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It won't provide much juice, but its creator calls it a 'nanowatt nuclear power plant'

It's illegal and impractical to construct a nuclear power plant in your backyard. But a DIY tritium nuclear battery is far less dramatic - just don't expect any appreciable amount of energy from it.…

Excessive friendliness may cause users to forget they're talking to a very confident autocomplete

A study into how humans interact with chatbots suggests the fastest way to make an LLM feel human isn't making it smarter – it's making it seem nicer.…

Axios reports that the NSA is using Anthropic's restricted Mythos Preview model despite the Pentagon insisting the company poses a "supply chain risk." Axios reports: The government's cybersecurity needs appear to be outweighing the Pentagon's feud with Anthropic. The department moved in February to cut off Anthropic and force its vendors to follow suit. That case is ongoing. The military is now broadening its use of Anthropic's tools while simultaneously arguing in court that using those tools threatens U.S. national security. Two sources said the NSA was using Mythos, while one said the model was also being used more widely within the department. It's unclear how the NSA is currently using Mythos, but other organizations with access to the model are using it predominantly to scan their own environments for exploitable security vulnerabilities. Anthropic restricted access to Mythos to around 40 organizations, contending that its offensive cyber capabilities were too dangerous to allow for a wider release. Anthropic only announced 12 of those organizations. One source said the NSA was among the unnamed agencies with access. The NSA's counterparts in the U.K. have said they have access to the model through the country's AI Security Institute. Anthropic's CEO met with top U.S. officials on Friday to discuss "opportunities for collaboration," according to a White House spokesperson, "as well as shared approaches and protocols to address the challenges associated with scaling this technology."

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US-based cloud providers could have to disclose certain data under American legal orders

The European Commission has awarded four contracts designed to advance cloud sovereignty in the EU, but one uses services from S3NS, a joint venture between Thales and Google Cloud, raising questions about its real independence.…

Google previews Android CLI as agentic development continues to snowball

Google has introduced a new Android command-line interface built specifically for AI agents, claiming a 70 percent cut in token usage and three times reduction in task completion time.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The winning runner at a Beijing half-marathon for humanoid robots finished the race today in 50 minutes and 26 seconds -- significantly faster than the human world record of 57 minutes recently set by Jacob Kiplimo. [...] [T]he winning time is a massive improvement over last year's race, when the fastest robot finished in two hours and 40 minutes. The Associated Press reports that this year's winner was built by Chinese smartphone maker Honor. It seems the winning robot wasn't actually the fastest, as a different Honor robot finished in 48 minutes and 19 seconds. But that one was remote controlled -- the 50:26 robot was autonomous and won due to weighted scoring. About 40% of participating robots competed autonomously, while the remaining 60% were remote controlled, according to Beijing's E-Town tech hub. Not all of them did as well as Honor's robots, with one robot falling at the starting line and another hitting a barrier.

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Out-of-band or out of control?

Microsoft has pushed out an out-of-band update to address the restart loop that hit some Windows Server devices after its April update.…

Bit barns need to worry more about space, access to grid – overstuffed center no longer a must, say experts

UK AI datacenter capacity could migrate away from London as power shortages, planning constraints and reduced reliance on low-latency connections to financial firms make other locations more attractive.…

Companies get to keep IP developed for government projects

The UK government is opening £80 million in AI procurement talks with tech firms, drawing on its £500 million sovereign capability fund.…

There's been a few complaints about Amazon's drone delivery service. "The automated mailmen are dropping off packages from 10 feet in the air," reports the New York Post, "rendering the contents of each box susceptible to crashing and smashing." One example? Tamara Hancock filmed a drone delivering a bottle of Torani flavoring syrup to her home in Arizona (as a test of how Amazon handled fragile items). It was delivered it in a plastic bottle — not glass — but the massive drone drops the drone from so high that the impact cracked the bottle's cap. (In the video Hancock opens her delivery to find leaked flavoring syrup "everywhere.") The delivery was hard to film, Hancock says, because "If the drone sees me in the back yard, it will not drop, because it is worried about hurting humans or animals." The Post notes Amazon's "AI-charged fleet" of drones are "Outfitted with industry-leading 'sense and avoid' technology, the aerodynamic machines are equipped to drop off eligible items, weighing a maximum of five pounds, at designated areas in 60 minutes or less." The high-tech, however, apparently does not ensure gentle landings. Collisions, including a recent crash-and-burn into a Texas building, as well as several mid-flight malfunctions in rainy weather, have abounded since the drones' inaugural launch.... Tasha, a separate Amazon user, spotted the drone plunging a package near the paved driveway of a neighbor's yard. Unfortunately, its propellers caused other, previously delivered parcels to blow away, sending one into the street... In a statement to The Post, Amazon said it apologized for one of the "rare instances when products don't arrive as expected." Amazon's drone fleet has been running since late 2024, the Post adds, and are now offering "ultra-fast" shipping in U.S. states including Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Kansas and Texas. The machines do seem massive. I'm surprised neighbors aren't complaining about the noise...

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Workstations that made distant desktops feel local is headed for a slow shutdown

HP is quietly pulling the plug on its Teradici-derived remote desktop business, shelving HP Anyware and its zero client hardware barely a few years after betting big on the tech as the backbone of its hybrid work push.…

Wouldn't be the first time a Jeff Bezos company left a package in the wrong place

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket nailed the landing this weekend, but failed at the crucial part of delivering a satellite to a usable orbit.…

£330M deal leaves service with no ownership of software built to connect trusts to the platform

The UK government is considering ending Palantir's involvement in a central NHS data platform after coming under fire from MPs, unions, and campaigners.…

Committee launches inquiry into emerging chip designs to curb datacenter energy use

MPs are probing whether radically different, low-energy chip designs can stop AI from turning the UK's power grid into a bottleneck.…

We've been here before. This time, we may not get out

Opinion Fans of the creative arts often find out where creators gather to talk among themselves, then sneak in to eavesdrop on what those masters of the art talk about. Golden insights, daring concepts, cutting-edge thinking? Not a bit. Gossip, if you're lucky. Travel miseries, if you're not. Mostly, they talk about money.…

Zoom "has partnered with World, Sam Altman's iris-scanning identity company (previously known as Worldcoin), " reports Digital Trends, "to add real-time human verification inside meetings." Zoom is now inviting organizations to join the beta version of the rollout, which Digital Trends says "lets hosts confirm that every face on the call belongs to a real person, not an AI-generated imposter. " For those wondering how World's Deep Face technology works, it includes a three-step process. It cross-references a signed image from a user's original Orb registration, a live face scan from the device, and the frame of the video that's visible to the other participants in the meeting. Only when the three samples match does a "Verified Human" badge appear next to the user's name... Hosts can also make Deep Face verification mandatory for joining meetings, preventing unverified participants from joining entirely. Mid-call, on-the-spot checks are also possible...

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Blames outfit called Context.ai, which reckons an agentic OAuth tangle caused the incident

Vercel, the company that created the open source Next.js web development framework, has a data leak that led to compromise of some customer credentials, and blamed an outfit called Context.ai for the mess.…

You can't fix what you can't see – especially when your workspace is a maelstrom

Who, Me? Welcome to yet another Monday, and therefore to this week's edition of Who, Me? For those unfamiliar, it's The Register's reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace messes, and how you tried to clean them up without dirtying your career prospects.…

Tests scheduled for May can’t come soon enough after VGER 1 power glitch led to instrument shutdown

NASA has revealed it’s working on a plan called “The Big Bang” that it hopes will extend the working lives of the Voyager probes.…

The Brave browser "has introduced Brave Origin, a stripped-down version of its browser that removes built-in monetization features like Rewards and other extras tied to its business model," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli" The stripped-down browser is available either as a separate browser download or as an upgrade to the existing Brave install, unlocked through a one-time purchase that can be activated across multiple devices. The idea is simple on paper: pay once, and you get a cleaner, more minimal browsing experience without the add-ons that fund Brave's ecosystem. What makes the move unusual is the pricing model itself. While paying to support a browser is not controversial, charging users specifically to remove features raises questions about whether those additions are seen as value or clutter. The situation gets even stranger on Linux, where Brave Origin is reportedly available at no cost, creating an uneven experience across platforms and leaving some users wondering why they are being asked to pay for something others get for free.

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