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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: An auto dealer software company is pitching AI-powered kiosks designed to replace car salesmen on showroom floors. Automotive News says the industry is "skeptical." But be honest -- would you really rather deal with the average car lot shark than a computer? Epikar, a South Korean company that cooks up digital management solutions for car dealers, has named its new AI invention the Pikar Genie. The idea is that customers can talk to this devic…

Meta has started removing ads from law firms seeking clients for social media addiction lawsuits, just weeks after a jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in a landmark case involving harm to a young user. "Lawyers across the country now are seeking new plaintiffs, in the hopes of bringing a class action lawsuit that could result in lucrative verdicts," reports Axios. From the report: Axios has identified more than a dozen such ads that were deactivated today, some of which came from large nati…

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from NewScientist: According to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) -- widely considered to be our best theory for describing the strong force, which binds quarks inside protons and neutrons -- even a perfect vacuum isn't truly empty. Instead, it is filled with short-lived disturbances in the underlying energy of space that flicker in and out of existence, known as virtual particles. Among them are quark-antiquark pairs. Under normal conditions, the…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Women in the U.S. gave birth to roughly 710,000 fewer children last year compared with the nation's peak in 2007, according to preliminary data released (PDF) this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lead researcher Brady Hamilton, a demographer with the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, said the latest one percent drop in "general fertility" from 2024 to 2025 is part of a long-running downward trend. "Since 2007, ther…

"One of VMware's biggest competitors, Nutanix, claims to have swiped tens of thousands of VMware customers," reports Ars Technica. They said higher prices, forced bundling, licensing changes, and more strained partner relationships have frustrated customers and driven them away from the leading virtualization firm. From the report: Speaking at a press briefing at Nutanix's .NEXT conference in Chicago this week, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said that "about 30,000 customers" have migrated from VM…

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company may eventually sell its Trainium AI chips directly to outside customers, not just through AWS, which would put Amazon in more direct competition with Nvidia. "There's so much demand for our chips that it's quite possible we'll sell racks of them to third parties in the future," Jassy wrote in his annual shareholder letter Thursday. He also revealed the company's chip business is already running at more than $20 billion annually, with demand so strong that …

OpenAI is reportedly preparing a new cybersecurity product for a small group of partners, out of concern that a broader rollout could wreak havoc if it were released more widely. If that move sounds familiar, it's because Anthropic took a similar limited-release approach with its Mythos model and Project Glasswing initiative. Axios reports: OpenAI introduced its "Trusted Access for Cyber" pilot program in February after rolling out GPT-5.3-Codex, the company's most cyber-capable reasoning model…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A hacker has allegedly stolen a massive trove of sensitive data -- including highly classified defense documents and missile schematics -- from a state-run Chinese supercomputer in what could potentially constitute the largest known heist of data from China. The dataset, which allegedly contains more than 10 petabytes of sensitive information, is believed by experts to have been obtained from the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin -- a…

After nearly 20 years on the platform, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it is leaving X. "This isn't a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue," the digital rights group said. "The math hasn't worked out for a while now." From the report: We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last y…

Waymo is launching a pilot with cities and Google's Waze to share pothole data collected by its robotaxis, giving local transportation departments a new way to find and fix road damage more quickly. "We realized, hey, once we're at scale, we can actually share this data with cities, which is something that they've asked for and something that we collect at scale," said Arielle Fleisher, Waymo's policy development and research manager. "And so we figured out a way to make that happen." The Verge…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: [Five skilled workers aged 50 and older spoke] to the Guardian about how, after struggling to find work in their fields, they have turned to an emerging and growing category of work: using their expertise to train artificial intelligence models. Known as data annotation, the work involves labeling and evaluating the information used to train AI models like Open AI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini. A doctor, for example, might review how an AI m…

BrianFagioli writes: Little Snitch, the well known macOS tool that shows which applications are connecting to the internet, is now being developed for Linux. The developer says the project started after experimenting with Linux and realizing how strange it felt not knowing what connections the system was making. Existing tools like OpenSnitch and various command line utilities exist, but none provided the same simple experience of seeing which process is connecting where and blocking it with a …

A federal appeals court denied Anthropic's bid to temporarily block the Pentagon's blacklisting, meaning the company remains shut out of Defense Department contracts while the case continues, even though a separate court has allowed other federal agencies to keep using Claude for now. CNBC reports: "In our view, the equitable balance here cuts in favor of the government," the appeals court said in its decision. "On one side is a relatively contained risk of financial harm to a single private co…

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple's foldable iPhone is still "on track" for a September unveiling alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup. 9to5Mac reports: The report notes that Apple's stock took a hit earlier today after Nikkei Asia indicated the iPhone Fold was having serious production issues. Clearly, sources within Apple were motivated to share positive news via Gurman. Not long ago, Gurman himself said that he was expecting an iPhone Fold release date that was a little bit later than iPhone …