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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2531894-remote-controlled-cockroach-swarm-can-now-breathe-underwater/?utm_campaign=rss%7cnsns&utm_source=nsns&utm_medium=rss&utm_content=technology

Swarms of cyborg insects controlled remotely via electrical implants can now operate underwater, thanks to tiny diving suits supplying them with oxygen – which could one day enable them to explore Mars.

Hirotaka Sato at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues first demonstrated in 2021 that Madagascar hissing cockroaches (Gromphadorhina portentosa) could be remotely controlled with electrodes embedded in sensory organs known as cerci. In 2024, they demonstrated that a swarm of 20 of these cyborg insects could coordinate.

The aim was to develop biological robots equipped with infrared sensors that could be released in large numbers after natural disasters to search for survivors. Cockroaches represent a ready-made platform for such applications with a working fuel source, efficient locomotion and in-built reflexes to dodge obstacles – capabilities that engineers still struggle to replicate mechanically at such a small scale.

But Sato and his team were unhappy with the insects’ inability to search flooded areas, which aren’t uncommon in disaster zones, so they have developed a diving suit to allow them to operate underwater.

Cockroaches breathe through pores called spiracles on their abdomen and thorax. The researchers 3D printed a watertight resin suit, which protects the abdominal spiracles from water. Tiny hoses run forwards from the suit to connect directly to the thorax spiracles; the main part of the suit would interfere with leg movement if it covered the thorax as well.

Rather than supplying the insects with a pressurised tank of oxygen, as scuba suits do, the researchers included a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and manganese dioxide. When these two chemicals react, the hydrogen peroxide decomposes to produce oxygen, which the cockroach can absorb.

While wearing the suit, the cockroaches were able to walk underwater for up to 3 hours at a time, at depths of up to 50 centimetres, with no ill effects: all five insects that were monitored after wearing the suits were still healthy three days later.

The suits also allowed the insects to move underwater surprisingly naturally. On land, the suit-wearing cyborg insects achieved an average forward speed of 87.5 millimetres per second, and this only slowed to 78.4 millimetres per second underwater.

Sato says such suits could make search-and-rescue cyborg insects far more capable, but he also hopes to explore their use in space, another environment lacking in vital oxygen.

“The ultimate goal is to [take this technology to] space,” he says. “It’s kind of one step, one big step, towards space suits for cyborg insects. Exploration over the Mars surface, for example.”

To this end, the research team now intends to test the cockroach suits in the various harsh conditions that they could encounter in orbit or on the surface of a planet like Mars: very low and high temperatures, a vacuum and intense radiation exposure. However, space agencies may not like the idea of sending cockroaches to Mars because it would risk contaminating the planet with microbes from Earth.

Alan Winfield at the University of the West of England says the concept of scuba-diving cockroaches may seem strange, but it has obvious applications, such as environmental monitoring.

“There have been attempts to build very small robots, but the problem is batteries. With a very small robot, you typically don’t get very much battery life,” he says. “People often used to say to me, what are the three big problems in mobile robots? And I’d say: energy, energy and energy.”

Cockroaches are not only vastly more efficient than robots and able to operate for longer without refuelling, they are also capable of foraging for their own food in the wild and operating almost indefinitely.

JournalReference: " "Nature Communications " DOI="10.1038/s41467-026-74235-1" This session brings together Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut, and Meganne Christian, a current ESA astronaut reserve. This is an inspirational session of bold ideas, real world insight, and a taste of off-planet science and adventure.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/supreme-court-ruling-guts-governments-use-of-geofence-warrants/

The Fourth Amendment protects a user's "location history," the Supreme Court ruled [.PDF] Monday.

The same logic already applied to a cellphone's tracking, and the high court found "no good reason exists to reach a different result for Location History" collected by third parties like Google.

Split 6-3, the majority agreed that the government needs a warrant and must show reasonable cause to turn a phone's location-tracking services into a government surveillance tool.

The decision came in a case where cops used so-called geofence warrants to track down an armed bank robber from a list of all phones logged in the area. Applying a three-part process, cops worked with Google to narrow down the list of suspects and eventually arrested Okello Chatrie, who had opted in to share his location with Google every few minutes. Chatrie was sentenced to 12 years in prison but challenged the geofence warrant as an unconstitutional search.

The US tried and failed to argue that no search was conducted under the Fourth Amendment, partly because they only searched a little bit of Chatrie's location data, which the government considered too small to warrant privacy protections.

They also claimed that Chatrie was aware that voluntarily sharing his location with Google could mean that law enforcement might get access to the data. And along similar lines, the government argued that Chatrie's data simply showed his movements in public, where he supposedly had no reasonable expectation of privacy.

However, Justice Elena Kagan, penning the majority opinion, said it didn't matter how much data the government obtained. It was still a search under the Fourth Amendment because people carrying cellphones today commonly opt in to location-tracking, so that their apps work.

"Google repeatedly prompts users to turn on the service, often warning that devices will not 'work correctly' otherwise, while not disclosing in that prompt how frequently users' location information would be recorded, how precise it would be, or how it might be given to the government," the majority agreed.

Much like carrying a cellphone is part of modern life, so is allowing a third party to track your movements, and that doesn't diminish a person's right to privacy, the majority ruled. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that "even short-term monitoring" of where a person has been can reveal "a wealth of detail about [his] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations"—particularly if he's seen visiting a sensitive location, like a clinic, an attorney's office, or a strip club.

"An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone's location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information—even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company," Kagan wrote.

Privacy advocates cheered the ruling, even though it "stopped short of striking down these warrants as inherently unconstitutional," the surveillance litigation director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Andrew Crocker, said in a statement provided to Ars.

"We applaud the Court's decision," Crocker said. "The Court reaffirmed that you have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and that even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment."

"fab23" writes:

FreeBSD vs. Linux: The Eternal Open:

In the vast and often passionate world of open-source operating systems, few debates are as enduring as the one between Linux and FreeBSD. Both are powerful, free, and Unix-like, serving as the backbone for countless servers, development environments, and even desktop machines around the globe. But beneath the surface of shared open-source principles lie fundamental differences that dictate their strengths, weaknesses, and ultimately, which one might be the superior choice for your specific needs.

This isn't just a technical comparison; it's a look at two distinct philosophies of building an operating system. So, let's cut through the noise and explore what sets these titans apart.

Let's be honest: the FreeBSD vs. Linux debate is the open-source world's version of "tabs vs. spaces", endless, passionate, and usually missing the point. Both are rock-solid, both are free, both are everywhere. But if you think they're interchangeable, you haven't been paying attention. Under the hood, these two take wildly different approaches to what an OS should be, who it's for, and how much control you actually have.

This isn't a dry technical checklist. It's about philosophy, real-world tradeoffs, and what actually matters when you're the one on the hook for uptime, security, or just getting your damn code to compile.

The following are discussed:

• The Core Divide: Kernel, Licensing, and Philosophy. [...] This isn't just legalese. It's a worldview: Linux is about keeping code open; BSD is about letting you do whatever the hell you want with it.

• Linux's Dominance: Versatility and Broad Appeal. [...] Why does Linux win the popularity contest? Simple: it runs on everything, everyone supports it, and if you Google your problem, you'll find a fix. Want to run a desktop, a Raspberry Pi, a supercomputer, or a Kubernetes cluster? Linux is the default. The community is massive, the software ecosystem is endless, and if you want to play with the latest tech, it'll land on Linux first.

• FreeBSD's Quiet Strength: Stability and Precision Engineering [...] While less ubiquitous, FreeBSD holds its own with a reputation for rock-solid stability, clean design, and a focus on specific strengths:

• When to Choose Which: Use Cases and Practical Considerations [...] The "superior" OS isn't about popularity; it's about the right tool for the job. The decision often comes down to a blend of technical requirements and practical realities.

"Fnord666" writes:

Prompt Injection as Role Confusion:

FNord666 has submitted a comprehensive study of using prompt injection to 'poison' or confuse a LLM. For those who are interested in such things it is an interesting read. It identifies various ways in which current LLMs process the tags, known as roles, and the resulting analysis indicates that they are vulnerable to certain role tags being misused.

The following is an excerpt from part way through the study (which therefore assumes you have understood the terms and techniques which have been discussed earlier) and it details several ways that the authors have already identified as being suitable for further research and potential exploitation.

8. Open Ideas for Roles Research

What would it look like to actually study roles? They're quietly one of the most important parts of the LLM stack, but little research on roles as their own abstraction exists. Here are some directions we like:

Subconscious steering. We've seen that role perception isn't binary. If that's the case, then downstream effects of role, like how much a token is treated as an instruction, are probably continuous as well. Combine this with LLMs seeing every token as a single stream of text, and we get "state bleeding": every token slightly shifts the LLM's state, even along dimensions that should be role-gated . For example, consider a shopping webpage retrieved as tool data. If the webpage has an enthusiastic tone, that tone could bypass role boundaries to bleed into the model's sense of its own persona (to be more enthusiastic itself), which could then steer the LLM toward recommending a purchase.

Current prompt injection research focuses on dramatic and illegal cybersecurity attacks. I think the bigger wave could be this kind of subconscious steering : using seemingly innocuous text to subtly shift an LLM's state toward an intended goal, legally and at scale. E-commerce is just the clearest application.

Advertisers already exploit humans like this. Ads with flashing colors and motion spike arousal, which bleeds into desire for consumption. LLMs are a much easier target. Their role boundaries are softer, there are only a few LLMs, and automated exploitation is trivial - thousands of variations of a product page can be tested in an hour to find which ones shift an agent's purchase recommendation From some early testing, it seems emotive steering doesn't always mirror human psychology (e.g., cockroach-related text on food product pages doesn't reduce agent purchase rate), but other traits like trust and skepticism can be subconsciously steered. If agents are responsible for a large share of shopping, the commercial incentive would be massive.

There's close to zero existing research here. What are the key emotive states of an LLM that can be subconsciously steered by external tokens? How well do these correspond to human states? Is this the same mechanism as in-context learning? What would defense or regulation of this even look like?

When to use roles. If roles exist where objectives collide, the current set probably isn't the final one. Adding roles trades off flexibility for objective splitting, which can improve interpretability or performance.

Consider a concrete case: nearly all coding agents use planning tools. The agent generates a plan intended as a "contract", providing both human transparency and a persistent signal to keep itself on track. In practice, agents often abandon the plan mid-task. Indeed, plans are tool text, which LLMs are biased to treat as ephemeral data. A dedicated planning role could train the LLM to treat plans as commitments rather than suggestions.

A similar tension appears in self-evaluation. RLHF trains the assistant role for coherent continuations, which works against the critical distance needed for honest evaluation. Coherence and evaluation are competing objectives (commitment vs distance), and cramming both into one role means training can't optimize for either cleanly. A dedicated eval role could split them. We know injecting the opinions of a second LLM into context reduces sycophancy and hallucination; a role could internalize this within a single model.

What other objective conflicts suggest new roles? Could roles be dynamic, introduced at inference time as the task demands? And can models learn role separation as a meta-skill, so new roles work without retraining every boundary from scratch?

Roles as a cognitive window. There's almost no existing research on how roles affect representations or internal computation. This is a missed opportunity, because roles create sharp discontinuities in how models process tokens, and each discontinuity is an unexploited natural experiment.

Here's one idea, which is surprisingly completely unstudied. During training, tokens in input-only roles ( user , tool ) are loss-masked: the LLM never has to predict the next token at those positions, so their activations focus entirely on comprehension instead of generation That is, their activations only have value used via attention for downstream tokens. In comparison, tokens in output roles ( assistant , think ) must simultaneously encode what the model understands and what the LLM is about to say . This is a problem for interp work: in later layers, the generation signal drowns out the comprehension signal, making it hard to study the latter. If so, could user -token activations be a clean window into what the model actually understands, unpolluted with the generation signal? Can the contrast between input and output roles tell us about how LLMs split storage from usage?

Here's another. Recall the "one-way mirror" from earlier: in many LLMs, the assistant text is computationally shaped by the preceding think block, but it can't quote or verbally acknowledge it. Ask such an LLM what it was thinking about, and it'll be surprised and skeptical at the idea that it had any thoughts at all, even as those thoughts are visibly steering its output. This is a consequence of how reasoning is trained, but the result is very weird. It means there's a discrete boundary across which information goes from fully accessible to verbally inaccessible while remaining causally active. Studying what information is lost or suppressed between late think tokens and early assistant tokens could tell us something fundamental about how LLMs verbalize computation.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Wants to revive the lost art of the National Internet Registry, which APNIC has deprecated and isn't keen to bring back:

The government of Malaysia has commenced a consultation on whether it should regulate management of IP addresses and autonomous systems numbers, over objections from regional internet registry the Asian Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC).

Malaysia announced its consultation in June, when the nation's Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) posted a paper [PDF] in which it explains that a lot has happened since passage of the 1998 Act that governs its activities – so it probably needs an update.

One of the proposed changes would see Malaysia create a statutory authority with the power to manage electronic addressing "including the management of IP addresses, AS numbers and associated fees."

"This is to support the development of a National Internet Registry model and to ensure a transparent and sustainable administration of electronic addressing resources in Malaysia which will be overseen by the Commission," the consultation paper states. "This will contribute to a more robust and well-governed digital infrastructure environment in Malaysia."

APNIC says its talks with the MCMC saw the Malaysian entity express a desire for "full operational and technical autonomy over resource assignments" – powers that existing NIRs don't have.

National Internet Registries (NIRs) are a relic of the time before regional internet registries came into being. Only APNIC and LACNIC, the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry, allowed NIRs – and only nine exist, covering China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil.

APNIC stopped accepting applications for new NIRs in 2012, and in 2024 made the moratorium on new applications permanent.

[...] The internet governance community long ago decided that internet resource distribution and management works best when handled by sizable organizations which operate at regional scale, and that if every country had an NIR it would create unhelpful risks and overlapping authorities.

If Malaysia presses ahead with its desire to create its own National Internet Registry (NIR) and have it assume some of APNIC's functions, it will therefore challenge the status quo. If it actually gets an NIR into operation, that would likely revive debate about whether national governments should have a role in allocating internet resources given the potential for such power to be used for political purposes such as denying resources to groups that a government opposes.

[...] If MCMC decides to pursue creation of an NIR, it will be in conflict on a collision course with APNIC. In the past, most collisions in the world of internet governance occurred at low speed and involved mostly civil debate that plays out over years.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.slashgear.com/2198018/australia-floating-solar-panels-doing-something-unexpected/

Australia is on the edge of a water shortage crisis. Farming represents the biggest drain on the continent in this context, using 70% of the country's water supply, though the issue is also compounded by prolonged periods of drought and increased human activity. In the spirit of preserving its water supplies, the country has designed a new kind of floating solar panel that could help.

Called floating photovoltaics (FPV), these solar panels can be found in the country's dams and water reservoirs. Essentially, they form a sort of roof over these bodies of water, trapping evaporation in by covering the water's surface. At the same time, they provide renewable energy to power grids in much the same way that standard solar panels help the environment.

These floating solar panels have the potential to save a lot of water. The dams and reservoirs across Australia see 1,400 gigaliters of water evaporate each year. As reported by Bloomberg, one company developing these panels has claimed these panels can reduce that evaporation by more than half. In an attempt to save water in the country, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency invested $8.5 million in an initiative designed to deploy more floating solar panels across its irrigation farms in 2025.

Wannon Water currently has one of Australia's largest floating solar panel systems, generating over 600,000 kilowatt-hours of renewable electricity each year over Warrnambool's Brierly Basin in southern Victoria. The 1,260 panels installed in the network capture direct sunlight not just from the sky above but from its reflection on the water's surface below. Since they have been installed, they have helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions by close to 600 tons every year. A similar installation of 644 floating solar panels by Gippsland Water is generating enough kilowatts to power 90 homes per day at peak capacity in the region as well.

What's unique about these floating solar panels is that they don't completely cover the water source like some other strategies designed to reduce evaporation. This is a plus because it avoids triggering algal blooms and keeps the water clean. With so many environmental benefits, floating solar panels are becoming a critical part of not just Au energy plans going forward, but also Germany, California, and other regions.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

When is buying not buying? When it's a digital library! On September 1 2026 the Sony company will remove access to a number of movie titles from Studio Canal. Details are not available for if users who spent money on this content will be reimbursed. This appears to be history repeating itself with Microsoft pulling out of the online content business last year.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

At ISC 2026 An Exec Said 'It Will Never Be Like It Was Last Year'

Lenovo's broader message is that the economics of the memory industry have fundamentally changed:

That comes to us by way of our German friends over at ComputerBase, who note that "never" was said with a smirk, thus implying that it wasn't meant to be taken literally. Instead, the message from Lenovo is that memory prices were unusually low in early 2025, and it will be a long time before we see comparatively low prices on RAM, flash memory, and other components, as the #1 worldwide PC OEM expects AI demand to continue growing.

The report points to SK hynix's recently announced plans to triple its memory production capacity by 2034 as supporting evidence. Lenovo's reasoning is straightforward: the notoriously profit-hungry memory manufacturers would be unlikely to invest so heavily in expanding production if they expected a return to the razor-thin margins and oversupply that characterized parts of the market in early 2025.

In case you needed extra evidence for its argument, Lenovo also suggested that memory capacity itself is becoming an increasingly important consideration when designing and purchasing servers. While vendors have traditionally advertised the maximum supported memory capacity of new platforms, actually populating those DIMM slots has become far more expensive. New dual-socket servers are on the way next year with 16 memory channels per processor, meaning that even a relatively modest configuration can require around 1 TB of installed memory to fully utilize the available bandwidth.

Even companies that traditionally wield enormous purchasing power are feeling the squeeze. Apple reportedly has sought permission from the U.S. government to source DRAM from Chinese memory maker CXMT, a Pentagon-blacklisted company, illustrating just how valuable additional memory supply has become as prices continue to climb. At the same time, memory vendors are enjoying some of the strongest pricing power (and profit margins) they've seen in years, giving them little incentive to accelerate a return to the boom-and-bust pricing cycles that once defined the DRAM market.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/06/28/boffins-build-a-better-pixel-capable-of-emitting-and-receiving-light/5263388

Researchers affiliated with ETH Zurich have devised a multifunction picture element, or pixel, that can both emit and measure light.

Traditional pixels generally do one or the other – illuminating a display screen or capturing light in a camera sensor.

A team led by David Norris, professor at ETH Zurich's Optical Materials Engineering Laboratory, has found a way to combine the two functions. 

The research raises the possibility of two-way screens that take and present pictures, holographic displays, optical communication systems, and quantum information processing.

As described in the Nature article "Fourier pixels for bidirectional light control," the ETH Zurich boffins developed a technique that involves measuring light wave interference patterns over a metallic surface.

By doing so, they're able to generate "Fourier pixels" that can create and detect the amplitude, phase and polarization of optical fields. 

The Fourier transform is a mathematical technique that takes a function like a sound wave and returns a function representing the specific frequencies present in that sound. A Fourier pixel represents the spatial frequency of light rather than the specific brightness at a given point in an image.

"Thanks to the fact that the relevant surface profiles of the pixels can be determined using Fourier analysis, we can combine the control and analysis of amplitude, phase and polarisation on a single pixel," said post-doc Sander Vonk in an ETH Zurich press release.

In the near term, Norris expects to put Fourier pixels into a matrix that can be used to construct more sophisticated camera displays.

Journal Reference: Glauser, Y.M., Vonk, S.J.W., Seda, D.B. et al. Fourier pixels for bidirectional light control. Nature (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10681-7

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-i-block-ads-with-cheap-raspberry-pi-alternative/

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and the skyrocketing prices of Raspberry Pi boards have definitely been the kick in the pants that I've needed to look at cheaper, perhaps also better-suited, alternatives. I mean, the Pi is a great board, but for a lot of applications I've used it for over the almost 15 years that they've been around, it's also been overkill.

The other day, I needed to put together an ad-block solution, not because I dislike ads, but simply because I was working with quite a limited bandwidth. I reflexively reached for a Raspberry Pi board, but stopped when I remembered how much they cost nowadays and put it back.

I was going to use PiHole on the Pi, but then I remembered coming across an ad-block project that worked on an ESP32 board. And the good news is that you can pick up one of those boards for under $10.

There's a huge difference between a Raspberry Pi 5 and an ESP32 board (specifically the ESP32-S3 board). The Pi 5 is powered by a 2.4 GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 64-bit chip, gigabytes of RAM, and the ability to use microSD or fast NVMe SSD storage, while the ESP32 makes use of a dual-core Tensilica Xtensa LX7 32-bit processor that can run at up to 240 MHz, 520 KB of RAM, and up to 16MB of flash storage. 

A Pi 5 can use as much as 12 W of power (and that's before you hook up various HATs and such), while an ESP32 board uses milliwatts. 

For this project, I'm happy to go with the ESP32, but there are a few compromises that I'll have to live with -- more on those later.

First, you need an ESP32 board. Look for the ESP32-S3 with 8MB of PSRAM (there's a 4MB version too, but using this board will result in compromises) rather than the classic ESP32. The ESP32-S3 is faster and more efficient, and you need this power to run the ad-block software. The cheapest way to buy these boards is in a 3-pack for $20. 

When you get an ESP32-S3 board for the first time, it's normal to think, "Wow, this is tiny, there must be more to it," but there isn't. It really is a computer you can balance on a finger. 

Well, you will need a USB-C cable to transfer data and power the board. However, you don't even need a microSD card for the board to work.

owl writes:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/28/ford-rehires-gray-beard-engineers-after-ai-falls-short/

Ford executives said they have hired 350 veteran engineers — some of them were former employees, while others had been working at suppliers — after artificial intelligence and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality level.

Bloomberg reports the company's chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told journalists that Ford had been "relying more and more on automated quality systems" with disappointing results. So the company "brought back technical specialists," and those specialists "hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor."

Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, added, "Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product."

To be clear, this doesn't mean Ford is abandoning its AI plans entirely. Instead, it's using the rehired employees — referred to as "gray beard" engineers — to train younger staff and reprogram AI tools.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intels-next-gen-52-core-nova-lake-cpu-could-pull-up-to-474w-high-end-lga1954-motherboards-may-need-three-8-pin-power-connectors-to-feed-the-monster

PL2, or Power Limit 2, represents the maximum power a CPU can draw during short boost periods. That said, a PL2 target of 474W remains quite demanding, although a previous rumor suggests Intel may also have a PL4 emergency power limit over 700W. It is important to note that these power limits may only apply to the top-end models with the dual-tile architecture.

The upcoming Nova Lake-S lineup is expected to carry the ‘Core Ultra 400S’ moniker and will be Intel's biggest desktop CPU overhaul in years. We’ve previously reported leaked specifications indicating configurations ranging from 6 to 52 cores, with support for DDR5-8000 memory. The flagship 52-core model is expected to feature 16 performance cores, 32 efficiency cores, and a new Big Last Level Cache (bLLC) design to take on AMD's 3D V-Cache gaming dominance. The company is also rumored to introduce integrated Xe3 graphics, Thunderbolt 5, PCIe 5.0 connectivity, and an upgraded NPU for AI workloads.

While these specifications are unconfirmed, it is clear that Intel is targeting substantial gains in gaming, multi-threaded performance, and overall platform capabilities with its next-gen processors.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

[Source]: yahoo!tech

[Editor's Comment: This is a biased article, but we have quoted the original source.]

The explosive popularity of prediction markets, spearheaded by Polymarket and Kalshi, has shocked experts, who are warning of a surge in gambling addiction. The platforms have massively lowered the barriers to entry for problem betting, allowing practically anybody to wager their hard-earned cash on events ranging from the outcomes of deadly wars to who will win the World Cup .

Given all that controversy, maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who excels at bringing out the absolute worst of humanity — has directed his staff to create a similar betting app of their own, dubbed "Arena."

As two employees with knowledge of the matter told the New York Times, users wouldn't be wagering real money, relying instead on a "video game-like points system." That makes it an even more baffling endeavor, considering the promise of getting rich quick is the only real reason prediction markets have become as popular as they are now.

[...] Meanwhile, Meta's graveyard of ill-conceived products has become crowded, from a botched cryptocurrency and paying celebrities millions of dollars to turn them into AI chatbots to cartoonized "metaverse" worlds filled with screaming children.

Beyond gambling, Meta is also trying to get an AI photo generating app off the ground, according to the NYT's sources. But whether there's any appetite left for even more slop apps is dubious at best.

Will this be successful or another disaster, as predicted ??

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/07/boeing-747-retirement/687304/

Through the heat haze, airplane tails rose from the desert. As I steered off the interstate toward Pinal Airpark, in Marana, Arizona, I got my first view of a corpse in full: a stark-white Boeing 747, its wings sheared off, its passenger doors open to the dust and wind, a rickety set of airstairs inviting no one aboard. The plane was a memory, a ruin, but its swooping, humped nose was still striking—a visage that signaled the freedom of movement in the Jet Age.

I was arriving at this desolate site north of Tucson, where airplanes go to die, to mourn the 747, the original jumbo jet—a.k.a. the Whale, the Longreach, the Sky Cruiser, the Mother of All Airliners, the Queen of the Skies. For 50 years, the aircraft was the principal host of Important Journeys: a young student's trip to study abroad in Paris, a first-generation American's pilgrimage to their ancestral home in Hungary, an Iranian family fleeing the 1979 revolution. Combining the immensity of an ocean liner and the elegance of a swan, the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful. Over the past two decades, airlines have stopped using it as a passenger plane and replaced it with smaller aircraft that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable. The 747 was once a symbol of American might, invention, progress, and populism. Now it embodies the decline of all of those values.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/hpc/2026/06/23/bold-move-cotton-trump-administration-tells-us-techies-it-expects-american-quantum-computer-by-2028/5260074

President Trump has ordered the development of a quantum computer to ensure that the US maintains a strategic technical advantage, along with a nationwide migration to post-quantum cryptography to protect sensitive data against just such a computer.

In an executive order signed Monday, Trump directed various federal agencies to establish a national program to deliver a quantum computer, aimed at driving scientific discoveries and keeping the US at the forefront of technology.

To be precise, it calls for "the first ever quantum computer powerful enough to initiate the era of quantum-enabled scientific discovery and accelerate quantum capabilities for commercial applications."

Trump's order directs the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST), Michael Kratsios, to coordinate the effort across the Departments of Energy, Defense, Commerce, and the Intelligence Community, as well as with the broader industry and research communities.

The program is to be given the somewhat clumsy moniker of Quantum Computer for Application Development and Discovery Science (QC-ADDS), and the intent is to deliver at least one such computer to a Department of Energy (DoE) facility and make it available to the scientific community.

Kratsios told reporters that the administration believes that this goal can be achieved by 2028, so that at least one full-blown quantum system will be operating by the time Trump leaves office.

This is a bold claim, as quantum computers are one of those technologies where a big breakthrough has been promised to be just around the corner for decades, yet never seems to arrive.

[...] The executive order makes no mention of a budget or how much the Trump administration believes development of its quantum Holy Grail will cost. However, our colleagues over at The Next Platform reported last month that it intends to dole out more than $2 billion to various companies for quantum research, plus $1.375 billion to GlobalFoundries and IBM to develop quantum foundries.

In anticipation that truly useful quantum kit could soon become reality, Trump also orders federal agencies to lead a nationwide migration to post-quantum cryptography (PQC).

The agencies in question are chiefly the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, which are to deliver guidance to other agencies on making the move to quantum-resistant encryption.

Original Submission