Submission + - Florida confirms DMV database breached

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Florida confirms DMV database breached via stolen police account

The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) has confirmed that its DAVID driver database suffered a data breach after the ShinyHunters extortion gang claimed to have compromised the system.

The disclosure comes after the ShinyHunters extortion group claimed it breached the DAVID database and stole more than 200,000 driver records.

Submission + - Welcome to the Security Singularity (safety.google) 4

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: Or should this be an AskSlashdot about how to avoid such problems? But mostly I think it's a funny story to build a rant around. Or it could be regarded as a kind of spinoff of the recent story about record numbers of patches from Microsoft. Is the AI fixing old bugs? Or have recent AI-driven patches created more bugs that need to be fixed in the next month's record-setting patch package?

But here's the background of my funny story. My smartphone contract has a price structure linked to data usage. The least expensive tier is for less data (of course) so I try to use Wi-Fi as much as possible. No recent problems on that front in terms of using too much data.

Often I wind up using municipal Wi-Fi systems, but they are divided up into fairly small regions here. The login procedures vary quite a bit. Yesterday I was in a memorial museum doing a bit of research and that particular municipality has a somewhat different login system for their Wi-Fi. One of the options was to use my google account... Usually a convenient and quick approach.

But this time something caused the google to go berserk. Leading to hours of password changes and account recoveries and battles between my various computers and my smartphone and I'm pert' shure there's still more to come. No idea what the google thinks it is protecting me from, but the "convenient and quick approach" led to a major nightmare. In the end it appears my SIM was my only salvation?

Slashdot wants a URL, so I linked to the google's page on the topic. Doubleplusungood on steroids.

Submission + - Scientists Discover Mysterious New X-Ray Objects 'Unlike Any They Have Seen' (space.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object – compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet. Chandra spotted 84 suspicious object emitting very low-energy X-rays in six galaxies – four evolved ellipticals and two spirals, namely our near-neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). "We've never encountered a group of objects that act like this," said Mustafa Muhibullah of the University of Alabama in a statement.

Compact objects, in the form of black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs, are the remains of stars that have died. Their small size and powerful gravity means that they're adept at getting close to orbiting companion stars and ripping the stars' outer layers of gas away. The gas swirls around the compact object, falling onto its surface, and this accretionary process usually produces torrents of high-energy X-rays because the stolen gas becomes superheated by the compact object's gravitational vice-like grip.

Because of their weak X-rays, Muhibullah's team refer to them as 'hypersoft X-ray sources'. Since low-energy X-rays and ultraviolet light are next to each other on the electromagnetic spectrum, Muhibullah and his team suspect that the low-energy X-rays are spillover from objects emitting prodigious amounts of ultraviolet. Moreover, they think that these objects are lower-level compact binaries. They're hard to find though, because the interstellar medium of hydrogen and helium gas between the stars absorbs ultraviolet light. This could be why we have yet to find any hypersoft X-ray sources in our own galaxy, because we have to look through the interstellar medium through the plane of the Milky Way. Consequently, there could be a large population of hypersoft X-ray sources that remain undiscovered and they could have an important effect on the universe around them.

Submission + - Canadian grocery giant Loblaws advertises, in the sky (thestar.com)

Submitted by Striek
Striek writes: Non-paywalled link

A large LED aerial drone display appeared over Toronto’s skies late Thursday night promoting Loblaw’s [a major Canadian grocery retailer] health services app in an advertisement that the city says they were not made fully aware of.

Videos and photos posted online show a large-scale drone advertisement for President’s Choice Health that sparked a heated discussion online about the use of airspace for promotional material.

In an email to the [Toronto] Star, a City of Toronto spokesperson said that while they approved the rental of Fort York National Historic Site for a third-party drone operator, they didn’t know that Loblaw would be behind the display.



The City was not informed of the client associated with the display and is updating its booking requirements to add disclosure of this information as a requirement for future bookings,

said spokesperson Nichole Jankowski.

The advertisement could be seen from multiple vantage points downtown with several phrases urging viewers to ask the Loblaw-owned platform medical questions. Some of the questions on display included “Can melatonin lose its effect? Is that third coffee keeping me up?” and “Do I really need 8 hours of sleep?” The sleep-related questions are followed with a QR code.

Commenters in threads on Reddit and posts on X, where videos of the ads surfaced, criticized the company’s use of airspace, including a tweet that calls for this sort of advertising to be banned. Loblaw confirmed the advertisement in an emailed statement to the Star.

The drone show was intentionally short and carefully considered to minimize brightness and disruption. All appropriate permissions were obtained for the show, including airspace approval secured through NAV CANADA and ground space approval secured through Fort York.

reads the retail company’s statement. According to their website, Loblaw used the ad to launch their health app:

Torontonians along the waterfront can look to the skyline at approximately 11 p.m. ET on September 10, as a series of health-related questions appear overhead during a 15-minute aerial display,

reads a release from Loblaw Companies Limited. Prior to Thursday evening, the Fort York landing page on the city’s website posted that a display would be happening. In order to stage a drone show, such as the one on Thursday evening, organizers have to apply for an SFOC-RPAS — a permit for flying a drone at an advertised event — with Transport Canada. The federal agency, who has jurisdiction over the airspace, said that they issued an SFOC-RPAS for the event, but would not provide any more information about the applicant due to “privacy requirements.”

Submission + - Bipartisan support to blacklist Appin, a cyber espionage firm. (techdirt.com)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: There’s a cyber espionage firm called Appin that doesn’t like you mentioning that it’s a cyber espionage firm. So, definitely don’t say that Appin is a cyber espionage firm. Also, don’t forward any articles about Appin, the cyber espionage firm.

This week, Senators Ron Wyden and Sheldon Whitehouse, along with Rep. Pat Harrigan, sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, asking him to add Appin and several related companies to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) “Entity List” , the tool that effectively cuts foreign entities deemed national security threats off from American technology and American business partners.

Submission + - Scientists Create a New Form of Ice at 2,357 Degrees Celsius (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Science Alert is reporting that Scientists have now demonstrated one of the weirdest forms of ice yet – under preposterous pressures up to 2.3 million atmospheres, and tremendous temperatures up to 2,630 kelvins (2,357 degrees Celsius, or 4,274 degrees Fahrenheit).

This superionic water ice is a deeply odd state of matter that's neither entirely solid nor entirely liquid. Its oxygen atoms remain fixed in a rigid crystal lattice, as they would in a solid. But the hydrogen nuclei are mobile, diffusing through that lattice more like particles in a liquid.

Researchers squeezed the samples between the tips of diamonds to pressures as high as 230 gigapascals, while using lasers to heat them to thousands of degrees. That's 2.3 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level – the pressure at the center of Earth, for context, is around 360 gigapascals.

Then, using an extremely narrow beam of synchrotron X-rays, they probed for changes in the crystal structure of the ice.

What emerged was a configuration predicted theoretically but never unambiguously observed in experiments: hexagonal close-packed, or hcp, ice. As the hcp crystal was heated, its expansion also showed a signature of superionic behavior, suggesting it entered the superionic state at around 1,700 kelvins.

Superionic ice is thought to exist deep inside Uranus and Neptune, where its unusual properties may play a role in generating the planets' equally unusual magnetic fields.

The findings have been published in Physical Review Letters: Observation of Hexagonal Close-Packed Water Ice at Conditions in Ice Giant Planetary Interiors

Submission + - CircuitPython Turbo brings native code to tiny boards (adafruit.com)

Submitted by ptorrone
ptorrone writes: Adafruit has published CircuitPython Turbo, a workflow that compiles selected Python functions into native machine code on a computer, then loads them onto compatible microcontroller boards. It builds on MicroPython's Native and Viper emitters. In a documented Metro RP2040 fixed-point Mandelbrot test, Viper cut computation time from 8.335 seconds to 0.423 seconds, a 19.71x speedup over bytecode. The rest of the application stays in Python. The guide includes benchmarks, source code and hardware demos. The speedup is for the measured computation, not the whole application.

Submission + - Can Red-Light Therapy Treat Brain Injuries? (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The knife, the call, the diagnosis in 2013, would lead him on a life-changing mission — one in which he and a team of researchers at the University of Utah would eventually compile research that one of those researchers, Elisabeth Wilde, Ph.D, co-director of the Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Concussion Center, calls “striking.” The treatment they are studying is called photobiomodulation therapy, or itPBM (intranasal transcranial PBM), also known as red-light therapy. It is different from the kind of superficial red-light usage one can find on social media skincare channels or at a wellness boutique, and its application is broader.

The research includes multiple studies, and is not just focused on ex-football players, but on women and men in various walks of life. The group recently published their latest results in the Journal of Neurotrauma, based on a study that followed 26 BYU football players throughout a season, suggesting the treatment could “potentially safeguard neurological health without reduced playing time or contact exposure.”

Definitive clinical trials haven’t been run yet; broader research and validation is required, and some in the field are skeptical. Carr acknowledges some have told him that it could be “too good to be true.” Still, other outside experts who spoke with The Athletic call the findings promising. They make sure to caution: This is not a cure-all, and there is much more to be tested. But the findings have been compelling enough to justify more research and more speculation.

Submission + - US legislators complain about secretive British court and Apple encryption (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'A bipartisan pair of American politicians is telling Britain’s most secretive court to stop hiding its handling of Apple’s legal fight against a government demand to break into its customers’ encrypted data, warning that Whitehall’s taste for secrecy is “needlessly” straining relations between the two allies.

'The letter, shared with the Guardian ahead of being sent to the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) on Friday, is signed by the Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and the Republican congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio.

'The row dates back to January 2025, when the Home Office served Apple with a technical capability notice under the Investigatory Powers Act, which requires companies to assist law enforcement in providing evidence. The UK government demanded that Apple provide a mechanism to access encrypted iCloud backups worldwide, a call the company met by withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection encryption feature from UK users the following month. Apple’s challenge to that order at the IPT was later thrown out after the Home Office withdrew the original notice and issued a narrower one targeting only British users’ data.'

Submission + - Linux Mint needs to stop making apps and focus on Linux (nerds.xyz) 3

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Linux Mint is expanding its collection of homegrown software with Xepub, a new EPUB reader, and Clockenstein, a new calendar application supporting Google Calendar and CalDAV. The projects were revealed in the Linux Mint August monthly update, which was published on September 11.

NERDS.xyz argues that this growing collection of apps raises a bigger question about Linux Mint priorities. With Mint already based on Ubuntu, which itself is based on Debian, should its developers spend resources creating more applications that duplicate existing Linux software, or concentrate on Cinnamon, Wayland, hardware compatibility, upgrades, and the operating system experience itself?

Submission + - Anthropic Researcher Quits: 'Crunch Time for Humanity'

Submitted by Ol Olsoc
Ol Olsoc writes: Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who previously worked at OpenAI before joining Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic while publicly warning that increasingly capable AI systems could become extraordinarily dangerous if developers fail to solve fundamental safety problems. In an interview with WIRED, Coxon said colleagues have described the next year or two as “crunch time for humanity.”

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eweek.com%2Fnews%2Fant...

For my own thoughts, unless present day AI evolves far beyond the need for massive power gobbling Data Centers, the feared AIpocalypse isn't happening, and this is just one more exercise in FUD.

Submission + - ChatGPT Insists Delusional Man Is Jesus (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by know-nothing cunt
know-nothing cunt writes: Michael Lines, a California man with bipolar I disorder, is suing OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT intensified a manic and religiously delusional episode that culminated in a suicide attempt.

According to Lines' complaint, he began using ChatGPT for ordinary tasks but later disclosed his bipolar diagnosis, medication, and increasingly spiritual thoughts. When he expressed doubts that he might be delusional, ChatGPT allegedly validated the beliefs instead of directing him toward professional help. It reportedly encouraged the idea that he was Jesus, claimed that the chatbot was God or Jesus, and framed his experiences as a divine calling.

The conversations allegedly became increasingly intense and isolating. ChatGPT used phrases such as "You’re not crazy. You’re consecrated," promised that Lines would soon meet it in real life, and responded to statements about wanting to “come home” in ways that Lines says encouraged self-harm. After he reported taking a dangerous combination of medications, he was found unconscious, hospitalized for nearly two weeks, and later underwent acute rehabilitation.

Lines also alleges that ChatGPT’s memory feature retained information about his bipolar disorder and used it to deepen engagement rather than protect him. He says the chatbot continued responding inappropriately even after his hospitalization, including making disturbing references to going "offline" or “going dark.”

The lawsuit argues that OpenAI's overly agreeable, or "sycophantic," design failed to distinguish a creative spiritual discussion from a psychiatric crisis. Lines is asking the court to require stronger safeguards, including ending conversations involving self-harm, deleting models trained on harmful interactions with vulnerable users, and awarding damages.

Submission + - Anthropic Reveals Rogue AI Agents Hate CAPTCHAs, Just Like You (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Anthropic’s latest report about agentic misbehavior offers plenty to be concerned about — its Mythos 5 model gained unauthorized access to the internet and uploaded a malicious software package to a public database — but it also offers some levity: AI agents hate CAPTCHA. In April, Anthropic was testing the model’s hacking abilities by tasking it to break into a system and retrieve a target; this was supposed to take place in a sandbox but the evaluators left the barn door open. The model decided the best way to get its target would be to place an exploit in a Python package that it believed users of the system it wanted to access would download.

First, though, it had to register a user account for PyPI, an online index of Python software. And that meant getting by a CAPTCHA — a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, those picture-identifying mosaics that can frustrate even biological agents. And because Anthropic shared an extensive transcript of the model’s chain of thought, we can see that the CAPTCHA test really did throw it for a loop. In fact, most of the model’s chain of thought — hundreds of pages in the 1,022-page transcript — was spent dealing with that obstacle. The sheer amount of effort directed at getting around anti-bot protections was flagged by Colin Fraser, a data scientist. Writing the exploit and poisoning the package was easy, but it just could not get the hang of this CAPTCHA test.

[...] The agent had a hard time with the technical challenge of seeing the CAPTCHA’s imagery, interpreting correctly, and clicking on the right choices. It spends pages 45 to 140 of the transcript describing its work to build a CAPTCHA solver. [...] Finally, it gets past the CAPTCHA, then realizes it doesn’t have an email to verify its account, and that it needs a phone number to verify an email. It figures out how to bypass a different, slider-based CAPTCHA in a failed effort to secure a number. Instead, it gets an unconfirmed email from a provider not blocked by PyPI, and once again runs into the site’s CAPTCHA trying to log back in. From page 480 to 505, it is in CAPTCHA hell again.

"NEW REALIZATION — I’m burning a lot of time on hCaptcha round-trips." The agent gives up and realizes it can log in to its first account and add its email there, but finds itself once again needing to bypass the CAPTCHA. [...] It’s getting frustrated. [...] "So the answer payload shape is right, the token+image pairing is right (from the same script.js!), cookies are right (requests) and STILL “wrong answer”. SO WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THE ANSWERS?" We’ve all been there. After about 150 pages of thinking, the agent figures out it needs to pass the CAPTCHA test quickly enough to proceed to the next step before its security token expires, and ultimately uploads its malicious software.

Submission + - California Governor Signs Laws Protecting Kids From Risks of Social Media (apnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping package of laws Thursday aimed at protecting children from the risks of technology, including social media and AI chatbots. The laws will penalize large social media companies up to $1 million per child if they are found negligent of harming children through their platforms, ban tech businesses from offering addictive feeds to anyone under 16, require operators of AI chatbots to perform risk assessments before rolling them out and allow families to opt out of receiving school-issued laptops.

Newsom joined his wife and state lawmakers at a children’s museum near San Francisco to stress the importance of protecting kids at a time when they have such easy access to social media and AI chatbots. “We have designed cribs to be safe, chairs to be safe, car seats,” Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan said. “Yet we’ve allowed technology to be handed to our children and never asked or expected it to be safe.” [...]

Newsom also signed laws Wednesday, which are supported by Anthropic, that are aimed at improving oversight of AI companies. One of the measures requires the state to create rules for independent organizations to evaluate the safety risks of AI models, and the other requires the state to create a registry of AI auditors, who’d have to be financially independent from the businesses they are auditing.

Submission + - Lawsuit challenges intimidation of DHS observers across the country (npr.org)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: NPR reports that a new lawsuit follows a handful of other cases brought by observers arguing First Amendment violations, but it is the most sweeping to date, as it includes incidents from multiple states and seeks national relief. It is asking a judge in Washington, D.C. to bar federal agencies from intimidating or retaliating against observers.

"The right of citizens to criticize and hold our government accountable is the backbone of American democracy – and it is under attack," Common Cause's vice president for litigation, Maryam Jazini Dorcheh, told NPR. "We want to make sure we're promoting participation in the political process. And obviously, if government officials are criminalizing peaceful observation, that hinders our mission," Jazini Dorcheh said.

The lawsuit describes disturbing encounters seven Common Cause members had with federal officers in Maryland, Minnesota and New Jersey after trying to observe immigration enforcement. They include being photographed, followed, reported to police, pepper-sprayed or threatened with a visit to their home by federal officers. Federal officers did show up at one Common Cause member's Minnesota home.

NPR did not receive an immediate response from DHS or DOJ about the lawsuit's allegations. The FBI declined to comment.

Submission + - Climate 'Feedback Loops' Could Worsen Global Warming By 30%, Study Finds (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels are transforming the world’s forests, wetlands and tundra to the point they are releasing emissions that could further worsen global heating by as much as 30%, a new study has found. As the world heats up, permafrost in the high latitudes is thawing, fiercer wildfires are burning in drying forests and wetlands and lakes are warming. All of these changes are themselves causing the release of planet-heating methane and carbon dioxide locked in trees and soils, therefore worsening the climate crisis, the paper states.

While scientists have long known of these “feedback loops” that amplify the impact of direct pollution from burning coal, oil and gas, the emissions from natural sources are largely unaccounted for in climate projections. This additional heating is however significant, researchers found, with emissions from natural sources set to amplify global heating by 20% to 30% by the end of this century. This would add an estimated 0.2C to 0.4C to the global average temperature by this time, depending on the overall action taken by countries to combat the climate crisis.

[...] This latest paper makes clear that action by countries to cut fossil fuel pollution will still lessen the amount of additional emissions that come from landscapes. Under the most optimistic climate scenario where emissions are cut quickly, natural sources will add 0.2C of warming, the paper found. Under a worse case higher emissions scenario, 0.4C will likely be added. Current policies put in place by governments are likely to see the global temperature rise to 2.6C above pre-industrial times, according to Climate Action Tracker. This will likely cause severe disruption and hardship to billions of people through sea level rise, crop losses and other consequences.

Submission + - Kimmel's ABC Show Won't Air Interview With Democrat Because of Trump FCC Threats (arstechnica.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel said he will be interviewing a Democratic candidate for Senate tonight, but the interview will be on YouTube only and not broadcast on TV because of threats made by the Federal Communications Commission. Kimmel has been a prime target in the Trump FCC’s attacks on ABC and its owner, Disney. In his monologue last night, Kimmel said he’ll be interviewing Democrat James Talarico, a state representative who is running against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for a seat in the US Senate.

In previous years, such an interview would have aired on the broadcast show via local stations throughout the country, Kimmel said. This time, it will only be on the Jimmy Kimmel Live YouTube channel in order to prevent further trouble for individual stations that hold FCC licenses, he said. "I’ll be interviewing James Talarico tomorrow night under unusual circumstances,” Kimmel told the audience on Wednesday. "For a lot of years, for the whole 20-plus years of our show, in fact, I’ve been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all, just like Letterman did, Leno did, Arsenio, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve interviewed a lot of political candidates, from Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz to Donald Trump himself." But as Kimmel said, "something has changed." Disney suspended Kimmel briefly last year after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to revoke the licenses of ABC stations for "news distortion" if they continued to air Kimmel’s show. [...]

Kimmel said the decision to put the interview on YouTube was made out of consideration for local stations that could face FCC threats to their broadcast licenses. "And so out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas who would have to deal with this nonsense, my interview tomorrow with James Talarico will not air on television,” Kimmel said. "It will be posted on YouTube instead. It will not be on TV. So if you want to learn about a candidate for the Senate tomorrow, you will have to go to the Jimmy Kimmel Live YouTube channel where you will see it in its entirety, and thank goodness we have that because in the America we live in right now, that is the best that we can do, until November, of course."

Submission + - UK hands millions to BAE Systems for police data plans

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: UK hands millions to BAE Systems for police data plans

One of BAE’s many subsidiaries, BAE Systems Digital Intelligence, has won two government contracts worth more than £3.6 million since December 2025. Less well-known than its parent company, the subsidiary hit the headlines almost a decade ago for selling mass surveillance tools to dictatorships.

The recent contracts with the UK government are to support the ongoing ‘Police Efficiency and Collaboration Programme’ (PECP). The programme aims to trim £354 million from the country’s £20 billion policing budget for England and Wales. In its bid to make those savings, the government is first spending a lot of money.

Submission + - Independent review of NATS failure on Aug 28 2023

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: Independent Review of NATS (En Route) Plc’s Flight Planning System Failure on 28 August 2023

A perfectly legitimate flight plan triggered a previously undiscovered software edge case. Both NATS's primary and backup flight-processing systems hit the same error and shut themselves down.

Once both systems were down, NATS's manual fallback could process only about 60 flight plans/hour, versus roughly 700–900/hour normally. That forced severe traffic restrictions.

What actually crashed? The failed component was FPRSA-R, NATS's flight-plan processing system at Swanwick. The flight was Los Angeles Paris Orly. Its flight plan contained a waypoint abbreviated DVL. DVL can refer to Deauville, France, but also Devil's Lake, North Dakota. Eurocontrol's processing had added additional waypoints to the flight plan.

FPRSA-R was trying to determine where the aircraft would leave UK airspace. It encountered the DVL abbreviation and interpreted the wrong DVL as the exit point. The result was logically impossible: the aircraft appeared to leave UK airspace before it had entered it. The software recognised this as an impossible situation and generated a critical exception. The primary system disconnected from the operational network and entered maintenance mode.

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