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An Anonymous Coward writes:

People who are interested in atomic distributions, particularly ones with immutable filesystems, but have not found one which suits them may find a tutorial on Fedora Magazine valuable. Daniel Mendizabal offers a step-by-step guide to creating a customized, immutable Linux distribution, from initial concept through to producing a bootable ISO. "Mainstream sources like Fedora and Universal Blue offer various atomic desktops with curated configurations and package selections for the average user. But what if you're ready to take control of your desktop and customise it entirely, from packages and configurations to firewall, DNS, and update schedules? Thanks to bootc and the associated tools, building a personalised desktop experience is no longer difficult."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

When it comes to long-term prosperity in the high-tech world, it's all about setting standards. Intel once set the standard with x86, PCIe, and USB and now the vast majority of devices use these technologies in one way or another. Nvidia now enjoys its investments in the CUDA ecosystem and is setting the standard in AI compute in general. To a large degree, Nvidia's efforts made the U.S. industry the leader in AI. However, containing AI hardware in the U.S. will provoke rapid development of competing AI ecosystems that can eventually outperform the one developed in America.

"We are at an inflection point: the United States needs to decide if it is going to continue to lead the global development and deployment of AI or if we are going to retreat and retrench," a remark by Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang (republished by Ray Wang [x.com] reads) to the U.S. lawmakers reads. "America cannot lead by slowing down. If we step back, others will step in. And the global AI ecosystem will fragment — technologically, economically, and ideologically."

[...] The new U.S. export rules for compute GPUs — known as the AI Diffusion Rule [tomshardware.com] — come into effect on May 15. Under the Biden administration's AI Diffusion framework, unrestricted access to high-end AI chips like Nvidia's H100 is reserved for companies in the U.S. and a select group of 18 allied countries classified as 'Tier 1.' Companies in 'Tier 2' nations are subject to an annual limit of approximately 50,000 H100-class GPUs, unless they secure verified end user (VEU) approval. They can still import up to 1,700 units per year without a license, and these do not count toward the national quota. However, countries listed as 'Tier 3' — including China, Russia, and Macau — are essentially blocked from receiving such hardware due to arms embargo restrictions. The Trump administration is now reviewing this tier system to make it more straightforward and enforceable, and is rumored to make limitations for Tier 2 nations even stricter.

Not only will Nvidia cease to be able to sell its GPUs to China, which is one of its largest markets, but its Chinese customers will be forced to either use its GPUs in the cloud, or switch to processors developed in China, such as those designed by Huawei or one of the aforementioned companies. While this will slow down development of China's AI sector in the short term, it will give a strong boost for its AI hardware ecosystem in the mid and long-term future.

[...] The U.S. has already seen the consequences of ceding technological leadership, when Huawei gained a dominant foothold in global 5G deployments by offering cheaper and faster-to-deploy infrastructure. This serves as a cautionary example of how losing control over foundational standards can shift both market power and geopolitical influence. Nevertheless, whether the current administration has learnt from similar past mistakes remains to be seen.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An investigation by 404 Media has uncovered a major security breach at TeleMessage, an Israeli company that provides modified versions of encrypted messaging apps – most notably Signal – to US government agencies and private-sector clients for message archiving. The breach, which exposed sensitive communications, has raised urgent concerns about the security of high-level government and organizational messaging.

The issue gained public attention after a Reuters photograph captured Mike Waltz, a former National Security Adviser to Donald Trump, using a Signal-like app during a cabinet meeting. The app, TeleMessage, closely mimics Signal's interface but is designed to retain and archive messages for compliance purposes – unlike the original Signal, which is built for privacy and strict end-to-end encryption.

[...] 404 Media reports that a hacker exploited a vulnerability in TeleMessage's backend system, gaining access to archived messages from some users. Alarmingly, the breach was relatively easy: the hacker claimed it took only 15 to 20 minutes to gain access, using credentials found in intercepted data to enter the backend panel, where they could view usernames, passwords, and message content.

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hubie writes:

People trust legal advice generated by ChatGPT more than a lawyer – new study:

People who aren't legal experts are more willing to rely on legal advice provided by ChatGPT than by real lawyers – at least, when they don't know which of the two provided the advice. That's the key finding of our new research, which highlights some important concerns about the way the public increasingly relies on AI-generated content. We also found the public has at least some ability to identify whether the advice came from ChatGPT or a human lawyer.

AI tools like ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) are making their way into our everyday life. They promise to provide quick answers, generate ideas, diagnose medical symptoms, and even help with legal questions by providing concrete legal advice.

But LLMs are known to create so-called "hallucinations" – that is, outputs containing inaccurate or nonsensical content. This means there is a real risk associated with people relying on them too much, particularly in high-stakes domains such as law. LLMs tend to present advice confidently, making it difficult for people to distinguish good advice from decisively voiced bad advice.

We ran three experiments on a total of 288 people. In the first two experiments, participants were given legal advice and asked which they would be willing to act on. When people didn't know if the advice had come from a lawyer or an AI, we found they were more willing to rely on the AI-generated advice. This means that if an LLM gives legal advice without disclosing its nature, people may take it as fact and prefer it to expert advice by lawyers – possibly without questioning its accuracy.

Even when participants were told which advice came from a lawyer and which was AI-generated, we found they were willing to follow ChatGPT just as much as the lawyer.

One reason LLMs may be favoured, as we found in our study, is that they use more complex language. On the other hand, real lawyers tended to use simpler language but use more words in their answers.

The third experiment investigated whether participants could distinguish between LLM and lawyer-generated content when the source is not revealed to them. The good news is they can – but not by very much.

In our task, random guessing would have produced a score of 0.5, while perfect discrimination would have produced a score of 1.0. On average, participants scored 0.59, indicating performance that was slightly better than random guessing, but still relatively weak.

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hubie writes:

Driverless trucks are officially running their first regular long-haul routes, making roundtrips between Dallas and Houston:

On Thursday [May 1, 2025], autonomous trucking firm Aurora announced it launched commercial service in Texas under its first customers, Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines, which delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight. Both companies conducted test runs with Aurora, including safety drivers to monitor the self-driving technology dubbed "Aurora Driver." Aurora's new commercial service will no longer have safety drivers.

  "We founded Aurora to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly, said Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of Aurora, in a release on Thursday. "Now, we are the first company to successfully and safely operate a commercial driverless trucking service on public roads."

The trucks are equipped with computers and sensors that can see the length of over four football fields. In four years of practice hauls the trucks' technology has delivered over 10,000 customer loads. As of Thursday, the company's self-driving tech has completed over 1,200 miles without a human in the truck.

Aurora is starting with a single self-driving truck and plans to add more by the end of 2025.

Self-driving technology continued to garner attention after over a decade of hype, especially from auto companies like Tesla, GM and others that have poured billions into the tech. Companies in the market of autonomous trucking or driving, tend to use states like Texas and California as their testing grounds for the technology.

California-based Gatik does short-haul deliveries for Fortune 500 retailers like Walmart. Another California tech firm, Kodiak Robotics, delivers freight daily for customers across the South but with safety drivers. Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, had an autonomous trucking arm but dismantled it in 2023 to focus on its self-driving ride-hailing services.

However, consumers and transportation officials have raised alarms on the safety record of autonomous vehicles. Aurora released its own safety report this year detailing how its technology works.

Unions that represent truck drivers are usually opposed to the driverless technology because of the threat of job loss and concerns over safety.

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upstart writes:

Black hole analogs are one of our best tools for understanding how they work:

Researchers have created the first laboratory analog of the 'black hole bomb', a theoretical concept developed by physicists in the 1970s.

If there's one thing black holes are known for, it's their insatiable, inescapable gravity. Stuff goes into a black hole. You're not really going to get much out.

From beyond the event horizon, this is, as far as we know, true. But from the space around a black hole, you might be able to get something. As Roger Penrose proposed in 1971, the powerful rotational energy of a spinning black hole could be used to amplify the energy of nearby particles.

Then, physicist Yakov Zel'Dovich figured out that you didn't need a black hole to see this phenomenon in action. An axially symmetrical body rotating in a resonance chamber, he figured, could produce the same energy transfer and amplification, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Later work by other physicists found that, if you enclose the entire apparatus in a mirror, a positive feedback loop is generated, amplifying the energy until it explodes from the system.

This concept was named the black hole bomb, and a team of physicists led by Marion Cromb of the University of Southampton in the UK now claim to have brought it to life. A paper describing their experiment has been uploaded to preprint server arXiv.

It doesn't, just to set your mind at ease, pose any danger. It consists of a rotating aluminum cylinder, placed inside layers of coils that generate magnetic fields that rotate around it, at controllable speeds.

[...] We can't experimentally replicate this gravitational effect; what the team's experiment does is simulate it, using magnetic fields as a proxy for the particles, with the coils around the system acting as the reflector to produce the feedback loop.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Times has seen plans indicating that the British government will soon announce a roadmap for installing solar panels on virtually all newly-built houses. If the legislation passes this year, the requirements might come into force in 2027.

According to experts, the plan will require 80% of new homes to cover 40% of their ground area with solar panels. Another 19% of new builds would have lower requirements due to factors such as roof angle, orientation, and shade. About one percent might be exempt from including panels.

Although the plans would make building new properties up to around £4,000 more expensive, the panels could help families save up to £1,000 on energy bills annually, potentially paying off the extra building costs in four years.

If implemented, the initiative would bring the UK closer to its goal of decarbonizing its electric grid by 2030.

Part of the strategy involves installing up to 47 gigawatts of solar power capacity by the end of this decade. The government is also expected to announce government loans for installing solar panels on existing homes, but building scaffolding and rewiring old buildings for solar is far more expensive than building it into new structures.

Although panels can dramatically reduce (and sometimes erase) energy bills, mass adoption can also throw power grids off balance. In Australia, which has adopted solar energy with remarkable speed over the last two decades, the technology sometimes generates more power than grids can withstand.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse-ipv6-networking-feature-to-hijack-software-updates/

A China-aligned APT threat actor named "TheWizards" abuses an IPv6 networking feature to launch adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks that hijack software updates to install Windows malware.

According to ESET, the group has been active since at least 2022, targeting entities in the Philippines, Cambodia, the United Arab Emirates, China, and Hong Kong. Victims include individuals, gambling companies, and other organizations.

The attacks utilize a custom tool dubbed "Spellbinder" by ESET that abuses the IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) feature to conduct SLACC attacks.

SLAAC is a feature of the IPv6 networking protocol that allows devices to automatically configure their own IP addresses and default gateway without needing a DHCP server. Instead, it utilizes Router Advertisement (RA) messages to receive IP addresses from IPv6-supported routers.

The hacker's Spellbinder tool abuses this feature by sending spoofed RA messages over the network, causing nearby systems to automatically receive a new IPv6 IP address, new DNS servers, and a new, preferred IPv6 gateway.

This default gateway, though, is the IP address of the Spellbinder tool, which allows it to intercept communications and reroute traffic through attacker-controlled servers.

"Spellbinder sends a multicast RA packet every 200 ms to ff02::1 ("all nodes"); Windows machines in the network with IPv6 enabled will autoconfigure via stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC) using information provided in the RA message, and begin sending IPv6 traffic to the machine running Spellbinder, where packets will be intercepted, analyzed, and replied to where applicable," explains ESET.

ESET said attacks deploy Spellbinder using an archive named AVGApplicationFrameHostS.zip, which extracts into a directory mimicking legitimate software: "%PROGRAMFILES%\AVG Technologies."

Within this directory are AVGApplicationFrameHost.exe, wsc.dll, log.dat, and a legitimate copy of winpcap.exe. The WinPcap executable is used to side-load the malicious wsc.dll, which loads Spellbinder into memory.

Once a device is infected, Spellbinder begins capturing and analyzing network traffic attempting to connect specific domains, such as those related to Chinese software update servers.

[...] To protect against these types of attacks, organizations can monitor IPv6 traffic or turn off the protocol if it is not required in their environment.

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upstart writes:

A breakthrough in Hilbert's sixth problem is a major step in grounding physics in math:

When the greatest mathematician alive unveils a vision for the next century of research, the math world takes note. That's exactly what happened in 1900 at the International Congress of Mathematicians at Sorbonne University in Paris. Legendary mathematician David Hilbert presented 10 unsolved problems as ambitious guideposts for the 20th century. He later expanded his list to include 23 problems, and their influence on mathematical thought over the past 125 years cannot be overstated.

Hilbert's sixth problem was one of the loftiest. He called for "axiomatizing" physics, or determining the bare minimum of mathematical assumptions behind all its theories. Broadly construed, it's not clear that mathematical physicists could ever know if they had resolved this challenge. Hilbert mentioned some specific subgoals, however, and researchers have since refined his vision into concrete steps toward its solution.

In March mathematicians Yu Deng of the University of Chicago and Zaher Hani and Xiao Ma of the University of Michigan posted a new paper to the preprint server arXiv.org that claims to have cracked one of these goals. If their work withstands scrutiny, it will mark a major stride toward grounding physics in math and may open the door to analogous breakthroughs in other areas of physics.

In the paper, the researchers suggest they have figured out how to unify three physical theories that explain the motion of fluids. These theories govern a range of engineering applications from aircraft design to weather prediction — but until now, they rested on assumptions that hadn't been rigorously proven. This breakthrough won't change the theories themselves, but it mathematically justifies them and strengthens our confidence that the equations work in the way we think they do.

Each theory differs in how much it zooms in on a flowing liquid or gas. At the microscopic level, fluids are composed of particles — little billiard balls bopping around and occasionally colliding — and Newton's laws of motion work well to describe their trajectories.

But when you zoom out to consider the collective behavior of vast numbers of particles, the so-called mesoscopic level, it's no longer convenient to model each one individually. In 1872 Austrian theoretical physicist Ludwig Boltzmann addressed this when he developed what became known as the Boltzmann equation. Instead of tracking the behavior of every particle, the equation considers the likely behavior of a typical particle. This statistical perspective smooths over the low-level details in favor of higher-level trends. The equation allows physicists to calculate how quantities such as momentum and thermal conductivity in the fluid evolve without painstakingly considering every microscopic collision.

Zoom out further, and you find yourself in the macroscopic world. Here we view fluids not as a collection of discrete particles but as a single continuous substance. At this level of analysis, a different suite of equations — the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations — accurately describe how fluids move and how their physical properties interrelate without recourse to particles at all.

upstart writes:

Seven gas turbines planned to juice datacenter demand by 2027:

Developers on Wednesday announced plans to bring up to 4.5 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power online by 2027 at the site of what was once Pennsylvania's largest coal plant, as part of a proposed datacenter campus running AI and high-performance computing workloads.

Development of the 3,200-acre natural gas-powered datacenter campus is being led by Homer City Redevelopment (HCR) and is expected to exceed $10 billion for power infrastructure and site readiness alone, with additional billions anticipated for the datacenter development.

As we understand it, the plant and server campus will be next to each other, as depicted in this video. The power station site will need rebuilding not only to turn it into a gas-fired system but also because it's pretty much demolished, save for electrical infrastructure such as transmission lines that can be reused.

HCR has yet to disclose a tenant for what's hoped to be a massive datacenter complex, with its emphasis for now largely on building out the energy infrastructure and datacenter shell in anticipation of future demand.

The project's backers, including Knighthead Capital Management, appear confident that demand will follow, with the campus designed to deliver up to 4.5 gigawatts of power to run AI and hyperscale workloads.

[...] Until that happens, the site won't exactly be a bright spot on hyperscalers' annual sustainability reports, though HCR claims the gas turbines will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60-65 percent per megawatt-hour compared to the plant's retired coal units.

Kiewit Power Constructors is expected to begin work on the facility later this year with the first generators installed in 2026; the site is expected to start generating power by 2027 — just in time for Nvidia's 600 kilowatt Kyber racks to make their debut.

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DECbot writes:

As first seen in @Day of the Dalek's journal, and suggested to be posted as a Meta story on the Main page by @quietus, here is a call for volunteers:

You've probably seen janrinok's resignation from the staff by now. As he was responsible for large portions of the site's day to day operation, this obviously leaves a big hole to fill. It's unlikely that any one person can step up to take on janrinok's duties. It will certainly require a community effort, probably from many people.

The future of SN isn't really determined by the board or the staff. For better or for worse, the community is really in control. Despite my obvious frustration with some things, I absolutely prefer the "for better" half of that choice.

I emailed admin@soylentnews.org Friday night to discuss the possibility of becoming a staff member, and what my role might be given my time constraints. The three roles suggested to me were: 1) editing an average of 1-2 stories a week, 2) facilitating policy discussions and drafting policy documents, and 3) writing occasional original content for SN such as editorials. These all seem reasonable to me. I've specifically requested that I not be given admin privileges, not now or in the future, only the minimum level of access needed to carry out my specific duties.

Like I said, I don't think any one person is likely to be able to assume janrinok's responsibilities. I cannot. This will work best if many members of the community volunteer a small amount of their time to help. I believe the site will be better off in the long term if responsibilities are distributed among many people instead of having a single person responsible for a large portion of SN's operations.

A user in one of my previous journals asked me to lead by example. I'm doing that, and discussions are already underway with the staff. But this will work best if others join me in volunteering to help a bit.

Who's in?

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.atariarchive.org/blog/adventure-march-1980/

Of all the original games Atari put out for the VCS, Adventure may be the one that most people are familiar with today. Warren Robinett's third and final VCS game – though seemingly the second to actually be released – serves as a counterweight to the arcade action of its March 1980 brethren Space Invaders by providing a nearly unique experience on a home console in its day.

[...] Since the VCS isn't designed for full text adventure gameplay, Robinett worked on translating Colossal Cave Adventure's core idea to a graphical interface using the limited capabilities of the system. The VCS's "ball" sprite became the player character.The two high resolution sprites typically used for player objects became the objects located throughout the world, and the system's low-resolution background graphics would be used for screen room designs.

[...] The duck-like dragons themselves deserve a special mention as being one of the first examples of computer opponents exhibiting unique personality traits and goals. Yorgle, the yellow dragon, primarily guards the chalice, but will wander the game world hunting you or assisting his dragon pals provided the golden key is not nearby, as he's terrified of it. Grundle, the green dragon, guards three vital objects: the magnet, the bridge and the black key, and as such will generally stick around wherever one of those is currently located.

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upstart writes:

Kosmos 482, weighing 500kg, was meant to land on Venus in the 1970s but it never made it out of orbit because of a rocket malfunction:

A Soviet-era spacecraft meant to land on Venus in the 1970s is expected to soon plunge uncontrolled back to Earth.

It's too early to know where the half-ton mass of metal might come down or how much of it will survive re-entry, according to space debris-tracking experts.

Dutch scientist Marco Langbroek predicts the failed spacecraft will re-enter about 10 May. He estimates it will come crashing in at 150mph (242km/h), if it remains intact.

"While not without risk, we should not be too worried," Langbroek said in an email.

[...] Most of it came tumbling down within a decade. But Langbroek and others believe the landing capsule itself — a spherical object about 3ft (1 metre) in diameter — has been circling the world in a highly elliptical orbit for the past 53 years, gradually dropping in altitude.

It's quite possible that the 1,000lb-plus (nearly 500kg) spacecraft will survive re-entry. It was built to withstand a descent through the carbon dioxide-thick atmosphere of Venus, said Langbroek of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Experts doubt the parachute system would work after so many years. The heat shield may also be compromised after so long in orbit.

It would be better if the heat shield fails, which would cause the spacecraft to burn up during its dive through the atmosphere, Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in an email. But if the heat shield holds, "it'll re-enter intact and you have a half-ton metal object falling from the sky".

The spacecraft could re-enter anywhere between 51.7 degrees north and south latitude, or as far north as London and Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, almost all the way down to South America's Cape Horn. But since most of the planet is water, "chances are good it will indeed end up in some ocean", Langbroek said.

In 2022, a Chinese booster rocket made an uncontrolled return to Earth and in 2018 the Tiangong-1 space station re-entered the Earth's atmosphere over the south Pacific after an uncontrolled re-entry.

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upstart writes:

Backstage access: Spotify's dev tools side-hustle is growing legs:

Spotify generates the vast bulk of its income from ads and subscriptions, but for the past few years the music-streaming giant has also been quietly building out a developer tooling business. Backstage, a project it open-sourced in 2020, has been adopted by more than 2 million developers across 3,400 organizations, including Airbnb, LinkedIn, Twilio, and American Airlines.

Backstage helps companies build customized "internal developer portals" (IDPs), bringing order to their infrastructure chaos by combining all their tooling, apps, data, services, APIs, and documents in a single interface.

Want to monitor Kubernetes, view cloud costs, or check your CI/CD status? Enter Backstage.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which accepted Backstage as an incubating project in 2022, reports that Backstage was one of its top 5 projects last year in terms of velocity and activity. And it's this momentum that is leading Spotify to double down, with various premium tools and services on the horizon.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft Finally Launches Its Controversial Recall Feature:

After a long delay over security concerns, Microsoft is ready to bring its controversial Recall feature out of beta. It arrives exclusively on Copilot+ Windows 11 PCs as part of a feature update rolling out today.

Recall is designed to help users conveniently pull up old folders, emails, or browser tabs that they've closed or misplaced. However, after its introduction last year, Recall drew comparisons to spyware since it takes and archives screenshots of your PC activity. In the wrong hands, this could be used to surveil users, making it a potent target for malware and even governments.

These privacy and security worries caused Microsoft to delay Recall and develop various safeguards to prevent such abuse. It offered Recall as a beta feature to Windows 11 Insiders, and gathered feedback from actual users before today's mainstream release.

[...] Another concern facing Recall is its potential to save any passwords or sensitive personal information that pops up on your computer. In response, Weston says Microsoft has been introducing "application filters" that promise to detect data, such as Social Security numbers, and stop capturing them from within the screenshots. "We have an initial set of filters that we're committed to continuing to update all the time to get better," he says.

Original Submission