BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: NordVPN has open sourced its Linux GUI on GitHub, giving the community full access to the code behind its graphical client. The move follows a 70 percent surge in daily active Linux users since the GUI's debut earlier this year, showing clear demand for a user friendly VPN experience on the platform. Alongside the previously open sourced command line tool, the GUI codebase is now available for anyone to audit, modify, and contribute to. While NordVPN's core backend infrastructure remains proprietary, the company says the open source release reflects its commitment to transparency and collaboration with the Linux community. The GUI can also now be installed with a single command using Snap, simplifying setup and ensuring automatic updates across distributions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Google announced on Tuesday that it will invest $15 billion in India over the next five years to establish its first artificial intelligence hub in the country. Located in the southern city of Visakhapatnam, the hub will be one of Google's largest globally. It will feature gigawatt-scale data center operations, extensive energy infrastructure and an expanded fiber-optic network, the company said in a statement. The investment underscores Google's growing reliance on India as a key technology and talent base in the global race for AI dominance. For India, it brings in high-value infrastructure and foreign investment at a scale that can accelerate its digital transformation ambitions. Google said its AI hub investment will include construction of a new international subsea gateway that would connect to the company's more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) of existing terrestrial and subsea cables. "The initiative creates substantial economic and societal opportunities for both India and the United States, while pioneering a generational shift in AI capability," the company's statement said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader Gadi Evron writes: Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan say agentic AI is already broken at the core. In their IEEE Security & Privacy essay, they argue that AI agents run on untrusted data, use unverified tools, and make decisions in hostile environments. Every part of the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) is open to attack. Prompt injection, data poisoning, and tool misuse corrupt the system from the inside. The model's strength, treating all input as equal, also makes it exploitable. They call this the AI security trilemma: fast, smart, or secure. Pick two. Integrity isn't a feature you bolt on later. It has to be built in from the start. "Computer security has evolved over the decades," the authors wrote. "We addressed availability despite failures through replication and decentralization. We addressed confidentiality despite breaches using authenticated encryption. Now we need to address integrity despite corruption." "Trustworthy AI agents require integrity because we can't build reliable systems on unreliable foundations. The question isn't whether we can add integrity to AI but whether the architecture permits integrity at all."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Walmart announced a new partnership with OpenAI that will let customers shop using ChatGPT. "For many years now, eCommerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses. That is about to change," Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said in a statement. NBC News reports: It was unclear Tuesday what the terms of the Walmart-AI partnership would be. The announcement also did not say when shoppers can expect to see ChatGPT integrated with their Walmart online shopping experiences, only that it's coming "soon." The OpenAI announcement is part of a broader push by Walmart, the biggest private employer in the U.S., to incorporate AI into its daily operations. "We're excited to partner with Walmart to make everyday purchases a little simpler. It's just one way AI will help people every day under our work together," Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said in a statement. The partnership could also serve OpenAI by introducing ChatGPT to a massive set of consumers who may not be as accustomed to using AI chats in their shopping as OpenAI's core user base. "There is a native AI experience coming that is multi-media, personalized and contextual," said Walmart's McMillon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today is the official end-of-support date for Microsoft's Windows 10. That doesn't mean these PCs will suddenly stop working, but if you don't take action, it does mean your PC has received its last regular security patches and that Microsoft is washing its hands of technical support. This end-of-support date comes about a decade after the initial release of Windows 10, which is typical for most Windows versions. But it comes just four years after Windows 10 was replaced by Windows 11, a version with stricter system requirements that left many older-but-still-functional PCs with no officially supported upgrade path. As a result, Windows 10 still runs on roughly 40 percent of the world's Windows PCs (or around a third of US-based PCs), according to StatCounter data. But this end-of-support date also isn't set in stone. Home users with Windows 10 PCs can enroll in Microsoft's Extended Security Updates (ESU) program, which extends the support timeline by another year. [...] Home users can only get a one-year stay of execution for Windows 10, but IT administrators and other institutions with fleets of Windows 10 PCs can also pay for up to three years of ESUs, which is also roughly the amount of time users can expect new Microsoft Defender antivirus updates and updates for core apps like Microsoft Edge. Obviously, Microsoft's preferred upgrade path would be either an upgrade to Windows 11 for PCs that meet the requirements or an upgrade to a new PC that does support Windows 11. It's also still possible, at least for now, to install and run Windows 11 on unsupported PCs. Your day-to-day experience will generally be pretty good, though installing Microsoft's major yearly updates (like the upcoming Windows 11 25H2 update) can be a bit of a pain.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Salesforce says it's saving about $100 million a year by using AI tools in the software company's customer service operations. From a report: The company is working to sell AI features that can handle work such as customer service or early-stage sales. To illustrate the value of the Agentforce product to business clients, Salesforce has been vocal about its own use of the technology. Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff announced the statistic on Salesforce's savings during a speech Tuesday at the annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The company said more than 12,000 customers are using Agentforce. For example, Reddit was able to cut customer support resolution time by 84%, Salesforce said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DirecTV wants to use AI to put you, your family, and your pets inside a custom TV screensaver. From a report: If that's not uncanny enough, you'll find items you can shop for within that AI environment, whether it's a piece of clothing similar to the one your AI likeness is wearing or a piece of furniture that pops up alongside it. The satellite TV giant is partnering with the AI company Glance to roll out this experience to DirecTV Gemini devices starting next year. "We are making television a lean-in experience versus lean back," Rajat Wanchoo, the group vice president of commercial partnerships at Glance, tells The Verge. "We want to give users a chance to use the advancements that have happened in generative AI to create a ChatGPT moment for themselves, but on TV." Glance is owned by InMobi, the same company that injected ecommerce bloatware into Motorola's budget phones.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An attorney in a New York Supreme Court commercial case got caught using AI in his filings, and then got caught using AI again in the brief where he had to explain why he used AI, according to court documents filed earlier this month. New York Supreme Court Judge Joel Cohen wrote in a decision granting the plaintiff's attorneys' request for sanctions that the defendant's counsel, Michael Fourte's law offices, not only submitted AI-hallucinated citations and quotations in the summary judgment brief that led to the filing of the plaintiff's motion for sanctions, but also included "multiple new AI-hallucinated citations and quotations" in the process of opposing the motion. "In other words," the judge wrote, "counsel relied upon unvetted AI -- in his telling, via inadequately supervised colleagues -- to defend his use of unvetted AI." The case itself centers on a dispute between family members and a defaulted loan. The details of the case involve a fairly run-of-the-mill domestic money beef, but Fourte's office allegedly using AI that generated fake citations, and then inserting nonexistent citations into the opposition brief, has become the bigger story.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indonesia's film industry has started using generative AI tools to produce films at a fraction of Hollywood budgets. The country's filmmakers are deploying ChatGPT for scriptwriting, Midjourney for image generation, and Runway for video storyboarding. VFX artist Amilio Garcia Leonard told Rest of World that AI has reduced his draft editing time by 70%. The Indonesian Film Producer Association supports the technology. Indonesian films typically cost 10 billion rupiah ($602,500), less than 1% of major Hollywood productions. The sector employed about 40,000 people in 2020 and generated over $400 million in box office sales in 2023. Jobs for storyboarders, VFX artists, and voice actors are disappearing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization projects record production of global cereal crops in the 2025-26 farming season. The forecast covers wheat, corn and rice, and comes as the global stocks-to-use ratio stands around 30.6% -- the world is producing nearly a third more of these foundational crops than it currently uses. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in August that American farmers would harvest a record corn crop at record yield per acre. The FAO Food Price Index has risen slightly this year but remains nearly 20% below its peak during the early months of the war in Ukraine. Average calories available per person worldwide have climbed from roughly 2,100 to 2,200 kilocalories daily in the early nineteen-sixties to just under 3,000 kilocalories daily by 2022. Cereal yields have roughly tripled since 1961. Yet the World Bank estimates around 2.6 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, and current famines in Gaza and Sudan stem from political failures rather than crop failures.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Generative AI models trained on internet data lack exposure to vast domains of human knowledge that remain undigitized or underrepresented online. English dominates Common Crawl with 44% of content. Hindi accounts for 0.2% of the data despite being spoken by 7.5% of the global population. Tamil represents 0.04% despite 86 million speakers worldwide. Approximately 97% of the world's languages are classified as "low-resource" in computing. A 2020 study found 88% of languages face such severe neglect in AI technologies that bringing them up to speed would require herculean efforts. Research on medicinal plants in North America, northwest Amazonia and New Guinea found more than 75% of 12,495 distinct uses of plant species were unique to just one local language. Large language models amplify dominant patterns through what researchers call "mode amplification." The phenomenon narrows the scope of accessible knowledge as AI-generated content increasingly fills the internet and becomes training data for subsequent models.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

California has enacted new legislation that aims to limit companies from charging consumers "exorbitant" fees to cancel fixed-term contracts. From a report: Assembly Bill 483 was signed into law by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday, placing transparency requirements and fee limits on early terminations for installment contracts -- plans that allow consumers to make recurring payments for goods and services over a specified duration. This includes services that lure consumers into signing annual contracts by allowing them to pay in installments that appear similar to rolling monthly subscriptions, but with hefty cancellation fees for not locking in for the full year. The bill bans companies from hiding early termination fee disclosures within fine print or obscured hyperlinks, and limits the total fee amount to a maximum of 30 percent of the total contract cost. The goal is to make it easier for Californians to take these fees into account when comparing between services, and lessen the financial burden if they need to end their contract early.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Maryland have found that roughly half of geostationary satellite signals transmit sensitive data without encryption. The team spent three years using an $800 satellite receiver on a university rooftop in San Diego to intercept communications from satellites visible from their location. They collected phone calls and text messages from more than 2,700 T-Mobile users in just nine hours of recording. The researchers also obtained data from airline passengers using in-flight Wi-Fi, communications from electric utilities and offshore oil and gas platforms, and US and Mexican military communications that revealed personnel locations and equipment details. The exposed data resulted from telecommunications companies using satellites to relay signals from remote cell towers to their core networks. The researchers examined only about 15% of global satellite transponder communications and presented their findings at an Association for Computing Machinery conference in Taiwan this week. Most companies warned by the researchers have encrypted their satellite transmissions, but some US critical infrastructure owners have not yet added encryption.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: China's expansion of its rare earth export controls appeared to mark another escalation in the US-China trade war last week. But the announcements were also significant in another way: unusually, the documents could not be opened using American word processing software. For the first time, China's Ministry of Commerce issued a slew of documents that could be directly accessed only through WPS Office -- China's answer to Microsoft Office -- as Beijing continues its tech self-reliance drive. Developed by the Beijing-based software company Kingsoft, WPS Office uses a different coding structure to Microsoft Office, meaning WPS text files cannot be opened directly in Word without conversion. Previously, the ministry primarily released text documents in Microsoft Word format.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After acquiring GitHub in 2018, Microsoft mostly let the developer platform run autonomously. But in recent months, that's changed. With GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke leaving the company this August, and GitHub being folded more deeply into Microsoft's organizational structure, GitHub lost that independence. Now, according to internal GitHub documents The New Stack has seen, the next step of this deeper integration into the Microsoft structure is moving all of GitHub's infrastructure to Azure, even at the cost of delaying work on new features. [...] While GitHub had previously started work on migrating parts of its service to Azure, our understanding is that these migrations have been halting and sometimes failed. There are some projects, like its data residency initiative (internally referred to as Project Proxima) that will allow GitHub's enterprise users to store all of their code in Europe, that already solely use Azure's local cloud regions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Engineer Denis Stetskov, writing in a blog: The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM. Not used. Not allocated. Leaked. A basic calculator app is hemorrhaging more memory than most computers had a decade ago. Twenty years ago, this would have triggered emergency patches and post-mortems. Today, it's just another bug report in the queue. We've normalized software catastrophes to the point where a Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM barely makes the news. This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed. AI just weaponized existing incompetence. [...] Here's what engineering leaders don't want to acknowledge: software has physical constraints, and we're hitting all of them simultaneously. Modern software is built on towers of abstractions, each one making development "easier" while adding overhead: Today's real chain: React > Electron > Chromium > Docker > Kubernetes > VM > managed DB > API gateways. Each layer adds "only 20-30%." Compound a handful and you're at 2-6x overhead for the same behavior. That's how a Calculator ends up leaking 32GB. Not because someone wanted it to -- but because nobody noticed the cumulative cost until users started complaining. [...] We're living through the greatest software quality crisis in computing history. A Calculator leaks 32GB of RAM. AI assistants delete production databases. Companies spend $364 billion to avoid fixing fundamental problems. This isn't sustainable. Physics doesn't negotiate. Energy is finite. Hardware has limits. The companies that survive won't be those who can outspend the crisis. There'll be those who remember how to engineer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Preteens who use increasing amounts of social media perform poorer in reading, vocabulary and memory tests in early adolescence compared to those who use little or no social media. A study published in JAMA examined data from over 6,000 children ages 9 to 10 through early adolescence. Researchers classified the children into three groups: 58% used little or no social media over several years, 37% started with low-level use but spent about an hour daily on social media by age 13, and 6% spent three or more hours daily by that age. Even low users who spent about one hour per day performed 1 to 2 points lower on reading and memory tasks compared to non-users. High users performed 4 to 5 points lower than non-social media users. Jason Nagata, a pediatrician at the University of California, San Francisco and study author, said the findings were notable because even modest social media use correlated with lower cognitive scores.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has rebranded its streaming service Apple TV+ to simply Apple TV, further blurring the already confusing line between the Apple TV device, the Apple TV app, and the Apple TV service. As John Gruber notes, users can now "watch Apple TV in Apple TV on Apple TV." From Daring Fireball: In some ways, I get it. Like, if you're telling someone how much you enjoy Slow Horses and they ask how to watch it, it's more natural and conversational to just say "It's on Apple TV." That's what most people say. That's what I say -- and as part of my job, I completely understand the difference between Apple TV the device, Apple TV the (free) app, and Apple TV+ the (paid) streaming service. But right there in Apple's own "About Apple TV" description, you see just how overused "Apple TV" now is. You can watch Apple TV in Apple TV on Apple TV -- the paid service in the free app on the set-top box. But you can watch any streaming service you want on the box, in that service's own app. But many of those services are also available in the Apple TV app. And the Apple TV streaming service is also available on just about all other popular set-top hardware platforms. So don't need an Apple TV to watch Apple TV. It's a bit like Abbott and Costello's classic "Who's on First" routine.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from Hackread: On October 3, 2025, Hackread.com published an in-depth report in which hackers claimed to have stolen 989 million records from 39 major companies worldwide by exploiting a Salesforce vulnerability. The group demanded that Salesforce and the affected firms enter negotiations before October 10, 2025, warning that if their demands were ignored, they would release the entire dataset. The hackers, identifying themselves as "Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters," a collective said to combine elements of Scattered Spider, Lapsus$, and ShinyHunters, have now published data allegedly belonging to 6 of the 39 targeted companies. The companies named in the leak are as follows: Fujifilm, GAP, INC., Vietnam Airlines, Engie Resources, Quantas Airways Limited, and Albertsons Companies, Inc. In all 6 leaks, the record contains personal details of customers, business, including email addresses, full names, addresses, passport numbers, phone numbers. The hackers said on Telegram that they will not be releasing any additional information, stating, "A lot of people are asking what else will be leaked. Nothing else will be leaked. Everything that was leaked was leaked, we have nothing else to leak, and obviously, the things we have cannot be leaked for obvious reasons."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is laying off around 550 employees, or roughly 11% of its workforce, as part of an effort to "restructure and establish an appropriate size to ensure future success." According to JPL Director Dave Gallagher, the job cuts "are not related to the current government shutdown." CNBC reports: JPL is a research and development lab funded by NASA -- the federal space agency -- and managed by the California Institute of Technology. "While not easy, I believe that taking these actions now will help the Lab transform at the scale and pace necessary to help achieve humanity's boldest ambitions in space," Gallagher wrote in a separate mekor to JPL employees and contractors. Gallagher, in the public announcement, noted that the reorganization of JPL began in July, and "over the past few months, we have communicated openly with employees about the challenges and hard choices ahead." "This week's action, while not easy, is essential to securing JPL's future by creating a leaner infrastructure, focusing on our core technical capabilities, maintaining fiscal discipline, and positioning us to compete in the evolving space ecosystem -- all while continuing to deliver on our vital work for NASA and the nation," Gallagher wrote. Gallagher said that JPL employees will be notified of their status on Tuesday, and the "new Lab structure ... will become effective Wednesday."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.