An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal:Sending drones and robots into battle, rather than humans, has become a tenet of modern warfare. Nowhere does that make more sense than in the frozen expanses of the Arctic. But the closer you get to the North Pole, the less useful cutting-edge technology becomes. Magnetic storms distort satellite signals; frigid temperatures...

An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget:OpenAI is looking for a new Head of Preparedness who can help it anticipate the potential harms of its models and how they can be abused, in order to guide the company’s safety strategy. It comes at the end of a year that’s seen OpenAI hit with numerous accusations about ChatGPT’s impacts on users’ mental health, including a few wrongful...

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this story from Interesting Engineering:Cybersecurity specialists from the research group DARKNAVY have demonstrated how modern humanoid robots can be compromised and weaponised through weaknesses in their AI-driven control systems. In a controlled test, the team demonstrated that a commercially available humanoid robot could be hijacked with nothing more...

Phoronix reports on “an exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list” proposing “a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the ‘Modern Standby’ functionality found with Microsoft Windows…”Modern Standby is a low-power mode on Windows 11 for letting systems remain connected to the network and appear “sleeping” but will allow for instant wake-up for...

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:Two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation with destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel, with the aim of reining in Western space superiority that has helped Ukraine on the battlefield. Intelligence findings seen by The Associated...

NVIDIA has been “gradually dropping support for older videocards,” notes Hackaday, “with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed.” “What’s more surprising is the terrible way that this is being handled by certain Linux distributions, with Arch Linux currently a prime example.?”On these systems, updating the OS with a Pascal, Maxwell or similarly unsupported GPU will result in the...

Waymo explained this week that its self-driving car technology is already “designed to handle dark traffic signals,” and successfully handled over 7,000 last Saturday during San Francisco’s long power outage, properly treating those intersections as four-way stops. But while during the long outage their cars sometimes experienced a “backlog” when waiting for confirmation checks (leading them to...

The nonprofit Open Source Initiative offers “enriched” license pages with “relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support”. So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license: mit (1.5M) apache-2-0 (344k) bsd-3-clause (214k) bsd-2-clause (128k) gpl-2-0 (76k) gpl-3-0 (55k) ...

The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima’s nuclear plant “was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986,” CNN remembers. But this week Japanese authorities “have approved a decision to restart the world’s biggest nuclear power plant,” reports CNN, “which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster.” Despite nerves from many local residents, the Niigata...

The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima’s nuclear plant “was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986,” CNN remembers. But this week Japanese authorities “have approved a decision to restart the world’s biggest nuclear power plant,” reports CNN, “which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster.” Despite nerves from many local residents, the Niigata...

An astrophysicist at the University of Rochester writes that “many” of his colleagues in physics “have come to believe that a mystery is unfolding in every microbe, animal, and human.” And it’s a mystery that: – “Challenges basic assumptions physicists have held for centuries”- “May even help redefine the field for the next generation”- “Could answer essential questions about AI.” In short,...

On Wednesday (Christmas Eve), the Free Software Foundation announced it had received two major contributions totaling around $900,000 USD — in the cryptocurrency Monero. The two donations “are among some of the largest private gifts ever made to the organization,” the FSF said in a statement. “The donors wish to remain anonymous,” according to the FSF’s statement:The organization is in its...

Those brief freezes and audio hiccups that plague video calls are not the benign nuisances that most people assume them to be, according to a new study published in Nature that found glitches during virtual interactions can meaningfully damage hiring prospects, reduce trust in healthcare providers and even correlate with lower chances of being granted parole. Researchers from Columbia, Cornell,...