SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Company's projected annual data center revenue to exceed its combined proceeds from Starlink, launch services, and AI in 2025:

It appears that Elon Musk's company will not deliver the entire 110,000-strong GPU compute capacity in one go — Google will pay a reduced monthly fee as the company brings more server racks online through September 30, 2027. If SpaceX cannot hit the 110,000-GPU target on that date plus a one-month grace period, then Google can cancel the agreement or settle for the lower number of available GPUs “with a corresponding pro-rata reduction in the monthly fees.” It also gave the two parties the option to cancel the deal altogether after December 31, 2027, provided that they give a 90-day notice to the other.

The combined annual value of just these two deals is already worth more than SpaceX’s entire revenue for 2025. Reuters estimated that they would bring in more than $25 billion annually to the company, compared to the less than $20 billion that it made from Starlink, launch services, and AI revenue.

These massive deals, worth more than $70 billion in total, will lift SpaceX as it targets a $1.75 trillion IPO on June 12, 2026. While it started out as a space exploration company and is known for commercially launching satellites at a fraction of the cost compared to NASA and providing relatively affordable and stable satellite internet, it’s actively expanding towards orbital data centers. SpaceX acquired xAI earlier this year to help achieve that dream and has even filed some documents at the FCC detailing its plans. Google is also reportedly in talks with the company for a slice of the orbital data center pie.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/06/08/canonical-sends-ubuntu-into-the-ai-agent-era/5252373

The event [Ubuntu Summit] opened with a keynote from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, and his opening sentence set the tone for much of what would follow:

The agentic revolution will touch every aspect of human endeavor.

We take that to mean the use of LLM "agents" to develop software, translate between human languages and from speech to text, and so on. For all that this vulture might personally dispute just how revolutionary this is, there were some 21 full-length talks over the two days of the summit, and about half of them were about AI, or at least touched upon the subject.

Shuttleworth's keynote also contained the biggest Canonical product announcement of the event: the new Workshop sandboxed LLM development environments (at the 20-minute mark in the video above). Workshop uses Canonical's LXD "containervisor" and snap packaging to make it easy to install and run LLM agents, while keeping them isolated in sandboxes so that they can only access specific limited resources in that user's home directory. For instance, they can access the machine's GPUs and nominated local files, while being walled off from personal data such as stored credentials. As Shuttleworth put it:

You can run random code, from the internet, on your laptop, without handing it root.

Canonical also announced Workshop online the same day, with a collection of documentation already available, including a tutorial. Workshop is an open source project with the source code on GitHub. Later that day, engineering manager Dmitry Lyfar gave a talk on the new tool, titled Introducing Workshop.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

SpaceX won't get easy access to billions of dollars from passive investors:

SpaceX has requested unusually swift entry into several leading stock market indexes as a condition of its historic stock market debut. But the S&P 500 stock market index representing many of the largest profitable US companies has surprised market analysts by refusing to bend the rules for Elon Musk's space and AI company.

The June 4 decision by S&P Dow Jones Indices—the company that creates and manages stock market indexes such as the S&P 500—means that SpaceX will not gain accelerated access to potentially billions more dollars through passive investment funds that automatically purchase shares of S&P 500 companies. An exception for SpaceX could have also allowed leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to gain entry not long after their own expected initial public offerings (IPOs). That possibility has now been shuttered.

The news will likely come as a relief to people concerned about passive investor money and people's retirement savings plans having greater exposure to the market risks associated with SpaceX's big bet on AI and speculative orbital data center plans. AI companies are generally facing more challenges in funding and building expensive AI data centers, even as they shift more of the subsidized costs of running AI services onto shocked customers through usage-based pricing.

To weigh expedited entry for SpaceX, the S&P Dow Jones Indices held a monthlong consultation to consider changing or waiving several main requirements for so-called MegaCap companies with "unprecedented market capitalizations."

Those proposed changes included shortening the "seasoning period" for new IPOs from 12 months to six months, waiving the investable weight factor (IWF) requirement for MegaCap companies to make at least 10 percent of their shares publicly available, and waiving the requirements for MegaCap companies to demonstrate profitability in the latest quarter of the financial year along with the previous four quarters.

Such rule changes would have accommodated SpaceX's plan to only offer approximately 3 percent of its IPO shares to public investors, and the fact that SpaceX is currently unprofitable with a growing debt load that has reached $29 billion because of its spending spree on AI infrastructure.

But in its final decision, the S&P Dow Jones Indices stated that "no changes will be made to the eligibility criteria including financial viability screens, seasoning period, or minimum IWF." Even after the standard yearlong wait, SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI may struggle to deliver the consistent profitability necessary to qualify for the S&P 500.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Cyberdecks are having a moment, rejecting big tech surveillance with style and substance:

An article where you simply must see the pics.

When I reach out to the self-proclaimed "open source baddie" CC for an interview, I'm pretty sure she's emailing me back from a pink mermaid purse.

"I'm just having so much fun," she tells me about her seashell cyberdeck. "It's a Tamagotchi. It's also an e-reader. It's networked to my vault and my servers, so it has access to all of my server data, which has all my PDFs, and books, and notes, and everything... It's also connected to my local AI setup at home."

CC has no background in software engineering or computer science, but she's gotten good enough at building unconventional cyberdecks — small DIY computers — that she documents the process on her blog Bimbo Tech so that other women can follow her lead, even if they don't yet know what RAM is.

The idea of the cyberdeck originated in William Gibson's 1984 sci-fi novel "Neuromancer," and when credit card-sized computers like the Raspberry Pi came on the market in the 2010s, hardware enthusiasts began building and sharing their own cyberdecks in niche online communities. But over the last few months, these communities have exploded in popularity thanks to women on social media who are teaching each other to build artistic, hyper-feminine computers by documenting their building processes.

        @bossbratbimbo

        built a #cyberdeck inside a pink mermaid shell 🐚 🍓🫐 #raspberrypi 3A+ 512MB 💾 my own custom os 🤖 #ai assistant 🧜‍♀️ mermaid tamagotchi 📖 e-reader ⌨️ markdown editor 📊 server monitor ◼️full terminal 🕸️ mesh vpn full #howto build guide + all parts linked @ bimbotech.co/cyberdeck 🧜‍♀️ #tech by girls 💖
        ♬ So Fresh, So Clean – Outkast

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

More than 600 University of California faculty members, led by mathematicians at UC Berkeley, are calling on the system to reinstate standardized testing requirements for science, technology, engineering and mathematics applicants, saying that six years of test-free admissions has not reliably assessed readiness and professors are often teaching middle school math to incoming students:

Without standardized testing in admissions, professors said they don't know whether incoming students can handle college-level math. The open letter, addressed to top UC leaders, asks for SAT or ACT exams to be required beginning in fall 2027 and for STEM faculty to be given formal oversight of readiness standards in their majors.

"We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields," they warned.

Over three years — from fall 2021 to fall 2023 — the letter said, at least 20% of Berkeley first-semester calculus students who took a diagnostic exam showed deficits. "Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students," faculty wrote.

[...] UC gained national attention in May 2020 when regents unanimously voted to suspend SAT and ACT testing requirements and eliminate them entirely by 2025. Board members cited concerns the tests were biased against students of color and those from lower-income families — including students who did not have access to prep courses.

[...] Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford and Caltech each restored standardized testing requirements for applicants in 2024 or 2025. USC is test-optional and scores are considered as part of holistic review, but students are not penalized if they do not submit them.

Previously:

• What in the World Is Going on in Our Public Schools?"
• Professors Issue Warning Over Surge in College Students Unable to Read

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Object 4 decayed out of a 300km parking orbit while 15 of its batch-mates slowly climbed toward operational altitude:

Object 4, one of 16 satellites in the first operational batch of Russia's Rassvet broadband network, re-entered Earth's atmosphere on approximately June 6th, according to orbital tracking compiled by space journalist Anatoly Zak at RussianSpaceWeb. The spacecraft launched on March 23rd from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome and is reportedly the only member of the batch that wasn't able to perform a single orbit-raising maneuver, instead decaying out of a roughly 288km x 324km insertion orbit while six of its companions slowly climb and eight hold altitude.

Each Rassvet-3 satellite weighs about 370 kilos (816 pounds) and was released into a near-polar orbit inclined 82.3 degrees to the equator. For the first two weeks, none of the batch showed any propulsion activity, raising the prospect that the whole group had a problem. Object 16 (NORAD ID 68375) was the first to climb, on April 6th, with others following over the next several days. Object 4 (NORAD ID 68363) stayed flat throughout, losing altitude at the natural rate until re-entry became unavoidable. The cause of this is unconfirmed, but a dead propulsion system and a complete loss of ground control would both produce the same outcome.

Earlier this year, Starlink pulled more than 4,000 satellites down to a roughly 300-mile orbit after a near miss with a Chinese spacecraft, and dead Starlink units routinely re-enter within weeks of an anomaly. Object 4 followed that same disposal pathway; a satellite that cannot raise itself simply falls.

Meanwhile, Bureau 1440, the Moscow company building Rassvet, has a fraction of the hardware in orbit that it needs. When Russia's "Starlink rival" launched, the company set a target of 250 satellites by 2027 and around 900 by 2035, backed by roughly $1.26 billion in state funding.

The March launch, however, was unusual in that neither Roscosmos nor the Russian Defense Ministry announced it, with Zak reporting that a Ukrainian drone attack on Plesetsk around the launch window likely meant the Russian government was keen to keep things under wraps.

Bureau 1440 confirmed the mission only the next morning, with a video of the satellites separating from the upper stage, and said they had reached an initial orbit and come under its control ahead of planned testing and the transfer to a target altitude. Rumors are currently circulating about an unconfirmed report suggesting a second Rassvet launch planned for around June 18th.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/04/please-do-not-vibe-f-up-this-software-broken-backups-spark-ai-coding-row-in-rsync-project/5251189

Incremental backups started failing for some rsync users after a recent update, and what they found in the project's commit history quickly turned a routine bug hunt into yet another fight over AI-generated code.

The controversy centers on rsync 3.4.3, a security-focused release published earlier this year to fix multiple vulnerabilities. Shortly after the upgrade, some users reported that incremental backup workflows were no longer behaving as expected, with one user saying their backup system failed on anything other than a full backup.

Rsync creator Andrew Tridgell has pushed back against the criticism in a Medium post titled "Rsync and Outrage," arguing that many commenters have drawn conclusions without understanding how the AI tools were actually used.

Rsync is not a weekend side project maintained by three people in a Discord server. First released in the 1990s, it remains one of the most widely used file synchronization and backup utilities in the Unix and Linux world. Countless backup products, scripts, NAS appliances, and IT departments depend on it quietly doing its job without surprises.

That makes any suggestion of AI-assisted development in the project far more contentious than it might be elsewhere.

The backup issue might have remained a fairly ordinary bug report had users not started poking around in rsync's recent commit history. They found that since rsync 3.4.1, dozens of commits have been attributed to "tridge and claude," referring to rsync creator Andrew Tridgell and Anthropic's AI assistant Claude.

The discovery prompted a strongly worded GitHub post titled "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software," a reference to the increasingly common practice of handing coding tasks to AI models and trusting the results.

From there, the discussion spread to Reddit and Hacker News, where the conversation shifted from a backup bug to a broader debate about AI-generated code finding its way into critical open source infrastructure.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

It's launching earlier than planned if everything goes well:

NASA is targeting an August 30, 2026 launch date for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, eight months earlier than originally planned and sooner than the September schedule it announced earlier this year. In late May, NASA Goddard engineers completed their final inspection of the infrared telescope's primary mirror, ensuring that no specks fell onto it during testing and making sure it remains in proper alignment after a "shake test." The 7.9-foot mirror will collect and focus light from cosmic objects, as the telescope observes the universe to look for answers about dark energy and to determine how common solar systems like ours are.

The agency's engineers are now packing up the telescope so it can be shipped from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida later this month. When it arrives at Kennedy, Roman will go through a thorough inspection to verify that nothing broke during its transportation. In the weeks leading to its target launch, it will undergo a series of tests rehearsals. It will of course be loaded with fuel and then encapsulated into a protective fairing before being installed on top of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket for launch.

The space telescope, which was named after NASA's first chief astronomer, has a field of view 100 times larger Hubble. That will enable Roman to capture more of the sky in less time once it arrives at its destination, where it will join the James Webb Space Telescope at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point that's located behind our planet.

"All this work will culminate in Roman delivering never-before seen views of the universe," NASA said in its announcement. Further, while Roman has its own objectives, it will provide observational capabilities to astronomers with other goals and give them access to data that could answer more questions about the universe.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Forecasts earnings well ahead of expectations, even as it taps credit facilities to lock in memory supply:

The AI gold rush is proving good for Raspberry Pi's bottom line, but it's also forcing the low-cost computer maker to borrow money to keep enough memory chips in stock.

In a trading update published on Friday, Raspberry Pi said it expects full-year earnings to come in significantly ahead of market expectations after a stronger-than-expected first half driven by healthy demand, higher average selling prices, and the benefit of lower-cost memory inventory purchased earlier.

Raspberry Pi expects first-half profits of at least $38 million from shipments of more than 4 million units, putting it close to the roughly $42 million analysts had forecast for the entire year.

Investors piled in after the update, pushing Raspberry Pi shares up nearly 20 percent and more than tripling the Cambridge-based firm's value since January.

The most interesting detail, however, was tucked away beneath the headline numbers.

Raspberry Pi warned that pricing and availability of DRAM and non-volatile memory remain challenging, a familiar complaint across the industry as AI infrastructure builders continue vacuuming up components. To ensure it meets production targets, the company said it intends to make strategic purchases of memory inventory and will "appropriately utilize" its debt facilities throughout the year.

Not so long ago, Raspberry Pi's biggest supply-chain challenge was making enough boards for eager tinkerers and classrooms.

The firm increasingly looks less like a hobbyist hardware vendor and more like a company navigating the same semiconductor supply chain headaches as much larger technology firms. Earlier this year it raised prices on some products as memory costs climbed, while executives have repeatedly pointed to component availability as a key business risk.

At least Raspberry Pi has a problem that many hardware vendors would happily take. Customers are still buying enough boards to keep the memory buyers busy.

Still, Raspberry Pi said first-half profitability benefited from lower-cost DRAM inventory acquired before memory prices moved higher. As that stock is consumed, margins are expected to moderate during the second half of the year. Still, management seems willing to sacrifice some profitability to secure supply.

It turns out the AI boom affects more than datacenter operators. Even Raspberry Pi is now playing the DRAM market.

The MSRP for a Pi 5 with 16 GB RAM is currently $305.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.slashgear.com/2184576/canada-spy-plane-deal-america-rejected/

Canada's Prime Minister, Mark Carney, announced in May 2026 that the nation's next-gen spy planes will no longer come from the United States. Instead of purchasing aircraft from Boeing, the nation has decided to buy radar planes from Swedish company Saab (yes, the Saab that used to make cars).

As reported by outlets such as WRAL News, Carney stated that the nation had entered negotiations with Saab to purchase its Airborne Early Warning & Control Aircraft, the GlobalEye, which is based on the Canadian-made Bombardier Global 6500. In the May 24 announcement, Carney said that "Saab's GlobalEye will be a key resource for the Canadian Armed Forces to detect and deter threats across the Arctic."

GlobalEye is essentially a flying radar system, capable of detecting threats in the air, on land, and at sea. It can fly for more than 12 hours and has a radar range of over 400 miles. Its Erieye ER radar can detect small targets, even in very cluttered conditions, while its Ground Moving Target Indication can identify moving objects over large distances. Programs like the Automatic Identification System can then, in turn, identify those spotted objects.

Canada has purchased spy planes from the U.S. before, acquiring a fleet of Boeing aircraft in 2023 to replace its then-aging fleet. It even considered Boeing's E-7 Wedgetail this time around. The nation's decision to go with Saab and Bombardier is part of an attempt to reduce dependence on the United States. In March 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney stated that Canada intended to take on the responsibility of protecting its Arctic territory on its own, moving away from the decades-long partnership with the U.S. it had previously relied on.

This move comes amid the backdrop of increased tensions between the United States and Canada, not least due to President Donald Trump's threat to impose 100% tariffs on Canadian imports and his decision to revoke Carney's invitation to join the Peace Council. Canada's decision to purchase the GlobalEye is expected to help create jobs in Canada, as the aircraft is based on a Canadian Bombardier plane and uses the same supply chain. Saab's reconnaissance aircraft have been used by other nations, too, with Sweden having sent Saab ASC 890 planes to Ukraine in 2024.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/meta-smart-glasses-code-face-recognition-biometric-tracking-privacy/

Products such as Ray-Man's Meta AI glasses could have facial recognition features added with code that already exists on a companion smartphone app.

When the feature is activated, Wired reports, "it will transform faces captured by Meta's glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and check each one against faceprints stored on the user's phone." 

In other words, NameTag would store biometric face data in an embedded database architecture that can compare new faceprints to existing ones. The database is designed to live on a user's phone but is configured to receive updates from Meta. 

The EFF says the code was verified through static analysis and argues that Meta is moving ahead with surveillance-capable glasses in a way that normalizes biometric tracking without people's consent. 

"Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine," EFF's senior staff technologist Cooper Quintin said in its article. "This is just one more reason to think twice before buying or using Meta's surveillance glasses."

Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that Meta was working on these types of features but had not officially announced plans to roll them out.

At the time, CNET's smart glasses and XR expert Scott Stein wrote about his concerns that "Meta's facial recognition is not an if, it's a when," and that the technology would need "to be handled with extreme measures of control and responsibility." 

Not long after that, Stein spoke with Meta about its privacy policies for smart glasses and came away "frustrated and uncertain" by a lack of clear guidelines and guardrails.

In an email to CNET, Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels said that the code is simply evidence of tech exploration and that no final decisions have been made to launch it to consumers.

"If we do decide to roll something out, we will take a thoughtful approach and do so with full transparency," Daniels wrote. "One decision we can be clear about -- we are not building a central face database."

The company's communications team also posted responses on X, complaining that the Wired article pushed Meta's response too far down. 

This recent reveal comes years after Meta had been automatically scanning faces on every photo uploaded to Facebook to power its Tag Suggestions tool. Following legal backlash, Meta agreed to pay $650 million to settle a lawsuit alleging violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which requires companies to obtain explicit consent before capturing biometric data such as facial scans. In 2021, the tech giant shut down its platform-wide facial recognition system and deleted the faceprint data of more than 1 billion people. 

Meta has partnered with companies such as Ray-Ban and Oakley on its smart glasses, but it faces competition. Google and Samsung recently introduced their own takes on the product category. Apple is said to be shifting away from VR products like the Vision Pro to augmented reality glasses it's developing, but it's not expected to introduce such a product until next year.

The flood of smart glasses is renewing debate about privacy and safety around these devices. Glasses can record video and audio, largely without bystanders noticing -- and thus without their consent -- undermining anonymity in public spaces. 

Digital rights experts have long worried about facial recognition tech because biometric data can be abused by governments to track dissidents or used by companies to spy on consumers. It can also be used for public harassment or doxing, or be leaked in data breaches.

If facial recognition software is enabled, it raises additional concerns about what sensitive data is being stored and how it's being used. 

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/legal/2026/06/05/new-york-advances-one-year-datacenter-permit-moratorium/5251911

New York lawmakers have approved a bill imposing new labor, energy, environmental, and community-benefit requirements on datacenters, including a one-year moratorium on certain permits for facilities drawing 20 MW or more.

The bill now heads to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for a signature. A spokesperson for the governor told the New York Post she would review the legislation, but gave no signal as to whether she would sign it. Hochul has previously said she hoped to leave regulating datacenter construction to the local communities. 

"Today we face an unprecedented wave of proposed large-scale data center development across New York," the bill's sponsor Assemblymember Anna Kelles wrote in a statement posted to Instagram. "My legislation seeks to provide New York with the time necessary to fully evaluate the environmental, energy, water, and ratepayer impacts of these facilities and to develop appropriate regulatory safeguards before additional projects move forward." 

The Assembly approved the bill on Thursday, the same day Anthropic, the AI giant behind Claude, called for a pause on LLM development sprints as developers believe the models could soon be capable of building themselves. In light of that possibility, researchers at Anthropic said the world would benefit from a slowdown in the race to make models more powerful. 

In New York, lawmakers hope to protect consumers from higher energy bills by creating a special classification for datacenter electrical customers and mandating that all necessary infrastructure upgrades, administrative expenses, and operational costs be assigned entirely to the datacenter. 

The bill also outlines electricity-sourcing requirements for datacenters with a peak load of at least 5 MW, requiring a phased shift toward renewable energy, with one-third of electricity coming from renewable sources between 2030 and 2034, two-thirds between 2035 and 2039, and 90 percent from 2040 onward.

For trade workers who are employed to build the facilities and maintain the buildings later, the bill requires the datacenters to meet prevailing wage requirements, unless the workers are operating under a collective bargaining agreement. Additionally, it demands datacenter companies help host communities with renewable energy initiatives, and mitigate the strain on local wastewater treatment facilities. 

Business leaders are urging Hochul to reject the bill, saying it was rushed through at the end of a legislative session and presented without appropriate debate. 

In a statement provided to The Register, Julie Samuels, president and CEO of Tech:NYC, which promotes the state's technology industry, said a blanket moratorium on datacenters would slow investment in the next generation of infrastructure projects.

"Energy usage, grid capacity, and the community impact of data centers must be addressed, and the Governor's Public Service Commission is already pursuing the right approach by ensuring data centers pay their fair share for grid upgrades and energy usage," Samuels wrote in a statement.  

Republican Assemblymember Phil Palmesano argued that datacenters were being unfairly targeted when other technology companies were given tax incentives to build, pointing to the recent groundbreaking of the Micron chip fab in Clay, New York, which is expected to create 50,000 New York jobs throughout construction, and up to 90,000 nationally. 

The bill, approved by the Senate on Friday, includes carve-outs for certain industrial computing applications, including manufacturing.

"If we told Micron they had to power their energy demands strictly using renewable resources, they wouldn't be here," Palmesano said, according to the NY Post. 

One of the first drafts of the bill had called for a three-year pause on datacenter construction.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/highly-reviewed-speaker-can-be-hacked-over-the-air-to-infect-connected-devices/

Operating system makers take many steps to prevent their wares from accepting commands from remote devices. The safeguards, designed to thwart malicious attacks, typically require hackers to jump through all kinds of hoops to bypass the measures. But what if remote code execution were as simple as being within Bluetooth range of a speaker connected to the targeted device?

It turns out it can, at least when the speaker is a Sound Blaster Katana V2X sold by Singapore-based Creative Technologies. The speaker, which sells for $283, is widely acclaimed with numerous reviews showering praise on the sound and performance of it and its predecessor, the Sound Blaster V2.

Researcher Rasmus Moorats stumbled on the hack by accident, after he purchased a Katana V2X, a soundbar that connects to PCs, Macs, and Linux devices over USB or Bluetooth. Moorats was curious if he could create a Linux tool that communicated with his speaker. He discovered he could do so through CTP, a proprietary mechanism he guesses is short for Creative Transport Protocol.

CTP allows devices connected via Bluetooth or USB to send commands to the speaker, such as changing LED colors and equalizer settings. CTP also allows the connected devices to receive responses from the speaker.

To Moorat's surprise, his Bluetooth device was able to connect to the speaker, which was connected to a PC via USB, without any authentication. Not only that, but his Bluetooth device didn't have to be paired first. Also surprising: One of the CTP commands, labeled "upload new firmware to device," allowed him to replace the official firmware with his own custom one. The firmware reflashing didn't use code signing or other measures to prevent the loading of unofficial code.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/06/07/uk-exam-watchdog-frets-over-smart-specs-turning-gcses-into-google-searches/5251365

England's exams watchdog is warning that the next generation of school cheating may arrive not in a student's pocket, but perched on their face.

In a new podcast, Ofqual chief regulator Sir Ian Bauckham said advances in consumer technology are creating fresh headaches for exam authorities, with smart glasses, hidden earpieces, and other connected gadgets raising the prospect of increasingly sophisticated cheating during exams.

"We shouldn't underestimate the challenge involved here," Bauckham said, warning that regulators will need to move quickly as technology evolves.

Students smuggling phones into exam halls is hardly a new phenomenon. According to Ofqual, mobile phones and other smart devices were involved in 2,225 malpractice cases during 2025 exams, accounting for 44.3 percent of all student malpractice incidents. Device-related offenses have been the largest category of student malpractice every year since 2018.

What appears to be keeping regulators awake at night is what comes next.

A smartphone hidden in a blazer pocket is one thing, but a pair of ordinary-looking glasses quietly displaying information to the wearer, or a near-invisible earpiece feeding them answers from elsewhere, is harder to spot from the back of an exam hall.

The concerns arise as consumer technology companies continue to cram cameras, microphones, AI assistants, and internet connectivity into an ever-growing range of wearable devices. What starts life as a gadget for checking messages or translating languages can easily become something more useful when sitting a three-hour mathematics exam.

Bauckham also suggested artificial intelligence poses a separate challenge outside the exam hall. Ofqual is examining ways to ensure coursework remains authentic as AI-generated submissions become harder to distinguish from student work.

Possible responses include tighter requirements around referencing sources and greater involvement from teachers in verifying that students actually produced the work they hand in. Bauckham even floated the possibility of removing coursework entirely from some qualifications if confidence in its authenticity cannot be maintained.

For now, students are still expected to turn up with a pen and whatever knowledge they've managed to retain. But as smart glasses and AI gadgets become cheaper and harder to spot, invigilators may soon need to know as much about consumer electronics as they do about exam regulations.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/we-pissed-off-a-lot-of-people-giant-data-center-plan-cut-50-amid-protests/

One of the world's biggest data center projects was designed to be nearly three times the size of Manhattan, stretching across multiple Utah sites. But intense local backlash in Box Elder County has now pushed the developer to cut the project plans in half before construction starts.

Residents' top concern was the Stratos data center project draining local waters, and they were willing to pay to protect them, most especially the vulnerable Great Salt Lake. Many locals paid a $15 fee to register comments to block the transfer of 1,900 acre-feet of water from a ranch to the hyperscale data center. Other concerns include electricity bills rising and potential risks to air quality, local wildlife, and land.

Venture capitalist Kevin O'Leary, chair of O'Leary Digital and Shark Tank investor, is behind the construction of the project. He told a local ABC affiliate that he regrets not working with state officials to be more transparent about the project from the beginning.

"We really screwed it up," O'Leary said, while confirming that he "was not expecting this kind of intense blowback from the public." He claimed that he and state officials anticipated that "people would be excited" about the major local investment and "made huge mistakes" by not involving the public more in discussions, based on that "assumption."

"We pissed off a lot of people, and that's not the way I do business," O'Leary said. "That's not."

As Utahns moved to defend their resources and demanded more information, Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, who is a Republican, sent a letter to O'Leary, asking him to cut the project's scope by 75 percent.

At an AI gala in Washington, DC, O'Leary claimed that he had "no choice" but to agree, NBC News reported. Initially, he planned to build the project on 40,000 acres, but now he's reduced that to about 20,000 acres. Of the remaining land, 10,000 acres will remain undeveloped, leaving about 25 percent of the initial acreage to develop the data center. O'Leary's group characterized this as bending to the Senate president's demands.

Moving forward, O'Leary wants to rebuild trust, he claimed. He told the ABC affiliate that he's personally taking over all communications on the project because he didn't "like being beaten up like this." With him as spokesperson, residents will supposedly be better informed about permitting requests and environmental impacts, rather than relying on sources that O'Leary claimed are unreliable or bent on manipulating public opinion.

"All the plans are going to be transparent," O'Leary said, while claiming that public concerns are exaggerated. "All the design is going to be transparent. Everything we do is going to be transparent because I'm not happy with where we're at right now."

He told the AI gala attendees that he now recognizes that "we should have answered all this stuff up front, now I got to do it after everybody's been pissed off."

"I hope this dialogue can serve as a model for how complex projects are best addressed—through direct, good-faith engagement between developers and elected officials rather than through public narratives that outpace the facts," O'Leary told a local Utah news site KLS.com.