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Coweta County stalls bit barn vote as residents revolt

A county in the US state of Georgia is facing opposition to the construction of a massive hyperscale datacenter campus, reflecting the growing concerns of communities in America and elsewhere over the rush to build more cloud and AI infrastructure.…

Project scrambles for mitigation as AUR, forums, and main site feel the strain

Some joyless ne'er-do-well has loosed a botnet on the community-driven Arch Linux distro, with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack now in its second week of sustained disruption.…

Graphics API, crash reporting and more: Making low-level code cross-platform for Windows is a challenge

Zed co-founder Max Brunfield has explained why the Windows port of the Rust-based editor is taking so long – illustrating the friction facing developers of cross-platform applications when including Microsoft's operating system.…

Davis Lu, a former Eaton Corporation developer, has been sentenced to four years in prison for sabotaging his ex-employer's Windows network with malware and a custom kill switch that locked out thousands of employees once his account was disabled. The attack caused significant operational disruption and financial losses, with Lu also attempting to cover his tracks by deleting data and researching privilege escalation techniques. BleepingComputer reports: After a corporate restructuring and subsequent demotion in 2018, the DOJ says that Lu retaliated by embedding malicious code throughout the company's Windows production environment. The malicious code included an infinite Java thread loop designed to overwhelm servers and crash production systems. Lu also created a kill switch named "IsDLEnabledinAD" ("Is Davis Lu enabled in Active Directory") that would automatically lock all users out of their accounts if his account was disabled in Active Directory. When his employment was terminated on September 9, 2019, and his account disabled, the kill switch activated, causing thousands of users to be locked out of their systems. "The defendant breached his employer's trust by using his access and technical knowledge to sabotage company networks, wreaking havoc and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses for a U.S. company," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti. When he was instructed to return his laptop, Lu reportedly deleted encrypted data from his device. Investigators later discovered search queries on the device researching how to elevate privileges, hide processes, and quickly delete files. Lu was found guilty earlier this year of intentionally causing damage to protected computers. After his four-year sentence, Lu will also serve three years of supervised release following his prison term.

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Open source Surya system promises early alerts for space weather that can fry satellites and grids

Boffins at IBM and NASA have concocted an AI model to help predict the weather, but this time it is taking on space weather that might disrupt satellites and spacecraft, possibly even terrestrial power grids and the internet.…

Escort's forgotten cap left techie facing rifles and a debrief

On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that tells tales of your tech support misadventures.…

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily: Southwest Research Institute led a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) survey, discovering a previously unknown tiny moon orbiting Uranus. A team led by SwRI's Dr. Maryame El Moutamid discovered the small object in a series of images taken on Feb. 2, 2025, bringing Uranus' total moon count to 29. "As part of JWST's guest observer program, we found a previously unknown satellite of the ice giant, which has been provisionally designated S/2025 U 1," said El Moutamid, a lead scientist in SwRI's Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado. "This object, by far the smallest object discovered to date, was detected in a series of 10 long exposures obtained by the Near-Infrared Camera." Located in the outer solar system, Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. Known as "the sideways planet" for its extreme axial tilt, the cyan-colored ice giant has a deep atmosphere composed of hydrogen, helium and methane. Scientists think Uranus' larger moons are roughly equal parts water ice and silicate rock. "Assuming that the new moon has an albedo comparable to other nearby satellites, this object is probably around six miles (10 km) in diameter," El Moutamid said. "It is well below the detection threshold for the Voyager 2 cameras."

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FTC chair: Companies could face enforcement if they give in

The head of America's consumer watchdog has issued a stark warning to some of the biggest names in the tech sphere – don't backdoor encryption or censor content at the behest of foreign governments, or there may be consequences.…

Fujitsu doesn’t have the project all to itself any more

Japanese research institution RIKEN has decided it needs GPUs for its next generation “FugakuNEXT” supercomputer and has signed Nvidia to supply them and design the systems needed to get them working.…

Radioactive decay produced a warm internal ocean

Dwarf planet Ceres, the unpleasant lump of icy rock orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, once had an environment in which microbes might have thrived.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Time and again, surveys and studies show that fears and concerns about charging are the main barriers standing in the way of someone switching from gas to EV. A new market research study by Telemetry Vice President Sam Abuelsamid confirms this, as it analyzes the charging infrastructure needs over the next decade. And one of the biggest hurdles -- one that has gone mostly unmentioned across the decade-plus we've been covering this topic -- is all the junk clogging up Americans' garages. lThat's because, while DC fast-charging garners all the headlines and much of the funding, the overwhelming majority of EV charging is AC charging, usually at home -- 80 percent of it, in fact. People who own and live in a single family home are overrepresented among EV owners, and data (PDF) from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory from a few years ago found that 42 percent of homeowners park near an electrical outlet capable of level 2 (240 V) AC charging. But that could grow by more than half (to 68 percent of homeowners) if those homeowners changed their parking behavior, "most likely by clearing a space in their garage," the report finds. "90 percent of all houses can add a 240 V outlet near where cars could be parked," said Abuelsamid. "Parking behavior, namely whether homeowners use a private garage for parking or storage, will likely become a key factor in EV adoption. Today, garage-use intent is potentially a greater factor for in-house charging ability than the house's capacity to add 240 V outlets." Creating garage space would increase the number of homes capable of EV charging from 31 million to more than 50 million. And when we include houses where the owner thinks it's feasible to add wiring, that grows to more than 72 million homes. And that's far more than Telemetry's most optimistic estimate of U.S. EV penetration for 2035, which ranges from 33 million to 57 million EVs on the road 10 years from now.

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Also fired another AI - GitHub Copilot - after it produced ‘mixed results in utilisation and efficacy’

Australia’s Commonwealth Bank has decided not to fire 45 workers it planned to replace with an AI chatbot.…

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Now, for the first time, quantum scientists at the Quantum Control Laboratory at the University of Sydney Nano Institute have demonstrated a type of quantum logic gate that drastically reduces the number of physical qubits needed for its operation. To do this, they built an entangling logic gate on a single atom using an error-correcting code nicknamed the "Rosetta stone" of quantum computing. It earns that name because it translates smooth, continuous quantum oscillations into clean, digital-like discrete states, making errors easier to spot and fix, and importantly, allowing a highly compact way to encode logical qubits. The curiously named Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code has for many years offered a theoretical possibility for significantly reducing the physical number of qubits needed to produce a functioning "logical qubit." Albeit by trading efficiency for complexity, making the codes very difficult to control. Research published in Nature Physics demonstrates this as a physical reality, tapping into the natural oscillations of a trapped ion (a charged atom of ytterbium) to store GKP codes and, for the first time, realizing quantum entangling gates between them. Led by Sydney Horizon Fellow Dr. Tingrei Tan at the University of Sydney Nano Institute, scientists have used their exquisite control over the harmonic motion of a trapped ion to bridge the coding complexity of GKP qubits, allowing a demonstration of their entanglement. "Our experiments have shown the first realization of a universal logical gate set for GKP qubits," Dr. Tan said. "We did this by precisely controlling the natural vibrations, or harmonic oscillations, of a trapped ion in such a way that we can manipulate individual GKP qubits or entangle them as a pair." [...] Across three experiments described in the paper, Dr. Tan's team used a single ytterbium ion contained in what is known as a Paul trap. This uses a complex array of lasers at room temperature to hold the single atom in the trap, allowing its natural vibrations to be controlled and utilized to produce the complex GKP codes. This research represents an important demonstration that quantum logic gates can be developed with a reduced physical number of qubits, increasing their efficiency.

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Point release retuned with new FP8 datatype for better compatibility with homegrown silicon

Chinese AI darling DeepSeek unveiled an update to its flagship large language model that the company claims is already optimized for use with a new generation of homegrown silicon.…

LinkedIn's engagement-driven algorithm systematically elevates shallow, meaningless content over substantive professional discourse, according to a new analysis that highlights how major platforms prioritize user retention metrics over content quality. Entrepreneur and product executive Elliot Smith describes encountering a "seemingly endless stream of posts that are over fluffed, over produced and ultimately say nothing" that he categorizes as "toxic mediocrity." Smith argues the platform's reward system creates a destructive cycle where "comments, likes and other engagement" signal user activity to LinkedIn's algorithm, which then promotes similar vapid content. "LinkedIn wants you on LinkedIn," Smith writes, noting the Microsoft-owned platform correlates engagement with ad clicks and premium conversions. Smith recommends professionals focus on substantive work rather than platform gaming, arguing "nothing you post there is going to change your career."

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Pro tip: When taking revenge, don't use your real name

A US court sentenced a former developer at power management biz Eaton to four years in prison after he installed malware on the company’s servers.…

Starting September 1st, Russia will require all smartphones and tablets sold in the country to come with MAX, a state-backed messaging app seen as a rival to WhatsApp and Telegram. Critics say the app could be used to track users. Reuters reports: The Russian government said in a statement that MAX, which will be integrated with government services, would be on a list of mandatory pre-installed apps on all "gadgets," including mobile phones and tablets, sold in Russia from September 1. State media says accusations from Kremlin critics that MAX is a spying app are false and that it has fewer permissions to access user data than rivals WhatsApp and Telegram. It will also be mandatory that from September 1, Russia's domestic app store, RuStore, which is pre-installed on all Android devices, will be pre-installed on Apple devices. A Russian-language TV app called LIME HD TV, which allows people to watch state TV channels for free, will be pre-installed on all smart TVs sold in Russia from January 1, the government added. [...] MAX said this week that 18 million users had downloaded its app, parts of which are still in a testing phase. Russia's interior ministry said on Wednesday that MAX was safer than foreign rivals, but that it had arrested a suspect in the first fraud case using the new messenger.

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Because savvy terrorists always use public internet services to plan their mischief, right?

Anthropic says it has scanned an undisclosed portion of conversations with its Claude AI model to catch concerning inquiries about nuclear weapons.…

Reviewers are more likely to approve a manuscript if their own work is cited in subsequent versions than are reviewers who are not cited, according to an analysis of 18,400 articles from four open-access publications. From a report: The study, which is yet to be peer reviewed, was posted online as a preprint earlier this month. The study was inspired by anecdotes from authors who cited articles only because reviewers asked them to, says study author Adrian Barnett, who researches peer review and meta-research at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Sometimes, these requests are fine, he says. But if reviewers ask for too many citations or the reason to cite their work is not justified, the peer-review process can become transactional, says Barnett. Citations increase a researcher's h-index, a metric reflecting the impact of their publications.

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Google's Android 16 QPR2 beta 1 is rolling out with new customization features, including the ability to force dark mode and icon themes on apps that don't support them. The update also adds enhanced parental controls, better data migration, PDF editing, and Bluetooth audio sharing, with a full release expected in December. The Verge reports: The beta includes a new dark theme option that will "intelligently invert the UI of apps that appear light despite users having selected the dark theme" when enabled, according to Google's announcement, forcibly making apps that don't natively support the feature to appear darker. Google says this is "largely intended as an accessibility feature" for users with low vision or photosensitivity, and will also automatically darken app splash screens and adjust status bar colors to match the darker theming. Another feature will allow users to forcibly apply themed icon colors to apps that don't natively support them. Android's icon theming currently only works if app developers have provided a monochrome version of their app icon that can be adjusted, which is annoying for users who want to apply a consistent aesthetic across their entire home page. Auto-themed app icons spare developers from adding this capability manually, removing the hassle for users to customize their phone's theme. The full list of features in the QPR2 beta 1 update can be found on the Android developers' blog.

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