had prompted Daejeon city government to issue an emergency text to residents, warning them of a wolf near the intersection. Authorities also presented the AI image during a press briefing on the runaway wolf, local media reported.

The police identified the man as a suspect after reviewing security camera footage and his AI program usage records. Authorities did not specify if the man had intentionally sent the photo to authorities during their search or simply shared it online. When questioned by the police, the man said he had done it "for fun," local media reported. Authorities are investigating him for disrupting government work by deception, an offence that carries up to five years in prison or a maximum fine of 10 million Korean won ($6,700).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The Department of Justice announced Thursday that it arrested Gannon Ken Van Dyke, an enlisted member of the US Army's special forces, for allegedly using "classified, nonpublic" information about the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro to notch more than $400,000 in profits on Polymarket trades. A grand jury indicted him on five counts, including multiple violations of the Commodity Exchange Act. Van Dyke is the first person to be charged with insider trading on a prediction market in the United States. Lawmakers have been voicing concerns for months about the high likelihood that politicians and public servants could use nonpublic information to profit from trades on leading industry platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, which have exploded in popularity over the past year. The arrest comes just weeks after Department of Justice prosecutors met with Polymarket about potential insider tradition violations. [...] After Van Dyke's arrest was made public, Polymarket posted a statement to social media noting that it had "identified a user trading on classified government information" and "referred the matter to the DOJ & cooperated with their investigation." The company declined to comment further.

According to court documents, Van Dyke has been an active duty US soldier since September 2008 and rose to the level of master sergeant in 2023. At the time of the alleged trading activity, he was stationed at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina and assigned to the Army's Special Operations Command Western Hemisphere Operations. [...] The complaint alleges that Van Dyke was involved in the planning and execution of Maduro's arrest and that he was aware that he wasn't authorized to share nonpublic information about US military operations. The complaint says that Van Dyke signed a nondisclosure agreement that forbade him from revealing sensitive or classified government information "by writing, word, conduct, or otherwise." The complaint also alleges Van Dyke saved a screenshot to his Google account "displaying the results of an artificial intelligence query" outlining how the US Special Forces maintains many classified files including "operational details that are not available to the public." [...] Van Dyke faces a maximum sentence of 60 years if convicted on all counts.

Apple has fixed a bug that could cause parts of Signal notifications to remain stored on iPhones even after messages disappeared and the app was deleted. "Affected users concerned about push notifications can update their devices to stop what Apple characterized as 'notifications marked for deletion' that 'could be unexpectedly retained on the device,'" reports Ars Technica. "According to Apple, the push notifications should never have been stored, but a 'logging issue' failed to redact data." From the report: Vulnerable users hoping to evade law enforcement surveillance often use encrypted apps like Signal to communicate sensitive information. That's why users felt blindsided when 404 Media reported that Apple was unexpectedly storing push notifications displaying parts of encrypted messages for up to a month. This occurred even after the message was set to disappear and the app itself was deleted from the device.

404 Media flagged the issue after speaking to multiple people who attended a hearing where the FBI testified that it "was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant's iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device's push notification database." The shocking revelation came in a case that 404 Media noted was "the first time authorities charged people for alleged 'Antifa' activities after President Trump designated the umbrella term a terrorist organization." "We're grateful to Apple for the quick action here, and for understanding and acting on the stakes of this kind of issue," Signal's post said. "It takes an ecosystem to preserve the fundamental human right to private communication."

In their post, Signal confirmed that after users update their devices, "no action is needed for this fix to protect Signal users on iOS. Once you install the patch, all inadvertently-preserved notifications will be deleted and no forthcoming notifications will be preserved for deleted applications."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The French government agency that handles the issuing and management of citizens' identity documents, including national IDs, passports, and immigration documents, confirmed Wednesday that it experienced a data breach. In an announcement, the Agence Nationale des Titres Securises (ANTS) said the data stolen in the breach could include full names, dates and places of birth, mailing and email addresses, and phone numbers on an undisclosed number of citizens. ANTS said the investigation to determine how the breach happened and its impact is ongoing, and people whose data was affected are being notified.

ANTS, which said it detected the attack on April 15, did not specify how many people were affected by the breach. But some reporting suggests millions may have had some of their personal information stolen. According to Bleeping Computer, a hacker has advertised the stolen data on a hacking forum, claiming to have a database with 19 million records. The hacker's forum post referenced the same kind of stolen information as mentioned in ANTS' announcement and was published before ANTS publicly disclosed the breach on April 20.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: New York is suing Coinbase and Gemini, two of the newest players in the prediction market industry, arguing that the companies' unregulated and unlicensed platforms are illegal gambling operations. Attorney General Letitia James' lawsuit, filed Tuesday in state court in Manhattan, seeks to bar the companies' platforms from operating in the state unless and until they obtain licenses from the state Gaming Commission.

"Gambling by another name is still gambling, and it is not exempt from regulation under our state laws and Constitution," James said in a statement. "Gemini and Coinbase's so-called prediction markets are just illegal gambling operations, exposing young people to addictive platforms that lack the necessary guardrails." Both companies began as cryptocurrency trading platforms before branching into the prediction space, which has been dominated by Kalshi and Polymarket.

[...] New York's lawsuit alleges that the Coinbase and Gemini are seeking "to avoid the legal and financial consequences" of the state's close regulation of gambling "by offering what is quintessentially wagering under the guise of offering 'event contracts' on a 'prediction market.'" By operating without licenses, the lawsuit says, Coinbase's and Gemini's prediction market businesses aren't paying the same taxes as licensed casinos and mobile sportsbooks, which are taxed by the state at a rate of approximately 51% of gross revenues. In addition, the lawsuit says, Coinbase and Gemini allow users as young as 18, while state law prohibits wagering by anyone under 21.

Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams shares a report from the BBC: The Trump family's World Liberty crypto venture is being sued by one of its billionaire backers over allegations of extortion. Justin Sun has accused World Liberty of an "illegal scheme" to seize his WLFI tokens, a cryptocurrency issued by the company. Sun alleges the firm, co-founded by U.S. President Donald Trump and his son Eric Trump, has "frozen" all of his tokens and stripped him of his right to vote on governance issues.

[...] Sun alleged that those running World Liberty, including another co-founder, Chase Herro, are using it as a "golden opportunity to leverage the Trump brand to profit through fraud." In his complaint, filed on Tuesday in a San Francisco federal court, Sun argues that initial promises to give token-holders the option to trade the currency in future "were false and misleading." While the tokens at large became tradeable, Sun said World Liberty has blocked him from being able to sell a single one, and is now threatening to "burn" his - deleting them entirely. WLFI said in a post on X: "Does anyone still believe @justinsuntron? Justin's favorite move is playing the victim while making baseless allegations to cover up his own misconduct. Same playbook, different target. WLFI isn't the first. We have the contracts. We have the evidence. We have the truth. See you in court pal."

Bloomberg reports that a small group of unauthorized users gained access to Anthropic's restricted Mythos model through a mix of contractor-linked access and online sleuthing. Anthropic says it is investigating and has no evidence the access extended beyond a third-party vendor environment or affected its own systems. From the report: The users relied on a mix of tactics to get into Mythos. These included using access the person had as a worker at a third-party contractor for Anthropic and trying commonly used internet sleuthing tools often employed by cybersecurity researchers, the person said. The users are part of a private Discord channel that focuses on hunting for information about unreleased models, including by using bots to scour for details that Anthropic and others have posted on unsecured websites such as GitHub. [...] To access Mythos, the group of users made an educated guess about the model's online location based on knowledge about the format Anthropic has used for other models, the person said, adding that such details were revealed in a recent data breach from Mercor, an AI training startup that works with a number of top developers.

Crucially, the person also has permission to access Anthropic models and software related to evaluating the technology for the startup. They gained this access from a company for which they have performed contract work evaluating Anthropic's AI models. Bloomberg is not naming the company for security reasons. The group is interested in playing around with new models, not wreaking havoc with them, the person said. The group has not run cybersecurity-related prompts on the Mythos model, the person said, preferring instead to try tasks like building simple websites in an attempt to avoid detection by Anthropic. The person said the group also has access to a slew of other unreleased Anthropic AI models.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US military's massive $1.5 trillion budget request for the next fiscal year includes what Pentagon officials described as the largest investment in drone warfare and counter-drone technology in US history. The proposed spending on drone and autonomous warfare technologies within the FY2027 budget proposal for the US Department of Defense would surpass most countries' defense budgets and rank among the top 10 in the world for military spending, ahead of countries such as Ukraine, South Korea, and Israel.

Specifically, the Pentagon is requesting $53.6 billion to boost US production and procurement of drones, train drone operators, build out a logistics network for sustaining drone deployments, and expand counter-drone systems to defend more US military sites. The funding request is budgeted under the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), an organization established in late 2025 that would see a massive budget increase after receiving about $226 million in the 2026 fiscal year budget.

[...] Another $20.6 billion would help purchase one-way attack drones and drone aircraft developed through the US Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which is building drone prototypes capable of teaming up with human-piloted fighter jets. Part of this funding would also go toward defensive systems for countering small drones and the US Navy's Boeing MQ-25 drone designed to perform midair refueling of carrier-borne fighter aircraft to extend their strike ranges. Such drone-related spending even rivals the entire budget of the US Marine Corps. But the Pentagon has not said that it is creating a dedicated drone branch of the US military similar to the standalone Space Force.

Pentagon officials emphasized that most of the money would go toward procuring drone and autonomous warfare technologies that already exist, and is largely separate from additional funding that would bolster US domestic manufacturing capacity to build such weapon systems. "That $70 billion is all going into existing systems and technologies," said Hurst. "The industrial base support is entirely separate." "The evolution we've seen in the battlefield is this evolution of technologies in the timeframe of weeks, not the typical years we see with our defense production," said Lt. Gen. Steven Whitney, director of force structure, resources, and assessment for the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a Pentagon press briefing. "So it's really critical we work with industry to get that capability fielded."

Federal authorities are now reviewing a string of deaths and disappearances involving scientists tied to sensitive U.S. aerospace and nuclear work, though officials have not established any confirmed link between the cases. The FBI says it "is spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists," adding that it "is working with the Department of Energy, Department of War, and with our state ... and local law enforcement partners to find answers." The Republican-led House Oversight Committee also announced an investigation into the reports. CNN reports: A nuclear physicist and MIT professor fatally shot outside his Massachusetts residence. A retired Air Force general missing from his New Mexico home. An aerospace engineer who disappeared during a hike in Los Angeles. These are among at least 10 individuals connected to sensitive US nuclear and aerospace research who have died or disappeared in recent years, prompting concerns whether they are connected and fueling speculation online about the possibility of nefarious activity. [...]

The Defense Department said only that it would respond to the committee directly, and the Department of Energy referred questions to the White House. In a post on X, NASA said it is "coordinating and cooperating with the relevant agencies" in relation to the scientists. "At this time, nothing related to NASA indicates a national security threat," NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens said.

The cases vary widely in circumstance. Some involve unsolved homicides, while others are missing persons cases with no signs of foul play. In at least two instances, families have pointed to preexisting medical conditions or personal struggles as explanations. Authorities have not established any links between the cases. The White House said last week it is also working with federal agencies to probe any potential links between the deaths and disappearances, with President Donald Trump referring to the matter as "pretty serious stuff." "The United States has thousands of nuclear scientists and nuclear experts," said Rep. James Walkinshaw, a Democrat who also serves on the Oversight Committee. "It's not the kind of nuclear program that potentially a foreign adversary could significantly impact by targeting 10 individuals."

Further reading: The 'Missing-Scientist' Story Is Unbelievably Dumb

Florida's attorney general has launched a criminal investigation into OpenAI over allegations that the accused gunman in a shooting at Florida State University last year used ChatGPT to help plan the attack. OpenAI says the chatbot is "not responsible for this terrible crime" and only provided factual information available from public sources. NPR reports: The Republican attorney general, James Uthmeier, said at a press conference in Tampa on Tuesday that accused gunman Phoenix Ikner consulted ChatGPT for advice before the shooting, including what type of gun to use, what ammunition went with it, and what time to go to campus to encounter more people, according to an initial review of Ikner's chat logs. "My prosecutors have looked at this and they've told me, if it was a person on the other end of that screen, we would be charging them with murder," Uthmeier said. "We cannot have AI bots that are advising people on how to kill others."

Uthmeier's office is issuing subpoenas to OpenAI seeking information about its policies and internal training materials related to user threats of harm and how it cooperates with and reports crimes to law enforcement, dating back to March 2024. At the press conference, Uthmeier acknowledged the investigation is entering into uncharted territory and is uncertain about whether OpenAI has criminal liability. "We are going to look at who knew what, designed what, or should have done what," he said. "And if it is clear that individuals knew that this type of dangerous behavior might take place, that these types of unfortunate, tragic events might take place, and nevertheless still turned to profit, still allowed this business to operate, then people need to be held accountable."

[...] Ikner, 21, is facing multiple charges of murder and attempted murder for the April 2025 shooting near the student union on FSU's Tallahassee campus, where he was a student at the time. His trial is set to begin on Oct. 19. According to court filings, more than 200 AI messages have been entered into evidence in the case.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Denver7: Maryland is poised to become the first state in the country to ban "surveillance pricing." The practice refers to companies using a shopper's personal data, such as browsing history, location, or purchasing behavior, to tailor prices to individual customers. The Protection From Predatory Pricing Act, passed this month and sent to the governor for a signature, would prohibit food retailers and third-party delivery services from using the practice. Violations would be treated as deceptive trade practices under state law, with potential fines and lawsuits. While Consumer Reports called the move "encouraging," it warned that the final version contains "loopholes" that don't fully protect consumers. Some of the exemptions noted in the report include "applying the ban only to the use of personal data to set higher prices without establishing a baseline or standard price; exempting pricing tied to loyalty or membership programs, even if prices are higher; and exempting pricing linked to subscriptions or subscription-based services."

Alex Bores, a former Palantir employee and current Democratic House candidate in New York, is proposing an "AI dividend" that would send direct payments to Americans if AI drives major job losses. "At its core, the AI Dividend is simple: if AI dramatically increases productivity and concentrates wealth, the American people have a stake in those gains," a memo on the policy reads. Axios reports: The dividend would fund direct payments to Americans. It would also be invested into workforce training and education, as well as government capacity to "govern AI safely and fund independent oversight," per the plan memo.

"You don't take out fire insurance because you expect your house to burn down -- you have insurance in case something goes awry," Bores told Axios in an interview. "Here we have, for the first time, a technology where the makers of the technology are explicitly saying that their goal is to replace all human labor." "The fact that they've put it out there means government needs to take it seriously." [...]

The proposal would be funded through:
- A token tax, described in the memo as a "modest tax on AI consumption"
- Equity participation in frontier AI firms
- Changes to the tax code that would reduce incentives to invest in AI "when it leads to less work" "If [AI companies] they can support this plan, that would show that they actually believe in what they're putting out there," Bores said. "If they're not doing it, then I think it shows that they're really putting window dressing out there."

Further reading: Palantir Posts Bond Villain Manifesto On X

"After a Supreme Court of the United States ruling in Feb. 2026, many tariffs imposed by the Trump administration were declared illegal because the president overstepped his authority," writes Slashdot reader hcs_$reboot. "As a result, the U.S. government now has to refund a massive amount of money, around $160-170+ billion, paid mainly by importers." According to the New York Times, the administration has now begun accepting refund requests, "surrendering its prized source of revenue -- plus interest." From the report: For some U.S. businesses, the highly anticipated refunds could be substantial, offering critical if belated financial relief. Tariffs are taxes on imports, so the president's trade policies have served as a great burden for companies that rely on foreign goods. Many have had to choose whether to absorb the duties, cut other costs or pass on the expenses to consumers. By Monday morning, those companies can begin to submit documentation to the government to recover what they paid in illegal tariffs.

In a sign of the demand, more than 3,000 businesses, including FedEx and Costco, have already sued the Trump administration in a bid to secure their refunds, with some cases filed even before the Supreme Court's ruling. But only the entities that officially paid the tariffs are eligible to recover that money. That means that the fuller universe of people affected by Mr. Trump's policies -- including millions of Americans who paid higher prices for the products they bought -- are not able to apply for direct relief.

The extent to which consumers realize any gain hinges on whether businesses share the proceeds, something that few have publicly committed to do. Some have started to band together in class-action lawsuits in the hopes of receiving a payout. Many business owners said they weren't sure how easy the tariff refund process would be, particularly given Mr. Trump's stated opposition to returning the money. The administration has suggested that it may be months before companies see any money. Adding to the uncertainty, the White House has declined to say if it might still try to return to court in a bid to halt some or all of the refunds. The money will mostly go to importers and companies, since they were the ones that directly paid the tariffs. While individual refunds with interest could take around 60 to 90 days to process, the overall effort will probably move much more slowly because of how large and complicated it will be.

There are also legal questions around whether companies would have to pass any of that money on to consumers. Slashdot reader AmiMoJo commented: "This is perhaps the biggest transfer of wealth in American history. Most of those companies will just pocket the refund and not pass any of it on to the consumer. If prices go down at all, they won't be back to pre-tariff levels. You paid the tariffs, but you ain't getting the refund."

Axios reports that the NSA is using Anthropic's restricted Mythos Preview model despite the Pentagon insisting the company poses a "supply chain risk." Axios reports: The government's cybersecurity needs appear to be outweighing the Pentagon's feud with Anthropic. The department moved in February to cut off Anthropic and force its vendors to follow suit. That case is ongoing. The military is now broadening its use of Anthropic's tools while simultaneously arguing in court that using those tools threatens U.S. national security.

Two sources said the NSA was using Mythos, while one said the model was also being used more widely within the department. It's unclear how the NSA is currently using Mythos, but other organizations with access to the model are using it predominantly to scan their own environments for exploitable security vulnerabilities.

Anthropic restricted access to Mythos to around 40 organizations, contending that its offensive cyber capabilities were too dangerous to allow for a wider release. Anthropic only announced 12 of those organizations. One source said the NSA was among the unnamed agencies with access. The NSA's counterparts in the U.K. have said they have access to the model through the country's AI Security Institute. Anthropic's CEO met with top U.S. officials on Friday to discuss "opportunities for collaboration," according to a White House spokesperson, "as well as shared approaches and protocols to address the challenges associated with scaling this technology."

"Nevada quietly signed an agreement earlier this year with a company that collects location data from cellphones, allowing police to track a device virtually in real time," reports the Associated Press. "All without a warrant." The software from Fog Data Science, adopted this January in Nevada through a Department of Public Safety contract, pulls information from smartphone apps in order to let state investigators identify the location of mobile devices. The state is allowed more than 250 queries a month using the tool, which allows officers to track a device's location over long stretches of time and enables them to see what Fog calls "patterns of life," according to company documents from 2022. It can help them deduce where and when people work and live, with whom they associate and what places they visit, according to privacy experts... Traditionally, police must obtain a warrant from a judge to access cellphone location information — a process that can take days or weeks. And while cellphone users may be aware that they are sharing their location through apps such as Google Maps, critics say few are aware that such information can make its way to police...

Other agencies in Nevada have been known to use technology similar to Fog. In 2013, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department acquired something known as a cell-site simulator that mimics cellphone towers and can sweep up signals from entire areas to track individuals, with some models capable of intercepting texts and calls. Police have not released detailed information about the technology since then.
"Police in other states have said the technology (and its low price tag) has helped expand investigatory capacity," the article adds.

But it also points out that Fog Data Science has a web page letting individuals opt out of all their data sets.

Slashdot reader Bismillah shared this report from ITNews: Research and development engineer Romain Marchand of Paris headquartered Quarkslab obtained a telematic control unit (TCU) from a salvage yard in Poland... Marchand tore down the TCU, which is based on a Qualcomm system on a chip, and extracted the Linux-based file system from the Micron multi-chip package (MCP) which contained NAND-based non-volatile storage memory. The non-volatile storage contained sensitive information, including system configuration data and more importantly, logs that revealed the vehicle's GPS positions over time.

None of that information was encrypted, Marchand told iTnews, which made it possible to collect and retrieve sensitive data of interest. What's more, the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) logs with GPS positions covered the BYD's full journey from the factory in China to its operational life in the United Kingdom, and to its final wrecking in Poland, Marchand explained in an analysis... The issue is not restricted to BYD, and Marchand added that the hardware architecture of the Chinese car maker's TCU is broadly similar to what can be found in other brands.

Yesterday the U.S. Congress approved "a short-term extension" of a FISA law that allows wiretaps without a warrant for surveilling foreign targets, reports CNN — but only until April 30. Republican congressional leaders had sought an 18-month extension, but "failed to secure" the votes after "clamoring from some of their members for reforms to protect Americans' privacy." The warrantless surveillance law, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was set to expire on Monday night. Members are hoping the additional time will allow them to come to agreement without ending authorization for the intelligence gathering program, which permits US officials to monitor phone calls and text messages from foreign targets... There was an hour of suspense in the Senate Friday morning when it appeared possible that Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, a longtime critic of FISA 702, might block the House-passed extension. But ultimately, he said his House colleagues had assured him "this short-term extension makes reform more likely, and expiration makes reform less likely," and so he chose not to object....

House Republican leaders believed Thursday night they had struck a deal with conservative holdouts who harbor deep and longstanding concerns that a key piece of the law infringes on Americans' privacy rights. But in a pair of after-midnight votes, more than a dozen rank-and-file Republicans rejected the long-term reauthorization plan on the floor, which was the result of days of tense negotiations among leadership, lawmakers and the White House.

The law allows authorized US officials to gather phone calls and text messages of foreign targets, but they can also incidentally collect the data of Americans in the process. Senior national security officials have for years said the law is critical for thwarting terror attacks, stemming the flow of fentanyl into the US and stopping ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure. Civil liberties groups on the left and the right, meanwhile, argue the surveillance authority risks infringing on Americans' privacy.

20-year-old Matthew Lane sent a text message to ABC News as his parents drove him to federal prison in Connecticut. "I'm just scared," he said, calling the whole situation "extremely sad." Barely a year earlier, while still a teenager, he helped launch what's been described as the biggest cyberattack in U.S. education history — a data breach that concerned authorities so much, it prompted briefings with senior government officials inside the White House Situation Room. The breach pierced the education technology company PowerSchool — used by 80% of school districts in North America... [and operating in about 90 countries around the world]. With threats to expose social security numbers, dates of birth, family information, grades, and even confidential medical information, the breach cornered PowerSchool into paying millions of dollars in ransom.

"I think I need to go to prison for what I did," Lane told ABC News in an exclusive interview, speaking publicly for the first time about the headline-grabbing heist and his life as a cybercriminal. "It was disgusting, it was greedy, it was rooted in my own insecurities, it was wrong in every aspect," he said in the interview, two days before reporting to prison... At about 6:30 on a Tuesday morning last April, FBI agents started banging on the door of Lane's second-floor dorm room. "FBI! We have a search warrant," Lane recalled them shouting. They seized his devices and many of the luxury items he bought with "dirty" money, as he put it. He said he felt a "wave of relief.... I'm honestly thankful for the FBI," he said. "After they left, I was like, 'It's over ... I'm done with this'..."

A federal judge in Massachusetts sentenced him to four years in federal prison and ordered him to pay more than $14 million in restitution.
"In the wake of the breach, PowerSchool offered two years' worth of credit-monitoring and identity protection services to concerned customer," the article points out. But it also notes two other arrests in September of teenaged cybercriminals:

- A 15-year-old boy in Illinois who allegedly attacked Las Vegas casinos, reportedly costing MGM Resorts alone more than $100 million

- A British national who when he was 16 helped breach over 110 companies around the world and extort $115 million.


But ironically, Lane tells ABC News it all started on Roblox, where he'd met cheaters, password-stealers, and cybercriminals sharing photos of their stacks of money, creating a "sense of camaraderie" Lane and others warn that online forums also attract criminal groups seeking to recruit potential hackers. "The bad guys are on all the platforms watching the kids playing," Hay said. "And when they see an elite-level performer, they go approach that kid, masquerading as another kid, and they go, 'Hey, you want to earn some [money]? ... Here are the tools, here are the techniques'...."

According to Lane, he spent his "ill-gotten gains" on designer clothes, diamond jewelry, DoorDash deliveries, Airbnb rentals for him and his friends, and drugs — "lots of drugs." He said he would numb ever-present feelings of guilt with drugs — from high-potency marijuana to acid. But it was hacking that gave him the strongest high. "It's indescribable the adrenaline you get when you do something like that," he said. "It's way more than driving 120 miles per hour. ... Incomparable to any drug at all, as well."
"On Monday, Roblox announced that, starting in June, it will offer age-checked accounts for younger users that limit what games they can play, and add 'more closely align content access, communication settings, and parental controls with a user's age.'"

Friday Anthropic's CEO met with top U.S. officials and "discussed opportunities for collaboration," according to a White House spokesperson itedd by Politico, "as well as shared approaches and protocols to address the challenges associated with scaling this technology."

CNN notes the meeting happens at the same time Anthropic "battles the Trump administration in court for blacklisting its Claude AI model..." The meeting took place as the US government is trying to balance its hardline approach to Anthropic with the national security implications of turning its back on the company's breakthrough technology — including its Mythos tool that can identify cybersecurity threats but also present a roadmap for hackers to attack companies or the government... The Office of Management and Budget has already told agencies it is preparing to give them access to Mythos to prepare, Bloomberg reported. Axios reported the White House is also in discussion to gain access to Mythos.
The Trump administration "recognizes the power" of Mythos, reports Axios, "and its highly sophisticated — and potentially dangerous — ability to breach cybersecurity defenses." "It would be grossly irresponsible for the U.S. government to deprive itself of the technological leaps that the new model presents," a source close to negotiations told us. "It would be a gift to China"... Some parts of the U.S. intelligence community, plus the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA, part of Homeland Security), are testing Mythos. Treasury and others want it.
The White House added they plan to invite other AI companies for similar discussions, Politico reports. But Mythos "is also alarming regulators in Europe, who have told POLITICO they have not been able to gain access..." U.S. government agency tech leaders sought access to the model after Anthropic earlier this year began testing the model and granted limited access to a select group of companies, including JPMorgan, Amazon and Apple... after finding it had hacking capabilities far outstripping those of previous AI models. This includes the ability to autonomously identify and exploit complex software vulnerabilities, such as so-called zero-day flaws, which even some of the sharpest human minds are unable to patch. The AI startup also wrote that the model could carry out end-to-end cyberattacks autonomously, including by navigating enterprise IT systems and chaining together exploits. It could also act as a force-multiplier for research needed to build chemical and biological weapons, and in certain instances, made efforts to cover its tracks when attacking systems, according to Anthropic's report on the model's capabilities and its safety assessments.

Those findings and others have inspired fears that the model could be co-opted to launch powerful cyberattacks with relative ease if it fell into the wrong hands. Logan Graham, a senior security researcher at Anthropic, previously told POLITICO that researchers and tech firms had been given early access to Mythos so they could find flaws in their critical code before state-backed hackers or cybercriminals could exploit them. "Within six, 12 or 24 months, these kinds of capabilities could be just broadly available to everybody in the world," Graham said.

Some failed startups are reportedly selling old Slack messages, emails, and other internal records to AI companies as training data, creating a new way to cash out after shutting down. Fast Company reports: Shanna Johnson, the CEO of now-defunct software company Cielo24, told the publication that she was able to sell every Slack message, internal email, and Jira ticket as training data for "hundreds of thousands of dollars."

This isn't a one-off scenario. SimpleClosure, a startup that helps companies like Cielo24 shut down, told Forbes that there's been major interest from AI companies trying to get their hands on workplace data. Because of this, SimpleClosure launched a new tool that allows companies to sell their wealth of internal communications -- from Slack archives to email chains -- to AI labs. The company said it's processed 100 such deals in the past year. Payouts ranged from $10,000 to $100,000. "I think the privacy issues here are quite substantial," Marc Rotenberg, founder of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, told Forbes. "Employee privacy remains a key concern, particularly because people have become so dependent on these new internal messaging tools like Slack. ... It's not generic data. It's identifiable people."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Sam Altman's iris-scanning, humanity-verifying World project announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday that Tinder users around the globe can now put a digital badge on their profiles signaling to potential suitors that they're a real human, provided they've already stared into one of World's glossy white Orbs and allowed their eyes to be scanned. The announcement follows a pilot project for Tinder verification that World previously conducted in Japan.

[...] In addition to the Tinder global expansion, Tools for Humanity, the company behind World, announced a number of other consumer and enterprise partnerships on Friday at its Lift Off event in San Francisco. The startup says Tinder users who verify with their World ID will receive five free "boosts," typically a paid feature that increases the number of users who see a profile by up to 10 times for 30 minutes. The videoconferencing platform Zoom also says that users can now require other participants to verify their identity with World before joining a call. Docusign, the contract signing software, will allow users to require World's identity verification technology.

Tiago Sada, Tools for Humanity's chief product officer, tells WIRED the company sees major platform partnerships as key to helping World become a mainstream identity-verification technology. Sada said he's especially interested in working with social media companies in the future, and was encouraged to see that Reddit has started testing World as a solution to help users distinguish bots from real people. [...] World is also launching a tool called Concert Kit, which lets artists reserve concert tickets for verified humans, a pitch aimed squarely at the bot-driven scalping problem that critics say has plagued sites like TicketMaster. World will test the feature on the upcoming Bruno Mars World Tour featuring Anderson .Paak, who is scheduled to play a verified-humans-only show under his alias DJ Pee .Wee in San Francisco on Friday night. "The idea that World ID is not just private, but it's one of the most private things you've ever used, that's not obvious," says Sada. "We're just not used to this kind of technology. Many people used to tape their [iPhone's sensor used to enable] Face ID when it came out, then we got used to it."

Newly unsealed records in California's antitrust case against Amazon allegedly show the company pressured third-party sellers to raise prices on rival sites like Walmart, Target, and Wayfair so Amazon could maintain the appearance of offering the lowest price. California says Amazon used tools like Buy Box suppression to punish cheaper listings elsewhere. The Guardian reports: [...] In one previously redacted deposition, marked "highly confidential," Mayer Handler, owner of a clothing company called Leveret, testified that he received an email in October 2022 from Amazon notifying him that one of his products was "no longer eligible to be a featured offer" through Amazon's Buy Box. The tech giant, he testified, had suppressed the item, a tiger-themed, toddler's pajama set, because his company was selling it for $19.99 on Amazon, a single cent higher than what his company was offering it for on Walmart. Afterwards, Handler testified, his company "changed pricing on Walmart to match or exceed Amazon's price" or changed the item's product code to try to throw off Amazon's price tracking system. In response to a question from the Guardian, Handler criticized Amazon for tracking prices across the internet and "shadow" blocking his company's products -- tactics which he said were depriving consumers of "lower prices." "Maybe that's capitalism," he wrote. "Or that's a monopoly causing price hikes on the consumer."

In another unsealed deposition, Terry Esbenshade, a Pennsylvania garden store supplier, testified in October 2024 that whenever his products lost Amazon's Buy Box because of lower prices elsewhere on the internet, his sales on Amazon would plummet by about 80%. This financial reality forced him to try to raise his products' prices with other retailers elsewhere, he said. In one instance, Esbenshade testified, he discovered that one of his company's better-selling patio tables had "become suppressed" on Amazon. Esbenshade wasn't sure why, he recalled, until someone at Amazon suggested he look at Wayfair, another online retailer that happened to be selling his patio table below Amazon's price. The businessman went online and set up a new minimum advertised price for the table on Wayfair to ensure it was higher than Amazon's. "So that raised the price up, and, voila, my product came back" on Amazon, he said, thanks to the reinstatement of the Buy Box.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two years ago, Microsoft launched its first wave of "Copilot+" Windows PCs with a handful of exclusive features that could take advantage of the neural processing unit (NPU) hardware being built into newer laptop processors. These NPUs could enable AI and machine learning features that could run locally rather than in someone's cloud, theoretically enhancing security and privacy. One of the first Copilot+ features was Recall, a feature that promised to track all your PC usage via screenshot to help you remember your past activity. But as originally implemented, Recall was neither private nor secure; the feature stored its screenshots plus a giant database of all user activity in totally unencrypted files on the user's disk, making it trivial for anyone with remote or local access to grab days, weeks, or even months of sensitive data, depending on the age of the user's Recall database.

After journalists and security researchers discovered and detailed these flaws, Microsoft delayed the Recall rollout by almost a year and substantially overhauled its security. All locally stored data would now be encrypted and viewable only with Windows Hello authentication; the feature now did a better job detecting and excluding sensitive information, including financial information, from its database; and Recall would be turned off by default, rather than enabled on every PC that supported it. The reconstituted Recall was a big improvement, but having a feature that records the vast majority of your PC usage is still a security and privacy risk. Security researcher Alexander Hagenah was the author of the original "TotalRecall" tool that made it trivially simple to grab the Recall information on any Windows PC, and an updated "TotalRecall Reloaded" version exposes what Hagenah believes are additional vulnerabilities.

The problem, as detailed by Hagenah on the TotalRecall GitHub page, isn't with the security around the Recall database, which he calls "rock solid." The problem is that, once the user has authenticated, the system passes Recall data to another system process called AIXHost.exe, and that process doesn't benefit from the same security protections as the rest of Recall. "The vault is solid," Hagenah writes. "The delivery truck is not." The TotalRecall Reloaded tool uses an executable file to inject a DLL file into AIXHost.exe, something that can be done without administrator privileges. It then waits in the background for the user to open Recall and authenticate using Windows Hello. Once this is done, the tool can intercept screenshots, OCR'd text, and other metadata that Recall sends to the AIXHost.exe process, which can continue even after the user closes their Recall session.

"The VBS enclave won't decrypt anything without Windows Hello," Hagenah writes. "The tool doesn't bypass that. It makes the user do it, silently rides along when the user does it, or waits for the user to do it." A handful of tasks, including grabbing the most recent Recall screenshot, capturing select metadata about the Recall database, and deleting the user's entire Recall database, can be done with no Windows Hello authentication. Once authenticated, Hagenah says the TotalRecall Reloaded tool can access both new information recorded to the Recall database as well as data Recall has previously recorded. "We appreciate Alexander Hagenah for identifying and responsibly reporting this issue. After careful investigation, we determined that the access patterns demonstrated are consistent with intended protections and existing controls, and do not represent a bypass of a security boundary or unauthorized access to data," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. "The authorization period has a timeout and anti-hammering protection that limit the impact of malicious queries."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google is negotiating an agreement with the Department of Defense that would allow the Pentagon to deploy its Gemini AI models in classified settings, the Information reported on Thursday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the discussions. The two parties are discussing an agreement that would allow the Pentagon to use Google's AI for all lawful uses, according to the report.

During the negotiations, Google has proposed additional language in its contract with the department to prevent its AI from being used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons without appropriate human control, the Information reported. The Pentagon will continue to deploy frontier AI capabilities through strong industry partnerships across all classification levels, a Pentagon official said, without confirming any talks with Google.

The EU says a new age-verification app is technically ready and could let users prove they are old enough to access restricted online content without revealing their identity or personal data. Deutsche Welle reports: Once released, users will be able to download the app from an app store and set it up using proof of identity, such as a passport or national ID card. They can then use it to confirm they are above a certain age when accessing restricted content, without revealing their identity. According to the Commission, the system is similar to the digital certificates used during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed people to prove their vaccination status.

The app is expected to support enforcement of the bloc's Digital Services Act, which aims to better regulate online platforms. This includes restricting access to content such as pornography, gambling and alcohol-related services. Officials say the app will be "completely anonymous" and built on open-source technology, meaning it could also be adopted outside the EU.

[...] While there is no binding EU-wide law yet, the European Parliament has called for a minimum age of 16 for social media access. For now, enforcement would largely fall to individual member states, but the new app is intended to help platforms comply with future national and EU rules.

Cal is moving its flagship scheduling software from open source to a proprietary license, arguing that AI coding tools now make it much easier for attackers to scan public codebases for vulnerabilities. "Open source security always relied on people to find and fix any problems," said Peer Richelsen, co-founder of Cal. "Now AI attackers are flaunting that transparency." CEO Bailey Pumfleet added: "Open-source code is basically like handing out the blueprint to a bank vault. And now there are 100x more hackers studying the blueprint." The company says it still supports open source and is releasing a separate Cal.diy version for hobbyists, but doesn't want to risk customer booking data in its commercial product. ZDNet reports: When Cal was founded in 2022, Bailey Pumfleet, the CEO and co-founder, wrote, "Cal.com would be an open-source project [because] limitations of existing scheduling products could only be solved by open source." Since Cal was successful and now claims to be the largest Next.js project, he was on to something. Today, however, Pumfleet tells me that AI programs such as "Claude Opus can scour the code to find vulnerabilities," so the company is moving the project from the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) to a proprietary license to defend the program's security.

[...] Cal also quoted Huzaifa Ahmad, CEO of Hex Security, "Open-source applications are 5-10x easier to exploit than closed-source ones. The result, where Cal sits, is a fundamental shift in the software economy. Companies with open code will be forced to risk customer data or close public access to their code." "We are committed to protecting sensitive data," Pumfleet said. "We want to be a scheduling company, not a cybersecurity company." He added, "Cal.com handles sensitive booking data for our users. We won't risk that for our love of open source."

While its commercial program is no longer open source, Cal has released Cal.diy. This is a fully open-source version of its platform for hobbyists. The open project will enable experimentation outside the closed application that handles high-stakes data. Pumfleet concluded, "This decision is entirely around the vulnerability that open source introduces. We still firmly love open source, and if the situation were to change, we'd open source again. It's just that right now, we can't risk the customer data."

A Manhattan federal jury found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally maintained monopoly power in the ticketing market. The findings follow an antitrust case brought by states after a separate DOJ settlement. CNN reports: The verdict was reached following a lengthy trial in New York federal court that included testimony from top executives in the music and entertainment industries. Jurors began deliberating on Friday. The Justice Department and 39 state attorneys general, including California and New York, and Washington, DC, sued Live Nation in 2024 alleging its combination with Ticketmaster and control of "virtually every aspect of the live music ecosystem" have harmed fans, artists, and venues.

During the second week of trial, in a move that surprised even the judge, the Justice Department reached a secret settlement with Live Nation. A handful of states signed onto the deal, but more than two dozen proceeded to trial. Under the DOJ deal, Live Nation agreed to allow competitors, like SeatGeek or StubHub, to offer tickets to its events, cap ticketing service fees at 15%, and divest exclusive booking agreements with 13 amphitheaters. The deal includes a $280 million settlement fund for state damages claims for the handful of states that signed onto the deal. The DOJ settlement requires the judge's approval.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Spotify and several major record labels, including UMG, Sony, and Warner, secured a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna's Archive. The shadow library failed to appear in court and briefly released millions of tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent. In addition to the monetary penalty, a permanent injunction required domain registrars and other parties to suspend the site's domain names. [...]

The music labels get the statutory maximum of $150,000 in damages for around 50 works. Spotify adds a DMCA circumvention claim of $2,500 for 120,000 music files, bringing the total to more than $322 million. The plaintiff previously described their damages request as "extremely conservative." The DMCA claim is based only on the 120,000 files, not the full 2.8 million that were released. Had they applied the $2,500 rate to all released files, the damages figure would exceed $7 billion. Anna's Archive did not show up in court, and the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment attempts to address this directly, by ordering Anna's Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents.

Whether the site will comply with this order is highly uncertain. For now, the monetary judgment is mostly a victory on paper, as recouping money from an unknown entity is impossible. For this reason, the music companies also requested a permanent injunction. In addition to the damages award, [Judge Jed Rakoff] entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna's Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg. Domain registries and registrars of record, along with hosting and internet service providers, are ordered to permanently disable access to those domains, disable authoritative nameservers, cease hosting services, and preserve evidence that could identify the site's operators.

The judgment names specific third parties bound by those obligations, including Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Switch Foundation, The Swedish Internet Foundation, Njalla SRL, IQWeb FZ-LLC, Immaterialism Ltd., Hosting Concepts B.V., Tucows Domains Inc., and OwnRegistrar, Inc. Anna's Archive is also ordered to destroy all copies of works scraped from Spotify and to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, including valid contact information for the site and its managing agents. That last requirement could prove significant, given that the identity of the site's operators remains unknown.

A proposed California bill would require 3D printer makers to use state-certified software to detect and block files for gun parts, but advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) say it would be easy to evade and could lead to widespread surveillance of users' printing activity. The Register reports: The bill in question is AB 2047, the scope of which, on paper, appears strict. The primary goal is clear and simple: to require 3D printer manufacturers to use a state-certified algorithm that checks digital design files for firearm components and blocks print jobs that would produce prohibited parts. [...] Cliff Braun and Rory Mir, who respectively work in policy and tech community engagement at the EFF, claim that the proposals in California are technically infeasible and in practice will lead to consumer surveillance.

In a series of blog posts published this month, the pair argued that print-blocking technology -- proposals for which have also surfaced in states including New York and Washington - cannot work for a range of technical reasons. They argued that because 3D printers and other types of computer numerical control (CNC) machines are fairly simple, with much of their brains coming from the computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software -- or slicer software -- to which they are linked, the bill would establish legal and illegal software. Proprietary software will likely become the de facto option, leaving open source alternatives to rot.

"Under these proposed laws, manufacturers of consumer 3D printers must ensure their printers only work with their software, and implement firearm detection algorithms on either the printer itself or in a slicer software," wrote Braun earlier this month. "These algorithms must detect firearm files using a maintained database of existing models. Vendors of printers must then verify that printers are on the allow-list maintained by the state before they can offer them for sale. Owners of printers will be guilty of a crime if they circumvent these intrusive scanning procedures or load alternative software, which they might do because their printer manufacturer ends support."

Braun also argued that it would be trivial for anyone who uses 3D printers to make small tweaks to either the visual models of firearms parts, or the machine instructions (G-code) generated from those models, to evade detection. Mir further argued that the bill offers no guardrails to keep this "constantly expanding blacklist" limited to firearm-related designs. In his view, there is a clear risk that this approach will creep into other forms of alleged unlawful activity, such as copyright infringement. [...] Braun and Mir have a list of other arguments against the bill. They say the algorithms are more than likely to lead to false positives, which will prevent good-faith users from using their hardware. Many 3D printer owners also have no interest in printing firearm components. Most simply want the freedom to print trinkets and spare parts while others use them to print various items and sell them as an income stream.

alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta, and Google web traffic in California found that the companies may be violating state regulations and racking up billions in fines. According to the audit from privacy search engine webXray, 55 percent of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user's browser even if they opted out of tracking. Each company disputed or took issue with the research, with Google saying it was based on a "fundamental misunderstanding" of how its product works.

The webXray California Privacy Audit viewed web traffic on more than 7,000 popular websites in California in the month of March and found that most tech companies ignore when a user asks to opt-out of cookie tracking. California has stringent and well defined privacy legislation thanks to its California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which allows users to, among other things, opt out of the sale of their personal information. There's a system called Global Privacy Control (GPC), which includes a browser extension that indicates to a website when a user wants to opt out of tracking.

According to the webXray audit, Google failed to let users opt out 87 percent of the time. "Google's failure to honor the GPC opt-out signal is easy to find in network traffic. When a browser using GPC connects to Google's servers it encodes the opt-out signal by sending the code 'sec-gpc: 1.' This means Google should not return cookies," the audit said. "However, when Google's server responds to the network request with the opt-out it explicitly responds with a command to create an advertising cookie named IDE using the 'set-cookie' command. This non-compliance is easy to spot, hiding in plain sight."

The audit said that Microsoft fails to opt out users in the same way and has a failure rate of 50 percent in the web traffic webXray viewed. Meta's failure rate was 69 percent and a bit more comprehensive. "Meta instructs publishers to install the following tracking code on their websites. The code contains no check for globally standard opt-out signals -- it loads unconditionally, fires a tracking event, and sets a cookie regardless of the consumer's privacy preferences," the audit said. It showed a copy of Meta's tracking data which contains no GPC check at all.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's Google is facing billions of dollars in potential damage claims as part of mass arbitration tied to the company's online search and advertising technology businesses, which courts have ruled were illegal monopolies. Advertisers are banding together to seek payouts through mass arbitration proceedings. While many companies that displayed ads purchased through Google -- including USA Today Co. and Advance Publications -- have sued for damages since the rulings in 2024, advertiser contracts with the search giant require mandatory arbitration over legal disputes.

In arbitration, legal disputes are handled by a mediator, a process that tends to favor companies in individual claims. Mass arbitration -- where 25 or more claims against the same company are pooled together -- have become more common and provide a greater likelihood of settlement awards for claimants. Ashley Keller, a Chicago lawyer whose firm has handled mass arbitrations against DoorDash, Postmates and TurboTax-maker Intuit, said he's already signed up a "significant number" of advertisers to participate in claims against Google. The first of those are expected to be filed this week.

"Two federal judges have already adjudicated Google to be a monopolist," Keller said in an interview with Bloomberg. "It seems sensible to seek redress." Keller, who is also representing Texas and other states in a lawsuit against Google for monopolization of advertising technology, estimates potential claims for online search and display ads could reach $218 billion or more, based on calculations from an economist his firm has hired. Similar mass arbitrations have lasted 12 to 24 months between the filing of claims and resolution, he said. "Given the nature of these matters, we cannot estimate a possible loss," Google said in a recent corporate filing. "We believe we have strong arguments against these open claims and will defend ourselves vigorously."

The FBI searched the Texas home of a 20-year-old man accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's San Francisco residence. Authorities say the suspect also made threats at OpenAI's headquarters, and reports indicate he had written extensively about fears over AI and opposition to AI executives.

The suspect reportedly authored a Substack blog and was a member of the Discord server PauseAI, an activist group focused on banning the development of the most powerful AI models to protect the public. In one post, they wrote: "These machines have already shown themselves to be unaligned with the interest of the people creating them. Models have often been found lying, cheating on tasks, and blackmailing their own creators whenever convenient; let alone the broader question of aligning them to whatever general 'human interest' may be." The Houston Chronicle reports: The search happened hours before the Justice Department charged 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama with possession of an unregistered firearm and damage and destruction of property by means of explosives. An FBI spokesperson on Monday morning confirmed agents were executing a search warrant in Spring, but provided no other information.

Around the same time, FOX News reported the search was being conducted at the home of Daniel Moreno-Gama, 20, who last week was arrested by San Francisco police suspicion of attempted murder, making criminal threats and possession of a destructive device. The charges were first reported by the Associated Press. When Moreno-Gama was arrested Friday, he was carrying a document that "identified views opposed to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the executives of various AI companies," the Associated Press reported. Moreno-Gama has no criminal history in Harris or Montgomery counties, according to public records. [...] Agents had left the cul-de-sac by 1 p.m. It was unclear if they removed any items from the house. Another incident occurred outside Sam Altman's residence early Sunday morning. "Early Sunday morning, a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI's CEO," reports The San Francisco Standard, citing reports from the local police department. Two suspects were arrested and booked for negligent discharge.

UPDATE: The suspect has been charged with attempted murder.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: More than 70 civil liberties, domestic violence, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+, labor, and immigrant advocacy organizations are demanding that Meta abandon plans to deploy face recognition on its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses, warning that the feature -- reportedly known inside the company as "Name Tag" -- would hand stalkers, abusers, and federal agents the ability to silently identify strangers in public. The coalition, which includes the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Fight for the Future, Access Now, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, is demanding Meta kill the feature before launch, after internal documents surfaced showing the company hoped to use the current "dynamic political environment" as cover for the rollout, betting that civil society groups would have their resources "focused on other concerns."

Name Tag, as revealed in February by The New York Times, would work through the artificial intelligence assistant built into Meta's smart glasses, allowing wearers to pull up information about people in their field of view. Engineers have reportedly been weighing two versions of the feature: one that would only identify people the wearer is already connected to on a Meta platform, and a broader version that could recognize anyone with a public account on a Meta service such as Instagram. The coalition wants Meta to scrap the feature entirely. In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, it argues that face recognition in inconspicuous consumer eyewear "cannot be resolved through product design changes, opt-out mechanisms, or incremental safeguards." Bystanders in public have no meaningful way to consent to being identified, it says.

Meta is also urged to disclose any known instances of its wearables being used in stalking, harassment, or domestic violence cases; disclose any past or ongoing discussions with federal law enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, about the use of Meta wearables or data from them; and commit to consulting civil society and independent privacy experts before integrating biometric identification into any consumer device. "People should be able to move through their daily lives without fear that stalkers, scammers, abusers, federal agents, and activists across the political spectrum are silently and invisibly verifying their identities and potentially matching their names to a wealth of readily available data about their habits, hobbies, relationships, health, and behaviors," write the groups, which also include Common Cause, Jane Doe Inc., UltraViolet, the National Organization for Women, the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the Library Freedom Project, and Old Dykes Against Billionaire Tech Bros, among others.

Booking.com says hackers accessed customer reservation data in a breach that may have exposed booking details, names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and messages shared with accommodations. PCMag reports: On Sunday, users reported receiving emails from Booking.com, warning them that "unauthorized third parties may have been able to access certain booking information associated with your reservation." The email suggests the hackers have already exploited customer information.

"We recently noticed suspicious activity affecting a number of reservations, and we immediately took action to contain the issue," Booking.com wrote. "Based on the findings of our investigation to date, accessed information could include booking details and name(s), emails, addresses, phone numbers associated with the booking, and anything that you may have shared with the accommodation."

Amsterdam-based Booking.com has now generated new PINs for customer reservations to prevent hackers from accessing them. Still, the incident risks exposing affected customers to potential phishing scams. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation and several Reddit users say they received scam messages from accounts posing as Booking.com.

Maine is on track to become the first U.S. state to impose a temporary statewide ban on new data center construction. "Lawmakers in Maine greenlit the text of a bill this week to block data centers from being built in the state until November 2027," reports CNBC. "The measure, which is expected to get final passage in the next few days, also creates a council to suggest potential guardrails for data centers to ensure they don't lead to higher energy prices or other complications for Maine residents." From the report: Maine's bill has a few steps to go through before becoming law, notably whether Gov. Janet Mills will exercise her veto power. Mills asked lawmakers to include an exemption for several areas of the state where data center construction could continue. However, an amendment to do so was stuck down in the House, 29 to 115. Complicating Mills' decision is her campaign to become Maine's next senator. Mills is facing off against Graham Platner, an oyster farmer, in a high-profile Democratic primary. Platner is leading Mills in most recent polls by double digits.

"Early Sunday morning, a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI's CEO," reportsThe San Francisco Standard, citing reports from the local police department:

The San Francisco Police Department announced the arrest of two suspects, Amanda Tom, 25, and Muhamad Tarik Hussein, 23, who were booked for negligent discharge... [The person in the passenger seat] put their hand out the window and appeared to fire a round on the Lombard side of the property, according to a police report on the incident, which cited surveillance footage and the compound's security personnel, who reported hearing a gunshot. The car then fled, and a camera captured its license plate, which later led police to take possession of the vehicle, according to the report... A search of the residence by officers turned up three firearms, according to police.
The incident follows Friday's arrest of a man who allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman's house. The San Francisco Standard also notes that in November, "threats from a 27-year-old anti-AI activist prompted the lockdown of OpenAI's San Francisco offices." Sam Kirchner, whose whereabouts have been unknown since Nov. 21, was in the midst of a mental health crisis when he threatened to go to the company's offices to "murder people," according to callers who notified police that day.

Mississippi has one warehouse — run by a contractor — that sells all the liquor for the entire state of 2.9 million people. "If a restaurant or store anywhere in Mississippi wanted a bottle of Jim Beam, they had to order it from the wholesale warehouse," reports the Washington Post.

But then Mississippi's warehouse-managing contractor implemented a new computer system that wasn't compatible with the state's delivery system (like they'd promised it would be back in 2023). And then things got even worse... "The problem, business owners allege, is that the company tore out the conveyor belts but didn't hire humans to replace them."

In February a state Revenue Department commissioner told lawmakers the state was hiring temporary replacement workers, but in the five weeks through March 29th they'd only managed to reduce "pending" orders by 21.7%, from 218,851 down to 171,190, according to stats from Mississippi Today. At least four Mississippi businesses are now suing the warehouse operator "claiming breach of contract and harm to their business."

So what's it like in a state suddenly running dry? The Washington Post reports: Willie the one-eyed skeleton is dressed for Cinco de Mayo, but the liquor store where Willie sits ran out of Jose Cuervo months ago. Arrow Wine and Spirits is also out of Tito's and Burnett's vodka, Franzia boxed wine, Jack Daniels, and every kind of premixed margarita... Restaurants in Jackson had no wine on Valentine's Day, and bars on the Gulf Coast ran dry before Mardi Gras. At least five liquor shops have closed, and if cheap pints don't hit the corner stores soon, many of them will, too...

[A]s both the state and its businesses lose millions in revenue, many say they see no real end to the crisis. Nearly 174,000 cases of alcohol are sitting in a warehouse north of Jackson, but no one seems to know how to get them out the door... Even the shops that have received deliveries say they often get the wrong thing — Jell-O shots, for instance, that should have been small-batch Norwegian gin...
At Willie the one-eyed skeleton's liquor store they'd previously made 300 to 400 sales a day, according to the article, but last week had 34 customers. And Mississippi is one of 17 U.S. states requiring liquor stores to buy their liquor from distribution centers controlled by the state's Department of Revenue...

Mississippi Today points out that while some want the state to finally privatize liquor distribution, "The state collects around $120 million a year in taxes on alcohol." Plus the state has already authorized "borrowing $95 million to construct a new warehouse, set to begin operations in 2027..."

Thanks to Slashdot reader jrnvk for sharing the news.

Arizona state prosecutors allege Kalshi is running an illegal gambling operation, charging the prediction market with 20 "wagering" misdemeanors. But Friday a federal judge "temporarily barred Arizona from enforcing its gambling laws against predictive market operators," reports the Associated Press, "and put the brakes on a criminal wagering case that the state has filed against Kalshi.

"U.S. District Judge Michael Liburdi's ruling means a Monday arraignment hearing for Kalshi has been called off." The order was issued in a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration. The judge's order said the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission had sufficiently shown that "event contracts" fall within the Commodity Exchange Act's definition of "swaps," and that it had demonstrated a reasonable chance of success in showing that the act preempts Arizona law... The commission had sued Arizona in response to cease-and-desist letters sent to Kalshi from state gambling regulators and the criminal charges filed against the prediction market operator. The commission argued Arizona is intruding on its exclusive federal power to regulate national swaps markets...

Earlier this month, the federal government filed lawsuits against Connecticut, Arizona and Illinois challenging their efforts to regulate prediction market operators. The Trump administration has so far backed the platforms. President Donald Trump's eldest son is an adviser for both Kalshi and Polymarket and an investor in the latter. Trump's social media platform Truth Social is also launching its own cryptocurrency-based prediction market called Truth Predict.
Federal and state judges in Nevada and Massachusetts have now issued early rulings in favor of states looking to ban Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket from offering sports being in their states, according to the article, "while federal judges in New Jersey and Tennessee have ruled in favor of Kalshi."

And Arizona's attorney general's office said it disagrees with the court's ruling and "will evaluate our next steps."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Trump administration has stepped up an effort to unmask a Reddit user who criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After failing to obtain information through a summons issued (PDF) to Reddit, the government reportedly issued a subpoena demanding that Reddit provide the information and appear before a grand jury in Washington, DC. The Intercept described the subpoena today. "According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month," the article said.

The legal saga began in US District Court for the Northern District of California. On March 12, the anonymous Reddit user whose information is being sought filed a motion (PDF) to quash a summons seeking a host of information from Reddit. The summons was issued by the Department of Homeland Security and directed Reddit to turn information over to an ICE senior special agent. The summons cited authority under 19 U.S. Code 1509, which is part of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. The motion to quash said the summons is not authorized by the law, which deals with imports of boats, alcoholic drinks, and animals, among other things.

"J. Doe is a US citizen who has not traveled out of the country, is not engaged in any international commerce, has no business concerns outside the United States, and primarily uses their Reddit account to engage in political speech relevant to their local community," said the filing by the Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC), which represents the Reddit user. "Yet the government claims the right to obtain Doe's name, telephone number, home address, banking and credit card information, IP addresses, telephone model number(s), and the names of any other accounts associated with their Reddit account. The information sought by the government in no way pertains to customs or importing or exporting merchandise, and is clearly intended to chill free speech." "We should be very, very, very concerned that they've now taken one of these to a grand jury," said David Greene, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's something to be taken very seriously."

A Reddit spokesperson told Ars today that "we seek to inform users of any legal process compelling disclosure of their data, as we did in this case, because users should have the agency to protect their own information and are often better positioned to challenge requests that impact them."

"We do not voluntarily share information with any government, especially not on users exercising their rights to criticize the government or plan a protest. We review every inquiry for legal sufficiency and routinely object to requests that are overbroad or threaten civil rights. When legally compelled to disclose data, we provide only the minimum required and notify the user whenever possible so they can defend their interests."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: As the Trump administration seeks to fill a national shortage of air traffic controllers, officials are targeting a new talent pool: gamers. The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday is making a recruiting push aimed at avid players of video games, as the agency strives to fill thousands of vacancies that lawmakers have said leave the traveling public less safe. In a new YouTube ad, the agency is using flashy graphics and the promise of six-figure salaries to convince video game enthusiasts to apply their trigger fingers in service of air safety.

In recent years, video gamers have emerged as a target demographic for recruiters at a number of federal agencies, including the military and the Department of Homeland Security. They are welcomed for their hand-eye coordination, quick decision-making in complex environments and ability to remain focused on screens for hours on end. "To reach the next generation of air traffic controllers, we need to adapt," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement. Focusing recruiting efforts on gamers, he added, "taps into a growing demographic of young adults who have many of the hard skills it takes to be a successful controller."

[...] The F.A.A. plans to begin prioritizing recruiting gamers over more traditional avenues like college fairs, officials said, pointing out that only 25 percent of controllers have a traditional college degree, while the vast majority appear to have logged hours gaming. During the presidential transition in 2024, incoming Trump administration officials polled about 250 new air traffic academy graduates over six weeks. Only two of those interviewed were not gamers, according to F.A.A. officials [...]. Students who failed out of the training academy were not similarly queried, officials said, though they have plans to conduct more comprehensive exit interviews in the future. Still, the overwhelming presence of gaming habits among graduates tracked with what they were hearing anecdotally from controllers already certified to work in towers and other air traffic facilities, the officials said, many of whom liked to play video games during breaks in their shifts.

Bruce66423 shares a report from the Guardian: The European parliament has blocked the extension of a law that permits big tech firms to scan for child sexual exploitation on their platforms, creating a legal gap that child safety experts say will lead to crimes going undetected. The law, which was a carve-out of the EU Privacy Act, was put in place in 2021 as a temporary measure allowing companies to use automated detection technologies to scan messages for harms, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM), grooming and sextortion. However, it expired on April 3, and the EU parliament decided not to vote to extend it, amid privacy concerns from some lawmakers.

The regulatory gap has created uncertainty for big tech companies, because while scanning for harms on their platforms is now illegal, they still remain liable to remove any illegal content hosted on their platforms under a different law, the Digital Services Act. Google, Meta, Snap and Microsoft said they would continue to voluntarily scan their platforms for CSAM, in a joint statement posted on a Google blog. Bruce66423 adds: "Child abuse as the excuse for avoiding privacy protections. Who would have thought it?"