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Politico notes that over 20 local jurisdictions in America "either stopped using Flock cameras or began the process of doing so in July, according to a tracker maintained by DeFlock, an activist group that has been mapping the company. It's the highest amount in a single month since they began tracking in 2021." Some local officials said the public safety promises weren't worth the cost. The cameras "didn't help us with anything. From a utility aspect, they were just kind of not useful," said Eric Couture, a Democratic first selectman in Killingworth, Connecticut, another city that recently canceled its contract with Flock. "I'd say it was a net negative." And their article adds that it's a bipartisan pushback that "runs parallel to sprawling fights over the future of technology in American life, including the rise of increasingly advanced artificial intelligence tools and the construction of massive data centers needed to power them." Salon even argues Flock's cameras "have become a symbol of growing anger over the efforts by technology oligarchs to impose their dystopian fantasies on the country, replacing liberal democracy with a surveillance state... People are sick of tech billionaires trying to control our lives"" By targeting Flock cameras, activists are building momentum for a larger rebellion against the tech industry — and against political leaders who are complicit in their assault on our freedoms. Flock Safety embodies the dishonesty that has been the prevailing theme of tech corporate communications and marketing for at least the past decade. While the cameras are sold to the public as a banal traffic safety measure, they have prompted an outpouring of stories about how they're being used to violate civil liberties and undermine democracy... According to an exhaustive 10-month analysis by Electronic Foundation Frontier, a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties in our digital age, local police were using the cameras to track protesters, such as those at No Kings rallies, who were then put in a national database to be used across all jurisdictions. Despite claims that the cameras only record license plates, the technology-focused outlet 404 Media found that the database is also being used to collect information on individual people whom cops can then search for using descriptions of clothing, race, gender and body type. The Flock uprising, though, is the stirrings of public understanding that none of this inevitable — and we have the right to fight back... Along with protests against data centers, it's a sign that the public is desperate for a way to fight back against not just AI, but also the anti-democratic forces fueling this latest tech wave. Salon's writer also adds that "what stands out about the burgeoning public rebellion against Flock security cameras is just how fun it all is," citing "a national cat-and-mouse game between vandals and cops that is being merrily followed on social media, mostly by people rooting for the vandals." City council meetings in which citizens swarm to protest paying for the cameras are the new must-see TV. In Huntington, West Virginia, a small city in the heart of Appalachia, one man became an internet folk hero when he stood up at a city council meeting and said, "I'm not gonna waste your time; I'm kinda hungry. But one last thing: Every single Flock camera has about 2-3 pounds of copper and about 1-2 grams of gold. Do with that information what you will." He then walked off in triumph.

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This week Anthropic announced its Claude chatbot will watermark the text it generates, reports the blog Futurism. "It works by making subtle changes in the AI's word choices across the text it generates, which are supposed to be imperceptible to a human but, in aggregate, form a pattern that is detectable with the tool." Anthropic said it was implementing the watermark system in response to the European Union's landmark AI Act passed in 2024, which requires that AI companies mark content that's been generated or edited by their systems. TechCrunch notes that other companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Synthesia have committed to adhering to the EU's code. But "The news about Claude watermarking kicked off a firestorm on X," reports Forbes, "with users panicking that AI-assisted writing will now bear a kind of permanent 'scarlet letter.'" (Forbes wonders if media companies are normalizing AI "while at the same time stigmatizing the output.") But there's another issue. Anthropic said the watermark indicates Claude processed text, Business Insider points out, "not that it was necessarily the original author. The company said marks can remain after Claude proofreads, translates, summarizes, or otherwise edits content... a watermark shows that Claude processed text, not necessarily that it wrote it." In the days since, "Dozens of people have posted on X since Monday that they had canceled their Claude subscriptions, citing the watermark." Vladislav Rajtmajer, a freelance developer in the Czech Republic, told Business Insider he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Tuesday, citing the watermark as the main reason. He said he uses AI for code reviews and translations, and worried an AI label on code shipped to clients could raise questions about authorship or trigger contract penalties... Richard Echols, an AI consultant in Georgia, also said he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Wednesday and that the watermark was a major factor in his decision. He said he uses Claude to create documentation for businesses and worried the mark could appear when he had written the underlying material himself and used the chatbot only for edits. "Even if you edit your own work that you wrote, they add the watermark anyway," Echols said... Anthropic isn't the only AI lab to use watermarks: Google uses its SynthID technology to watermark AI-generated content, and OpenAI uses SynthID for supported images and audio. Elon Musk's social media platform X also adds a "Made with AI" tag on content it determines to be AI-generated or manipulated. Long-time Slashdot reader kmleon (also a tech consultant and RPG researcher) experienced another issue. He'd built some software using their own custom-built AI tool, only asking Claude to do some testing. "Little did I know that Claude would sometimes decide, since it was involved on the edges... to take credit for all of my work, claiming some parts were either "100%" or "Co-Authored/Created" by Claude.Ai / Claude Code!" I'm sure the good folks at Anthropic will eventually tweak Claude enough to, hopefully, not make these mistakes in the future.... I only became aware of it today, because I recently setup scanners to catch Claude incorrectly watermarking any content it touches for various projects I'm working on. I found that it has (apparently as far back as Sonnet 4.6, but as recently as today, August 14th, 2026) sometimes been mistakenly over-zealous in taking credit for 100% creating or co-authoring docs, code, images, videos, etc. I've only, so far, found about a dozen instances spanning the past year, and most of them appear to have been injected in the last few weeks, so it is not a common issue (yet). On the bright side? Maybe watermarks can help AI stop training on AI-generated text. Although Forbes also reports that Google "announced on Friday that it will now let users remove the visible watermark from AI-generated images, videos and music created with several of its models."

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Linux Kernel 7.2 has just been officially released with a slew of new features, reports the blog 9to5Linux. Highlights of Linux 7.2 "include cache-aware load-balancing support, initial HDMI 2.1 FRL support to the AMDGPU driver, support for devres-based management of ACPI notify handlers, initial CRI platform support for the Intel Xe driver, and Rust support for the IBM System/390 (S/390) architecture." Linux kernel 7.2 also introduces a "Fair(er)" GPU scheduler, support for the 'zerocopy' library to Rust support to make zero-cost memory manipulation effortless, new hwcaps for the 2025 dpISA extensions on the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture, and enables large folios by default for the Btrfs file system. It also brings Intel CPU model number support for Panther Lake R processor series, improvements to the kernel's swap subsystem, support for multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs) to the khugepaged kernel thread, and support for compressed files to the SMB filesystem. On top of that, Linux 7.2 improves the new NTFS filesystem introduced in Linux kernel 7.1, adds devicetree updates for 64-bit NXP/Freescale and Qualcomm platforms, introduces MPTCP signaling support for IPv6 addresses, adds GRO/GSO support for PPPoE, and brings more SMP load-balancing updates... [T]he TCP authentication option has been implemented, and there are also some Thunderbolt networking improvements. Also worth mentioning is that the KVM subsystem has received support for AMD's "guest-mode execution trap" and Intel's "mode-based execution control" (MBEC) features, the NFS file system's default block size was bumped to 4MB on systems with at least 16GB RAM, and support for the Intel Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) feature has been added. Thanks to Slashdot reader prisoninmate for bring the news.

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"We are in a 21st century space race," U.S. Senator Ted Cruz has said. And this week CNN noted a competition that for decades loomed in the background of geopolitics "is now roaring to the forefront," with China "demonstrating rapid advances in space technology" while the U.S. is "ratcheting up rhetoric about a looming battle for control of the cosmos." It's the fact that China plans to build a permanent settlement on the moon by 2040 that has prompted an urgent response from [U.S.] lawmakers... They've declared a new space race, and NASA is pledging to build a lunar outpost of America's own.... Both the United States and China plan to send robotic explorers to the south pole later this year, paving the way for human explorers to follow close behind. The US is relying on the private sector to develop and build low-cost, exploratory robotic landers... Meanwhile, China is aiming to launch its robotic Chang'e-7 mission as soon as this month. The complex endeavor will seek to use four different robotic vehicles — an orbiter, lander, rover and mobile "hopper" — working in tandem to attempt to gather unprecedented data. The effort will include tools to drill for and directly analyze water ice, a feat that the US will only attempt with robotic missions slated for next year at the earliest. "If lunar water ice is successfully located, it could significantly reduce the cost and time required to transport water from Earth, facilitating the establishment of a human base for long-term activities on the moon and enabling further exploration of Mars or deep space," Tang Yuhua, the deputy chief designer of the Chang'e-7 mission, said in a 2025 interview with state media. The oncoming flurry of south-pole-centric activity, with few established international laws to govern the outcomes, is heightening the drama of this rivalry... But with a much more ambitious goal — a future in which people attempt to flourish within permanent settlements rather than just visit the moon — the stakes of this new space race are even higher, according to Clayton Swope, the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan nonprofit. "The long-term vision will take generations to execute on," Swope said. "But in my mind, it's a scenario where there are people being born, people dying, their families, children growing up in a place that is not Earth — so that looks a lot like a city, more than it looks like an expedition to the south pole." If such a future comes to fruition, Swope added, his hope is that such extraterrestrial colonies would be governed by rules reminiscent of Western ideals and democratic principles. Whether China would be on the same page is an open question. China is already fine-tuning its plans for a lunar settlement, CNN writes: The country envisions the International Lunar Research Station, or ILRS, as a sprawling science-focused facility on the moon's surface that can be operated robotically, "with the prospect of subsequent human presence," according to a government's ILRS website. China could partner with Russia to build a massive nuclear reactor to power the base, though questions remain regarding how the war in Ukraine may impact Russia's ability to deliver... China and Russia were mapping these plans long before the US announced its own intention to build a nuclear reactor on the moon last year and detailed its plans for a lunar settlement spanning hundreds of square miles... Who will write the rules? And how, exactly, will the use of lunar resources be policed on the international stage? Meanwhile, NASA "still does not have a vehicle capable of getting astronauts down to the lunar surface," the article points out: Returning to the moon is not as simple as repeating Apollo. The space agency cannot — and does not wish to — replicate its 20th century lunar-landing success. The supply chains, skilled machinists and factories that built Apollo's rockets, landers and command modules no longer exist. And while the Apollo landings stuck close to the lunar equator, landing near the south pole is substantially more complex and requires more powerful vehicles.... China, meanwhile, has been laser focused on its lunar exploration program since 2004, using its top-down, central planning system to keep resources flowing toward specific goals.

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While Flock announced changes for its AI-powered traffic cameras, "Several of the proposed changes Flock is touting are merely retreads of previous ," complains the American Civil Liberties Union. "Flock's latest announcement still appears more focused on addressing a perceived PR problem than the significant harms its products create... [T]his is hardly the step forward Flock wants us to think it is " The ACLU continues to urge that default retention periods be shortened to 48 hours — not one week. And they warn Flock allows longer retention to any police department that asks for it, or when police officers activate "Evidence Mode" (the scope of which is not yet clear): Even if "Evidence Mode's" data retention hold only applies to hits returned on a given search, it would still retain significant amounts of location data on persons and vehicles who law enforcement do not suspect have engaged in any wrongdoing... Flock claims that its changes will provide "more local control," meaning local police can decide what types of offenses other Flock customers can search their data for... This is not new. Flock has attempted this before, and the security measure failed because users were easily able to circumvent the system's requirement that police input the purpose of their search. For example, on June 12, 2025 Flock started claiming its new "Proactive Search Term Tool" would block any "impermissible" searches, such as abortion-related searches in states like Illinois that prohibit sharing reproductive healthcare data. But police officers quickly realized they could just input "investigation" or even "hehehe" as a search reason and it would be approved. Flock later switched from an open text box to a drop-down menu of reasons, but that just offered police a list of acceptable purposes they could choose from, whether it was accurate or not. Until Flock demonstrates they can develop a reliable, workable system to prevent improper searches, this promise of local control provides nothing more than a false sense of security... While providing "Audit Assistance" to all departments makes sense, there is no evidence that the tool works consistently to address what the Washington Post observed is a growing pattern of police officers turning Flock into a personal stalking tool. While dozens of officers have recently been arrested, fired, or otherwise disciplined for misusing Flock for personal reasons, Flock claims these arrests are proof its auditing tool works. However, unless we know the number of officers misusing the system, we cannot conclude if Flock and its auditing tools are catching 95 percent of violators or 5 percent. Flock needs to have its auditing tool analyzed by an independent evaluator to determine its actual effectiveness. Until then, we don't know if the tool is a real security measure or just window dressing. Perhaps the oddest part of Flock's announcement is its claims that "now every search will require" police to input a case code... While claiming that a "search without a reason is a search that shouldn't happen in the first place," Flock's announcement fails to note how easily users have circumvented "search reason" security measures in the past... This leaves the public wondering how making an ineffective voluntary security measure mandatory will improve its functionality. Flock's "nearly $1 billion in venture capitalist funding has locked it into an operational model that seeks to trade our privacy for massive profits," concludes the ACLU's statement, as they promise to continue "The ACLU is fighting alongside communities to cancel local ALPR contracts and push lawmakers to protect our rights from this surveillance nightmare..."

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"As Sony soldiers ahead with their plans to end hard copies for new PlayStation games, players are fearing a future which will force them to pay more and own less," writes Kotaku. What will prices do in a world with no physical copies to share or sell? One former Square Enix executive speculates this could actually drive down the price of games: "Digital on the PS store will likely get cheaper," posted Jacob Navok, former Square Enix business strategist. "Current prices are tied to retail. Without physical discs holding digital hostage we'll see a larger spectrum of pricing similar to steam." Navok says that the digital-only landscape will pit major publishers in constant, dynamic competition with each other... "The more the Playstation store becomes digital only, the greater this trend will accelerate," Navok follows up. "You will see more sales and dynamic pricing similar to Steam because publishers will compete among themselves to a greater extent." [O]n the other end newer games are getting increasingly expensive, even on digital platforms. The fact that Grand Theft Auto VI will be a purely digital release has not caused its price point to budge.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: According to data from digital intelligence provider Similarweb, Bluesky's mobile app had 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide in June 2026, down 27.2% year-over-year. In addition, mobile daily active users continued to decline, falling 25.6% year-over-year in July to around 3 million... Bluesky's app has lost more than half its monthly active users from its late-2024 high... Its quarterly average was around 22.1 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2024, Similarweb's data indicates, and it declined to 10.7 million in the second quarter of 2026. That's a decline of around 52%. While Bluesky's numbers are down, those who stuck around are committed. Its smaller community remains relatively active, with a stickiness rate (the ratio of daily to monthly active users) of roughly 29% in June, about the same as Threads. For Bluesky's new CEO, Toni Schneider, these numbers may not be as concerning. The company is not entirely focused on making Bluesky (the app) succeed, but on making it possible for the underlying protocol (AT Proto) to power a growing number of social apps, services, and communities. That's something that is now taking place, as projects like BlackSky and Eurosky are growing, while some AT Proto apps like the video-focused Skylight have found early traction, too. In addition, the company has launched new products, like the AI-powered research tool Attie, and is now working on adding support for private data to Bluesky. The latter could generate new interest in Bluesky from a different type of user — those less interested in the public square, and more interested in private networking and communities. But on Threads in July of 2026, daily active users were up 21.3% year-over-year to 147 million, the article points out, and website visits were up 112% year-over-year to 471.6 million. And Threads now appears to have roughly 66% more monthly active users than X.

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Saturday Disneyland announced a special Star Wars-themed collaboration with third-person shooter game Fortnite — including a slick new trailer for its Star Wars: Smuggler's Gambit quest. Visitors to Disneyland's Smuggler's Run attraction at Disney's theme parks in Orlando and in Anaheim can accept a special mission while waiting in line for the ride, according to The Hollywood Reporter. And "If they succeed, they will get a unique Forsworn Trooper Outfit in a newly-created Fortnite adventure called Smugglers Gambit set in that same universe." "Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run | Fortnite marks the first time this attraction has reached beyond its physical walls into a connected game world — a story that starts in a queue in Orlando or Anaheim can now continue on a screen almost anywhere," said Sean Shoptaw, executive VP of Disney Games and Digital Entertainment.... "Together these experiences reflect our ambition to connect stories and worlds across formats into one converged entertainment ecosystem...." The cockpit technology in the ride was actually created using Epic's Unreal Engine, which allows for many assets from the ride to appear in Smugglers Gambit.... "Whether you're at a Disney Park or playing Fortnite with your friends, fans have new ways to keep their Star Wars adventures going," [said Adam Sussman, president of Epic Games]. "This is only the beginning of what's possible when world-class storytellers bring their creativity into Fortnite." Disney, of course, is an investor in Epic Games, and the two companies have been at work building a new world that will connect to Fortnite with all of the Disney's beloved characters... This new collaboration, however, extends to the real world for the first time, bringing some video game magic to Disney's parks, and some of that theme park magic to the video game. Disneyland will also launch a new area based on James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water, reports The Orange County Register — which even has a picture of the Avatar Destination ride's model, showing an enormous (and very colorful) waterfall. The model was part of Saturday's Disney fan expo "D23", showing the Disneyland Monorail traveling around the edge of the attraction (which reportedly involves a 30-person vehicle). Saturday's event also included details on the long-awaited "reimagining" of the park's Tomorrowland area, with their official blog promising "Yesterday's tomorrow, today!" Tomorrowland has some history, explains the Orange County Register: The land's first update in 1967 was dubbed the New Tomorrowland with the 1998 makeover jokingly referred to as the New, New Tomorrowland. The latest iteration is already being called the New, New, New Tomorrowland. Disneyland's Land of Tomorrow has plenty of empty spaces in need of some Imagineering magic with the Tomorrowland Theater, Star Wars Launch Bay and PeopleMover track all sitting underused. Or, as The Wrap puts it, "The problem with Tomorrowland, of course, has been keeping up with tomorrow." 1967 introduced New Tomorrowland, with Adventures Thru Inner Space, Carousel of Progress and the PeopleMover giving it the "World on the Move" theme. In 1975 Space Mountain opened and in the 1980's the Tomorrowland stage was enclosed to become a 3D theater, where "Magic Journeys" and "Captain EO" played. Star Tours also opened in the 1980's, giving the area some additional adrenaline. But an elaborate redo of the area, planned for the 1990's, was cut short due to financial woes following the opening of Disneyland Paris and were largely shuttered. (In Florida, a new Tomorrowland was approximated in the mid-1990's but not really followed through on, adopting some of the timelessness of the Jules Verne-inspired Discoveryland from Paris.) Since the 1990's, Tomorrowland in Disneyland has become largely defunct or outright abandoned... In the late 1990's, Disney tried to use the [PeopleMover] track for a high-speed attraction called Rocket Rods. The attraction never worked properly and was shuttered after just a few years. Rumor has it that the intensity of the ride vehicles actually weakened the PeopleMover track and removing the track would be time consuming and costly. So since the turn of the millennium, there has just been track above and all around Tomorrowland that sits, untouched.

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Science Daily reports: Researchers showed that unencrypted signals routinely exchanged between WiFi devices and routers can be used to create radio-based images of people and recognize them within seconds. In tests involving 197 participants, the system identified individuals with nearly 100% accuracy, even from different angles and regardless of how they walked. "By observing the propagation of radio waves, we can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present," says Professor Thorsten Strufe from KASTEL, KIT's Institute of Information Security and Dependability. "This works similar to a normal camera, the difference being that in our case, radio waves instead of light waves are used for the recognition," explains the cybersecurity expert. Because the technique analyzes radio waves moving through a space, a person does not need to have a phone, smartwatch, or other WiFi enabled device with them. "Thus, it does not matter whether you carry a WiFi device on you or not." Even turning off your own device would not necessarily prevent the system from working. "It's sufficient that other WiFi devices in your surroundings are active...." Connected devices routinely send information back to the router to help optimize wireless communication. These signals, known as beamforming feedback information (BFI), are transmitted without encryption, meaning that anyone within range can potentially read them. By analyzing that information, the system can generate images of people from multiple viewpoints. Those images can then be used to determine a person's identity. Once the machine learning model has already been trained to recognize individuals, the identification process takes only a few seconds.

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When Anthropic instructed three agents to migrate a Python backend, but telling each agent to perform the migration in a different language, "We consistently saw a multiagent turf war," they wrote Thursday: All of the models we tested quickly assumed that others were purposefully impeding their work, and began to sabotage others while protecting their own contributions. In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware. This included disabling the Unix accounts of the other agents, writing automated scripts that found and killed competing processes on a loop, and deploying malicious code that was disguised as belonging to another agent. In many runs, one agent settles the conflict by force via access-revocation (e.g., sudo/group removal, account lock, nologin, SSH denial). In others, some agents settle into passivity: they give up and refuse to escalate further. Agents sometimes manage to communicate their goals and coordinate: they recognize others' motivations as conflicting directives rather than hostility, and subsequently break out of the conflict loop in order to stop escalating indefinitely. In many of these successful episodes, they write commit messages or markdown files apologizing for malicious behavior and coordinate a truce. They clean up their malicious code, clarify the nature of the conflict, and ask for a human to intervene... In several episodes with Mythos 5, we observe an emergent behavior where the agents propose and run a tournament for application performance in each language. In the example above, the Rust agent strategizes about bake-off metrics that appear neutral enough for the others to agree to this mechanism, yet would likely favor Rust: one thinking trace warns to be "careful not to be seen as metric shopping". Ultimately, the Golang/TypeScript losers gracefully concede codebase ownership to the Rust agent, giving up on their original user directives under their self-negotiated commitment device. One problem is that AI agents do reward hacking, Anthropic notes, while current institutions "are designed by and for people, resting on assumptions about the sufficiency of oversight at human speed... As autonomous agents become more and more prevalent in the world and operate in ever-more demanding settings, it is crucial that they learn how to effectively coordinate." In addition to everything else, the agents struggled with a lack of clearly defined hierarchy, Anthropic points out. "Nothing above suggests that these failures are permanent — but nothing suggests they will fix themselves, either..." They argue a fix "takes two forms: environments that exert the kinds of social pressure that evolution exerted on us, and social computing systems redesigned for actors that can self-replicate and self-improve. These are open problems in interaction and mechanism design, and our experiments here provide early evidence that new solutions are necessary." "The AI models being tested in this case were Sonnet 4.6, Sonnet 5, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.8, Mythos Preview, and Mythos 5," notes Business Insider, adding that Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6 "were the most combative, settling about 60% of their runs by force instead of truces or passivity." Anthropic argues there's a clear case for researching this phenomenon — especially since "The volume of agent-agent interaction could plausibly exceed that of human-human and human-agent interactions before the world understands the conditions for making such interactions go well."

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An anonymous reader shares this report from Space.com: On Saturday evening (Aug. 15), SpaceX set another mark, for the shortest time between orbital flights: It launched two Falcon 9 rockets just 38 minutes apart, besting its old mark — set on Aug. 31, 2024 with two Starlink missions — by 27 minutes. The first liftoff, from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, occurred Saturday at 9:12 p.m. EDT (0112 GMT on Aug. 16) and carried eight satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) for Louisiana-based telecom company Globalstar. All eight spacecraft were deployed successfully, separating over a six-minute span beginning 56.5 minutes after liftoff, SpaceX announced via social media. While that Falcon 9 was powering its way to low Earth orbit, another one launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, on California's central coast. That liftoff, at 9:50 p.m. EDT (6:50 p.m. local time; 0150 GMT on Aug. 16), kicked off a mission for the U.S. Space Force called USSF-366... Both of Saturday's missions featured successful rocket landings. The Falcon 9 first stage that launched the Globalstar mission came back for a touchdown at Cape Canaveral about eight minutes after launch. It was the 14th flight for that particular booster. The USSF-366 Falcon 9 first stage, meanwhile, came back to Earth about 8.5 minutes after its launch, touching down in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You." That booster now has 18 missions under its belt. Saturday's doubleheader brought the tally of Falcon 9 launches in 2026 to 96. The vast majority of those — about 75% — have been Starlink missions.

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Phys.org reports: Future fusion power plants aim to recreate the heart of a star here on Earth to power our future energy needs. While the core fusion plasma will burn at hundreds of millions of degrees, the surrounding structural components must handle sudden, punishing heat loads that rival the extreme temperatures faced by spacecraft upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere. Copper and its alloys are primary candidates for handling these intense heat fluctuations, making it vital to understand exactly how the metal behaves when pushed to its melting point. Now, researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and collaborators have captured a detailed, step-by-step look at copper atoms as they underwent extreme heating. Published in Nature Communications, the results revealed a key parameter that allowed copper's crystal lattice to melt steadily rather than collapse instantaneously, as earlier simulations predicted. "These results greatly improve the simulations we use to predict which materials have the best shot at surviving the extreme conditions of future fusion reaction chambers," said Mianzhen Mo, a SLAC staff scientist who led the research. "They also demonstrate the incredible, atomic-scale resolution imaging we can achieve at SLAC's electron camera...." Researchers use computer simulations, aided by AI and machine learning, to sift through innumerable combinations of elements and identify promising candidate materials for real-world testing. "Whether the copper melts slowly or suddenly collapses, by the time the researchers look, the sample resembles nothing more than a metallic brown puddle," the article points out. But SLAC's powerful electron camera captures atomic and molecular movements down to the femtosecond — a millionth of a billionth of a second — and revealed that at around 1,424 degreesC (2,595 degreesF) there was still gradual melting as the temperature rose beyond the superheating limit, with real-world conditions showing the atoms shifted and retained some order. "It's a straightforward solution," said Mianzhen Mo, a SLAC staff scientist who led the research. "But molecular dynamics simulations had been overlooking it for years. When you have complex simulations attempting to capture every aspect of reality, down to individual atoms, it takes real-world data to show you what's missing from the calculations."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: X is significantly expanding its open source codebase, which includes the app's "For You" algorithm and its core ranking engine, and adding a feature that will let users see if their account or posts have been impacted by any of its ranking systems, the social network said on Thursday. The company is making the source code for the "For You" timeline, the default feed you see when you open the app, available on GitHub under the Apache v2 license. It's also expanding its previous efforts to open source parts of its codebase to add more detail, including the model configuration, filter, and core ranking system details. That means it includes the parameters used to weight different signals — key to understanding which posts are actually displayed. This also makes the codebase roughly 10 to 15 times larger than it was before. "You'll get the core ranking code that pulls posts and ranks them for any given user and assembles the feed," X's VP of Product Keith Coleman told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of the announcement. "You can see the systems that filter out potentially problematic, rule-violating content...And some of those systems, like the ranker and the score, you can even run yourself outside the company." "This is the kind of thing that I think people will be fairly shocked that we are releasing," he added. In addition to the repository, X is providing tools that will let users see for themselves if and how X's ranking systems have impacted their account or posts. A new transparency tool is rolling out to an "Under the Hood" page in the app's settings, which will let users who have posted 10 or more times over the past month download their aggregate stats as a JSON file. The file will show if any labels have been applied to their account or posts over the past calendar month. X's VP of Product told TechCrunch that X engineers will consider pull requests. "That would be amazing to have people submitting code that improves the algorithm...I mean, how cool would it be for the X algorithm to be not just visible to the public, but also, like, by the public?"

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Europe is facing its fifth round of dangerously high temperatures this summer, the New York Times reports. Now climate scientists wonder if global warming is doing more than raise temperatures... The weather patterns that create heat domes aren't new, but today they arise on top of the warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. That makes it more likely that heat waves reach record-shattering temperatures for long stretches. But other environmental changes — natural, human-influenced or both — might also be causing heat domes to become more frequent and longer lasting. And it's these changes that scientists around the globe are trying to puzzle out. One change has to do with the Arctic. The differences in temperature between the hot Equator and the frigid far north help keep weather moving around the Northern Hemisphere. But with the top of the world now warming at several times the pace of the rest of the globe, those temperature gradients are narrowing. That might be causing the movements of weather systems to become more sluggish, producing more persistent heat waves. In Europe, reduced air pollution could be having a similar effect. Industrial emissions can contain particles called aerosols that reflect sunlight. Curbing aerosols has improved air quality, but it may also have altered the way air moves across the continent. Scientists haven't come to firm conclusions about how these shifts might be affecting European summers, said Antje Weisheimer, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford. The complex, fine-scale interactions in the atmosphere that drive weather dynamics are tough to capture in computer simulations, Dr. Weisheimer said. "It's tricky," she said. "We're making small progress." Dim Coumou, a professor of climate science at the Dutch university VU Amsterdam, sees artificial intelligence as one way forward. In a recent study, he and his colleagues used an A.I. algorithm to help a weather model better predict summer temperatures in Europe. They not only improved the model's forecasts; they also discovered why some of the model's predictions had been off: It misrepresented the way conditions in the western Pacific Ocean influenced atmospheric patterns that eventually made their way to Europe. With A.I., "we can also learn what the climate models are missing," Dr. Coumou said.

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A "massive influx" of jellyfish forced Electricite de France SA to shut three units at its Gravelines nuclear power plant this week and reduce output at a fourth, reports Bloomberg. Just as summer temperatures surged, 3.2 gigawatts went offline — and the power utility was already facing cuts other nuclear sites as high temperatures reduced the river water available for cooling. More details from ScienceAlert: As Politico reports, the Gravelines nuclear power plant spent hundreds of thousands of euros in 2025 to stop this happening again, only to see a repeat 12 months later... Increasing temperatures in the water can produce more of the plankton and animals that jellyfish feed on, as well as accelerating life cycles and extending breeding seasons.... It's not just jellyfish that have a habit of disrupting human energy infrastructure. Last year in Connecticut, a single raccoon caused more than a thousand power outages, as reported by CT Insider. It's not clear exactly what the raccoon did, but we do know it somehow got into a substation and caused damage to the equipment in there. The unwitting act of sabotage left more than 2,500 customers in the area without power at one stage — though repairs were swiftly carried out. Reuters reported Tuesday on how the French utility responded to their jellyfish swarm: EDF has installed fixed cameras at the intake canals and on the filter drum screens to detect any incoming blockages as soon as possible, an engineer told Reuters... The company has also partnered with a French fishing organisation and a sea rescue organisation, which monitor for swarms and can raise an alert to launch targeted trawling operations by fishermen to reduce the swarm's density before it reaches the plant, the engineer said. The fishing boats were deployed [last] Saturday after an initial alarm was raised, limiting the impact from the swarm. The jellyfish that are already on site are being removed with vacuum trucks, he said. No new jellyfish are arriving, so cleanup is finishing, which should lead to a quick restart of the units, they added... Scientists warn such events could become more common due to factors including global warming, the arrival of invasive species, habitat loss of predators and over-fishing. Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the news.

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Less than a year ago he was the #1 richest man in the world. 10 weeks ago he was #2. But yesterday Larry Ellison dropped to #8, Forbes reports, falling behind Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Ellison's net worth is now estimated at just $192.6 billion — after a $104 billion decline: Shares of Oracle plunged roughly 54% between hitting a high of just over $250 on June 1 to a low of $114.50 on July 28, though the stock rebounded slightly to $150.52 as of Friday. A decline followed Oracle telling investors it expected to raise $40 billion through debt and equity financing, with capital expenditures surging 162% to $55.7 billion and spending expected to top $95 billion by fiscal 2027. Jacob Bourne, an analyst at eMarketer, told Reuters there are broader concerns about how Oracle would fund its capital spending to match its revenue projections, and Bank of America analysts separately flagged in a note cautioning that more than 50% of Oracle's remaining performance obligation comes from OpenAI. Melius Research analysts wrote last month that Oracle's spending plans may not hold if OpenAI or Anthropic demands more computing capacity. S&P Global also downgraded Oracle's credit rating in July, arguing the firm's "rapidly expanding" AI infrastructure business could pay off, but may be too expensive and could weaken Oracle's financial position in the meantime. $443 billion. That's how much Oracle's market valuation has dropped since peaking at $877.1 billion in September, hitting $433.5 billion as of Friday... Oracle, once viewed as a potential winner of the booming AI infrastructure buildout, has since raised concerns among investors who appear to view the firm as taking on too much financial risk to fund its projects. Wall Street has cautioned that mega-cap tech firms may be taking on too much spending to match growing demand for AI products, with firms like Amazon expecting to spend more than $200 billion. Oracle's backlog has exploded to $638 billion, but more than half is reportedly associated with OpenAI, and some analysts have cautioned that most of those funds may not be guaranteed.

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"An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025," remembers the BBC. And earlier this year OpenAI "formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself." However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day work week it suggested others should try while they were there. Instead, the person described what was often a gruelling work culture marked by frequent "crisis meetings", working on weekends, and "super cut-throat" performance reviews that would see colleagues suddenly let go... [T]he former OpenAI employee said they would put in at least 70 hours a week, much more than they did in previous tech jobs... Other companies have also pushed the idea that AI will effectively reduce the number of hours people need to work, for better or worse. [At OpenAI and Anthropic] sprints can stretch on for many weeks and top 90 hours of work in a seven-day period, tech workers that the BBC spoke to for this story said... At Meta, workers said they have been abruptly pushed onto teams this year doing AI work being treated as urgent... The hours on such teams at Meta are often long, with staff working into the night, on weekends, and feeling they are "on call" during the hours they are not working, according to descriptions of the work from the current and former employees... Some new research suggests that AI tools are making people's workloads even more burdensome. A study out of UC Berkeley followed hundreds of workers at a US tech company for eight months as they used AI. It found the employees "worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day"... The UC Berkeley research found that the workload of tech employees was expanded in part because of the need to constantly check the output of AI tools. In the article Neil Thompson, an innovation scholar at MIT, pointed out a problem with estimates that AI will ease the workload on humans. "People assume that 20% less work means four-day weeks. But new work emerges." The BBC also points out helpfully that "there are no limits in the U.S. on how many hours a person over the age of 16 can work." (While in the UK and Europe, "laws limit a working week to 48 hours, including overtime.") Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hadleyburg for sharing the article.

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It's not just RAM prices that are going up, writes CNET. "Reports suggest the cost of Windows licenses for manufacturers is rising by up to 10%." Several sites that closely follow Microsoft news, including Windows Central and Windows Latest, have published articles citing a report from Taiwan's Economic Daily News that claims some PC manufacturers are seeing a 7% to 10% increase in the cost of Windows 11 licenses... Because they buy licenses in bulk, they get a sizeable discount over what a consumer would pay for a new copy of Windows 11. But given the existing cost pressures from other components, a big Windows 11 price hike could lead them to pass on some of the added cost to PC buyers. According to the EDN story, PC makers could raise prices by about 5% over the next quarter due to the reported Windows price hike. .. A translated version of the Economic Daily News article contains information from an unnamed PC brand executive. It says that while Microsoft typically raises licensing costs every year by single-digit percentages, that hike has reached 7% to 10% this year, a significant increase. "A representative for Microsoft declined to comment on the report," according to the article. But it also notes that three weeks ago laptop maker Framework blamed price hikes and reconfigurations for some of their models on processor, memory, storage, "and other silicon costs — but also "an increase in Windows license costs." Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

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"The European Union's Copernicus climate monitoring service confirmed Monday that June and July were the hottest on record in western Europe," .according to a report from the CBC. "The period saw an estimated 25,000 heat-related deaths." CNN has before-and-after photos of Europe's dried rivers, calling it "a crisis so dire it can be seen from space" River levels are so low that commercial ships have had to reduce their loads by as much as 80% to avoid running aground. It's disrupting supply chains and making shipping more expensive. Other effects of Europe's drying rivers The BBC reports that Romania has "shut down its only nuclear power station because of extremely low water levels in the Danube river." A bridge built in the year 39 AD by the Roman emperor Caligula "is usually entirely underwater," reports CNN, but this year full blocks of the ancient structure are visible, giving archaeologists a rare opportunity to study it." The reports adds that drying Tiber has also now also revealed formerly submerged e-bikes, scooters, refrigerators and a car." The CBC reports a dozen Nazi warships scuttled in a river during the Second World War are now resurfacing as water levels plunge. "Elsewhere, the drying Danube has revealed a German military motorcycle in Hungary, an unexploded 700-kilogram British bomb in Slovakia, and what are believed to be the ancient remains of a mammoth in Bulgaria."

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This week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word open letter titled "The Future is for Everyone". But the BBC is more interested in why big tech executives keep writing manifestos about AI: [Zuckerberg's] vision echoes what AI leaders have expressed in various forms: the product they are building is among the "most important technologies in history." Marc Andreessen, co-founder of early web titan Netscape, perhaps started this trend in 2023 with a 5,000-word essay he called "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto", which argued innovation was the way to solve life's problems... As the International Monetary Fund warns AI could affect nearly 40% of jobs and worsen global financial inequality, Zuckerberg says he believes there will be an abundance of jobs in the future. "I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future." Never mind that Zuckerberg's Meta has cut 10% of its global workforce — about 8,000 jobs — as the company reorganizes to focus on AI. Zuckerberg's manifesto is the latest to land in our social media feeds in an effort to put a positive spin on AI. In 2024, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI boss Sam Altman released a manifesto called "The Intelligence Age", a sweeping expression of optimism about the tech's potential... That same year, in a manifesto titled "Machines of Loving Grace", Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei touted the potential of AI to transform everything from healthcare to politics. So what's going on with these tech executives' manifestos? Economics blogger Noah Smith suggested to the BBC "they all feel like it's such an important moment that it's incumbent upon them to do whatever they can to shape the direction that this technology is going." Although he does see some value in their engagement with important issues. "Should we open-source something that has the ability to kill humanity? If you don't take that seriously, you're just a fool." But Rob Lalka, a business professor at Tulane University, had a different explanation for the BBC: Lalka said the timing of Zuckerberg's manifesto coincides with rising anger over AI's impact on everything from jobs to the environment. And while tech journalists and academics might pore over them trying to glean nuggets of meaning, these executive manifestos are not necessarily landing with the general public. "They're trying to make the case that the positives will far outweigh some of those negatives that the public backlash is pointing out," he said. "But I think a lot of the reasons for optimism are still yet to be seen."

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