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• 'Linux Mint Debian Edition 7' Gets OEM Support

  13-04-2025 18:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 "will come with full support for OEM installations," according to their monthly newsletter, so Linux Mint "can be pre-installed on computers which are sold throughout the World. It's a very important feature and it's one of the very few remaining things which wasn't supported by Linux Mint Debian Edition."
  Slashdot reader BrianFagioli speculates that "this could be a sign of something much bigger."
  OEM installs are typically reserved for operating systems meant to shi
  
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• Companies Ditch Fluorescent Lights in Battle for Office Return

  22-04-2025 20:40 via slashdot.org
  
  Offices nationwide are ditching harsh fluorescent lighting in favor of advanced systems designed to improve cognitive function and entice remote workers back to physical workplaces. Companies are investing in circadian-tuned lighting that adjusts intensity and color temperature throughout the day to mimic natural light patterns, syncing with employees' biological rhythms, according to WSJ.
  The technology arsenal includes faux skylights displaying virtual suns and moons, AI-controlled self-tintin
  
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• AI Floods Amazon With Strange Political Books Before Canadian Election

  22-04-2025 20:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Canada has seen a boom in political books created with generative artificial intelligence, adding to concerns about how new technologies are affecting the information voters receive during the election campaign.
  Prime Minister Mark Carney was the subject of at least 16 books published in March and listed on Amazon.com, according to a review of the site on April 16. Five of those were published on a single day. In total, some 30 titles were published about Car
  
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• Google Chrome To Continue To Use Third-Party Cookies in Major Reversal

  22-04-2025 19:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: In a shocking development, Google won't roll out a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies in Chrome. It's a move that amounts to a U-turn on the Chrome team's earlier updated approach to deprecating third-party cookies, announced in July last year, with the latest development bound to cause ructions across the ad tech ecosystem."We've made the decision to maintain our current approach to offering users third-party cookie choice in Chrome, and will not
  
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• The Effect of Deactivating Facebook and Instagram on Users' Emotional State

  22-04-2025 18:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Abstract of a paper on National Bureau of Economic Research: We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users' emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six we
  
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• Apple Removes 'Available Now' Claim from Intelligence Page Following NAD Review

  22-04-2025 18:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple has quietly removed the "available now" designation from its Apple Intelligence marketing page following a National Advertising Division review. The change came after the NAD recommended Apple "discontinue or modify" the claim, which "reasonably conveyed the message" that all promoted AI features were immediately available with iPhone 16 devices.
  The NAD, part of the Better Business Bureau, determined Apple's footnote explaining feature availability was "neither sufficiently clear and cons
  
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• Movies Made With AI Can Win Oscars, Academy Says

  22-04-2025 17:20 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Films made with the help of AI will be able to win top awards at the Oscars, according to its organisers. From a report: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences issued new rules on Monday which said the use of AI and other digital tools would "neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination."
  [...] The Academy said it would still consider human involvement when selecting its winners. The Academy said its new language around eligibility for films made using generative AI tools
  
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• US Scientists Flee Abroad as Research Funding Cuts Deepen: Nature

  22-04-2025 16:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  US scientists are fleeing abroad in record numbers as the Trump administration slashes research funding, according to exclusive data analysis by Nature. Applications from American researchers for international positions surged 32% between January and March 2025 compared to the same period last year, while US-based users browsing overseas jobs jumped 35%.
  The exodus accelerated in March as the administration intensified science cuts, with job views spiking 68% year-over-year. Applications to Cana
  
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• Google Pays Samsung 'Enormous Sums' for Gemini AI App Installs

  22-04-2025 16:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google pays Samsung an "enormous sum of money" every month to preinstall Google generative AI app, Gemini, on its phones and devices, according to court testimony, even though the company's practice of paying for installations has twice been found to violate the law. From a report: The company began paying Samsung for Gemini in January, according to Peter Fitzgerald, Google's vice president of platforms and device partnerships, who testified Monday in Washington federal court as part of the Just
  
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• Logitech Quietly Raises Prices By Up To 25%

  22-04-2025 15:00 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Logitech has quietly increased prices on several flagship products by as much as 25%, according to findings (video) by YouTuber Cameron Dougherty. The MX Master 3S mouse now costs $120, up 20% from its previous $100 price point, while the MX Keys S keyboard has jumped 18% to $130. The K400 Plus Wireless Touch keyboard saw the most dramatic percentage increase, rising from $28 to $35.
  These price adjustments, implemented without formal announcement, come amid ongoing tariff pressures from the Tru
  
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• Google Says DOJ Breakup Would Harm US In 'Global Race With China'

  22-04-2025 12:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google has argued in court that the U.S. Department of Justice's proposal to break up its Chrome and Android businesses would weaken national security and harm the country's position in the global AI race, particularly against China. CNBC reports: The remedies trial in Washington, D.C., follows a judge's ruling in August that Google has held a monopoly in its core market of internet search, the most-significant antitrust ruling in the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than 20 y
  
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• NASA's Oldest Astronaut Celebrates 70th Birthday With Return To Earth

  22-04-2025 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  NASA's oldest active astronaut, Don Pettit, celebrated his 70th birthday by returning to Earth after a seven-month mission aboard the ISS. The Guardian reports: A Soyuz capsule carrying the American and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan on Sunday, Pettit's birthday. "Today at 0420 Moscow time (0120 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan," Russia's space agency Roscosmos said.Spending
  
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• The Quest To Build Islands With Ocean Currents In the Maldives

  22-04-2025 05:30 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Arete Glacier Initiative has raised $5 million to improve forecasts of sea-level rise and explore the possibility of refreezing glaciers in place.
  Off one atoll, just south of the Maldives' capital, Male, researchers are testing one way to capture sand in strategic locations -- to grow islands, rebuild beaches, and protect coastal communities from sea-level rise. Swim 10 minutes out into the En'boodhoofinolhu Lagoon and you'll find
  
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• AI Hallucinations Lead To a New Cyber Threat: Slopsquatting

  22-04-2025 03:40 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Researchers have uncovered a new supply chain attack called Slopsquatting, where threat actors exploit hallucinated, non-existent package names generated by AI coding tools like GPT-4 and CodeLlama. These believable yet fake packages, representing almost 20% of the samples tested, can be registered by attackers to distribute malicious code. CSO Online reports: Slopsquatting, as researchers are calling it, is a term first coined by Seth Larson, a security developer-in-residence at Python Software
  
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• Airbnb Now Shows the Full Price of Your Stay By Default

  22-04-2025 03:12 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Airbnb is rolling out a global update that displays the total cost of a stay upfront in search results. The only fee that won't be included are taxes. The Verge reports: The company first started showing the full price of its listings in some locations in 2019 after facing scrutiny from the European Union over how it displays its fees. It later launched a toggle in the US and hundreds of other countries that shows the total cost of a stay across Airbnb's search results, individual listings pages
  
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• Microsoft Implements Stricter Performance Management System With Two-Year Rehire Ban

  22-04-2025 03:08 via slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft is intensifying performance scrutiny through new policies that target underperforming employees, according to an internal email from Chief People Officer Amy Coleman. The company has introduced a formalized Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) system that gives struggling employees two options: accept improvement targets or exit the company with a Global Voluntary Separation Agreement.
  The policy establishes a two-year rehire blackout period for employees who leave with low performance r
  
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• China's CATL Says It Has Overtaken BYD On 5-Minute EV Charging Time

  22-04-2025 01:40 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  CATL has unveiled a second-generation Shenxing battery capable of delivering a 520km range in just five minutes of charging, surpassing BYD's recent breakthrough and positioning both Chinese firms ahead of Western rivals in EV battery tech. The battery manufacturer also introduced a sodium-ion battery called Naxtra, offering up to 500km range for EVs and potential to diversify global energy resources. The Financial Times reports: The claims by the Chinese battery groups would put them ahead of m
  
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• WD Launches HDD Recycling Process That Reclaims Rare Earth Elements, Cuts Out China

  22-04-2025 01:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: While most people enjoy PCs that are powered by SSDs, mechanical hard drives are still king in the datacenter. When these drives reach the end of their useful lives, they are usually shredded, and the key materials they're made of -- including several rare earth elements (REE) -- end up as e-waste. At the same time, countries are mining these same materials and emitting a lot of greenhouse gases in the process. And China, a major source of
  
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• Amazon Has Paused Some Data Center Lease Commitments, Wells Fargo Says

  22-04-2025 00:20 via slashdot.org
  
  Amazon has delayed some commitments around new data center leases, Wells Fargo analysts said Monday, the latest sign that economic concerns may be affecting tech companies' spending plans. From a report: A week ago, a Microsoft executive said the software company was slowing down or temporarily holding off on advancing early build-outs. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are the leading providers of cloud infrastructure, and both have ramped up their capital expenditures in recent quarters to mee
  
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• Cursor AI's Own Support Bot Hallucinated Its Usage Policy

  21-04-2025 23:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Cursor AI users recently encountered an ironic AI failure when the platform's support bot falsely claimed a non-existent login restriction policy. Co-founder Michael Truell apologized for the issue, clarified that no such policy exists, and attributed the mishap to AI hallucination and a session management bug. The Register reports: Users of the Cursor editor, designed to generate and fix source code in response to user prompts, have sometimes been booted from the software when trying to use the
  
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• Wine 10.6 Released

  21-04-2025 22:57 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Wine 10.6 has been released, featuring a new lexer within its Command Processor (CMD), support for the PBKDF2 algorithm to its Bcrypt implementation, and improved metadata handling in WindowsCodecs. According to Phoronix, the update also includes 27 known bug fixes that address issues with Unity games, Alan Wake, GDI+, and various other games and applications.You can see all the changes and download the relesae via WineHQ.org GitLab.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Teen Coder Shuts Down Open Source Mac App Whisky, Citing Harm To Paid Apps

  21-04-2025 22:15 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Whisky, a gaming-focused front-end for Wine's Windows compatibility tools on macOS, is no longer receiving updates. As one of the most useful and well-regarded tools in a Mac gamer's toolkit, it could be seen as a great loss, but its developer hopes you'll move on with what he considers a better option: supporting CodeWeavers' CrossOver product.Also, Whisky's creator is an 18-year-old college student, and he could use a break. "I am 18, yes,
  
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• EU Says It Will Enforce Digital Rules Irrespective of CEO and Location

  21-04-2025 21:10 via slashdot.org
  
  The European Union is determined to enforce its full digital rule book no matter who is in charge of companies such as X, Meta, Apple and Tiktok or where they are based, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told Politico. From a report: "That's why we've opened cases against TikTok, X, Apple, Meta just to name a few. We apply the rules fairly, proportionally, and without bias. We don't care where a company's from and who's running it. We care about protecting people," Politico quoted von de
  
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• FTC Sues Uber Over Deceptive Subscription Billing Practices

  21-04-2025 20:15 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The Federal Trade Commission filed suit against Uber on Monday, alleging the transportation giant violated federal consumer protection laws through deceptive billing and cancellation practices for its Uber One subscription service. According to the complaint, Uber violated both the FTC Act and the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act by misleading consumers about subscription terms, charging users without consent, and implementing deliberately complicated cancellation processes.
  "Americans ar
  
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• Google Faces Off With US Government in Attempt To Break Up Company in Search Monopoly Case

  21-04-2025 19:36 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google is confronting an existential threat as the U.S. government tries to break up the company as punishment for turning its revolutionary search engine into an illegal monopoly. From a report: The drama began to unfold Monday in a Washington courtroom as three weeks of hearings kicked off to determine how the company should be penalized for operating a monopoly in search. In its opening arguments, federal antitrust enforcers also urged the court to impose forward-looking remedies to prevent G
  
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• Verizon Consumer CEO Says Net Neutrality 'Went Literally Nowhere'

  21-04-2025 18:50 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath has declared that net neutrality regulations "went literally nowhere." Sampath claimed he couldn't identify what problem net neutrality was attempting to solve, despite Verizon's history of aggressive lobbying against such rules. "I don't know what net neutrality does," Sampath told The Verge. "I still don't know what problem we are trying to solve with net neutrality."
  When pressed about potential anti-competitive behaviors like zero-rating services, S
  
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• Invasion of the 'Journal Snatchers': the Firms That Buy Science Publications and Turn Them Rogue

  21-04-2025 18:05 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Major scholarly databases have removed dozens of academic journals after researchers discovered they had been purchased by questionable companies and transformed into predatory publications. A January 2025 study identified 36 legitimate journals acquired by recently formed firms with no publishing experience, who then dramatically increased publication fees and output while lowering quality standards.
  According to information scientist Alberto Martin-Martin from the University of Granada, publis
  
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• The FBI Can't Find 'Missing' Records of Its Hacking Tools

  21-04-2025 17:28 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The FBI says it is unable to find records related to its purchase of a series of hacking tools, despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on them and those purchases initially being included in a public U.S. government procurement database before being quietly scrubbed from the internet. From a report: The news highlights the secrecy the FBI maintains around its use of hacking tools. The agency has previously used classified technology in ordinary criminal investigations, pushed back aga
  
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• Over 100 Public Software Companies Getting 'Squeezed' by AI, Study Finds

  21-04-2025 16:43 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Over 100 mid-market software companies are caught in a dangerous "squeeze" between AI-native startups and tech giants, according to a new AlixPartners study released Monday. The consulting firm warns many face "threats to their survival over the next 24 months" as generative AI fundamentally reshapes enterprise software.
  The squeeze reflects a dramatic shift: AI agents are evolving from mere assistants to becoming applications themselves, potentially rendering traditional SaaS architecture obsol
  
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• We May Have Already Hit Peak Booze

  21-04-2025 16:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Global alcohol consumption has entered what appears to be a permanent decline, with total volume peaking at 25.4 billion liters in 2016 and falling approximately 13% since then, according to data from market research firm IWSR.
  Per-capita consumption has dropped dramatically from 5 liters of pure alcohol per adult annually in 2013 to 3.9 liters in 2023. Wine production, which reached its maximum of 37.5 million metric tons in 1979, has already decreased by 27%. Beer production peaked more recent
  
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