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• UK Laws Are Not 'Fit For Social Media Age'

  14-04-2025 23:30 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: British laws restricting what the police can say about criminal cases are "not fit for the social media age (source paywalled; alternative source)," a government committee said in a report released Monday in Britain that highlighted how unchecked misinformation stoked riots last summer. Violent disorder, fueled by the far right, affected several towns and cities for days after a teenager killed three girls on July 29 at a Taylor Swift-
  
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• Hacked Crosswalks In Bay Area Play Deepfake-Style Messages From Tech Billionaires

  14-04-2025 22:50 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Several crosswalk buttons in Palo Alto and nearby cities were hacked over the weekend to play deepfake-style satirical audio clips mimicking Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Authorities have disabled the altered systems, but the identity of the prankster remains unknown. SFGATE reports: Videos of the altered crosswalks began circulating on social media throughout Saturday and Sunday. [...] A city employee was the first to report an issue with one of the signals at University Avenue and High Street
  
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• Meta Starts Using Data From EU Users To Train Its AI Models

  14-04-2025 22:10 via meta.slashdot.org
  
  Meta said the company plans to start using data collected from its users in the European Union to train its AI systems. Engadget reports: Starting this week, the tech giant will begin notifying Europeans through email and its family of apps of the fact, with the message set to include an explanation of the kind of data it plans to use as part of the training. Additionally, the notification will link out to a form users can complete to opt out of the process. "We have made this objection form eas
  
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• NATO Inks Deal With Palantir For Maven AI System

  14-04-2025 21:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from DefenseScoop: NATO announced Monday that it has awarded a contract to Palantir to adopt its Maven Smart System for artificial intelligence-enabled battlefield operations. Through the contract, which was finalized March 25, the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) plans to use a version of the AI system -- Maven Smart System NATO -- to support the transatlantic military organization's Allied Command Operations strategic command. NATO plans to
  
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• VMware Revives Its Free ESXi Hypervisor

  14-04-2025 20:51 via it.slashdot.org
  
  VMware has resumed offering a free hypervisor. News of the offering emerged in a throwaway line in the Release Notes for version 8.0 Update 3e of the Broadcom business unit's ESXi hypervisor. From a report: Just below the "What's New" section of that document is the statement: "Broadcom makes available the VMware vSphere Hypervisor version 8, an entry-level hypervisor. You can download it free of charge from the Broadcom Support portal."
  VMware offered a free version of ESXi for years, and it wa
  
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• EU Issues US-bound Staff With Burner Phones Over Spying Fears

  14-04-2025 20:14 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  The European Commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some US-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage [non-paywalled source], a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China. Financial Times: Commissioners and senior officials travelling to the IMF and World Bank spring meetings next week have been given the new guidance, according to four people familiar with the situation. They said the measures replicate those used on trips to Ukraine and China, where standard IT kit ca
  
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• OpenAI Unveils Coding-Focused GPT-4.1 While Phasing Out GPT-4.5

  14-04-2025 19:26 via slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI unveiled its GPT-4.1 model family on Monday, prioritizing coding capabilities and instruction following while expanding context windows to 1 million tokens -- approximately 750,000 words. The lineup includes standard GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano variants, all available via API but not ChatGPT.
  The flagship model scores 54.6% on SWE-bench Verified, lagging behind Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro (63.8%) and Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet (62.3%) on the same software engineering benchmark,
  
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• Apple Preparing Major iPadOS 19 Overhaul with Mac-like Features

  14-04-2025 18:40 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple is readying a substantial overhaul for iPadOS 19 that will transform the tablet experience to function more like macOS, according to Bloomberg. The update will focus on productivity features, multitasking capabilities, and app window management - areas where iPad power users have long requested improvements.
  The software revamp comes approximately a year after Apple introduced the M4 chip to the iPad Pro lineup and coincides with the expected arrival of new iPad Pro models featuring M5 pro
  
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• Librarians in UK Increasingly Asked To Remove Books

  14-04-2025 18:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Requests to remove books from library shelves are on the rise in the UK, as the influence of pressure groups behind book bans in the US crosses the Atlantic, according to those working in the sector. Although "the situation here is nowhere [near] as bad, censorship does happen and there are some deeply worrying examples of library professionals losing their jobs and being trolled online for standing up for intellectual freedom on behalf of their users," said
  
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• Blue Origin Sends All-Female Crew To Edge of Space in Historic Flight

  14-04-2025 17:20 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Blue Origin's New Shepard completed its 31st mission Monday morning, carrying the first all-female crew to space since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova's 1963 solo flight. The NS-31 mission lifted off from West Texas at 9:30 a.m. EDT, with hundreds of thousands watching via livestream as the autonomous vehicle crossed the Karman line 62 miles above Earth.
  The 10-minute suborbital journey carried six passengers: journalist and Bezos' fiancee Lauren SÃnchez, former NASA scientist Aisha
  
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• Facebook Sought To 'Neutralize' Competitive Threats, FTC Argues As Landmark Antitrust Trial Begins

  14-04-2025 16:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: An attorney for the Federal Trade Commission told a judge that Facebook, fearing the competitive threat of Instagram posted to their social media network, acquired both as a way to "neutralize" the rival. "They decided that competition was too hard," the FTC's attorney, Daniel Matheson, said in his opening statement in the government's antitrust case against the Meta Platforms social media empire.
  He argued that with Meta's monopoly in social media, "consumer
  
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• Nvidia To Make AI Supercomputers in US for First Time

  14-04-2025 16:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Nvidia has announced plans to manufacture AI supercomputers entirely within the United States, commissioning over 1 million square feet of manufacturing space across Arizona and Texas. Production of Blackwell chips has begun at TSMC's Phoenix facilities, while supercomputer assembly will occur at new Foxconn and Wistron plants in Houston and Dallas respectively.
  "The engines of the world's AI infrastructure are being built in the United States for the first time," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's fou
  
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• Can AI Help Manage Nuclear Reactors?

  14-04-2025 13:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  America's Department of Energy launched a federally funded R&D center in 1946 called the Argonne National Laboratory, and its research became the basis for all of the world's commercial nuclear reactors.
  But it's now developed an AI-based tool that can "help operators run nuclear plants," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing comments from a senior nuclear engineer in the lab's nuclear science and engineering division:
  Argonne's plan is to offer the Parameter-Free Reasoning Operator for Au
  
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• An Electric Racecar Drives Upside Down

  14-04-2025 09:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Formula One cars, the world's fastest racecars, need to grip the track for speed and safety on the curves — leading engineers to design cars that create downforce. And racing fans are even told that "a Formula 1 racecar generates enough downforce above a certain speed that it could theoretically drive upside down," writes the automotive site Jalopnik.
  "McMurtry Automotive turned this theory into reality after having its Spéirling hypercar complete the impressive feat..."
  Admittedly,
  
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• The EFF's 'Certbot' Now Supports Six-Day Certs

  14-04-2025 06:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  10 years ago "certificate authorities normally issued certificate lifetimes lasting a year or more," remembers a new blog post Thursday by the EFF's engineering director. So in 2015 when the free cert authority Let's Encrypt first started issuing 90-day TLS certificates for websites, "it was considered a bold move, that helped push the ecosystem towards shorter certificate life times."
  And then this January Let's Encrypt announced new six-day certificates...
  This week saw a related announcement
  
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• Trump Denies Tariff 'Exception' for Electronics, Promises New Electronics Tariffs Soon

  14-04-2025 03:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Late Friday news broke that U.S. President Trump's new tariffs included exemptions for smartphones, computer monitors, semiconductors, and other electronics. But Sunday morning America's commerce secretary insisted "a special-focus type of tariff" was coming for those products, reports ABC News. President Trump "is saying they're exempt from the reciprocal tariffs," the commerce secretary told an interviewer, "but they're included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a mont
  
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• Palantir's 'Meritocracy Fellowship' Urges High School Grads to Skip College's 'Indoctrination' and Debt

  14-04-2025 01:44 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Stanford law school graduate Peter Thiel later co-founded Facebook, PayPal, and Palantir. But in 2010 Thiel also created the Thiel Fellowship, which annually gives 20 to 30 people under the age of 23 $100,000 "to encourage students to not stick around college." (College students must drop out in order to accept the fellowship.)
  And now Palantir "is taking a similar approach as it maneuvers to attract new talent," reports financial news site The Street:
  The company has launched what it refers to
  
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• After Meta Cheating Allegations, 'Unmodified' Llama 4 Maverick Model Tested - Ranks #32

  14-04-2025 00:28 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Remember how last weekend Meta claimed its "Maverick" AI model (in the newly-released Llama-4 series) beat GPT-4o and Gemini Flash 2 "on all benchmarks... This thing is a beast."And then how within a day several AI researchers pointed out that even Meta's own announcement admitted the Maverick tested on LM Arena was an "experimental chat version," as TechCrunch pointed out. ("As we've written about before, for various reasons, LM Arena has never been the most reliable measure of an AI model's pe
  
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