A magician who implanted an RFID chip in his hand lost access to it after forgetting the password, leaving him effectively locked out of the tech embedded in his own body. The Register reports: “It turns out,” said [said magician Zi Teng Wang], “that pressing someone else’s phone to my hand repeatedly, trying to figure out where their phone’s RFID reader is, really doesn’t come off super...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Amid a deepening ecological crisis and acute water shortage, Tehran can no longer remain the capital of Iran, the country’s president has said. The situation in Tehran is the result of “a perfect storm of climate change and corruption,” says Michael Rubin, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. “We no longer have a...

The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) was forced to cancel its leadership election after a trustee lost their portion of the Helios voting system’s decryption key, making it impossible to reveal or verify the final results. Ars Technica reports: The IACR said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open source voting system that uses...

Google has begun testing sponsored ads inside its Gemini-powered AI Mode, placing labeled “sponsored” links at the bottom of AI-generated responses. Engadget reports: [A] Google spokesperson says the result shown is akin to similar tests it’s been running this year. “People seeing ads in AI Mode in the wild is simply part of Google’s ongoing tests, which we’ve been running for several months,”...

The SEC has officially dismissed its high-profile case against SolarWinds and its CISO that was tied to a Russia-linked cyberattack involving the software company. Reuters reports: The landmark case, which SEC brought in late 2023, rattled the cybersecurity community and later faced scrutiny from a judge who dismissed many of the charges. The SEC had said SolarWinds and its chief information...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Malaysia’s palm oil giants, long-blamed for razing rainforests, fueling toxic haze and driving orangutans to the brink of extinction, are recasting themselves as unlikely champions in a different, potentially greener race: the quest to lure the world’s AI data centers to the Southeast Asian country (source paywalled; alternative source). Palm...

Phoronix’s Michael Larabel reports: A 21 year old bug report requesting support of the XDG Base Directory specification is finally being addressed by Firefox. The Firefox 147 release should respect this XDG specification around where files should be positioned within Linux users’ home directory. The XDG Base Directory specification lays out where application data files, configuration files,...

Google’s AI infrastructure chief told employees the company must double its AI serving capacity every six months in order to meet demand. In a presentation earlier this month, Amin Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, gave a presentation titled “AI Infrastructure.” It included a slide on “AI compute demand” that said: “Now we must double every 6 months…. the next 1000x in 4-5 years.” CNBC...

A global group of researchers was unable to read the vote tally, after an official lost one of three secret code keys needed to unlock a hyper-secure election system.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US crackdown on chip exports to China has continued with the arrests of four people accused of a conspiracy to illegally export Nvidia chips. Two US citizens and two nationals of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all of whom live in the US, were charged in an indictment (PDF) unsealed on Wednesday in US District Court for the Middle...

British soldiers are using computer games such as Call of Duty to sharpen their “war-fighting readiness,” an Army chief has said. From a report: General Sir Tom Copinger-Symes, the deputy commander of Cyber and Specialist Operations Command, said the war in Ukraine, where remote-operated drones have become crucial on the battlefield, proved the worth of having soldiers skilled in video gaming....

The Japanese government said that the world’s biggest nuclear plant would restart operations. Semafor: The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa site closed in 2012, as Japan — which previously generated 30% of its electricity from nuclear power — shuttered most of its fleet in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown. But like much of the world, it is looking once again to nuclear power for reliable, low-carbon...