An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Bumblebees can use tools to solve a problem, according to experiments that demonstrate their remarkably advanced cognitive abilities. The bees were given an adapted version of an experiment that, 100 years ago, first demonstrated chimpanzees could work out how to retrieve an out-of-reach banana by ...

Anthropic is urging leading AI labs to consider slowing development, warning that frontier models are advancing fast enough that they may soon be able to improve themselves without direct human intervention. The company says a global ability to pause or slow AI development would "likely be a good thing," citing internal data about accelerating model ...

A new npm supply-chain attack has infected 36 packages with Rust-based infostealer malware called IronWorm. According to BleepingComputer, the malware "targets 86 environment variables (key-value pairs) and 20 credential files that may contain OpenAI, AWS, Anthropic, and npm credentials, vault configuration files, SSH keys, and Exodus cryptocurrency wallet ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The moderators of the biohacking subreddit say that peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots. The strategy is an effort to systematically manipulate the answers provided by chatbots by manipulating ...

Meta has reportedly delayed the developer release of its Muse Spark AI model API multiple times, and as of Tuesday, had no scheduled launch date, according to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled). Reuters reports: A Meta spokesperson told Reuters on Wednesday that the company is already testing the Application Programming Interface (API) with some early ...

The U.S. and its Five Eyes intelligence partners issued a joint warning (PDF) that Chinese military intelligence services are using LinkedIn and other professional networking sites to recruit people with access to government, military, foreign policy, or sensitive economic information. "These actors use an aggressive online recruitment strategy whereby ...

schwit1 shares a report from NJ.com: Samsung is pulling up stakes in New Jersey and heading to Texas, a move that could leave roughly 1,000 Garden State workers facing a stark choice: relocate or risk losing their jobs. The South Korean tech giant confirmed this week that it will move its US headquarters from Englewood Cliffs, NJ, to its existing campus in ...

joshuark shares a report from The Verge: Apple will introduce age verification in the App Store for users in Texas starting on Thursday, June 4th. The move, as spotted by MacRumors, comes just days after a federal appeals court allowed Texas' App Store Accountability Act to go into effect while a lawsuit against it proceeds. People in Texas who are creating ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: UK regulators today ordered (PDF) Google to put clearer attributions and links to publishers' content in its AI-generated search features. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) also said Google must give publishers a way to opt out of AI features in search. "In a world first, publishers will ...

NASA has officially ended the MAVEN mission after the Mars orbiter stopped responding in December, apparently after an unexpected spin drained its batteries and knocked out communications. Launched in 2013 and orbiting Mars since 2014, MAVEN spent more than a decade studying how the planet lost its atmosphere and helped explain how Mars transformed from a ...

Amazon has reportedly killed its planned new Stargate series despite giving it a series order in 2025. According to Variety, studio executives were worried it would only appeal to longtime fans. ScreenRant reports: Reports of what became Gero's Stargate series started in 2022, after Amazon acquired MGM Studios. Dean Devlin, who co-wrote the 1994 Stargate ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The secondary market for decades old, low-tech John Deere tractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere's repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if ...

BrianFagioli writes: Fedora Linux 43 users upgrading to the latest Dovecot mail server discovered something rather unsettling: some older Microsoft Outlook configurations may have been silently ignoring SSL/TLS settings for POP3 email connections for years. According to a Fedora community blog post, affected Outlook clients reportedly continued using ...

Ancient Slashdot reader whitroth shares a report from Politico, with the caption: "shutting down Microsoft Office for the International Criminal Court (ICC) was clearly a wake-up call." From the report: The EU is moving to counter American dominance in technology by reaching for one of the oldest tools in its arsenal: industrial strategy. As the European ...

According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple has reportedly doubled 2026 MacBook Neo production from 5 million to 10 million units after stronger-than-expected demand for its $599 budget laptop. MacRumors reports: On an earnings call in late April, Apple's CEO Tim Cook said that customer response to the MacBook Neo was "off the charts," and the ...

Google has launched Gemma 4 12B, a 12-billion-parameter open AI model designed to run locally on your laptop without depending entirely on cloud infrastructure. WION reports: According to Google, the new model delivers performance close to much larger AI systems while requiring significantly less memory. The company says Gemma 4 12B can run locally on ...

Google has released (PDF) technical specs and 2D CAD drawings for the Fitbit Air to encourage users to make their own accessories. "These CAD drawings include crucial mating dimensions, tolerances, and mating force specifications -- including attach and detach force -- to help you build a high-quality accessory band," Google says on a store page listing. ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft's Build developer conference kicked off today, and as with almost everything the company has done in the last few years, Microsoft's opening keynote focused overwhelmingly on AI and other closely related technologies. [...] On the hardware front, we didn't get any updates for existing Surface ...

Meta is scaling back parts of its employee tracking initiative after staff objected to software that collected mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and other actions for AI training data. According to Reuters, the company will now let workers pause collection for up to 30 minutes and request exemptions. Reuters reports: [Stephane Kasriel, a vice president ...

Microsoft says its new Majorana 2 quantum chip is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor, with qubits lasting about 20 seconds instead of milliseconds, and claims it could have a commercially useful quantum machine by 2029. The BBC reports: "We will have a quantum machine in 2029 that can solve commercially viable, reasonable problems," said Zulfi ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Phone by Google wants to combat the "growing threat of impersonation scams" and protect Android users against "sophisticated, AI-powered deepfake attacks" with fake call detection. [...] Fake call detection requires that both parties are on Android and use the Phone by Google app, while Google Messages ...

fjo3 shares a report from Defense One: A small but growing number of European officials and analysts are saying what four years ago was unthinkable: Ukraine isn't just surviving its grueling war with Russia, it is in some ways thriving and may even be on a path to victory. This isn't yet captured in headlines -- for example, about last weekend's barrage of ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: A team inside Microsoft has been quietly building a platform for devices that run AI agents instead of apps, based on Android instead of Windows, with two working hardware designs so far, and an initial set of big-name companies lined up to run pilots. The platform, dubbed "Project Solara," is Microsoft's ...

A new Leiden Declaration, endorsed by the International Mathematical Union and published on June 2, 2026, warns that AI could undermine mathematics by flooding the field with plausible but flawed proofs, weakening attribution, shifting incentives, and giving tech companies too much influence over research priorities. "Mathematicians should find it quite ...

The European Parliament is replacing Google with French search engine Qwant as the default on in-house computers, citing digital sovereignty and privacy concerns. Politico reports: As of Thursday June 4, "Qwant will replace Google as default search engine on European Parliament computers," officials told lawmakers in an email seen by POLITICO. The change is ...