NPR looks at the “high-quality, climate-friendly apartments” in Vienna, asking if it’s a model for addressing both climate change and the housing crisis.
About half the city’s 2 million people live in the widespread (and government-supported) apartments, with solar panels on top and very thick, insulated walls that reduce the need for heating and cooling. (One resident tells NPR they don’t even need an air conditioner because “It’s not cold in winter times. It’s not hot in summer times.”)

Vienna council member Nina Abrahamczik, who heads the climate and environment committee, says as the city transitions all of its buildings off planet-heating fossil fuels, they’re starting with the roughly 420,000 housing units they already own or subsidize…. As Vienna makes an aggressive push to completely move away from climate-polluting natural gas by 2040, it’s starting with much of this social housing, says Jürgen Czernohorszky, executive city councilor responsible for climate and environment. City-owned buildings are now switching from gas to massive electric heat pumps, and to geothermal, which involves probing into the ground to heat homes. Another massive geothermal project that drills even deeper into the earth to heat homes is also underway.
The city is also powering housing with solar energy. As of a year and a half ago, Vienna mandates all new buildings and building extensions to have rooftop solar. And Vienna’s older apartment buildings are getting climate retrofits, says Veronika Iwanowski, spokesperson for Vienna’s municipal housing company, Wiener Wohnen. That includes new insulation, doors and windows to prevent the city’s wind from getting in the cracks. The increase in energy efficiency and switching from gas to renewables doesn’t just have climate benefits from cutting fossil fuel use. It also means housing residents are paying less on electric bills…
With city-subsidized housing, housing developers can compete to get land and low-interest loans from the city. Officials say those competitions are a critical lever for climate action. “As we can control the contents of the competitions, we try to make them fit to the main goals of the city,” says Kurt Hofstetter, city planner for Vienna, “which is of course also ecological….” Now the housing judges give out points for things like increased energy efficiency, green roofs and sustainable building materials… Now the climate innovations in subsidized housing are inspiring the private market as well, Hofstetter says…
The article notes that most of the city’s funding is provided in the form of low-interest loans, according to a researcher at the Austrian Federation of Limited-Profit Housing Associations. (And the average social housing rents are about $700 for a large one-bedroom apartment, says Gerald Kössl, researcher at the Austrian Federation of Limited-Profit Housing Associations.)

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Most of us have seen a nature documentary or two (or three) at some point in our lives, so it’s a familiar format: sweeping majestic footage of impressively regal animals accompanied by reverently high-toned narration (preferably with a tony British accent). Underdogs, a new docuseries from National Geographic, takes a decidedly different and unconventional approach. Narrated by with hilarious irreverence by Ryan Reynolds, the five-part series highlights nature’s less cool and majestic creatures: the outcasts and benchwarmers, more noteworthy for their “unconventional hygiene choices” and “unsavory courtship rituals.” It’s like The Suicide Squad or Thunderbolts*, except these creatures actually exist.

Per the official premise, “Underdogs features a range of never-before-filmed scenes, including the first time a film crew has ever entered a special cave in New Zealand—a huge cavern that glows brighter than a bachelor pad under a black light thanks to the glowing butts of millions of mucus-coated grubs. All over the world, overlooked superstars like this are out there 24/7, giving it maximum effort and keeping the natural world in working order for all those showboating polar bears, sharks and gorillas.” It’s rated PG-13 thanks to the odd bit of scatalogical humor and shots of Nature Sexy Time

Each of the five episodes is built around a specific genre. “Superheroes” highlights the surprising superpowers of the honey badger, pistol shrimp, and the invisible glass frog, among others, augmented with comic book graphics; “Sexy Beasts” focuses on bizarre mating habits and follows the format of a romantic advice column; “Terrible Parents” highlights nature’s worst practices, following the outline of a parenting guide; “Total Grossout” is exactly what it sounds like; and “The Unusual Suspects” is a heist tale, documenting the supposed efforts of a macaque to put together the ultimate team of masters of deception and disguise (an inside man, a decoy, a fall guy, etc.).  Green Day even wrote and recorded a special theme song for the opening credits.

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A revealing demonstration with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving mode is raising concerns about whether fully autonomous cars are ready to hit the streets. Tesla has reportedly pushed back the rollout of its upcoming all-electric, fully autonomous car called the Cybercab, while a recent demonstration in Austin, Texas showed a Tesla Model Y running through a school bus’ flashing lights and stop signs, and hitting child-size mannequins. The tests were conducted by The Dawn Project, along with Tesla Takedown and ResistAustin, and showed Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software repeating the same mistake eight times.

It’s worth noting that Tesla’s autonomous driving feature is formally known as Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and “requires a fully attentive driver and will display a series of escalating warnings requiring driver response.” Tesla even has a warning that says, “failure to follow these instructions could cause damage, serious injury or death.” However, it’s not the first time that Tesla’s FSD software has found itself in hot water. The Dawn Project, whose founder Dan O’Dowd is the CEO of a company that offers competing automated driving system software, previously took out ads warning about the dangers of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving and how it would fail to yield around school buses. In April 2024, a Model S using Full Self-Driving was involved in a crash in Washington, where a motorcyclist died.

With anticipation building up for an eventual Cybercab rollout on June 22, the company’s CEO posted some additional details on X. According to Elon Musk, Tesla is “being super paranoid about safety, so the date could shift.” Beyond that, Musk also posted that the “first Tesla that drives itself from factory end of line all the way to a customer house is June 28.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/tesla-blows-past-stopped-school-bus-and-hits-kid-sized-dummies-in-full-self-driving-tests-183756251.html?src=rss

A chain of stores called Home Bargains installed facial recognition software to spot returning shoplifters. Unfortunately, “Facewatch” made a mistake.
“We acknowledge and understand how distressing this experience must have been,” an anonymous Facewatch spokesperson tells the BBC, adding that the store using their technology “has since undertaken additional staff training.”

A woman was accused by a store manager of stealing about £10 (about $13) worth of items (“Everyone was looking at me”). And then it happened again at another store when she was shopping with her 81-year-old mother on June 4th:

“As soon as I stepped my foot over the threshold of the door, they were radioing each other and they all surrounded me and were like ‘you need to leave the store’,” she said. “My heart sunk and I was anxious and bothered for my mum as well because she was stressed….”
It was only after repeated emails to both Facewatch and Home Bargains that she eventually found there had been an allegation of theft of about £10 worth of toilet rolls on 8 May. Her picture had somehow been circulated to local stores alerting them that they should not allow her entry. Ms. Horan said she checked her bank account to confirm she had indeed paid for the items before Facewatch eventually responded to say a review of the incident showed she had not stolen anything. “Because I was persistent I finally got somewhere but it wasn’t easy, it was really stressful,” she said. “My anxiety was really bad — it really played with my mind, questioning what I’ve done for days. I felt anxious and sick. My stomach was turning for a week.”
In one email from Facewatch seen by the BBC, the firm told Ms Horan it “relies on information submitted by stores” and the Home Bargains branches involved had since been “suspended from using the Facewatch system”. Madeleine Stone, senior advocacy officer at the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said they had been contacted by more than 35 people who have complained of being wrongly placed on facial recognition watchlists.

“They’re being wrongly flagged as criminals,” Ms Stone said.
“They’ve given no due process, kicked out of stores,” adds the senior advocacy officer. “This is having a really serious impact.” The group is now calling for the technology to be banned. “Historically in Britain, we have a history that you are innocent until proven guilty but when an algorithm, a camera and a facial recognition system gets involved, you are guilty.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said: “While commercial facial recognition technology is legal in the UK, its use must comply with strict data protection laws. Organisations must process biometric data fairly, lawfully and transparently, ensuring usage is necessary and proportionate.

“No one should find themselves in this situation.”

Thanks to alanw (Slashdot reader #1,822) for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The state of New York is “asking companies to disclose whether AI is the reason for their layoffs,” reports Entrepreneur:
The move applies to New York State’s existing Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) system and took effect in March, Bloomberg reported. New York is the first state in the U.S. to add the disclosure, which could help regulators understand AI’s effects on the labor market.

The change takes the form of a checkbox added to a form employers fill out at least 90 days before a mass layoff or plant closure through the WARN system. Companies have to select whether “technological innovation or automation” is a reason for job cuts. If they choose that option, they are directed to a second menu where they are asked to name the specific technology responsible for layoffs, like AI or robots.

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It turns out that region-locking your games makes it harder to sell more copies. First discovered by Wario64, Sony has lifted regional restrictions for several of its titles that are available to play on PC through Steam. Sony hasn’t officially announced the removal of these region locks, nor the reason why, but God of War Ragnarok, The Last of Us Part II Remastered, Spider-Man 2, and the hit co-op shooter Helldivers 2 can be purchased once again in 177 countries that were previously prohibited, as seen in database changelogs.

To understand why Sony decided to limit sales of its games in certain countries, we have to revisit when the video game publisher announced it would require Helldivers 2 PC players to link their Steam accounts to the PlayStation Network. This controversial decision prohibited players in countries that didn’t have access to the PSN, so Sony also removed Helldivers 2 from being on sale in those locations. The publisher quickly backtracked on that move, even later removing the PSN requirements for other titles like Spider-Man 2.

More recently, the PC release of Stellar Blade on June 11 resurfaced Sony’s PSN login requirement debacle. The game’s developer, Shift Up, was able to work with Sony to loosen restrictions and make a PSN login optional, allowing for an explosive launch where the game saw a peak of nearly 200,000 players in its opening week. Now, PC gamers across the world can play Stellar Blade and Helldivers 2 without needing a PSN account. However, there are still some Sony titles on Steam that are heavily restricted, like Ghost of Tsushima and Until Dawn.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/sony-unlocks-regional-restrictions-for-some-pc-games-in-more-than-100-countries-162228948.html?src=rss

“Cooper Taylor is only 17 years old, but he’s already trying to revolutionize the drone industry,” writes Business Insider:

His design makes the drone more efficient, customizable, and less expensive to construct, he says. He’s built six prototypes, 3D printing every piece of hardware, programming the software, and even soldering the control circuit board. He says building his drone cost one-fifth of the price of buying a comparable machine, which sells for several thousand dollars. Taylor told Business Insider he hopes that “if you’re a first responder or a researcher or an everyday problem solver, you can have access to this type of drone.”

His innovation won him an $8,000 scholarship in April at the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, funded by the Defense Department. Then, on May 16, he received an even bigger scholarship of $15,000 from the US Navy, which he won after presenting his research at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair…

It all started when Taylor’s little sister got a drone, and he was disappointed to see that it could fly for only about 30 minutes before running out of power. He did some research and found that a vertical take-off and landing, or VTOL, drone would last longer. This type of drone combines the multi-rotor helicopter style with the fixed wings of an airplane, making it extremely versatile. It lifts off as a helicopter, then transitions into plane mode. That way, it can fly farther than rotors alone could take it, which was the drawback to Taylor’s sister’s drone. Unlike a plane-style drone, though, it doesn’t need a runway, and it can hover with its helicopter rotors.
Taylor designed a motor “that could start out helicopter-style for liftoff, then tilt back to become an airplane-style motor,” according to the article.
And now this summer he’ll be “working on a different drone project through a program with the Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

Thanks to Slashdot reader Agnapot for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America’s federal government is building a website and API called ai.gov to “accelerate government innovation with AI”, according to an early version spotted by 404 Media that was posted on GitHub by the U.S. government’s General Services Administration.

That site “is supposed to launch on July 4,” according to 404 Media’s report, “and will include an analytics feature that shows how much a specific government team is using AI…”
AI.gov appears to be an early step toward pushing AI tools into agencies across the government, code published on Github shows….
The early version of the page suggests that its API will integrate with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic products. But code for the API shows they are also working on integrating with Amazon Web Services’ Bedrock and Meta’s LLaMA. The page suggests it will also have an AI-powered chatbot, though it doesn’t explain what it will do… Currently, AI.gov redirects to whitehouse.gov. The demo website is linked to from Github (archive here) and is hosted on cloud.gov on what appears to be a staging environment. The text on the page does not show up on other websites, suggesting that it is not generic placeholder text…

In February, 404 Media obtained leaked audio from a meeting in which [the director of the GSA’s Technology Transformation Services] told his team they would be creating “AI coding agents” that would write software across the entire government, and said he wanted to use AI to analyze government contracts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s the technology “Google tried (and failed at) more than a decade ago,” writes CNN. (And Meta and Amazon have also previously tried releasing glasses with cameras, speakers and voice assistants.)
Yet this week Snap announced that “it’s building AI-equipped eyewear to be released in 2026.”

Why the “renewed buzz”? CNN sees two factors:
– Smartphones “are no longer exciting enough to entice users to upgrade often.”
– “A desire to capitalize on AI by building new hardware around it.”
Advancements in AI could make them far more useful than the first time around. Emerging AI models can process images, video and speech simultaneously, answer complicated requests and respond conversationally… And market research indicates the interest will be there this time. The smart glasses market is estimated to grow from 3.3 million units shipped in 2024 to nearly 13 million by 2026, according to ABI Research. The International Data Corporation projects the market for smart glasses like those made by Meta will grow from 8.8 in 2025 to nearly 14 million in 2026….

Apple is also said to be working on smart glasses to be released next year that would compete directly with Meta’s, according to Bloomberg. Amazon’s head of devices and services Panos Panay also didn’t rule out the possibility of camera-equipped Alexa glasses similar to those offered by Meta in a February CNN interview. “But I think you can imagine, there’s going to be a whole slew of AI devices that are coming,” he said in February.”

More than two million Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses have been sold since their launch in 2023, the article points out. But besides privacy concerns, “Perhaps the biggest challenge will be convincing consumers that they need yet another tech device in their life, particularly those who don’t need prescription glasses. The products need to be worth wearing on people’s faces all day.”
But still, “Many in the industry believe that the smartphone will eventually be replaced by glasses or something similar to it,” says Jitesh Ubrani, a research manager covering wearable devices for market research firm IDC.
“It’s not going to happen today. It’s going to happen many years from now, and all these companies want to make sure that they’re not going to miss out on that change.”

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The Federal Aviation Administration may soon levy fees on companies seeking launch and reentry licenses, a new tack in the push to give the agency the resources it needs to keep up with the rapidly growing commercial space industry.

The text of a budget reconciliation bill released by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) last week calls for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known as AST, to begin charging licensing fees to space companies next year. The fees would phase in over eight years, after which the FAA would adjust them to keep pace with inflation. The money would go into a trust fund to help pay for the operating costs of the FAA’s commercial space office.

The bill released by Cruz’s office last week covers federal agencies under the oversight of the Senate Commerce Committee, which he chairs. These agencies include the FAA and NASA. Ars recently covered Cruz’s proposals for NASA to keep the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, and Gateway lunar space station alive, while the Trump administration aims to cancel Gateway and end the SLS and Orion programs after two crew missions to the Moon.

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Space may be the perfect place to study cancer — and someday even treat it,” writes Space.com:

On Earth, gravity slows the development of cancer because cells normally need to be attached to a surface in order to function and grow. But in space, cancer cell clusters can expand in all directions as bubbles, like budding yeast or grapes, said Shay Soker, chief science program officer at Wake Forest’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Since bubbles grow larger and more quickly in space, researchers can more easily test substances clinging to the edge of the larger bubbles, too. Scientists at the University of Notre Dame are taking advantage of this quirk to develop an in-space cancer test that needs just a single drop of blood. The work builds on a series of bubble-formation experiments that have already been conducted on the ISS. “If cancer screening using our bubble technology in space is democratized and made inexpensive, many more cancers can be screened, and everyone can benefit,” said Tengfei Luo, a Notre Dame researcher who pioneered the technology, speaking to the ISS’ magazine, Upward. “It’s something we may be able to integrate into annual exams. It sounds far-fetched, but it’s achievable….”

Chemotherapy patients could save precious time, too. In normal gravity, they typically have to spend a half-hour hooked up to a needle before the medicine begins to take effect, because most drugs don’t dissolve easily in water. But scientists at Merck have discovered that, in space, their widely used cancer drug pembrolizumab, or Keytruda, can be administered through a simple injection, because large crystalline molecules that would normally clump together are suspended in microgravity… Someday, microgravity could even help patients recovering from surgery heal faster than they would on Earth, Soker added. “Wound healing in high pressure is faster. That’s the hyperbaric treatment for wounds….”

For the Wake Forest experiment, which is scheduled to launch next spring, scientists will cut out two sections of a cancer tumor from around 20 patients. One sample will stay on Earth while the other heads to the ISS, with scientists observing the difference. The testing will be completed within a week, to avoid any interference from cosmic radiation. If successful, Soker said, it could set the stage for diagnostic cancer tests in space available to the general population — perhaps on a biomedical space station that could launch after the planned demise of the ISS. “Can we actually design a special cancer space station that will be dedicated to cancer and maybe other diseases?” Shoker asked, answering his question in the affirmative. “Pharmaceutical companies that have deep pockets would certainly support that program.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta’s CTO, Palantir’s CTO, and OpenAI’s chief product officer are being appointed as lieutenant colonels in America’s Army Reserve, reports The Register. (Along with OpenAI’s former chief revenue officer).

They’ve all signed up for Detachment 201: Executive Innovation Corps, “an effort to recruit senior tech executives to serve part-time in the Army Reserve as senior advisors,” according to the official statement. “In this role they will work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems…”

“Our primary role will be to serve as technical experts advising the Army’s modernization efforts,” [Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth] said on X…
As for Open AI’s involvement, the company has been building its ties with the military-technology complex for some years now. Like Meta, OpenAI is working with Anduril on military ideas and last year scandalized some by watering down its past commitment to developing non-military products only. The Army wasn’t answering questions on Friday but an article referenced by [OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin] Weil indicated that the four will have to serve a minimum of 120 hours a year, can work remotely, and won’t have to pass basic training…

“America wins when we unite the dynamism of American innovation with the military’s vital missions,” [Palantir CTO Shyam] Sankar said on X. “This was the key to our triumphs in the 20th century. It can help us win again. I’m humbled by this new opportunity to serve my country, my home, America.”

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This is a spoiler-free preview of the first five episodes of season three.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ended its second season with arguably the single strongest run of any streaming-era Trek. The show was made with such confidence in all departments that if there were flaws, you weren’t interested in looking for them. Since then, it’s gone from being the best modern Trek, to being the only modern Trek. Unfortunately, at the moment it needs to be the standard bearer for the show, it’s become noticeably weaker and less consistent. 

As usual, I’ve seen the first five episodes, but can’t reveal specifics about what I’ve seen. I can say plenty of the things that made Strange New Worlds the best modern-day live-action Trek remain in place. It’s a show that’s happy for you to spend time with its characters as they hang out, and almost all of them are deeply charming. This is, after all, a show that uses as motif the image of the crew in Pike’s quarters as the captain cooks for his crew.

Its format, with standalone adventures blended with serialized character drama, means it can offer something new every week. Think back to the first season, when “Memento Mori,” a tense action thriller with the Gorn, was immediately followed by “Spock Amock,” a goofy, starbase-set body-swap romantic comedy of manners centered around Spock. Strange New Worlds is the first Trek in a long while to realize audiences don’t just want a ceaseless slog of stern-faced, angry grimdark. And if they want that, they can go watch Picard and Section 31.

Marni Grossman/Paramount+

But, as much as those things are SNW’s greatest strength, it’s a delicate balance to ensure the series doesn’t lurch too far either way. And, it pains me to say this, the show spends the first five episodes of its third season going too far in both directions (although, mercifully, not at the same time). No specifics, but one episode I’m sure was on the same writers room whiteboard wishlist as last season’s musical episode. What was clearly intended as a chance for everyone to get out of their usual roles and have fun falls flat. Because the episode can never get past the sense it’s too delighted in its own silliness to properly function.

Marni Grossman/Paramount+

At the other end of the scale, we get sprints toward the eye-gouging grimdark that blighted those other series. Sure, the series has gone to dark places before, but previously with more of a sense of deftness, rather than just going for the viscerally-upsetting gore. A cynic might suggest that, as Paramount’s other Trek projects ended, franchise-overseer Alex Kurtzman — who has pushed the franchise into “grittier” territory whenever he can — had more time to spend in the SNW writers’ room.

Much as I’ve enjoyed the series’ soapier elements, the continuing plotlines take up an ever bigger part of each episode’s runtime so far. Consequently, the story of the week gets less service, making them feel weaker and less coherent. One episode pivots two thirds of the way in to act as a low-key sequel to an episode from season two. But since we’ve only got ten minutes left, it feels thrown in as an afterthought, or to resolve a thread the creative team felt they were obliged to deal with (they didn’t).

In fact, this and the recently-finished run of Doctor Who suffered from the same problem that blights so many streaming-era shows, which is the limited episode order. Rather than producing TV on the scale broadcast networks were able to — yearly runs of 22-, 24- or 26 episodes, a lot of (expensive) genre shows get less than half that. The result is that each episode has to be More Important Than The Last One in a way that’s exhausting for a viewer.

But Strange New Worlds can’t solve all the economic issues with the streaming model on its own. My hope is that, much like in its first season, the weaker episodes are all in its front half to soften us up for the moments of quality that followed toward its conclusion.

ASIDE: Shortly before publication, Paramount announced Strange New Worlds would end in its fifth season, which would be cut from ten episodes to six. It’s not surprising — given the equally-brilliant Lower Decks was also axed after passing the same milestone — but it is disappointing. My only hope is that the series doesn’t spend that final run awkwardly killing off the series’ young ensemble one by one in order to replace them with the entire original series’ roster as to make it “line up.” Please, let them be their own things. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-third-season-falls-short-of-its-second-020030139.html?src=rss

In 1989 a computer scientist argued that more functionality in software actually lowers usability and practicality — leading to the counterintuitive proposition that “worse is better”. But is that still true?

Python’s original creator Guido van Rossum addressed the question last month in a lightning talk at the annual Python Language Summit 2025.

Guido started by recounting earlier periods of Python development from 35 years ago, where he used UNIX “almost exclusively” and thus “Python was greatly influenced by UNIX’s ‘worse is better’ philosophy”… “The fact that [Python] wasn’t perfect encouraged many people to start contributing. All of the code was straightforward, there were no thoughts of optimization… These early contributors also now had a stake in the language; [Python] was also their baby”…

Guido contrasted early development to how Python is developed now: “features that take years to produce from teams of software developers paid by big tech companies. The static type system requires an academic-level understanding of esoteric type system features.” And this isn’t just Python the language, “third-party projects like numpy are maintained by folks who are paid full-time to do so…. Now we have a huge community, but very few people, relatively speaking, are contributing meaningfully.”
Guido asked whether the expectation for Python contributors going forward would be that “you had to write a perfect PEP or create a perfect prototype that can be turned into production-ready code?” Guido pined for the “old days” where feature development could skip performance or feature-completion to get something into the hands of the community to “start kicking the tires”. “Do we have to abandon ‘worse is better’ as a philosophy and try to make everything as perfect as possible?” Guido thought doing so “would be a shame”, but that he “wasn’t sure how to change it”, acknowledging that core developers wouldn’t want to create features and then break users with future releases.
Guido referenced David Hewitt’s PyO3 talk about Rust and Python, and that development “was using worse is better,” where there is a core feature set that works, and plenty of work to be done and open questions. “That sounds a lot more fun than working on core CPython”, Guido paused, “…not that I’d ever personally learn Rust. Maybe I should give it a try after,” which garnered laughter from core developers.

“Maybe we should do more of that: allowing contributors in the community to have a stake and care”.

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Here’s a lesson for today’s colleges from the Associated Press. Online classes + AI = financial aid fraud.

“In some cases, professors discover almost no one in their class is real…”
Fake college enrollments have been surging as crime rings deploy “ghost students” — chatbots that join online classrooms and stay just long enough to collect a financial aid check… Students get locked out of the classes they need to graduate as bots push courses over their enrollment limits.
And victims of identity theft who discover loans fraudulently taken out in their names must go through months of calling colleges, the Federal Student Aid office and loan servicers to try to get the debt erased. [Last week], the U.S. Education Department introduced a temporary rule requiring students to show colleges a government-issued ID to prove their identity… “The rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid program,” the department said in its guidance to colleges.

An Associated Press analysis of fraud reports obtained through a public records request shows California colleges in 2024 reported 1.2 million fraudulent applications, which resulted in 223,000 suspected fake enrollments. Other states are affected by the same problem, but with 116 community colleges, California is a particularly large target. Criminals stole at least $11.1 million in federal, state and local financial aid from California community colleges last year that could not be recovered, according to the reports… Scammers frequently use AI chatbots to carry out the fraud, targeting courses that are online and allow students to watch lectures and complete coursework on their own time…
Criminal cases around the country offer a glimpse of the schemes’ pervasiveness. In the past year, investigators indicted a man accused of leading a Texas fraud ring that used stolen identities to pursue $1.5 million in student aid. Another person in Texas pleaded guilty to using the names of prison inmates to apply for over $650,000 in student aid at colleges across the South and Southwest. And a person in New York recently pleaded guilty to a $450,000 student aid scam that lasted a decade.

Fortune found one community college that “wound up dropping more than 10,000 enrollments representing thousands of students who were not really students,” according to the school’s president.

The scope of the ghost-student plague is staggering. Jordan Burris, vice president at identity-verification firm Socure and former chief of staff in the White House’s Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer, told Fortune more than half the students registering for classes at some schools have been found to be illegitimate. Among Socure’s client base, between 20% to 60% of student applicants are ghosts… At one college, more than 400 different financial-aid applications could be tracked back to a handful of recycled phone numbers. “It was a digital poltergeist effectively haunting the school’s enrollment system,” said Burris.

The scheme has also proved incredibly lucrative. According to a Department of Education advisory, about $90 million in aid was doled out to ineligible students, the DOE analysis revealed, and some $30 million was traced to dead people whose identities were used to enroll in classes. The issue has become so dire that the DOE announced this month it had found nearly 150,000 suspect identities in federal student-aid forms and is now requiring higher-ed institutions to validate the identities of first-time applicants for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms…

Maurice Simpkins, president and cofounder of AMSimpkins, says he has identified international fraud rings operating out of Japan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nairobi that have repeatedly targeted U.S. colleges… In the past 18 months, schools blocked thousands of bot applicants because they originated from the same mailing address; had hundreds of similar emails with a single-digit difference, or had phone numbers and email addresses that were created moments before applying for registration.

Fortune shares this story from the higher education VP at IT consulting firm Voyatek. “One of the professors was so excited their class was full, never before being 100% occupied, and thought they might need to open a second section. When we worked with them as the first week of class was ongoing, we found out they were not real people.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Will an expansion of biofuels increase greenhouse gas emissions, despite their purported climate benefits? That’s the claim of a new report from the World Resources Institute, which has been critical of US biofuel policy in the past.

Ars Technica has republished an article from the nonprofit, non-partisan news organization Inside Climate News, which investigates the claim. Drawing from 100 academic studies on biofuel impacts, the Institute’s new report “concludes that [U.S.] ethanol policy has been largely a failure and ought to be reconsidered, especially as the world needs more land to produce food to meet growing demand.”
“Multiple studies show that U.S. biofuel policies have reshaped crop production, displacing food crops and driving up emissions from land conversion, tillage, and fertilizer use,” said the report’s lead author, Haley Leslie-Bole. “Corn-based ethanol, in particular, has contributed to nutrient runoff, degraded water quality and harmed wildlife habitat. As climate pressures grow, increasing irrigation and refining for first-gen biofuels could deepen water scarcity in already drought-prone parts of the Midwest….”

It may, in fact, produce more greenhouse gases than the fossil fuels it was intended to replace. Recent research says that biofuel refiners also emit significant amounts of carcinogenic and dangerous substances, including hexane and formaldehyde, in greater amounts than petroleum refineries. The new report points to research saying that increased production of biofuels from corn and soy could actually raise greenhouse gas emissions, largely from carbon emissions linked to clearing land in other countries to compensate for the use of land in the Midwest.
On top of that, corn is an especially fertilizer-hungry crop requiring large amounts of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which releases huge amounts of nitrous oxide when it interacts with the soil. American farming is, by far, the largest source of domestic nitrous oxide emissions already — about 50 percent. If biofuel policies lead to expanded production, emissions of this enormously powerful greenhouse gas will likely increase, too.

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“People are replacing Google search with artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT,” reports the Washington Post.

But that’s just the first change, according to a New York-based start-up devoted to watching for content-scraping AI companies with a free analytics product and “ensuring that these intelligent agents pay for the content they consume.” Their data from 266 web sites (half run by national or local news organizations) found that “traffic from retrieval bots grew 49% in the first quarter of 2025 from the fourth quarter of 2024,” the Post reports.
A spokesperson for OpenAI said that referral traffic to publishers from ChatGPT searches may be lower in quantity but that it reflects a stronger user intent compared with casual web browsing.
To capitalize on this shift, websites will need to reorient themselves to AI visitors rather than human ones [said TollBit CEO/co-founder Toshit Panigrahi]. But he also acknowledged that squeezing payment for content when AI companies argue that scraping online data is fair use will be an uphill climb, especially as leading players make their newest AI visitors even harder to identify….
In the past eight months, as chatbots have evolved to incorporate features like web search and “reasoning” to answer more complex queries, traffic for retrieval bots has skyrocketed. It grew 2.5 times as fast as traffic for bots that scrape data for training between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, according to TollBit’s report. Panigrahi said TollBit’s data may underestimate the magnitude of this change because it doesn’t reflect bots that AI companies send out on behalf of AI “agents” that can complete tasks on a user’s behalf, like ordering takeout from DoorDash. The start-up’s findings also add a dimension to mounting evidence that the modern internet — optimized for Google search results and social media algorithms — will have to be restructured as the popularity of AI answers grows. “To think of it as, ‘Well, I’m optimizing my search for humans’ is missing out on a big opportunity,” he said.

Installing TollBit’s analytics platform is free for news publishers, and the company has more than 2,000 clients, many of which are struggling with these seismic changes, according to data in the report. Although news publishers and other websites can implement blockers to prevent various AI bots from scraping their content, TollBit found that more than 26 million AI scrapes bypassed those blockers in March alone. Some AI companies claim bots for AI agents don’t need to follow bot instructions because they are acting on behalf of a user.

The Post also got this comment from the chief operating officer for the media company Time, which successfully negotiated content licensing deals with OpenAI and Perplexity.
“The vast majority of the AI bots out there absolutely are not sourcing the content through any kind of paid mechanism… There is a very, very long way to go.”

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Rocky Linux 10 “Red Quartz” has reached general availability, notes a new article in The Register — surveying the differences between “RHELatives” — the major alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux:

The Rocky 10 release notes describe what’s new, such as support for RISC-V computers. Balancing that, this version only supports the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 series; it drops Rocky 9.x’s support for the older Pi 3 and Pi Zero models…

RHEL 10 itself, and Rocky with it, now require x86-64-v3, meaning Intel “Haswell” generation kit from about 2013 onward. Uniquely among the RHELatives, AlmaLinux offers a separate build of version 10 for x86-64-v2 as well, meaning Intel “Nehalem” and later — chips from roughly 2008 onward. AlmaLinux has a history of still supporting hardware that’s been dropped from RHEL and Rocky, which it’s been doing since AlmaLinux 9.4. Now that includes CPUs. In comparison, the system requirements for Rocky Linux 10 are the same as for RHEL 10. The release notes say…. “The most significant change in Rocky Linux 10 is the removal of support for x86-64-v2 architectures. AMD and Intel 64-bit architectures for x86-64-v3 are now required.”

A significant element of the advertising around RHEL 10 involves how it has an AI assistant. This is called Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed, and you can use it right from a shell prompt, as the documentation describes… It’s much easier than searching man pages, especially if you don’t know what to look for… [N]either AlmaLinux 10 nor Rocky Linux 10 includes the option of a helper bot. No big surprise there…
[Rocky Linux] is sticking closest to upstream, thanks to a clever loophole to obtain source RPMs. Its hardware requirements also closely parallel RHEL 10, and CIQ is working on certifications, compliance, and special editions. Meanwhile, AlmaLinux is maintaining support for older hardware and CPUs, which will widen its appeal, and working with partners to ensure reboot-free updates and patching, rather than CIQ’s keep-it-in-house approach. All are valid, and all three still look and work almost identically… except for the LLM bot assistant.

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These are some recently released titles we think are worth adding to your reading list. This week, we read Hungerstone, a retelling of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and EC Comics’ first serialized miniseries, Blood Type.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/what-to-read-this-weekend-vampires-and-more-vampires-191517765.html?src=rss

Recently the Browser Company (the startup behind the Arc web browser) switched over to building a new AI-powered browser — and its beta has just been released, reports TechCrunch, “though you’ll need an invite to try it out.”

The Chromium-based browser has a URL/search bar that also “acts as the interface for its in-built AI chatbot” which can “search the web for you, summarize files that you upload, and automatically switch between chat and search functions.”

The Browser Company’s CEO Josh Miller has of late acknowledged how people have been using AI tools for all sorts of tasks, and Dia is a reflection of that. By giving users an AI interface within the browser itself, where a majority of work is done these days, the company is hoping to slide into the user flow and give people an easy way to use AI, cutting out the need to visit the sites for tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude…

Users can also ask questions about all the tabs they have open, and the bot can even write up a draft based on the contents of those tabs. To set your preferences, all you have to do is talk to the chatbot to customize its tone of voice, style of writing, and settings for coding. Via an opt-in feature called History, you can allow the browser to use seven days of your browsing history as context to answer queries.
The Browser Company will give all existing Arc members access to the beta immediately, according to the article, “and existing Dia users will be able to send invites to other users.”

The article points out that Google is also adding AI-powered features to Chrome…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.