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Shame about the internet blackouts and airstrikes

North America has some of the world's most expensive broadband, according to a new study, while Iran has the cheapest.…

Fortune 500 companies and one US defense contractor got taken for $5m in four-year scam

Two Americans have been jailed for a combined 200 months for helping North Korea generate $5 million through fraudulent IT worker schemes.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: A group of independent researchers built a device that can artificially induce smell using ultrasound, with no consumable cartridges required. [...] The team of four are Lev Chizhov, Albert Yan-Huang, Thomas Ribeiro, Aayush Gupta. Chizhov is a neurotech entrepreneur with a background in math and physics, Yan-Huang is a researcher at Caltech with a background in computation and neural systems, and Ribeiro and Gupta are co-researchers on the project with software engineering and AI expertise. Instead of targeting your nose at all, the device directly targets the olfactory bulb in your brain with "focused ultrasound through the skull." The researchers say that as far as they're aware, no one has ever done this before, even in animals. A challenge in targeting the olfactory bulb is that it's buried behind the top of your nose, and your nose doesn't provide a flat surface for an emitter. Ultrasound also doesn't travel well through air. The solution the researchers came up with was to place the emitter on your forehead instead, with a "solid, jello-like pad for stability and general comfort," and the ultrasound directed downward towards the olfactory bulb. To determine the best placement, they say they used an MRI of one of their skulls to "roughly determine where the transducer would point and how the focal region (where ultrasound waves actually concentrate) aligned with the olfactory bulb (the target for stimulation)". [...] According to the researchers, they were able to induce the sensation of fresh air "with a lot of oxygen", the smell of garbage "like few-day-old fruit peels," an ozone-like sensation "like you're next to an air ionizer," and a campfire smell of burning wood. While technically head-mounted, the current device does require being held up with two hands. But as with all such prototypes, it likely could be significantly miniaturized.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Includes a to-do list on search data sharing and platform access as DMA enforcement ramps up

Brussels has told Google to open up its search data and give rivals equal footing on its own platforms, sketching out how it expects the tech giant to comply with the bloc's competition rulebook.…

When the taxpayers are wondering whose side you are on...

Britain's government faces a public backlash against AI unless it can show ordinary people that they stand to benefit from its push to inject the technology into every area of the UK in the name of growth.…

Latest version points to a shift in how Microsoft thinks about IDEs

Visual Studio 2026 18.5 arrives with two headline changes – a smarter code suggestion system and an AI-powered debugger. Yet developer frustration over color contrast and forced updates continue to overshadow the improvements.…

Forged metadata made AI reviewer treat hostile changes as though they came from known maintainer

Security boffins say Anthropic's Claude can be tricked into approving malicious code with just two Git commands by spoofing a trusted developer's identity.…

Publisher claims misconfigured Salesforce-hosted page leaked data

Textbook giant McGraw Hill has landed on a ransomware crew's leak site after an alleged Salesforce-linked misconfiguration spilled 13.5 million records into the wild.…

Some Japanese bullet trains will soon support premium private suites this October, featuring windows with embedded 5G antennas for steadier onboard Wi-Fi and NTT noise-cancelling cabin tech to reduce train noise. The 5G window antennas are designed to maintain line-of-sight connections as trains race past base stations at up to 285 km/h. The Register reports: Rail operator JR Central announced the new tech late last month and will initially deploy a couple of the suites on six trains. The carrier explained that the antennas come from a Japanese company called AGC that weaves microscopic wires through glass to form an antenna. JR Central will connect the windows to an on-train Wi-Fi router. AGC says rival tech relies on 5G signals reaching a train and then bouncing around inside before reaching the Wi-Fi unit. The company says antennas woven into train windows maintain line of sight to nearby 5G base stations. That matters because JR Central's Shinkansen can achieve speeds of up to 285 km/h, which means they speed past cellular network base stations so quickly that it's frequently necessary to reconnect to another radio. AGC says keeping a line of sight connection means its antennas allow increased 5G signal strength, so Wi-Fi service on board trains should be more stable and speedy. The sound-deadening kit JR Central will deploy is called Personalized Sound Zone (PSZ) and comes from Japan's tech giant NTT. The tech uses the same principles applied to noise-cancelling headphones -- determine the waveform of sound and project an inversion of that waveform that cancels out ambient noise.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Giant UAV package will include strike, recon, logistics, and maritime systems

The UK government says it will deliver at least 120,000 drones to Ukraine this year to help it fight against Russia.…

Just migrate already, would you? But if you can't, Redmond will take your cash

Microsoft will keep delivering security updates for old versions of Exchange Server and Skype for Business Server, after admitting that some customers aren't ready to make the move to newer products.…

Backup and Sync may be dead, but it still knows how to kill the buzz before the ukuleles start

Bork!Bork!Bork! Sweden is arguably the home of bork – think the Swedish Chef from The Muppets – so we are delighted to note an example of the breed turning up north of Stockholm.…

Biz as usual for Brit public sector: ESN replacement is 12 years late and £3B over budget

UK police tech buyers have awarded a £25 million no-competition contract for communications technology first commissioned in 2000, with the replacement project 12 years behind schedule and £3 billion over budget.…

Your cybersecurity is only as good as the physical security of the servers

PWNED Welcome back to Pwned, the column where we immortalize the worst vulns that organizations opened up for themselves. If you’re the kind of person who leaves your car doors unlocked with a pile of cash in the center console, this week’s story is for you.…

Deciphering the third transport protocol's four RFCs is a task to rival the proverbial blind man trying to understand an elephant

While Larry was producing most of the content for the "Request/Reponse" chapter for the next edition of our book, I took the lead on writing a section on QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections), since I have closely followed its development.…

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Guardian: Households will be called on to boost their consumption of Great Britain's record renewable energy this summer to help balance the power grid and lower energy bills. Under the new plans, people could be encouraged to run dishwashers and washing machines or charge up their electric vehicles when there is more wind and solar power than the electricity grid needs. The plan will be delivered with the help of energy suppliers, which may choose to offer heavily discounted or free electricity to their customers during specific periods when the energy system operator predicts there will be a surplus of electricity. Many suppliers already offer more than 2 million households the opportunity to pay lower rates for electricity used during off-peak hours but this will be the first time that the system operator will use this tool to help balance the grid. The National Energy System Operator (Neso) hopes that by issuing a market notice to call on energy users to increase their consumption it can avoid making hefty payments to turn wind and solar farms off when demand for electricity is low, which are ultimately paid for through energy bills.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shinkansen upgrade rolling out in October

Some Japanese bullet trains will soon be equipped with private suites that include windows with embedded 5G antennas and noise-cancelling technology that envelops passengers in a bubble of quiet.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Many scientists have contended that humans have evolved very little over the past 10,000 years. A few hundred generations was just a blink of the evolutionary eye, it seemed. Besides, our cultural evolution -- our technology, agriculture and the rest -- must have overwhelmed our biological evolution by now. A vast study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests the opposite. Examining DNA from 15,836 ancient human remains, scientists found 479 genetic variants that appeared to have been favored by natural selection in just the past 10,000 years. The researchers also concluded that thousands of additional genetic variants have probably experienced natural selection. Before the new study, scientists had identified only a few dozen variants. "There are so many of them that it's hard to wrap one's mind around them," said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the new study. He and his colleagues found that a mutation that is a major risk factor for celiac disease, for example, appeared just 4,000 years ago, meaning the condition may be younger than the Egyptian pyramids. The mutation became ever more common. Today, an estimated 80 million people worldwide have celiac disease, in which the immune system attacks gluten and damages the intestines. The steady rise of the mutation came about through natural selection, the scientists argue. For some reason, people with the mutation had more descendants than people without it -- even though it put them at risk of an autoimmune disorder. Other findings are even more puzzling. The researchers found that genetic variants that raise the odds of a smoking habit have been getting steadily rarer in Europe for the past 10,000 years. Something is working against those variants -- but it can't be the harm from smoking. Europeans have been smoking tobacco for only about 460 years. The scientists can't see from their research so far what forces might be making these variants more or less common. "My short answer is, I don't know," said Ali Akbari, a senior staff scientist at Harvard and an author of the study. The researchers also found that some variants, like the one linked to Type B blood, became much more common in Europe around 6,000 years ago, while others changed direction over time. For example, a TYK2 immune gene variant that may have once been beneficial later became harmful because it increased tuberculosis risk. The study also found signs of natural selection in 44 out of 563 traits. Variants linked to Type 2 diabetes, wider waists, and higher body fat have become less common, possibly because farming and carbohydrate-heavy diets made once-useful fat-storing traits more harmful. Other findings, such as selection favoring genes linked to more years of schooling, are harder to interpret.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Services giant’s staff accused of assaults, inappropriate religious practices

Police in the Indian city of Nashik conducted a sting operation at Tata Consultancy Services and allegedly found instances of sexual harassment and other revolting behavior.…

Browser fingerprinting is everywhere

Google markets its Chrome browser by citing its superior safety features, but according to privacy consultant Alexander Hanff, Chrome does not protect against browser fingerprinting – a method of tracking people online by capturing technical details about their browser.…