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Anthropic has launched Claude Duet, an AI agent aimed at professionals and small businesses that competes with Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots. Here's Anthropic's description of what it can do: Each morning, it sends you a short brief on the most important items across your connected apps. Throughout the day, it keeps tabs on those apps and messages you only when something needs your attention. You can also hand it tasks of all shapes -- from simple administrative tasks of scheduling meetings to …

Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative appears to have accidentally disclosed several unpatched Linux kernel vulnerabilities on the public LKML instead of the private security list, including two CVSS 9.0 flaws that could enable remote code execution through SMB Direct and KSMBD. "This seemingly was a mistake with Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman responding to each report asking about their submission to the public mailing list," adds Phoronix. The newly-disclosed vulnerabilities include…

Airbnb is banning hosts from requiring guests to perform time-consuming checkout chores, including washing dishes, stripping beds, doing laundry, and taking trash off-site. The updated policy applies to reservations booked on or after November 20. The Verge reports: Airbnb is displaying hosts' requests more prominently now in a new "rules and requests" section on listings. You might see an "includes cleaning requests" warning if a host leaves chore requests in their listing after the new policy…

Longtime Slashdot reader destinyland shares a report from CNN: The Pentagon has given the Department of Homeland Security permission to test a military-grade heat ray and develop tactics to potentially use it in operations at the southern US border, according to a memo signed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last month and obtained by CNN. The heat ray, officially known as the Active Denial System, is a nonlethal weapon that shoots an invisible beam of electromagnetic waves that can reach a li…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: For the first time, scientists say they have used viruses designed by artificial intelligence to treat a human patient. Researchers announced on Tuesday that they had administered the virus, known as a phage, to a patient suffering from a deadly bacterial infection. Phages attack bacteria, and the hope is that this one will kill the microbes causing the infection. Radical Numerics, the start-up that created the viruses, posted a techn…

eBay plans to cut about 1,000 jobs, or 9% of its workforce, as CEO Jamie Iannone moves to redirect resources toward the company's fastest-growing businesses. Reuters reports: The company had 12,300 employees at the end of last year. It also let go about 6% of its workforce, or 800 employees, in February as part of efforts to streamline operations. EBay has set itself apart from rivals by pushing into authenticated luxury goods, collectibles and refurbished products, which draw enthusiasts willi…

AMD has published Linux kernel patches for an official Ryzen overclocking driver that allows users to adjust CPU power and current limits through a firmware interface exposed via sysfs. Phoronix reports: AMD engineer Shyam Sundar S K posted the patches for the AMD Overclocking "AOD" WMI driver as an interface to the platform firmware for managing overclocking and power/current limits of modern Ryzen CPUs. The driver in its initial form allows setting via sysfs a number of CPU tunables including…

A CBC investigation found that more than 1.5 million Canadian Crime Stoppers tips spanning 25 years were exposed in a breach of the P3 Global Intel tip-management platform. About 850,000 records contained personally identifiable information, including addresses, phone numbers, emails, license plates and some banking details. Longtime Slashdot reader doconnor shares the report: The data was stolen last March by hacktivist collective Internet Yiff Machine. In a manifesto, the group said it wanted…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: We haven't heard many details about Microsoft's upcoming "Project Helix" gaming hardware since the company announced it in March as a device that will "play your Xbox and PC games." In a new wide-ranging profile of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, though, Fortune alludes to a dual release strategy for upcoming Microsoft gaming hardware, with "a next-generation handheld device" planned by the end of next year and a 2028 holiday season console release t…

A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found Facebook liable for deceiving users about privacy during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. State Attorney General Raul Torrez called it "one of the largest, if not the single largest state verdict against a company in American history." While Meta plans to appeal the ruling, the funds that are to be collected will go toward state education spending. The Associated Press reports: Jurors in September found Meta liable for ov…

"According to a recent report by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier (paywalled), EA has reportedly decided to shut down BioWare," the studio behind the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, writes longtime Slashdot reader atari_kid. Quartz reports: Chief Studios Officer Cam Weber and Chief Operating Officer David Tinson wrote that "over the past several months, we've taken a hard look at our business." They said a small BioWare team had been doing early groundwork on a Mass Effect game, but EA chose to dro…

OpenAI is bringing its models to Google Cloud's model garden and Antigravity coding tool, putting its technology on all three major U.S. cloud platforms after Microsoft's exclusive license ended earlier this year. "Google Cloud's longstanding investment in machine learning and AI has made it a destination for AI workloads and the developers and data scientists building them," OpenAI said in a blog post. It continues: [...] The integration will pair OpenAI's frontier models with Google Cloud's b…

"PHP disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in their programming language and urged web site operators to immediately apply the fix," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "As a result, government web sites in Europe and elsewhere temporarily went dark on Wednesday as operators worked to protect their systems." The Independent reports: Dane Knecht, the chief technology officer of Web and cloud security firm Cloudflare, said that attacks were emerging and Cloudflare was updating its fir…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Website admins, brace yourselves. Fixes for what are believed to be uncommonly severe vulnerabilities are scheduled to drop in a little more than 12 hours for PHP, a programming language that powers websites and Web applications everywhere. PHP maintainers said Monday that they planned to release patches for two vulnerabilities, both with severity ratings of 9.2 out of a possible 10. "All PHP users are encouraged to prepare now so they can …