Reuters reports: Incoming British prime minister Andy Burnham will scrap the government's troubled plans for a digital ID scheme when he enters office on Monday, a spokesperson for the new Labour Party leader said. Resources devoted to the scheme, deemed a "fiasco" by a cross-party committee of lawmakers, will be redirected to Burnham's priorities, the spokesperson said... "All the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it's most needed, such as helping with the cost of living," Burnham's spokesperson said. In November, the Office for Budget Responsibility watchdog estimated the cost of the digital ID scheme at around £1.8 billion ($2.4 billion) between financial years 2026/27 and 2028/29.

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"Approximately half of Gen Z and millennials who have purchased a CD do not own a CD player," according to midyear sales statistics from entertainment data company Luminate. It's driven in part by "collection building", according to their report [PDF]: The CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible. This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist as it is listening to the music on the product itself "Among artists who had a direct impact on the resurgence of CDs, K-Pop icons BTS' 10th studio album, ARIRANG, was a big seller," Vice points out in their report on the new data. "However, Luminate also found that, beyond K-Pop's overall influence, CD sales still increased 6.7% year over year, even if the whole genre was removed from the equation, jumping 16% to 16.3 million units." That's more than the growth of vinyl sales (2.4%) — but physical media in general seems to be making a comeback: Through the first half of the year, total physical album sales on vinyl, CDs, and cassettes reached 38.2 million units in the United States. This equates to a 7.8% increase.... [I]t seems that younger music fans have been driving a lot of the retro revival. The report shows that in 2026, 60% of Gen Z listeners said they most often listen to music from the 1990s and older. This is a massive increase from the 18 percent marker in 2021. The new report also revealed that the way music fans are buying physical media has shifted. Indie record stores have been the largest generator of physical album sales for some time, and they continue to be. However, big-box stores like Target and Walmart took significant strides in the first half of 2026. Collectively, their music sales made up about 30% of the market. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

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"One of the most interesting BSD variants of the 2010s, NextBSD, has come back to life under new management," reports The Register: Aside from the homepage, there's a GitHub repository — but beware, this is separate from the old one, whose repo is still there although the most recent changes were seven years ago. The new project also has a project history giving credit where it's due. The main man behind the revival is Joe Maloney, known on GitHub as pkgdemon. In case his name rings a bell, we've mentioned him before: he put together the Gershwin desktop in GhostBSD. Soon after we covered Gershwin on GhostBSD, he asked the maintainers if he could take over the NextBSD project. He did have a relatively minor role in the original — you can see his list of commits. The original NextBSD project was started by FreeBSD co-founder Jordan Hubbard in 2015 — its Wikipedia article has some of the history. The plan was to port some of the components of Apple's Darwin OS to FreeBSD... [T]he NextBSD plan is to take the FreeBSD kernel, the most capable of the FOSS BSD kernels, but replace FreeBSD's traditional and server-focused userland with the relevant parts of the publicly available Apple code. The rebooted NextBSD-redux is not based on a fork of the decade-old code. FreeBSD has moved on substantially in that time, and so have macOS and Darwin. This is a new project by a new developer, but it picks up the same overall plan, aims to assemble the same puzzle pieces, and shares the same intended goal. In places, it does draw on a little of the same code, though. The NextBSD-redux README describes what's working so far, with a lot more detail in the porting notes. Although there's no graphical desktop yet, that's underway as well.... For us, perhaps the key aspect of NextBSD — both the original version and NextBSD-redux — is that it isn't an effort to build something completely new from scratch. It's an effort to cherry-pick and combine elements of existing separate FOSS projects, and assemble them into a useful whole. The Team section of the homepage lists two core developers: Maloney and Anthropic's Claude Code. "From my perspective, AI is a force multiplier here," Maloney told The Register. "It is my team of developers, but I am steering the entire thing."

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In a sign of our times, CNBC's Jim Cramer "said Wednesday that it's time for companies to prove artificial intelligence is paying off," reports CNBC: "I need cold hard return facts," the "Mad Money" host said. "Or, I, too, will grow more skeptical than I am now...." While Cramer said he remains optimistic about the long-term opportunity, he argued the market needs more evidence that those investments are translating into measurable financial returns for customers. Cramer said one of his biggest concerns this earnings season is that companies adopting AI have largely failed to point to meaningful revenue gains or cost savings from the technology. "We're still early in the earnings season but already we are not hearing anything material about the use of AI," he said... While AI infrastructure companies continue to benefit from the spending boom, Cramer said the same cannot yet be said for many of the businesses buying the technology... Cramer said only a handful of companies, most notably fintech firm Block and web-security provider Cloudflare, have clearly attributed recent layoffs to AI adoption. Block did so in February, while Cloudflare's job cuts were disclosed in May. Plus, critics argue some companies may also cite AI as a buzzy excuse for cuts, leading to the creation of the term "AI washing." Ultimately, Cramer said that if more businesses do not begin reporting tangible returns, the AI skeptics will grow louder, with ramifications for the tech industry's big spenders.

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Launched in 2006, NASA's New Horizons probe flew by the planet Pluto in 2015. But this week it "awakened from its longest sleep ever," reports CNN. It's now 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth... NASA's New Horizons spacecraft went into a planned hibernation mode on August 7, 2025, and woke up on June 23 using commands stored on its main computer. The mission's flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed that New Horizons is in great shape and ready to transmit a stream of science data gathered during hibernation from its location in the region of icy objects known as the Kuiper Belt. Pluto is the largest of thousands of frozen, rocky bodies called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, that exist in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system — remnants from its formation 4.5 billion years ago... The spacecraft is capturing data about the rotation rates, orientations and shapes... The measurements provide insights into how planets are born from dust and pebbles, said Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "There seems to be more paired, snowman-shaped bodies, like Arrokoth, out there than anyone expected," Brandt wrote in an email. "Are such binaries the most common planetesimal and is this how larger planets have been built in our own and other stellar systems? These are very deep questions that New Horizons can help answer." The spacecraft also measures the distribution of gas in the outer heliosphere, the expansive, protective bubble formed by a steady stream of particles that release from the sun called the solar wind. Meanwhile, an instrument called the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation is measuring galactic cosmic rays, extremely fast particles created when stars explode. The particles pose one of the more severe threats for human activities in space, Brandt said, but the boundary of the heliosphere acts as a shield to protect our solar system from 70% of them. New Horizons' data could help scientists learn more about how this puzzling shielding works, he said. Another instrument, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, has collected data that has thrown New Horizon's team a curveball, Brandt said. The team expected dust abundance to be high within the Kuiper Belt due to the significant presence of small objects. But New Horizons has traveled beyond the known boundary of the Kuiper Belt — and it's still in a dusty environment.

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Thursday the union that helped organize thousands of workers across numerous Microsoft-owned video game studios filed unfair labor complaints against Microsoft over the layoffs of 1,600 employees. The gaming news site Aftermath says the complaints allege unlawful action: "Xbox management is required to bargain with the union over the decision of layoffs prior to implementing them during the status quo period, and we are pursuing every available avenue to protect our members," a Communications Workers of America spokesperson said in a statement to Aftermath... Speaking to Game Developer, CWA Canada president Carmel Smyth elaborated on the unions' misgivings... "Basically the employer cannot arbitrarily change working conditions while it is engaged in negotiating with the union. We will continue to file legal challenges if necessary, and do all we can to defend the rights of Bethesda Game Studios workers...." "I'm very proud of the hard work the bargaining committees and CWA staff have put in to evaluate the legality of how the layoffs were conducted," a current id Software employee and union member told Aftermath. "It's important, even for the world's largest and most profitable companies, that there are consequences for violating federal labor law. If we hadn't explored this avenue to hold Microsoft accountable, it would be a sign to all other game executives that they can break the law and get away with it." Legal action is just one part of unions' larger effort to hold Microsoft accountable for its decision to lay off thousands of workers. This week, CWA also hosted a series of "Save Our Devs" demonstrations outside the offices of affected studios like Zenimax, id Software, Bethesda, and Obsidian.

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Last year just 0.6% of new vehicles made for U.S. customers were stick shifts, reports the Washington Post, citing preliminary government data. "That's a precipitous drop from the 34.6 percent of vehicles with manual transmissions produced in 1980." [T]he stick shift's popularity hit multiple new lows in recent years, with no signs of a turnaround, thanks to new technologies and a rapidly changing marketplace. Buyers and automakers increasingly have turned to the sophisticated automatic drivetrains that now smoothly swap gears in fractions of a second and with better fuel efficiency. The average new vehicle today comes with seven gears, thanks to computers, twice as many as in 1980 and more gears than any ordinary driver would want to shift through using a manual gearbox. At the same time, sporty cars — the kind that buyers might demand a stick shift to drive — have fallen out of favor, replaced by interest in hulking SUVs, which are almost always automatics. The stick shift's demise has been hastened, too, by the rise of electric vehicles and increasingly autonomous vehicles. Neither have any need for a manual transmission... Europe has seen a less dramatic decline in stick shifts, with manual transmissions dropping from 91 percent of car registrations in 2001 to 29 percent in 2024 among Europe's largest auto markets, according to industry analyst JATO Dynamics... Subaru made its name with manual cars. But the Japanese automaker stopped offering a manual Crosstrek with the 2023 model year, having already dropped that transmission from its Legacy, Outback and Forester models. Other automakers have followed the same path. Volkswagen announced that it plans this year to ditch its last U.S. stick-shift model, the Jetta GLI. Even Toyota, Honda, and BMW have all reduced the number of cars for the U.S. market with a manual transmission, the article points out — leaving stick shift-loving Americans with a total of about 24 new-vehicle models to choose from. The articles adds that only 60% of Americans know how to drive a manual transmission (according to a survey from auto parts retailer AmericanMuscle): 83% for baby boomers but 39% for Gen Z. "Respondents were about evenly split on whether knowing how to drive a manual is an important life skill." But Ford CEO Jim Farley said earlier this year he has no plans to make the Mustang automatic-only. "Out of our cold, dead hands will we not have a manual Mustang." Farley said.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: Officials in Kansas City, Missouri, are preparing to equip cameras on some public buses with facial recognition software capable of identifying passengers who appear on a list of banned riders or missing persons. Supporters and opponents alike view the effort as a major litmus test for tapping the AI-powered software on a U.S. public transportation system, positioning Kansas City as the latest epicenter of a fierce debate over whether the safety benefits of artificial intelligence are worth the privacy costs. "The idea of running face recognition on a camera that is pointed on live spaces in public is a line that until recently has never really been crossed in the last 25 years," said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the Project on Speech, Privacy and Technology at the American Civil Liberties Union. The state of Missouri declined to help fund the project as expected due to concerns with the facial recognition component. Still, the city is pushing ahead with local and federal money, said Tyler Means, chief mobility and strategy officer at the Kansas City Transportation Authority. "Privacy is always a tricky thing," Means said. "We've always had cameras on our buses. It's just new technology. I think in time it'll smooth over and people will realize, 'Well, it didn't really feel any different'...." Images captured by cameras aboard the buses would immediately be checked against any active alerts, generated when a missing person, banned rider or someone on a law enforcement watch list designated by the transportation authority is identified... After the buses return to the depot, the transportation authority would archive the regular video footage on a local server for up to five years. The company partnering with Kansas City to run the cameras "started using live facial recognition years ago to alert nursing homes when residents left the building," according to the article, and then "brought the technology to correctional institutions and schools." But this is its first attempt at bringing its cameras onto public transportation. The article also includes this quote from Will Owen, communications director for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. "City residents should not be guinea pigs for transit systems to test Silicon Valley's latest unproven, biased surveillance tech."

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In January a college student posted a video showing him winning $100,000 on Polymarket — one of 145 that appeared to show bets adding up to almost $410,000, reports the Wall Street Journal. "But none of those bets were real." Instead its creator was "one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film themselves making fake trades and sometimes scoring fake wins," the Journal reports, citing interviews with the creators an an analysis of more than 1,100 of their videos: Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket. To get the videos to go viral, Polymarket has recruited a social-media army to copy and re-post creators' footage. Though the New York-based company has been banned from offering its primary crypto platform in the U.S. since 2022, the social-media creators are paid to specifically target U.S. users, who can still access the site with a virtual private network... Polymarket hired and worked closely with a marketing contractor to promote the site. In a message reviewed by the Journal, that contractor told its social-media army to repost content made by 10 Polymarket creators in particular... These creators didn't initially identify themselves as paid by Polymarket, although one offered a $20 bonus code in his social-media bio... The company instructed creators not to disclose they are paid, according to creators who have worked with the company. They said the pay often added up to $2,000 to $3,000 a month... A handful of videos the Journal reviewed also contained short glimpses of URLs indicating the sites were test environments for Polymarket engineers... Creators said they send the finished videos to Polymarket for review. If a video isn't engaging enough, or if it bears obvious signs of being faked, Polymarket will ask for the videos to be reshot, the creators said... Polymarket sends creators bullet-point guidance on what to say, according to creators who have worked with the company and a recruiting website... Polymarket's viral clipping campaign racked up more than 140 million views on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, according to the analytics provider Tubular... Internal materials show that Polymarket and Virality promote videos showing how easy it is to conduct insider trades on the platform. Polymarket has paid clippers to promote at least 19 videos discussing opportunities to use inside information or other tactics to manipulate markets. America's advertising laws "require people who are paid to endorse a product to disclose their ties," the article notes, "although there is some gray area about what's permitted." (After the Journal's investigation, the creators started adding "@polymarket partner" to their bios, the article points out._ And when asked for a comment, Polymarket "said it plans to conduct a comprehensive audit of active promotional content."

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The gaming news site Aftermath reports: Four gamers are suing Sony Interactive Entertainment for allegedly breaking a California law that requires digital storefronts selling games to make it clear people are buying licenses, not actually owning the games. Sony Interactive Entertainment's PlayStation store uses language like "Buy Now" and "Confirm Purchase," lawyers wrote in a complaint filed on Thursday... "In reality, consumers who 'purchase' digital games through PlayStation do not obtain ownership of those products," lawyers wrote. "Instead, PlayStation grants only a limited, revocable license to access the software, subject to multiple restrictions contained in a separate Software Product License Agreement".... [T]he PlayStation store does have a disclosure. Above the "Confirm Purchase" button, there's a note: "By selecting [Confirm Purchase], you agree to complete the purchase in accordance with the PlayStation Terms of Service before using this content. You further acknowledge that your purchase of this digital product amounts to a license subject to the Software Product License Agreement." These four gamers aren't satisfied with that; they said in the complaint that it's too small, and that "a reasonable customer completing a purchase would not necessarily notice this disclosure." "It's a proposed class action complaint, meaning the group of four gamers is asking a judge to grant them class action status."

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The Wall Street Journal reports on internet-connected devices — and how every year millions of them "can contain a secret digital backdoor that opens up access to your home internet, so that anyone... can surf the web as if they were you." (And this is especially true for "knockoffs that you buy online"...) In a video report this week they tested two digital picture frames from Amazon and three streaming devices from Walmart "because we heard that they often ship with backdoor software used in cyberattacks. Security experts believe manufacturers are being paid to add this malware, but many people also get tricked into downloading the software onto their phones or computers... Within minutes of turning the devices on, there was a surge of internet traffic... Visits to gambling, porn, cryptocurrency and loads of other sketchy web sites started pouring in from users around the world." (And remote visitors also tried to access Outlook and Gmail accounts...) Residential proxy companies even rent out access to "tens of millions of home networks around the world," according to the report. "But the problem is actually worse than that. Hackers figured out a way to seize control of these backdoors, and they started taking over these residential networks. Last month authorities arrested a 23-year-old Ottawa man, saying he'd taken control of more than a million devices to launch some of the largest cyberattacks anyone had ever seen.." After a couple months the Journal's reporter collected logs of all the traffic, and sent it to an investigator at Comcast, who said both were conducting DDoS attacks. But estimate for the number of infected devices are as low as tens of millions or as high 500 million-plus. "We've seen nation state attacks launched through these kind of endpoints, which means your device sitting in your house is part of a nation state attack against another nation state... We've seen ad fraud, we've seen ticket scalping, we've seen financial fraud." But more importantly, "We have seen some of the largest computer attacks — meaning computers attacking other computers at human request — ever recorded in our digital history in the last several months." At cybersecurity conferences, some are warning "there are much larger ones on the horizon if we don't get a hold of this problem." The company making the picture frame "couldn't be reached for comment," while Amazon said it's been out of stock since last year. Both Amazon and Walmart said they take action when they confirm malware on a third-party product.

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This week OpenAI announced a 750-task test to to measure "whether AI systems can support realistic life science research tasks, not just answer biology questions." But while OpenAI's top-performing GPT-Rosalind model led the rankings, Slashdot reader BrianFagioli notes that "it achieved a pass rate of just 36.1 percent, failing nearly two-thirds of benchmark tasks." Nerds.xyz points out that means "the best-performing model failed nearly two-thirds of the benchmark's tasks." The benchmark also revealed a familiar weakness. AI systems generally perform better when everything is presented as text. Once they are forced to work with supporting documents, figures, or complex datasets, performance drops noticeably. GPT-Rosalind's pass rate fell from 45.1 percent on text-only tasks to 28.1 percent on tasks involving artifacts or URLs. To be fair, the benchmark is not intended to suggest AI is useless in research. Quite the opposite. OpenAI found that models are becoming increasingly capable of scientific communication, evidence synthesis, and translating research findings into practical explanations. Those are valuable skills, particularly for researchers drowning in information. But LifeSciBench serves as a useful reminder that today's AI systems are still far from autonomous scientists. They can help. They can assist. They can sometimes provide surprisingly useful insights. What they cannot reliably do, however, is replace the expertise, judgment, and skepticism that real scientific research requires.

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Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording. "Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack," Jack Copeland wrote in an article for IEEE Spectrum, "Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack." More from Popular Mechanics: Turingâ(TM)s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes âoewas a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.â The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well... [T]he reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isnâ(TM)t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasnâ(TM)t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turingâ(TM)s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turingâ(TM)s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.

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Long-time tech pundit Robert Cringely started his career at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab back in 1978. Last month 73-year-old Cringely explained why his site went on a two-year hiatus — and it's not just because of a heart attack and a stroke last July: Just like everyone else, I've been busy all this time on Artificial Intelligence, founding with two partners a company called 2Brains... The work we were doing together is unfinished, but it's not stopped. The patents are filed, the architecture is documented, and the small team continuing the work includes me. Cringely's first piece made the cast that "the trillion-dollar bet the AI industry is making right now may be wrong, and that there's an architectural alternative we've patented and built." In Machines of Loving Grace, Amodei made the case that scaling compute would eventually solve essentially every hard problem in artificial intelligence. Buried in that optimism — or maybe not buried, maybe right out in the open — was a quiet absolution. Hallucinations, the embarrassing tendency of these systems to state falsehoods with total confidence, would take care of themselves. Make the models big enough, train them long enough, and the problem dissolves. You don't have to solve it. You just have to wait, and spend. And so the entire AI industry breathed a sigh of relief. I have spent forty years watching this industry, and I know a permission slip when I see one. Because that is what the essay became, whatever Amodei intended. It gave every other person writing nine- and ten-figure checks a reason not to worry about the one thing that should worry them most. The hallucination problem is the difference between a clever toy and a system a hospital or a bank or a court can actually rely on. It is the whole ballgame for enterprise AI. And the prevailing wisdom, blessed from the top, is that you needn't address it directly. Scale will provide... A small company I helped start, 2Brains Inc., set out in 2022 to solve hallucinations — before ChatGPT, before the scaling consensus hardened into received truth, back when the polite assumption was that the problem was simply insurmountable. We did not solve it by waiting for bigger models. We solved it architecturally, by separating the part of the system that generates language from the part that retrieves and verifies facts, and reconciling the two before anything reaches the user. It runs on ordinary processors. It is cheap. And on the industry's own benchmark for this kind of faithfulness, it more than doubles the published baseline, with no fabricated facts in the verified case at all. The article asks whether scaling will, at tremendous cost, eventually reduce hallucinations — or even worse, if the largest companies in the world "are spending a fortune chasing a cure that is not coming." And last week Cringely pitched more advantages for their solution, noting that most prompts aren't even chatbot-level creative prompts — but just requests to retrieve simple data: The reason 2Brains doesn't lie and the reason it's cheap are the same reason. It looks the fact up instead of guessing it — so it cannot fabricate, and the lookup runs on a processor that sips power instead of a chip that gulps it. Trust and thrift are not a trade-off you balance against each other. They fall out of a single design decision. You do not pay extra for the honest version. The honest version is the cheap version. That sentence is the whole company.

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CNBC reports: Waymo is recalling almost 3,900 robotaxis in the U.S. to fix software issues after some cars drove into freeway construction zones, according to notices filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The voluntary recall, the Alphabet-owned company's second in just over a month, followed 13 known incidents where Waymo robotaxis drove into construction zones on freeways in Phoenix, or entered freeway lanes with active construction in the San Francisco area, the filings published Thursday said... A letter posted to the regulator's website... noted that, "Driving through a closed construction zone increases the risk of a crash..." [Waymo said in a statement emailed to CNBC] "We voluntarily restricted freeway operations last month while making improvements, proactively notified state and federal regulators, and decided to file a voluntary software recall with NHTSA. We continue to safely serve riders on surface streets in all the cities where we operate...." The company implemented another voluntary recall in May after some of its robotaxis had driven into flooded zones or standing water. The NHTSA Safety Board also initiated a probe of Waymo after a January incident in which a robotaxi illegally passed a stopped school bus.

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CNN reports: An unauthorized alert bearing a mysterious message that was sent to cell phones in several states across Brazil on Saturday morning is suspected to be the work of hackers, the Brazilian government said. Devices lit up with the word "misantropi4," an alphanumeric spelling of the Portuguese word "misantropia," which in English translates to "misanthropy". The final letter "a" was substituted with a number '4' — a practice often used by hackers and termed "leetspeak.". The alert — categorized as "extreme" — was initially received in the southern state of Paraná, but a second warning was triggered a few minutes later for cell phones in the major cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian authorities said that the National Civil Defense's warning platform was taken offline after being targeted by a likely hacker attack, and the government is working to restore the tool once all security conditions are reestablished.

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The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers has published over 800 technical standards over the years (as a professional association for the media and entertainment industry). But this week SMPTE "announced that its complete Standards catalog, the technical backbone behind everything from SDI and timecode to IP-based broadcast workflows, is now freely available to anyone in the global media technology community," reports the filmmaking news site CineD, arguing it's "one of the more meaningful structural shifts we have seen from a standards body in years" that could "reshape how smaller developers and educators engage with professional media technology." The move covers all published Standards, Recommended Practices, Engineering Guidelines and Registered Disclosure Documents, plus every future release, ending a long-standing model in which individual documents often sold for well over $100 each. For more than a century, SMPTE Standards have quietly governed how images and sound move through the production chain. If you have ever recorded timecode in the HH:MM:SS:FF format, routed a signal over 3G-SDI, or built a facility around the ST 2110 suite for media over IP, you have relied on SMPTE specifications, whether you knew it or not... Until now, accessing the actual text of those documents usually meant paying per file, a barrier that this announcement removes entirely... The latest releases are available through the Recently Published Documents page on the SMPTE website, with the complete archive reachable through the SMPTE Standards Library... There is also a practical, behind-the-scenes story here. The open-access move is part of a broader modernization of how SMPTE develops and publishes Standards. Recent initiatives include adopting GitHub-based workflows for version control, issue tracking and automation, transitioning to structured HTML-based authoring, and implementing an integrated publishing pipeline that streamlines document creation, review, validation and release... The most consequential beneficiaries are arguably not the large members already inside the system, but the developers, integrators, educators and manufacturers who previously worked around the paywall... The practical upshot is that developers and emerging markets can build from accurate primary specifications rather than secondhand sources, which matters enormously when a single misread tolerance or metadata field can break compatibility down the line. This also fits a wider pattern of the industry moving toward openness. We have previously covered moments like GoPro's decision to make its CineForm codec open source and release the SDK, a codec that SMPTE itself standardized in 2015 as an open standard for acquisition and post production. Lowering the cost of knowledge tends to widen the pool of people who can contribute to it, and a freely readable standards library is a significant step in that direction for an organization that has historically sat behind a per-document fee. "This was a decision we did not make lightly," says SMPTE President Rich Welsh. But "For 110 years, SMPTE has evolved alongside the media technology industry, helping to drive change and innovation — and we're not stopping now." "Our industry is confronting transformative shifts, from IP-based workflows to AI authenticity and content provenance, and we find ourselves at another inflection point. We listened to our Members, Partners and the global Standards community, and the answer was clear: Interoperability is essential to the future of media. Now is the time to open the gates and ensure the next generation of media technology is built on a stronger, more accessible foundation." Thanks to innocent_white_lamb (Slashdot reader #151,825) for sharing the news.

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Ars Technica's senior security editor reports: Microsoft says it has detected new self-propagating malware that spreads through USB drives in search of cryptocurrency credentials, which it then sends to attacker-controlled servers. The company named the worm Crypto Clipper because it monitors the contents of device clipboards for patterns consistent with wallet addresses or seed phrases. When found, the malware also takes five screenshots over a 10-second period... "The execution of this clipper is notable because it does not depend on a traditional installer or exposed IP-based C2 infrastructure," Microsoft said Thursday. "Instead, it deploys a portable Tor client, routes traffic through a local SOCKS5 proxy, and blends data theft with remote code execution, turning a financially motivated stealer into a lightweight backdoor." Microsoft said it observed Crypto Clipper spreading through .lnk file on a USB drive. These files store executable code. When an infected USB drive is plugged into a device, the code checks whether it is already installed on the machine. If it isn't, the malware downloads it through the Tor proxy. To better conceal evidence of the worm, the malware scans the infected USB drive and names the .lnk files with similar names... The stealer also replaces addresses it finds with ones belonging to attacker-controlled wallets. This allows the malware to divert payments to the attacker's pockets. Microsoft believes the purpose of the screenshots is to provide context that may be useful. "This malware family shows how lightweight, script-based stealers can deliver outsized impact when paired with anonymized communications and runtime tasking," Microsoft said. "The combination of Tor-routed C2, clipboard targeting, screenshot capture, and remote code execution gives attackers both immediate monetization paths and continued control over compromised devices." Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the news.

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The Free Software Foundation's GNU Savannah hosts thousands of free software projects — both GNU and non-GNU projects, including Drupal. But in early May, security researchers from Hacktron.AI reported vulnerabilities and demonstrated an exploit, according to a new statement Friday from the FSF: We have been working with these researchers since their initial report, and have also addressed additional security issues they submitted. All reported issues have been patched thanks to the hard work of GNU and FSF volunteers, as well as FSF staff. After thorough review, we have found no reason to believe that sensitive project data or credentials were accessed, nor that there has been any compromise of Savannah's software supply chain. Nevertheless, we take the security of the GNU system, the tools which make it possible, and the projects we host very seriously. This body of software has become essential to millions (if not billions) of users around the world. We are therefore taking additional precautionary steps. Though the initial security issue was reported to us in early May, the vulnerabilities were discovered in software that was published approximately two years prior. We will be communicating directly with Savannah-hosted projects about steps they can take to review and strengthen the security of their projects. We have also communicated with the other Savane instances we're aware of to assist their review of their own environments, and take any steps needed to help protect their users... This statement is intended as an initial notice. We expect to publish a report on the incident within 30 days. Hacktron.AI bills itself as "Your AI teammate for security." Its web page notes that its investors include Meta, DeepMind, and Perplexity.

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Futurism reports: in a new essay for The Chronicle Higher Education, university-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt recalls how not a single one of his students could get through an assigned 20-page article, something that he had read "without complaint" as an undergraduate a decade ago. One student confessed that the reason they didn't finish was that they kept losing track of what the paper was about. And there's no doubt that they're not alone. Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992. Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment's "basic" level in reading, meaning they likely "cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text." Younger children aren't better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can't read at a proficient level. "What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch," Jagt writes. "There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires...." Jagt cites an MIT study that found users who used ChatGPT during cognitive tasks like writing essays showed lower brain activity in areas associated with creativity compared to students who only used a traditional Google Search or didn't lookup information at all. An astonishing 83 percent of the AI users couldn't quote a single line from the essays they had just written, and capstoning the alarm, the brain activity in the AI users didn't return to normal when they were later asked to write without AI... On our pernicious pocket devices, Jagt touted a 2017 study that found that simply having a smartphone physically nearby — even if it's face down or turned off — reduced available cognitive capacity and impaired cognitive functioning. "So when a student tells me they 'kept losing track' of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition," Jagt wrote. "The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception." Sunday an "Ask Reddit" question went viral — drawing over 11,000 upvotes — for its question to any teachers reading Reddit. "Is the 'Gen Alpha can't read (write, or do math ext)' crisis real? If so how bad is it?" Some responses... "The run of the mill non-honors kids have gotten really bad," posted one high school teacher. "Very low tolerance for working hard, very short attention span, very short stamina for active listening... It's the group that is the most worrying because a decade ago, I'd estimate that maybe 10-20% of kids at a school are like this, and now it's probably 40-50% of each graduating class... Then there's of course the bottom 10-20% kids (excluding the special ed/severe/moderate learning disability kids). This is what the viral videos are about and it's not an exaggeration. They can't read, write, or do very basic math like multiplication or division as a 17 year old." "This is the first year the MAJORITY of my class cheated on their first essays...." posted one high school English teacher. "It was also the first year a kid yelled 'We don't care about your fucking books, Miss!' while I was in front of the class presenting books they might be interested in for their book reviews... Almost all of them cheated on the book review they had to write." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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