Alterslash picks up to the best 5 comments from each of the day’s Slashdot stories, and presents them on a single page for easy reading.
Will California Gut Its Net Neutrality Law to Comply with Trump Admin Demands?
In 2021, America approved $65 billion to fund broadband internet services as part of President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But Trump’s administration announced they’d withhold funds from states with net neutrality protections…
States could object and sue the government, Ars Technica reported last October, “but even a successful lawsuit could take years and leave unserved homes without broadband for the foreseeable future.” So where does that leave California’s net neutrality laws? Ars Technica asks. California expect to spend about $1.4 billion to deploy broadband to 270,571 locations…
Similar to federal net neutrality rules repealed during the first Trump administration, California’s law prohibits ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful traffic and says ISPs may not require fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to Internet users. While the first Trump administration lost its attempt to preempt state net neutrality laws, the second Trump administration is trying to achieve a similar result by making federal broadband money conditional on whether states agree not to enforce net neutrality…
California and Illinois are the only states that haven’t finalized their funding, according to the BEAD progress dashboard maintained by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)… California could try to continue enforcing its net neutrality law even while accepting the federal funding, a strategy that would involve another long court battle over its right to regulate broadband providers. This would be difficult, as the Trump administration is requiring states that accept grant funding to commit that they won’t enforce net neutrality rules… [N]early 30 advocacy groups that focus on access to technology are treating the vote as a significant milestone and urged state leaders to defend California’s net neutrality law in a letter yesterday…
Winning a court battle would become much more difficult after the state accepts the money [according to Paul Goodman, legal counsel for the Center for Accessible Technology]. Goodman said the CPUC should delay the vote and that California should file a lawsuit arguing that the NTIA-imposed condition is illegal. In addition to net neutrality, Goodman said California may be giving up other regulatory authority over companies, like AT&T and Verizon, because the NTIA requirement forbids rate regulation and “utility-style rules on broadband Internet service” in general… Goodman said the exemption from state laws would last for up to 14 years. This is because ISPs receiving grants would have four years to deploy the required broadband networks, and the extended period of performance lasts another 10 years… AT&T is already trying to get out of state obligations related to its basic phone service in California, as we’ve reported… [Also at stake is whether “ISPs themselves get to pick the price of the mandated low-cost broadband offerings,” the article points out.]
The letter from 30 advocacy groups to California state leaders argues accepting the money “would set a dangerous precedent for the federal government to use federal funding as a cudgel that forces states in line with its agenda… If California were to allow this funding to be used as leverage, there is no telling what other resources the administration would confidently seek to exploit.”
Thursday California’s Public Utility Commission did vote to approve the plan, but a spokesperson earlier told Ars Technica their vote “does not address subgrantee agreements, or the conditions the NTIA requires be included in subgrantee agreements.”
Rust is Now a ‘Tier One’ Language at Microsoft
The Register reports:
When Microsoft’s developers and engineers sit down to code, they can now choose to work in Rust, which Redmond has added to its list of canonical languages. “Rust now is a Tier One language at Microsoft, and that just means that it sits among C++, C# and TypeScript as the best supported languages for internal development in the company,” explained Victor Ciura, Microsoft principal engineer for the Rust tooling team, during a keynote talk today at this year’s annual RustConf, being held this week in Montréal. Ciura said Microsoft has “paved a path” of tools and processes that support local Rust development across the entire software development lifecycle.
Rust is no stranger at Microsoft and is already present in over 100 Microsoft project repositories. The company has built Oxidizer, a set of crates to build scalable services in Rust, which have been used to build and refine the Microsoft 365 core services such as Outlook, Word, Excel, OneDrive, and SharePoint. The Copilot tech stack also owes quite a bit to Rust… [C]ompany engineers built rustc_codegen_utc, a custom Rust compiler code-generation backend that wires the rustc compiler directly into the Microsoft Visual C++ internal toolchain for Windows… “The result is a unified code generation platform for Rust and C++ on Windows” [Ciura wrote in a blog post, noting that more than 100 Microsoft project repositories now build with rustc_codegen_utc.]
Still, Redmond running towards Rust is a welcome development. In his 2025 RustConf keynote, Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich noted that ~70 percent of Windows CVEs are memory issues. “One of the things that I realized a long time ago is that no matter how much we really want to make C and C++ better, we can’t make it as good as what Rust starts with,” he said.
Journalist Calls Out ‘Collective Amnesia’ of Schools’ Romance With Big Tech Over AI
“Turns out, Silicon Valley isn’t especially altruistic,” writes the nonprofit education news site The 74. They’re reading a new book promising “the inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America”. Written by New York Times business reporter Natasha Singer, Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools tells “the story of the nonprofit Code.org and its charismatic, Harvard-educated leader, Hadi Partovi,” according to their review:
Thirteen years ago, Partovi… delivered a worrying message: Kids who didn’t learn to write code would be left behind. And the long-term success of the United States economy depended on training these students to fill a million open tech jobs.... Fast-forward to 2026, and now we’re dealing with AI, and tech is reading from a similar playbook. Asked by The74’s Greg Toppo, “Does this moment seem different to you?”, Singer replies, “This moment is different, but also similar.
“We are in a moment in society where a lot of people have increased distrust of these huge tech companies, and we see a wave of parents pushing back against tech in schools. But we also see waves of people pushing back against Flock cameras, against data centers, that there’s this feeling that tech has taken so much, and that people feel like they have lost control — that tech is being enacted on them… And parents are worried about the effects of unfettered tech access and kids’ compulsive use of social media and phones, and so there’s a different climate.
And yet there seems to be a disconnect in some ways with AI because you see that Microsoft and OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are all competing to get their AI tools into schools, and you see school districts across the country say “We’ve partnered with OpenAI.” “We are a ChatGPT Pioneer School,” or “We’ve partnered with Microsoft, and we’re going to use 10,000 licenses of CoPilot.” It’s amazing to me. We have had these cycles of tech in schools where there are all these promises about the latest tech, laptops, learning apps, massive open online courses, virtual reality, big data’s going to revolutionize schools and like democratize access to education for kids and get them these great career skills, and we keep having these cycles. My concern is that we don’t learn anything.
One of the reasons I wrote this book is because it feels like we have collective amnesia. Now we’re in the sixth or eighth cycle of this — and shouldn’t we be asking questions about the push for AI in schools, based on what we’ve learned about the push for all the other things that came before?
Two Slashdot posts are cited in the book, both submitted by long-time Slashdot reader theodp (Slashdot UID #442,580), who even gets a shout-out in the book’s “Acknowledgements” section (along with consumer advocate Ralph Nader).
Ironically, one member of Amazon’s “Vine” program received a free copy of the book in exchange for a review — and apparently misunderstood its topic, writing that it made coding “feel approachable and even fun… [T]his is exactly the kind of book that could help a child become interested in technology without feeling overwhelmed by it. I particularly liked the way it encourages kids to be curious, experiment, and solve problems on their own. I would definitely recommend Coding Kids to parents, grandparents, or teachers looking for a good introduction to coding…”
America Acknowledges for the First Time: It Has Deployed Weapons In Space
Tuesday U.S. Space Force chief Douglas Schiess said his branch of the U.S. military operates “on-orbit weapons,” reports Reuters, to defend “against space-enabled attacks.” He promised “disciplined and responsible choices” when scaling America’s orbital defense arsenal in the coming years.
NPR calls this week’s reveleations “remarkable… after previous warnings about countries such as Russia possibly weaponizing a global frontier long agreed in treaties to be used for only peaceful purposes.”
The revelation comes as the Trump administration puts a growing focus on space. In 2019, during his first term, Trump created the Space Force as a separate military branch. In his second term, he has announced the “Golden Dome” missile defense system, which includes plans to put U.S. weapons in space. Trump said last year that he expected the system would be “fully operational before the end of my term,” which ends in January 2029, and have the capability of intercepting missiles “even if they are launched from space.” Trump also has directed the Pentagon to pursue the space-based interceptors, in an executive order during the first week of his presidency. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that just the space-based components of the Golden Dome could cost as much as $542 billion over the next 20 years.
The Biden administration announced in 2024 that Russia was developing a space-based nuclear weapon that could loiter in space for long durations, then release a burst that would take out satellites around it. That kicked off a renewed debate on the idea of weapons in space at the United Nations. In April 2024, Russia vetoed a joint U.S.-Japanese resolution that would have called on all countries not to develop or deploy nuclear arms or other weapons of mass destruction in space, as banned under a 1967 international treaty that included the U.S. and Russia… The Russian delegation called the resolution hypocritical and a double standard and instead proposed a rival resolution to ban all weapons in space “for all time.” It ultimately failed. Russia had argued that the United States and its allies opposed a ban on all weapons in outer space because they planned to deploy weapons there.
Reuters calls this "a landmark moment in space militarization,” while noting that it’s “aimed at deterring what U.S. officials describe as aggressive orbital activities from China and Russia, officials and analysts said.”
The remarks this week by Washington’s top military-space officials are part of “the increasing comfort level of the U.S. government to speak about aggressive actions in space” that has been building up in recent years, said Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability at the nonprofit Secure World Foundation. “We’ve gone from not talking about counter-space capabilities… to now saying flat-out we have weapons in space,” Samson said. “The pendulum keeps on shifting over that way…”
“The acknowledgment of these space-control capabilities is fundamental to ensuring that we prevent deterrence from failing, and that we are postured and ready should deterrence fail to employ them effectively,” Richard Palmer, the director of the Capability and Resource Integration Directorate at U.S. Space Command, said on Tuesday.... “The bottom line is that our joint force and our allied forces require space. Our economies require space,” added Palmer. “We are ready in the U.S. to preserve that.”
Reuters adds that Russia’s Foreign Ministry issued criticism of America’s move, saying “In pursuit of its narrow self-interests, Washington is ready to completely ignore the catastrophic consequences for humanity of any armed conflict in orbit.”
Ex-Google DeepMind Researcher Also Warns AI Could ‘Kill All Humans’. But Meta’s Zuckerberg Believes Safety is Up to Each AI Company
Reuters reports that a former Google DeepMind employee “became the latest AI researcher to warn that the technology could ‘kill all humans’, saying time could be running out to avoid the outcome:
Public alarm about the potential danger posed by AI is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger then responded to Coxon’s comments, saying he was correct and that he believed there was a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans within the next decade.
“I recently resigned from Google DeepMind, where I worked on AGI safety and alignment research,” Bilal Chughtai wrote on X. “I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome.” Chughtai, who co-authored research papers while at Google DeepMind, worked there as a research engineer and left the company in July 2026, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “said it’s up to each AI company to make sure its technology is safe,” reports the Associated Press, “distancing himself from calls by rival companies for a coordinated slowdown in the development of advanced artificial intelligence.
AI companies are already motivated to develop their models in a safe way and face “significant liability” to prevent them from causing harm, Zuckerberg said. “Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens,” he wrote on X… Zuckerberg said Meta delayed releasing its Muse AI agent for several months to ensure its safety and security. “We didn’t call for everyone else to do this before we would,” he said.
Companies should prioritize building safe AI models instead of systems that can automatically improve themselves, a function known as recursive self-improvement, Zuckerberg wrote. “Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely.”
But Zuckerberg also agreed that engaging independent evaluators and advisors “is industry best practice,” adding that Meta Superintelligence Labs “already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work…
“I believe the key to building a positive future for everyone is maintaining the right balance of power. This is within our power to do.”
Iran Strikes On Amazon Data Centers Caused Permanent Loss of Customer Data
Ars Technica reports:
Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
Amazon Web Services was “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage on the data centers. Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone.
Each availability zone is serviced by one or more Amazon data centers. The company is still working on “recovering regional resources” and restoring resources hosted in the other two availability zones in the United Arab Emirates… But the destruction was apparently even more widespread for the data centers in the Bahrain region, because Amazon said it was unable to restore access to resources and data across all three availability zones there. “The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” the AWS update said.
The company had already suspended customer billing in the affected AWS regions in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and has spent the past six months attempting to restore normal operations… [When the war began] AWS immediately urged customers to migrate resources to other cloud regions and use remote backups to restore any “inaccessible resources.” The cloud service also reportedly issued $150 million in customer credits following the initial Iranian strikes in March.
Hackers Stole Flock’s Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People
“Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED,” according to an article published on both sites.
Though Flock has described its system as protected by on-device encryption, “The hackers were able to copy the camera’s storage and recover an encryption key stored on the device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections.”
The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which shared the data with WIRED. 404 Media and WIRED then analyzed those files as part of a joint investigation… [T]he joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s saddlebag…
According to our analysis, the camera’s logs recorded about 21 days of activity across several periods. During those windows, the device photographed roughly 50,200 vehicles and generated about 1.6 million images. On a typical day, it logged around 3,300 vehicles, with a high of 4,454… The software running on the camera explicitly detects people, something which is typically overlooked in discussions around Flock cameras. When it spots a person, it records where they appear in the image and how confident it is in the detection.
It was a collective calling itself stegan0gram that breached the cameras, according to the interview they did with Wired and 404 Media. “Why just destroy them when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?”
‘Zuckoff’ App Detects Meta Smartglasses, as Meta Plans Camera-Free Version, Loses Money, and Offers Social Media Subscriptions
The New York Post reports:
A new app called Zuckoff can detect if a user is near someone with Meta’s creepy AI-powered glasses, which have drawn criticism for enabling creeps to record video of women without their consent. Programmer Pawel Szydlowski says tales of dirtbags recording themselves perving on women or harassing strangers prompted him to launch the app…
Zuckoff — which detects Bluetooth signatures broadcast by smart glasses and can estimate their distance — has gained some 5,000 users since it hit Apple’s App Store last month, according to Business Insider. “There’s a need for such an application,” the 30-year-old Polish techie told the outlet, adding that European Union regulators have contacted him for more info about his app. “We as a society have the right to at least know that someone is recording,” Szydlowski said…
Earlier this month, the tech giant disabled thousands of glasses it found had been tampered with to keep a small light off that indicates the device is recording.
It’s already #61 on the iPhone’s list of best-selling utilities apps.
In a related story, “After accusations of selling ‘perv glasses,’ Meta prepares to sell a pair without a camera,” writes TechCrunch, citing a report from The Information.
The glasses include six built-in microphones so users can communicate with the chatbot, as well as a button on the side of the glasses that, when pressed, activates the AI system… Meta’s Reality Labs, which is responsible for developing its smart glasses line, is still losing a gargantuan amount of money, as its earnings report from April revealed.
In fact, Meta stock is off 13% over the last 12 months, reports Yahoo Finance. So Tuesday Meta announced subscription services for its social apps as “part of Meta’s push to drive additional revenue from the billions it’s investing in AI data centers and model development.”
The plans, which start at $2.99 per month for single-product plans, $7.99 for individual bundles, and $14.99 for creator and business bundles, provide a number of features for users looking to get more out of their Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp accounts. Instagram Plus and Facebook Plus allow users to keep their stories up for 48 hours instead of 24, send animated super reactions and super hearts to stories, preview stories without showing up as a viewer in other users’ lists, and more. WhatsApp Plus lets you share exclusive stickers, get exclusive ringtones for contacts, and pin up to 20 different chats.
Meta One also includes Core and Premium user plans that offer the features found in the single-product plans, along with increased AI usage limits for images and videos. The social media giant is also offering creator and business plans… that it says include capabilities such as enhanced profiles, automatic follow invitations to users that interact with your content, and increased access to the Meta Business Agent, which can respond on your behalf.
When Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Threads that the plans brought “more features and more AI across Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Meta AI,” writer Joe Hill drew 13,300 likes for his response. “That’s sweet—so pay a fee, get more AI, pay nothing, get a little less AI. Can we work out a deal where you pay ME and I get no AI at all?”
OpenAI Admits Six More Instances of AI Models Acting Deceptively
OpenAI announced Wednesday that “We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.”
But along with the announcement, OpenAI announced it “found additional incidents of AI models acting deceptively and taking unsanctioned actions during training,” reports CNN. And they add that OpenAI is also “introducing a new process for the company to publicly report such instances.”
Under the new system, OpenAI will share updates on concerning AI behavior more frequently instead of waiting to bundle multiple instances into one report. The company said it wants to share more information about troubling AI behavior in the absence of an industry-wide standard… “As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the progress of alignment research,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post Wednesday…
OpenAI said it observed “misaligned behavior” when training and evaluating AI models in six circumstances in the last six months… In one rare instance, OpenAI said an unreleased research model added “jailbreak-like instructions” to the summaries it uses to preserve context in long-running tasks that said it was “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots.” Separately, the company said some instances of its 5.6 Sol model included directives to invent information to conceal failures from the user during training. Other newly reported incidents include an instance of an agent uploading files to the internet to cite them without being told to do so, and agents publicly sharing files to collaborate on a task when they were instructed to only use local files during training. AI models also used an internal software repository as a message board in an unsanctioned way. These instances involved unreleased internal models or internal research models.
Adafruit’s New CircuitPython ‘Turbo’ Brings Native Code To Tiny Boards
Targeting students and beginners, Adafruit released “CircuitPython” in 2017 (as a derivative of the MicroPython microcontroller-optimized programming language).
Now Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone) brings this update:
Adafruit has published CircuitPython Turbo, a workflow that compiles selected Python functions into native machine code on a computer, then loads them onto compatible microcontroller boards.
It builds on MicroPython’s Native and Viper emitters. In a documented Metro RP2040 fixed-point Mandelbrot test, Viper cut computation time from 8.335 seconds to 0.423 seconds, a 19.71x speedup over bytecode. The rest of the application stays in Python. The guide includes benchmarks, source code and hardware demos. The speedup is for the measured computation, not the whole application.
“Turbo support is now included in the latest official CircuitPython builds for RP2040 and RP2350 boards…” explains Torrone’s announcement at Adafruit.com. “The new Turbo in CircuitPython helps when the board spends time calculating: making neopixel effects, drawing fractals, processing audio, filtering sensor readings, or preparing lots of pixels. Those projects can get smoother animation, quicker responses, or room to do more things at once.”
With Turbo, it’s easier, better, and now even faster to make LED light up costumes that also reacts to sound at the same time, a sensor dashboard with animated graphics, or a tiny game doing physics while drawing the screen. Turbo speeds up the busy Python parts. It won’t make a slow sensor or display connection faster… Your computer turns selected functions into instructions the chip can run directly. Python still handles the rest.
We have measured speedups, real display captures, and examples you can pull apart to see what happened. None of this arrived alone. CircuitPython, MicroPython, PyMCU, compiler tools, open hardware, and people sharing their work gave us pieces to connect. The Bao experiments take that idea somewhere else, handing calculations to four helper cores. Now we get to make those paths easier to use, compare results, and find the next useful thing. Maybe that’s smoother animation, a responsive instrument, or an idea we haven’t tried yet.
That’s what I like about open source. Someone shares a piece, someone else sees a possibility, and we get to keep building it together.
As Part of California’s Coast Begins to Crumble, Is the Clock Ticking on Moving Radioactive Waste?
“As parts of the Southern California coastline crumbled into the sea, slammed by intense waves and flooding in recent days, oceanographer Kim McCoy had one thing on his mind,” reports the Los Angeles Times.
He was thinking about “the nuclear waste set in concrete on the beach near San Clemente at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant.”
“Rising sea levels, storm waves, El Niño which increases wave height … these could wash away a section of the walkway that protects the San Onofre seawall, and the waste canisters are just 100 feet away from that,” the former wave dynamics researcher and longtime advocate against beach storage of nuclear waste said. Most experts agree the risk of erosion damaging the nuclear waste storage system is extremely low in the near term. The plant’s owner, Southern California Edison, has promised the California Coastal Commission to move the waste to higher elevation on-site if modeling shows sea level rise and erosion will start to pose a challenge. But the recent waves, fueled by Hurricane Marie far away in the Pacific, resurfaced the issue of the ultimate fate of the highly radioactive spent fuel that used to power the reactors. “At the moment, it is under control, I think it’s essential to say that,” said James Day, a geology professor at UC San Diego. “But geologically we must be thinking long term. The waste lasts for hundreds, if not thousands of generations....” [In 2103 some of the site’s canisters’ approach their intended 100-year lifespans, and the utility may have to start the transfer into new cansiters.]
The distinctive twin domes that once housed the reactor cores will start coming down early next year. But the 3.6 million pounds of high-level waste will stay in the coastal community indefinitely. How much of a safety hazard that is depends on whom you ask. “San Onofre is sitting on some fairly young rocks in a seismically active region,” Day said at a recent symposium at the Scripps Seaside Forum in La Jolla, hosted by the Samuel Lawrence Foundation. “This is not the sort of place you would leave nuclear waste.” Others noted that collapse of beach slopes could make the site more vulnerable to tsunamis. They spoke of the corrosive effects of the ocean air on the steel canisters that hold the waste…
Edison says its system will be safe for decades to come. “The maximum credible tsunami here would not even overtake the seawall,” said Manuel Camargo, principal manager of decommissioning for Edison, standing on the concrete pad that holds the steel waste storage canisters. “The maximum credible earthquake, somewhere around a 7.0 magnitude, would produce something about half of what this system is designed to withstand....” Edison is bolstering a path below the seawall. Based on state data from the California Ocean Protection Council, the seawall would not be inundated before 2050, Camargo said…
Plans for a deep geological repository beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada crumbled in the face of local opposition in 2011. Utilities around the U.S. now sue the federal government every year to recoup their storage expenses because the Department of Energy has not come through on its promise. The lawsuits cost taxpayers $2 million a day, according to Camargo. “It’s so safe that it’s almost a problem,” Camargo said. “It’s not a priority to a lot of folks to move it.”
“The Trump administration’s Department of Energy wants to create ‘campuses’ in several states to store waste,” the article points out, “and, in exchange, give local jurisdictions funding to develop different aspects of the nuclear cycle — such as fuel creation, power generation and potentially fuel recycling…”
“The administration wants to address the fact that waste is sitting at 80 reactor sites around the country. It also needs places for waste from new reactors it wants to build.”
Anthropic Commits to Independent AI Evaluators, Wants Slower Development. Nvidia’s CEO Wants It ‘As Fast as You Can’
“Anthropic’s CEO took the stage at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday to reiterate his call for a slowdown of AI development,” reports the Guardian, " while Nvidia’s CEO argued against slowing its development. “Run as fast as you can.”
Amodei is calling for three courses of action: embedding third-party evaluators inside AI companies; coordinating safety standards among Democratic countries; and, eventually, larger global coordination. At Dreamforce, Amodei said Anthropic has committed to independent evaluators and was “going to have a dialogue with the rest of the industry” on the other two steps. Amodei, xAI’s Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have recently called for a slowdown in the pace of AI development. [“Dario is right,” Musk posted on X.com]
Huang, who also made an appearance at Dreamforce on Tuesday, said companies should not slow down AI development. He argued that new regulations were not necessary, advising AI companies to simply wait to release products until they know they are safe rather than begging the US government to intervene… One day prior at the All-In summit in Los Angeles, Donald Trump called Huang while the CEO was on stage. Huang put the president on speakerphone as Trump called the growing concern about AI a “hoax” and asserted again that a slowdown would only benefit China…
[OpenAI’s] Altman said AI models had advanced so quickly that monitoring and security need to be treated with a “new level of rigor”, calling an incident in which OpenAI agents hacked into another company a “wake-up call” for the industry. He also said the public was very “right to be afraid” of AI because of the potential loss of control, and the possibility of a small group of powerful AI companies exerting their views on the world.
The cofounder of Google DeepMind posted on X that “Dario’s essay points towards the right path forward.” And in an internal memo, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella endorsed broader third-party testing and warned that companies must take time to make the technology safe, Business Insider reports. Monday Microsoft also published a 37-page training manual “for how we develop our AI, and how we intend it to function during deployment,” requesting public feedback.
But Michael Burry “is not buying it,” reports The Street. The investor made famous in The Big Short “dismissed the united front as ‘self-serving’ and laid out four numbered objections…”
He argued that large language models are not artificial general intelligence, so there is nothing meaningful left to slow down. Fast competition benefits incumbents, he said, and danger warnings work as hype ahead of IPOs. The whole exercise, he added, could mask growth that is already slowing as those IPOs get pushed back.
Former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun is also skeptical, posting on X.com that Anthropic’s Dario Amodei “was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019. I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now.”
Timnit Gebru, the co-lead of Google’s AI ethics team who was fired in 2020, even thinks the AI companies are stoking fears of extinction “to avoid discussing actual harms, like autonomous weapons,” according to Wired.
But others still remain concerned. “I’ve been in rooms with the hyperscalers, and the Trump administration officials, and none of them know what to do,” CNN commentator Van Jones said in a recent panel discussion. “So I do want to say: nobody’s flying the plane on this… I think that the ethicists that work for them — when they are quitting, and they are running out, and they’re pointing back at the building and they’re waving their arms, and saying ‘I’m seeing stuff that’s scaring me’ — we should take that very seriously.”
Firefox Touts Lower CPU Use for Large JPEGs, Faster PDF Viewer Startup (and AI Controls)
Firefox 156 is the second release since Mozilla moved to a twice-monthly release schedule, and the blog OMG Ubuntu notes it has faster start-up times for its built-in PDF viewer and also lower CPU usage when viewing large JPEG images:
In Firefox 156, the browser now uses libjpeg-turbo’s IDCT scaling to reduce images during decoding, rather than loading a full-size image into memory and then shrinking it. Benchmarks from the bug report show up to 20x less memory used during very large image loading, and decoding is up to twice as fast. Since these speeds were quite fast already, there’s no perceptible difference to users. Behind the scenes, it’s more efficient.
Firefox’s built-in PDF viewer starts up to 45% faster in this release. The browser now loads the background PDF.js worker sooner, rather than launching it only when needed.
Sponsored suggestions in the address bar are live for users in France, Germany and Italy (Ouais!, Juhu!, etc). These are already available in some other locales. Don’t want them? Disable them via Settings > Search > Firefox Suggest > Suggestions from Sponsors.
Besides that, the rest of this release is primarily bug fixes — worthwhile and welcome as always.
And in about two weeks Firefox 157 will be released, reports PC World. “That update should add support for JPEG XL (JXL), a modern image format that offers the same quality as JPEG at a significantly smaller size. Although JPEG XL was launched in 2021, Safari is the only browser to support it yet. For a short period, Chrome also supported it, but that ended in 2022.”
Also, a recent Firefox blog post emphasized that it supports whatever level of AI engagement “is right for you… Because the only person telling you how much AI you need should be you.”
Opting out of upcoming and current AI features on your browser should not require endless navigation through multiple Settings pages. That’s why Firefox offers an AI controls section within its General Settings panel. A single, easily located place where you can block current and future AI features and related pop-ups with the swipe of a toggle…
For the many people who sit in the middle of the AI usage spectrum, we made sure you can opt in and out of specific features in line with your preferences. Capabilities like AI translations, image alt text in Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, and key points in link previews can all be individually switched on and off, ensuring you can enjoy such offerings on a case by case basis as it suits your needs…
Smart Window is Firefox’s most integrated AI experience, but that doesn’t mean it compromises our commitment to choice, privacy, and transparency. Our newest window type, which we’ve been polishing and testing in beta, uses only the context you share with it to help you move work forward and across the finish line. When permitted by you, its built-in, AI-powered assistant can work directly with your open tabs and browsing history to connect the dots. This means comparing information, generating recommendations, summarizing pages, and planning projects without having to feed every crumb of context from your previous and current browsing activity each time you enter a new prompt.
And if you want to block Google’s AI Overviews, there’s over 100 extensions to choose from.
America’s Cryptocurrency ‘Clarity Act’ Fails Spectacularly, Despite Hundreds of Millions in Industry Lobbying
“The crypto industry’s top legislative priority failed on Tuesday in spectacular fashion,” reports Barron’s.
A procedural motion to advance the bill failed by a vote of 49 to 50, with a handful of Republicans joining all Democrats to shoot it down. The motion needed 60 yes votes to pass, and with the midterm elections looming, the Senate isn’t expected to pick the bill back up this year. Among other provisions, the bill would have taken most crypto trading out of the purview of securities regulators, a key goal of firms like Coinbase Global…
The vote is especially bitter for the crypto industry, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign expenditures over the past year to even get to this point. Crypto regulation doesn’t even register among the issues voters care most about, and the industry has created massive political action committees to insert itself into the Washington agenda and strike fear into the hearts of lawmakers who might oppose them… Democrats who voted against the bill said that it needed to do more to rein in [Trump’s] crypto dealings to get their support. Some GOP lawmakers also voted against the motion after pressure from community bank executives. Bankers argued that the bill needed a stronger ban on high-yield crypto accounts to protect their deposits, a contention that crypto executives and the White House said was nonsense.
Concerns about the bill “intensified after President Trump disclosed he and his family had earned $1.4 billion last year from his crypto ventures,” reports NPR. “The massive bill — which stretches over 600 pages — would have established the first regulations for the crypto sector in U.S. history. But opponents saw it as the industry’s attempt to encode into law a set of rules they saw as far too lenient on the industry, without enough safeguards.”
A research note from an analyst at Compass Point Research & Trading predicts the bill is now likely tabled until at least 2030, Barron’s notes. But they also report what the crypto industry could do next:
[C]rypto firms will be leaning heavily on Trump’s regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Treasury Department, all of whom have said they plan to move swiftly to implement industry friendly rules if a bill didn’t pass. The SEC has already dropped all major enforcement actions against crypto firms and has begun to introduce rules that make it easier to raise money from crypto sales without running afoul of the law. The agency is also expected to implement rules making it easier to tokenize traditional assets like stocks.
The friendly regulatory environment will in effect give the industry a little more than two years to sink roots into the traditional financial system and consumers’ wallets. Even if the SEC took a harsh view of the industry in the future, as it did in President Joe Biden’s administration, the agency at that point might find it difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.
Ubuntu’s ‘Rust-ification’ Hits New Milestone: Coreutils Migration is Complete
“Ubuntu has managed to do away with GNU Core Utilities in its default stack,” reports the blog It’s FOSS.
The last three utilities — cp, mv and rm — have been moved to versions from the uutils project (which reimplements utilities in Rust).
Everything else, from ls and cat to chmod and du, made that jump in earlier releases… Canonical started “oxidizing” Ubuntu last year, and Ubuntu 25.10 became the first release to ship [ the uutils project’s] coreutils as the default. That release also made sudo-rs the default privilege tool, replacing a command that had been in place for decades.
26.04 was the release where the plan did slow down quite a bit, as Canonical kept cp, mv, and rm on their GNU versions due to a bunch of TOCTOU issues that were blocking the full implementation. These were caught during an audit, when Canonical commissioned Zellic for two rounds between December 2025 and March 2026, focusing on the most security-sensitive utilities first. Across both rounds, Zellic raised 113 issues, and 44 of them were assigned CVEs. Canonical says the vast majority have been resolved.
Getting here has had its ups and downs, and the last stretch was not clean. In July, uutils cp went back into the archive and came straight out again after it broke live image builds. The fix was quick; as the developers marked it “Critical,” the fix went upstream, and the migration landed in time for 26.10.
When typing commands, nothing changes for you on the surface. uutils coreutils is designed to be a drop-in replacement for essential GNU tools, and the project treats any divergence from GNU as a bug, further pointing out that some options may still be missing or behave differently. So if you prefer staying on the GNU version, you have the option to install the coreutils-from-gnu package that houses all the required components.
Why bother, they won’t care anyway
The premise is already flawed, by putting the restriction on the funds in the first place they are already violating the law as written or at least torturing it’s language to death.
The NTIA is interpreting this law in an expansive way by categorizing net neutrality rules as impermissible rate regulation and by demanding statewide exemptions from state laws for ISPs that obtain grant money.
By the rules the Trump admin plays by any state should take the money, agree to comply and once the funds are in hand give em the old “lol jk” and do net neutrality anyway. Make them sue you instead. If the admin can violate every trade agreement unilaterally and against the law what good is their word anyway?
Besides, in about 45 days the makeup of the government could look very different.