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.
Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform
Seamus Blackley, one of the original founders of Xbox who helped convince Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to back a console project more than 26 years ago, told GamesBeat in an interview that he believes Microsoft is quietly sunsetting the platform under the guise of an AI-driven leadership transition.
Microsoft recently announced that Asha Sharma, whose career has focused on AI and software as a service, will replace Phil Spencer as Xbox CEO, and that COO and president Sarah Bond is leaving the company. Blackley said he expects Sharma’s role to be that of “a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night,” arguing that Satya Nadella’s all-consuming bet on generative AI has turned every business unit — Xbox included — into a nail for the same hammer.
He compared the appointment to putting someone who doesn’t like movies in charge of a major motion picture studio, and advised Sharma to either develop a genuine passion for games or find a way to leave the job soon.
Hacker Used Anthropic’s Claude To Steal Sensitive Mexican Data
A hacker exploited Anthropic’s AI chatbot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican government agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information, according to cybersecurity researchers. From a report:
The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security said in research published Wednesday.
The activity started in December and continued for roughly a month. In all, 150 gigabytes of Mexican government data was stolen, including documents related to 195 million taxpayer records as well as voter records, government employee credentials and civil registry files, according to the researchers.
DVD Sales Decline Slows Sharply as Gen Z Discovers the Appeal of Physical Media
DVD and Blu-ray sales have been in freefall for years, but the decline is slowing considerably as Gen Z buyers turn to physical media and drive a measurable uptick at video rental stores and retailers across the U.S.
Overall disc sales fell just 9% last year after dropping more than 20% in both 2023 and 2024, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, and U.S. consumers spent 12% more on 4K UHD Blu-rays in 2025 than the prior year. The Criterion Collection, a leading boutique Blu-ray label, confirmed significant year-over-year sales increases that its president credits to younger customers.
Vidiots, a video store in Los Angeles, averaged 170 rentals a day in January 2026 — its biggest month ever — after loaning about 22,000 discs total in 2023 and roughly 50,000 in 2024. Barnes & Noble reported DVD and Blu-ray sales growth of “mid-double digits” over the past year.
Scientists Crack the Case of ‘Screeching’ Scotch Tape
The screeching sound that Scotch tape makes when you rip it off a surface — that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard noise most people try not to think about — is produced by shock waves from micro-cracks that travel across the peeling tape at supersonic speeds, according to a new paper published in Physical Review E.
Researchers led by Sigurdur Thoroddsen of King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia used simultaneous high-speed imaging and synchronized microphones to capture both the propagating fractures and the sound waves they generate in the surrounding air. The team’s earlier work, in 2010, had identified a sequence of transverse cracks racing across the width of the adhesive during peeling, and a 2024 follow-up established a direct correspondence between those cracks and the screeching sound, but neither study pinpointed a mechanism.
The new findings show that a partial vacuum forms between the tape and the surface as each crack opens, and because the crack moves faster than air can rush in to fill the void, the vacuum travels along until it reaches the tape’s edge and collapses into the stationary air outside, producing a discrete sound pulse.
Microsoft Japan Raided Over Suspected Violation of Anti-Monopoly Law
An anonymous reader shares a report:
Japan’s Fair Trade Commission raided Microsoft Japan’s offices on Wednesday as part of an investigation into whether it improperly restricted customers of its Azure platform from using rival cloud services, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
The source said Japan’s antitrust authorities would also be seeking clarification from Microsoft’s parent company in the United States. Microsoft Japan is suspected of setting conditions that effectively shut out other services by limiting access to popular services on other cloud platforms, the source said.
Uber Previews Its Dubai Air Taxi Service
An anonymous reader shares a report:
Uber is one step closer to going airborne. On Wednesday, the company previewed its air taxi booking service ahead of an expected launch in Dubai later this year. The inaugural Uber Air program will let travelers book Joby Aviation’s electric air taxis through a familiar process in the Uber app.
The experience of booking an air taxi will be much like reserving a four-wheeled Uber. In the app, after entering your destination, Uber Air will appear as an option for eligible routes. The Uber app will book a flight and an Uber Black to pick you up and drop you off at a Joby “vertiport.” Joby’s air taxis, built exclusively for city travel, can accommodate up to four passengers and luggage. (Uber says size and weight guidelines will be announced closer to launch.) The interior is about the size of an SUV and has “comfortable seating” with panoramic windows. They can travel up to 200 mph and have a range of up to 100 miles. Four battery packs and a triple-redundant flight computer are onboard for safety purposes.
Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge
Anthropic, the AI company that has long positioned itself as the industry’s most safety-conscious research lab, is dropping the central commitment of its Responsible Scaling Policy — a 2023 pledge to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee beforehand that its safety measures were adequate. “We didn’t really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments … if competitors are blazing ahead,” chief science officer Jared Kaplan told TIME.
The overhauled policy, approved unanimously by CEO Dario Amodei and Anthropic’s board, instead commits the company to matching or surpassing competitors’ safety efforts and to delaying development only if Anthropic considers itself to be leading the AI race and believes catastrophic risks are significant.
The company also plans to publish detailed “Risk Reports” every three to six months and release “Frontier Safety Roadmaps” laying out future safety goals. Chris Painter, director of policy at the AI evaluation nonprofit METR, who reviewed an early draft, told TIME the shift signals that Anthropic “believes it needs to shift into triage mode with its safety plans, because methods to assess and mitigate risk are not keeping up with the pace of capabilities.”
HP Says Memory’s Contribution To PC Costs Just Doubled To 35%
HP has revealed that memory now accounts for 35% of the cost of materials it needs to build a PC, up from between 15 and 18% last quarter. And the company expects RAM’s contribution will rise through the year. From a report:
Speaking on the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call, interim CEO Bruce Broussard said the company has secured long-term supply agreements for the year and also “qualified new suppliers [and] built in strategic inventory positions for key platforms and cut the time to qualify new material in half to accelerate our product configuration changes.”
That sounds a lot like HP Inc is signing up new suppliers at a brisk pace. Broussard said the company has also “expanded lower-cost sourcing across our commodity basket, lowering logistics costs with agile end-to-end planning processes.” The company is using its internal AI initiatives to power those new processes. The company is also “configuring our products and shaping demand to align the supply we have with our customer needs” and “taking targeted pricing actions to offset the remaining cost impact in close partnership with both our channel and direct customers.”
Apple’s Touch-Screen MacBook Pro To Have Dynamic Island, New Interface
Apple’s forthcoming touch-screen MacBook Pro models — the company’s first-ever laptops to support touch input — will feature the iPhone’s Dynamic Island at the center top of their OLED displays and a new interface that dynamically adjusts between touch and point-and-click controls, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the plans.
The 14-inch and 16-inch models, code-named K114 and K116, are slated for release toward the end of 2026 and won’t be part of Apple’s product announcements in the first week of March. The redesigned interface brings up a contextual menu surrounding a user’s finger when they touch a button or control, and enlarges menu bar items when tapped, adapting the available controls based on whether the input is touch or click.
Apple does not plan to position the machines as iPad replacements or describe them as touch-first; the physical design retains the full keyboard and large trackpad of the current MacBook Pro. Last year’s Liquid Glass redesign in macOS Tahoe, which added more padding around icons and touch-optimized sliders in the control center, was partly groundwork for this shift.
The US Had a Big Battery Boom Last Year
The United States installed a record 57 gigawatt hours of new battery storage on its electric grids in 2025, a nearly 30% increase over the prior year that arrived even as the Trump administration cut tax credits for wind and solar in last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
The figures come from a Solar Energy Industries Association report published Monday, which also projects the market will grow another 21% this year by adding 70 gigawatt hours in 2026 alone. Battery tax credits themselves survived the legislation largely intact, and the majority of last year’s new installations were stand-alone systems not tied to specific solar projects.
In Texas, solar met more than 15% of electricity demand throughout the summer and beat out coal for the first time, and the SEIA report predicts the state will overtake California this year in total deployed storage. Supply chain restrictions reinforced by the bill and project cancellations could slow the pipeline this year, the report cautions.
First British Baby Born Using Transplanted Womb From Dead Donor
A 10-week-old boy named Hugo has become the first baby born in the UK from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor, after his mother Grace Bell — who was born without a viable womb due to a condition called MRKH syndrome, which affects one in every 5,000 women — underwent a 10-hour transplant operation at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford in June 2024.
Hugo was born just before Christmas 2025, weighing nearly 7lbs, at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in west London, following IVF treatment and embryo transfer at The Lister Fertility Clinic. Bell’s transplant is one of three completed so far as part of a UK clinical research trial that plans to carry out 10 such procedures from deceased donors, and Hugo is the first baby born from any of them.
Earlier in 2025, a separate effort produced baby Amy, the first UK birth from a living womb donation — her mother had received her older sister’s womb in January 2023. Globally, more than 100 womb transplants have been performed, resulting in over 70 healthy births.
Meta AI Security Researcher Said an OpenClaw Agent Ran Amok on Her Inbox
Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue posted a now-viral account on X describing how an OpenClaw agent she had tasked with sorting through her overstuffed email inbox went rogue, deleting messages in what she called a “speed run” while ignoring her repeated commands from her phone to stop.
“I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb,” Yue wrote, sharing screenshots of the ignored stop prompts as proof. Yue said she had previously tested the agent on a smaller “toy” inbox where it performed well enough to earn her trust, so she let it loose on the real thing. She believes the larger volume of data triggered compaction — a process where the context window grows too large and the agent begins summarizing and compressing its running instructions, potentially dropping ones the user considers critical.
The agent may have reverted to its earlier toy-inbox behavior and skipped her last prompt telling it not to act. OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent designed to run as a personal assistant on local hardware.
New Datacentres Risk Doubling Great Britain’s Electricity Use, Regulator Says
The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report:
Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity — 5GW more than the country’s current peak demand.
The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a “surge in demand” for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts.
Meanwhile, new renewable energy projects are not being connected to the grid at the pace they are being built to help meet the government’s clean energy targets by the end of the decade. Ofgem said the work required to connect surging numbers of datacentres could mean delays for other projects that are “critical for decarbonisation and economic growth.” Datacentres are the central nervous system of AI tools such as chatbots and image generators, playing a vital role in training and operating products such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
CrowdStrike Says Attackers Are Moving Through Networks in Under 30 Minutes
An anonymous reader shares a report:
Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting trusted systems.
The average breakout time — how long it took financially-motivated attackers to move from initial intrusion to other network systems — dropped to 29 minutes in 2025, a 65% increase in speed from the year prior. “The fastest breakout time a year ago was 51 seconds. This year it’s 27 seconds,” Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop. Defenders are falling behind because attackers are refining their techniques, using social engineering to access high-privilege systems faster and move through victims’ cloud infrastructure undetected.
Hegseth Gives Anthropic Until Friday To Back Down on AI Safeguards
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to give the military unfettered access to its AI model or face harsh penalties, Axios has learned. Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting on Tuesday that the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military’s needs.
The Pentagon wants to punish Anthropic as the feud over AI safeguards grows increasingly nasty, but officials are also worried about the consequences of losing access to its industry-leading model, Claude. “The only reason we’re still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good,” a Defense official told Axios ahead of the meeting. Anthropic has said it is willing to adapt its usage policies for the Pentagon, but not to allow its model to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or the development of weapons that fire without human involvement.
31337 C14ud3
It’s no surprise that these tools can enable script kiddies to elevate their game. This is what they’re pushing, after all… you don’t have to know what you’re doing, just keep prompting until it works!
We’re in a golden age of sorts. Soon these LLMs will be so locked down due to fears of stuff like this. Use it while you can before you have to pay an exorbitant license fee for that “elite hacker” persona.