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Feeds are alive, well and can help deshittify things

opinion A couple of timely blog posts remind us that RSS is alive, well, and can help you resist enshittification of the Web.…

Three agents is about all we can handle

As AI adoption in the workplace accelerates, many people find themselves in a position where babysitting bots and agents is a significant part of their day. Those people are feeling a bit like AI has fried their brains. …

"If Lockheed Martin made a Game Boy, would you buy one?" That was the [rhetorical] question The Verge's Sean Hollister asked when he reviewed ModRetro's Game Boy-style handheld device back in 2024. He said it "might be the best version of the Game Boy ever made," though the connection to Palmer Luckey and his defense tech startup Anduril left him conflicted. "I don't remember my childhood nostalgia coming with a side of possible guilt and fear about putting money into the pocket of a weapons contractor," he wrote. "Feels weird!" Those conflicted feelings have lingered ever since. TechCrunch recently cited Hollister's review while reporting that ModRetro is now seeking funding at a $1 billion valuation. The company is said to have additional retro-inspired hardware in development, including one designed to replicate the Nintendo 64. As for Anduril? It's reportedly in talks to raise a new funding round that would value the company at around $60 billion.

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E7 arrives with a hefty price. Got to keep those shareholders happy

Microsoft has finally confirmed that its AI-centric E7 subscription tier - where it licenses AI agent agents like employees - will debut on May 1 for an eye-watering $99 per user per month (pupm).…

An attack on the company’s AWS platform may have exposed customers' names and home addresses

Exclusive ELECQ, maker of smart electric vehicle (EV) chargers, is warning customers that their personal details may have been stolen in a ransomware attack that encrypted and copied user data from its cloud systems.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: AI has made it vastly easier for malicious hackers to identify anonymous social media accounts, a new study has warned. In most test scenarios, large language models (LLMs) -- the technology behind platforms such as ChatGPT -- successfully matched anonymous online users with their actual identities on other platforms, based on the information they posted. The AI researchers Simon Lermen and Daniel Paleka said LLMs make it cost effective to perform sophisticated privacy attacks, forcing a "fundamental reassessment of what can be considered private online". In their experiment, the researchers fed anonymous accounts into an AI, and got it to scrape all the information it could. They gave a hypothetical example of a user talking about struggling at school, and walking their dog Biscuit through a "Dolores park." In that hypothetical case, the AI then searched elsewhere for those details and matched @anon_user42 to the known identity with a high degree of confidence. While this example was fictional, the paper's authors highlighted scenarios in which governments use AI to surveil dissidents and activists posting anonymously, or hackers are able to launch "highly personalized" scams.

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Swiss voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to use physical cash. "The vote means Switzerland will join the likes of Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, which have already written the right to cold, hard cash in their constitutions," reports Politico. From the report: Official results revealed that 73.4 percent of voters backed the legal amendment, which the government proposed as a counter to a similar initiative by a group called the Swiss Freedom Movement. The Swiss Freedom Movement triggered the national referendum after its initiative to protect cash collected more than 100,000 signatures, triggering a national referendum. Its initiative secured only 46 percent of the final vote after the government said some of the group's proposed amendments went too far.

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But questions remain over long-term commitment to clustering tech in open source

After a couple of years of relative calm, the relationship between MariaDB and its open source foundation was ruffled in February, leaving observers with a few unanswered questions.…

Plain-text fans rejoice as Writer gains native CommonMark import and export

Markdown has been around for more than 20 years, but native support in LibreOffice might suddenly help to make it viable for more people.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Tonight, we have details of a classified U.S. intelligence mission that has obtained a previously unknown weapon that may finally unlock a mystery. Since at least 2016, U.S. diplomats, spies and military officers have suffered crippling brain injuries. They've told of being hit by an overwhelming force, damaging their vision, hearing, sense of balance and cognition. but the government has doubted their stories. They've been called delusional. Well now, 60 Minutes has learned that a weapon that can inflict these injuries was obtained overseas and secretly tested on animals on a U.S. military base. We've investigated this mystery for nine years. This is our fourth story called, "Targeting Americans." Despite official government doubt, we never stopped reporting because of the haunting stories we heard [...]. 60 Minutes interviewed Dr. David Relman, a scientific expert and professor from Stanford University who was tasked by the government to lead two investigations into the Havana Syndrome cases. What he and his panel of doctors, physicists, engineers and others found was that "the most plausible explanation for a subset of these cases was a form of radiofrequency or microwave energy," the report says. According to confidential sources cited in the report, undercover Homeland Security agents bought a miniaturized microwave weapon from a Russian criminal network in 2024 and tested it on animals at a U.S. military lab. The injuries reportedly matched those seen in the human cases. "Our confidential sources tell us the still classified weapon has been tested in a U.S. military lab for more than a year," says Dr. Relman. "Tests on rats and sheep show injuries consistent with those seen in humans." He continues: "Also, as a separate part of the investigation, security camera videos have been collected that show Americans being hit. The videos are classified but they were described to us. In one, a camera in a restaurant in Istanbul captured two FBI agents on vacation sitting at a table with their families. A man with a backpack walks in and suddenly everyone at the table grabs their head as if in pain. Our sources say another video comes from a stairwell in the U.S. embassy in Vienna. The stairs lead to a secure facility. In the video, two people on the stairs suddenly collapse. Those videos and the weapon were among the reasons the Biden administration summoned about half a dozen victims to the White House with about two months left in the president's term." Former intelligence officials and researchers claim elements of the U.S. government downplayed or dismissed the theory for years, possibly to avoid political consequences of accusing a foreign state like Russia of conducting attacks on American personnel.

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Former policy boss Nick Clegg joins Cheryl Sandberg and one-time Yahoo prez Susan Decker

Former British deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg has landed a board seat at UK-based neocloud Nscale, alongside fellow ex-Meta exec Sheryl Sandberg and former president of Yahoo Susan Decker.…

Two-week deadline to fraudsters to fess up or have their faces plastered across every screen in the country

Dutch national police are taking a novel stand against scammers - 100 suspects now have less than two weeks to hand themselves in or face public shaming.…

Dutch spies flag large-scale campaign to hijack secure messaging accounts

Russian-linked hackers are trying to break into the Signal and WhatsApp accounts of government officials, journalists, and military personnel globally – not by cracking encryption, but by simply tricking people into handing over the keys.…

Vulcan rocket hardware drafted in amid Artemis reshuffle but still no word on lander

NASA has selected United Launch Alliance's Centaur V upper stage for the Artemis missions that aim to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.…

This isn't just a nostalgia trip – billions of legacy microcontrollers may be at risk

AI can reverse engineer machine code and find vulnerabilities in ancient legacy architectures, says Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, who used his own Apple II code from 40 years ago as an example.…

After decades of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, the nonprofit SETI Foundation has an announcement. "A new study by researchers at the SETI Institute suggests stellar 'space weather' could make radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence harder to detect." Stellar activity and plasma turbulence near a transmitting planet can broaden an otherwise ultra-narrow signal, spreading its power across more frequencies and making it more difficult to detect in traditional narrowband searches. For decades, many SETI experiments have focused on identifying spikes in frequency — signals unlikely to be produced by natural astrophysical processes. But the new research highlights an overlooked complication: even if an extraterrestrial transmitter produces a perfectly narrow signal, it may not remain narrow by the time it leaves its home system... "If a signal gets broadened by its own star's environment, it can slip below our detection thresholds, even if it's there, potentially helping explain some of the radio silence we've seen in technosignature searches," said Dr. Vishal Gajjar, Astronomer at the SETI Institute and lead author of the paper. The researchers created "a practical framework for estimating how much broadening could occur for different types of stars" — and accounting for space weather — by "using radio transmissions from spacecraft in our own solar system, then extrapolated to other stellar environments." The study's co-author (a SETI Institute research assistant) suggests this coud lead to better-targetted SETI searches. (M-dwarf stars — about 75% of stars in the Milky Way — actually have the highest likelihood that narrowband signals would get broadened before leaving their system...)

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UK government slams comments as 'sickening and irresponsible'

Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok is once again under investigation after it began posting explicit and derogatory remarks about historic football disasters when prompted by users on X.…

Atomic clocks will tell you when your Waymo is late

The British government is to pour £180 million into ensuring the UK keeps up with the times.…

Gargantuan ERP and HR overhaul has committed around £1.7B and affects nearly half a million public workers

Opinion On the eve of its fifth birthday, the UK's Shared Services Strategy for Government got a couple of presents. With around £1.7 billion already committed to tech suppliers and a 2028 deadline looming, the 450,000 civil servants and military personnel set to depend on these systems might wonder what was in store.…

Britain's Ministry of Defence wants a counter-drone system designed, contracted, and delivered within weeks

Britain's Royal Navy is urgently seeking a ship-based counter-drone system and recent world events likely explain why.…