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Colorado unveiled an autonomous crash-protection truck designed to absorb highway work zone collisions, removing human drivers from one of the most dangerous road maintenance roles. The Denver Gazette reports: At a press event in Falcon on Monday, the Colorado Department of Transportation demonstrated an autonomous truck-mounted attenuator -- a driverless crash-protection vehicle designed to absorb impacts in roadside work areas. These trucks are already in the state's fleet, but previously required a worker in the cab, leaving them exposed during crashes. "These vehicles are designed to get hit so people don't have to," said Kay Kelly, CDOT's chief of innovative mobility. "We want to remove the human from that truck whenever possible." [...] Colorado pioneered this technology in 2017, becoming the first state to test it. Developed by San Diego-based defense contractor Kratos Defense, the company started on autonomous follower systems in 2012 and installed its initial version in Colorado in 2013, according to Maynard Factor, Kratos' vice president of business development. The system uses sensors, actuators, and video links, allowing the unmanned crash truck to trail directly behind a paint-striping or maintenance vehicle. The lead vehicle records its route and transmits navigation data to the follower. Both are equipped with global positioning system and communication tools, with the lead driver monitoring via video feed. "It's a convoy system," Factor said. "The leader does the work, while the driverless vehicle mirrors its path. This protects the operator with the crash truck instead of sitting inside it." Sensors detect objects darting into the lane, triggering an automatic stop. Operators can pause or override via a user interface featuring forward-facing cameras on the autonomous truck and rear-facing ones on the work vehicle. The trucks, existing state assets, are driven to sites and then switched to autonomous mode. Outfitting each with the technology costs about $1 million, excluding the base vehicle and crash absorber.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: New Zealand's Institute of IT Professionals has discovered it is insolvent and advised members it has no alternative but to enter liquidation. The Institute (ITP) wrote to members on Thursday and posted a document titled "Important Update on ITP's Future" that reveals it has "reached a point where the organization cannot continue. After a full review of our finances, the Board has confirmed that ITP is insolvent." Insolvency seems to have come as something of a surprise. "These debts are historic. They go back over many years. While some of the issues were worked on in more recent times, the full scale of the problem only became visible during the leadership change in 2025," the Update states. "Once the Board understood the full picture, it was clear that there was no responsible way forward other than liquidation." [...] ITP's constitution requires its members to formally resolve to wind up the organization, so as one of its final acts the group has called a Special General Meeting (SGM) for 23 October 2025 to confirm liquidation and appoint a liquidator. This situation impacts more than ITP's ~10,000 members, because the organization offers assessment services that assess whether IT professionals' skills and qualifications make them eligible to move to New Zealand for work. ITP also certifies IT degrees at New Zealand universities, and oversees the NZ Cloud Computing Code of Practice. ITP also conducted educational and advocacy activities aimed at growing New Zealand's tech workforce.

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No injuries, but the FAA and NTSB are investigating

Amazon has grounded its drone fleet in Arizona after two of the airborne delivery vehicles crashed on Wednesday.…

"Your AMD chips may have Intel Inside soon," writes longtime Slashdot reader DesScorp. "Discussions are underway between the two companies to move an undisclosed amount of AMD's chip business to Intel foundries. (AMD currently does their production through TSMC.) The talks come hot on the heels of a flurry of other Intel investments." Tom's Hardware reports: In the past several weeks, Intel has seen a flurry of activity and investments. The United States announced a 9.9% ownership stake in Intel, while Softbank bought $2 billion worth of shares. Alongside Nvidia, Intel announced new x86 chips using Nvidia graphics technology, with the graphics giant also purchasing $5 billion in Intel shares. There have also been reports that Intel and Apple have been exploring ways to work together. The article notes that there is a trade/political dimension to an AMD-Intel deal as well: It makes sense for Intel's former rivals -- especially American companies -- to consider coming to the table. The White House is pushing for 50% of chips bound for America to be built domestically, and tariffs on chips aren't off the table. Additionally, doing business with Intel could make the US government, Intel's largest shareholder, happy, which can be good for business. AMD faced export restrictions on its GPUs earlier this year as the US attempted to throttle China's AI business.

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Agentforce Vibes is a new AI-assisted IDE for building Salesforce apps and agents

Salesforce is bringing "vibe coding" to enterprise customers through a service called Agentforce Vibes - and it may not be as troubling as it sounds.…

Beards, body fat, and cyber refreshers now frowned upon

Cybersecurity training, beards, and body fat have something in common, according to the Pentagon. They're not helping the US military fight and win wars.…

Two Amazon Prime Air drones collided with a crane in Tolleson, Arizona near 96th Avenue and Roosevelt Street. Amazon confirmed the incident and is working with authorities to determine what happened, though no injuries have been reported. CNBC reports: The incident occurred on Wednesday around 1 p.m. EST in Tolleson, Arizona, a city west of Phoenix. Two MK30 drones crashed into the boom of a stationary construction crane that was in a commercial area just a few miles away from an Amazon warehouse. One person was evaluated on the scene for possible smoke inhalation, said Sergeant Erik Mendez of the Tolleson Police Department. Both drones sustained "substantial" damage from the collision on Wednesday, which occurred when the aircraft were mid-route, according to preliminary FAA crash reports. The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the incident. The drones were believed to be flying northeast back-to-back when they collided with the crane that was being used for roof work on a distribution facility, Tolleson police said in a release. The drones landed in the backyard of a nearby building, according to the release.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The operator of a popular pirate sports streaming site in Argentina has gone from spending time in jail with murderers to landing a new high-profile job a month later. Alejo "Shishi" Warles, the 25-year-old operator of Al Angulo TV, was arrested on August 20 in a LaLiga-backed crackdown. After his release on bail, he was hired by professional esports team 9z Globant, a partnership involving Argentine tech unicorn Globant. [...] The team is the result of a partnership between 9z Team and Argentinian tech unicorn Globant. Somewhat ironically, Globant previously worked with LaLiga to monitor the live-streaming user experience. Warles welcomed himself to 9z Globant via the team's social media account, referring to himself as an idol, genius, and GOAT. Lucia Quinteros, the main social media manager at the esports team, informed Entre Rios that after considering their new hire's history, they believe that he can add value to the team. "We hired Alejo, not the person who set up that project (Al Angulo TV). Of course, we evaluated what happened, but we believe that, from now on, Alejo can pursue a different career path," Quinteros said. According to Warles himself, he was hired because he's the best. Like many of his comments, this bravado should not be taken too seriously, but nevertheless sits in stark contrast to the typical pirate site operator facing criminal charges.

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The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano erupted on January 15, 2022. The pyroclastic flow severed both of Tonga's underwater internet cables. The eruption cut sixty-five miles from the domestic cable and fifty-five miles from the international link to Fiji. Tonga lost all internet access. The cables sit on the ocean floor and carry 95% of the world's international internet traffic. The Guardian has a long read on what happened in the aftermath. A.T.M.s (cash machines) stopped working because banks could not verify account balances. Businesses could not file export paperwork. Foreign remittances made up 44% of the country's G.D.P. The government found old satellite phones. Three or four days later, officials restored a hundred and twenty megabytes per second of bandwidth for essential work. A month after the eruption, SpaceX donated fifty Starlink terminals. SubCom's repair ship Reliance took five weeks to restore the international cable. Vava'u did not get broadband back until August, 2023. Another earthquake in the summer of 2024 severed the domestic cable again.

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Honor among thieves - extortion is fine, but no juveniles, please

A ransomware crew that posted pictures and addresses of preschool children in an effort to get a payday has now deleted the data, apparently under pressure from other criminals.…

Pivot will hinge on success of next-gen Maia accelerator

Microsoft buys a lot of GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD. But moving forward, Redmond's leaders want to shift the majority of its AI workloads from GPUs to its own homegrown accelerators.…

AI has run out of training data, according to Neema Raphael, Goldman Sachs' chief data officer and head of data engineering. "We've already run out of data," Raphael said on the bank's podcast. He said this shortage is already shaping how developers build new AI systems. China's DeepSeek may have kept costs down by training on outputs from existing models instead of fresh data. The web has been tapped out. Developers have been using synthetic data -- machine-generated material that offers unlimited supply but carries quality risks. Raphael said he doesn't think the lack of fresh data will be a massive constraint. "From an enterprise perspective, I think there's still a lot of juice I'd say to be squeezed in that," he said. Proprietary datasets held by corporations could make AI tools far more valuable. The challenge is "understanding the data, understanding the business context of the data, and then being able to normalize it."

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Police say they found the evidence on his phone

A Missouri college student has learned the hard way that admitting a vandalism spree to ChatGPT and asking whether he was likely to get caught may not be the best use of AI. …

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google said hackers are sending extortion emails to an unspecified number of executives, claiming to have stolen sensitive data from their Oracle business applications. In a statement, Google said a group claiming affiliation with the ransomware gang cl0p, opens new tab was sending emails to "executives at numerous organizations claiming to have stolen sensitive data from their Oracle E-Business Suite." Google cautioned that it "does not currently have sufficient evidence to definitively assess the veracity of these claims."

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Walmart plans to deploy sensors across its 4,600 US stores by the end of 2026 to track 90 million pallets of groceries shipped annually [Editor's note: non-paywalled source]. The retailer and technology vendor Wiliot announced the expansion Thursday. The sensors will monitor the location, condition and temperature of perishables as they move from warehouses to stores. Walmart started testing Wiliot's sensors at a Texas warehouse in 2023 and has expanded to 500 locations. The full rollout will cover the retailer's US store network and 40 distribution centers. The microchips measure 0.7 square millimeters and are embedded in shipping labels. They use Bluetooth to transmit real-time data about pallets. Walmart previously relied on manual scanning and paper checks by employees. The Arkansas-based company employs 2.1 million people but increased revenues by $150 billion over five years without adding workers. Walmart accounts for more than a fifth of US grocery sales.

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Artificial intelligence works when humans use it wisely

Over the past two years, the open source curl project has been flooded with bogus bug reports generated by AI models.…

One officer was recorded pressing the 'I' key more than 16,000 times

Police in the United Kingdom appear to be taking a cue from Homer Simpson's playbook, with officers in multiple departments accused of "key jamming" to make it look like they were working from home when they likely weren't. …

Top college degrees may no longer provide the edge they once did in the job market, per LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky. "I think the mindset shift is probably the most exciting thing because my guess is that the future of work belongs not anymore to the people that have the fanciest degrees or went to the best colleges, but to the people who are adaptable, forward thinking, ready to learn, and ready to embrace these tools," Roslansky said. "It really kind of opens up the playing field in a way that I think we've never seen before." A 2024 Microsoft survey found 71% of business leaders would choose less-experienced candidates with AI skills over experienced candidates without them. LinkedIn data showed job postings requiring AI literacy increased about 70% year-over-year. Roslansky said AI will not replace humans but people who embrace AI will replace those who don't.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: It's not the vibes; Earth is literally getting darker. Scientists have discovered that our planet has been reflecting less light in both hemispheres, with a more pronounced darkening in the Northern hemisphere, according to a study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The new trend upends longstanding symmetry in the surface albedo, or reflectivity, of the Northern and Southern hemispheres. In other words, clouds circulate in a way that equalizes hemispheric differences, such as the uneven distribution of land, so that the albedos roughly match -- though nobody knows why. "There are all kinds of things that people have noticed in observations and simulations that tend to suggest that you have this hemispheric symmetry as a kind of fundamental property of the climate system, but nobody's really come up with a theoretical framework or explanation for it," said Norman Loeb, a physical scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, who led the new study. "It's always been something that we've observed, but we haven't really explained it fully." To study this mystery, Loeb and his colleagues analyzed 24 years of observations captured since 2000 by the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES), a network of instruments placed on several NOAA and NASA satellites. Instead of an explanation for the strange symmetry, the results revealed an emerging asymmetry in hemispheric albedo; though both hemispheres are darkening, the Northern hemisphere shows more pronounced changes which challenges "the hypothesis that hemispheric symmetry in albedo is a fundamental property of Earth," according to the study.

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And don't even get him started on AI

interview The bodies responsible for securing America from cyberattacks are currently too fragmented to be successful, according to former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis, the first person ever to hold that job. …