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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Trevor Milton, the founder of electric vehicle start-up Nikola who was sentenced to prison last year, was pardoned by Donald Trump late on Thursday, the White House confirmed on Friday. The pardon of Milton, who was sentenced to four years in prison for exaggerating the potential of his technology, could wipe out hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution that prosecutors were seeking for defrauded investors. Milton and his wife donated more than $1.8 million to a Trump re-election campaign fund less than a month before the November election, according to the Federal Election Commission. At Milton's trial, prosecutors say a company video of a prototype truck appearing to be driven down a desert highway was actually a video of a non-functioning Nikola that had been rolled down a hill. Milton had not been incarcerated pending an appeal. Milton said late on Thursday on social media and via a press release that he had been pardoned by Trump. "I am incredibly grateful to President Trump for his courage in standing up for what is right and for granting me this sacred pardon of innocence," Milton said. Here's a timeline of notable events surrounding Nikola: June, 2016: Nikola Motor Receives Over 7,000 Preorders Worth Over $2.3 Billion For Its Electric Truck December, 2016: Nikola Motor Company Reveals Hydrogen Fuel Cell Truck With Range of 1,200 Miles February, 2020: Nikola Motors Unveils Hybrid Fuel-Cell Concept Truck With 600-Mile Range June, 2020: Nikola Founder Exaggerated the Capability of His Debut Truck September, 2020: Nikola Motors Accused of Massive Fraud, Ocean of Lies September, 2020: Nikola Admits Prototype Was Rolling Downhill In Promo Video September, 2020: Nikola Founder Trevor Milton Steps Down as Chairman in Battle With Short Seller October, 2020: Nikola Stock Falls 14 Percent After CEO Downplays Badger Truck Plans November, 2020: Nikola Stock Plunges As Company Cancels Badger Pickup Truck July, 2021: Nikola Founder Trevor Milton Indicted on Three Counts of Fraud December, 2021: EV Startup Nikola Agrees To $125 Million Settlement September, 2022: Nikola Founder Lied To Investors About Tech, Prosecutor Says in Fraud Trial December, 2023: Nikola Founder Trevor Milton Sentenced To 4 Years For Securities Fraud February 19, 2025: Nikola Files for Bankruptcy With Plans To Sell Assets, Wind Down

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An anonymous reader shares a report: New data recently released by the Environmental Protection Agency indicate that more than 158 million people across the U.S. have drinking water contaminated by toxic "forever chemicals," scientifically known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). "Drinking water is a major source of PFAS exposure. The sheer number of contaminated sites shows that these chemicals are likely present in most of the U.S. water supply," said David Andrews, deputy director of investigations and a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit advocacy organization, in a recent press release.

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Smart TV platforms are increasingly monitoring what appears on users' screens through Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology, building detailed viewer profiles for targeted advertising. Roku, which transitioned from a hardware company to an advertising powerhouse, reported $3.5 billion in annual ad revenue for 2024 -- representing 85% of its total income. The company has aggressively acquired ACR-related firms, with Roku-owned technology winning an Emmy in 2023 for advancements in the field. According to market research firm Antenna, 43% of all streaming subscriptions in the United States were ad-supported by late 2024, showing the industry's shift toward advertising-based models. Most users unknowingly consent to this monitoring when setting up their devices. Though consumers can technically disable ACR in their TV settings, doing so often restricts functionality.

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KDE contributor David Edmundson has published a blog post about improving KDE Plasma's login experience by replacing SDDM with a new Plasma Login Manager.

It's worth stressing nothing is official or set in stone yet, whilst it has come up in previous Plasma online meetings and in the 2023 Akademy. I'm posting this whilst starting a more official discussion on the plasma-devel mailing list.

Oliver Beard and I have made a new mutli-process greeter, that uses the same startup mechanism as the desktop session. It doesn't have all the features that we propose at the start of the blog, but an architecture where features and services can be slowly and safely added.

That discussion is here for those who would like to follow along. The prototype is currently in two repositories: plasma-login for the frontend work, and plasma-login-manager, which is a fork of SDDM.

Stanford University researchers have proposed creating "bodyoids" -- ethically sourced human bodies grown from stem cells without neural components for consciousness or pain sensation -- to revolutionize medical research and address organ shortages. In a new opinion piece published in MIT Technology Review, scientists Carsten T. Charlesworth, Henry T. Greely, and Hiromitsu Nakauchi argue that recent advances in biotechnology make this concept increasingly plausible. The approach would combine pluripotent stem cells, artificial uterus technology, and genetic techniques to inhibit brain development. The researchers point to persistent shortages of human biological materials as a major bottleneck in medical progress. More than 100,000 patients currently await solid organ transplants in the US alone, while less than 15% of drugs entering clinical trials receive regulatory approval. These lab-grown bodies could potentially generate patient-specific organs that are perfect immunological matches, eliminate the need for lifelong immunosuppression, and provide personalized drug screening models.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Amnesty International published a new report this week detailing attempted hacks against two Serbian journalists, allegedly carried out with NSO Group's spyware Pegasus. The two journalists, who work for the Serbia-based Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), received suspicious text messages including a link -- basically a phishing attack, according to the nonprofit. In one case, Amnesty said its researchers were able to click on the link in a safe environment and see that it led to a domain that they had previously identified as belonging to NSO Group's infrastructure. "Amnesty International has spent years tracking NSO Group Pegasus spyware and how it has been used to target activists and journalists," Donncha O Cearbhaill, the head of Amnesty's Security Lab, told TechCrunch. "This technical research has allowed Amnesty to identify malicious websites used to deliver the Pegasus spyware, including the specific Pegasus domain used in this campaign." To his point, security researchers like O Cearbhaill who have been keeping tabs on NSO's activities for years are now so good at spotting signs of the company's spyware that sometimes all researchers have to do is quickly look at a domain involved in an attack. In other words, NSO Group and its customers are losing their battle to stay in the shadows. "NSO has a basic problem: They are not as good at hiding as their customers think," John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, a human rights organization that has investigated spyware abuses since 2012, told TechCrunch.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A former director of data science at the UK prime minister's office has told MPs that people working with data in government are not typically technical and would be unlikely to get a similar job in the private sector. In a hearing designed to illuminate the challenges facing the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) as it strives to become the digital centre for government, MPs quizzed Laura Gilbert, head of AI for Government, at the Ellison Institute and former director of data science at 10 Downing Street, the prime ministers' office. Members of the House of Common's Science, Innovation and Technology Committee wanted to know about the performance of the Government Digital Service, which in January was moved from the Cabinet Office to DSIT and merged with Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), the Incubator for AI (i.AI). Gilbert, a particle physicist who has worked in a number of tech industry roles, said one of the challenges was understanding the level of tech skills in the civil service in central government.

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Fake movie trailers created with AI are proliferating across YouTube, with some garnering more views than official studio releases -- and Hollywood studios are quietly profiting from the phenomenon rather than shutting it down. Instead of enforcing copyright on these unauthorized videos, Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony Pictures, and Paramount are claiming monetization rights, directing ad revenue from fake trailers for films like "Superman" and "Gladiator II" into studio coffers, according to a Deadline investigation published Friday. YouTube channels like Screen Culture, which has amassed 1.4 billion views, merge official footage with AI-generated imagery to create convincing trailer mockups that frequently rank higher in search results than legitimate studio releases. "Monetizing unauthorized, unwanted, and subpar uses of human-centered IP is a race to the bottom," SAG-AFTRA told Deadline, condemning studios for profiting from content that exploits performers without permission.

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The College Board, described as a $2 billion nonprofit, functions as the primary gatekeeper for academic success within American higher education, according to an analysis by Bloomberg. The organization significantly shapes university admissions by controlling not only who gains entry to college but also influencing what students know upon arrival. This central role in managing and defining higher education admissions positions the Board uniquely. The story adds: The College Board writes the curriculum for 40 AP courses, administers and grades the exams, oversees the PSAT and SAT, and offers a variety of free and paid resources to help prepare for the courses and tests. Many students will wind up paying the company north of $1,000 over the course of their high school career. "If the same people can create the content and create the tests, that's a really great business model where you've got the whole public secondary education system wrapped up in one little company," says Jon Boeckenstedt, the vice provost of enrollment management at Oregon State University and a prominent critic of the College Board. Housing so many parts of the high school experience under one roof has made the New York-based organization immensely wealthy, with more than $1 billion in annual revenue -- on which it pays no taxes as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. But mere money isn't the biggest source of the College Board's might. Twelve decades after its creation, it's now the closest thing the fragmented American educational system has to a central governing body, with a huge amount of authority over what students are expected to know when they get to college. Higher education is arguably the most important driver of social mobility, as well as the most powerful force in selecting which members of the next generation will set the political and cultural agenda. By controlling who gets in and what they know when they get there, the College Board has become the chief gatekeeper of academic success in America.

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In a keynote on the final day of SCALE 22x, Denver Gingerich said that he wanted to talk "a little bit about a router and also the big picture around that router". Gingerich is the director of compliance at the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), which is the organization behind the OpenWrt One router that LWN looked at back in November. The router is, of course, based on firmware from the OpenWrt project, which got its start because of GPL-enforcement activities and is a member project at the SFC.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Staff at the Federal Trade Commission have been instructed to no longer refer to the agency as "independent" in complaints, according to an email obtained by The Verge.

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A Nature survey has found that three-quarters of responding U.S. scientists are considering leaving the nation following disruptions to science under the Trump administration. Out of 1,608 respondents, 75.3% said they were contemplating leaving the country. Scientists cited concerns over research funding and the general treatment of science as contributing factors for their reasoning. Europe and Canada were mentioned as potential destinations for those looking for opportunities abroad.

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As of this writing, 6,653 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline kernel repository for the 6.15 release. This merge window is thus well underway. A number of significant changes have been merged so far; read on for our summary of the first half of the 6.15 merge window.

theodp writes: "As I prepared for a White House meeting last fall on the nation's electricity needs," begins Microsoft President Brad Smith in The Country Needs More Electricity --And More Electricians, a Fox Business op-ed. "I met with the leaders at Microsoft who are building our AI infrastructure across the country. During our discussion, I asked them to identify the single biggest challenge for data center expansion in the U.S. I expected they would mention slow permitting, delays in bringing more power online or supply chain constraints -- all significant challenges. But instead, they highlighted a national shortage of people. Electricians, to be precise." Much as Smith has done in the past as he declared crisis-level shortages of Computer Science, cybersecurity, and AI talent, he's calling for the nation's politicians and educators to step up to the plate and deliver students trained to address the data center expansion plans of Microsoft and Big Tech. "How many new electricians must the U.S. recruit and train over the next decade?" Smith asks. "Probably half a million. [...] The good news is that these are good jobs. The bad news is that we don't have a national strategy to recruit and train the people to fill these jobs. Given the Trump administration's commitment to supporting American workers, American jobs and American innovation, we believe that recruiting and training more electricians should rise to its list of priorities. There are several ways to address this issue, and they deserve consideration. For example, we need to do more as a nation to revitalize the industrial arts and shop classes in American high schools. [...] This should be a priority for local school boards, state governors and appropriate federal support. [..] We must also adopt a broad perspective on where new technology is taking us. The tech sector is most often focused on computer and data science -- people who code. But the future will also be built in critical ways by a new generation of engineers, electricians, plumbers, pipefitters, iron workers, carpenters and other skilled trades. So, is 'Learn to Wire' the new 'Learn to Code'?

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SoftBank Group plans to create industrial parks for AI across the US and is considering an investment of more than $1 trillion, Nikkei reported. From a report: Founder and Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son is expected to visit the US to discuss his ideas for such industrial parks, the newspaper said. The factories would likely use AI-equipped robots that would operate autonomously because of labor shortages in the country, according to the report. Son teamed up with OpenAI and Oracle in January to unveil a $100 billion joint venture to fund AI infrastructure in the US, one of the first such pledges after Donald Trump became president. They said at the time they would deploy $100 billion immediately with the goal of increasing that to at least $500 billion for data centers and physical campuses.

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Security updates have been issued by Debian (mercurial and opensaml), Fedora (augeas, mingw-libxslt, and nodejs-nodemon), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), Red Hat (grafana, kernel, kernel-rt, opentelemetry-collector, and podman), SUSE (apache-commons-vfs2, python3, and python36), and Ubuntu (ghostscript, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-intel-iotg, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-6.11, linux-oracle, linux-realtime, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-aws-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-azure, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.11, linux-oem-6.11, linux-oem-6.8, linux-realtime, smarty, and snakeyaml).

uninet writes: The same year Apple launched the iPhone, it unveiled a massive upgrade to Mac OS X known as Leopard, sporting "300 New Features." Two years later, it did something almost unheard of: it released Snow Leopard, an upgrade all about how little it added and how much it took away. Apple needs to make it snow again. Current releases of MacOS Sequoia and iOS/iPadOS 18 are riddled with easily reproducible bugs in high-traffic areas, the author argues, suggesting Apple's engineers aren't using their own software. Messages can't reliably copy text, email connections randomly fail, and Safari frequently jams up. Even worse are the baffling design decisions, like burying display arrangement settings and redesigning Photos with needless margins and inconsistent navigation. Apple's focus on the Vision Pro while AI advances raced ahead has left them scrambling to catch up, the author argues, with Apple Intelligence features now indefinitely delayed. The author insists that Apple's products still remain better than Windows or Android alternatives -- but "least bad" isn't the premium experience Apple loyalists expect. With its enormous resources, Apple could easily have teams focus on cleaning up existing software while simultaneously developing AI features. Further reading: 'Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino' .

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The Register: Following our report last week on IBM's ongoing layoffs, current and former employees got in touch to confirm what many suspected: The US cuts run deeper than reported, and the jobs are heading to India. IBM's own careers site numbers back that up. On January 7, 2024, Big Blue listed just 173 open positions in India. On November 23, 2024, there were 2,946 jobs available in the nation. At the time of writing, the IT titan listed 3,866 roles in India. American jobs listed for these three periods are 192, 376, and 333, respectively, though at least among those being laid off, there's doubt those roles will be filled with job seekers in the States. A current IBMer who won't be there much longer said that after being told to teach recently hired workers in India "everything I know," the reward was a resource action, or RA -- Big Blue's euphemism for a layoff. After receiving an RA notification, employees typically have a set period of time to apply for open roles elsewhere in the mega-corporation. But just because there are open positions listed in the US doesn't mean IBM is making much of an effort to fill them, we are told.

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As NASA faces potential budget cuts, China is unveiling an ambitious series of deep space missions -- including Mars sample returns, outer planet exploration, and a future Mars base. While some of China's plans are aspirational, their track record of successful missions lends credibility to their expanding role in space. Ars Technica reports: China created a new entity called the "Deep Space Exploration Laboratory" three years ago to strengthen the country's approach to exploring the Solar System. Located in eastern China, not far from Shanghai, the new laboratory represented a partnership between China's national space agency and a local public college, the University of Science and Technology of China. Not much is known outside of China about the laboratory, but it has recently revealed some very ambitious plans to explore the Solar System, including the outer planets. This week, as part of a presentation, Chinese officials shared some public dates about future missions. Space journalist Andrew Jones, who tracks China's space program, shared some images with a few details. Among the planned missions are: - 2028: Tianwen-3 mission to collect samples of Martian soil and rocks and return them to Earth - 2029: Tianwen-4 mission to explore Jupiter and its moon Callisto - 2030: Development of a large, ground-based habitat to simulate long-duration human spaceflight - 2033: Mission to Venus that will return samples of its atmosphere to Earth - 2038: Establishment of an autonomous Mars research station to study in-situ resource utilization - 2039: Mission to Triton, Neptune's largest moon, with a subsurface explorer for its ocean

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