Polymarket Gamblers Threaten To Kill Journalist Over Iran Missile Story | | An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Times of Israel, written by journalist Emanuel Fabian: On Tuesday, March 10, a massive explosion shook the city of Beit Shemesh, just outside Jerusalem, in yet another Iranian ballistic missile attack during the ongoing war. Rescue services scrambled to the scene in search of possible casualties, though as it turned out, the projectile had struck a forested area just outside the city, around 500 meters from homes. On The Times of Israel's liveblog that day, I reported that the missile had hit an open area and no injuries were caused, citing the rescue services, as well as footage that emerged showing the massive explosion caused by the missile's warhead. But what I thought was a seemingly minor incident during the war has turned into days of harassment and death threats against me. Emanuel began receiving numerous emails, messages and phone calls from individuals urging him to change the report to say the missile had been intercepted. "It was indeed a little strange to receive the same question, about something relatively inconsequential, from two different people within a day," he said. The connection eventually became clear after he noticed two users on X responding to his story with apparent ties to Polymarket. "There are people saying that they have received word from you that the missile strike in Beit Shemesh on March 10th was in fact intercepted, is this true or did no such interaction occur?" one user wrote. Another asked, "Was there any video of the actual impact?"
The rules of this particular Polymarket bet state: "This market will resolve to 'Yes' if Iran initiates a drone, missile, or air strike on Israel's soil on the listed date in Israel Time (GMT+2). Otherwise, this market will resolve to 'No'." However, there is a clause: "Missiles or drones that are intercepted... will not be sufficient for a 'Yes' resolution, regardless of whether they land on Israeli territory or cause damage."
At that point, Emanuel realized his "minor report" of a missile strike had suddenly become part of a "betting war," with traders who had wagered 'No' on an Iranian strike on Israel on March 10 pressuring him to change the article so they could win their bets.
When he refused, some of the Polymarket gamblers escalated to harassment, fabricated messages, bribery attempts, and explicit threats against him and his family. "You have no idea how much you've put yourself at risk," wrote a user named Haim. "Today is the most significant day of your career. You have two choices: either believe that we have the capabilities, and after you make us lose $900,000 we will invest no less than that to finish you. Or end this with money in your pocket, and also earn back the life you had until now."
After receiving no response, Haim sent him another series of messages: "You are choosing to go to war knowing that you will lose your life as you've grown accustomed to it -- for nothing." He later added: "You have exactly a few hours left to fix your attempt at influencing [the market]. It would be stupid of you to ignore this." According to Emanuel, the messages also included detailed threats referencing his neighborhood, parents, and family. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Encyclopedia Britannica Sues OpenAI For Copyright, Trademark Infringement | | Encyclopedia Britannica has sued OpenAI, alleging its AI models were trained on nearly 100,000 copyrighted articles and sometimes reproduce or misattribute passages to the encyclopedia. The lawsuit also claims trademark infringement and argues tools like ChatGPT divert traffic away from Britannica and Merriam-Webster sites. Engadget reports: More specifically, Britannica alleged that OpenAI illegally used its "copyrighted content at a massive scale" when training its AI models. Not just with training, the encyclopedia company claimed that ChatGPT's responses to user queries sometimes contain "full or partial verbatim reproductions of [Britannica's] copyright articles."
Along with claims of copyright violations, Britannica argued that OpenAI was also responsible for trademark infringement. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT generates "made-up content or 'hallucinations' and falsely attributes them" to Encyclopedia Britannica. The lawsuit doesn't specify an amount for monetary damages, but Britannica is also seeking an injunction to prevent OpenAI from repeating these accusations. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Apple Launches AirPods Max 2 With Better ANC, Live Translation | | Apple has quietly announced the AirPods Max 2, featuring improved active noise cancellation, an H2 chip, and new features like adaptive audio and AI-powered real-time translation. Like the original model, these headphones start at $549. The Verge reports: As noted by Apple, the AirPods Max 2 offer active noise-cancellation that's 1.5 times more effective when compared to its predecessor. Transparency mode, which allows you to hear your surroundings while wearing the headphones, also sounds "more natural" with the AirPods Max 2, according to Apple.
The AirPods Max 2 support 24-bit, 48kHz lossless audio when connected with a USB-C cable, as well as offer up to 20 hours of listening time on a single charge. Other capabilities include loud sound reduction, a camera remote feature that works by pressing the digital crown to take a photo or start a recording, as well as a personalized volume feature that "automatically fine-tunes the listening experience" based on your preferences over time. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Meta Signs $27 Billion AI Infrastructure Deal With Nebius | | AI infrastructure company Nebius signed a deal to provide up to $27 billion in AI computing capacity to Meta over the next five years, including a guaranteed $12 billion purchase by 2027. Reuters reports: Under the agreement, Meta will also buy an additional $15 billion worth of capacity planned by Nebius over the coming five years if it is not sold to other customers, giving the contract a total value of up to $27 billion, Nebius said. The deal is the latest example of U.S. tech giants' efforts to supplement their own AI data-centre build-outs by locking in scarce GPU and power capacity from "neocloud" providers like Nebius. Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh said the latest Meta deal would help "accelerate the build-out and growth of our core AI cloud business." Further reading: Data Centers Overtake Offices In US Construction-Spending Shift Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Data Centers Overtake Offices In US Construction-Spending Shift | | An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Spending on data center projects in the U.S. has exploded, surpassing offices for the first time at the end of last year. It's a trend Matt Kunz saw early on when Meta built a computing hub outside Columbus, Ohio. Other tech companies soon swarmed into the area, drawn by its stable economy, university talent pipeline and ample power, water and land, said Kunz, vice president and general manager at Turner Construction Co., the firm that led Meta's build-out. Since Meta broke ground in 2017, it's expanded its data center campus, and Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Microsoft Corp. made plans to join it nearby.
"When one shows up, almost all the other ones tend to follow," Kunz said. For Turner, a construction giant responsible for supertall office skyscrapers, sports stadiums and cultural venues around the globe, data centers are commanding more of its bandwidth. The company completed $9.4 billion of the projects last year, more than five times its 2020 total. Last month, Turner announced it was chosen as one of the contractors on a $10 billion data center for Meta in Indiana. Tech companies' needs for AI processing facilities have made data centers the latest darling of the real estate industry. The properties are figuring heavily into portfolios of major investors such as Blackstone, Brookfield Asset Management and KKR, on a bet that long-term demand for computing power will continue to grow. At the same time, office development has slowed as cities across the U.S. contend with vacancies that have piled up since the Covid lockdowns.
Construction spending for data centers has climbed steadily in recent years, while outlays for general office projects headed downward, U.S. Census data show. The two crossed paths in December, with roughly $3.57 billion spent on data centers that month, compared with $3.49 billion for offices, according to preliminary estimates. The shift is likely to continue and "may perpetuate itself even further as AI is utilized for automating day-to-day jobs," said Andy Cvengros, co-lead of U.S. data center markets for the brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. "It's going to directly impact the amount of office space people need." According to Christopher McFadden, senior vice president at Turner, more than a third of the company's backlog is now tied to data centers.
"We're going to be building these at this scale for years to come," McFadden said. "There's a lot of wind in the sail." Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Court Rules TCL's 'QLED' TVs Aren't Truly QLED | | A German court ruled that TCL misled consumers by marketing certain TVs as "QLED" when they "do not deliver the color reproduction expected from QLED TVs." It has ordered the company to stop advertising or selling those models in Germany. TechRadar reports: The case was filed by Samsung, which claimed that TCL was running deceptive advertising, and more court cases on the same topic are coming in other countries, including the US. The lawsuits all make the same claim: that what TCL calls a QLED isn't a QLED as it's commonly understood, and that consumers are being mis-sold TVs as a result. The court found that TCL's quantum dot TVs, such as the QLED870 series available in Germany, didn't deliver the characteristics of a quantum dot LED, and that consumers were being misled as a result.
The tests were commissioned by Seoul chemicals company Hansol Chemical (which, it's worth noting, works with Samsung, a key TCL rival, and which heavily promoted the results of these tests alongside launching the court case) and carried out by Geneva's SGS and the UK's Intertek. According to ET News (via Google Translate), "no indium (In) or cadmium (Cd) was detected in three TCL QD TV models. Indium and cadmium are essential materials that cannot be omitted for QD implementation... if neither is present, QD technology cannot be said to have been applied." You can see the test results here.
TCL disputed the findings -- "The QD content may vary depending on the supplier, but it definitely contains cadmium," it responded -- and published its own tests, including a test by SGS, the same firm that conducted tests for Hansol. The results contradicted Hansol Chemical's tests, but those tests used a different methodology: where TCL's tests focused on TCL's quantum dot films, Hansol's commissioned tests were on finished TCL TVs. [...] Hansol Chemical has filed a complaint against TCL with the US Federal Trade Commission, alleging false advertising, and TCL is also facing class action lawsuits in several US states making the same claim. TCL isn't alone here: Hisense has also been targeted in the US. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Animated 'Firefly' Reboot In Development With Nathan Fillion | | An animated reboot of Firefly is in early development at 20th Television Animation with Nathan Fillion involved. The project has Joss Whedon's blessing and will be run by writers Tara Butters and Marc Guggenheim, with early concept art already underway. According to the Hollywood Reporter, "The series would be set in the timeline between the original, 11-episode TV run in 2002 and the 2005 feature film continuation, Serenity." You can watch Fillion announce the Firefly reboot on Instagram.
When the first episode of the original series premiered in late 2002, Slashdot reader fm6 wrote: "Firefly, Joss Whedon's 'anti-Trek drama' premieres tonight, on Fox, 8 E/P. I normally despise hypespeak, but this time it's the only language that fits: this is groundbreaking, mind-boggling, totally original. I've seen a bootleg of the pilot (which, unfortunately, the network is holding back) and I promise you this is the most geek-friendly SF you've seen in a long time. Yes, more so than Star Trek and B5, and way past Star Wars. I've never seen the future so skillfully, realistically, and lovingly portrayed. Here is the Official Site and a leading fan site." "This is the single new show this season I have added a season pass for to the old Tivo," CmdrTaco said at the time. "But I'll probably watch it live. This looks like it could be as good as we hope." Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Sodium-Ion Battery Tested for Grid-Scale Storage in Wisconsin | | "A new type of battery storage is about to be deployed on the Midwestern grid for the first time," reports Electrek:
Sodium-ion battery storage manufacturer Peak Energy and global energy company RWE Americas will pilot a passively cooled sodium-ion battery system in eastern Wisconsin on the Midcontinent Independent System Operator network — the first sodium-ion deployment on that grid. Peak Energy says its technology is specifically designed for grid-scale storage and leverages sodium-ion chemistry's inherent stability. Unlike many lithium-ion systems, sodium-ion batteries don't require active cooling and can operate over a wide temperature range without losing performance.
That simpler design could make a meaningful dent in the cost of storing electricity. According to Peak Energy, its system cuts the lifetime cost of stored energy by an average of $70 per kilowatt-hour. That's roughly half the total cost of a typical battery system today. The company says it achieves those savings by removing energy-hungry cooling systems, eliminating routine maintenance requirements, and reducing the need to overbuild storage capacity to account for battery degradation over time...
If the Wisconsin pilot proves successful, it could open the door to wider adoption of sodium-ion batteries for large-scale energy storage across the US.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Android, Epic, and What's Really Behind Google's 'Existential' Threat to F-Droid | | Starting in September, even Android developers not in Google's Play Store will still be required to register with Google to distribute their apps in Brazil, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, with Google continuing "to roll out these requirements globally" four months later. Even developers distributing Android apps on the web for sideloading will be required to register, pay Google a $25 fee, and provide a government ID.
But there's a new theory on what's secretly been motivating Google from an unnamed source in the "Keep Android Open" movement, writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland:
"You can't separate this really from their ongoing interactions with Epic and the settlement that they came to," they argue. Twelve days ago Epic Games and Google announced a new proposal for settling their long-running dispute over the legality of alternative app stores on Android phones. (Rather than agreeing to let third-party app stores into their Play Store, Google wants them to continue being sideloaded, promising in a blog post last week that they'll even offer a "more streamlined" and "simplified" sideloading alternative for rival app stores. "This Registered App Store program will begin outside of the US first, and we intend to bring it to the US as well, subject to court approval.")
So "developer verification" could be Google's fallback plan if U.S. courts fail to approve this. "If the Google Play Store has to allow any third-party repository app store, Google essentially has given up all control of the apps. But if they're able to claw back that control by requiring that all developers, no matter how they distribute their apps, have to register with Google — have to agree to their Terms & Conditions, pay them money, provide identification — then they have a large degree of indirect control over any app that can be developed for the entire platform."
But that plan threatens millions of people using the alternative F/OSS app distributor F-Droid, since Google also wants to have only one signature attached to Android apps. Marc Prud'hommeaux, a member of F-Droid's board of directors, says that "all of a sudden breaks all those versions of the application distributed through F-Droid or any other app store!"
Prud'hommeaux says they've told Google's Android team "You know perfectly well that you're killing F-Droid!" creating an "existential" threat to an app distributor "that has existed happily for over 10 years." But good things started happening when he created the website Keep Android Open:
There's now a "huge backlog" of signers for an Open Letter that already includes EFF, the Software Freedom Conservancy, and the Free Software Foundation. He believes Android's existing Play Protect security "is completely sufficient to handle the particular scenarios they claim that developer verification is meant to address"...
The Keep Android Open site urges developers not to sign up for Android's early access program when it launches next week. (Instead, they're asking developers to respond to invites with an email about their concerns — and to spread the word to other developers and organizations in forums and social media posts.) There's also a petition at Change.org currently signed by 64,000 developers — adding 20,000 new signatures in the last 10 days. And "If you have an Android device, try installing F-Droid!" he adds. Google tracks how many people install these alternative app repositories, and a larger user base means greater consequences from any Android policy changes.
Plus, installing F-Droid "might be refreshing!" Prud'hommeaux says. "You don't see all the advertisements and promotions and scam and crapware stuff that you see in the commercial app stores!" Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
FSF Threatens Anthropic Over Infringed Copyright: Share Your LLMs Freely | | In 2024 Anthropic was sued over claims it infringed copyrights when training LLMs.
But as they try to settle, they may have a problem. The Free Software Foundation announced Friday that Anthropic's training data apparently even included the book "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" — for which the Free Software Foundation holds a copyright.
It was published by O'Reilly and by the FSF under the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL). This is a free license allowing use of the work for any purpose without payment.
Obviously, the right thing to do is protect computing freedom: share complete training inputs with every user of the LLM, together with the complete model, training configuration settings, and the accompanying software source code. Therefore, we urge Anthropic and other LLM developers that train models using huge datasets downloaded from the Internet to provide these LLMs to their users in freedom.
We are a small organization with limited resources and we have to pick our battles, but if the FSF were to participate in a lawsuit such as Bartz v. Anthropic and find our copyright and license violated, we would certainly request user freedom as compensation.
"The FSF doesn't usually sue for copyright infringement," reads the headline on the FSF's announcement, "but when we do, we settle for freedom." Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
The UK Will Invest Billions to Build a Nuclear Fusion Industry | | The UK's science minister is announcing details of a five-year, £2.5 billion investment in nuclear fusion, reports the Times of London, "including building one of the world's first prototype fusion power plants in Nottinghamshire and developing a UK sector projected to employ 10,000 people by 2030."
Despite the potentially transformative impact of fusion, which in theory could provide limitless clean energy and create a £12 trillion global market, no country has managed to use this fledgling technology to generate useable electricity... [T]he UK is backing a spherical tokamak design... investing an initial £1.3 billion into a prototype fusion power plant called Step (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) on the site of a decommissioned coal-fired power station at West Burton in Nottinghamshire. Paul Methven, chief executive of the government-owned UK Industrial Fusion Solutions, which is delivering the Step project, said the aim is to get the reactor operating early in the 2040s. "It's quite an aggressive programme," he said. "We need to show that we can achieve genuine 'wall socket' energy — which has not been done before."
On Monday, [science minister] Vallance will also announce £180 million for a facility in Culham, Oxfordshire, to manufacture tritium fuel and £50 million for training 2,000 scientists and engineers in fusion-related disciplines. The government is also buying a £45 million fusion-dedicated AI supercomputer called Sunrise to model plasma physics. Scientists at the UK Atomic Energy Authority last year developed an AI model that can rapidly simulate how the ultra-hot fuel in a fusion power plant will behave, cutting calculations that previously took days down to seconds...
Vallance will also announce new support and collaboration for the many fusion, robotics, engineering and AI start-ups working in Britain, to develop a strong supply chain for a new fusion sector. One of those companies, Tokamak Energy, which spun out from the UK Atomic Energy Authority in 2009, has already built a smaller reactor that has informed the Step design. In March 2022, it became the first private organisation in the world to surpass 100 million degrees Celsius in its reactor. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
2026's EV Sales Hit 1.1M - But Europe Surges While North America Slides | | Europe's EV sales for January and February spiked 21% from last year, according to new data from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Electrek reports that just in those two months over 600,000 EVs were sold in Europe.
And figures for "rest of world" (which excludes Europe, North America, and China) are up a whopping 84% — with 370,000 EVs sold in January and February. (EVs now represent more than 30% of the vehicles sold in South Korea.)
But for the same period China's sales are down 26% from last year, with 1.1 million vehicles sold. And North America showed an even larger drop of 36% from the January/February figures in 2025, now selling just 170,000 electric vehicles, while Canada's EV sales were down 23%. EV sales seem heavily influenced by government incentives, with Germany and France leading Europe's growth:
EV sales in Germany are up 26% so far this year, following the country's introduction of a new subsidy program at the start of 2026. France's market is up 30%, supported by its existing incentive program.
Italy is also seeing rapid growth. EV sales there jumped 23% month-over-month in February, making it the country's strongest month ever for EV sales. The Italian market is now up 98% year to date. That surge follows the Italian government's October 2025 launch of a new subsidy program, funded by the EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility, to increase EV adoption. Households can receive up to €11,000 ($12,700) in incentives, while smaller businesses can get up to €20,000 ($23,200)...
[T]he global EV transition isn't slowing, but it's becoming much more uneven depending on policy, incentives, and trade rules.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Ask Slashdot: What's the Best All-Purpose RISC-V System on a Chip Family? | | Slashdot reader SysEngineer does embedded/IoT work, but "I want to pick a single system-on-a-chip architecture family and commit to it across multiple product lines — sensor nodes up through edge gateways... I've been on one platform for years and want to know what embedded engineers are actually running in production before I commit!"
And "the family needs to scale — cheap and small at the low end, capable of running Linux on the bigger variants!"
Their requirements?
WiFi + BLE required
LoRaWAN a nice-to-have.
Low power modes that actually work in the field, not just on the datasheet.
Full peripheral set — SPI, I2C, UART, ADC, timers, CAN.
A toolchain and runtime support, support multi threads...
Slashdot reader Gravis Zero is skeptical all the requirements can be met. "If you want embedded, you get embedded. If you want to run a big OS, you get one that will run a big OS."
But Slashdot reader SysEngineer believes "The obvious architecture candidates are ARM, STM, and RISC-V" — and specifically they want to hear your experiences with the RISC-V choices. "What would you standardize on today if you were starting fresh? And how does real-world toolchain and community support hold up compared to the marketing?"
Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments.
What's the best all-purpose RISC-V system on a chip family? Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
CachyOS Dethrones Arch As ProtonDB's Top Linux Gamer Desktop Distro | | Linux gaming "has gotten to the point where some people claim that Linux runs their games better than Windows does," according to the Android site XDA Developers. And there's a new surprise on ProtonDB, an "unofficial" community website with crowdsourced data about videogame compatability with the Linux software/gaming compatability layer Proton:
On ProtonDB, one operating system had reigned supreme since 2021: Arch Linux. And I say 'had,' because its streak has just been ended by [Arch-based] CachyOS in an upset that has slowly grown over the past two years. As reported on Boiling Steam, the number of reports coming from CachyOS has topped that of Arch Linux, which held the crown for the most number of reports since 2021...
[T]his isn't really a statement that CachyOS is the best gaming distro out there; however, it's seemingly attracting the largest number of gamers who are invested in testing games on Proton and reporting their performance, which is a pretty big milestone if you ask me.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
How One Company Finally Exposed North Korea's Massive Remote Workers Scam | | NBC News investigates North Korea's "wide-ranging effort to place remote workers at U.S. companies in order to funnel money back to its coffers and, in some cases, steal sensitive information."
And working with the FBI, one corporate security/investigations company decided to knowingly hire one of North Korea's remote workers — then "ship him a laptop and gain as much information as possible" about this "sprawling international employment scheme that is estimated to include hundreds of American companies, thousands of people and hundreds of millions of dollars per year."
It worked.... Over a roughly three-month investigation, Nisos uncovered an apparent network of at least 20 North Korean operatives including "Jo" who had collectively applied to at least 160,000 roles. During that time, workers in the network — which some evidence showed were based in China — were employed by five U.S.-based companies and allegedly helped by an American citizen operating out of two nondescript suburban homes in Florida...
Nisos estimated that in about a year, "Jo", who was likely a newer member of the team, applied to about 5,000 jobs... "They attended interviews all day every day, and then once they secured a job, they would collect paychecks until they were terminated," [according to Jared Hudson, Nisos' chief technology officer]... With the ability to see which other U.S. companies Jo and his team were working for — all remote technology roles — Nisos' CEO, Ryan LaSalle, began making calls to their security teams to alert them of the fraud. "Most of the companies weren't aware of it, even if they had pretty robust security teams," LaSalle said. "It wasn't really high on the radar."
NBC News describes North Korea's 10-year effort — and its educational pipeline that steers promising students into "computer science and hacking training before being placed into cyberunits under military and state agencies, according to a recent report by DTEX, a risk-adaptive security and behavioral intelligence firm that tracks North Korea's cybercrime."
In one case, a North Korean worker stole sensitive information related to U.S. military technology, according to the Justice Department. In another, an American accomplice obtained an ID that enabled access to government facilities, networks and systems. At least three organizations have been extorted and suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages after proprietary information was posted online by IT workers... Analysts warn that North Korean IT workers are targeting larger organizations, increasing extortion attempts and seeking out employers that pay salaries in cryptocurrency. More recently, security researchers have uncovered fake job application platforms impersonating major U.S. cryptocurrency and AI firms, including Anthropic, designed to infect legitimate applicants' networks with malware to be utilized once hired. The global cybersecurity company CrowdStrike identified a 220% rise in 2025 in instances of North Koreans gaining fraudulent employment at Western companies to work remotely as developers...
The payoff flowing back to Pyongyang from these schemes is enormous. Some North Korean IT workers earn more than $300,000 per year, far more than they'd be able to earn domestically, with as much as 90% of their wages directed back to the regime, according to congressional testimony from Bruce Klinger, a former CIA deputy division chief for Korea. The United Nations estimates the schemes, which proliferated after the pandemic when more companies' workforces went remote, generate as much as $600 million annually, while a U.S. State Department-led sanctions monitoring assessment placed earnings for 2024 as high as $800 million... So far, at least 10 alleged U.S.-based facilitators have been federally charged, including one active-duty member of the U.S. Army, for their alleged roles in hosting laptop farms, laundering payments and moving proceeds through shell companies. At least six other alleged U.S. facilitators have been identified in court documents but not named...
"We believe there are many more hundreds of people out there who are participating in these schemes," said Rozhavsky, the FBI assistant director. "They could never pull this off if they didn't have willing facilitators in the U.S. helping them...." The scheme itself is also becoming more complex. North Korean IT teams are now subcontracting work to developers in Pakistan, Nigeria and India, expanding into fields like customer service, financial processing, insurance and translation services — roles far less scrutinized than software development. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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