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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6256wpn97ro

Work has begun on a controversial project to create the building blocks of human life from scratch, in what is believed to be a world first.

The research has been taboo until now because of concerns it could lead to designer babies or unforeseen changes for future generations.

But now the World's largest medical charity, the Wellcome Trust, has given an initial £10m to start the project and says it has the potential to do more good than harm by accelerating treatments for many incurable diseases.

Dr Julian Sale, of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, who is part of the project, told BBC News the research was the next giant leap in biology.

"The sky is the limit. We are looking at therapies that will improve people's lives as they age, that will lead to healthier aging with less disease as they get older.

"We are looking to use this approach to generate disease-resistant cells we can use to repopulate damaged organs, for example in the liver and the heart, even the immune system," he said.

But critics fear the research opens the way for unscrupulous researchers seeking to create enhanced or modified humans.

Dr Pat Thomas, director of the campaign group Beyond GM, said: "We like to think that all scientists are there to do good, but the science can be repurposed to do harm and for warfare".

[...] The Human Genome Project enabled scientists to read all human genes like a bar code. The new work that is getting under way, called the Synthetic Human Genome Project, potentially takes this a giant leap forward – it will allow researchers not just to read a molecule of DNA, but to create parts of it – maybe one day all of it - molecule by molecule from scratch.

[...] "Building DNA from scratch allows us to test out how DNA really works and test out new theories, because currently we can only really do that by tweaking DNA in DNA that already exists in living systems".

The project's work will be confined to test tubes and dishes and there will be no attempt to create synthetic life. But the technology will give researchers unprecedented control over human living systems.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Commandos, secret operations and drones now offer action video that is effective for messaging on social media:

Israel's airstrikes on Iran exploded across the world's screens as a public display of military firepower. Underpinning that was a less visible but equally vital Israeli covert operation that pinpointed targets, guided the attacks and struck Iran from within.

Agents from Israel's spy agency, Mossad, operated inside Iran before and during the initial attacks earlier this month, Israeli officials said. The disclosure was itself an act of psychological warfare—a boast of Israel's ability to act with impunity inside Iran's borders and Tehran's failure to stop it.

Israel flaunted its tactical success by releasing grainy video emblazoned with Mossad's seal that it said showed operatives and drone strikes inside Iran.

Not long ago, such covert operations stayed secret. Today, belligerents from Ukraine to the U.S. increasingly broadcast their triumphs, with messages amplified in real time by social-media networks.

When T.E. Lawrence wanted to publicize his World War I secret forays deep into Ottoman territory, he wrote a book and articles. Nobody saw those commando raids for half a century until the blockbuster film "Lawrence of Arabia" recreated his exploits.

These days, barely hours pass before the world sees action footage of Ukraine's latest drone attacks on Russian military targets. Israel's detonation of explosives hidden inside Hezbollah militants' pagers played out in almost real time across the internet. The U.S. repeatedly fed social media the details—and sometimes imagery—of its special-operations strikes on Islamic State leaders in recent years.

The result is a major shift in warfare: Call it the battle of timelines. Spying and clandestine operations, in the traditional sense, have never been so difficult. Biometric data makes document forgery obsolete. Billions of cameras, attached to phones, rearview mirrors and doorbells, stand ready to capture the movements of any operative hoping to lurk invisibly. In seconds, artificial intelligence can rifle through millions of photos to identify the faces of foreign spies operating in the wild.

upstart writes:

First images from world's largest digital camera reveal galaxies and cosmic collisions:

Millions of stars and galaxies fill a dreamy cosmic landscape in the first-ever images released from a new astronomical observatory with the largest digital camera in the world.

In one composite released Monday, bright pink clouds of gas and dust light up the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas, located several thousand light-years away from Earth. In another, a bonanza of stars and galaxies fills the sky, revealing stunning spirals and even a trio of galaxies merging and colliding.

A separate video uncovered a swarm of new asteroids, including 2,104 never-before-seen space rocks in our solar system and seven near-Earth asteroids that pose no danger to the planet.

The images and videos from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory represented just over 10 hours of test observations and were sneak peeks ahead of an event Monday that was livestreamed from Washington, D.C.

Keith Bechtol, an associate professor in the physics department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has been involved with the Rubin Observatory for nearly a decade, is the project's system verification and validation scientist, making sure the observatory's various components are functioning properly.

He said teams were floored when the images streamed in from the camera.

"There were moments in the control room where it was just silence, and all the engineers and all the scientists were just seeing these images, and you could just see more and more details in the stars and the galaxies," Bechtol told NBC News. "It was one thing to understand at an intellectual level, but then on this emotional level, we realized basically in real time that we were doing something that was really spectacular."

In one of the newly released images, the Rubin Observatory was able to spot objects in our cosmic neighborhood — asteroids in our solar system and stars in the Milky Way — alongside far more distant galaxies that are billions of light-years away.

"In fact, for most of the objects that you see in these images, we're seeing light that was emitted before the formation of our solar system," Bechtol said. "We are seeing light from across billions of years of cosmic history. And many of these galaxies have never been seen before."

looorg writes:

In the not to distant future you'll have/own the copyright for your face, voice bodily features as far as digital reproductions are concerned. That is if you live in Denmark. In an effort to combat deep fakes their citizens will gain those rights. Question is if it will matter much if the deep fakes are made or stored outside of Denmark. But it could perhaps be the start of something other EU countries might adapt if it turns out well for them.

The Danish government is to clamp down on the creation and dissemination of AI-generated deepfakes by changing copyright law to ensure that everybody has the right to their own body, facial features and voice.

It defines a deepfake as a very realistic digital representation of a person, including their appearance and voice.

It will also cover "realistic, digitally generated imitations" of an artist's performance without consent. Violation of the proposed rules could result in compensation for those affected.

What about, identical, twins? Or people that just look really like each other? Unclear as of yet. Also as noted how is the enforcement going to take place.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/deepfakes-denmark-copyright-law-artificial-intelligence

Original Submission

The reason that the site was offline is that the cable to the NOC has been cut - again! It is not something that we could control.

We apologise for the problem. You could have stayed up-to-date with the cause and rectification if you had joined us on our back-up IRC - Libera.Chat, ##soylentnews (irc.libera.chat/6697)

Anonymous Coward writes:

The Fedora project is planning to reduce its package maintenance burden by dropping support for 32-bit x86 (i686) packages from the distribution's repositories. The plan detailed in the (mislabelled) change proposal is to drop 32-bit packages for Fedora 44. "By dropping completely the i686 architecture, Fedora will decrease the burden on package maintainers, release engineering, infrastructure, and users. Building and maintaining packages for i686 (and 32-bit architectures in general, but i686 is the last 32-bit architecture - partially - supported by Fedora) has been requiring more and more effort.

Many projects have already been officially dropping support for building and / or running on 32-bit architectures, requiring either adding back support for this architecture downstream in Fedora, or requiring packaging changes in a significant number of packages to adapt to this dropped support." The discussion under the proposal points out some of the situations where users will be unable to run software, such as the Steam gaming portal, under the current plan.

- - https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=showheadline&story=20014

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Rejoice! No more Blue Screens of Death. It will now become the Black Screen of Death. Good thing the abbreviation will be unchanged, BSOD. Lets hope it won't be come as prevalent and lethal as the Black Death.

The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has held strong in Windows for nearly 40 years, but that's about to change. Microsoft revealed earlier this year that it was overhauling its BSOD error message in Windows 11, and the company has now confirmed that it will soon be known as the Black Screen of Death. The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified black screen.

https://www.theverge.com/news/692648/microsoft-bsod-black-screen-of-death-color-change-official

Is there a favorite horrible crash message? The bomb? The cryptic codes? Sad faces? If there is such as thing. A black and red blinking Guru Meditation always warms my soul.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

SPARCS will deploy an electrodynamic tether to attempt a controlled reentry

More and more satellites are being added to low Earth orbit (LEO) every month. As that number continues to increase, so do the risks of that critical area surrounding Earth becoming impassable, trapping us on the planet for the foreseeable future. Ideas from different labs have presented potential solutions to this problem, but one of the most promising, electrodynamic tethers (EDTs), have only now begun to be tested in space. A new CubeSat called the Spacecraft for Advanced Research and Cooperative Studies (SPARCS) mission from researchers at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran hopes to contribute to that effort by testing an EDT and intersatellite communication system as well as collecting real-time data on the radiation environment of its orbital path.

SPARCS actually consists of two separate CubeSats. SPARCS-A is a 1U CubeSat primarily designed as a communications platform, with the mission design requiring it to talk to SPARCS-B, which is a 2U CubeSat that, in addition to the communication system, contains a EDT. That EDT, which can measure up to 12 meters in length, is deployed via a servomotor, with a camera watching to ensure proper deployment.

EDTs are essentially giant poles with electric current running through them. They use this current, and the tiny magnetic field it produces, to push off of the Earth’s natural magnetic sphere using a property called the Lorentz force. This allows the satellite to adjust its orbit without the use of fuel, simply by orienting its EDT in a specific direction (which the EDT itself can assist with) and then using the Lorentz force to either push it up into a higher orbit, or—more significant for the purposes for technology demonstration—to slow the CubeSat down to a point where it can make a controlled entry into the atmosphere.

The final piece of SPARCS’ kit is its dosimeter, which is intended to monitor the radiation environment of its orbit. As anyone familiar with spacecraft design knows, radiation hardening of electronics is absolutely critical to the success of a mission, but it is also expensive and time consuming, so it is best done at a minimal required level. Understanding the radiation environment of this popular orbital path can help future engineers make better, and hopefully less expensive, design decisions tailored to operation in this specific area.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=showheadline&story=20013

Typically open source operating systems work to close off avenues for potential bugs and exploits, but sometimes, in the quest for convenience or performance, security takes a lower priority. We see an example of this in Canonical disabling a vulnerability mitigation for Intel GPUs in order to gain a 20% performance boost. The issue report on Launchpad states: "After discussion between Intel and Canonical's security teams, we are in agreement that Spectre no longer needs to be mitigated for the GPU at the Compute Runtime level.

At this point, Spectre has been mitigated in the kernel, and a clear warning from the Compute Runtime build serves as a notification for those running modified kernels without those patches. For these reasons, we feel that Spectre mitigations in Compute Runtime no longer offer enough security impact to justify the current performance trade-off."

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Microsoft "relaunches" MS Editor (edit) as open source with some improvements and old limitations removed. You no longer need MS DOS to run it either.

The fact that Microsoft's 1991 design philosophy from MS-DOS translates so well to 2025 suggests that most fundamental aspects of text editing haven't changed much despite 34 years of tech evolution.

Or it's just really hard to mess up a simple text editor. Yet they somehow succeeded.

So they mess up, or enhance, notepad. But figure out they need an actual texteditor and not an AI fueled monstrosity so they look deep in the DOS catalog. At least they didn't bring back Edlin.

Any other old DOS commands that are missing and need a comeback/reboot? Which might seem like an odd question for people still used to a command line interface. But for other people ...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/microsoft-surprises-ms-dos-fans-with-remake-of-ancient-text-editor-that-works-on-linux/
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/edit-is-now-open-source/
https://github.com/microsoft/edit

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is working to let borrowers use crypto as part of their federal mortgage applications without converting it to cash:

In a landmark shift for the U.S. housing finance system, the Federal Housing Finance Agency has issued a directive ordering Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to formally consider cryptocurrency as an asset in single-family mortgage loan risk assessments.

The move, signed by FHFA Director William J. Pulte on Wednesday, signals a new era of crypto integration into traditional financial infrastructure — this time within the core of American home lending.

The order directs both housing finance giants to develop proposals that include digital assets — without requiring borrowers to liquidate them into U.S. dollars prior to a loan closing.

Pulte said in a post on X that the move aligns with President Donald Trump's vision "to make the United States the crypto capital of the world."

Historically, cryptocurrency has been excluded from underwriting frameworks due to volatility, regulatory uncertainty, and the inability to easily verify reserves. This directive changes that.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In a quiet corner of Beltsville, Maryland, a new chapter in battery technology is unfolding. Ion Storage Systems, a company that began as a university research project, has emerged as a leading contender in the race to commercialize solid-state batteries – a technology long promised but rarely delivered at scale.

After a recent visit to the company's Maryland facility, The Wall Street Journal concluded that Ion Storage Systems stands out as a company with a real chance of achieving this long-sought breakthrough. Backed by the US Department of Energy and private investors, Ion's batteries are now rolling off the production line, with early units already being tested by the Department of Defense and major electronics manufacturers.

Solid-state batteries are often described as the holy grail of energy storage. Unlike conventional lithium-ion batteries, which use a liquid electrolyte and a graphite anode, solid-state batteries replace the liquid with a solid ceramic material and often use lithium metal as the anode.

This design promises a host of benefits: higher energy density, faster charging, longer lifespan, and, crucially, greater safety. Traditional lithium-ion cells are prone to overheating and, in rare cases, catching fire. The solid ceramic separator in Ion's design is nonflammable, dramatically reducing that risk.

[...] Manufacturing these batteries is no small feat. The ceramic layer must be produced in meticulously clean environments, using processes more akin to semiconductor fabrication than traditional battery assembly. Ion recently invested in advanced sintering furnaces to expand its ceramic production, positioning itself to scale up from pilot production to commercial volumes. The company's new 33,000-square-foot facility employs 75 people, with plans to double that number as production ramps up.

Ion's batteries have already achieved impressive technical milestones. The company's cells have achieved over 1,000 charge cycles in laboratory tests, retaining more than 80% of their capacity – a key requirement for consumer electronics and electric vehicles. Unlike many solid-state prototypes that require external pressure to maintain contact between layers, Ion's design is fully compressionless and anodeless, simplifying manufacturing and integration into existing products.

[...] If Ion can continue to meet its technical and manufacturing milestones, the implications are far-reaching. Solid-state batteries could enable electric vehicles with significantly longer range, smartphones that last days on a single charge, and even the electrification of heavy equipment and aircraft.

For the US and its allies, developing this technology domestically is also a strategic priority, offering a chance to reduce reliance on foreign battery suppliers and leapfrog competitors in the global energy transition.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A 59-year-old living in the Greek city of Piraeus was recently sentenced by a local court to five years in prison, a €10,000 fine, and an additional €1,800 in legal costs. According to reports, the man was involved with a popular Greek BitTorrent site more than a decade ago. The website is long defunct and does not appear to have provided him with significant financial gain.

The site in question, P2Planet.net, launched in 2011 and shut down in 2014. Despite struggles with hosting costs and repeated DDoS attacks targeting Greek P2P sites, the community managed to attract over 44,000 registered members. The site's torrent tracker hosted 14,000 torrents, mostly offering films, TV series, music, and software.

According to the ruling, P2Planet was eventually shut down by local law enforcement. Authorities raided the home of the person they identified as the private tracker's administrator, arrested him, and seized a hard drive for forensic investigation. Members of the community primarily used Azureus/Vuze, a BitTorrent client that was once popular but has been abandoned for about seven years.

More than 10 years after the case was first opened, the Court of Appeals in Piraeus handed down a harsh and unprecedented sentence. According to sources, it is the first time in Greece that someone has been sent directly to prison for facilitating the unlawful sharing of copyrighted content through the BitTorrent network.

Observers were reportedly stunned when the judge ordered the man to be handcuffed and taken to prison immediately.

[...] As TorrentFreak reported, a comparable five-year prison sentence was handed down a few years ago to the operator of greekstars.net and greekstars.co. In that case, the defendant initially received a suspended sentence but was later arrested and imprisoned after attempting to relaunch the offending domains.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.programmax.net/articles/png-is-back/

Jokes aside, this is exciting news. PNG is back to its former glory after its progress stalled for over two decades. Did you know the U.S. Library of Congress, Library and Archives Canada, and the National Archives of Australia recommend PNG? It is important that we keep PNG current and competitive. After 20 years of stagnation, PNG is back with renewed vigor!

What's new?

• Proper HDR support (future‐proof, too!)
• Finally recognizes APNGs (animations!)
• Officially supports Exif data
• General tidying up—fixing errata, clarifications, etc.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Genetically engineered Escherichia coli bacteria converted a broken-down plastic bottle into the active ingredient in pain medicines like Tylenol and Panadol, scientists report June 23 in Nature Chemistry.

The approach could help reduce plastic pollution and curb reliance on the fossil fuels now used to make the ubiquitous medication. “I genuinely think this is quite an exciting sort of starting point for plastic waste upcycling,” says Stephen Wallace, an engineering biologist at the University of Edinburgh.

[...] Before setting the bacteria to work on manufacturing pharmaceuticals, the researchers backed up a step and tested the microbes’ ability to create a necessary precursor molecule called para-aminobenzoic acid, or PABA, from plastic. And key to that step was seeing if E. coli can support an essential chemical reaction called a Lossen rearrangement, which alters the structure of a nitrogen-bearing molecule to make PABA.

The scientists modified E. coli so that it couldn’t make PABA through its regular biological pathway. That way, the cells would die without getting PABA (which is also essential in making the vitamin folic acid) through another route. They then gave those bacteria a starting compound that turns into PABA only after going through a Lossen rearrangement. The cells lived — a clear sign that the Lossen rearrangement was taking place.

Next, the researchers prepared the same starting compound by chemically breaking down a plastic bottle ingredient known as polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. Again, the E. coli thrived, turning the plastic-based precursor into PABA.

Turning plastic waste into fuel for organisms is interesting in its own right, Wallace says. But he and his colleagues took the reaction a step further. With some additional genetic instructions, E. coli can convert PABA into paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen, the active ingredient in the painkillers Tylenol, Calpol and Panadol.