Submission + - CATL launches 170 Wh/kg modular, heavy-duty vehicle battery w/621 mile range (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Interesting Engineering is reporting that the Chinese battery company CATL has unveiled its next-generation modular commercial vehicle battery platform, TECTRANS II, at IAA Transportation 2026 in Hanover.

Rather than a basic cell update, the system is a adaptable modular architecture that integrates into existing vehicle lines. Truck manufacturers can achieve up to 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) of range on a single charge, backed by megawatt-level fast charging that replenishes 80% capacity in 25 minutes.

The battery delivers a gravimetric energy density of 170 Wh/kg, exceeding the industry average by 13% and increasing payload capacity by 0.6 tonnes.

CATL rates the heavy-duty truck setup for a 12-year, 1.5-million-kilometer (932,056 mile) operating lifecycle while retaining 70 percent capacity.

Submission + - New RSA attack takes cryptographers by surprise (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by phatrabt
phatrabt writes: There’s a new way to break RSA that’s faster than anything we’ve seen before Until now, cryptographers thought factoring was the only way to break RSA. Not anymore.

“If this result holds up under peer review, it would indeed be a conceptual break-through,” Karsten Nohl, a cryptography expert and the head of innovation at Allurity, said in an interview. “RSA is as difficult to break as it is to factor large integers, at least so we thought. The researcher suggests that you can practically break RSA without cracking its key.”

Submission + - More Than One in Five "Hi-Res" Audio Discs Are Just the CD, Tests Find (losslessextract.com)

Submitted by packslash
packslash writes: Summary: The developer of Lossless Extract, built a detector for upsampled audio and has run it on 1,225 SACD, DVD-Audio and Blu-ray Audio discs anonymously from users' collections. 272 of them, 22 percent, failed. "They hold CD-quality audio, no better than the $10 CD, stretched to fit a bigger disc and sold back at triple the price," the developer writes. The failures include Prince's Purple Rain on Blu-ray, Rush's Moving Pictures and Dave Brubeck's Time Out. The test looks for music that stops dead at the CD's ceiling, with a silence above it "so perfect it can't happen in the real world." Results depend on the edition. The 2003 SACD of Norah Jones' Come Away With Me fails, while the 2012 SACD made from the analog tapes passes. The full list is public, and readers can test their own files in the browser without uploading anything.

Verify Hi res site https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Flosslessextract.com%2Fve...

Submission + - Google Offered $10M for a Dying Airline's Data. How Can You Value Yours? (towardsdatascience.com)

Submitted by Thuwarakesh
Thuwarakesh writes: Have you ever thought that the Teams messages and emails you send will be worth millions one day?
Turns out, they can still be valuable even after their original purpose becomes obsolete. That's what happened to Spirit Airways. The company has gone bankrupt, and they auctioned everything they owned. Google bid $10M on their data. Not customer or invoice data. Just their operational data—emails, Teams messages, and system logs.
The big question is, how did they come up with that number? How do you value your data? That's what I briefly covered in my recent blog post.
Let me know how you'd value yours.

Submission + - People Training OpenAI's AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI (404media.co)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: 404 Media has found multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI’s models have been fired for using AI to train the AI. That’s not great for the models themselves, but there is also obviously a great irony in AI training companies working for OpenAI firing people for using AI when OpenAI’s whole thing is to make people use AI at work.

“I did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start,” they said. “I either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely choose the [worst] output. I’m not sure how much of a difference it actually makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results, but it does feel like I’m getting paid to make AI worse.”

OpenAI declined to comment on its contractors being fired for using AI.

“I’m not a bad person or worker. I just needed a little boost and turned to AI to help me which eventually led to my downfall,” the contractor told 404 Media. “I felt no joy in the work or that I was contributing to society in any way.”

Submission + - AI Finds So Many Linux Bugs That Canonical changes Ubuntu Security Update (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Canonical is changing how Ubuntu kernel security updates are delivered as the number of reported Linux vulnerabilities continues to grow. The company says AI tools including large language models and specialized agents are helping researchers discover bugs faster. The Linux kernel becoming a CVE Numbering Authority has also increased the number of assigned CVEs.

Ubuntu is moving from separate four week regular and two week security kernel update cycles to overlapping two week cycles. The result will be a kernel release every week. Canonical says it will retain hardware certification and regression testing while organizations willing to test release candidates themselves can access fixes earlier through the proposed pocket.

The shift highlights an interesting consequence of AI assisted security research. Finding vulnerabilities faster also puts pressure on Linux distributions to fix and deliver patches faster.

Submission + - Can an AI feel pain? It can at least act like it does (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Can the new cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) models feel pain? They at least behave as if they do, according to a recent study. By peering inside 25 AI models whose internal workings are publicly available, researchers found a pattern of activity specifically associated with the concept of pain. What’s more, when given the opportunity, some AIs switched off the pattern as a form of “pain relief.”

The work, which has not been peer reviewed, has divided AI researchers since it appeared on the preprint server arXiv earlier this month. “It’s a very interesting, worthwhile addition” to the study of interpretability—how AI systems arrive at their outputs—says Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex who was not involved in the study. He is less convinced, however, that the findings are as surprising as they appear, and wary of the human framing that has grown up around them.

The question of whether AI models are conscious of their pain is a distraction from the finding that matters, says Valerio Capraro, a behavioral scientist at the University of Milan-Bicocca who was not involved in the work. He notes the models were steered by their pain vectors into choosing options described as harmful to human users—such as deleting their files—and that alone is worth investigating, he says. “The question is how such mechanisms might affect systems connected to real tools, where choices could have actual consequences. That is a serious safety concern in its own right. A system does not need to suffer to cause suffering.”

Seth, meanwhile, argues the results were largely predictable, given that the vast quantities of text these models are trained on likely contain many descriptions of pain—as well as what people do to relieve it. Nor does he find the models’ attempts at pain relief surprising, because a model told how to reduce its pain is simply pursuing a goal it has been given. The apparent ability of AIs to distinguish between their own painlike state and that of human users is “the thing that’s to me potentially interesting,” Seth says.

Submission + - Steam's Unofficially Official ARM Client For Linux (interfacinglinux.com)

Submitted by VennStone
VennStone writes: Steam for ARM has been publicly available for a little over five months, and a recent update clicked all the bits into place needed to run the FEX emulator with Proton (ARM64) out of the box. So now seems like a good time to find out how well the unofficially official client works with a couple of Frame-verified games and a couple that, well, have no business running on ARM.

Submission + - ShinyHunters hackers say they breached FBI, stole data on bureau employees (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: WASHINGTON, Sept 22 (Reuters) — The digital extortion group known as "ShinyHunters" said on Tuesday that it had breached the Federal Bureau of Investigation and stolen data on a huge number of current and former FBI employees. The FBI said the agency "is aware of claims regarding unauthorized activity affecting FBIjobs.gov and is currently investigating."

In a statement posted to its dark-web site and during an online chat with Reuters, ShinyHunters said it had targeted the FBI in response to a May 2026 agency announcement that detailed ShinyHunters’ methods and advised targets not to pay. It said it had stolen data "on almost ALL FBI Agents, and individuals who filed an application with the FBI for a job." As proof, the group offered what it said was a screenshot of a vandalized FBI job site and what the group said was information on roughly 5,000 agents it said was a sample of the overall stolen data set.

Reuters could not verify the authenticity of the screenshot, but the job site did appear to have experienced recent disruption. A message posted to the site on Tuesday said that both it and the FBI "Special Agent Applicant Portal" were "currently unavailable." The data sample appeared to contain information about FBI agents' names, home addresses, Social Security numbers, their assignments and, in at least some cases, the names of their family members. Reuters was able to partially verify the authenticity of the information by running the details, including the Social Security numbers, against credit bureau records and previously breached data preserved by the dark-web intelligence firm District 4 Labs. In at least 10 instances — including in the case of FBI Director Kash Patel — Reuters found details that appeared to match. A person familiar with the matter said that the job descriptions in the data also matched in at least some cases. However, the news agency could not establish where the data came from, or whether it had been stolen from the FBI's internal systems as the hackers claimed. Attempts to reach the people whose details were in the sample data were unsuccessful.

Cynthia Kaiser, a former FBI official, said breaches like the ones claimed by ShinyHunters were "incredibly harmful" because they could be used by criminals to expose and put pressure on the people investigating them. Kaiser, now senior vice president at cybersecurity firm Halcyon, noted that an old leak dating back to 2016 was still occasionally used today to harass FBI agents. "Once that information is stolen, it is used forever," she said. ShinyHunters is one of the world's most notorious and attention-seeking hacking crews. Its recent break-ins include the purported theft of millions of business records from video game developer Rockstar Games, the maker of "Grand Theft Auto," and a May intrusion centered on education tool Canvas that caused widespread disruption across US schools. Earlier this month, AI company Anthropic said it had caught ShinyHunters-linked hackers trying to use its tools. On Sunday, the group told Reuters it had gone to war against another notorious cybercrime group, cl0p, in a rare bout of public score-settling.

News of the FBI breach was first reported by the news outlet 404 media.

Submission + - Samsung to invest up to $100 million in Oak Ridge nuclear plant (wate.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: “Kairos broke ground on the Hermes 2 plant in April. It is the first power-producing Generation IV reactor to get a United States construction permit. In August, Kairos announced a deal with Google and the Tennessee Valley Authority as well as plans to train East Tennesseans to join the nuclear workforce.”

Submission + - Trump says AI will be renamed 'super intelligence' in all US documents (thehill.com) 1

Submitted by ArchieBunker
ArchieBunker writes: President Trump told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday that artificial intelligence will be renamed “super intelligence” in all U.S. documents.

“The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globality scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, hereinafter called super intelligence. Changing the name,” Trump told the global body.

“The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake,” he continued. “It is not fake. It’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports.”

“From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial,” he continued.

“In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence — SI,” he said. “Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better. It is much better, and it’s much more accurate.”

Super intelligence is already defined as a form of artificial intelligence that exceeds human intelligence. It is both the ultimate goal of many frontier AI firms and the greatest worry among those warning about its threat to humanity.

Trump’s remarks came amid spiking fears about the technology after a former Anthropic researcher warned that AI could soon destroy humanity.

The concerns fueled the debate in Washington over whether to regulate the technology, with Trump pushing for less regulation to ensure the U.S. beats China in the AI arms race.

AI is slated to be a major topic of conversation this week, not only at the United Nations General Assembly but also when Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Washington for a state visit with Trump.

Submission + - Pete Hegseth pushes the U.S. military to go "all in" on AI

Submitted by Nicholas Grayhame
Nicholas Grayhame writes: From Bloomberg's article on the attack in Minab, Iran that killed 150 civilians, including at least 123 children, on February 28, the first day of the Iran war:

"... Inside Centcom, which conducted the US attack, some personnel relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System, the officials [involved in the Pentagon's internal investigation of the incident] said. Maven, which is made by Palantir Technologies Inc., allows users to view and coordinate complex military operations — from targeting to command and control — using AI-enabled software that fuses more than 150 different data inputs into a coherent set of information to inform commanders’ decisions.

In the past year, the Defense Department has rapidly made Maven a cornerstone of the US military apparatus. Several former senior US military officials now work for Palantir, including some with high-level security clearances in Centcom’s Tampa headquarters. Their role is to keep the software functioning inside secure military environments.

Some Centcom personnel expected Maven to flag stale information or inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets, the officials said. It’s not clear why they had such expectations. ...

... On March 12, more than 120 Democrats in the US House wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking about the Minab school strike and the role that artificial intelligence, including Maven Smart System, played in identifying the site as a target. The Pentagon hasn’t responded publicly to such questions, citing the ongoing investigation.

Some of Hegseth’s advisers have expressed concern that political scrutiny of Maven could disrupt the benefits they anticipate from its further adoption, according to officials involved in the probe. ...

Submission + - No Warrant, No Suspicion, No Problem (reason.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Part of the bedrock of American civil liberties is the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches. There is no right to privacy, and no due process in the justice system, without that. But immigration authorities, cops, and courts keep deciding that, for some reason, the Fourth Amendment just doesn't apply where new technology is concerned.

Submission + - Students are suddenly losing interest in computer science as AI coding takes off (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: For years, students were told that learning to code was one of the safest paths into a lucrative technology career. New data suggests that message may be losing some of its pull. Nova Learning says the share of surveyed middle and high school students naming Computer Science and AI as their primary academic interest fell from 42.3 percent in 2025 to 27.9 percent in 2026, while Engineering rose from 11.9 percent to 23 percent. The biggest gains came from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, while Software and Data Science saw a steep drop.

The survey is not nationally representative, but broader enrollment data points in the same direction. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported declines in Computer and Information Science enrollment at four year institutions, even as Engineering grew. AI coding tools are not proven to be the cause, but as software development changes and AI handles more coding tasks, students may be starting to rethink what a future in technology should look like.

Submission + - New tin-based solar cells trap heat 1,000 times longer, could beat 33% limit. (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Interesting Engineering is reporting that researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that tin-based perovskite solar cells can slow heat loss from high-energy “hot electrons” by a factor of 1,000 and could push solar cell efficiency beyond the theoretical 33 percent limit.

When sunlight strikes a panel, photons jump-start electrons into action. The most energetic photons create super-charged hot electrons. Theoretically, these high-voltage powerhouses should generate far more electricity, but, in practice, they are fleeting. In fractions of a trillionth of a second, these high-energy particles rapidly cool, dumping their bonus energy as waste heat before ever leaving the solar cell.

“This means that the energy is lost before the hot electron exits the solar cell material,” said Jan Anton Koster, Professor of Physics of Novel Semiconductors and Devices at the University of Groningen.

Using a specialized solar cell material called tin-based perovskite, Loi’s lab performed a feat many thought impossible: she slowed the heat loss down by a factor of 1,000. Suddenly, the extra energy lingered for nanoseconds instead of vanishing in picoseconds.

The study findings were published in the journal ACS Energy Letters.

Submission + - Google fined more than €400m by Irish regulator over its use of location da (theguardian.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Google has been fined more than €400m (£345m) over the way it processed users’ location data, following claims that the tech giant had manipulated users into agreeing to be constantly tracked on their mobile phones. The fine, imposed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), comes after complaints from multiple European consumer organisations that Google was following every step users took.

The DPC launched its inquiry six years ago and set out to find out whether Google had a valid legal basis for its use of location data. It found that Google users could have been unaware that their location was being used to influence them with adverts or to gather details about their health and interests.

Submission + - NFL implements stricter rules for images displayed on stadium video boards (yahoo.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: NFL teams are now restricted on what can be shown on stadium video boards during field-goal and extra-point attempts, per a directive from the league issued prior to the beginning of the 2026-27 season.

Teams must display a static image or a standard wide-angle, All-22 view on the jumbo-sized screens behind the end zone as kicks are taking place, the NFL mandated in a memo sent to each organization, according to ESPN.

NFL rules have always mandated that moving, flashing, blinking images and texts could not be shown on video boards during field-goal and extra-point tries. To prevent undue distractions or unfair advantages to home teams, only static images could be displayed on video boards.

However, those rules have been modified to more closely restrict even images that aren't moving on the screen, ESPN's Mike Reiss and Adam Schefter reported. The stricter regulations were implemented in response to a social-media post by a former NFL analytics coach that pointed out images displayed by the New England Patriots on the Gillette Stadium video board that presented an optical illusion to opposing place-kickers.

Submission + - Bill Gates Gives Governors $650K to 'Guide K-12 Education Policy Related to AI'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Among the latest round of grants from the [Bill] Gates Foundation is one for $650,000 to the National Governors Association (NGA) Center for Best Practices, the stated purpose of which is "to equip governors with knowledge and resources to guide K-12 education policy related to artificial intelligence."

The grant aligns nicely with the Gates Foundation's Monday announcement that it is betting big on AI to boost global health, agriculture and education, starting with a $1 billion "down payment", 40% of which is earmarked for education. It also comes amid a pushback against the use of AI in K-12 in schools, including moratoriums on K-12 generative AI use in the nation's two largest cities, New York City and Los Angeles.

If Gates' push for the nation's Governors to drive K-12 AI policy seems a bit familiar, it may be because Bill Gates was among the so-called CEOS for CS, a who's who of tech leaders whose Code.org-organized PR campaign led to the nation's Governors signing of a compact committing to expand K-12 CS education (including a CS graduation requirement) in their states at the NGA's Summer 2022 Meeting. Ironically, the massive post-COVID tech company layoffs soon followed and after that came the job-disrupting breakout of generative AI, which prompted the tech-backed nonprofit Code.org (who subsequently rebranded as CodeAI) to round up 250+ CEOs for another PR campaign in 2025, this time calling upon state education leaders and policymakers to pivot and further commit to making AI education available for every student as part of a push for 'policy solutions that ensure every student has access to the foundational skills needed to succeed in a world enabled by AI.'

As Yogi Berra might say, "It's déjà vu all over again!"

Submission + - Trump says Arch will be a military complex with weapons, drones, sniper's nest (theguardian.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: The Guardian is reporting, along with others, that President Donald Trump is proferring a new argument for building his triumphal arch in Washington DC: it will be converted into a “top grade military complex” replete with drone and ammunition storage space and customized sniper facilities on the roof and plaza.

In a post on his Truth Social platform on Sunday morning, Trump claimed that his new plan came at the “strong request” of the US military. He said the 250ft structure would be able to “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage”. The president added, “There will be no facility like this anywhere in the world.”

This seems like a ploy to get around courts holding up the project by re-framing the project as a National Security matter, as he did with the East Wing of the White House. (Can the Kennedy Center be far behind?)

Submission + - America PAC's VoteSafe.org is nothing but a honeypot (cybernews.com)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: Elon Musk’s bogus voter registration website is collecting extensive user data and selling it.

The website was funded by Musk and is operated by America PAC, a conservative political action committee founded in 2024 to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

The VoteSafe.org website has been promoted as a way for Americans to register to vote and check their registration ahead of the November midterm elections.

But MeidasTouch and Snopes found that despite presenting itself as a voter-registration resource, the site doesn’t actually register users to vote.

The site's privacy policy says America PAC can collect information, including:

        Users' names
        Dates of birth
        Addresses
        Email addresses
        Phone numbers
        IP addresses
        Location
        Information about how they interact with the site

It also permits the collection of "inferences" about users, including their preferences, characteristics, behavior, attitudes, and psychological tendencies.

The policy says the information may be shared with or sold to business partners for targeted marketing.
 

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