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California's proposed billionaire tax appears headed for the November ballot after backers said they gathered more than 1.5 million signatures, well above the threshold needed to qualify. SF Standard reports: Backers of the initiative announced this weekend that more than 1.5 million people signed a petition to bring the one-time, 5% wealth tax to a statewide vote come November. That's well beyond the 875,000 names needed to qualify the measure, and likely sufficient to account for illegible or…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: The whale has resurfaced. DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup offshoot of High-Flyer Capital Management quantitative analysis firm, became a near-overnight sensation globally in January 2025 with the release of its open source R1 model that matched proprietary U.S. giants. It's been an epoch in AI since then, and while DeepSeek has released several updates to that model and its other V3 series, the international AI and business community has be…

"There are about 70% more bookstores now than there were six years ago in the United States," says Andy Hunter, the founder/CEO of Bookshop.org. Fast Company checks in on his site, which gives over 80% of its profit margin to independent bookstores, structuring itself as a B Corporation (a for-profit company certified for its social-impact) while providing an alternative to Amazon and other online booksellers: Hunter created Bookshop.org in January 2020 to help independent bookstores survive by…

Public stock exchanges "appear to be warming to climate tech startups," reports TechCrunch. "Or at least some of them." This week, nuclear startup X-energy went public, raising $1 billion in an upsized share offering that appears to have delivered a windfall for its investors, including Amazon [and Google]. Retail investors apparently can't get enough, with the stock popping 25% in its first hour of trading. Also this week, geothermal startup Fervo said it filed for an initial public offering. …

"California, Colorado, Minnesota, New York, Connecticut, Oregon and Washington have all passed comprehensive right-to-repair regulations," reports CNBC, "covering everything from consumer electronics and farm equipment to wheelchairs and automobiles." And the consumer movement "continues to gain political momentum" across America... As of this year, advocates are tracking 57 right-to-repair bills across 22 states. In Maine, the state senate just advanced a bill that would bring the right to rep…

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Pres: Okello Chatrie's cellphone gave him away. Chatrie made off with $195,000 from the bank he robbed in suburban Richmond, Virginia, and eluded the police until they turned to a powerful technological tool that erected a virtual fence and allowed them collect the location history of cellphone users near the crime scene... Now the Supreme Court will decide whether geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable sea…

Are AI agents already facing Indirect Prompt Injection attacks? Google's Threat Intelligence teams searched for known attacks that would target AI systems browsing the web, using Common Crawl's repository of billions of pages from the public web). We observed a number of websites that attempt to vandalize the machine of anyone using AI assistants. If executed, the commands in this example would try to delete all files on the user's machine. While potentially devastating, we consider this simple…

An anonymous reader shared this report from Bloomberg: More than three years after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk says he's nearing his long-stated goal of turning it into an "everything app" with a new financial services tool that he pledged to launch for the public this month... Early users testing the service have touted competitive perks, including 3% cash back on eligible purchases and a 6% interest rate on cash savings — the latter of which is roughly 15 times the national average. Musk's n…

"I love these machines," writes long-time Slashdot reader Shayde: I was super-active in the Unix-PC Usenet groups back in the 90s... We hacked the hell out of them. They were small, sexy, and... they ran Unix! Unfortunately, they were a commercial failure. There were so many things wrong with them — not just stuff that broke, but the baseline configuration was nigh on worthless. I recently was able to get another machine and got it up and running (with a few hiccups). I whipped up a video showi…

How will Apple change in September under its new CEO — former hardware chief John Ternus? The blog Geeky Gadgets is already expecting "significant updates to the iPhone over the next three years," as well as streamlined internal engineering (plus durability enhancements and high-capacity batteries). 2026: Foldable display 2027: Bezel-less iPhone 20 (celebrating the iPhone's 20th anniversary) CNET's web sites (which include ZDNET, PCMag, Mashable and Lifehacker) are even hosting a contest "to se…

Framework began shipping its new Laptop 13 Pro this week. And the Ubuntu variant is outselling the Windows variant, reports PC World: [I]t's selling quickly by Framework's internal metrics, with six batches of the Intel version of the laptop already sold out. [A later Framework social media post added "Spoke too soon, we're onto Batch 8."] "Also nice validation of our approach, the Ubuntu configurations are outselling the Windows ones!" That's not really surprising, for a few reasons. One, if y…

In March, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced that the moon-orbiting "Lunar Gateway" space station was being "paused" to focus instead of missions to the moon's surface. And Ars Technica agrees that the project was essentially "spending billions of dollars to make it more difficult to reach the lunar surface and faced the prospect of watching Chinese astronauts wander around on the Moon from orbit instead of being there themselves." "But this week, we learned another reason that Gateway…

The Washington Post reports that some teachers are now implementing "brain breaks" in their classrooms to cope with shorter attention spans, "including limiting screen time; cutting the time students spend on one activity; adding more engaging, hands-on projects; and practicing meditation." Some teachers say the efforts are helping, at least a little... To engage students, teachers say they often feel the need to deliver teaching not only in shorter bursts, but also in more entertaining ways. "…

It's "the curious case of... the Pokémon Go pro who celebrated too hard," reports the gaming news site Aftermath. It all started on the first weekend in April... Firestar73, a competitive Pokémon Go player who placed seventh at last year's world championships, managed to narrowly cinch a game-five finals win at the 2026 Pokémon Orlando Regional Championships after battling his way out of the dreaded losers' bracket. As stress and adrenaline gave way to relief, Firestar73 stood up from his chair…

The Conversation published this warning from privacy/tech law/electronic surveillance attorney Anne Toomey McKenna (also an affiliated faculty member at Penn State's Institute for Computational and Data Sciences). The U.S. government "is able to purchase Americans' sensitive data because the information it buys is not subject to the same restrictions as information it collects directly. The federal government is also ramping up its abilities to directly collect data through partnerships with pr…