Linux fréttir

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) intend to reevaluate how H-1B visas are issued, according to a regulatory filing. From a report: The notice, filed on Thursday with the US Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), seeks the statutory review of a proposed rule titled "Weighted Selection Process for Registrants and Petitioners Seeking To File Cap-Subject H-1B Petitions." Once the review is complete, which could be a matter of days or weeks, the text of the rule is expected to be published in the US Federal Register. Based on the rule title, it appears the government intends to change the system for allocating H-1B visas the current lottery to some system that will favor applicants who meet specified criteria, possibly related to skills. The H-1B visa program, which reached its Fiscal 2026 cap on Friday, allows skilled guest workers to come work in the US. As of 2019, there were about 600,000 H-1B workers in the US, according to USCIS. The foreign worker program is beloved by technology companies, ostensibly to hire talent not readily available from American workers. But H-1B -- along with the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program -- has long been criticized for making it easier to undercut US worker wages, limiting labor rights for immigrants, and for persistent abuse of the rules by outsourcing companies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After abandoning in-house replacement for scandal-hit system, government company looks to off-the-shelf software

The UK Post Office has said the public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal is a risk to its £410 million ($552 million) plan to replace its ageing POS and accounting system, and may force changes to awarded contracts.…

The modern art form that redeemed a Windows utility has lessons for all

Opinion The speedrun is one of the internet's genuinely new artforms. At its best, it's akin to a virtuoso piano recital. Less emotional depth, more adrenalin. Watching an expert fly through a game creates an endorphin rush without the expense or time of doing it for yourself. …

ChatGPT now handles 2.5 billion prompts daily, with 330 million from U.S. users. This surge marks a doubling in usage since December when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that users send over 1 billion queries to ChatGPT each day. TechCrunch reports: These numbers show just how ubiquitous OpenAI's flagship product is becoming. Google's parent company, Alphabet, does not release daily search data, but recently revealed that Google receives 5 trillion queries per year, which averages to just under 14 billion daily searches. Independent researchers have found similar trends. Neil Patel of NP Digital estimates that Google receives 13.7 billion searches daily, while research from SparkToro and Datos -- two digital marketing companies -- estimates that the figure is around 16.4 billion per day.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ofcom suggests government should use legislation to back PSB content on the platform

Public service broadcasters (PSBs) need to work with Google-owned YouTube "urgently," says the UK's communications watchdog, Ofcom.…

As long as you get paid like a 5-day gig

Employees work better and tire less when working a four-day week, according to a six-month trial involving thousands of individuals.…

Smaller vendors offering alternatives cash in concerns

Analysis Recent research suggests customers are concerned about the uptime reliability of hyperscalers' PostgreSQL instances, giving smaller alternative vendors an opening to fill the gap.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2023 and 2024, the hottest years on record, more than 78 million acres of forests burned around the globe. The fires sent veils of smoke and several billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, subjecting millions of people to poor air quality. Extreme forest-fire years are becoming more common because of climate change, new research suggests. "Climate change is loading the dice for extreme fire seasons like we've seen," said John Abatzoglou, a climate scientist at the University of California Merced. "There are going to be more fires like this." The area of forest canopy lost to fire during 2023 and 2024 was at least two times greater than the annual average of the previous nearly two decades, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers used imagery from the LANDSAT satellite network to determine how tree cover had changed from 2002 to 2024, and compared that with satellite detections of fire activity to see how much canopy loss was because of fire. Globally, the area of land burned by wildfires has decreased in recent decades, mostly because humans are transforming savannas and grasslands into less flammable landscapes. But the area of forests burned has gone up.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Announces beta for separate production and development databases that will land in a few weeks

Vibe coding service Replit has announced changes to its product that should prevent the database deletion disaster reported by one of its users.…

Deliberate overheating brought relief to Juno probe’s camera, twice

NASA has revealed that one of the cameras on the Juno craft it sent to Jupiter malfunctioned, and that it fixed it with some very, very, remote hardware hacking.…

At least 759 US hospitals experienced network disruptions during the CrowdStrike outage on July 19, 2024, with more than 200 suffering outages that directly affected patient care services, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open by UC San Diego researchers. The researchers detected disruptions across 34% of the 2,232 hospital networks they scanned, finding outages in health records systems, fetal monitoring equipment, medical imaging storage, and patient transfer platforms. Most services recovered within six hours, though some remained offline for more than 48 hours. CrowdStrike dismissed the study as "junk science," arguing the researchers failed to verify whether affected networks actually ran CrowdStrike software. The researchers defended their methodology, noting they could scan only about one-third of America's hospitals, suggesting the actual impact may have been significantly larger.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alternative_right shares a report from The Conversation: Greek philosophers may not have known about 21st-century technology, but their ideas about intellect and thinking can help us understand what's at stake with AI today. Although the English words "intellect" and "thinking" do not have direct counterparts in the ancient Greek, looking at ancient texts offers useful comparisons. In "Republic," for example, Plato uses the analogy of a "divided line" separating higher and lower forms of understanding. Plato, who taught in the fourth century BCE, argued that each person has an intuitive capacity to recognize the truth. He called this the highest form of understanding: "noesis." Noesis enables apprehension beyond reason, belief or sensory perception. It's one form of "knowing" something -- but in Plato's view, it's also a property of the soul. Lower down, but still above his "dividing line," is "dianoia," or reason, which relies on argumentation. Below the line, his lower forms of understanding are "pistis," or belief, and "eikasia," imagination. Pistis is belief influenced by experience and sensory perception: input that someone can critically examine and reason about. Plato defines eikasia, meanwhile, as baseless opinion rooted in false perception. In Plato's hierarchy of mental capacities, direct, intuitive understanding is at the top, and moment-to-moment physical input toward the bottom. The top of the hierarchy leads to true and absolute knowledge, while the bottom lends itself to false impressions and beliefs. But intuition, according to Plato, is part of the soul, and embodied in human form. Perceiving reality transcends the body -- but still needs one. So, while Plato does not differentiate "intelligence" and "thinking," I would argue that his distinctions can help us think about AI. Without being embodied, AI may not "think" or "understand" the way humans do. Eikasia -- the lowest form of comprehension, based on false perceptions -- may be similar to AI's frequent "hallucinations," when it makes up information that seems plausible but is actually inaccurate. Aristotle, Plato's student, sheds more light on intelligence and thinking. In "On the Soul," Aristotle distinguishes "active" from "passive" intellect. Active intellect, which he called "nous," is immaterial. It makes meaning from experience, but transcends bodily perception. Passive intellect is bodily, receiving sensory impressions without reasoning. We could say that these active and passive processes, put together, constitute "thinking." Today, the word "intelligence" holds a logical quality that AI's calculations may conceivably replicate. Aristotle, however, like Plato, suggests that to "think" requires an embodied form and goes beyond reason alone. Aristotle's views on rhetoric also show that deliberation and judgment require a body, feeling and experience. We might think of rhetoric as persuasion, but it is actually more about observation: observing and evaluating how evidence, emotion and character shape people's thinking and decisions. Facts matter, but emotions and people move us -- and it seems questionable whether AI utilizes rhetoric in this way. Finally, Aristotle's concept of "phronesis" sheds further light on AI's capacity to think. In "Nicomachean Ethics," he defines phronesis as "practical wisdom" or "prudence." "Phronesis" involves lived experience that determines not only right thought, but also how to apply those thoughts to "good ends," or virtuous actions. AI may analyze large datasets to reach its conclusions, but "phronesis" goes beyond information to consult wisdom and moral insight.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The $500 billion Stargate AI project announced by SoftBank and OpenAI at the White House six months ago has failed to complete a single data center deal and sharply scaled back its near-term plans. The venture, which originally pledged to invest $100 billion "immediately," now aims to build one small data center by year-end, likely in Ohio, according to WSJ. SoftBank and OpenAI have disagreed over crucial partnership terms, including site locations. OpenAI has proceeded independently, signing a deal with Oracle worth more than $30 billion annually starting within three years. That agreement totals 4.5 gigawatts of capacity and would consume power equivalent to more than two Hoover Dams. Combined with a smaller CoreWeave deal, OpenAI has secured nearly as much data center capacity as Stargate promised for this year. SoftBank invested $30 billion in OpenAI earlier this year as part of the infrastructure partnership plans.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is proposing (PDF) to roll back key Biden-era broadband policies, scrapping the long-term gigabit speed goal, halting analysis of broadband affordability, and reinterpreting deployment standards in a way that favors industry metrics over consumer access. The proposal, which is scheduled for a vote on August 7, narrows the scope of Section 706 evaluations to focus on whether broadband is being deployed rather than whether it's affordable or universally accessible. Ars Technica reports: The changes will make it easier for the FCC to give the broadband industry a passing grade in an annual progress report. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's proposal would give the industry a thumbs-up even if it falls short of 100 percent deployment, eliminate a long-term goal of gigabit broadband speeds, and abandon a new effort to track the affordability of broadband. Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans. If the answer is no, the US law says the FCC must "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market." Generally, Democratic-led commissions have found that the industry isn't doing enough to make broadband universally available, while Republican-led commissions have found the opposite. Democratic-led commissions have also periodically increased the speeds used to determine whether advanced telecommunications capabilities are widely available, while Republican-led commissioners have kept the speed standards the same.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spotify was found publishing AI-generated songs on the official pages of deceased artists like Blaze Foley and Guy Clark -- without permission from their estates or labels. The tracks, flagged for deceptive content and now removed, were uploaded via TikTok's SoundOn distribution platform. "We've flagged the issue to SoundOn, the distributor of the content in question, and it has been removed for violating our Deceptive Content policy," a Spotify spokesperson told 404 Media. From the report: McDonald, who decided to originally upload Foley's music to Spotify in order to share it with more people, told me he never thought that an AI-generated track could appear on Foley's page without his permission. "It's harmful to Blaze's standing that this happened," he said. "It's kind of surprising that Spotify doesn't have a security fix for this type of action, and I think the responsibility is all on Spotify. They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so. And I think they should take that responsibility and do something quickly." McDonald's suggested fix is not allowing any track to appear on an artist's official Spotify page without allowing the page owner to sign off on it first. "Any real Blaze fan would know, I think, pretty instantly, that this is not Blaze or a Blaze recording," he said. "Then the harm is that the people who don't know Blaze go to the site thinking, maybe this is part of Blaze, when clearly it's not. So again, I think Spotify could easily change some practices. I'm not an engineer, but I think it's pretty easy to stop this from happening in the future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air grounded all flights Sunday night due to a major IT outage, prompting a system-wide FAA ground stop that lasted until early Monday. Although operations have since resumed, passengers are still facing delays and residual disruptions. Gizmodo reports: The airline requested a system-wide ground stop from federal aviation authorities at about 11 p.m. ET on Sunday night. That stop remained in effect until around 2 a.m. ET Monday, when the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed it had been lifted. But disruptions didn't end there. Alaska warned passengers to brace for likely delays throughout the day. [...] The FAA's website listed the stop as applying to all Alaska Airlines aircraft. Gizmodo notes that the incident comes nearly a year after the massive 2024 CrowdStrike crash, which has become known as the largest IT outage in history. "The July 2024 outage brought down an estimated 8.5 million Microsoft Windows systems running CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor software, disrupting everything from hospitals and airports to broadcast networks." "There's no word yet from Alaska on whether the outage ties into a broader software problem, but the timing, almost exactly a year after the CrowdStrike crash, isn't going unnoticed on social media, with users wondering if the events are related."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Raided homes despite known likelihood that aircon or EVs could explain high electricity consumption

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has advanced a lawsuit in which it alleges the City of Sacramento misused energy records to accuse residents of growing cannabis, often with disastrous results.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Figma is targeting a fully-diluted valuation of up to $16.4 billion in its initial public offering, as the cloud-based design software firm prepares for a debut on the NYSE that could inject fresh momentum into a resurgent market for tech listings. The San Francisco-based company, along with some investors, is eyeing proceeds of up to $1.03 billion by selling nearly 37 million shares priced between $25 and $28 each, it said on Monday. The listing could be a major milestone for Figma, coming more than a year after its $20 billion sale to Adobe failed due to regulatory hurdles in Europe and the UK. Figma's IPO is expected to occur the week of July 28th, offering shares priced between $25 and $28. It'll trade under the symbol "FIG".

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

No customer, partner info stolen, spokesperson tells The Reg

Dell has confirmed that criminals broke into its IT environment and stole some of its data — but told The Register that it's "primarily synthetic (fake) data."…

NVIDIA has released additional open-source header files for its Blackwell and Hopper GPU architectures, continuing its effort to support open-source drivers like Nouveau/NVK and the NOVA Rust driver. Phoronix reports: Last week NVIDIA open-sourced 12k lines of C header files for Blackwell GPUs to help in the open-source driver efforts, namely for Nouveau / NVK and the in-development NOVA Rust driver. On Friday they made public some additional header files for helping in the Blackwell and Hopper open-source driver enablement. Following the previously-covered open-source header activity, on Friday this commit was pushed to their open-source documentation repository that provides Hopper and Blackwell DMA-copy class header files. [...] In turn the code has already been imported into Mesa Git.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.