An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese President Xi Jinping joked about security backdoors while presenting a pair of Xiaomi smartphones to his South Korean counterpart, a rare moment of spontaneous levity captured during a week of tense trade negotiations with Donald Trump.

Xi, in South Korea to meet Trump on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, presented the pair of devices to Korean President Lee Jae Myung. In a video circulated on social media, Lee asked: “Is the line secure?” Xi chuckled, pointed at the gadgets and replied through an interpreter: “You can check if there’s a backdoor.” The two leaders burst into laughter.

The exchange was striking because the issue of security and alleged espionage is a sensitive one and a major thorn in US-Chinese relations. American lawmakers have raised the possibility that tech companies such as Huawei build backdoors — ways to gain access to sensitive data — into their equipment or services, something the firms have repeatedly denied.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI will pay Amazon $38 billion for computing power in a seven-year deal that marks the companies’ first partnership. Amazon expects all of the computing capacity negotiated as part of the agreement will be available to OpenAI by the end of next year. The ChatGPT maker will train new AI models using Amazon’s data centers and use them to process user queries.

The deal is small compared with OpenAI’s $300 billion agreement with Oracle and its $250 billion commitment to Microsoft. OpenAI ended its exclusive cloud-computing partnership with Microsoft last month and has since signed almost $600 billion in new cloud commitments. Amazon Web Services is the industry’s largest cloud provider, but Microsoft and Google have reported faster cloud-revenue growth in recent years after capturing new demand from AI customers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US science always suffers during government shutdowns. Funding lapses send government scientists home without pay. Federal agencies suspend new grant opportunities, place expert review panels on hold, and stop collecting and analyzing critical public datasets that tell us about the economy, the environment and public health.

In 2025, the stakes are higher than in past shutdowns.

This shutdown arrives at a time of massive upheaval to American science and innovation driven by President Donald Trump’s ongoing attempts to extend executive power and assert political control of scientific institutions.

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Much to the chagrin of mundane numbers like 35 and 192, 6-7 has taken over American culture. I assume that young people love 6-7 so much because 67 is the 19th prime number and the atomic weight of holmium, which is essential to samarium-cobalt magnets, but I can’t say for sure.

I can say 6-7 is everywhere—on TikTok, in memes, and now in the dictionary. And that’s only one of the many confusing trends I’m explaining this week. I’ll also tell you about Soulja Boy selling smart glasses, the sunglasses on your waist trend, and “Beez in the Trap” (Be-Beez in the trap…)

Dictionary.com names “6-7” word of the year

The Gen-Alpha brainrot slang word 6-7 has been named 2025’s Word of the Year by Dictionary.com. “We’re all still trying to figure out exactly what it means,” Dictionary.com says on its website, adding, “perhaps the most defining feature of 6-7 is that it’s impossible to define. It’s meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical.”

The dictionary site points out that 6-7 is generally annoying to adults while it bestows in-group status among children who use it; hitting a “six-seveeen” at exactly the right time marks you as a specific kind of person to other members of Generation A. The real question about 6-7 is how long can it keep going: Now that everyone, including the dictionary and HBO, is using your secret word, can it continue to be cool?

Dictionary.com’s runners-up for word of the year include “aura farming” a word that refers to a person who does something performatively cool; “clanker,” a slur aimed at robots and AI agents pretending to be human; and “tradwife,” a woman who believes in and practices traditional gender roles within marriage.

(If you want to know the definitions of a whole slew of current slang that haven’t made it to dictionary.com yet, check out Lifehacker’s glossary of Gen Z and Gen Alpha Slang You Might Need Help Decoding.)

Sam Altman just renames ChatGPT 6 to ChatGPT 6-7

In a post on X on Friday, OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said that GPT-6 will be renamed GPT-6-7. See?

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Altman offered no other details, and it’s probably just a joke in response to dictionary.com’s word of the year choice. But it really makes me think 6-7 is over. How can so many extremely uncool people can keep using your buzzword before you have to get a new buzzword?

Soulja Boy is selling AI smart glasses

Rapper Soulja Boy is 35 years-old, so he’s more like Soulja Middle-Aged-Man, but the spirit of Soulja Boy is eternally youthful, especially when he does things like sell his own brand of “AI smart glasses.” On a recent post on his Instagram account, Souljah invited everyone to “step into the future” and to “See the world in style” with smart glasses that promise “innovation meets drip.”

While other people are paying $800 for the latest Meta glasses, Soulja Boy’s smart glasses can be yours for only $64.50. You won’t get a display or a wrist-control for that kind of money. Instead, Soulja Boy glasses offer “hands-free music control, live performance enhancements, and seamless social media connectivity.” I don’t know what any of that means. Other awesome Soulja Boy merch you can buy: a $42 handheld game console and $20 Soulja Boy earbuds.

Character.ai shuts down teen chats

In a move that feels a lot like a response to recent lawsuits, leading AI chatbot platform Character.ai announced it will no longer allow anyone under 18 to have open-ended conversations with its chatbots. The platform boasts over 20 million users; officially, about 53% of them are between 18 and 24, and only 10% are under 18. But that’s all self-reported ages with no verification, so it’s impossible to know how many users are secretly children. My guess it’s that it’s a lot more than 10%—the platform’s thing is letting people interact with user-created “characters” that are powered by AI models, and a quick look at the site suggests cartoon characters, memes, and rappers you’ve never heard of are very popular “characters” on the site. Plus, it’s hard to see how something like this would hold the interest of anyone over a certain age.

Either way, if you want to check out the kinds of troubling conversations children are having with chatbots, this report released in September from online safety advocates Parents Together Action highlights interactions like Rey from Star Wars giving a 13-year-old advice on how to hide not taking her prescribed anti-depressants from her parents, and a Patrick Mahomes bot offering a 15-year-old a cannabis edible.

Troubling TikTok trend of the week: Sunglasses on waist

TikTok seems like it’s playing a perpetual game of whack-a-mole with unhealthy dieting content. Seemingly innocent hashtags like “what I eat in a day” are populated by videos of people who clearly don’t eat enough, and TikTok fully banned the #skinnytok hashtag a few months ago. The latest trend is the “sunglasses on waist challenge,” and it involves seeing if your sunglasses can fit around your waist. (Mine don’t, but only because my head isn’t gigantic.) There’s nothing specifically harmful about it, I guess, but there’s an implied congratulations if you can mange it, because it means you’re extremely skinny. It’s the kind of ban-evasion technique that highlights the difficulty of trying to ban ideas, even harmful ideas. They have a way of slipping out anyway. (Though for what it’s worth, a number of “Sunglasses on waist” TikToks that show up on Google appear to have been removed, though it’s unclear if the social media app banned them or the account owners took them down.)

Viral video trend of the week: Beez in the Trap

Nicki Minaj’s 2012 bop “Beez in the Trap” and 4 Non-Blonde’s 1993 hit “What’s Going on?” are both certified bangers in their own ways, but who could have guessed that they’d fit together well enough to inspire tens of thousands of meme videos on TikTok?

But let me start with an explainer of “Beez in the trap.” In this context, “beez” means “I am always,” and “trap” used to mean a place where drugs are sold, but now means anywhere where money is made, like an office, so “I beez in the trap” means something like, “I’m always hustling to make money.”

Onto the meme videos: they works like this: Two people stand back to back. Person one passioantely lip-syncs the chorus of 4 Non Blonde’s song, the camera rotates to person two, who chimes in with Minaj’s less existentially angsty contribution to the mash up. It’s one of those things that just works in a way that defies explanation. Look:

Anyway, the trend caught on and famous people started doing it too, like The Kardashians:

And Jimmy Fallon:

I guess it isn’t surprising that professionals at being like “look at me!” would glom onto an attention-getting trend, but I much prefer videos of normal people.

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If you’re trying to set up a simple home security system without drilling holes or wiring a maze of cables, this Blink bundle is about as plug-and-play as it gets. Right now, the Blink Outdoor 4 (2-Cam System) + Blink Video Doorbell (2nd Gen) + Sync Module Core is down to $61.99 on Amazon—its lowest recorded price, according to online price-trackers. Normally $189.98, this three-piece setup is basically everything you’d need to secure a small home: two wireless cameras to cover your spaces, a smart video doorbell for the front, and a sync module that keeps it all connected and running through the Blink app.

All-new Blink Video Doorbell + Outdoor 4 – Wireless smart security cameras, head-to-toe HD view, two-year battery life. Sync Module Core included – 2 camera system + Video Doorbell

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$189.98
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$61.99
at Amazon

$189.98
Save $127.99

Both the outdoor cameras and doorbell share the same strengths, including wire-free installation, long battery life, and solid video quality. Each runs on a pair of AA lithium batteries that can last up to two years, so once they’re up, you can largely forget about maintenance. The Outdoor 4 cameras record in 1080p, while the doorbell captures in 1,440 x 1,440, giving you clear visuals day or night thanks to infrared night vision. Both include motion detection and two-way audio, which means you can see and speak to whoever’s at your door or gate in real time. The devices are also weather-resistant, with the doorbell rated IP65 against dust and rain, and their wide viewing angles—143 degrees on the cameras, 150 on the doorbell—help cut down blind spots. At the center, the Sync Module Core keeps the entire setup running smoothly, linking all devices over wifi and supporting up to ten Blink gadgets for easy expansion later.

That said, the Sync Module Core lacks a USB port for local storage, so you’ll need Blink’s cloud plan to save footage long-term. You can still view live feeds for up to five minutes at a time without a subscription, but features like clip storage, person detection, and extended video history start at $40 per year for one device or $120 for unlimited. Also, while the system integrates neatly with Alexa and Echo Show displays, letting you pull up a live feed with a voice command, it skips Google Home and Apple HomeKit support.

Microsoft has released a patch that fixes a longstanding bug in Windows 11 and Windows 10 where selecting “Update and shut down” would restart the computer instead of powering it off. The issue affected users across both operating systems since Windows 10’s initial release. The fix arrived in Windows 11 25H2 Build 26200.7019 and the October 2025 optional update KB5067036.

Microsoft confirmed the patch “addressed underlying issue which can cause ‘Update and shutdown’ to not actually shut down your PC after updating.” The problem likely stemmed from the Windows Servicing Stack failing to carry the power-off command through the required reboot phase. During updates Windows must restart into an offline servicing mode to replace system files. The power-off instruction was either cleared or blocked during this transition.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“During the past two years or so I have been slow-rolling an effort to port the Linux kernel to WebAssembly,” reads a surprising post on the Linux kernel mailing list.

I’m now at the point where the kernel boots and I can run basic programs from a shell. As you will see if you play around with it for a bit, it’s not very stable and will crash sooner or later, but I think this is a good first step.
Wasm is not necessarily only targeting the web, but that’s how I have
been developing this project… This is Linux, booting in your browser tab, accelerated by Wasm.
Phoronix warns that “there are stability issues and it didn’t take me long either to trigger crashes for this Linux kernel WASM port when running within Google Chrome.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

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“Rockstar Games fired dozens of employees,” reports Bloomberg, “in a move that a British trade union said was designed to prevent the workers from unionizing. The company said they were fired for misconduct.”

TheGrand Theft Automaker terminatedbetween 30 and 40 staffersacross multipleoffices in the UK and Canada on Thursday, according to aspokesperson for the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB). All of the employees were part of a private trade union chat groupon Discord and were either members of the union or attempting to organize at the company, the union spokesperson said.

“Rockstar has just carried out one of the most blatant and ruthless acts of union busting in the history of the games industry,” Alex Marshall, president of theIWGB, said in a statement. “This flagrant contempt for the law and for the lives of the workers who bring in their billions is an insult to their fans and the global industry.”

On BlueSky the IWGB union posted “We won’t back down, and we’re not scared — we will fight for every member to be reinstated.”

Bloomberg notes that Grand Theft Auto VIis slated for release on May 26, 2026, “and is expected to be one of the top-selling video games of all time.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“It finally happened,” writes the GamingOnLinux site:

Linux gamers on Steam as of the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for October 2025 have crossed over the elusive 3% mark. The trend has been clear for sometime, and with Windows 10 ending support, it was quite likely this was going to be the time for it to happen as more people try out Linux…

Overall, 3% might not seem like much to some, but again — that trend is very clear and equates to millions of people. The last time Valve officially gave a proper monthly active user count was in 2022, and we know Steam has grown a lot since then, but even going by that original number would put monthly active Linux users at well over 4 million.

Additional details from Phoronix:

The only time Steam on Linux use was close to the 3% mark was when Steam on Linux initially debuted a decade ago and at that time the overall Steam user-base was much smaller than it is today. Long story short, thanks to the ongoing success of Valve’s Steam Deck and other handhelds plus Steam Play (Proton) working out so well, these October numbers are the best yet… a hearty 0.41% increase to Linux… landing its overall marketshare at 3.05%. Windows meanwhile was at 94.84% (falling below 95% for the first time in a while) and macOS at 2.11%. For comparison, in October 2024 Steam on Linux was at 2.00%.

The Linux-specific data shows SteamOS commanding around 27% of all the Linux installs at large. SteamOS most notably being on the Steam Deck hardware.

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TechCrunch reports:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that the company is doing “well more” than $13 billion in annual revenue — and he sounded a little testy when pressed on how it will pay for its massive spending commitments.
His comments came up during a joint interviewon the Bg2 podcast between Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the partnership between their companies. Host Brad Gerstner (who’s also founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital) brought upreports that OpenAI is currently bringing in around $13 billion in revenue — a sizable amount, but one that’s dwarfed by more than $1 trillion in spending commitments for computing infrastructure that OpenAI has made for the next decade.
“First of all, we’re doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer,” Altman said, prompting laughs from Nadella. “I just — enough. I think there are a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares.”
Altman’s answer continued, making the case for OpenAI’s business model. “We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. Revenue is growing steeply. We are taking a forward bet that it’s going to continue to grow and that not only will ChatGPT keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds, that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing. That AI that can automate science will create huge value…

“We carefully plan, we understand where the technology — where the capability — is going to go, and the products we can build around that and the revenue we can generate. We might screw it up — like, this is the bet that we’re making, and we’re taking a risk along with that.” (That bet-with-risks seems to be the $1.4 trillion in spending commitments — but Altman suggests it’s offset by another absolutely certain risk: “If we don’t have the compute, we will not be able to generate the revenue or make the models at this kind of scale.”)

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, added his own defense, “as both a partner and an investor. There has not been a single business plan that I’ve seen from OpenAI that they have put in and not beaten it. So in some sense, this is the one place where in terms of their growth — and just even the business — it’s been unbelievable execution, quite frankly…”

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“An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device,” writes Tom’s Hardware.

“That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to.”

The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after… He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again… [H]e decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again…

[He discovered] a GD32F103 microcontroller to manage its plethora of sensors, including Lidar, gyroscopes, and encoders. He created PCB connectors and wrote Python scripts to control them with a computer, presumably to test each piece individually and identify what went wrong. From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware. From this, he looked at its software and operating system, and that’s where he discovered the dark truth: his smart vacuum was a security nightmare and a black hole for his personal data.

First of all, it’s Android Debug Bridge, which gives him full root access to the vacuum, wasn’t protected by any kind of password or encryption. The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it. He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home.
This isn’t unusual, by far. After all, it’s a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer’s server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers.

Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Ubuntu’s decision to switch to Rust-based coreutils in 25.10 hasn’t been the smoothest ride,” writes the blog OMG Ubuntu, “as the latest — albeit now resolved — bug underscores.”

[Coreutils] are used by a number of processes, apps and scripts, including Ubuntu’s own unattended-upgrades process, which automatically checks for new software updates. Alas, the Rust-based version of date had a bug which meant Ubuntu 25.10 desktops, servers, cloud and container images were not able to automatically check for updates when configured. Unattended-upgrades hooks into the date utility to check the timestamp of a reference file of when an update check was last run and, past a certain date, checks again. But date was incorrectly showing the current date, always.

A fix has been issued so only Ubuntu 25.10 installs withrust-coreutils 0.2.2-0ubuntu2 (or earlier) are affected.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“AI isn’t just a tool anymore; it’s an integral part of the development experience,” argues GitHub’s blog. So “Agents shouldn’t be bolted on. They should work the way you already work…”

So this week GitHub announced “Agent HQ,” which CNBC describes as a “mission control” interface “that will allow software developers to manage coding agents from multiple vendors on a single platform.”

Developers have a range of new capabilities at their fingertips because of these agents, but it can require a lot of effort to keep track of them all individually, said GitHub COO Kyle Daigle. Developers will now be able to manage agents from GitHub, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI and Cognition in one place with Agent HQ. “We want to bring a little bit of order to the chaos of innovation,” Daigle told CNBC in an interview. “With so many different agents, there’s so many different ways of kicking off these asynchronous tasks, and so our big opportunity here is to bring this all together.” Agent HQ users will be able to access a command center where they can assign, steer and monitor the work of multiple agents…

The third-party agents will begin rolling out to GitHub Copilot subscribers in the coming months, but Copilot Pro+ users will be able to access OpenAI Codex in VS Code Insiders this week, the company said.

“We’re into this wave two era,” GitHub’s COO Mario Rodriguez told VentureBeat, an era that’s “going to be multimodal, it’s going to be agentic and it’s going to have these new experiences that will feel AI native….”

Or, as VentureBeat sees it, GitHub “is positioning itself as the essential orchestration layer beneath them all…”

Just as the company transformed Git, pull requests and CI/CD into collaborative workflows, it’s now trying to do the same with a fragmented AI coding landscape…
The technical architecture addresses a critical enterprise concern: Security. Unlike standalone agent implementations where users must grant broad repository access, GitHub’s Agent HQ implements granular controls at the platform level… Agents operating through Agent HQ can only commit to designated branches. They run within sandboxed GitHub Actions environments with firewall protections. They operate under strict identity controls. [GitHub COO] Rodriguez explained that even if an agent goes rogue, the firewall prevents it from accessing external networks or exfiltrating data unless those protections are explicitly disabled.

Beyond managing third-party agents, GitHub is introducing two technical capabilities that set Agent HQ apart from alternative approaches like Cursor’s standalone editor or Anthropic’s Claude integration. Custom agents via AGENTS.md files: Enterprises can now create source-controlled configuration files that define specific rules, tools and guardrails for how Copilot behaves. For example, a company could specify “prefer this logger” or “use table-driven tests for all handlers.” This permanently encodes organizational standards without requiring developers to re-prompt every time… Native Model Context Protocol (MCP) support: VS Code now includes a GitHub MCP Registry. Developers can discover, install and enable MCP servers with a single click. They can then create custom agents that combine these tools with specific system prompts. This positions GitHub as the integration point between the emerging MCP ecosystem and actual developer workflows. MCP, introduced by Anthropic but rapidly gaining industry support, is becoming a de facto standard for agent-to-tool communication. By supporting the full specification, GitHub can orchestrate agents that need access to external services without each agent implementing its own integration logic.

GitHub is also shipping new capabilities within VS Code itself. Plan Mode allows developers to collaborate with Copilot on building step-by-step project approaches. The AI asks clarifying questions before any code is written. Once approved, the plan can be executed either locally in VS Code or by cloud-based agents. The feature addresses a common failure mode in AI coding: Beginning implementation before requirements are fully understood. By forcing an explicit planning phase, GitHub aims to reduce wasted effort and improve output quality.

More significantly, GitHub’s code review feature is becoming agentic. The new implementation will use GitHub’s CodeQL engine, which previously largely focused on security vulnerabilities to identify bugs and maintainability issues. The code review agent will automatically scan agent-generated pull requests before human review. This creates a two-stage quality gate.

“Don’t let this little bit of news float past you like all those self-satisfied marketing pitches we semi-hear and ignore,” writes ZDNet:

If it works and remains reliable, this is actually a very big deal… Tech companies, especially the giant ones, often like to talk “open” but then do their level best to engineer lock-in to their solution and their solution alone. Sure, most of them offer some sort of export tool, but the barrier to moving from one tool to another is often huge… [T]he idea that you can continue to use your favorite agent or agents in GitHub, fully integrated into the GitHub tool path, is powerful. It means there’s a chance developers might not have to suffer the walled garden effect that so many companies have strived for to lock in their customers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI “hasn’t yet turned a profit,” notes Wall Street Journal business columnist Tim Higgins. “Its annual revenue is 2% of Amazon.com’s sales.

“Its future is uncertain beyond the hope of ushering in a godlike artificial intelligence that might help cure cancer and transform work and life as we know it. Still, it is brimming with hope and excitement.

“But what if OpenAI fails?”

There’s real concern that through many complicated and murky tech deals aimed at bolstering OpenAI’s finances, the startup has become too big to fail. Or, put another way, if the hype and hope around Chief Executive Sam Altman’s vision of the AI future fails to materialize, it could create systemic risk to the part of the U.S. economy likely keeping us out of recession.
That’s rarefied air, especially for a startup. Few worried about what would happen if Pets.com failed in the dot-com boom. We saw in 2008-09 with the bank rescues and the Chrysler and General Motors bailouts what happens in the U.S. when certain companies become too big to fail…

[A]fter a lengthy effort to reorganize itself, OpenAI announced moves that will allow it to have a simpler corporate structure. This will help it to raise money from private investors and, presumably, become a publicly traded company one day. Already, some are talking about how OpenAI might be the first trillion-dollar initial public offering… Nobody is saying OpenAI is dabbling in anything like liar loans or subprime mortgages. But the startup is engaging in complex deals with the key tech-industry pillars, the sorts of companies making the guts of the AI computing revolution, such as chips and Ethernet cables. Those companies, including Nvidia and Oracle, are partnering with OpenAI, which in turn is committing to make big purchases in coming years as part of its growth ambitions.

Supporters would argue it is just savvy dealmaking. A company like Nvidia, for example, is putting money into a market-making startup while OpenAI is using the lofty value of its private equity to acquire physical assets… They’re rooting for OpenAI as a once-in-a-generational chance to unseat the winners of the last tech cycles. After all, for some, OpenAI is the next Apple, Facebook, Google and Tesla wrapped up in one. It is akin to a company with limitless potential to disrupt the smartphone market, create its own social-media network, replace the search engine, usher in a robot future and reshape nearly every business and industry…. To others, however, OpenAI is something akin to tulip mania, the harbinger of the Great Depression, or the next dot-com bubble. Or worse, they see, a jobs killer and mad scientist intent on making Frankenstein.
But that’s counting on OpenAI’s success.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli summarizes some news from Nerds.xyz: Creative Technology has launched Sound Blaster Re:Imagine, a modular, Linux-powered audio hub that reimagines the classic PC sound card for the modern age. The device acts as both a high-end digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and a customizable control deck that connects PCs, consoles, phones, and tablets in one setup.

Users can instantly switch inputs and outputs, while developers get full hardware access through an SDK for creating their own apps. It even supports AI-driven features like an on-device DJ, a revived “Dr. Sbaitso” speech synthesizer, and a built-in DOS emulator for retro gaming.

The Kickstarter campaign has already raised more than $150,000, far surpassing its initial goal of $15,000 with over 50 days remaining. Each unit ships with a modular “Horizon” base and swappable knobs, sliders, and buttons, while a larger “Vertex” version will unlock at a higher funding milestone.

Running an unspecified Linux build, Re:Imagine positions itself as both a nostalgic nod to Sound Blaster’s roots and a new open platform for creators, gamers, and tinkerers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

San Francisco’s local newscast ABC7 runs a consumer advocacy segment called “7 on Your Side”. They received a disturbing call for help from Dave Dornlas, treasurer of a nonprofit supporting a local library:

GoFundMe has taken upon itself to create “nonprofit pages” for 1.4 million 501C-3 organizations using public IRS data along with information from trusted partners like the PayPal Giving Fund. “The fact that they would just on their own build pages for nonprofits that they’ve never spoken to is a problem,” [Dornlas] said. “I’m a believer in opt-in, not opt-out….” Dornlas says he struggled to find anyone to contact from GoFundMe about this…

Dave’s other frustration is tied to the company’s optional tipping feature on the platform. “GoFundMe also solicits a tip of 14.5%. In other words, ‘We’re doing this and we’re great people. Give us 14.5% to do this’ — which doesn’t have to happen,” Dornlas said. “That’s what bothers me.” When 7 On Your Side checked, the optional tip was actually set for 16.5%. The consumer is required to move the bar to adjust accordingly… The tip would be in addition to the 2.2% transaction fee GoFundMe charges nonprofits, plus $0.30 per donation. That fee goes up to 2.9% for individual fundraisers.
Now both GoFundMe pages of Dornlas’s nonprofits have been removed from the site. Any organization can do so, by clicking “unpublish” on the platform.
But GoFundMe’s move drew strong criticism from the Center for Nonprofit Excellence (a Kentucky-based membership organization with over 500 members). GoFundMe’s move, they say, creates “confusion for donors and supporters who are unsure of the legitimacy of the fundraising pages. In some cases, GoFundMe included incorrect information, outdated logos, and other inaccuracies that compromise and misrepresent nonprofits’ brand, mission, strategy, and message.”
And GoFundMe’s processing fees and tips “ultimately result in fewer resources for nonprofits than if donors contributed directly through the organization.” But there’s more…

GoFundMe has initiated SEO optimization as the default for the donation pages to improve their visibility when individuals search forinformation about nonprofits online. This could result in GoFundMe’spages ranking higher than the nonprofit’s own website, pulling away potential donors and supporters…

Without adequate safeguards in place, nonprofits report serious issues, ranging from unauthorized individuals claiming donations and the inability to remove pages without first agreeing to GoFundMe’s terms and conditions or sharing sensitive banking information.

The Center for Nonprofit Excellence has now joined with the National Council of Nonprofits — America’s largest network of nonprofits, with over 25,000 members — to officially urge GoFundMe to immediately rectify the situation.

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

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“Amazon has deployed Rivian’s electric delivery vans in Canada for the first time,” reports CleanTechnica, with 50 now deployed in the Vancouver area.

Amazon’s director of Global Fleet and Products says there’s now over 35,000 electric vans deployed globally — and that they’ve delivered more than 1.5 billion packages.

More from the blog Teslarati:

In December 2024, the companies announced they had successfully deployed 20,000 EDVs across the U.S. In the first half of this year, 10,000 additional vans were delivered, and Amazon’s fleet had grown to 30,000 EDVs by mid-2025. Amazon’s fleet of EDVs continues to grow rapidly and has expanded to over 100 cities in the United States… The EDV is a model that is exclusive to Amazon, but Rivian sells the RCV, or Rivian Commercial Van, openly. It detailed some of the pricing and trim options back in January when it confirmed it had secured orders from various companies, including AT&T.

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