An anonymous reader quotes a report from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee police are mulling a trade: 2.5 million mugshots for free use of facial recognition technology. Officials from the Milwaukee Police Department say swapping the photos with the software firm Biometrica will lead to quicker arrests and solving of crimes. But that benefit is ...

Three Democratic senators are sounding the alarm over brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies' ability to collect -- and potentially sell -- our neural data. From a report: In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Maria Cantwell (D-IN), and Ed Markey (D-MA) called for an investigation into neurotechnology companies' ...

The sale of bankrupt DNA data bank 23andMe is delayed as the company struggles to secure a lead bidder who can meet regulatory and privacy requirements, pushing the initial auction deadline from Friday to Monday. Seeking Alpha reports: 23andMe Holdings (OTC:MEHCQ), currently in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, is requiring that any potential bidders for ...

Huawei is gearing up to test its newest and most powerful AI processor, which the company hopes could replace some higher-end products of U.S. chip giant Nvidia. From a WSJ report: Huawei has approached some Chinese tech companies about testing the technical feasibility of the new chip, called the Ascend 910D, people familiar with the matter said. The ...

Inventor James Dyson described his career as "a life of failure" in a recent Wall Street Journal interview, citing setbacks as drivers of innovation. The 77-year-old creator of the bagless vacuum cleaner, who built a $16.8 billion fortune according to Bloomberg's Billionaire Index, created 5,127 prototypes over five years before successfully launching his ...

Researchers claiming affiliation with the University of Zurich secretly deployed AI-powered bots in a popular Reddit forum to test whether AI could change users' minds on contentious topics. The unauthorized experiment, which targeted the r/changemyview subreddit, involved bots making over 1,700 comments across several months while adopting fabricated ...

IBM announced plans to invest $150 billion in the United States over the next five years, with more than $30 billion earmarked specifically for research and development of mainframes and quantum computing technology. The investment follows similar commitments from tech giants including Apple and Nvidia -- each pledging approximately $500 billion -- in the ...

Ruby on Rails creator and Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson, makes a case for why Google shouldn't be forced to sell Chrome: First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet. This wasn't some opportune acquisition. This was the result of grand investments, great technical prowess, and markets doing what ...

Widespread power outages were reported Monday in parts of Spain, Portugal and France, affecting critical infrastructure like airports and causing transportation disruptions. From a report: "The interruption was due to a problem in the European electricity grid," E-Redes, the national energy supplier of Portugal, said in a statement. In addition to Portugal, ...

Sales of electric vehicles in America jumped 10.6% in the first three months of 2025 (compared to the same period in 2024), reports Bloomberg. And research provider BloombergNEF expects all of 2025 will see a 31.5% sales increase from 2024's sales in the U:S. — slightly above the global increase rate of 30%. (That's 22 million battery-powered vehicles ...

"A new study found that a gene recently recognized as a biomarker for Alzheimer's disease is actually a cause of it," announced the University of California, San Diego, "due to its previously unknown secondary function." "Researchers at the University of California San Diego used artificial intelligence to help both unravel this mystery of Alzheimer's ...

A new DARPA project called expMath "aims to jumpstart math innovation with the help of AI," writes The Register. America's "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency" believes mathematics isn't advancing fast enough, according to their article... So to accelerate — or "exponentiate" — the rate of mathematical research, DARPA this week held a Proposers ...

Remember First Light Fusion? Founded in 2011, it was a pioneering British startup that in 2022 "successfully combined atomic nuclei, which U.K. regulators called a milestone in the decades-long push for fusion energy. It's now "pulled the plug on plans to build its first reactor," reports the Telegraph, abandoning its push for a prototype power plant ...

Its goal was to "support workers to reclaim the power of future-making". A 2022 pilot project saw over 25 Amazon workers meeting online "to discuss how science fiction shed light on their working conditions and futures." 13 of them then continued meeting regularly in 2023 with the "Worker as Futurist" project (funded by Canada's Social Sciences and ...

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: The secretive Russian satellite in space that U.S. officials believe is connected to a nuclear anti-satellite weapon program has appeared to be spinning uncontrollably, suggesting it may no longer be functioning in what could be a setback for Moscow's space weapon efforts, according to U.S. analysts... ...

What can you build with a 3D printer? Starbucks just printed itself a new store — a drive-through location in the southern tip of Texas. Fast Company says it's a store that "looks more like the future of construction than your average café." Built with layers of concrete piped out by a giant robotic printer, the 1,400-square-foot structure is part of ...

Microsoft Copilot "isn't doing as well as the company would like," reports XDA-Developers.com (citing a report from startup/VC industry site Newcomer). The Redmond giant has invested billions of dollars and a lot of manpower into making it happen, but as a recent report claims, people just don't care. In fact, if the report is to be believed, Microsoft's ...

"Google's DeepMind UK team reportedly seeks to unionize," reports TechCrunch: Around 300 London-based members of Google's AI-focused DeepMind team are seeking to unionize with the Communication Workers Union, according to a Financial Times report that cites three people involved with the unionization effort. These DeepMind employees are reportedly ...

"Not so long ago, working in tech meant job security, extravagant perks and a bring-your-whole-self-to-the-office ethos rare in other industries," writes the Wall Street Journal. But now tech work "looks like a regular job," with workers "contending with the constant fear of layoffs, longer hours and an ever-growing list of responsibilities for the same ...

The university blamed it on "the significant number of students" who violated their coding competition's rules. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp quotes this report from The Logic: Finding that many students violated rules and submitted code not written by themselves, the University of Waterloo's Centre for Computing and Math decided not to release results ...

"The U.S. and Canadian websites for Lenovo offered U.S. $140 and CAD $211 off on the same ThinkPad X1 Carbon model when choosing any one of the Linux-based alternatives," reports It's FOSS News: This was brought to my attention thanks to a Reddit post... Others then chimed in, saying that Lenovo has been doing this since at least 2020 and that the big ...

80-year-old George Lucas appeared this week at a 45th anniversary screening of The Empire Strikes Back, reports CNN — and finally gave a good explanation for why Yoda speaks the way he does. "He explained that it came about in order to ensure that the little alien's usually profound messages really landed with audiences." "Because if you speak regular ...

Some patches for Linux 6.15-rc4 (updating the kernel driver for the Bcachefs file system) triggered some "straight-to-the-point wisdom" from Linus Torvalds about case-insensitive filesystems, reports Phoronix. Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet started the conversation, explaining how some buggy patches for their case-insensitive file and folder support ...

"4chan, down for more than a week after hackers got in through an insecure script that handled PDFs, is back online," notes BoingBoing. (They add that Thursday saw 4chan's first blog postin years — just the words "Testing testing 123 123...") But 4chan posted a much longer explanation on Friday," confirming their servers were compromised by a malicious ...

An anonymous reader shared this report from Business Insider: A Lufthansa flight carrying 461 passengers had to divert after someone's tablet became "jammed" in a business-class seat. The Airbus A380 took off from Los Angeles on Wednesday, bound for Munich, and had been flying for around three hours when the pilots diverted to Boston Logan International ...