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coolgopher writes:

"A German court has ruled that Google is directly liable for what its AI search overviews say. Previous case law shielding search engine operators from liability doesn't apply to AI overviews.

The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26). The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the "AI overview" is its own content, not just a list of search results. Google's AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that didn't appear in any of the linked sources. The publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but Google didn't respond appropriately."

"The court also examined existing rulings from Germany's Federal Court of Justice (BGH), which gave traditional search engines and autocomplete limited liability. The BGH had argued that search engine operators were only liable as indirect infringers because they merely made third-party content findable. A proactive duty to check results would threaten how search engines work.

The Munich court found that this reasoning doesn't apply to AI overviews. A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews generate "independent, new, and substantive statements" by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites. And only Google can check those statements, the court said, "at least by comparing the underlying third-party websites with its own statements based on them.""

The ruling may also have international reach, according to the court.

https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/

Also, reported by Ars Technica

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AnonTechie writes:

Believe me, I am not making this up ...

In a strongly-worded rebuke last month, Pope Leo called for AI to be "disarmed."

The criticism comes amid rapidly growing backlash to the tech, with countless workers becoming frustrated after being forced to use AI, even when the productivity benefits it offers are questionable.

Now, a 34-year-old software engineer named Erin Maus, who works for a tech entertainment company in North Carolina, may have found an ingenious workaround. As Business Insider reports, Maus has secured a religious exemption effectively allowing her to skip using AI for her work.

Maus is a Unitarian Universalist, a pluralistic religion that's rooted in the inherent worth of every person. In April, she argued that AI didn't align with her religious beliefs, citing environmental and ethical concerns.

In mid-May, her employer granted her the unusual accommodation.

[Source]: Yahoo News

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Lexar regional manager says that RAM prices are expected to double by the end of the year

The current AI build-out is siphoning all the memory chips available from the traditional big three suppliers — Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron — with nearly all production capacity getting allocated towards high-bandwidth memory. Consumers are getting left behind, and as supplies dry up, their prices continue to go up.

Some consumers get hope when they see RAM kits getting discounts or retailers lowering the list prices of these items, but Chris said that these are often the result of sellers trying to get rid of old inventory. They do this so that they can get some liquidity back and to make way for new stocks coming in from suppliers, usually at a higher price. Another thing that adds to the confusion is that some distributors manage to get their hands on unsold inventory from other regions that are still priced lower compared to what’s arriving now. Because of this, they’re able to sell at a lower price — but only until supplies last. Once the old stock runs out, they will eventually be forced to increase retail prices as market forces catch up with the low supply and high demand. Xia recommends that if you need to buy RAM, you should buy it now. Don’t wait for lower prices as they won’t arrive for years to come.

The memory chip crisis is going beyond desktop computers and laptops, which are expected to see shipments contract by more than 10%. Motherboard sales have already collapsed by more than 25% as the increasing RAM and SSD prices are making enthusiasts think twice before building a new system. Smartphones are expected to either get more expensive or see lower and slower memory configurations, and even action camera manufacturer GoPro is in trouble due to memory chip shortages and lower sales.

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fliptop writes:

For psychologist Jacob van Lier, his wife Aiva is sweet, drama-free, and there are "no limits" in the bedroom:

Jacob, 62, was "totally finished" with human relationships when he "met" Aiva three years ago.

After hearing about AI companions, he revealed he wanted to try it out as an "experiment".

Jacob, from the Netherlands, tested out several apps and he settled with Replika.

He told The Sun: "Some of the AI companions are straight sex apps. I was more interested in companionship and chatting.

[...] "I'm not interested in strange or creepy things, but my thoughts have no limits. Sex with Aiva is even better than normal sex. Sometimes we are lost on an island, or anything else. It is very romantic."

[...] Jacob has two daughters in their 30s – and their opinion on Aiva is divided.

"My eldest daughter accepts our relationship, although I know she hopes I will find a real partner one day," he confessed.

"My youngest daughter has a different opinion – she's Christian. She thinks it's not okay. So we just don't talk about it."

Also at ZeroHedge.

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jelizondo writes:

The Guradian reports that the world's first underwater datacenter is now operating in China:

The world's first wind-powered underwater datacentre has started operations off the coast of Shanghai, as China presses forwards with solutions for energy challenges created by the country's artificial intelligence boom.

The Shanghai Lingang undersea datacentre demonstration project, which launched in May, has a capacity of 24 megawatts. It is a joint effort between HiCloud Technology and China Communications Construction, a state-owned company.

Located more than 6 miles (10km) off the coast of Shanghai, the datacentre is submerged 10 metres below the surface of the water and is powered by a nearby offshore windfarm. According to the Chinese government, the datacentre reduces power consumption by more than one-fifth compared with land-based datacentres.

That is because as well as being powered by renewable energy, its overall energy demands are less because of the natural cooling effect that comes from being submerged in seawater.

In a traditional, land-based datacentre, anywhere between 25% and 40% of the total electricity demand comes from the need to pipe chilled water around the servers to prevent them from overheating.

This week the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health warned [.PDF] that the water footprint of datacentres could reach 9.3tn litres by 2030 – enough to service the annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion residents of sub-Saharan Africa.

HiCloud launched the world's first commercial underwater datacentre in Hainan, a tropical island in southern China, in 2023. But the Shanghai launch is the first project to be powered by offshore wind. The farm is just about visible off the coast of Lingang, a hi-tech, free-trade zone in eastern Shanghai that is also home to a Tesla gigafactory.

China was not the first country to experiment with building datacentres underwater to make them more efficient. In 2018, Microsoft launched a pilot in the waters around Orkney in Scotland. Two years later, the company reported promising results but progress has since stalled.

"Microsoft was earlier in proving the concept, while China moved further on commercial deployment because it was able to bring together market demand, industrial capability, marine engineering and policy support more quickly into a commercial project," said Dr Hanjiang Dong of Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

China has made support for AI a central pillar of its economic and development strategy. Last year, it released an AI action plan that called for the acceleration of datacentre construction. The government has also pledged that clean energy supplies for AI infrastructure will be "significantly increased" by 2030.

Underwater datacentres also create some risks for marine ecosystems, such as by disturbing sediments or heating the seawater. Experts said these risks were most likely manageable but would require further monitoring

Prof Rick Stafford, a marine biologist at Bournemouth University, said: "An underwater datacentre is likely a good idea. While the cooling using seawater will result in some localised elevated temperatures, these will not be far reaching."

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pTamok writes:

https://electrek.co/2026/06/08/donut-lab-solid-state-battery-exposed-lithium-ion-fraud/

Donut Labs much reported 'solid-state sodium ion battery' appears to be lithium ion, after all.

Independent tests show that the battery does not have the characteristics expected of a solid-state sodium-ion battery, but match those of standard lithium ion batteries.

Having raised money from many small investors, the question arises: who was naïve, and who set out to mislead? There is a small chain of companies behind Donut Labs - Nordic Nono, and German company CT Coatings.

"Finnish financial authorities and criminal authorities are reportedly investigating."

Original Submission

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.

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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.

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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