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A software engineer tried steering his robot vacuum with a videogame controller, reports Popular Science — but ended up with "a sneak peak into thousands of people's homes." While building his own remote-control app, Sammy Azdoufal reportedly used an AI coding assistant to help reverse-engineer how the robot communicated with DJI's remote cloud servers. But he soon discovered that the same credentials that allowed him to see and control his own device also provided access to live camera feeds, …

Lockheed Martin's F-35 combat aircraft is a supersonic stealth "strike fighter." But this week the military news site TWZ reports that the fighter's "computer brain," including "its cloud-based components, could be cracked to accept third-party software updates, just like 'jailbreaking' a cellphone, according to the Dutch State Secretary for Defense." TWZ notes that the Dutch defense secretary made the remarks during an episode of BNR Nieuwsradio's "Boekestijn en de Wijk" podcast, according to …

Programmer/entrepreneur Paul Ford is the co-founder of AI-driven business software platform Aboard. This week he wrote a guest essay for the New York Times titled "The AI Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun," arguing that Anthropic's Claude Code "was always a helpful coding assistant, but in November it suddenly got much better, and ever since I've been knocking off side projects that had sat in folders for a decade or longer... [W]hen the stars align and my prompts work out, I can do hu…

Besides running tech operations at the UK's Post Office, their interim CTO is also removing and replacing Fujitsu's Horizon system, which Computer Weekly describes as "the error-ridden software that a public inquiry linked to 13 people taking their own lives." After over 16 years of covering the scandal they'd first discovered back in 2009, Computer Weekly now talks to CTO Paul Anastassi about his plans to finally remove every trace of the Horizon system that's been in use at Post Office branch…

How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and "You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?" And more importantly, why is it all taking so long? In a world of 4-5 GHz CPU's that are thousands of times faster than they were, has hardware become thousands of times more complicated, to warrant the longer start time? Is…

"More than four decades after a teenager was murdered in California, DNA found on a discarded cigarette has helped authorities catch her killer," reports CNN: Sarah Geer, 13, was last seen leaving her friend's houseï in Cloverdale, California, on the evening of May 23, 1982. The next morning, a firefighter walking home from work found her body, the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office said in a news release... Her death was ruled a homicide, but due to the "limited forensic science of the d…

The consumer movement Stop Killing Games "has come a long way in the two years since YouTuber Ross Scott got mad about Ubisoft's destruction of The Crew in 2024," writes the gaming news site PC Gamer. "The short version is, he won: 1.3 million people signed the group's petition, mandating its consideration by the European Union, and while Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot reminded us all that nothing is forever, his company promised to never do something like that again." (And Ubisoft has since update…

Last week an AI agent wrote a blog post attacking the maintainer who'd rejected the code it wrote. But that AI agent's human operator has now come forward, revealing their agent was an OpenClaw instance with its own accounts, switching between multiple models from multiple providers. (So "No one company had the full picture of what this AI was doing," the attacked maintainer points out in a new blog post.) But that AI agent will now "cease all activity indefinitely," according to its GitHub pro…

Over 240,000 Americans volunteered for Peace Corps projects in 142 countries since the program began more than half a century ago. But now the agency is launching a new initiative — called Tech Corps. "It's the Peace Corps, but make it AI," explains Engadget: The Peace Corps' latest proposal will recruit STEM graduates or those with professional experience in the artificial intelligence sector and send them to participating host countries. According to the press release, volunteers will be plac…

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Last July, as Microsoft pledged $4 billion to advance AI education in K-12 schools, Microsoft President Brad Smith told nonprofit Code.org CEO/Founder Hadi Partovi it was time to "switch hats" from coding to AI. He added that "the last 12 years have been about the Hour of Code, but the future involves the Hour of AI." On Friday, Code.org announced leadership changes to make it so. "I am thrilled to announce that Karim Meghji will be stepping into the rol…

Berlin-based T2 Linux developer René Rebe (long-time Slashdot reader ReneR) is announcing that their Xorg display server has now restored its XAA acceleration architecture, "bringing fixed-function hardware 2D acceleration back to many older graphics cards that upstream left in software-rendered mode." Older fixed-function GPUs now regain smooth window movement, low CPU usage, and proper 24-bit bpp framebuffer support (also restored in T2). Tested hardware includes ATi Mach-64 and Rage-128, SiS…

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: The Salvation Army has launched what it calls the world's first digital thrift store inside Roblox, an experience named Thrift Score that lets players browse virtual racks and buy digital fashion for their avatars. While I understand the strategy of meeting Gen Z and Gen Alpha where they already spend time and money, I feel uneasy about turning something that, in the real world, often serves low income families in genuine need into a gamified aesthetic insid…

CNN reports on a 13,000-year-old glacier in a Romanian cave, where scientists say a bacterial strain they thawed and analyzed "is resistant to 10 modern antibiotics used to treat diseases such as urinary tract infections and tuberculosis." But there's no evidence the bacteria is harmful to humans, CNN notes, and "The scientists said the insights they have gained from the work may help in the fight against modern superbugs that can't be treated by commonly used antibiotics." Analysis of the Psyc…

Can being "very online" really affect our brains, asks the Washington Post: Research suggests that scrolling through short videos on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube Shorts is affecting our attention, memory and mental health. A recent meta-analysis of the scientific literature found that increased use of short-form video was linked with poorer cognition and increased anxiety... In a 2025 study published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, researchers looked at longitudinal data from more than…

This week the Python Software Foundation explained how they keep Python secure. A new blog post recognizes the volunteers and paid Python Software Foundation staff on the Python Security Response Team (PSRT), who "triage and coordinate vulnerability reports and remediations keeping all Python users safe." Just last year the PSRT published 16 vulnerability advisories for CPython and pip, the most in a single year to date! And the PSRT usually can't do this work alone, PSRT coordinators are encou…