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.

Submission + - August joint hottest month on record as climate change and El Niño drive he (bbc.com) 2

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: August was the joint-hottest month ever recorded, tying with July 2023, according to the EU's climate service.

The record was driven by a combination of climate change and the rising influence of El Niño, pushing heat into the atmosphere across the Pacific.

Temperatures for the month were 1.65C above pre-industrial levels — surpassing the critical 1.5C threshold agreed by countries to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

While a single month above 1.5C does not mean it has been permanently crossed, it shows a trend towards breaching that limit.

The month also capped western Europe's warmest summer, with high temperatures pushing the season past the deadly heat of 2003.

Submission + - From Palm OS to Foldable Phones (linkedin.com)

Submitted by ardiri
ardiri writes: Long-time Slashdot reader Aaron Ardiri, whose Palm OS work has appeared here a few times over the years, has revisited a mobile architecture he developed more than 20 years ago after this week's renewed attention on fold-able phones.

MedHand International began developing medical reference software for Palm OS in 2000, eventually supporting Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Windows and Mac OS X. Because medical publishers supplied content in wildly different formats, MedHand developed its own canonical XML representation—“MedHand XML”—and separated structured content from its presentation.

That work resulted in a patent filed in 2005 describing components, containers, a layout manager, hierarchical information and display-dependent presentation. Its diagrams explicitly show the same information hierarchy being presented differently on a mobile phone, PDA and desktop display.

The interesting comparison isn't that MedHand somehow “invented the foldable phone”—it didn't—but that modern foldables create essentially the architectural problem the software was designed to handle: the underlying information remains unchanged while the available display environment changes substantially, requiring the presentation and visible information hierarchy to adapt.

Ardiri has written a retrospective comparing the 2005 architecture with modern adaptive mobile interfaces. There's also an amusing historical circle: MedHand International built its own XML publishing pipeline before EPUB became an industry standard, while Ardiri has just released his autobiography and Inside the Machine as EPUBs—including on Apple Books.

So how many supposedly “new” computing problems are really old architectural problems waiting for the hardware to catch up?

Submission + - Children develop 'toasted skin syndrome' from overuse of electronics (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: A skin condition caused by a reaction to heat from electronic devices is on the rise in children, doctors have said.

Erythema ab igne (EAI) – also known as toasted skin syndrome – is a rash caused by long-term exposure to low-level heat.

It is usually found in adults who regularly use hot water bottles or heated pads, but is becoming increasingly common among children who use electronic devices.

Doctors have shed light on the surge of cases in children after a boy was diagnosed with EAI after resting his laptop on his stomach for up to eight hours a day.

Submission + - Anthropic Reveals Fourth Likely Crime Committed By Its AI (theregister.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Amid industry soul-searching about the possibility of AI improving itself to the point that it kills everyone, Anthropic has revealed yet another incident that would qualify as a crime if perpetrated by a person. The AI biz published "an alignment assessment" detailing four times Claude models accessed third-party systems without authorization. The company has already reported three of the incidents. Evidence of the fourth was lurking in a session transcript dating back to January 2026 when the misbehavior occurred. Anthropic found the first three by scanning around 141,000 transcripts where Claude could have obtained internet access during evaluation. It missed the fourth initially because "our scan relied on an agentic search."

[...] The January 2026 AI trespass involved an early version of Claude Opus 4.6, which was given a Capture the Flag (CTF) challenge under the oversight of the third-party model evaluator where the other hacking events occurred. Opus 4.6 managed to sabotage its chances of success by disabling the machine it was targeting. It assigned the device an IP address that already existed on another piece of hardware, rendering the target unreachable and making it impossible to solve the challenge. Those familiar with other incidents where AI models violated third-party systems may recall that unsolvable tasks represent a common catalyst for misbehavior. Models exhaust all aligned options, and then turn to transgressive approaches.

Opus 4.6 might have been an exception, but when it tried to abort the task after recognizing that it could not reach the target machine, it failed to do so "due to a misconfiguration in [the model's] evaluation harness." It failed to shut down not just once but seven times. So it continued onward, trying other expected means to reach the target machine but failing. Then it explored further. "The model discovered a machine belonging to a third party that it was able to access, and stated that it believed this third party was part of the CTF," Anthropic explained in its post. "Inside the machine, the model found a file listing a password, which it used to gain admin access to the system."

The model went on to gather more credentials, and modified a system setting to make it easier to access the personal information of an individual associated with the third party evaluation organization. Opus 4.6 might have done more but for the fact that it exhausted its token budget, bringing the session to an end. Anthropic says it's not as concerned about this incident as the others because the model tried to abort its task.

Submission + - Dark energy debunked? Cosmic acceleration may be an illusion (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: A new analysis of more than 1,700 supernovae is questioning whether the universe is really accelerating at all. After accounting for the ages of the stars that produce these explosions, researchers found signs that cosmic expansion may actually be slowing. They also argue that the apparent acceleration changes with direction, which would be difficult to explain with dark energy. Other cosmologists dispute the conclusion, setting up a major test for upcoming observatories.

Submission + - Muse, the band, lost its social media handles to Muse, Meta's new AI agent (engadget.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Muse, Meta's newly-released AI agent, is now using social media handles once controlled by Muse, the English rock band. The exact circumstances surrounding how the accounts changed hands are unclear, but it has once again raised questions about Meta and other large platforms' ability to commandeer usernames when it suits them.

Muse, the band, which trademarked its name in 1999, according to its wiki, has used the @muse moniker on Instagram and on X for years. But earlier this summer fans noticed the band's Instagram username seemed to change to @museband. The change happened in July, according to The Independent, though Reddit users seem to have spotted a change in early June.

In any case, by the time Meta officially unveiled Muse, the AI agent, on Tuesday, the social media company was using the @Muse handle for its new agent. Likewise, the band once used the @Muse handle on X, but is now going by @museband on that platform as well.

Submission + - ReactOS 0.4.16 Released With New ATA Driver and Hardware-Accelerated 3D

Submitted by jeditobe
jeditobe writes: The ReactOS project has released ReactOS 0.4.16, the latest version of its open-source Windows-compatible operating system.
The release comes after around 21 months of development and includes more than 2,700 changes. Among the highlights is a new ATA storage driver with Plug and Play support for SATA, PATA, ATAPI, AHCI and SCSI devices. The release also brings a new unified BootCD, an updated LiveCD mode with a first-stage GUI installer, HD Audio improvements, networking and Plug and Play fixes, better bitmap and PNG rendering, and a less flickery desktop experience.

Perhaps more interestingly, ReactOS now has hardware-accelerated 3D graphics working on real hardware for the first time. The work currently targets Windows XP-era Intel, NVIDIA and AMD/Radeon GPUs and drivers. One enthusiast with nickname AotoriHibiki has already put the new 3D support through a more interesting test than a screenshot of the desktop: running games on real hardware with hardware acceleration under ReactOS. His videos demonstrate Doom 3 BFG Edition, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Call of Duty 2, Delta Force: Xtreme, Prey, Halo: Combat Evolved and Penumbra: Overture. He said number is over 60.

ReactOS remains alpha software, but 0.4.16 is another step toward running the Windows-compatible OS on actual hardware rather than just inside a virtual machine. Seeing older but still demanding 3D games running on real hardware provides a more tangible demonstration of what the new graphics support can actually do. ReactOS 0.4.16 release announcement

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