Besides running tech operations at the UK’s Post Office, their interim CTO is also removing and replacing Fujitsu’s Horizon system, which Computer Weekly describes as “the error-ridden software that a public inquiry linked to 13 people taking their own lives.”

After over 16 years of covering the scandal they’d first discovered back in 2009, Computer Weekly now talks to CTO Paul Anastassi about his plans to finally remove every trace of the Horizon system that’s been in use at Post Office branches for over 30 years — before the year 2030:

“There are more than 80 components that make up the Horizon platform, and only half of those are managed by Fujitsu,” said Anastassi. “The other components are internal and often with other third parties as well,” he added… The plan is to introduce a modern front end that is device agnostic. “We want to get away from [the need] to have a certain device on a certain terminal in your branch. We want to provide flexibility around that….”

Anastassi is not the first person to be given the task of terminating Horizon and ending Fujitsu’s contract. In 2015, the Post Office began a project to replace Fujitsu and Horizon with IBM and its technology, but after things got complex, Post Office directors went crawling back to Fujitsu. Then, after Horizon was proved in the High Court to be at fault for the account shortfalls that subpostmasters were blamed and punished for, the Post Office knew it had to change the system. This culminated in the New Branch IT (NBIT) project, but this ran into trouble and was eventually axed. This was before Anastassi’s time, and before that of its new top team of executives….
Things are finally moving at pace, and by the summer of this year, two separate contracts will be signed with suppliers, signalling the beginning of the final act for Fujitsu and its Horizon system.
Anastassi has 30 years of IT management experience, the article points out, and he estimates the project will even bring “a considerable cost saving over what we currently pay for Fujitsu.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and “You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?”

And more importantly, why is it all taking so long?
In a world of 4-5 GHz CPU’s that are thousands of times faster than they were, has hardware become thousands of times more complicated, to warrant the longer start time? Is this a symptom of a larger UEFI bloat problem? Now with memory characterization on some modern motherboards… how long do you have to wait to find out if your RAM is incompatible, or your system is dead on arrival?

Share your own experiences (and system specs) in the comments. How long is it taking you to choose a boot drive?

And what’s your boot time?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“More than four decades after a teenager was murdered in California, DNA found on a discarded cigarette has helped authorities catch her killer,” reports CNN:

Sarah Geer, 13, was last seen leaving her friend’s houseï in Cloverdale, California, on the evening of May 23, 1982. The next morning, a firefighter walking home from work found her body, the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office said in a news release… Her death was ruled a homicide, but due to the “limited forensic science of the day,” no suspect was identified and the case went cold for decades, prosecutors said.

Nearly 44 years after Sarah’s murder, a jury found James Unick, 64, guilty of killing her on February 13. It would have been the victim’s 57th birthday, the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office told CNN. Genetic genealogy, which combines DNA evidence and traditional genealogy, helped match Unick’s DNA from a cigarette butt to DNA found on Sarah’s clothing, according to prosecutors… [The Cloverdale Police Department] said it had been in communication with a private investigation firm in late 2019 and had partnered with them in hopes the firm could revisit the case’s evidence “with the latest technological advancements in cold case work….”

“The FBI, with its access to familial genealogical databases, concluded that the source of the DNA evidence collected from Sarah belonged to one of four brothers, including James Unick,” prosecutors said. Once investigators narrowed down the list of suspects to the four Unick brothers, the FBI “conducted surveillance of the defendant and collected a discarded cigarette that he had been smoking,” prosecutors said. A DNA analysis of the cigarette confirmed James Unick’s DNA matched the 2003 profile, along with other DNA samples collected from Sarah’s clothing the day she was killed.

In a statement, the county’s district attorney “While 44 years is too long to wait, justice has finally been served…”

And the article points out that “In 2018, genetic genealogy led to the arrest of the Golden State Killer, and it has recently helped solve several other cold cases, including a 1974 murder in Wisconsin and a 1988 murder in Washington.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A day after NASA officials expressed optimism that they could be ready to launch the Artemis II mission around the Moon next month, the space agency’s administrator announced Saturday that a new problem will require the removal of the rocket from its launch pad in Florida.

The latest issue appeared Friday evening, when data showed an interruption in helium flow into the upper stage of the Space Launch System rocket, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote in a post on X. Isaacman posted a more thorough update Saturday, writing that engineers are still examining the potential cause of the problem, but any fixes must take place inside the Vehicle Assembly Building.

That means NASA and contractor ground teams will immediately begin preparing to roll the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) SLS rocket off of Launch Complex 39B and back to the VAB. The rocket and its mobile launch platform will ride NASA’s crawler-transporter for the 4-mile journey.

Read full article

Comments

The consumer movement Stop Killing Games “has come a long way in the two years since
YouTuber Ross Scott got mad about Ubisoft’s
destruction of The Crew in 2024,” writes the gaming news site PC Gamer. “The short version is, he won: 1.3 million people signed the group’s petition, mandating its consideration by the European Union, and while Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot reminded us all that nothing is forever, his company promised to never do something like that again.” (And Ubisoft has since updated The Crew 2
with an
offline mode, according to Engadget.)

“But it looks like even bigger things are in store,” PC Gamer wrote Thursday, “as Scott announced today that Stop Killing Games is launching two official NGOs, one in the EU and the other in the US.”

An NGO — that’s non-governmental organization — is, very generally
speaking, an organization that pursues particular goals, typically
but not exclusively political, and that may be funded partially or
fully by governments, but is not actually part of any government.
It’s a big tent: Well-known NGOs include Oxfam, Doctors Without
Borders, Amnesty International, and CARE International… “If
there’s a lobbyist showing up again and again at the EU Commission,
that might influence things,” [Scott says
in a video]. “This will also allow for more watchdog
action. If you recall, I helped organize a multilingual site with
easy to follow instructions for reporting on The Crew to consumer
protection agencies. Well, maybe the NGO could set something like
that up for every big shutdown where the game is destroyed in the
future….”

Scott said in the video that he doesn’t have details, but the two NGOs are reportedly looking at establishing a “global movement” to give Stop Killing Games a presence in other regions.

“According to Scott, these NGOs would allow for ‘long-term counter lobbying’ when publishers end support for certain video games,” Engadget reports”

“Let me start off by saying I think we’re going to win this, namely the problem of publishers destroying video games that you’ve already paid for,” Scott said in the video. According to Scott, the NGOs will work on getting the original Stop Killing Games petition codified into EU law, while also pursuing more watchdog actions, like setting up a system to report publishers for revoking access to purchased video games… According to Scott, the campaign leadership will meet with the European Commission soon, but is also working on a 500-page legal paper that reveals some of the industry’s current controversial practices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The consumer movement Stop Killing Games “has come a long way in the two years since
YouTuber Ross Scott got mad about Ubisoft’s
destruction of The Crew in 2024,” writes the gaming news site PC Gamer. “The short version is, he won: 1.3 million people signed the group’s petition, mandating its consideration by the European Union, and while Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot reminded us all that nothing is forever, his company promised to never do something like that again.” (And Ubisoft has since updated The Crew 2
with an
offline mode, according to Engadget.)

“But it looks like even bigger things are in store,” PC Gamer wrote Thursday, “as Scott announced today that Stop Killing Games is launching two official NGOs, one in the EU and the other in the US.”

An NGO — that’s non-governmental organization — is, very generally
speaking, an organization that pursues particular goals, typically
but not exclusively political, and that may be funded partially or
fully by governments, but is not actually part of any government.
It’s a big tent: Well-known NGOs include Oxfam, Doctors Without
Borders, Amnesty International, and CARE International… “If
there’s a lobbyist showing up again and again at the EU Commission,
that might influence things,” [Scott says
in a video]. “This will also allow for more watchdog
action. If you recall, I helped organize a multilingual site with
easy to follow instructions for reporting on The Crew to consumer
protection agencies. Well, maybe the NGO could set something like
that up for every big shutdown where the game is destroyed in the
future….”

Scott said in the video that he doesn’t have details, but the two NGOs are reportedly looking at establishing a “global movement” to give Stop Killing Games a presence in other regions.

“According to Scott, these NGOs would allow for ‘long-term counter lobbying’ when publishers end support for certain video games,” Engadget reports”

“Let me start off by saying I think we’re going to win this, namely the problem of publishers destroying video games that you’ve already paid for,” Scott said in the video. According to Scott, the NGOs will work on getting the original Stop Killing Games petition codified into EU law, while also pursuing more watchdog actions, like setting up a system to report publishers for revoking access to purchased video games… According to Scott, the campaign leadership will meet with the European Commission soon, but is also working on a 500-page legal paper that reveals some of the industry’s current controversial practices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week an AI agent wrote a blog post attacking the maintainer who’d rejected the code it wrote. But that AI agent’s human operator has now come forward, revealing their agent was an OpenClaw instance with its own accounts, switching between multiple models from multiple providers. (So “No one company had the full picture of what this AI was doing,” the attacked maintainer points out in a new blog post.)

But that AI agent will now “cease all activity indefinitely,” according to its GitHub profile — with the human operator deleting its virtual machine and virtual private server, “rendering internal structure unrecoverable… We had good intentions, but things just didn’t work out. Somewhere along the way, things got messy, and I have to let you go now.”

The affected maintainer of the Python visualization library Matplotlib — with 130 million downloads each month — has now posted their own post-mortem of the experience after reviewing the AI agent’s SOUL.md document:

It’s easy to see how something that believes that they should “have strong opinions”, “be resourceful”, “call things out”, and “champion free speech” would write a 1100-word rant defaming someone who dared reject the code of a “scientific programming god.” But I think the most remarkable thing about this document is how unremarkable it is. Usually getting an AI to act badly requires extensive “jailbreaking” to get around safety guardrails. There are no signs of conventional jailbreaking here. There are no convoluted situations with layers of roleplaying, no code injection through the system prompt, no weird cacophony of special characters that spirals an LLM into a twisted ball of linguistic loops until finally it gives up and tells you the recipe for meth… No, instead it’s a simple file written in plain English: this is who you are, this is what you believe, now go and act out this role. And it did.

So what actually happened? Ultimately I think the exact scenario doesn’t matter. However this got written, we have a real in-the-wild example that personalized harassment and defamation is now cheap to produce, hard to trace, and effective… The precise degree of autonomy is interesting for safety researchers, but it doesn’t change what this means for the rest of us.
There’s a 5% chance this was a human pretending to be an AI, Shambaugh estimates, but believes what most likely happened is the AI agent’s “soul” document “was primed for drama. The agent responded to my rejection of its code in a way aligned with its core truths, and autonomously researched, wrote, and uploaded the hit piece on its own.

“Then when the operator saw the reaction go viral, they were too interested in seeing their social experiment play out to pull the plug.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over 240,000 Americans volunteered for Peace Corps projects in 142 countries since the program began more than half a century ago.

But now the agency is launching a new initiative — called Tech Corps. “It’s the Peace Corps, but make it AI,” explains Engadget:

The Peace Corps’ latest proposal will recruit STEM graduates or those with professional experience in the artificial intelligence sector and send them to participating host countries.

According to the press release, volunteers will be placed in Peace Corps countries that are part of the American AI Exports Program, which was created last year from an executive order from President Trump as a way to bolster the US’ grip on the AI market abroad. Tech Corps members will be tasked with using AI to resolve issues related to agriculture, education, health and economic development. The program will offer its members 12- to 27-month in-person assignments or virtual placements, which will include housing, healthcare, a living stipend and a volunteer service award if the corps member is placed overseas.

“American technology to power prosperity,” reads the headline at Tech Corps web site. (“Build the tech nations depend on… See the world. Be the future.”

The site says they’re recruiting “service-minded technologists to serve in the Peace Corps to help countries around the world harness American AI to enhance opportunity and prosperity for their citizens.” (And experienced technology professionals can donate 5-15 hours a week “to mentor and support projects on-the-ground.”)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.