Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Four LTS Java Versions Get End-of-Support in a Three-Year Window (2029-2032)
  2. UK Police Officer Accused of Using AI to Fake Evidence
  3. How Author Dave Eggers Avoids Smartphones, Internet Access, and Flock Cameras
  4. Amazon CEO’s Talks with U.S. Officials Triggered Crackdown on Anthropic Models
  5. Shutterstock ‘Evolves’ Into ‘Human-Led, AI-Powered Creative Platform’
  6. GM Updates 250,000 EVs with Vehicle-to-Grid Firmware, Announces Grid-Scale Sodium-Ion Batteries
  7. Vim Classic 8.3 Launched as an AI-Free Vim Fork
  8. Arch Linux Malware Incident: Malicious Commits Found in 1,579 Packages
  9. OpenAI Investigated By Coalition of America’s State Attorneys General
  10. New UK Referendum Would Flip ‘Brexit’ Result of a Decade Ago, Poll Finds
  11. US Congress Lets ‘Warrantless Wiretap’ Law FISA Lapse
  12. Mystery Orb Videos, Other UFO Records Released By White House
  13. World’s First Crewed Solid-State Flight Electrifies Aviation’s Future
  14. Anthropic ‘Suspends’ All Mythos and Fable Access After US Order Limiting Foreign Access
  15. Data Center Opponents Have Blocked Or Delayed Projects Worth Nearly $130 Billion In 2026

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.

Four LTS Java Versions Get End-of-Support in a Three-Year Window (2029-2032)

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Simon Ritter joined Sun Microsystems in 1996 and spent time working in both Java development and consultancy. He’s now written an opinion piece for InfoWorld warning that “Between 2029 and 2032, every currently supported long-term support (LTS) version of Java will reach end-of-support within a single three-year window.”

That’s Java 17 in 2029, Java 8 in 2030, Java 21 in 2031, and Java 11 in 2032…
On paper, this looks like a manageable upgrade cycle. In practice, it creates a collision of timelines that most enterprises have failed to forecast. Organizations attempting to modernize incrementally — moving application by application, version by version — are operating on a model that the calendar has already rendered obsolete… [W]hen every major Java version expires in the same compressed window, sequential planning collapses. By the time this becomes obvious, organizations will be forced into reactive mode, making rushed decisions under extreme pressure.

For organizations planning traditional stepwise upgrades — Java 8 to Java 11 to Java 17 to Java 21 — this convergence elevates a routine maintenance task into a structural crisis. Enterprises with large Java estates will be forced to upgrade multiple applications across multiple versions simultaneously to maintain security compliance and business continuity.
“Parallel modernization requires parallel capacity — something most organizations haven’t budgeted for,” he points out. “This explains why traditional approaches struggle to scale.”

UK Police Officer Accused of Using AI to Fake Evidence

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
The Sunday Times reports:
A criminal investigation has begun after a police officer allegedly used AI to create evidential material in a “number of cases”. Derbyshire Constabulary said an officer was being investigated over an allegation of suspected perverting the course of justice. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) confirmed it was engaging with defence lawyers and the courts over potentially affected cases…

It is the first known allegation of AI misuse by police in a criminal case in the UK, but it follows an incident last year in which West Midlands police relied on AI-generated material that fabricated a match involving Maccabi Tel Aviv. The material was used in intelligence supporting a proposed ban on away fans at the club’s match against Aston Villa.

Another honest job lost to the AI machine

By T34L • Score: 3 Thread

Back in my day being a corrupt cop required imagination, ingenuity and guts. Also racism. Now it’s all just baked into the machine. Before you know it, AI will be beating your wife for you, too. Absurd.

How Author Dave Eggers Avoids Smartphones, Internet Access, and Flock Cameras

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
A few weeks ago on a bike ride “inspiration struck” for Dave Eggers, reports SFGate
Without a pen and paper handy, he was stuck texting the idea to himself. The problem? Eggers doesn’t own a smartphone. “It takes 20 minutes to write a sentence,” Eggers said… It’s a funny predicament for Eggers, given that he’s arguably the city’s biggest proponent of the written word… Now age 56, Eggers’ latest book is called "Contrapposto"…

On writing days, Eggers bikes to his sailboat docked near the Golden Gate Bridge. He writes using a hefty 1998 Mac that has never been connected to the internet. On the boat, he keeps “banker’s hours,” working 9 to 5 without any meetings or interruptions except for the occasional wildlife visit. “You’re there with the cormorants and the occasional porpoise and sea lions and seals, and when you want to take a break, you walk around and you’re in the thick of it, one of the most beautiful spots on Earth,” he said. “Especially coming from the Midwest, it never gets old.”

Given Eggers’ decidedly low-tech existence, it’s not surprising that the current state of San Francisco gives him pause, but there’s a streak of hope that underlies his concerns. He abhors the growing surveillance technology that’s gripping the city, refusing to get into Ubers that use recording devices, but he feels a well-written ballot measure about Flock cameras could potentially save our dwindling privacy. ChatGPT’s effects on the art of writing are demoralizing, but he welcomes that teachers are re-embracing pencil and paper, with cursive making a big comeback. The wave of artificial intelligence ads blanketing bus stops imploring companies to stop hiring humans are so over the top, they’d sound cliché if he were to include them in one of his dystopian tech industry novels like “The Circle” or “The Every,” but tech philanthropy has helped many of his projects flourish.

Case in point, Art + Water, a new art space scheduled to open next year on Pier 29 funded largely by art world donations… Co-founded with the artist JD Beltran, the space is slated to operate as an old-school apprenticeship system, hosting 10 artists in residence mentoring 20 students, all free of charge… The ultimate goal is to break down the financial barriers that keep students from pursuing art.
Thanks to Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.

Banker’s hours…

By HotNeedleOfInquiry • Score: 4, Informative Thread
Are 9-3, not 9-5. Traditionally, this gave the staff 2 hours between 3 and 5 to balance the books before going home.

Does the world need more starving artists?

By Powercntrl • Score: 3 Thread

If you’ve ever visited Disney World, one of the things you might’ve noticed is that there are quite a few talented individuals working for theme park wages (which if you weren’t aware, are fairly low). Very, very few people make what could be considered a good living drawing, dancing, and/or singing for their supper.

There tends to be more than a bit of a survivorship bias among those who’ve “made it” in any sort of creative endeavor. Yes, if you’re one of the lucky few, it is true that you wouldn’t have succeeded if you’d given up on your dreams. Thing is, that’s like a lottery winner saying they’d never have won if they didn’t purchase their ticket. While it’s technically true, it completely ignores the millions who, despite also purchasing their tickets, did not win.

self punishment

By markdavis • Score: 3 Thread

>“Without a pen and paper handy, he was stuck texting the idea to himself. Eggers doesn’t own a smartphone. “It takes 20 minutes to write a sentence,” Eggers said… It’s a funny predicament for Eggers,”

Um, if he has a “dumb” cell phone at all that is on, it is tracking his location, essentially the same as a smartphone with GPS off.

He could carry a computer tablet with no cell modem and save stuff to internal storage or SD. It will enable a large on-screen keyboard and with option to voice type/edit off-line. Or a smart phone with no SIM card/data plan and GPS off. There are options.

Wait for it....

By msauve • Score: 3 Thread
Read the summary. Some guy wants to be an urban hermit. Where’s the news for nerds?

Re:Does the world need more starving artists?

By wickerprints • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I don’t think that’s a meaningful question to ask, since it seems to be based on the flawed premise that there should only be a limited market for creative work, and that the forces of supply and demand ought to dictate how we as a society should value such work.

And what the developments in generative AI have shown us is that those same market forces have no problem trying to replace the underappreciated, underpaid work of countless artists and creative industry employees with a neverending firehose of AI slop.

The human desire to create and the desire for imaginative self-expression is extremely deep seated. To be told that this is economically worthless, easily replaceable, and undeserving of recognition, while at the same time the very means for automated generation of AI slop are stolen from and built upon centuries of handcrafted, human-imagined labor, is the height of hypocrisy.

So, to answer your useless question, no. The world does NOT need more starving artists. What the world needs is to properly recognize the value of human art and creative expression. And to the extent that technology is being used to suppress the worth of others, I say artists have every right to reject it. I hate the panoptic, uneducated society we have become. I detest how creative people are being forced to choose between bringing something new into this world, versus preventing some tech oligarch from training a LLM model on it. I despise the fact that mega-corporations routinely wield their vast financial and legal resources to protect the enormously profitable intellectual property that they pay slave wages to artists to create.

I don’t know this Eggers guy. I haven’t read his books. Whatever he wants to do with his time and money is up to him. But wanting to give more people a pathway to create, and to do it without having it stolen by the Zuckerbergs and Musks and Altmans and Bezoses of this world so that they can turn around and claim that the same things they’ve stolen are not really worth anything after all, is, in my opinion, better than sitting behind a computer asking whether the market for art is saturated.

Amazon CEO’s Talks with U.S. Officials Triggered Crackdown on Anthropic Models

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
The Wall Street Journal reports:
The Trump administration’s decision to halt all foreign use of Anthropic’s most capable AI models was prompted by conversations between Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy and U.S. officials including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, people familiar with the matter said.

Researchers at Amazon had used a series of prompts to get Anthropic’s Fable 5 model to provide them with information that could be used to aid cyberattacks and was supposed to be off limits, Jassy told the officials, according to people familiar with the matter. Tech industry executives have been in regular touch with the administration about the power of cutting-edge AI tools. Shortly afterward, White House officials held a meeting to discuss how to respond and security researchers began testing Amazon’s claims. The officials asked Anthropic to fix the vulnerabilities or take down the model, according to administration officials. The officials decided that the most direct way to address that risk was by preventing foreign governments, companies and individuals from accessing the tool, the people said. President Trump later signed off on the action despite reservations about it hindering innovation, a senior White House official said.

The administration had long felt that Anthropic, one of the leaders in America’s AI race, couldn’t be trusted to manage the security risks its new model presented. Friday’s call between some administration officials and Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei reinforced that feeling, the people said…

Anthropic has said that the vulnerabilities like those flagged by Amazon are relatively basic. The company has said that other publicly available models are capable of discovering them and that they don’t represent a full so-called jailbreak, a point of view shared by some security researchers familiar with Amazon’s research.
The article points out that Amazon is “a big investor in Anthropic, supply Anthropic with chips for data centers.

What about domestic use?

By alvinrod • Score: 3 Thread
What about domestic use? Can we halt that too?

Brides

By rsilvergun • Score: 3, Insightful Thread
You can just say bribes. We all know it’s bribes so you can just say bribes. Bezos out bid Amodei.

It’s going to be weird if we ever become a democracy again not seeing a headline involving an obvious quid pro quo bribe every day. There are Latin American dictatorships that would take a look at what Trump’s doing and say hey buddy, tone it down a bit.

Re:Random ass “decisions”

By evanh • Score: 5, Informative Thread

The story is pure spin. If there was any truth in what’s being said then all LLMs would be banned. The real story is one of pick-on-Anthropic.

Well, Bessent is an idiot, so

By presearch • Score: 3 Thread

If Bessent is involved, and taken at all seriously,
then here’s no truth or insight to be found with any of them.
Just more banditry.

Shutterstock ‘Evolves’ Into ‘Human-Led, AI-Powered Creative Platform’

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes:
Shutterstock has unveiled what it calls a “human-led, AI-powered” creative platform that combines its massive library of [human] contributor-created content with AI image and video generation, AI editing, conversational search, prompt enhancement, and automated model selection tools. The company says the goal is to help creators move from idea to finished work faster [in a single application] while maintaining commercial licensing protections and contributor royalty payments… While Shutterstock repeatedly emphasizes human creativity, much of the platform’s future appears centered on AI-generated and AI-modified content.
An article at Nerds.xyz suggests Shutterstock’s AI tools let users “transform existing content into something new,” while noting Shutterstock’s repeated references to human creativity “almost feel defensive.”

But it points out other companies including Adobe and Canva “and countless startups are all racing to integrate AI into creative workflows.”

Also known aw a “slop fest”…

By gweihir • Score: 3 Thread

I don’t think they are making themselves any friends here.

GM Updates 250,000 EVs with Vehicle-to-Grid Firmware, Announces Grid-Scale Sodium-Ion Batteries

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“Battery breakthroughs will lessen AI’s demand on the electricity grid,” argues The Washington Post’s editoral board, arguing that GM’s latest moves “offer a fresh reminder that resource constraints can be solved by innovation.”

Or As Fortune put it, “America’s electric grid is buckling under extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and an AI build-out that is quietly rewriting U.S. power demand — and General Motors wants to turn that crisis into a business.” They describe GM’s plan as offering itself “as a distributed utility in disguise… stitching together hundreds of thousands of battery-powered cars, new grid-scale storage, and a unified charging platform into what amounts to a virtual fleet of power plants.”
The bet puts GM on a collision course with Ford’s newly branded Ford Energy unit as both Detroit rivals race to repurpose underused EV capacity for a more urgent problem: keeping the lights on in the AI era. GM’s case rests on three planks. The first is its existing fleet. GM says more than 250,000 of its EVs on U.S. roads can already charge bidirectionally — pulling electricity from the grid and sending it back. “Every evening, a quiet transformation occurs across the American landscape,” GM Energy vice president Wade Sheffer writes in an open letter to utilities and regulators, describing the EVs sitting in driveways as “a massive opportunity to aggregate energy storage capacity.”

A firmware update is rolling out to customers with GM Energy’s vehicle-to-home hardware, converting those systems into full vehicle-to-grid assets with no new hardware and turning home backup systems into grid resources when utilities need them. GM is piloting the idea in Michigan with DTE Energy at 30 employee homes, and has sketched a 2030 vision with Pacific Gas & Electric in which more than 52,000 GM EVs help balance the grid out of a projected 130,000 vehicles in the area.
GM is also “seeking partnerships with utility companies nationwide to assist in offering such vehicle-to-grid services for customers,” reports CNBC, noting it’s one of two moves “meant to address concerns about rising energy costs amid an artificial intelligence boom.”

Forbes reports that GM’s second goal “is to leapfrog the dominant battery cell tech used for energy storage packs right now” — right past the LFP (lithium-iron phosphate) stage, “which is dominated by China.”
Sodium batteries are cheaper to use than LFP because they don’t need an additional cooling system. They also have a 20-year usable life and are made from materials that can be sourced from within the U.S., the company said at a briefing in San Francisco on Tuesday. “Sodium-ion actually is the better chemistry for that application. And when I say sodium-ion is better, I mean GM’s version of sodium-ion,” Kurt Kelty, GM’s battery chief and a long-time Tesla battery executive, told Forbes. He said GM is seeing great results from its prototypes, even at scorching temperatures of 55 Celsius (131 Fahrenheit).
“Sodium-ion-powered energy storage systems have the potential to operate without active cooling and with much less system complexity,” Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president of battery and sustainability, said Tuesday in a blog post. “In large energy storage systems, that matters.” Not having to cool the battery cells could lead to lower upfront costs as well as operating costs, the automaker said.

TechCrunch reports on GM’s big new partnership with energy-storage startup Peak Energy to develop GM’s sodium-ion battery chemistry for grid-scale deployments:
GM wouldn’t share with TechCrunch how much money it is investing in this energy-storage effort. But we do know the company has committed $900 million to commercialize new battery chemistries, an investment that includes a new battery-development center. .. The first GM cells are expected to enter trial production at the company’s Battery Cell Development Center in 2028.
“Our next-generation sodium-ion cell development will drive energy density higher,” promises GM’s blog post, arguing they’re extending the company’s battery expertise and technical infrastructure “into the electrical grid itself. If we get this right, we will not just build better batteries. We will help create a more resilient, more affordable and more flexible energy future… Every improvement we make strengthens the development stack that supports both EVs and energy storage.”

“The message: GM isn’t just selling cars into a stressed grid; it’s supplying the batteries to stabilize it,” argues Fortune.

And GM also announced they’re augmenting their apps with an “Energy Pass” offering “seamless access to Tesla Supercharger, IONNA, Electrify America, and soon, ChargePoint and EVgo networks.” Their goal is to simplify the charging experience with an app “that covers nearly 70% of all DC fast chargers in the United States, plus many Level 2 chargers, all through one app.”

expectations

By fortunatus • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
I think I would be pretty dismayed to hop in my car to head out for work in the morning and discover that it dumped half it’s charge for datacenters… and that GM took profit out of that, to boot!

Re:I dont want to waste car charge cycles

By AmiMoJo • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

It all depends on what the warranty is. IIRC VW limit the number of lifetime kWh you can use for this, and then the car just refuses to do it anymore.

If you don’t drive the car regularly it might actually help to cycle the battery a bit regularly. Also, not all cycles are equal - 70-60-70% is not the same as 100-90-100, and not 1/6th of 80-20-80.

It also depends how much you get paid for it. The battery will probably outlast the car anyway, so it might be worth doing to extract more value from your asset.

Re:expectations

By XXongo • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I think I would be pretty dismayed to hop in my car to head out for work in the morning and discover that it dumped half it’s charge for datacenters…

My car has a range of 300 miles, and I have a commute of ten miles. The average American car is driven about 35 miles per day. I wouldn’t mind if I hopped in the car to head for work and discovered half of the range miles that I don’t use had been sold.

As long as I can turn off that feature when I have a long trip scheduled the next day, I wouldn’t mind buying electricity at low rates and selling it back at high rates.

and that GM took profit out of that, to boot!

All of the discussions say that the utilities pay for the electricity they buy.

Re:expectations

By dfghjk • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Today you can convert that unused capacity into longer battery life by reducing charge capacity (and you change the charge capacity for those same long trips). All you’re really saying here is that you might want to profit from selling your car’s lifetime to electrical utilities when they should be able to do a far better job. It’s a terrible idea, but it appeals to people like you because you’re easily duped with promises of profit. What should you care, once you ruin the lifetime of a car you can unload the problem on someone else, what should you care as long as there’s a dollar in your pocket.

Dispersed power can be more robust.

By couchslug • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Fire easily destroys or disables concentrated “force loss multiplier” fratricidal storage designs. Not just accidents, but terrorist-style attacks can take them out easily via drones using simple electric triggers.

https://theconversation.com/wh…

Disperse batteries far and wide and they’ll be much more difficult to interfere with if they’re designed to function without grid power during emergencies. A controlled, graceful shutdown is better than abrupt power interruption.

Vim Classic 8.3 Launched as an AI-Free Vim Fork

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
This month saw the release of Vim Classic 8.3, the first stable version of a new long-term support fork of Vim maintained without generative AI tools. Linuxiac reports:
The release is based on Vim 8.2.0148 and includes selected bug fixes and patches backported from later upstream Vim releases. Vim Classic was first announced by [SourceHut’s CEO/founder] Drew DeVault in March 2026 after he objected to LLM-assisted development in Vim and Neovim. In his announcement, DeVault said he no longer wanted to use software developed with LLM assistance and introduced Vim Classic as a fork for users who want to continue using Vim without that involvement… Vim Classic follows Vim’s charityware model and continues to direct users toward Bram Moolenaar’s long-running support for children in Uganda. The release is distributed as a signed source tarball from SourceHut, while future important announcements are expected through the project’s mailing list.
“Vim is important to me…” DeVault wrote in March. (DeVault even tattooed “hjkl” on his right arm.) "[A]lmost every word I have ever committed to posterity, through this blog, in my code, all of the docs I’ve written, emails I’ve sent, and more, almost all of it has passed through Vim.”

But DeVault wrote that he also cares about AI’s impact on air pollution, fresh water supplies, global supply chains, and the working conditions of miners in African companies:
And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world’s total energy production in order to eliminate jobs and replace them with a robot that lies… All this to enrich the few, centralize power, reduce competition, and underwrite an enormous bubble that, once it bursts, will ruin the lives of millions of the world’s poor and marginalized classes.

I don’t think it’s cute that someone vibe coded “battleship” in VimScript. I think it’s more important that we stop collectively pretending that we don’t understand how awful all of this is. I don’t want to use software which has slop in it. I do what I can to avoid it, and sadly even Vim now comes under scrutiny in that effort as both Vim and NeoVim are relying on LLMs to develop the software… To keep my conscience clear, and continue to enjoy the relationship I have with this amazing piece of software, I have forked Vim…

Since forking from this base, I have backported a handful of patches, most of which address CVEs discovered after this release, but others which address minor bug fixes. I also penned a handful of original patches which bring the codebase from this time up to snuff for building it on newer toolchains…

I invite you to use Vim Classic, if you feel the same way as me, and to maintain it with me, contributing the patches you need to support your own use cases.

Say

By rossdee • Score: 3 Thread

Is there a list of other text editors that don’t have AI ?

Different tools for different skills

By MpVpRb • Score: 3 Thread

I have talents and handicaps
When I took my first programming class, I learned faster and deeper than any of the other students.
Evidently, I have a strong talent for code.
I can’t touch type. I tried to learn and failed. I also failed to learn to play the piano.
If I was forced to use vi, I would have failed as a software engineer.
But, with an IDE, I have done very well over a 40+ year career.

How a compiler differs from an LLM

By tepples • Score: 4, Informative Thread

His hand written “artisan” code is being turned into machine code by a computer anyway.

A compiler is a deterministic process that runs locally on a modest home computer in reasonable time without needing an expensive NVIDIA GPU, doesn’t regurgitate memorized copyrighted code from its training set, and doesn’t boil the oceans in a datacenter for training plus use.

Arch Linux Malware Incident: Malicious Commits Found in 1,579 Packages

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
More than 1,500 user-contributed packages in the Arch Linux User Repository “AUR” were infected with malware, reports Phoronix:
The last message in the thread over this security incident is noting that Arch Linux developers have deleted all the malicious commits they are aware of. Cited was this list that puts the number of malware-affected packages at 1,579…

Even at 1,579 packages listed, that final updated noted, it’s a "list containing many (but not all) of the affected packages".
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader couchslug for sharing the report.

AUR

By julian67 • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

AUR has been a rest home for abandoned and insecure packages for years. A lot of years. It makes Ubuntu’s Universe and PPAs look like Fort Knox. Of course whenever anyone makes any less than positive comment about Arch the fanboys descend as a self-righteous, angry, stupid mob so stuff like this goes mostly undiscussed until the shit has hit the fan and been liberally distributed.

Many eyes

By CustomBuild • Score: 3, Insightful Thread
Are blind when everyone is indoctrinated into the same cult.

OpenAI Investigated By Coalition of America’s State Attorneys General

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“A coalition of state attorneys general has opened an investigation into OpenAI,” reports the Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the matter.”
OpenAI was served Friday with a subpoena seeking documents related to a broad range of its activities and impact on users, including advertising, user engagement and retention, handling of consumer data and health data, activities related to minors and seniors, deep learning models, model sycophancy and company policies, some of the people said. The subpoena, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, was sent by New York’s attorney general....

Earlier this month, Florida became the first state to file a lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman. The lawsuit claims OpenAI and Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users. Florida’s Attorney General, James Uthmeier, opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI in April over the role its chatbot played in a mass shooting that killed two people at Florida State University last year. The suspect allegedly turned to ChatGPT as a confidant and sounding board to plan the attack, and the chatbot dispensed advice for his questions…

State attorneys general have been scrutinizing OpenAI’s competitors in the AI industry as well. In December, a coalition of 42 state attorneys general led by Pennsylvania’s Dave Sunday sent a letter to companies including OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google and xAI. In the letter, the Attorneys General demanded safeguards to protect vulnerable users from harmful interactions with chatbots, warning that “developers may be held accountable for the outputs of their GenAI products” for “encouraging an individual to commit a criminal act.”
“We take the concerns raised by state attorneys general seriously,” OpenAI told the Journal in a statement, “and intend to engage constructively with their offices.”

The article also acknowledges that The Wall Street Journal‘s parent company “has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.”

New UK Referendum Would Flip ‘Brexit’ Result of a Decade Ago, Poll Finds

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
It’s the 10-year anniversary of Britain’s “Brexit” vote withdrawing from the European Union. But a new UK poll “shows that a new Brexit referendum would reverse the vote that led to Britain’s departure,” reports Bloomberg:
Fifty-two percent of Britons think the UK should rejoin the EU, according to an Ipsos survey of 1,137 British adults conducted between May 14 and May 20. That’s the inverse of the mood in June 2016 when a comparable share of the electorate backed Brexit… Younger voters overwhelmingly favor reversing Brexit, whereas half of those ages 55 and above oppose returning to the bloc.
“The number of people who say Brexit is going worse than they had predicted has almost doubled in the past five years,” reports The Independent, " from 27% in 2021 to 48% today — more than those saying it was going as well as or better than expected.”
[T]here is more backing for a second referendum, with 48 per cent now saying they would support one, against 27 per cent who would oppose it. Even a fifth of Reform UK voters and a quarter of those who voted Leave in 2016 would back a second vote, the study found.
Tufts University discussed the last 10 years with the European Studies chair at their international relations graduate school:
Q: Have their fears of negative financial effects been realized?

A: The figures are quite revealing: The British GDP has been reduced by 6-8%, business investment has been reduced by 12%, and trade volume has been reduced by 15%, compared to what it could have been if the U.K. had remained in the EU…

Q: What do you think happens next?

A: The United Kingdom made a choice and they might have the opportunity, at some point, to revise this choice. I hope that when they have to decide again, they will be much more informed.

Re:If I ruled ..

By Zontar_Thing_From_Ve • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

No idea why you’d want to say “you’ve got to stay out for 2 decades”, but certainly “you’ve got to actually participate in the union if you want back in” is entirely reasonable, and I say that as a Brit.

Disclaimer: I’m American, so I’m coming from an outsider’s perspective. For the record, I was opposed to Brexit.

The reason the EU should insist on a minimum “stay out” time if not a “Once you leave, you NEVER get back in” approach is that you don’t want asshole counties like Hungary (in the Viktor Orbán days) or the current leadership of Slovakia threatening to leave and/or cause havoc unless you buy them off. My personal opinion is that the UK should never be allowed back in to show that once you leave, you leave forever. I would make an exception for North Ireland in that if they choose to reunite with the Republic of Ireland, they should definitely be allowed to be part of the EU as part of the Republic of Ireland.

Re:If I ruled ..

By beelsebob • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Meh, taking petty revenge doesn’t make sense from a diplomatic stand point. The fact is that both the UK, and the EU have a lot to gain by trading with each other, and sharing regulations. Refusing to do that is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Dealing with countries like Orban’s Hungary is easily doable by taking a much more nuanced approach than “once you leave you’re done”.

For example, the UK would hopefully learn its lesson about leaving because before they left, they had a privileged position, with vetos, and the ability to opt out of implementing certain regulation, and not being part of schengen, and opting out of the €uro, and … By leaving and rejoining (if it ever happens) they will (presumably) lose all of those benefits. If they were to do it again, and prove themselves to be abusing the mechanism, I’m sure the penalties would become much more harsh, and people would become much more reticent to let them back in.

Long story short - most diplomacy works best by taking a nuanced, and in general, forgiving approach, not by blunty applying rules like “if you leave you never get back in”.

Of course… I might be biased in all these. I’m a Scot who voted to stay in (like most Scots by a wide margin). I of course very much want it to be possible for us to rejoin.

Re:UK

By karmawarrior • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

America and the UK have very little in common even if they often think otherwise. Look, for example, at the overwhelming support for state run healthcare, and consumer rights, with pro-active enforcement, etc. Culturally they’re not close either. Despite language differences, the UK is much closer to most European countries in culture, attitude towards government, and so on.

Have your cake it and eat it too?

By Wheres the kaboom • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Dig just a little deeper, and the full story flips the article. British support for reverting Brexit drops sharply into negative territory if that specifically means losing out on its previous carve-outs like keeping the pound, keeping border controls, and keeping immigration controls. For example, yougov then puts rejoin support at around 36%, with opposition at 45%. But the majority of polled EU folks oppose such carve outs for Britons.

See https://yougov.com/en-gb/artic…

Re:UK

By greytree • Score: 5, Funny Thread
We have a deal, a fantastic deal, and I am sure the UK is definitely going to sign it this weekend, no more discussions but a great deal, this weekend. For sure.

US Congress Lets ‘Warrantless Wiretap’ Law FISA Lapse

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
It’s the U.S. law that allows wiretaps without a warrant for surveilling foreign targets. And the U.S. Congress just let it lapse. Sort of. NPR reports:
Each year, the provision is used by American intelligence agencies to collect the electronic communications of hundreds of thousands of foreigners located outside of the United States. The government says that more than 60% of the president’s daily intelligence briefing relies on information collected under the authority. The tool officially lapsed at the end of the day on Friday. What happens now?

Intelligence collection under FISA’s Section 702 is authorized annually by a federal court — and the law allows for that collection to continue for the duration of the court’s authorization, even if the law lapses before the court’s next approval. That means companies — electronic communications service providers, in this context — will still be legally required to turn over material to intelligence agencies.

Still, some lawmakers worry that the companies compelled to turn over communications may attempt to challenge the law in court, possibly leading to an indeterminately long window during which they stop providing intel. Advocates on all sides of the surveillance fight believe those challenges are ultimately likely to fail, but those closely linked to the intelligence community emphasize that even a small pause comes with risks ahead of major events like America’s 250th celebration and the World Cup.

Risk

By Iamthecheese • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Am I supposed to see the word “risk” and ask the government to come save me? Give me liberty or give me death.

Re: Irony

By YetanotherUID • Score: 5, Informative Thread
No, Trump decided he was going to play chicken with the FISA renewal by nominating a completely unqualified partisan hack (Bill Pulte) as acting Director of National Intelligence over the objections of basically all the Democrats, as well as a significant contingent of his own party.

He lost.

Re:good?

By hdyoung • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
That’s gone. And, barring some sort of technological collapse that I don’t see happening, that form of privacy isn’t coming back.

The important question: what replaces the old way? Nowadays, governments see basically anything/everything about their citizens private lives. That’s a given. So, now what? The way I see it, there are three models. In the Russian model, anyone identified as a potential troublemaker goes pavement surfing from a hotel balcony or gets a dose of novichok in the tea. In the Chinese model, any troublemakers disappear for six months of “re-education”. In the American model, the government watches, but doesn’t take any action until a violent crime is imminent. Heck, that’s not quite true. In the American model we generally won’t take any action until AFTER the crime is committed. We’re actually really committed to this form of freedom. Our government will stand by and watched a clearly mentally ill, pissed-off 19 year old guy acquire assault riffles, ammo and tactical gear, and then basically announce on social media that he’s gonna shoot up a school. Nobody does anything until AFTER the shooting.

I’ll take the American model over the others. Any day of the week. It’s got problems, but the other ways are worse.

The change in the warrantless wiretapping law won’t have any significant effect. Privacy laws have gaping loopholes. All the government has to do is set up a single FISA judge with an overclocked autopen, and it can get legal permission to monitor as many US citizens as it pleases.

Again, the important question is not IF the information is being collected. The important question is WHAT is done with the info?

Trump put a really crazy asshole

By rsilvergun • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
In charge of the intelligence apparatus. Even by Trump’s standards he was a completely incompetent toady piece of shit lunatic.

This was Congress telling Trump he couldn’t have his pick without directly opposing him because direct opposition risks a primary Challenger.

Anyway Trump backed down so it’ll get renewed here in a few weeks. Nothing to see here just a little back room politics.

It is frustrating how completely fucked up our politics are because Republican primary voters are bat shit insane. On the other hand if you’re voting Republican in this day and age you’re pretty far gone.

Re:good?

By lucifuge31337 • Score: 4, Informative Thread

The important question: what replaces the old way?

It’s already been replaced with private companies doing things that require warrants for government agents to do. And they’re doing it en masse, and the government simply buys the data from them. Think Flock, Ring, various data aggregators that you don’t know the names of but the government sure does.....

Mystery Orb Videos, Other UFO Records Released By White House

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
The Trump administration released another large batch of government UAP records, including videos of glowing orb-like objects appearing to split and rejoin, witness accounts, illustrations, and decades-old investigative documents. Axios reports:
The documents indicate that government agents have spent years monitoring, investigating and documenting suspected UAP incidents. At lease some of the sightings took place near sensitive government facilities, according to the reports. Videos showing red and yellow light-emitting orbs, some of which appear to split apart and then reattach as they fly across the sky. The videos were taken by witnesses whom the government deemed “credible.”

Illustrations and videos showing reenactments of what observers saw, and the positions they were in when they viewed them. Memos from government agents describing their experiences seeing flying objects. An illustration of a grayish-white balloon-like object hovering above an area near Colorado Springs, Colo. An illustration depicting a series of incidents that took place in the “western United States” where government officials reported seeing UAPs in 2023.

There also are decades-old records documenting the government’s involvement in investigating UAPs, including a 1949 letter then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote federal agents after receiving a message from an American citizen expressing their belief they’d seen a non-human-made flying object. The records released by the administration do not express any conclusions as to whether the government believes the UAPs represent the existence of alien life. They also do not indicate any conclusions as to whether UAPs represent a national security threat to the U.S.

Credible

By Ozeroc • Score: 5, Informative Thread
The current government has no credibility so neither do their sources.

Re: Credible

By fortfive • Score: 5, Informative Thread

While the leadership of the current government is a corrupt shambles, not all sectors are, and in the past there were greater numbers of serious and community minded workers. At least some of this material comes from there and that makes it interesting.

Of course it is distraction, and of course the most interesting stuff has been culled, but that doesn’t make it all worthless.

Why Aliens

By gurps_npc • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Why do we always think the UFO/UAP are Aliens? Here are a bunch of other explanations that are JUST as credible as Aliens:

Dragons. With Wizards riding them.

Time Traveling humans. Mostly likely drunk Fraternity brothers considering all the reports of anal probes.

Hallucinations caused by my Canadian girlfriend’s psychic powers.

Humans are drunk and/or ignorant enough to think a balloon will not appear to move even though they are in a car.

Investigation

By GeekWithAKnife • Score: 5, Funny Thread
That’s the sort of commitment we need. Years of documenting and investigating all of Epstein’s friends, accomplices, business partners and those in government that are obstructing said investigations.

Apparently there’s many thousands of mentions of current US government officials in those files in very compromising fashion.

Maybe the government can get Anthropic’s Fable 5 to do a thorough analysis and sign all the files, their dates, counts, mentions of people and interactions with all metadata into a publicly verifiable library.

After all, the current POTUS is a huge proponent of transparency and honesty. Some say the most transparent and honest president ever, in the history of all mankind. All the people that work for him say so.

Re:The alternative..

By ArchieBunker • Score: 5, Funny Thread

At least Jim Jones gave away the kool aid for free. Trump would charge you for it.

World’s First Crewed Solid-State Flight Electrifies Aviation’s Future

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
The Helios Horizon has completed what its developers call the first crewed, fixed-wing flight powered by solid-state batteries. New Atlas reports:
On June 5, test pilot Miguel Iturmendi lifted off from Zephyrhills Municipal Airport in Florida at the controls of the Helios Horizon — the first crewed, fixed-wing aircraft ever to fly on solid-state batteries. The flight was neither spectacular in distance nor in duration — it was a series of short tests to validate the aircraft’s weight and balance after the new batteries had been installed — but it didn’t need to be to make history. […] The Helios Horizon’s previous lithium-ion pack delivered 260 Wh/kg (watt-hours per kilogram, a measure of how much energy a battery holds relative to its weight). The new solid-state cells hit 410 Wh/kg, a 60% jump. Chief test pilot and company founder Miguel Iturmendi expects that figure to grow another 40% within two years.

Though the battery pack can be topped up over any AC outlet, no special infrastructure needed, fast-charging is also supported for up to 80% capacity in under 15 minutes. The aircraft also recovers energy in flight through wing-mounted solar panels and a regenerative system that spins the propeller as a wind turbine during glides and descents. “Regenerative flight can significantly extend the aircraft’s range,” Iturmendi said after the test flights.

The Helios Horizon itself started life as a Pipistrel Taurus motorized glider. Iturmendi’s team added proprietary battery management, a custom propulsion stack, thermodynamic controls, and solar panel wing extensions. The aircraft already holds the world altitude record for electric planes in its weight class, having reached 24,000 ft (7,315 m). The next goal is 40,000 ft (12,192 m), commercial cruising altitude, in stratospheric flights planned for later this year.

Battery energy density

By bubblyceiling • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
I think the actual news here is the 410wh/kg battery. It is a good increase over the 300wh/kg top of the line batteries available.

Re:Silly.

By dunkelfalke • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Electric airplanes are perfect for flight schools - they are much easier to fly than piston engined aircraft and are far cheaper to operate. The range is not important for that.

And by the way, i seriously doubt that you are important enough for anyone to go out of their way to impress you. Certainly not for an aircraft manufacturer.

This is a milestone

By gweihir • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

They are not close to commercial viability. But they made another step in that direction. Some things just need time, sometimes several generations. Still worth doing.

Re:Silly.

By Tony Isaac • Score: 5, Informative Thread

I’m confused by your point about weight, because it’s exactly what is addressed in the summary.

The new solid-state cells hit 410 Wh/kg, a 60% jump.

A 60% increase in power stored “per ounce” of battery is pretty significant. This isn’t going to be the last increase, this is just the very first time solid state batteries have been used in this way.

Drone range has continued to increase. I see no reason range for planes that carry people, couldn’t also increase.

Re:Silly.

By JaredOfEuropa • Score: 5, Informative Thread
Range is still a bit of an issue, even if you’re just doing touch & go’s at your local field. You need 1 hour endurance for the lesson, 15-30 minutes alternate fuel (in case you have to divert), and 15 minutes emergency fuel (normally 45 mins, but EASA issued a waiver for electric aircraft). In practice you want an aircraft with at least 2 hours “trip fuel” (the portion used for the planned flight), so that student pilots can complete the cross-country solo flight they are required to fly. Only now are we starting to see some electric aircraft that have the battery capacity for that.

Then there’s the recharging. At the flight school I attended, the airplanes would typically go up 4 times on busy days, sometimes 5. With recharging, that drops to 2-3 flights a day (you’re not draining the battery completely on each flight). But if operating costs for electric planes are significantly lower, perhaps having a few extra planes might turn out to be economical… but it does mean you can’t pass that savings on to your students.

Anthropic ‘Suspends’ All Mythos and Fable Access After US Order Limiting Foreign Access

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
UPDATE: Amazon CEO’s Talks With U.S. Officials Triggered Crackdown on Anthropic Models.

“Anthropic said on Friday it will ‘abruptly disable’ its most advanced AI models for all users,” reports Reuters, “after the U.S. government ordered it to suspend access to the models for foreign nationals, citing national security concerns. The company received the export control directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals, without being given specific details of its national security concern, Anthropic said in a statement.”

Anthropic’s blog post writes that the directive applies to foreign nationals “whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.”

“Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.”
We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET)… Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5… We have not even received a disclosure of a concerning non-universal potential jailbreak that led to a harmful result. The potential jailbreaks that have been disclosed to us are either entirely benign responses or are minor findings that provide no Mythos-specific uplift.

To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe… We are complying with the government’s legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.

As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Reuters notes that Amazon’s cloud unit AWS “said late on Friday that Anthropic has asked it to revoke access to the models for ‘all users in all regions.’"
Dean Ball, a former White House official who contributed to the AI Action Plan the administration issued in the summer of 2025, said in a post on X that the order suggests all “non-Americans” would be restricted from using Anthropic’s latest models, including those based in the U.S. “This means you should expect to have to prove your citizenship to use Anthropic models,” Ball said. Several key Anthropic personnel, including co-founder Chris Olah, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and philosopher Amanda Askell, were born outside the United States.

foreign offices

By gtall • Score: 3 Thread

While based in San Francisco, they have offices all over the world. If I were them, I’d be threatening to leave the U.S. and not make an idle threat.

Re:Holy Pre-IPO Hype, Batman!

By thesandbender • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
So far most of the popular Chinese models have relied heavily on training with US Frontier models. Even as recently as Qwen 3.5 it would sometimes respond that it was ChatGPT or Gemini. Anthropic and ChatGPT even play whack a mole with accounts that are doing this and a large chunk of them have been tied to the PRC. It’s a perfectly valid approach (technically) but it’s against the ToS for the providers.

Anthropic didn’t pay the Trump tax

By teg • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Under this administration, you know the underlying cause is they didn’t pay off Trump, his family, and his cronies.

It’s sickening how corrupt the US has become. Sure, one can argue it’s been bad - but Trump has turned it up to 20, on a scale from 1-10 - just bulldozing through any limits one thought existed. “Want a pardon? Sure, buy some millions in Trump coin and it’s yours.” Or just giving himself a giant slush fund via a settlement with his underlings.

Good example for why not to rely on US services

By ffkom • Score: 3 Thread
This should teach even the most gullible of politicians around the world that single-sourcing your brain substitute from a US service is really really stupid. People will need to host their own LLMs… or at least permanently load-balance between using LLMs from N different countries. And yes, I am assuming here that human brain atrophy due to habitual LLM use will make people entirely dependent on such technology.

Can we be honest?

By DarthBobo • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Can we be honest for just one minute and admit that this in unlikely to be about national security, and more likely the current administration intervening in private enterprise? They have been very clear that they want to bring Anthropic to heal by threatening their business (eg, Dept of Defense declaring them a supply chain risk). Anthropic’s competitors have the direct ear of the administration and have shown themselves to be willing to act unethically to get what they want (Altman, Musk). Until we can recognize this behavior, point at it and discuss it out loud it won’t end and we will continue a slide towards oligarchy.

I used Fable for about 24 hours - it’s impressive. We used it to review a system for potential security hardening and it did a really good job, but not much better than 4.8 or gpt-5.5 running for a longer time. And it wouldn’t identify potential attack vectors. I can’t say how useful Mythos would be in the hands of an adversary, but I can say that Fable wouldn’t be a step change for anyone that can afford to burn tokens in agentic fan out pattern.

Data Center Opponents Have Blocked Or Delayed Projects Worth Nearly $130 Billion In 2026

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News:
The first quarter of 2026 produced the most blocked and delayed data center projects on record, according to a new study shared with NBC News. The study — conducted by Data Center Watch, a project of the AI intelligence firm 10a Labs that tracks local data center activity — found that data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide worth about $130 billion from January through March, the most in a three-month period since the group began tracking in 2023.

“The quarter reflected a structural shift rather than a cyclical spike: communities have internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states,” the authors wrote, noting that the total number and value of data centers blocked or delayed during the first three months of 2026 roughly matched the total for all of 2025.

[…] The report found that legislative pushes for moratoriums on constructing data centers ballooned during the first quarter of 2026, sponsored by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The report found such proposals introduced in 14 states from January through March, with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introducing a federal version. Though none of the proposals has been signed into law, one did reach the desk of Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in Maine. She vetoed it in April.

More than 300 bills were introduced in statehouses across the country just in the first six weeks of 2026, the authors found, saying it marked “a clear shift from incentive-focused policies toward regulatory oversight as the scale of energy demands became clearer.” What’s more, the study found that the number of active grassroots opposition groups across the country more than doubled from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by March. The authors found that the states with the most opposition groups through that month were Maryland, Ohio and Texas. “In some cases,” they wrote, “opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed, the mere rumor of a data center was enough to trigger organized resistance.”

No, they didn’t

By hdyoung • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
The advocacy groups didn’t stop datacenters from getting built. Reality did. Altogether, the big companies had announced enough data center building to consume 10 times the total planetary electricity generation, and also use up the next 150 years of semiconductor production. The math and physics literally didn’t work. Only a sliver of them can get built. The rest are vapor. It’s like Meta assuming that it’ll command every ad dollar on the planet, or a memecoin valuing itself at “a HUnDREd tRIlliOn doLlARz”. Just cause someone says it, doesn’t make it reality.

The anti-datacenter movement is full of people who need something shiny and new to be outraged about, and the politicians pander to it because they can pass laws banning the construction of datacenters that were never gonna be constructed anyways,

Re:Blocks .....

By phantomfive • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Those communities will be the losers.

No LOL. These datacenters don’t employ many local residents. They wouldn’t be getting the money.

Re:Blocks .....

By 93 Escort Wagon • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Those communities will be the losers.

Because of the significantly higher power and water rates they won’t be paying, or because of the half-dozen relatively low-paying jobs that won’t be created?

Re:Is Ohio shooting themselves in the foot?

By Todd Knarr • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Yes. The construction jobs are very short-term, and once built the data centers bring huge costs (financial and otherwise) while contributing only a handful of permanent jobs. Remember, these are lights-out hands-off facilities. They’ll employ a handful of security guards and maintenance workers, the rest will all be handled remotely from Malaysia or the like.

Re:Blocks .....

By psycho12345 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Why? Data centers drive up local electric bills, the take up local water at below cost. They provide virtually no jobs. They provide constant noise pollution. They are a depreciating asset.

What benefit does it provide them???