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Subsea cables. Ukrainian power stations. Russian oil refineries. Even airports, water-desalination plants and Amazon data centers. They've all become targets in wartime, notes the Wall Street Journal, and around the world now arguments "are already brewing between companies and governments over new regulations and potential costs." In Germany, powerful associations representing private companies and municipal utilities have pushed back against new standards for physical protection, warning they…

South Carolina's pine forests "have spent centuries hiding a secret as old as America itself," reports CBS News: In August 1780, British and American soldiers clashed there, leading to a terrible defeat for the Continental army [fighting for the 13 colonies rebelling against England]. Battlefield archaeologists Jim Legg and Steve Smith have been studying the site for decades, but recently, they made a shocking discovery: The sandy soil was home to several sets of remains buried in shallow grave…

As America began celebrating its 250th birthday Saturday, 842,000 homes reported power outages, notes ABC News. Figures from tracking site PowerOutage showed states in America's Northeast and Midwest were impacted by severe weather and extreme heat. That number, which will fluctuate throughout the day as crews work to restore power, is for households, meaning that the number of people impacted by these outages is likely to be much larger... Millions of Americans, however, will be contending wit…

Microsoft is apparently shifting its profits to countries with low taxes — and out of countries where they have many more employees and significant sales. Back in 2005 Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer even said that a low corporate tax rate "is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland," remembers long-time Slashdot reader theodp. (Ballmer added "It would be disingenuous to say otherwise.") But in 2026 the EU now requires a country-by-country compliance report, and the New Yo…

At the end of 2025, the FSF launched LibrePhone project, which is working to "better understand and reverse-engineer the nonfree blobs used by a great majority of (if not all) system on a chip designs available today." The FSF's summer newsletter shares this update: We started with researching the proprietary files in Android phones supported by the Lineage project, an Android-based volunteer-led mobile phone operating system with much free software already in it. Our current, primary focus is …

"The owner of AOL and other tech businesses hit Wall Street with a $1.7 billion initial public offering Wednesday," reports the Associated Press: The company is getting $1 billion in proceeds, while the rest is going to shareholders. The stock surged 39.7% in its first day of trading under the symbol "BSP" on the Nasdaq, giving it a market value of $25.2 billion. Among the company's well-known holdings are the event creation and ticketing company Eventbrite, and the video hosting service Vimeo.…

EchoStar's satellite pay-TV unit Dish DBS has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, reports Reuters. The move also applies to its wireless subsidiaries, according to the article, and "facilitates the wind-down of Dish Wireless's 5G network operations following an unexpected delay in a spectrum license sale to AT&T... under which EchoStar agreed to sell about 50 megahertz of its nationwide spectrum for $23 billion." Some context from Deadline.com: Charlie Ergen, who co-founded EchoStar and…

Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: AI security researchers have uncovered a structural security flaw dubbed GuardFall that allows decades-old Bash shell tricks to bypass safeguards in most open source AI coding agents. By exploiting shell behaviors such as quote removal and variable expansion, attackers can hide malicious commands in repositories, README files, Makefiles, or other content consumed by AI agents. If executed — particularly in auto-approve or CI environments—the commands can steal…

The Verge argues that researchers "have made genuine progress in quantum computing — it's just been largely incremental and too esoteric to immediately capture the public's imagination." And there are predictions that quantum computers will finally do something useful as soon as 2028: The drama can overshadow the real progress in quantum computing... Researchers have improved the qubits themselves, so they hold onto information longer. When they hold onto information longer, you can fit in more…

Startup Ampera has unveiled what it calls the first 3D-printed nuclear reactor module, built around a silicon-carbide core and pressure vessel designed for a thorium-based microreactor. The company says future systems could deliver 15 or 30 megawatts for up to 30 years without refueling. When The Register asked about availability, their spokesperson said: "We expect the power generation portion of the system to be available as early as 2027, with the nuclear module being available to customers …

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechSpot: Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi recently supported claims that piracy is the only effective way to preserve video games. The comments lay the blame squarely on game companies' refusal to keep legacy content available or allow archivists to build legal repositories. Sony's announcement that all PlayStation games will be digital-only from 2028 onward has sparked concern that titles will become harder to preserve and more easil…

Alibaba has reportedly banned employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code and directed them to its own Qoder platform amid a growing dispute over features that can help identify China-linked users. Reuters reports: The ban is part of a deepening spat between the two companies after Anthropic accused Alibaba of illicitly extracting its Claude AI model capabilities -- a dispute that highlights the frantic race between the U.S. and China to take the lead in artificial intelligence. [...] Anthropi…

Valve has open-sourced the design for a customizable e-ink front panel for the Steam Machine, dubbed the "Inkterface." "All of it is available on their GitLab under the MIT license, which goes over everything you need to make your own and stick it on the front of your fancy new Steam Machine," reports GamingOnLinux. From the report: They're now calling it the "Inkterface" and there's a good few things you'll need to make it including: 1 x Adafruit ESP32 Feather with 2MB PSRAM. 1 x Adafruit eInk…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have found a never-before-seen piece of macOS malware that combines a series of clever tradecraft to infect Macs with stealthy, custom-developed credential-stealing code. The malware is delivered in two stages. The first is distributed in a disk image that masquerades as Maccy, a clipboard manager for Macs. It's compiled as AppleScript that is notable for the way it delivers the second stage. The malware is named PamStealer beca…

The US age-adjusted death rate fell to a record low in 2025, likely pushing life expectancy to a record high as overdose deaths declined and mortality improved across all age groups. CNN reports: There were about 689 deaths for every 100,000 people in the US in 2025, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- the lowest rate recorded in more than a century of tracking. The age-adjusted rate has fallen 22% since 2021, landing about 4% lower than it was ju…