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LinkedIn is facing allegations that it quietly scans users' browsers for installed Chrome extensions. The German group Fairlinked e.V. goes so far as to claim that the site is "running one of the largest corporate espionage operations in modern history." "The program runs silently, without any visible indicator to the user," the group says. "It does not ask for consent. It does not disclose what it is doing. It reports the results to LinkedIn's servers. This is not a one-time check. The scan runs on every page load, for every visitor." PCMag reports: This browser extension "fingerprinting" technique has been spotted before, but it was previously found to probe only 2,000 to 3,000 extensions. Fairlinked alleges that LinkedIn is now scanning for 6,222 extensions that could indicate a user's political opinions or religious views. For example, the extensions LinkedIn will look for include one that flags companies as too "woke," one that can add an "anti-Zionist" tag to LinkedIn profiles, and two others that can block content forbidden under Islamic teachings. It would also be a cakewalk to tie the collected extension data to specific users, since LinkedIn operates as a vast professional social network that covers people's work history. Fairlinked's concern is that Microsoft and LinkedIn can allegedly use the data to identify which companies use competing products. "LinkedIn has already sent enforcement threats to users of third-party tools, using data obtained through this covert scanning to identify its targets," the group claims. However, LinkedIn claims that Fairlinked mischaracterizes a LinkedIn safeguard designed to prevent web scraping by browser extensions. "We do not use this data to infer sensitive information about members," the company says. "To protect the privacy of our members, their data, and to ensure site stability, we do look for extensions that scrape data without members' consent or otherwise violate LinkedIn's Terms of Service," LinkedIn adds. [...] The statement goes on to allege that Fairlinked is from a developer whose account was previously suspended for web scraping. One of the group's board members is listed as "S.Morell," which appears to be Steven Morell, the founder of Teamfluence, a tool that helps businesses monitor LinkedIn activity. [...] Still, the Microsoft-owned site is facing some blowback for not clearly disclosing the browser extension scanning in LinkedIn's privacy policy. Fairlinked is soliciting donations for a legal fund to take on Microsoft and is urging the public to encourage local regulators to intervene.

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Geopolitics enter the room as Thierry Carrez shows that there's more to Kubecon than AI

Kubecon Sovereignty was a big topic was at last week's Kubecon, and Thierry Carrez, the General Manager of the OpenInfra Foundation, shared strong feelings around it that included raising the idea that tech companies might be forced by their countries' governments to deploy "kill switches."…

Walled gardens make more sense when it's an AI-lligator infested swamp outside

Opinion When the first M1 Apple Silicon systems sprouted at the end of 2020, we loved the tech but not the walled garden it grew in. Apple had complete control over all its platforms and could set its own rules, but only to become more Apple-y. There was a whole world outside that area where Apple Silicon would never tread, even if Cupertino could iterate fast enough to keep up. Plus, Apple's appliance sensibility limited its expansion options, especially with performance dependent on its own silicon. …

Ofcom finds social media participation dropping as skepticism about digital life grows

British adults are now less active on social media, according to Ofcom, with just half of users actively posting, and fewer now believe the benefits outweigh the risks of being online.…

Longtime Slashdot reader walterbyrd shares a report from Fuel Cells Works: China says the AEP100, a megawatt-class hydrogen-fueled turboprop engine developed by the Aero Engine Corporation of China, has completed its maiden flight on a 7.5-ton unmanned cargo aircraft in Zhuzhou, Hunan. The 16-minute test covered 36km at 220km/h and 300 meters altitude, with the aircraft returning safely after completing its planned maneuvers. State media described it as the world's first test flight of a megawatt-class hydrogen-fueled turboprop engine. [...] The Aero Engine Corporation of China (AECC) says the result shows China now has a full technical chain for hydrogen aviation engines, from core parts to system integration, which is the kind of capability needed before any industrial rollout can begin. You can watch a video of the test flight here.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A federal appeals court ruled on Monday that New Jersey gaming regulators cannot prevent Kalshi from allowing people in the state to use its prediction market to place financial bets on the outcome of sporting events. A three-judge panel of the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 (PDF) in finding that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has exclusive jurisdiction over the sports-related event contracts that Kalshi allows people to trade on its platform. The ruling marked the first time a federal appeals court has ruled on what has become the central issue in an escalating battle over the ability of state gaming regulators to police the activity of prediction market operators. Kalshi and companies like it allow users to place trades and profit from predictions on events such as sports and elections. States argue that firms like Kalshi are operating without required state licenses, in violation of gaming laws, including bans on wagers by those under 21. Those states include New Jersey, which last year sent Kalshi a cease-and-desist letter stating that its listing of sports-related event contracts on its platform violated state gambling laws that prohibit betting on collegiate sports. Kalshi sued the state, arguing its event contracts qualify as "swaps," a type of derivative contract, that under the Commodity Exchange Act can only be regulated by the CFTC, which had granted the company a license to operate a designated contract market (DCM). A lower-court judge had sided with New York-based Kalshi and issued a preliminary injunction, prompting New Jersey to appeal. But a majority of the judges on the 3rd Circuit panel concluded the Commodity Exchange Act likely preempted state law. "Kalshi's sports-related event contracts are swaps traded on a CFTC-licensed DCM, so the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction," U.S. Circuit Judge David Porter wrote. The ruling was in line with the position advanced in other litigation by the CFTC under President Donald Trump's administration. The regulator last week sued Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois to prevent them from pursuing what it called unlawful efforts to regulate prediction markets.

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Customizations are causing pain so new cloud will stick to upstream cuts of the open source stack

LY Corporation, the Japanese web giant that dominates messaging, e-commerce and payments in many Asian countries, has revealed it is replacing a heavily-customized OpenStack cloud with a more conventional cut of the open source cloud stack – and making massive consolidations along the way.…

Broadcom's building the silicon and is chuffed about that, but also notes Anthropic remains a risk

Broadcom has announced that Google has asked it to build next-generation AI and datacenter networking chips, and that Anthropic plans to consume 3.5GW worth of the accelerators it delivers to the ads and search giant.…

CUPS server shown spilling out remote code execution and root access

In the latest chapter on leaky CUPS, a security researcher and his band of bug-hunting agents have found two flaws that can be chained to allow an unauthenticated attacker to remotely execute code and achieve root file overwrite on the network.…

OpenAI is proposing (PDF) sweeping policy changes to help manage the societal disruption caused by advanced AI, including taxes on automated labor, a public wealth fund, and experiments with a four-day workweek. The company said the policy document offered a series of "initial ideas" to address the risk of "jobs and entire industries being disrupted" by the adoption of AI tools. Business Insider reports: Among the core policy suggestions is a public wealth fund, which would see lawmakers and AI companies work together to invest in long-term assets linked to the AI boom, with returns distributed directly to citizens. Another is that the government should encourage and incentivize employers to experiment with four-day workweeks with no loss in pay and offer "benefits bonuses" tied to productivity gains from new AI tools. The policy document also suggests lawmakers modernize the tax system and shift the tax base to corporate income and capital gains, rather than relying on labor income and payroll taxes that could be hit by a wave of AI-powered job losses. It also recommends taxes related to automated labor. OpenAI also called for the accelerated expansion of the US's electricity grid, which is already feeling the strain from a wave of data center construction and energy demand for training ever more powerful AI models.

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Once AI bug reports become plausible, someone still has to verify them

If AI does more of the work but humans still have to check it, you need more reviewers. Now that AI models have gotten better at writing and evaluating code, open-source projects find themselves overwhelmed with the too-good-to-ignore output.…

A teardown video of LG's never-released Rollable phone helps explain why rollable phones never became a real product category: they were likely too expensive, fragile, and complicated to manufacture at scale. "The complexity of the internals would have made the Rollable extremely expensive to manufacture, and it would have demanded a high price tag," reports Ars Technica. "Durability is also a big concern. There's just a lot going on inside this phone, with multiple motors, springy arms, tracks, and a screen that has to loop around the back. [...] It seems unlikely the LG Rollable could have survived daily use for multiple years." From the report: The LG Rollable is just one of several rollable concept phones that appeared throughout the early 2020s. Flexible OLED screens had finally become affordable, leading to foldable phones like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold. Although, "affordable" is relative here. Foldables were and still are very expensive devices. Based on what we can see of the complex inner workings of the LG Rollable, these devices may have commanded even higher prices. Noted YouTube phone destroyer JerryRigEverything managed to snag a working prototype LG Rollable. It may even be the unit LG demoed at CES 2021. The device looks like a regular phone at first glance, but a quick swipe activates the motor, which unfurls additional screen real estate from around the back. This makes the viewable area about 40 percent larger without the added thickness of a foldable. The device expands with the aid of two tiny motors, which are attached via straight teeth to an internal track. The screen assembly has zipper-like teeth that keep it locked into the frame as it moves. The motors make a surprising amount of noise when operating, so LG designed the phone to play a musical chime to hide the sound. While the motor does the heavy lifting, the phone also has a lattice of articulating spring-loaded arms inside that keep the OLED panel even as the frame slides side to side. The battery and motherboard sit in a tray that allows the back of the phone to expand as the OLED rolls into view. This is a prototype phone, featuring a chunky frame and visible screws. That helped Zack Nelson from JerryRigEverything successfully disassemble and reassemble the phone. So this little bit of mobile history was not destroyed, and the teardown gives us a good look at how LG was hoping to attract new customers before calling it quits.

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The Associated Press is offering buyouts to U.S. journalists "as part of an acceleration away from the focus on newspaper journalism that sustained the company since the mid-1800s," the not-for-profit outlet reported today. AP says it is making the move from a position of strength, responding to shrinking newspaper revenue and growing demand from digital, broadcast, and tech clients. "The AP is not in trouble," said Julie Pace, executive editor and senior vice president of the AP. "We're making these changes from a position of strength but we're doing so now to recognize our changing customer base." From the report: The news organization is becoming more focused on visual journalism and developing new revenue sources, particularly through companies investing in artificial intelligence, to cope with the economic collapse of many legacy news outlets. Once the lion's share of AP's revenue, big newspaper companies now account for 10% of its income. "We're not a newspaper company and we haven't been for quite some time," [said Pace]. Despite changes -- the company has doubled the number of video journalists it employs in the United States since 2022 -- remnants of a staffing structure built largely to provide stories to newspapers and broadcasters in individual states have remained. That has its roots well back in American history; the AP was started in the mid-19th century by New York newspapers looking to share the costs of reporting outside their immediate territory. The number of AP journalists who will lose jobs is murky, in part intentionally. The AP does not say how many journalists it employs, though it has a large international presence as well as its U.S. staff. Pace said the AP's goal is to reduce its global staff by less than 5%. The Marketing and Media Alliance estimated the AP had 3,700 staffers, but it was not clear when that estimate was made. Since buyouts are being offered now to only U.S. journalists, it stands to reason that the cut among that workforce will be more than 5%. Whether there are layoffs depends on how many people take the offer, Pace said.

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'Claude cannot be trusted to perform complex engineering tasks' according to GitHub ticket

If you've noticed Claude Code's performance degrading to the point where you find you don't trust it to handle complicated tasks anymore, you're not alone.…

Artemis II has broken the Apollo 13 record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth. NASA reports: The Artemis II crew of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen have set the record for the farthest distance from Earth traveled by a human mission, surpassing the Apollo 13 record of 248,655 miles set in 1970. NASA Flight Director Brandon Lloyd, Capsule Communicator Amy Dill, and Command and Handling Data Officer Brandon Borter also marked a lighthearted milestone today by emailing the crew what is now assumed to be the longest person-to-person message ever sent in human history. After breaking the record for human spaceflight, crew also took a moment to provisionally name a couple of craters on the Moon, noting they were able to see them with their naked eye. Just northwest of Orientale basin highlighted above is a crater they would like to name Integrity after their spacecraft and this historic mission. Just northeast of Integrity, on the near and far side boundary, and sometimes visible from Earth, the crew suggested Carroll crater in honor of Reid Wiseman's late wife, Carroll Taylor Wiseman. After this mission is complete, the crater name proposals will be formally submitted to the International Astronomical Union, the organization that governs the naming of celestial bodies and their surface features. On April 1, NASA successfully launched humanity's first crewed trip around the Moon in more than 50 years. A couple of days into the mission, attention turned to a more mundane problem when reports said the astronauts had access to "two Microsoft Outlooks" and neither was working properly. By April 4, the crew had passed 100,000 miles from Earth as they continued deeper into space, and by April 6, they had entered the Moon's gravitational pull and caught their first views of the lunar far side.

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The company is having trouble meeting user demand

OpenClaw is popular, but not with the people responsible for keeping Anthropic’s services online. The company has disallowed subscription-based pricing for users who use the open-source agentic tool with Claude to try to keep things moving.…

Samsung says it will discontinue its Samsung Messages app in July 2026 and is directing Galaxy users to switch to Google Messages instead. Android Central reports: [...] Samsung says users can switch to Google Messages as their default app to maintain a consistent Android messaging experience. The fine print also states that once the app is discontinued, "sending messages via Samsung Messages on your phone will no longer be possible, except for emergency service numbers or emergency contacts defined in your device." Samsung also notes that users will no longer be able to download the Messages app from the Galaxy Store once it is discontinued. Newer devices, including the Galaxy S26 series, already do not support installing Samsung Messages. It is, however, worth noting that users on Android 11 or older are not affected by this change and will still be able to use the Samsung Messages app on their devices. [...] Samsung also warns that on some devices released before 2022, switching apps may temporarily disrupt ongoing RCS conversations. However, chats should resume once both users move to Google Messages. The company also highlights some of the benefits of the switch, including improved security, RCS support, AI features, and better multi-device connectivity.

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CISA added the flaw to KEV after Fortinet confirmed exploitation in the wild

Fortinet released an emergency patch over the weekend for a critical FortiClient Enterprise Management Server (EMS) bug believed to be under attack since at least March 31.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: An elusive hacker who went by the handle "UNKN" and ran the early Russian ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil now has a name and a face. Authorities in Germany say 31-year-old Russian Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin headed both cybercrime gangs and helped carry out at least 130 acts of computer sabotage and extortion against victims across the country between 2019 and 2021. Shchukin was named as UNKN (a.k.a. UNKNOWN) in an advisory published by the German Federal Criminal Police (the "Bundeskriminalamt" or BKA for short). The BKA said Shchukin and another Russian -- 43-year-old Anatoly Sergeevitsch Kravchuk -- extorted nearly $2 million euros across two dozen cyberattacks that caused more than 35 million euros in total economic damage. Germany's BKA said Shchukin acted as the head of one of the largest worldwide operating ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil, which pioneered the practice of double extortion -- charging victims once for a key needed to unlock hacked systems, and a separate payment in exchange for a promise not to publish stolen data. Shchukin's name appeared in a Feb. 2023 filing (PDF) from the U.S. Justice Department seeking the seizure of various cryptocurrency accounts associated with proceeds from the REvil ransomware gang's activities. The government said the digital wallet tied to Shchukin contained more than $317,000 in ill-gotten cryptocurrency. The BKA believes Shchukin resides in Krasnodar, Russia, where he is from. "Based on the investigations so far, it is assumed that the wanted person is abroad, presumably in Russia," the BKA advised. "Travel behavior cannot be ruled out."

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More Americans have moved into upper-middle-class incomes over the past several decades (source paywalled; alternative source), with new research suggesting that group has grown sharply while the lower and core middle class have shrunk. The Wall Street Journal reports: In 2024, about 31% of Americans were part of the upper middle class, up from about 10% in 1979, according to a report released this year by the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. There is no single, standard definition of middle class, or upper middle class, and what counts as a hefty income in one city can feel paltry in another. The AEI report, by Stephen Rose and Scott Winship, classified a family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 in 2024 dollars as upper middle class. Households earning more were categorized as rich. The analysis looked just at incomes, not assets such as stocks or real estate. [...] The gains span generations. Many baby boomers, born to parents who grew up in the Great Depression, are living well on their savings, aided by steady Social Security checks and decades of stock-portfolio gains that they can now tap. Millennials, who everyone worried would be permanently set back by the 2008-09 financial crisis, are earning solid incomes, buying homes and surpassing their parents. Many families are surprised to find that they have moved into this new economic tier, and see themselves as comfortable, not rich. They tend to have jobs that are white collar but not flashy -- think accountants, not tech founders. This doesn't mean that all Americans are climbing the ladder. Entrenched inflation and higher prices on major necessities have pushed many families closer to the financial edge, or locked them out of homeownership. Those costs weigh on high-earning families too, and for many are the reason they don't feel wealthy. The AEI report divided families into five different groups by income. Three groups were in the middle: lower middle class, core middle class and upper middle class. The authors found that more families now fall into the two highest-earning groups -- upper middle class and rich -- and fewer fall into the three lower-earning categories.

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