Alphabet-owned Wing “is expanding its drone delivery service to an additional 150 Walmart stores across the U.S.,” reports Axios:

[T]he future is already here if you live in Dallas — where some Walmart customers order delivery by Wing three times a week. By the end of 2026, some 40 million Americans, or about 12 percent of the U.S. population, will be able to take advantage of the convenience, the companies claim… Once the items are picked and packed in a small cardboard basket, they are loaded onto a drone inside a fenced area in the Walmart parking lot. Drones fly autonomously to the designated address, with human pilots monitoring each flight from a central operations hub….

For now, Wing deliveries are free. “The goal is to expose folks to the wonders of drone delivery,” explains Wing’s chief business officer, Heather Rivera… Over time, she said Wing expects delivery fees to be comparable to other delivery options, but faster and more convenient.

Service began recently in Atlanta and Charlotte, and it’s coming soon to Los Angeles, Houston, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Miami and other major U.S. cities to be announced later, according to the article.
“By 2027, Walmart and Wing say they’ll have a network of more than 270 drone delivery locations nationwide.”

Walmart also announced a new deal today with Google’s Gemini, allowing customers to purchase Walmart products from within Gemini. (Walmart announced a similar deal for ChatGPT in October.)

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli calls this “a defensive angle that Walmart does not quite say out loud.”

As AI models answer more questions directly, retailers risk losing customers before they ever hit a website. If Gemini recommends a product from someone else first, Walmart loses the sale before it starts. By planting itself inside the AI, Walmart keeps a seat at the table while the internet shifts under everyone’s feet.
Google clearly benefits too. Gemini gets a more functional purpose than just telling you how to boil pasta or summarize recipes. Now it can carry someone from the moment they wonder what they need to the moment the order is placed. That makes the assistant stickier and a bit more practical than generic chat. Walmart’s incoming CEO John Furner says the company wants to shape this new pattern instead of being dragged into it later. Sundar Pichai calls Walmart an early partner in what he sees as a broader wave of agent style commerce, where AI starts doing the errands people used to handle themselves.
The article concludes “This partnership serves as a snapshot of where retail seems to be heading…”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The loss of the federal EV tax credits may have been a huge blow to prospective buyers, but California wants to fill that gap for its residents. Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget for 2026-2027, which was released on Friday, includes a “light-duty zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) incentive program” that details a one-time infusion of $200 million.

According to the budget summary, this incentive program is “a critical part of the Administration’s strategy to keep ZEVs affordable and accessible for all.” The proposed budget still has to make it through the state’s legislature later this year, but if passed, the new incentive would help continue the momentum of EV adoption across California. In the third quarter of 2025, the state saw almost 30 percent of auto sales being EVs, according to the California Energy Commission.

There are no details in the budget summary outlining how exactly the $200 million would break down on a per-vehicle basis, but USA Today reported that the rebate would be an “on the hood” instant discount for EVs. Previously, buyers would get up to $7,500 back in federal tax rebates on new EV purchases and up to $4,000 on used EVs. For California’s proposed incentives, the chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, Lauren Sanchez, told USA Today that the state is still trying to figure out if it will offer tax credits for those who buy used EVs.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/californias-governor-plans-to-set-aside-200-million-for-state-ev-tax-credits-194446449.html?src=rss

Gentoo Linux posted its 2025 project retrospective this week. Some interesting details:

Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories, Gentoo currently considers and plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contributions to Codeberg. Codeberg is a site based on Forgejo, maintained by a non-profit organization, and located in Berlin, Germany. Gentoo continues to host its own primary git, bugs, etc infrastructure and has no plans to change that…

We now publish weekly Gentoo images for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), based on the amd64 stages, see our mirrors. While these images are not present in the Microsoft store yet, that’s something we intend to fix soon…

Given the unfortunate fracturing of the GnuPG / OpenPGP / LibrePGP ecosystem due to competing standards, we now provide an alternatives mechanism to choose the system gpg provider and ease compatibility testing…

We have added a bootstrap path for Rust from C++ using Mutabah’s Rust compiler mrustc, which alleviates the need for pre-built binaries and makes it significantly easier to support more configurations. Similarly, Ada and D support in gcc now have clean bootstrap paths, which makes enabling these in the compiler as easy as switching the useflags on gcc and running emerge.

Other interesting statistics for the year:

Gentoo currently consists of 31,663 ebuilds for 19,174 different packages.For amd64 (x86-64), there are 89 GBytes of binary packages available on the mirrors.Gentoo each week builds 154 distinct installation stages for different processor architectures and system configurations, with an overwhelming part of these fully up-to-date.The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2025, with a slight decrease from 123,942 to 112,927.The number of commits by external contributors was 9,396, now across 377 unique external authors.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Heraklit for sharing the 2025 retrospective.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Don’t be surprised if you see even more drones delivering groceries across the US since the Alphabet-owned Wing announced another service expansion with Walmart over the next year. The partnership said that drone delivery services will be available at 150 more Walmart locations in Los Angeles, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Miami and more metros that have yet to be announced.

According to Wing, its top 25 percent of customers have ordered its delivery drones up to three times a week. To meet growing demand, Wing and Walmart said it will serve up to 40 million US customers and build up a network of 270 delivery locations by 2027. The partnership launched its service in August 2023 with the inaugural deliveries offered to the Dallas-Fort Worth customer base. In June 2025, Wing and Walmart increased drone delivery coverage to 100 more stores across Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando and Tampa. Last month, the two companies launched their delivery service in Atlanta and are planning to kick off deliveries in Houston on January 15.

Before Walmart, Wing broke into the US market by working with Walgreens to deliver health and wellness products in April 2022. Since then, the Alphabet subsidiary has partnered with DoorDash and Apian, a London-based healthcare logistics company. Besides its commercial partnerships, Wing has been working on a larger delivery drone that will be able to fly at up to 65 mph and carry up to five pounds, or double its current capacity.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/wings-drone-deliveries-are-coming-to-150-more-walmarts-180708189.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget:

If you received a bunch of password reset requests from Instagram recently, you’re not alone. As reported by Malwarebytes, an antivirus software company, there was a data breach revealing the “sensitive information” of 17.5 million Instagram users. Malwarebytes added that the leak included Instagram usernames, physical addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and more.

The company added that the “data is available for sale on the dark web and can be abused by cybercriminals.” Malwarebytes noted in an email to its customers that it discovered the breach during its routine dark web scan and that it’s tied to a potential incident related to an Instagram API exposure from 2024.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“China recently placed a supercritical carbon dioxide power generator into commercial operation,” writes CleanTechnica, “and the announcement was widely framed as a technological breakthrough.”

The system, referred to as Chaotan One, is installed at a steel plant in Guizhou province in mountainous southwest China and is designed to recover industrial waste heat and convert it into electricity. Each unit is reported to be rated at roughly 15 MW, with public statements describing configurations totaling around 30 MW. Claimed efficiency improvements range from 20% to more than 30% higher heat to power conversion compared with conventional steam based waste heat recovery systems. These are big numbers, typical of claims for this type of generator, and they deserve serious attention.

China doing something first, however, has never been a reliable indicator that the thing will prove durable, economic, or widely replicable. China is large enough to try almost everything. It routinely builds first of a kind systems precisely because it can afford to learn by doing, discarding what does not work and scaling what does. This approach is often described inside China as crossing the river by feeling for stones. It produces valuable learning, but it also produces many dead ends. The question raised by the supercritical CO2 deployment is not whether China is capable of building it, but whether the technology is likely to hold up under real operating conditions for long enough to justify broad adoption.

A more skeptical reading is warranted because Western advocates of specific technologies routinely point to China’s limited deployments as evidence that their preferred technologies are viable, when the scale of those deployments actually argues the opposite. China has built a single small modular reactor and a single experimental molten salt reactor, not fleets of them, despite having the capital, supply chains, and regulatory capacity to do so if they made economic sense… If small modular reactors or hydrogen transportation actually worked at scale and cost, China would already be building many more of them, and the fact that it is not should be taken seriously rather than pointing to very small numbers of trials compared to China’s very large denominators…

What is notably absent from publicly available information is detailed disclosure of materials, operating margins, impurity controls, and maintenance assumptions. This is not unusual for early commercial deployments in China. It does mean that external observers cannot independently assess long term durability claims.

The article notes America’s Energy Department funded a carbon dioxide turbine in Texas rated at roughly 10 MW electric that “reached initial power generation in 2024 after several years of construction and commissioning.” But for both these efforts, the article warns that “early efficiency claims should be treated as provisional. A system that starts at 15 MW and delivers 13 MW after several years with rising maintenance costs is not a breakthrough. It is an expensive way to recover waste heat compared with mature steam based alternatives that already operate for decades with predictable degradation…”

“If both the Chinese and U.S. installations run for five years without significant reductions in performance and without high maintenance costs, I will be surprised. In that case, it would be worth revisiting this assessment and potentially changing my mind.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader cusco for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember that re-discovered computer tape with one of the earliest versions of Unix from the early 1970s? This week several local news outlets in Utah reported on the find, with KSL creating a video report with shots of the tape arriving at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum, the closet where it was found, and even its handwritten label.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that the closet where it was found also contained “old cords from unknown sources and mountains of papers that had been dumped from a former professor’s file cabinet, including old drawings from his kids and saved plane ticket stubs.” (Their report also includes a photo of the University of Utah team that found the tape — the University’s Flux Research Group).

Professor Robert Ricci believes only 20 copies were ever produced of the version of Unix on that tape:

At the time, in the 1970s, Ricci estimates there would have been maybe two or three of those computers — called a PDP-11, or programmed data processor — in Utah that could have run UNIX V4, including the one at the U. Having that technology is part of why he believes the U. got a copy of the rare software. The other part was the distinguished computing faculty at the school.

The new UNIX operating system would’ve been announced at conferences in the early 1970s, and a U. professor at the time named Martin Newell frequently attended those because of his own recognized work in the field, Ricci said. In another box, stuffed in under manila envelopes, [researcher Aleks] Maricq found a 1974 letter written to Newell from Ken Thompson at Bell Labs that said as soon as “a new batch comes from the printers, I will send you the system.” Ricci and Maricq are unsure if the software was ever used. They reached out to Newell, who is now 72 and retired, as well as some of his former students. None of them recalled actually running it through the PDP-11…

The late Jay Lepreau also worked at the U.’s computing department and created the Flux Research Group that Ricci, Maricq and [engineering research associate Jon] Duerig are now part of. Lepreau overlapped just barely with Newell’s tenure. In 1978, Lepreau and a team at the U. worked with a group at the University of California, Berkeley. Together, they built their own clone of the UNIX operating system. They called it BSD, or Berkeley Standard Deviation. Steve Jobs, the former CEO of Apple, worked with BSD, too, and it influenced his work.
Ultimately, it was Lepreau who saved the 9-track tape with the UNIX system on it in his U. office. And he’s why the university still has it today. “He seems to have found it and decided it was worth keeping,” Ricci said…
The U. will also get the tape back from the museum. Maricq said it will likely be displayed in the university’s new engineering building that’s set to open in January 2027. That’s why, the research associate said, he was cleaning out the storage room to begin with — to try to prepare for the move. He was mostly just excited to see the floor again. “I thought we’d find some old stuff, but I didn’t think it’d be anything like this,” he said. And Maricq still has boxes to go through, including more believed to be from Lepreau’s office.

Local news station KMYU captured the thoughts of some of the University researchers who found the tape:

“When you see the very first beginnings of something, and you go from seed to sapling, that’s what we saw here,” [engineering research associate Jon] Duerig said. “We see this thing in the moment of flux. We see the signs of all the things changing — of all the things developing that we now see today.”
Duerig also gave this comment to local news station KSL. “The coolest thing is that anybody, anywhere in the world can now access this, right? People can go on the internet archive and download the raw tape file and simulate running it,” Duerig said. “People have posted browsable directory trees of the whole thing.”
One of the museum’s directors said the tape’s recovery marked a big day for the museum “One of the things that was pretty exciting to us is that just that there is this huge community of people around the world who were excited to jump on the opportunity to look at this piece of history,” Ricci said. “And it was really cool that we were able to share that.”
Duerig said while there weren’t many comments or footnotes from the programmers of that time, they did discovery more unexpected content having to do with Bell Labs on the tape. “There were survey results of them actually asking survey questions of their employees at these operator centers,” he said.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scifi author/tech activist Cory Doctorow has decried the “enshittification” of our technologies to extract more profit. But Saturday he also described what could be “the beginning of the end for enshittification” in a new article for the Guardian — “our chance to make tech good again”.

There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product to make it work better for its users (at the expense of its manufacturer)…

Post-Brexit, the UK is uniquely able to seize this moment. Unlike our European cousins, we needn’t wait for the copyright directive to be repealed before we can strike article 6 off our own law books and thereby salvage something good out of Brexit… Until we repeal the anti-circumvention law, we can’t reverse-engineer the US’s cloud software, whether it’s a database, a word processor or a tractor, in order to swap out proprietary, American code for robust, open, auditable alternatives that will safeguard our digital sovereignty. The same goes for any technology tethered to servers operated by any government that might have interests adverse to ours — say, the solar inverters and batteries we buy from China.

This is the state of play at the dawn of 2026. The digital rights movement has two powerful potential coalition partners in the fight to reclaim the right of people to change how their devices work, to claw back privacy and a fair deal from tech: investors and national security hawks. Admittedly, the door is only open a crack, but it’s been locked tight since the turn of the century. When it comes to a better technology future, “open a crack” is the most exciting proposition I’ve heard in decades.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Since 2018, a group of researchers from around the world has crunched the numbers on how much heat the world’s oceans are absorbing each year. In 2025, their measurements broke records once again, making this the eighth year in a row that the world’s oceans have absorbed more heat than in the years before.

The study, which was published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science, found that the world’s oceans absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules’ worth of heat in 2025, the most in any year since modern measurements began in the 1960s. That’s significantly higher than the 16 additional zettajoules they absorbed in 2024. The research comes from a team of more than 50 scientists across the United States, Europe, and China.

A joule is a common way to measure energy. A single joule is a relatively small unit of measurement—it’s about enough to power a tiny lightbulb for a second, or slightly heat a gram of water. But a zettajoule is one sextillion joules; numerically, the 23 zettajoules the oceans absorbed this year can be written out as 23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Read full article

Comments