SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/planned-us-data-centers-set-to-produce-24m-cars-worth-of-co2/

A new analysis of the 60 largest data centers under construction in the US by Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft estimates the sites could produce a cumulative 101.5 million tons of carbon dioxide annually once they’re fully up and running, Financial Times reports [Paywalled]. That’s about 7% of all 2025 US power-sector emissions. Put another way, it’s the equivalent of running 27 coal power plants or putting 24 million more gas-powered cars on the road.

The backlash against America’s data center and artificial intelligence boom has been building for a while now, reaching a fever pitch over water use, land grabs and noise complaints. Recently, environmental activist Erin Brockovich has been mapping out communities affected by data center construction and operations, and polling shows that most Americans don’t want AI factories anywhere near them.

Now, it appears there’s a looming carbon problem to add to the pile.

Big Tech companies appeared publicly committed to cutting emissions just five years ago, making the new findings feel like a notable about-face. Financial Times found that Amazon’s emissions climbed 16% from 2024 to 2025, driven by data center construction and a 34% jump in electricity purchases. Microsoft reported a 25% increase in estimated emissions during the same period, while Google's parent company, Alphabet, reported an 18% year-over-year increase in its emissions figure according to its own adjusted metric.

Researchers point to a mix of causes, from the sheer scale of demand for AI infrastructure to a political environment under the Trump administration that dramatically rolled back climate rules and clean energy tax credits in favor of fossil fuels.

Data center construction has revitalized local activism. In May, Albany, New York, residents gathered at a rally for the AI data center moratorium.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Fairphone 6 Plus is a refreshed version of the 6, with more RAM and a faster chipset:

The Fairphone 6 Plus is a minor hardware refresh, but a major launch for the company: It's the first phone that Fairphone is selling directly in the US. It's on sale now for $649.99, available through Fairphone's website and Amazon, and is sold unlocked with support for both T-Mobile and AT&T. In Europe, it costs €649, a €50 increase on last year's phone.

Fairphones from the 4 onwards have been available to buy in the US, but never from Fairphone itself. They were exclusively sold through a partnership with Murena, the developer of /e/OS, a "de-Googled" version of Android. That meant buyers were forced to use Murena's software — which is capable, but certainly an acquired taste — and paid a significant premium for the phone. Last year's Fairphone 6 sold for $899.

[...] Fairphone has been building up to the US launch of the 6 Plus, bringing audio products to Amazon US starting with the Fairbuds XL over-ear headphones last November. Alongside the announcement of the 6 Plus, the company has confirmed that a new pair of earbuds, the Fairbuds 2, will launch in Q4 this year, and "will set a new bar for repairability and performance." The company says it will reveal more in October.

Any Soylentils familiar with these phones, or Murena Android, or installing something else like LineageOS or GrapheneOS for the discerning person wanting a bit more control in their phones? Asking for a friend. --hubie

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/hackers-tricked-a-major-retailers-ai-shopping-bot-to-do-something-it-was-never-supposed-to/

It started with avocados and ended with sensitive information being leaked.

Onstage at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, researchers Netanel Rubin and Dan Avraham pulled up an AI shopping assistant — the kind that's available inside most major retail apps to answer questions, compare products and help shoppers navigate a store's enormous catalog.

But the conversation didn't stay on groceries for long.

By the end of the demonstration, the researchers had bypassed the assistant's safeguards and forced code to run inside the computer environment behind it. The bot returned directory listings, environment variables and other information that an ordinary shopper should never be able to see.

In the wrong hands, that kind of information could give an attacker clues about the retailer's systems and potentially expose secrets or access that could be used in further attacks, putting both the company and, depending on what the AI can reach, its customers at risk.

The retailer wasn't a small online shop experimenting with a hastily assembled chatbot, either.

According to Rubin and Avraham's company Rein Security, it was one of the three largest retailers in the US, and the assistant was available through the same public mobile app used by everyday customers. 

A few important notes: Rein Security sells technology designed to monitor AI agents and provide visibility into what those agents are doing. Rein also didn't identify the retailer, citing legal concerns. That means the findings cannot be independently verified with the retailer, and shoppers can’t know whether they’ve used the affected assistant.

The attack started with one of the assistant's most useful abilities: comparing products.

To answer certain questions, the AI can retrieve information from websites outside the retailer's control. That helps it gather more information for shoppers, but it also means the assistant can encounter material created by virtually anyone, including an attacker.

The researchers placed instructions in content they controlled and got the shopping assistant to retrieve them. Instead of treating that material only as information to summarize, the AI was manipulated into treating some of it as new directions to follow.

This is known as an indirect prompt injection. The malicious code can be hidden within a website, document, product listing or other material the AI encounters while trying to complete a legitimate task.

That alone wasn't enough to reach the system behind the assistant, but it gave the researchers a starting point.

canopic jug writes:

Hackaday has an overview of why poly(lactic acid) (PLA) is so brittle, yet used all the time in 3D printing.

Over the years poly(lactic acid) (PLA) – also known as polylactide – has become a popular thermoplastic for a variety of reasons. One of these reasons is that it's easily produced from a renewable resource, i.e. lactic acid, with the resulting polymer even being compostable if you assume that your compost pile hits a steady 65°C or more, well above the polymer's glass transition temperature (Tg).

That said, PLA by itself is a pretty crummy material, being exceedingly brittle and inferior to common alternatives like PET(G) in many metrics. Over the decades much research has gone into figuring out this material, its amorphous and crystalline states, as well as how to use plasticizers, copolymers, mechanical manipulation and PLLA/PDLA blends to produce more useful variants of PLA.

Today's spools of thermoplastic filament that gets marketed as 'PLA' are the result of such engineering, though with plenty of remaining issues, as anyone who has struggled through a spool of brittle PLA filament can attest to. Although you can find plenty of tips online about how you should 'just' toss said spool into an filament dryer, oven or similar to bake it – with accusing fingers pointed at moisture intrusion, hydrolysis and kin – it helps to understand the fundamentals of how PLA works, and how it degrades.

Previously:
(2026) Investigating 3D-Printed Metals for Aeronautical Engineering
(2025) Bye-Bye Microplastics: New Plastic is Recyclable and Fully Ocean-Degradable
(2022) Innovative 3D-Printing Technology Creates Glass Microstructures With Rays of Light
(2021) Polymer Discovery Gives 3D-Printed Sand Super Strength

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/17/an-ai-broke-snowflakes-code-then-another-ai-agent-exploited-it/5288666

An AI broke Snowflake's code; then another AI, an attack agent, autonomously found the bug, exploited it, and extracted credentials without human intervention.

Luckily, this wasn't yet another case of rogue AI agents doing evil things. It was a sanctioned bug hunt, conducted through Snowflake's HackerOne vulnerability disclosure program, and Snowflake fixed the flaw the same day Wiz reported it and rotated the affected credentials the following day.

Wiz's red agent, an AI-powered autonomous attacker designed for offensive security, found the GitHub Actions workflow flaw during a routine scan of public repositories on June 23. The script injection vulnerability existed in snowflakedb/snowflake-connector-net, and it allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary commands within a GitHub Actions runner by opening a GitHub issue with a specially crafted title.

And it turned out an AI had inadvertently injected the bug into the code five days earlier.

GitHub Copilot Autofix, an AI coding assistant, co-authored the commit on June 18, and it introduced a script injection bug in run: blocks by removing the repository's existing sanitized input pattern and replacing it with direct string expansion in a shell script.

"We crafted an issue title that, after template expansion, breaks out of the echo string and exfiltrates the Jira credentials via an out-of-band callback," Wiz's head of threat exposure Gal Nagli said in a Monday blog. 

These credentials gave Wiz read access to Snowflake's engineering, security compliance, and bug bounty tracking projects.

Wiz reported the workflow vulnerability to the cloud data platform on June 23, and Snowflake patched it the same day. It also revoked and rotated the Jira token, and confirmed, via audit logs, that Wiz was the only third-party to access the endpoint during the five-day exposure window. 

The disclosure "was immediately investigated and remediated, and our investigation found no evidence of unauthorized access," a Snowflake spokesperson told The Register. "We are working together with Wiz to share these learnings with the broader industry to encourage widespread adoption of these security best practices."

Wiz, for its part, deleted all of the data it accessed during the vulnerability research and proof-of-concept exploit testing, and told us that this incident proves human code review isn't sufficient to quickly detect vulnerabilities -  especially as developers increasingly use AI.

"This incident highlights a rapidly emerging reality in software development: how AI coding assistants can inadvertently introduce workflow injection vulnerabilities, and how automated AI agents can rapidly surface them in the wild," Nagli wrote.

Of course, the Google-owned biz has a vested interest in saying this. But this doesn't make it not true.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The film Aliens was released to theaters in 1986, that is to say 40 years ago. Many new technologies were featured in the film and some have come to be in real life. The Conversation looks at the film and at the then fictional technologies and reviews which did and did not come to pass.

The technology featured in Aliens appears to be there to support the wonderful storytelling, rather than predict the path of innovation, as a futurologist might.

But let's take a look at it. The film is set in 2179, 153 years into our future. Journeying 153 years into the past would land us in 1893, when common technologies were horse drawn and steam streetcars and gas lighting. Typewriters with Qwerty keyboards went on sale the following year.

Previously:
(2025) 50 Years of JAWS
(2025) Monty Python and the Holy Grail Turns 50
(2024) The Terminator: How James Cameron's 'science-fiction slasher film' predicted AI fears, 40 years ago
(2018) Sci-Fi Classic "They Live" -- 30 Years Later

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Screen readers suffer as nearly 90% of top websites tested contain HTML spec violations:

Are web coders losing their respect for standards? A recent review of the world's largest sites suggests so.   

ValidateHTML, a project by independent French developer Théo Ducreux, examined the contents of the 5,000 most widely used web domains, as estimated by the Tranco research project. They include the usual suspects (Google, YouTube, Akamai) plus those without public-facing components (Google's "gstatic," EZVIZ's "Ezviz7").

Ducreux found more than half – 2,656 sites – served a home page readable by humans. Many of the others, such as Google and EZVIZ's, were just traffic redirection sites, a beacon for a company's products to call home.

Headless or not, nearly 90 percent of these sites were not serving proper HTML, as specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group). These standards are important so that different browsers and reading tools can render the requested pages in more or less the same way.

Ducreux tallied a total of 100,305 HTML violations (including the most recent HTML5 specs) across all these sites, plus an additional 18,863 CSS errors. In other words, 87.2 percent of sites violate web specs in at least one place. Only 12.8 percent have fully valid HTML. And only 2.6 percent of all sites are completely clean, returning zero errors and zero best-practice warnings.

More alarming, over a third of sites failed accessibility checks, which to their owners is more of a legal liability (and hence a compliance issue) than an embarrassment, given the potential reach of the 2025 European Accessibility Act. (Here in the U.S., woe be the accessibility-inconsiderate e-commerce site that raises the ire of the National Federation of the Blind.) 

Accessibility-wise, 20.4 percent of sites are missing alt text on images, which often contain vital information. Worse, 41.6 percent of pages are missing ARIA labels that identify page regions, potentially leaving screen readers struggling to convey the page's structure. Here's an iframe, figure it out. 

"Screen readers don't have anywhere near the error tolerance Chrome has, so markup that looks totally fine to you can be broken for someone using assistive tech," Ducreux told The Register. 

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/inside-defcon-the-conference-that-made-cybersecurity-noob-friendly/

The first thing I learned at Defcon was that I apparently didn't know what a badge was.

I already had one hanging around my neck: the press credential that got me through the door at the annual hacker convention in Las Vegas in early August. Yet everywhere I looked, people stood in long lines to buy more. When I asked what they were waiting for and heard "badges," I glanced down at mine, confused.

I would soon learn that Defcon badges can be electronic puzzles, soldering projects, collectibles and signs of belonging to a culture I was experiencing for the first time. Those badges were my first indication of how much I had to learn.

Everyone else seemed to understand the schedule, the language and the unwritten rules. But me? I felt like I was back in high school and had somehow missed orientation.

Over the next few days, talking with professionals, hobbyists and other beginners made cybersecurity feel much more accessible. For the first time, I could see a path from playing around with hacking tools to actually understanding how they work.

I wasn't completely new to hacking. In college at UCLA, I spent more time than I probably should have in the library experimenting with Firesheep, a Firefox extension that demonstrated how exposed session cookies could be intercepted over shared Wi-Fi. Watching it work showed me how easily technology could be manipulated.

I didn't build Firesheep or understand the code behind it. I knew how to install it and click around. In hacker terminology, that made me a script kiddie: someone who uses tools created by other people without fully understanding how they work.

Still, I loved testing technology's limits and making it do things it wasn't designed to do. I liked the feeling of opening a door everyone else assumed was locked. That curiosity stuck, even if my technical knowledge never caught up. 

Defcon was my chance to see whether it finally could.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/sabotage-experts-lawmakers-blast-rfk-jr-for-destroying-healthcare-research/

The federal agency tasked with studying ways to improve America's outstandingly poor healthcare system is "on the brink," experts warn. The Trump administration has cut its staff by 75 percent, canceled its grants en masse, and is refusing to spend tens of millions of dollars appropriated by Congress.

Whether the agency "will survive the second Trump administration is an open question," health policy experts Aaron Carroll and David Atkins wrote in an opinion piece published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The agency in question is the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which has focused on ways to improve patient safety, healthcare quality, care delivery, and new technologies and practices since the 1990s. In the past, "Republican leaders recognized that health care disparities were fundamental quality problems," Carroll and Atkins wrote. But recently, disparities in care have become partisan issues.

During Trump's second term, DOGE cuts led to the firing or retirement of an estimated 75 percent of the AHRQ's staff. In July, AHRQ abruptly sent grant cancellation letters to around 150 researchers. More than 100 research grants collectively worth over $250 million have been canceled. Although Congress appropriated $345 million for the 2026 fiscal year, much of it has gone unspent, with only $15 million going to grants so far. As such, scientists across over 30 states have halted research, laid off staff, shut down programs, and stopped pursuing new lines of research.

In addition to the losses in data and research findings, Carroll and Atkins lament the loss to the scientific community. "This is what it looks like when we stop developing the next generation of health services researchers." Reversing the damage is doable, but will be difficult, they write, while calling on Congress to act.

Last week, 30 Democratic senators sent a fiery letter [PDF] to anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Noting the same series of events as Carroll and Atkins, they called Kennedy's handling of AHRQ "sabotage" and an "outrageous abuse of administrative power that will leave Americans sicker, poorer, and dying from preventable causes."

They highlighted just a few of the research programs that were axed under Kennedy, including studies on training rural healthcare workers to handle maternal medical emergencies in Connecticut, improving access to home dialysis in New York, reducing risks of patient falls in rural hospitals in Colorado, reducing overuse of antibiotics in Utah, improving autism screening and care for Black children in North Carolina, and improving chronic pain management to reduce reliance on opioids in Virginia. The senators also noted that grants were canceled out of the blue with form letters, which had contradictory explanations and incorrect citations.

With "profound concern and unequivocal opposition" to the mass grant cancellations, the senators wrote, "We demand that you immediately rescind these cancellations and ensure that the funding Congress appropriates to AHRQ is invested in health research in accordance with the law."

"We want to be clear: Democrats and Republicans did not work together to appropriate funds for AHRQ as a gentle suggestion for the [health] Department to follow at their discretion or leisure," they wrote. "We provided this money with the explicit instruction that the Department faithfully support life-saving research to improve access and health outcomes for Americans."

The health department under Kennedy has previously defended the cuts. The senators gave Kennedy until August 25 to respond to their letter.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/top-6-ai-free-linux-distros/

AI is everywhere, and the technology's tendrils continue finding their way into more and more places. Will we soon see AI in shopping carts, waffle makers, heated blankets -- rocks?

OK, maybe AI in rocks is a stretch, but you get the point.

Microsoft and Apple are embedding their respective AIs into the heart of their operating systems, and some Linux distributions, such as Omarchy, have followed suit.

Fortunately, not every Linux distribution has plans to add AI into the mix. In fact, several distros have either explicitly taken a stance against AI -- or have a general ethos that ensures AI will not become part of the OS. 

One thing to know: Just because an OS refuses to ship (or use) AI, it doesn't mean that users can't install it for themselves. That's up to the end user. Also, not every one of these distro developers has made public statements about not including AI, but their foundations and ethos stand against such things. To that end, I've had to draw conclusions based on my long-term experience and understanding of how these distributions work and evolve.

Here are the best of those distros.

Debian has made it clear that AI will never be included in the OS. For Debian, part of the issue is the openness of LLMs. The developers made that perfectly clear when they stated, "AI models released under DFSG-compatible license without original training data or program are not seen as DFSG-compliant." DFSG stands for Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the developers and community take the standard seriously. Because of this, I cannot see any point at which Debian will include AI with the operating system.

Keep in mind that Debian is the "mother of distributions," because so many distributions (including Ubuntu) use it as a base. This means that all of those distributions beneath it will not have to deal with preinstalled AI.

Although the Void developers haven't taken an official public stance on AI in the OS, it's safe to assume we'll never see it ship with AI. One reason for this is the very nature of Void Linux as a "DIY" Linux distribution. 

Void Linux starts with just the basics and leaves the rest up to the user. That ethos alone should ensure that AI is never a part of the base. On top of all that, Void is considered a minimalist distro, which means it aims to be as small as possible. (AI would increase the ISO size.)

I'm fairly confident that Void Linux will never include AI out of the box.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/08/19/nasa-estimates-the-size-of-the-hole-spacex-made-in-the-moon/5289425

NASA has used its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to capture more pics of the mess on the moon left by a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage.

As The Register has previously reported, in 2025 private aerospace concerns Firefly and ispace hired a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for their respective Blue Ghost Mission 1 and RESILIENCE moonshots.

RESILIENCE did not live up to its name. Blue Ghost did rather better.

The trajectory used to get the two craft to Luna meant the upper stage of the Falcon 9 was on a collision course with Earth's sole permanent natural satellite. The vehicle met its end in early August, and South Korea's space agency captured a few snaps.

NASA did likewise between August 11 and 12, and on Tuesday shared some of them.

You're looking at four of those images, each taken from a different angle as LRO passed 60 miles (96km) above the lunar surface while travelling at a mile per second (1600 m/s).

Crater boffins who have seen the snaps apparently think they show the Falcon 9 made a hole 60 feet wide and 10 feet deep (18m x 3m).

We're told that the darker area that fans around the crater in the upper-left image is rougher than the surroundings, as this surface material has been altered over a long time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts. The brighter rays and splotch above the crater in the lower-right image is fresher material that was excavated from deeper below the surface.

Another piece of SpaceX hardware, the Starship used in the 13^th test flight, has also turned up in the Australian territory of Christmas Island.

The island is a speck in the Indian Ocean more famous for its annual migration of red crabs (and its role Australian immigration policies)  than its contributions to space exploration. It is, however, usefully close to the location where the Starship hit the water.

As SpaceX explained on X, its recovery team towed the spacecraft to the island to take advantage of the calm waters in its vicinity so engineers can perform extra post-flight analysis. The company hopes to return it to its Texas Starbase for more work.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Rob, the Administrator over at Linux.org has announced:

I set up an IRC server this week. irc.linux.org, port 6697, TLS.

Main channel is #linux.org.

NickServ and ChanServ are both running, so you can lock down your nickname and register your own channels:

/msg NickServ REGISTER
/msg ChanServ REGISTER #yourchannel

Once a channel is registered it stays yours, ops and all, even if you're the only one who ever shows up.

If you haven't touched IRC in fifteen years, nothing has changed,. apt install hexchat or apt install irssi, connect, join, type.

Channels are open for the taking. Distro channels, project channels, whatever you want to run. Grab them before somebody else does.

Original Submission

"mrcoolbp" writes:

It seems like Nvidia's not getting back into the Middle Kingdom anytime soon:

Chinese web giant Baidu yesterday told investors it sees good days ahead for its Kunlunxin chip biz, because local buyers won't have alternatives.

Baidu has previously said it plans to spin out and float Kunlunxin, which makes CUDA-compliant inferencing chips that it uses for its own cloud services and has sold to the likes of Huawei and ZTE, who use them in kit they sell to Chinese telcos.

Speaking on the company's Q2 earnings call, Dou Shen, executive veep of Baidu's AI Cloud Group, said Baidu is working to list Kunlunxin and will have concrete info to share soon.

"From a business perspective, we remain very confident in Kunlunxin's long-term growth and commercial potential for a few reasons," he said. One of those reasons is that demand for inferencing continues to rise, and Baidu thinks that trend will continue for the long term.

His second reason was that China's domestic market has "significant growth potential" because supply of AI chips is "likely to remain constrained for some time."

"Against this backdrop, customers are increasingly seeking high performance, reliable, and cost-efficient domestic AI chips."

Those remarks are notable in the context of the US government's policy to allow Nvidia to resume sales of its products into China, and Beijing's response of giving itself a veto over any purchases by local companies.

After Washington banned Nvidia from selling its products in China, the company said that decision cost it $10.5 billion in six months. In its most recent results announcement the GPU giant said it had not won any revenue in China after the USA's policy reversal, and is "uncertain whether any imports will be allowed into the country."

And now Baidu is saying Chinese buyers are looking to local chips due to supply challenges.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

After only two years in business, too:

Firm Test-Fires 3D-Printed, Fully Cryogenic Reusable Rocket Engine — Indian Startup Leverages SLM Printing To Create Its First Working Prototype

As a broad description, SLM printers work by depositing a layer of microscopic metal powder on a base, and then firing a laser that melts the powder into solid at specific places. The base then drops down a fraction of a millimeter, a new layer of powder is deposited, and the process repeats. All told, this results in layers around just 0.05 to 0.06 mm thick, made of metals and alloys that traditional consumer 3D printers can't quite handle. Here's an illustrative video of the process.

Additionally, the burn is stronger than the commonly used Kerolox, while leaving behind almost no residue, lowering maintenance time and improving reusability turnaround. Drawbacks include lower fuel density (thus the need for larger tank sizes), trickier storage due to the low temperature, and potential hazards for handling.

Othisis has reportedly signed MoUs (memorandum of understanding) to carry payloads into space, even though it's only been formally in business for two years. The company is the brainchild of Syed Affan, the creator of the Rocketry India Discord server, who founded the company while pursuing his undergraduate degree.

Original Submission

Anonymous Coward writes:

It's like Windows Recall, but without all the creepy screenshots. (But it's still kind of creepy.):

ChatGPT's desktop app on macOS has a new feature called Computer History that turns your actions into training data, learning how you work, suggesting automations, and even picking up tasks you left half done. It uses your activity to build a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can reference when you make a request.

The feature is opt in, rather than opt out, and you can exclude certain apps and websites from Computer History, and you can delete entries if you want finer-grained control. Ari Weinstein, Product and Engineering manager at OpenAI, said on X that Computer History will automatically ignore content in incognito or private browser tabs.

In a quick demo video, Dominik Kundel, a member of the Developer Experiences team at OpenAI, shows the app looking up the last document he edited, checking if it was shared with people via Slack, and delivering a recap of how he spent his morning.

The feature is definitely reminiscent of Windows Recall, but where Microsoft's controversial AI feature relied heavily on screenshots, OpenAI says Computer History doesn't capture images, videos, or audio, instead relying on "events."

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/14/openai-ditches-recall-style-screenshot-surveillance-for-friendly-keylogging/5287618
https://thenextweb.com/news/openai-chatgpt-computer-history-mac-keystrokes

Original Submission