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After Australia banned social media for users younger than 16, teenagers "immediately worked to circumvent the restrictions," reports Fortune: 14-year-old in New South Wales, told The Washington Post in December 2025, just before the implementation of the ban, she planned to use her mother's face ID to log in to Snapchat and . In a Reddit thread on ways to bypass the ban, one user suggested using a printed mesh face mask from Temu to outsmart apps' facial recognition tools. Others still have tr…

Colorado's "age-attestation" bill left the House committee with new exemptions for open-source operating systems, applications, code repositories, and containerized software distribution, reports the blog Linuxiac: [The bill] focuses on operating system providers and application stores. Its main requirement is that these providers supply an age-related signal via an interface, so applications can determine whether a user is a minor... System76 founder Carl Richell shared on Fosstodon that the u…

There's a glass roof — but no rear-view window. Instead the Polestar 4 replaces the rear-view mirror with a live feed from a wide-angle camera. Its high-resolution display (1480 x 320 pixels) promises "a panoramic view of the outside," according to Polestar's web site, showing more of what's behind you. "Visibility in the dark and in rainy conditions is also vastly improved." Besides the camera feed (and side mirrors), the Polestar 4 offers four short-range cameras (for 360-degree views), and e…

Microsoft released the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" in 2016, adding an optional Linux environment into every operating system since Windows 10. But now an open source developer has brought Linux to Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me, reports the blog It's FOSS, "with Linux kernel 6.19 running alongside the Windows 9x kernel, letting both operate on the same machine at the same time." A virtual device driver handles initialization, loads the kernel off disk and manages the event loop for pa…

"Old code like amateur radio and NFC have long been a burden to core networking developers," reads the pull request. And so Thursday Linus Torvald merged the pull request "to rid the Linux kernel of the old Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) subsystem," reports Phoronix, "and various other old network drivers largely for PCMCIA era network adapters." This was the code suggested for removal given the recent influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports against this dated code that likely has no…

It's the U.S. government's main link to the AI industry, reports The Washington Post, working to assess national security risks of new models like Anthropic's "Mythos". To run it they'd hired Collin Burns, who'd worked at OpenAI and then Anthropic. But Burns started work Monday at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation — and then "was pushed out Thursday by the White House, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations." Officials were co…

The Free Software Foundation's Licensing and Compliance Manager published a blog post this week to explicitly state that"Responsible AI" Licenses (RAIL) are nonfree and unethical. The licenses restrict AI and ML software "from being used in a specific list of harmful applications," according to the license's web site, "e.g. in surveillance and crime prediction." (The license's steering committee is volunteers from multiple academic institutions.) But even though Responsible AI licenses are mark…

Intel's stock price soared 24% Friday. It's the stock's largest single-day spike since since October 1987, reports CNBC, "as investors cheered signs of renewed growth due to mounting artificial intelligence demand." The stock closed at $82.57 and is now up 124% this year after jumping 84% in 2025. Friday's rally topped a 23% gain for the stock on Sept. 18, when Nvidia agreed to invest $5 billion in the company... "INTC's new CEO fixed the balance sheet, and is executing on a strategy that appea…

Physicists have proposed a new kind of atomic clock based on a revived superradiant laser concept that could produce an extraordinarily stable signal with a linewidth around 100 microhertz, potentially the narrowest ever for an optical laser. "The implications of this result could stretch well beyond timekeeping," reports Phys.org. "A laser immune to environmental frequency shifts would be a powerful tool in optical interferometry -- using interference patterns in light to make ultra-precise me…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The Food and Drug Administration approved the first gene therapy to restore hearing for people who were born deaf. The decision, while only immediately affecting people born with a very rare form of genetic deafness, is being hailed as a milestone in the quest to treat hearing loss. "It's the first time in history there's a new drug for hearing loss," says Zheng-Yi Chen, an associate scientist at Mass Eye and Ear in Boston who was not involved in th…

Maine Gov. Janet Mills vetoed a bill that would have imposed the nation's first statewide moratorium on new data centers, saying she supported the idea in principle but would not block a major redevelopment project tied to jobs and local investment. Instead, she said she will create a council to study data centers' effects while also signing a separate measure to deny them certain state tax incentives. Politico reports: "After prior redevelopment efforts failed, the Town of Jay worked for two y…

BMW's latest concept car moves the color-changing tech it debuted back at CES 2022 closer to reality by embedding an E Ink panel directly into the hood. The Verge reports: BMW's previous concepts wrapped the entire vehicle in a patchwork of E Ink panels that were all custom-sized and shaped to match its contours. It was an approach that wasn't practical for mass production, and one that wasn't very durable. The new BMW iX3 Flow Edition is potentially the most exciting of all of BMW's concepts a…

A report says Samsung's mobile division could post its first-ever annual loss in 2026, as rising memory costs, tougher competition, and pressure across products like foldables and smartwatches weigh on the business. SammyGuru reports: Samsung boss TM Roh reportedly told company leaders that the mobile (MX) business could lose money this year. That warning has clearly rattled management. The MX unit has long been a key pillar for Samsung. That's why the idea of it slipping into the red is a seri…

Longtime Slashdot reader Himmy32 writes: Socket Security published an article on the compromise of the Bitwarden CLI client, which was pushed from Bitwarden's client repository. This breach was the next in a chain of supply-chain attacks that have affected Checkmarx KICS and Aqua Security's Trivy scanners. The breach was quickly detected and reported by JFrog on the GitHub repository; JFrog also provided a technical write-up. The Bitwarden team has released statements on a blog post indicating …

Google plans to invest up to $40 billion more in Anthropic, starting with $10 billion now and another $30 billion tied to performance milestones. CNBC reports: Anthropic said the agreement expands on a longstanding partnership between the two companies. Earlier this month, Anthropic secured 5 gigawatts worth of computing capacity as part of an announcement with Google and Broadcom that will start to come online next year. Anthropic could decide to add additional gigawatts of compute in the futu…