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Slashdot reader sandbagger brings news about the classic science ficdtion magazine Starlog. It's 33-year run from 1976 to 2009 is now available on the Internet Archive. And 17 years after publishing its final issue, Starlog is relaunching, publishing one issue a year starting November 13, according to The Hollywood Reporter: The magazine launched in 1976 and gained a fanbase for being one of the few places to get reliable news and interviews about geek culture. It launched with a cover focusing…

Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030) shares his article about a new OS in the BSD family "combining NetBSD's kernel and libc with a port of the Alpine Linux userland" — and promising it won't use AI-generated code: AlpineBSD is so new that it barely exists yet. There are no installation media available, though it's possible to manually bootstrap an installation. What AlpineBSD does already have is an AI policy, and the plan is to avoid "the output of generative AI models (e.g. LLMs)" as far as poss…

Windows 11 offered a PC-to-PC Migration feature that "moved files and settings directly between two PCs over Wi-Fi or Ethernet," reports Ghacks. But according to an updated Microsoft support page, the tool is no longer available. "Microsoft's support documentation now redirects users to Windows Backup, a tool that relies on OneDrive cloud storage instead of a direct connection between two computers..." Windows Backup works differently. It requires a personal Microsoft account and backs up suppo…

Rather than racing toward their net-zero targets, Amazon and other AI/cloud computing companies "are driving emissions sharply higher," reports the Washington Post: To support their data centers, tech firms are driving construction of a new generation of supersized, gas-fired power plants that could lock in hundreds of millions of tons of climate pollution for decades to come, according to corporate disclosures and an analysis conducted for The Post by a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan Scho…

Some workplaces are holding mandatory AI training sessions, while others "are requiring employees to use a specific number of tokens," reports the Washington Post, "or log a certain amount of time on AI platforms." The article's headline? "Why mandating AI use in the workplace can backfire." [A] lot of employers are going about it the wrong way, said Arvind Karunakaran, an assistant professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University. "You can consume a lot of tokens without …

"I didn't think a rock like this existed on Earth," a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas told the Washington Post. It looks like a polished rock, dark brown with a clay-colored stripe — but it's actually one of the oldest Mars meteorites ever found, blasted by an impact from the surface of Mars billions of years ago: Technically speaking it's a collection of eight rock fragments, the largest of which is about the size of a fist. Nearly two pounds of the meteorite was discov…

Despite the Trump administration's efforts to halt development on a $6.2 billion wind farm, it's now "completely up and running," reports the nonprofit energy news site Canary Media, delivering enough electricity to power the equivalent over 350,000 homes: On Thursday, the Danish energy giant Ørsted said its 704-megawatt wind farm near Connecticut and Rhode Island began "generating up to its full capacity" in October. Revolution Wind began producing smaller amounts of power in the spring, and t…

"AlmaLinux OS charted a new path in 2023 when Red Hat restricted source code access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux," remembers Linux Magazine. "Rather than pursue 1:1 compatibility with RHEL like other Enterprise Linux alternatives, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation chose application binary interface (ABI) compatibility, which guarantees that applications and kernel modules that work on RHEL will work on AlmaLinux OS." No longer constrained by the 1:1 promise, AlmaLinux can offer new features, or add ba…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with the chief executive of one of the most important artificial intelligence companies in the United States was a spy for China's Ministry of State Security, Beijing's top intelligence agency, according to people briefed on U.S. surveillance. The businesswoman, Alice Huang, was recruited by the ministry to collect intelligence on Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, as part…

A UN-backed report warns that even temporarily overshooting the Paris agreement's 1.5C warming target could cause permanent and widespread losses of glaciers, snow and polar ice sheets. With Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets already melting about six times faster than in the 1990s, the report argues that global temperatures should ultimately be brought back below 1C. The Guardian reports: The report, which comes as world leaders and diplomats converge on Turkey for the 31st annual Cop climate …

A vibrating mattress combined with two pills that release nitric oxide enhanced the brain's ability to clear an Alzheimer's-related protein. According to New Scientist, the experiment "caused the brain's blood vessels to swell and constrict more strongly, which enhanced the glymphatic system's clearance of [the protein]." From the report: [Kesa Kiviniemi at the University of Oulu in Finland] and his colleagues recruited 29 adults who hadn't been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or any other c…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: On Tuesday, Mexico's Senate approved (PDF) a reform of the Federal Copyright Law that ties ISP liability to having a policy to terminate repeat infringers. [This policy has to be published permanently on their website and in their terms of service, and it must include a basic way to notify users. In other words, what can be terminated is the Internet connection itself, not just an account. According to Mexican business outlet EL CEO, this m…

The European Commission has preliminarily found that TikTok violates the Digital Services Act because its For You recommendation algorithm can create a "rabbit hole effect," repeatedly exposing users to potentially harmful content involving topics such as sadness, isolation and body image. TikTok must change the feed's design or potentially face fines of up to 6% of its global annual revenue. The Verge reports: The findings come months after the EU Commission declared that TikTok's design is to…

Chainalysis says attackers exposed usernames, password hashes and live tokens for all of its customers. "While the company locked Chainalysis accounts as a precaution after discovering that some customers' passwords had been exposed and asked users to reset their passwords before signing in again, it has now taken the login portal offline, together with Reactor and Data Solutions, the Know-Your-Transaction (KYT) user interface and API, and address screening products, after discovering further a…

More than 100 activists breached a Microsoft AI data center construction site in Amsterdam as part of coordinated protests against the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure. "These data centres are destroying our world. It's becoming uninhabitable because of all the resources they consume. That's why we're here today," protester Sam van der Beek said. Reuters reports: Activist groups have announced actions in 16 countries on Friday and Saturday, according to the "Stop Dirty Data Centers" coaliti…