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.

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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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“People are creating ‘dumb homes,'” the VP of research at the Global Wellness Institute, tells the web site Axios.

Some are swapping NASA-style setups for old-fashioned buttons, switches and knobs. Others are designing digital detox corners — all part of a bigger “analog wellness” movement…

The return to analog hobbies and spacesis about more than nostalgia for pre-internet times, researchers say. A home where “technology is always in the background, working and listening, feels anxiety-producing” instead of restorative, architect Yan M. Wang tells Axios… Design media brand Dwell named the decline of smart homes a top trend for 2025 and beyond.

Wealthy Los Angeles house hunters have started shunning WiFi-enabled, voice-activated appliances “to escape the $100 billion home-automation industry,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Meanwhile, landlines have found new fans — many of them parents who want to keep their kids off screens, the Washington Post reports.

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“It’s been hard for me to understand why Atlas exists,” writes MIT Technology Review. ” Who is this browser for, exactly? Who is its customer? And the answer I have come to there is that Atlas is for OpenAI. The real customer, the true end user of Atlas, is not the person browsing websites, it is the company collecting data about what and how that person is browsing.”

New York Magazine’s “Intelligencer” column argues OpenAI wants ChatGPT in your browser because “That’s where people who use computers, particularly for work, spend all their time, and through which vast quantities of valuable information flow in and out. Also, if you’re a company hoping to train your models to replicate a bunch of white-collar work, millions of browser sessions would be a pretty valuable source of data.”

Unfortunately, warns Fast Company, ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity Comet, and other AI browses “include some major security, privacy, and usability trade-offs… Most of the time, I don’t want to use them and am wary of doing so…”

Worst of all, these browsers are security minefields. A web page that looks benign to humans can includehidden instructions for AI agents, tricking them into stealing info from other sites… “If you’re signed into sensitive accounts like your bank or your email provider in your browser, simply summarizing a Reddit postcould result in an attacker being able to steal money or your private data,”Brave’s security researchers wrotelast week.No one has figured out how to solve this problem.

If you can look past the security nightmares, the actual browsing features are substandard. Neither ChatGPT Atlas nor Perplexity Comet support vertical tabs — a must-have feature for me — and they have no tab search tool or way to look up recently-closed pages. Atlas also doesn’t support saving sites as web apps, selecting multiple tabs (for instance, to close all at once with Cmd+W), or customizing the appearance. Compared to all the fancy new AI features, the web browsing part can feel like an afterthought. Regular web search can also be a hassle, even though you’ll probably need it sometimes. When I typed “Sichuan Chili” into ChatGPT Atlas, it produced a lengthy description of the Chinese peppers, not the nearby restaurant whose website and number I was looking for…. Meanwhile, the standard AI annoyances still apply in the browser. Getting Perplexity to fill my grocery cart felt like a triumph, but on other occasions the AI has run into inexplicable walls and only ended up wasting more time.

There may be other costs to using these browsers as well. AI still has usage limits, and so all this eventually becomes a ploy to bump more people into paid tiers. Beyond that,Atlas is constantly analyzing the pages you visit to build a “memory” of who you are and what you’re into. Do not be surprised if this translates to deeply targeted ads as OpenAI startslooking at ways to monetize free users. For now, I’m only using AI browsers in small doses when I think they can solve a specific problem.

Even then, I’m not going sign them into my email, bank accounts, or any other accounts for which a security breach would be catastrophic. It’s too bad, because email and calendars are areas where AI agents could be truly useful, but the security risks are too great (andwell-documented).

The article notes that in August Vivaldi announced that “We’re taking a stand, choosing humans over hype” with their browser:

We will not use an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine to fill up forms for you, until more rigorous ways to do those things are available. Vivaldi is the haven for people who still want to explore. We will continue building a browser for curious minds, power users, researchers, and anyone who values autonomy. If AI contributes to that goal without stealing intellectual property, compromising privacy or the open web, we will use it. If it turns people into passive consumers, we will not…

We’re fighting for a better web.

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CBS News investigates what happened when police thought they’d tracked down a “porch pirate” who’d stolen a package — and accused an innocent woman.

“You know why I’m here,” the police sergeant tells Chrisanna Elser. “You know we have cameras in that town…”

“It went right into, ‘we have video of you stealing a package,'” Elser said… “Can I see the video?” Elser asked. “If you go to court, you can,” the officer replied. “If you’re going to deny it, I’m not going to extend you any courtesy….” [You can watch a video of the entire confrontation.] On her doorstep, the officer issued a summons, without ever looking at the surveillance video Elser had. “We can show you exactly where we were,” she told him. “I already know where you were,” he replied.
Her Rivian — equipped with multiple cameras — had recorded her entire route that day… It took weeks of her collecting her own evidence, building timelines, and submitting videos before someone listened. Finally, she received an email from the Columbine Valley police chief acknowledging her efforts in an email saying, “nicely done btw (by the way),” and informing her the summons would not be filed.

Elser also found the theft video (which the police officer refused to show her) on Nextdoor, reports Electrek. “The woman has the same color hair, but different facial and nose shape and apparent age than Elser, which is all reasonably apparent when viewing the video…”

But Elser does drive a green Rivian truck, which police knew had entered the neighborhood 20 times over the course of a month. (Though in the video the officer is told that a male driver in the same household passes through that neighborhood driving to and from work.) The problem may be their certainty — derived from Flock’s network of cameras that automatically read license plates, “tracking movements of vehicles wherever they go…”

The system has provoked concern from privacy and freedom focused organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union. Flock also recently announced a partnership with Ring, seeking to use a network of doorbell cameras to track Americans in even more places…. [The police] didn’t even have video of the truck in the area — merely tags of it entering… (it also left the area minutes later, indicating a drive through, rather than crawling through neighborhoods looking for packages — but police neglected to check the exit timestamps)… Elser has asked for an apology for [officer] Milliman’s aggressive behavior during the encounter, but has heard nothing back from the department despite a call, email, and physical appearance at the police station.

The article points out that Rivian’s “Road Cam” feature can be set to record footage of everything happening around it using the car’s built in cameras for driver-assist features. But if you want to record footage all the time, you’ll need to plug in a USB-C external drive to store it. (It’s ironic how different cameras recorded every part of this story — the theft, the police officer accusing the innocent woman, and that innocent woman’s actual whereabouts.)

Electrek’s take? “Citizens should not need to own a $70k+ truck, or even a $100 external hard drive, to keep track of everything they do in order to prove to power-tripping officers that they didn’t commit a crime.”

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Millions will set their clocks back an hour tonight for Daylight Saving Time — only to set them forward an hour six months later.

But does anyone like doing this, asks Yahoo News:

A recent AP-NORC poll found that about half of the American public, 47%, oppose the current daylight saving time system, compared to 40% who neither favor nor oppose the current practice, while 12% favor the current system, which involves most states switching their clocks twice a year.

Of those polled, 56% would prefer to have daylight saving time year-round, meaning less light in the morning for a tradeoff of more light in the evening. While 42% of Americans said they would prefer to have standard time year-round, which means more light in the morning and less light in the evening. And 12% of Americans prefer switching between standard time and daylight saving time.

Sleep doctors would prefer we switch to standard time permanently. “The U.S. should eliminate seasonal time changes in favor of a national, fixed, year-round time,” the American Academy of Sleep Medicine said in a statement published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine last year. “Current evidence best supports the adoption of year-round standard time, which aligns best with human circadian biology and provides distinct benefits for public health and safety.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“We’ve spent the last year rebuilding major components of our system,” Cloudflare announced this week, “and we’ve just slashed the latency of traffic passing through our network for millions of our customers,” (There’s a 10ms cut in the median time to respond, plus a 25% performance boost as measured by CDN performance tests.) They replaced a 15-year-old system named FL (where they run security and performance features), and “At the same time, we’ve made our system more secure, and we’ve reduced the time it takes for us to build and release new products.”

And yes, Rust was involved:

We write a lot of Rust, and we’ve gotten pretty good at it… We built FL2 in Rust, on Oxy [Cloudflare’s Rust-based next generation proxy framework], and built a strict module framework to structure all the logic in FL2…
Built in Rust, [Oxy] eliminates entire classes of bugs that plagued our Nginx/LuaJIT-based FL1, like memory safety issues and data races, while delivering C-level performance. At Cloudflare’s scale, those guarantees aren’t nice-to-haves, they’re essential. Every microsecond saved per request translates into tangible improvements in user experience, and every crash or edge case avoided keeps the Internet running smoothly. Rust’s strict compile-time guarantees also pair perfectly with FL2’s modular architecture, where we enforce clear contracts between product modules and their inputs and outputs…

It’s a big enough distraction from shipping products to customers to rebuild product logic in Rust. Asking all our teams to maintain two versions of their product logic, and reimplement every change a second time until we finished our migration was too much. So, we implemented a layer in our old NGINX and OpenResty based FL which allowed the new modules to be run. Instead of maintaining a parallel implementation, teams could implement their logic in Rust, and replace their old Lua logic with that, without waiting for the full replacement of the old system.

Over 100 engineers worked on FL2 — and there was extensive testing, plus a fallback-to-FL1 procedure. But “We started running customer traffic through FL2 early in 2025, and have been progressively increasing the amount of traffic served throughout the year….”

As we described at the start of this post, FL2 is substantially faster than FL1. The biggest reason for this is simply that FL2 performs less work [thanks to filters controlling whether modules need to run]… Another huge reason for better performance is that FL2 is a single codebase, implemented in a performance focussed language. In comparison, FL1 was based on NGINX (which is written in C), combined with LuaJIT (Lua, and C interface layers), and also contained plenty of Rust modules. In FL1, we spent a lot of time and memory converting data from the representation needed by one language, to the representation needed by another. As a result, our internal measures show that FL2 uses less than half the CPU of FL1, and much less than half the memory. That’s a huge bonus — we can spend the CPU on delivering more and more features for our customers!

Using our own tools and independent benchmarks like CDNPerf, we measured the impact of FL2 as we rolled it out across the network. The results are clear: websites are responding 10 ms faster at the median, a 25% performance boost. FL2 is also more secure by design than FL1. No software system is perfect, but the Rust language brings us huge benefits over LuaJIT. Rust has strong compile-time memory checks and a type system that avoids large classes of errors. Combine that with our rigid module system, and we can make most changes with high confidence…
We have long followed a policy that any unexplained crash of our systems needs to be investigated as a high priority. We won’t be relaxing that policy, though the main cause of novel crashes in FL2 so far has been due to hardware failure. The massively reduced rates of such crashes will give us time to do a good job of such investigations. We’re spending the rest of 2025 completing the migration from FL1 to FL2, and will turn off FL1 in early 2026. We’re already seeing the benefits in terms of customer performance and speed of development, and we’re looking forward to giving these to all our customers.
After that, when everything is modular, in Rust and tested and scaled, we can really start to optimize…!

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal looks at swarm robotics, where no single robot is in charge, robots interact only with nearby robots — and the swarm accomplishes complex tasks through simple interactions.

“Researchers say this approach could excel where traditional robots fail, like situations where central control is impractical or impossible due to distance, scale or communication barriers.”

For instance, a swarm of drones might one day monitor vast areas to detect early-stage wildfires that current monitoring systems sometimes miss… A human operator might set parameters like where to search, but the drones would independently share information like which areas have been searched, adjust search patterns based on wind and other weather data from other drones in the swarm, and converge for more complete coverage of a particular area when one detects smoke.
In another potential application, a swarm of robots could make deliveries across wide areas more efficient by alerting each other to changing traffic conditions or redistributing packages among themselves if one breaks down. Robot swarms could also manage agricultural operations in places without reliable internet service. And disaster-response teams see potential for swarms in hurricane and tsunami zones where communication infrastructure has been destroyed.

At the microscopic scale, researchers are developing tiny robots that could work together to navigate the human body to deliver medication or clear blockages without surgery… In recent demonstrations, teams of tiny magnetic robots — each about the size of a grain of sand — cleared blockages in artificial blood vessels by forming chains to push through the obstructions. The robots navigate individually through blood vessels to reach a clog, guided by doctors or technicians using magnetic fields to steer them, says researcher J.J. Wie, a professor of organic and nano engineering at Hanyang University in South Korea. When they reach an obstruction, the robots coordinate with each other to team up and break through. Wie’s group is developing versions of these robots that biodegrade after use, eliminating the need for surgical removal, and coatings that make the robots compatible with human tissue. And while robots the size of sand grains work for some applications, Wie says that they will need to be shrunk to nano scale to cross biological barriers, such as cell membranes, or bind to specific molecular targets, like surface proteins or receptors on cancer cells.

Some researchers are even exploring emergent intelligence — “when simple machines, following only a few local cues, begin to organize and act as if they share a mind…beyond human-designed
coordination.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

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