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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Subscribers in Southern California of Spectrum's Internet service experienced outages over the weekend following what company officials said was an attempted theft of copper lines located in Van Nuys, a suburb located 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The people behind the incident thought they were targeting copper lines, the officials wrote in a statement Sunday. Instead, they cut into fiber optic cables. The cuts caused service disruptions for subscribers in Van Nuys and surrounding areas. Spectrum has since restored service and is offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the apprehension of the people responsible. Spectrum will also credit affected customers one day of service on their next bill. "Criminal acts of network vandalism have become an issue affecting the entire telecommunications industry, not just Spectrum, largely due to the increase in the price of precious metals," the officials wrote in a statement issued Sunday. "These acts of vandalism are not only a crime, but also affect our customers, local businesses and potentially emergency services. Spectrum's fiber lines do not include any copper." Outage information service Downdetector showed that thousands of subscribers in and around Van Nuys reported outages starting a little before noon on Sunday. Within about 12 hours, the complaint levels returned to normal. Spectrum officials told the Los Angeles Times that personnel had to splice thousands of fiber lines to restore service to affected subscribers.

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Threads is testing a new feature that lets users hide spoiler content by blurring images or text, which can then be revealed with a tap. The Verge reports: Meta spokesperson Alec Booker told The Verge that this is a "global test," though it's not clear how many people will gain access to it. Spoilers will also look a bit different depending on which device you're using. On desktop, spoilers are hidden by a gray block, but they appear behind a bunch of floating dots on mobile (which you can see in the GIF embedded [here]). "This feature is currently optimized for mobile, but we're working to improve the experience for desktop," Booker said.

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A new Salesforce-led study found that LLM-based AI agents struggle with real-world CRM tasks, achieving only 58% success on simple tasks and dropping to 35% on multi-step ones. They also demonstrated poor confidentiality awareness. "Agents demonstrate low confidentiality awareness, which, while improvable through targeted prompting, often negatively impacts task performance," a paper published at the end of last month said. The Register reports: The Salesforce AI Research team argued that existing benchmarks failed to rigorously measure the capabilities or limitations of AI agents, and largely ignored an assessment of their ability to recognize sensitive information and adhere to appropriate data handling protocols. The research unit's CRMArena-Pro tool is fed a data pipeline of realistic synthetic data to populate a Salesforce organization, which serves as the sandbox environment. The agent takes user queries and decides between an API call or a response to the users to get more clarification or provide answers. "These findings suggest a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the multifaceted demands of real-world enterprise scenarios," the paper said. [...] AI agents might well be useful, however, organizations should be wary of banking on any benefits before they are proven.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: While Silicon Valley executives like those from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI are grabbing headlines for trading their Brunello Cucinelli vests for Army Reserve uniforms, a quieter transformation has been underway in the U.S. Navy. How so? Well, the Navy's chief technology officer, Justin Fanelli, says he has spent the last two and a half years cutting through the red tape and shrinking the protracted procurement cycles that once made working with the military a nightmare for startups. The efforts represent a less visible but potentially more meaningful remaking that aims to see the government move faster and be smarter about where it's committing dollars. "We're more open for business and partnerships than we've ever been before," Fanelli told TechCrunch in a recent episode of StrictlyVC Download. "We're humble and listening more than before, and we recognize that if an organization shows us how we can do business differently, we want that to be a partnership." Right now, many of these partnerships are being facilitated through what Fanelli calls the Navy's innovation adoption kit, a series of frameworks and tools that aim to bridge the so-called Valley of Death, where promising tech dies on its path from prototype to production. "Your granddaddy's government had a spaghetti chart for how to get in," Fanelli said. "Now it's a funnel, and we are saying, if you can show that you have outsized outcomes, then we want to designate you as an enterprise service." In one recent case, the Navy went from a Request for Proposal (RFP) to pilot deployment in under six months with Via, an eight-year-old, Somerville, Massachusetts-based cybersecurity startup that helps big organizations protect sensitive data and digital identities through, in part, decentralization, meaning the data isn't stored in one central spot that can be hacked. (Another of Via's clients is the U.S. Air Force.) The Navy's new approach operates on what Fanelli calls a "horizon" model, borrowed and adapted from McKinsey's innovation framework. Companies move through three phases: evaluation, structured piloting, and scaling to enterprise services. The key difference from traditional government contracting, Fanelli says, is that the Navy now leads with problems rather than predetermined solutions. "Instead of specifying, 'Hey, we'd like this problem solved in a way that we've always had it,' we just say, 'We have a problem, who wants to solve this, and how will you solve it?'" Fanelli said.

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Thousands of American investors have lost millions of dollars to sophisticated pump-and-dump schemes involving small Chinese companies listed on Nasdaq, prompting the Justice Department to declare the fraud a priority under the Trump administration's white-collar enforcement program. The scams recruit victims through social media ads and WhatsApp messages, directing them to purchase shares in obscure Chinese firms whose stock prices are artificially inflated before collapsing. Since 2020, nearly 60 China-based companies have conducted initial public offerings on Nasdaq raising $15 million or less each, with more than one-third experiencing sudden single-day price drops exceeding 50%. In one recent case, seven traders earned over $480 million by defrauding 600 victims who purchased shares in China Liberal Education Holdings.

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The Kubernetes project has announced that it will be losing its "special status" with the Slack communication platform and will be downgraded to the free tier in a matter of days:

On Friday, June 20, we will be subject to the feature limitations of free Slack. The primary ones which will affect us will be only retaining 90 days of history, and having to disable several apps and workflows which we are currently using. The Slack Admin team will do their best to manage these limitations.

The project has a FAQ covering the change, its impacts, and more. The CNCF projects staff has proposed a move to the Discord service as the best option to handle the more than 200,000 users and thousands of posts per day from the Kubernetes community. The Kubernetes Steering Committee will be making its decision "in the next few weeks".

Tensions between OpenAI and Microsoft over the future of their famed AI partnership are flaring up. WSJ, minutes ago: OpenAI wants to loosen Microsoft's grip on its AI products and computing resources, and secure the tech giant's blessing for its conversion into a for-profit company. Microsoft's approval of the conversion is key to OpenAI's ability to raise more money and go public. But the negotiations have been so difficult that in recent weeks, OpenAI's executives have discussed what they view as a nuclear option: accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior during their partnership, people familiar with the matter said. That effort could involve seeking federal regulatory review of the terms of the contract for potential violations of antitrust law, as well as a public campaign, the people said.

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Researchers are cautioning users against clicking unsubscribe links embedded in email bodies, citing new data showing such actions can expose recipients to malicious websites and confirm active email addresses to attackers. DNSFilter found that one in every 644 clicks on unsubscribe links leads users to potentially malicious websites. "You've left the safe, structured environment of your email client and entered the open web," TK Keanini, DNSFilter's chief technology officer, told WSJ. The risks range from confirming to bad actors that an email address belongs to an active user to redirecting victims to fake websites designed to steal login credentials or install malware. Clicking such links "can make you a bigger target in the future," said Michael Bargury, CTO of security company Zenity.

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A Dutch court on Monday confirmed a 2021 consumer watchdog's ruling saying that Apple had abused its dominant position by imposing unfair conditions on providers of dating apps in the App Store. From a report: The Rotterdam District Court ruled that the Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) was therefore right to impose an order subject to a penalty for non-compliance. The court ruled that ACM was right in finding that dating app providers had to use Apple's own payment system, were not allowed to refer to payment options outside the App Store, and had to pay a 30% commission (15% for small providers) to Apple.

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Version 2.50.0 of the Git source-code management system has been released with a long list of new user features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. See the announcement and this GitHub blog post for details.

Microsoft has disabled Windows Hello's ability to authenticate users in low-light environments through a recent security update that now requires both infrared sensors and color cameras to verify faces. The change forces the system to see a visible face through the webcam before completing authentication with IR sensors. Windows Hello earlier relied solely on infrared sensors to create 3D facial scans, allowing the feature to work in complete darkness similar to iPhone's Face ID. Microsoft pushed the dual-camera requirement to address a spoofing vulnerability in the biometric system.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Japan is the latest nation hoping to tempt disgruntled US researchers alarmed by the Trump administration's hostile attitude to academia to relocate to the Land of the Rising Sun. The Japanese government aims to create an elite research environment, and has detailed a $693 million package to attract researchers from abroad, including those from America who may have seen their budgets slashed or who fear a clampdown on their academic freedom.

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Researchers have built a breakthrough random number generator that solves a critical problem: for the first time, every step of creating random numbers can be independently verified and audited, with quantum physics guaranteeing the numbers were truly unpredictable. Random numbers are essential for everything from online banking encryption to fair lottery drawings, but current systems have serious limitations. Computer-based generators follow predictable algorithms -- if someone discovers the starting conditions, they can predict all future outputs. Hardware generators that measure physical processes like electronic noise can't prove their randomness wasn't somehow predetermined or tampered with. The new system, developed by teams at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, uses quantum entanglement -- Einstein's "spooky action at a distance" -- to guarantee unpredictability. The setup creates pairs of photons that share quantum properties, then sends them to measurement stations 110 meters apart. When researchers measure each photon's properties, quantum mechanics ensures the results are fundamentally random and cannot be influenced by any classical communication between the stations. The team created a system called "Twine" that distributes the random number generation process across multiple independent parties, with each step recorded in tamper-proof digital ledgers called hash chains. This means no single organization controls the entire process, and anyone can verify that proper procedures were followed. During a 40-day demonstration, the system successfully generated random numbers in 7,434 of 7,454 attempts -- a 99.7% success rate. Each successful run produced 512 random bits with mathematical certainty of randomness bounded by an error rate of 2^-64, an extraordinarily high level of confidence.

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The Trump Organization on Monday unveiled a mobile phone plan and a $499 smartphone that is set to launch in September. CNBC: The new service, Trump Mobile, will offer a $47.45-per-month plan that includes "unlimited" talk, text and data, as well as roadside assistance and a "Telehealth and Pharmacy Benefit," according to its website. The company, owned by President Donald Trump, also announced it will sell a "T1" smartphone, which appears to feature a gold-colored metal case etched with an American flag.

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Microsoft's latest Windows 11 preview builds contain a bug that replaces the operating system's startup sound with Windows Vista's iconic boot chime from 2006. Microsoft acknowledged the bug in its release notes -- describing it as a "delightful blast from the past" -- and said it was working on a fix.

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Pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk forfeited patent protection for semaglutide -- the active ingredient in blockbuster diabetes and weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy -- in Canada after failing to pay a $450 maintenance fee in 2019. The company had paid maintenance fees through 2018 but requested a refund for the 2017 fee, apparently seeking more time to decide whether to continue protecting the patent. When the 2019 fee came due at $450 with late penalties, Novo never paid despite having a one-year grace period. Canadian patent authorities confirmed the patent "cannot be revived" once lapsed. The oversight is particularly costly given Canada represents the world's second-largest semaglutide market, worth billions annually. Generic drugmaker Sandoz plans to launch a competing version in early 2026, while Novo's U.S. patent protection extends until at least 2032.

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At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Anna Schumaker led a discussion about implementing the NFS v4.2 WRITE_SAME command in both the NFS client and server. WRITE_SAME is meant to write large amounts of identical data (e.g. zeroes) to the server without actually needing to transfer all of it over the wire. In her topic proposal, Schumaker wondered whether other filesystems needed the functionality, so that it should be implemented at the virtual filesystem (VFS) layer, or whether it should simply be handled as an NFS-specific ioctl().

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0 and .NET 9.0), Arch Linux (curl, ghostscript, go, konsole, python-django, roundcubemail, and samba), Fedora (aerc, chromium, golang-x-perf, libkrun, python3.11, python3.12, rust-kbs-types, rust-sev, rust-sevctl, valkey, and wireshark), Gentoo (Konsole and sysstat), Oracle (.NET 9.0), Red Hat (bootc, grub2, keylime-agent-rust, python3.12-cryptography, rpm-ostree, rust-bootupd, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, docker, grub2, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, less, python-Django, screen, and sqlite3), and Ubuntu (cifs-utils and modsecurity-apache).

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, the messaging app had a clear focus. No ads, no games and no gimmicks. For years, that is what WhatsApp's two billion users -- many of them in Brazil, India and other countries around the world -- got. They chatted with friends and family unencumbered by advertising and other features found on social media. Now that is set to change. On Monday, WhatsApp said it would start showing ads inside its app for the first time. The promotions will appear only in an area of the app called Updates, which is used by around 1.5 billion people a day. WhatsApp will collect some data on users to target the ads, such as location and the device's default language, but it will not touch the contents of messages or whom users speak with. The company added that it had no plans to place ads in chats and personal messages. [...] In-app ads are a significant change from WhatsApp's original philosophy. Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who founded WhatsApp in 2009, were committed to building a simple and quick way for friends and family to communicate with end-to-end encryption, a method of keeping texts, photos, videos and phone calls inaccessible by third parties. Both left the company seven years ago. Since then, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, now Meta, has focused on WhatsApp's growth and user privacy while also melding the app into the company's other products, including Instagram and Messenger.

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"Walmart is bringing drone deliveries to three more states," reports CNBC: On Thursday, the big-box retailer said it plans to launch the speedier delivery option at 100 stores in Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando and Tampa within the coming year. With the expansion, Walmart's drone deliveries will be available in a total of five states: [parts of northwest] Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and [the Dallas-Fort Worth area of] Texas... The drone operator will have an up to a six-mile range from stores. Walmart tells CNBC the most frequently delivered items include ice cream, fresh fruit, and pet food, as well as "urgent items, such as hamburger buns for a cookout, eggs to make brownies or Tylenol or cold medicine needed when sick." It's all part of Walmart's effort to compete with Amazon: With more than 4,600 Walmart stores across the U.S., the retailer has used its large footprint to get online orders to customers faster. It has an Express Delivery service that drops purchases at customers' doors in as fast as 30 minutes, along with InHome, a subscription-based service, that puts items directly into people's fridges. The company began same-day prescription deliveries last fall and has expanded the service across the country.... Walmart stores have an assortment of over 150,000 items in a location. Over 50% of those can be delivered by drone, said Greg Cathey [Walmart's senior VP for U.S. transformation and innovation]... Walmart's drone delivery count so far is modest. The company did not share the specific count, but said it has racked up a total of more than 150,000 drone deliveries since 2021.

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