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U.S. President Donald Trump "doxxed" a U.S. senator today, writes the Washington Sun, by posting his cell phone number "as part of a plea for his Truth Social followers to badger his Republican ally into making daylight saving time permanent." When The Washington Sun called the number minutes after Trump's post, a recording said the mailbox was full and could not receive messages... [Senator Tom] Cotton has long detested the idea of making daylight saving time permanent. In a Senate floor speec…

Phoronix reports: Steam on Linux use in March hit an all-time high of around 5.33% marketshare. Since then it pulled back to around 4% while for September 2026 the Steam Survey results... indicate a rather steep decline of 0.85%, down to 3.05%. Meanwhile macOS is at 1.92% and Microsoft Windows at 95%... Steam's Survey reports a 7.42% increase in Chinese use, up to 31.39% overall of the Steam population. Usually those large month-over-month swings where Steam China use shoots up dramatically is …

"The winner of the Nikon Small World in Motion competition is under investigation," writes the photography news site PetaPixel , "after scientists accused Dr Ning Xu of using AI in his video." The Nikon competition is about showcasing the beauty, complexity, and artistry of the microscopic world. The entries are abstract, often baffling to laypeople. But when Dr Xu was announced as the winner last month, members of the scientific community began to cry foul. "There are many serious problems wit…

The Guardian reports that California governor Gavin Newsom signed laws on Wednesday "aimed at protecting California workers from the threats of artificial intelligence , including potential job losses and workplace surveillance." The laws ban employers from using the technology to predict a worker's emotional state by using their biometric data, require employers to send written notices to workers if AI is responsible for mass layoffs and ban employers from relying on AI to decide to fire someo…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Rendering Doom in a database is obviously a bad idea," Lukas Vogel writes in a lengthy blog post explaining how exactly he managed to render Doom using an SQL database. OK, that's not entirely accurate. The SQLDoom project uses a small Python client to handle input and output, drive the game's timing, and display each frame to the screen. Behind that, a series of CedarDB tables tracks the game geometry and state, while about 1,300 lines of …

Flock's cameras offer "indiscriminate mass surveillance," a U.S. federal judge wrote in a ruling Thursday, as does any system with "continuously updated" location histories for all the vehicles filmed by automated license plate-reading cameras. The judge's ruling included italics for emphasis when describing "the question of why is it the government's business where everyone goes all the time?" Judge Hill: We might reasonably expect our friends and family to tell us something like: "Hey, I saw …

An estimated 2.3 million cancer cases worldwide in 2024, about one in eight, were attributable to infections, according to a study published in The Lancet Oncology. "This recent Lancet data is a profound reminder that a significant portion of our global cancer burden is fundamentally preventable," said David Greenberg, MD, of Hackensack Meridian Jersey Shore University Medical Center, in a news release. "We have historically siloed infectious diseases and oncology, but they are deeply intertwin…

Longtime Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis shares a report from NPR: Google just put a refrigerator-sized satellite into space, part of a research project the company hopes can pave the way for orbiting AI data centers powered by the sun. The prototype satellite has four specialty chips in it called Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, that Google designed for machine learning and has already deployed in data centers on Earth. The chips will run a version of the company's Gemma AI model for 15 minut…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The state of New Mexico asked a judge on Thursday to order Meta Platforms to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion in penalties after a jury found the company had misled consumers about the privacy of their data on Facebook in a case that came out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Attorneys for New Mexico made the request at a hearing in a lawsuit brought following revelations that the British political consulting firm, which worked on Donal…

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, NYU, and Stanford have built an AI called Ataraxos that finally cracked Stratego, beating four-time world champion Pim Niemeijer 15 games to one with four draws. Its key advantage was a second neural network that estimates the identities of hidden enemy pieces, letting the system search plausible game states rather than brute-force a massive hidden-information space. Ars Technica reports: Just like [DeepMind's DeepNash, introduced in 2022], Ataraxos learne…

Apple says it will tighten macOS Full Disk Access controls as increasingly capable AI agents raise the risks of apps gaining broad access to users' files, messages, mail, and browsing history. TechCrunch reports: Days after a journalist claimed that Meta's Muse app on Mac read their private messages -- a claim that Meta disputed -- Apple announced that it's introducing additional controls around a setting called "Full Disk Access" on macOS. The feature was designed to allow backups to function …

Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery will operate under the Skydance name once their roughly $110 billion merger closes, which is expected on October 6. The combined company will bring together Paramount+, HBO Max, CBS, CNN, MTV and other networks, along with major franchises including The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, DC and Yellowstone. Ellison said the Paramount and Warner Bros. brands will remain prominent. "We never wanted a new corporate identity to diminish, alter or overshadow eit…

AmiMoJo shares a report from heise online: Anyone buying used hardware for a gaming PC needs to be careful: not just whether the components are still in order but also what the previous owner did with them. A case on Reddit shows this. Someone installed a used AMD processor, a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, in their PC. Because the previous owner was caught cheating, the new owner cannot start several online games. The problem was noticed in the first-person shooter "Valorant" from the development studio Rio…