T-Mobile appears to be migrating its 303,000-core VMware environment to another platform while fighting Broadcom in court for the extended support it says its perpetual-license agreement guarantees. "The matter is somewhat urgent," The Register reports, because a court-ordered support arrangement expires August 3, "so T-Mobile may soon be unable to get support for its very substantial VMware estate." The Register reports: The dispute relates to a deal T-Mobile struck with VMware in August 2023, which saw the telco acquire perpetual licenses and two years of support for some software, plus the option for a further year of support. When Broadcom acquired VMware in 2023, it stopped selling perpetual licenses and standalone support deals for customers with those licenses. Broadcom also reduced the virtualization giant's product range from over 150 products to two subscription-only bundles. Broadcom now mostly sells its Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud suite. Customers including AT&T and Tesco tried to exercise their right to extended support, but Broadcom declined to do so. AT&T settled on confidential terms. Tesco is pursuing the matter in the courts.

When customers exercise their option for extended support, Broadcom argues it can't deliver because the products covered by the contract don't exist anymore, its contracts allow it to deny support for dead products, and subscriptions are now the industry standard. T-Mobile started using VMware's products in 2008. In one hearing, the carrier's counsel described T-Mobile's VMware implementation as "the base of the entire internal network" and "the place where 1,000 applications reside." Another filing, from Broadcom, says the telco runs VMware software on over 303,000 CPU cores.

Court documents allege that in 2024 Broadcom notified T-Mobile it would not renew support after the initial two-year deal expired in 2025. The two parties kept talking about possible new arrangements. T-Mobile also sought an injunction that would compel Broadcom to provide extended support. Broadcom opposed the injunction, arguing that T-Mobile deliberately waited too long to seek it. At one point T-Mobile suggested a $20 million deal for another two years of support. An affirmation filed last week by T-Mobile vice president of technology Kevin Luu says the carrier sought that arrangement "to be able to complete T-Mobile's transition away from VMware at a more deliberate pace."

The court eventually granted the injunction forcing Broadcom to offer support beyond August 2025, but required T-Mobile to pay $5.28 million and post a $500,000 undertaking. Broadcom continued to provide support but also sought damages on grounds that the injunction meant it missed out on a new deal with T-Mobile. The telco has rubbished that argument in part because the two parties were still talking about a new deal. Broadcom later proposed to charge $24 million for extended support covering six products, a sum it said would cover over 20 staff needed to support T-Mobile. The carrier fired back by pointing out that it has made just two support calls in 2026, which hardly justifies such a massive staff and expense.

The FAA plans to replace its 1973 ban on civilian supersonic flight over U.S. land with a noise-based standard, potentially allowing aircraft to exceed Mach 1 as long as they stay below certain sound limits. The agency aims to finalize the rules by mid-2027, opening the door for companies such as Boom Supersonic and Spike Aerospace to operate quieter next-generation passenger jets over land. Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shared the notice (PDF) published Tuesday by the FAA. Forbes reports: Technological advances "will eliminate the old sonic boom," FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said in a statement. "This means we can ultimately repeal the ban from the 1970s on supersonic flight over U.S. territory while minimizing noise impacts to residents in communities along the route and near airports." The primary reason was public opposition to loud sonic booms. In the 1960s, a plane flying faster than the speed of sound -- about 660 mph at high altitudes -- created shock waves that traveled to the ground and reached human ears as a loud gunshot-like crack or thunder-like boom. Tests during that decade, including the Oklahoma City sonic boom experiments, found repeated booms broke windows, damaged property and generated thousands of public complaints.

In its 1973 ruling, the FAA stated that due to the limits of technology at that time, "a prohibition was needed to protect the public from sonic boom .... by preventing operations of a civil aircraft at a true flight Mach number greater than 1." Several years later, Air France and British Airways introduced Concorde, and were allowed to serve New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport as long as flights remained subsonic over U.S. land. Notably, "the prestigious London-New York service was the only truly profitable [Concorde] route, supported by high-powered business and celebrity travel," wrote a former British Airways network planner for Forbes in 2021.

Several U.S. companies are working on a new generation of luxurious supersonic passenger aircraft with much quieter sonic booms and improved fuel efficiency. In particular, Colorado-headquartered Boom Supersonic says it has pre-orders from United Airlines, American Airlines and Japan Airlines for its Overture jets, which will carry 60-80 passengers. Atlanta-based Spike Aerospace is developing smaller Diplomat jets for up to 18 passengers. Both companies' websites tout future transatlantic flights in under four hours.

Microsoft has released a public preview of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) containers, adding a built-in command-line tool and API for running Linux containers directly inside Windows applications without third-party software. The update also introduces faster file access, improved networking and memory management, plus integration with Defender, Intune, and VS Code. The Register reports: WSL has always been a handy way to run Linux workloads from Windows, and is particularly convenient for Linux developers who must comply with corporate edicts to use a Windows device. The CLI for end-to-end container workflows furthers this. Microsoft stated, "WSL containers make it easier for developers and organizations to build, test, and run containerized workloads while benefiting from the security, manageability, and integration of the Windows platform."

Alternatively, you could run your preferred Linux distribution natively, but that might not be an option, particularly if an organization is keen on the "security, manageability, and integration of the Windows platform." And this is an important point. WSL's existing Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) has been updated (in private preview) to be aware of Linux container events, and there are settings in Intune for managing WSL containers. Support is also in a pre-release version of VS Code, where the Docker path in the dev container settings can be changed to wslc.

There is also a new default file system for WSL container that Microsoft claims makes Windows file access twice the speed. So, going from terribly slow to just slow? We'll wait until general availability is reached before passing judgment. There's a new default networking mode to improve compatibility and better memory reclaim techniques. However, none of these tweaks will be enabled by default in WSL. Microsoft wrote, "Since these changes touch mission critical paths like file system access and network, for now they are enabled just in WSL container."

Spanish startup FOSSA Systems "has raised about $10.5 million to expand its connectivity constellation," reports Space News, noting some funding is backed by Spain's government: The support from the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETT) comes a year after the fund injected 14 million euros into Spain's Sateliot , which is also developing a satellite connectivity network with security and defense applications. Spanish private investment firm Kibo Ventures led FOSSA's funding round, the six-year-old venture announced June 24, bringing its total raised to date to nearly 20 million euros.

The proceeds will help fuel FOSSA's push beyond the tiny picosatellites it once used to connect low-power monitoring devices toward larger cubesats in low Earth orbit, enabling additional sovereign communications and space-based intelligence capabilities... The company's funding round follows a wave of investments this year in European ventures planning to develop sovereign space capabilities, including Austrian propulsion startup Gate Space, which secured 6.3 million euros earlier this month from a European Commission-backed accelerator program.
"Our goal is to establish FOSSA as a European benchmark in sovereign space infrastructure," said Julián Fernández, FOSSA's CEO and cofounder.

There's a deadly, record-breaking heat wave spreading east across Europe, reports the Washington Post — and it's even worse than a dire earlier forecast: The forecast was recorded in 2014 as part of a campaign coordinated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that invited about 60 presenters worldwide to imagine a weather report from the year 2050. In one clip, Ãvelyne Dhéliat from French television network TF1 presented a hypothetical scenario of high temperatures 36 years into the future — during a heat wave in a warmer climate in 2050... One of the maps that Dhéliat shared was lit up in shades of orange, filled with temperature predictions of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), reaching as high as 43 degrees Celsius (109.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

But it turns out, it didn't take 36 years for those imagined temperatures to be reached — and even exceeded. The heat on Wednesday alone, when the temperature soared as high as 112.3 degrees Fahrenheit (44.3 degrees Celsius), exceeded the 2050 projections in 19 out of 34 locations across mainland France — far sooner than some may have expected. Some places surpassed those hypothetical future temperatures by more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit. It's part of a dramatic shift in heat wave frequency across the country. Half of the heat waves observed since 1947 have occurred since 2010. "By 2100, heat waves could last up to two months continuously," the country's weather agency, Météo-France, said this week.

It was hotter in France on Wednesday than in Las Vegas and Phoenix and just two degrees Fahrenheit shy of what was observed in Death Valley, California. An estimated less than one percent of the planet was hotter than France's hottest place... [T]he heat dome, which will linger into early next week, is only part of the story. This type of extreme heat is becoming more common as the planet warms, especially in Europe.

Climate scientist Robert Rohde said in a post explaining the heat wave's causes that France and Western Europe should expect many more heat waves like this over the coming decades. "This isn't a fluke, but simply part of the new normal," he said.
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

SpaceX plans to begin building an eight-mile natural gas pipeline called "Starpipe" next month to supply its Starbase launch site with fuel for a much higher cadence of Starship launches. The pipeline is expected to enter service in January 2027. Reuters reports: The pipeline plan, previously reported by Rio Grande Valley Business Journal, signals Musk's intent to accelerate Starship's development and lay the groundwork for a faster flight rate. The 40-story rocket is central to SpaceX's push to expand its Starlink broadband network, deploy orbital AI data center satellites, and eventually carry astronauts to the moon and Mars.

Designed to be fully reusable, Starship uses about 630,000 gallons (2.4 million liters) of liquid methane per launch, currently delivered by hundreds of tanker trucks in an hours-long process incompatible with Musk's expansion plans. Starship has completed 12 test launches since 2023, but Musk aims to ramp up to dozens, hundreds and eventually thousands of launches a year.

Though it is unusual for a space company to build its own natural gas pipeline for launchpad fuel, Starpipe might only be an initial step in a longer-term plan for SpaceX, which has spent years exploring its own drilling operations near Starbase and throughout Texas, according to a Reuters review of Cameron County land records. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC on June 12, when the company went public, that the company planned to build pipelines and process its own propellant, and was looking into drilling its own natural gas.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Spain will require mobile networks to have backup systems that maintain connectivity when power outages occur. Per a royal decree that will be approved by the end of 2026, mobile network operators (MNOs) and infrastructure companies will need to install batteries or other backups to keep service active for at least four hours during a blackout.

The mobile network rules will apply to businesses that serve at least 500,000 users or generate upwards of 50 million euros ($56.9 million) in annual revenue. The decree will stipulate that half of the population will need to be covered by this failsafe within the first year, then 65 percent in the second year and three quarters in the third.

[...] The decree will require other key infrastructure elements to remain up and running for a certain period after a power outage. For instance, control centers that could impact all of Spain if they were to go offline will need to remain in service for at least 24 hours. Emergency call centers will also need to have plans in place to maintain operations, as Reuters notes. The move is in response to the widespread blackout across the Iberian peninsula in 2025, which left more than 50 million people without power. Experts called it "the most severe and unprecedented blackout that had occurred in Europe in the past 20 years."

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from autoevolution: The U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security denied Polestar an authorization under the Connected Vehicle Rule. Polestar will continue to sell its existing inventory of Polestar 3 and 4 crossovers in the United States and will continue to offer support to customers and access to its service network. But no new 2027 models will set wheels on American soil.

The Connected Vehicle Rule is a regulation that restricts the import and sale of vehicles equipped with Vehicle Connectivity Systems (VCS) and Automated Driving Systems (ADS) tied to foreign adversaries, primarily from China and Russia. Polestar is owned by Chinese auto giant Geely, which has also been the parent company of Swedish brand Volvo since 2010. However, Volvo has recently been granted authorization to sell connected vehicles in the United States.

The rule, set out by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), classifies modern vehicles as mobile data centers and is designed to protect national security by keeping sensitive driver data and vehicle control systems out of the hands of foreign governments. Michael Lohscheller, Polestar CEO, confirms that the company is well aware that the automotive industry is entering a new phase, based on regional dynamics. So, Polestar will shift its strategy to its biggest market as it is preparing its exit from the U.S. market. The report notes that Polestar sold 5,384 cars in the U.S. in 2025, with 60,119 units sold globally.

A private tutor who charged money to take dozens of exams for students and submit coursework for them "has been jailed for three years," reports the BBC, "after his scam earned him £300,000." Shahid Adnan completed assignments and online tests for more than 120 students at Liverpool John Moore's University, the Crown Prosecution Service said. The 43-year-old, of Lysander Close, Liverpool, was caught in February 2023 after a student handed in a USB drive containing suspicious coursework to Dr Tom Berry of the university's school of computer science and mathematics. Berry's checks revealed the drive was used by Adnan with documents linked to a company he set up called Study Sharp Ltd.

Excel spreadsheets containing details of other students, their study modules, coursework due dates, and their personal login credentials were also found. Further checks confirmed suspicions that Adnan was accessing the university's network to submit fraudulent work and sit examinations on behalf of students... [I]nvestigations led police to believe Adnan may have been doing work for 124 students at universities all over the world.
The BBC also interviewed detective sergeant Adam Dagnall from Merseyside Police's cybercrime unit, who said Adnan was living a lavish lifestyle "well beyond" his stated occupations as a private tutor and Amazon delivery driver. His bank accounts held more than £2m ($2,645,100 USD).

The blog Linuxiac reports: A new systemd fork has appeared with a specific purpose: removing systemd's recently added support for storing a user's birth date in JSON user records.

The fork, called Liberated systemd, published its first tagged release as v261 shortly after the official systemd 261 release. In other words, the fork follows upstream systemd while reverting the change that added the new optional birthDate field.

Importantly, this is not a new init system, a wider redesign of systemd, or a general-purpose alternative to the upstream project. Its stated purpose is to remain close to upstream systemd while removing what the author describes as "surveillance enablement"... The author recommends testing the fork in a virtual machine before using it on real hardware and warns nightly builds are more likely to be unstable than named releases.

In January a college student posted a video showing him winning $100,000 on Polymarket — one of 145 that appeared to show bets adding up to almost $410,000, reports the Wall Street Journal. "But none of those bets were real."

Instead its creator was "one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film themselves making fake trades and sometimes scoring fake wins," the Journal reports, citing interviews with the creators an an analysis of more than 1,100 of their videos: Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket. To get the videos to go viral, Polymarket has recruited a social-media army to copy and re-post creators' footage. Though the New York-based company has been banned from offering its primary crypto platform in the U.S. since 2022, the social-media creators are paid to specifically target U.S. users, who can still access the site with a virtual private network...

Polymarket hired and worked closely with a marketing contractor to promote the site. In a message reviewed by the Journal, that contractor told its social-media army to repost content made by 10 Polymarket creators in particular... These creators didn't initially identify themselves as paid by Polymarket, although one offered a $20 bonus code in his social-media bio... The company instructed creators not to disclose they are paid, according to creators who have worked with the company. They said the pay often added up to $2,000 to $3,000 a month...

A handful of videos the Journal reviewed also contained short glimpses of URLs indicating the sites were test environments for Polymarket engineers... Creators said they send the finished videos to Polymarket for review. If a video isn't engaging enough, or if it bears obvious signs of being faked, Polymarket will ask for the videos to be reshot, the creators said... Polymarket sends creators bullet-point guidance on what to say, according to creators who have worked with the company and a recruiting website... Polymarket's viral clipping campaign racked up more than 140 million views on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, according to the analytics provider Tubular...

Internal materials show that Polymarket and Virality promote videos showing how easy it is to conduct insider trades on the platform. Polymarket has paid clippers to promote at least 19 videos discussing opportunities to use inside information or other tactics to manipulate markets.
America's advertising laws "require people who are paid to endorse a product to disclose their ties," the article notes, "although there is some gray area about what's permitted." (After the Journal's investigation, the creators started adding "@polymarket partner" to their bios, the article points out._ And when asked for a comment, Polymarket "said it plans to conduct a comprehensive audit of active promotional content."

Video game composer and sound designer Bobby Prince has died at age 81 following an illness. Developer id software shared the news. Engadget reports: Prince was perhaps best known for his pioneering work on the Doom series. The Library of Congress inducted his soundtrack for the original game into the National Recording Registry just last month. "Despite the limitations of the 1993-era sound card drivers, Prince composed the perfect riff-shredding accompaniment for the game's demon-slaying journey to hell and back," the Library of Congress stated.

"Taking advantage of his knowledge of MIDI, Prince even worked to ensure that the sound effects he created could cut through the music by assigning them to different MIDI frequencies." Prince also worked on games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3D. In 2006, the Game Audio Network Guild honored Prince with a lifetime achievement award.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In May, the federal government announced without warning that it would take apart a network of ocean monitoring systems that it had spent over $350 million to build. No reason was given for the decision to shut down the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), but suspicion immediately focused on the network's role in tracking climate change. But the OOI also provides data that's useful for weather forecasting and fisheries management, leading to widespread opposition. Today, it appears that the opposition has won, as the government will announce that it's reversing the decision. The big remaining question is how much damage the OOI took during the intervening month.

[...] The OOI is a federally supported resource that provides ocean data for use by academic researchers, government planners, and private companies. It consists of arrays of monitoring systems in several locations in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that can track things like currents, salinity, chemical levels, temperatures, and tectonic activity. (There are over 100 individual entries on the page that display the data gathered by the system.) Obviously, there are many potential uses of that data. The fact that it has been gathered continuously for a decade means it can help track changes in how carbon dioxide and heat enter the oceans. This is probably what made it a target for the climate change denialists who helped set the Trump administration's policy.

Those policymakers are perfectly happy to annoy people with environmental concerns, but they apparently neglected to consider how upset everyone else would be about losing access to the other data. The ensuing public backlash led the Senate on Wednesday to unanimously agree with a measure that would block the government from taking down the OOI. Today's decision may indicate that the administration recognized it had gotten itself into a fight it knew it was losing. The National Science Foundation formally announced the decision, stating: "effective immediately, [it] will not proceed with further removal or descoping of equipment from the remaining arrays and will continue operations including planned maintenance." The agency added that it "appreciates the concerns raised by the range of stakeholders that have informed us they rely on data" from the OOI.

The NSF also said it would "issue a Dear Colleague Letter to collect input from stakeholders and convene an expert panel to assess observational needs, evaluate available data sources, consider responses ... and help the agency identify a sustainable path for NSF's ocean observing systems."

Carvana is testing a radically different new-car dealership model in Dallas, turning the location into a test-drive center and themed "playground" while requiring every purchase to be completed through its online platform. "Every single car that we sell, whether it's used or new, is online," said Tom Taira, Carvana president of special projects who's leading the new vehicle operations. "That's a very inherent difference. Even coming into the store, you're buying it online, and that's a big difference in how people think about it." The company hopes its no-haggle pricing, hourly employees, service operations, and national logistics network can reshape franchised auto retail. CNBC reports: Through its used vehicles sales, Carvana has become the most valuable auto retailer in the U.S. with a more than $70 billion market cap. Carvana's target with the new vehicle business is to grow its market share and customer base as well as assist used vehicle sales through trade-ins and other means, according to Taira. If the company is successful, the strategy could cause a ripple effect across the U.S. franchised dealership model, which the National Automobile Dealers Association reports includes 16,990 retailers that topped $1.3 trillion in sales last year.

[...] Carvana is using a location in Dallas as a test center for its foray into new vehicle sales. The facility looks like a traditional Stellantis dealership from the outside, but the consumer process for purchasing a vehicle and the responsibilities of its employees are unprecedented. Couches and chairs replace cubicles and sales offices. There are no finance and insurance departments, and instead of an army of commission-based employees, the facility has associates that are paid hourly to assist customers -- if they want the help.

The experience is meant to be as self-guided as a customer wants. By scanning QR codes located on 10-foot-by-10-foot screens inside the building or on vehicles and displays outside, shoppers can customize a vehicle, learn about a product's features and conduct test drives before deciding whether to purchase anything. If they do decide to buy something, it's online and not originated from a sales person, the company said.

The "playground" has roughly 50 vehicles divided by brand, with each having a theme. Jeep has an off-road display. Dodge has race tracks, including a Carvana-themed Charger pace car and part of a traditional track fence barrier. Chrysler minivans, meanwhile, have a soccer net and Ram's area is truck-centric. Carvana is not committing to expanding the exact experience to its other franchised dealer locations, but Taira told CNBC that the overall process of online sales, vehicle testing and service are expected to be consistent throughout the locations. Further reading:: Online Car Retailer Launching Nation's First Car "Vending Machine

Epic Games has released Lore, an MIT-licensed version control system written in Rust and designed specifically for "games and entertainment purposes with large file sizes," reports Phoronix. From the report: While there is Git LFS for large file storage with Git, Epic Games has crated Lore as a version control system designed entirely around the large file needs of modern game development as well as multimedia/entertainment purposes. Lore is designed to be fast and efficient for large files including binary files, and be easy-to-use including for 3D artists and more.

The Lore documentation elaborates more on its differences and motivation for development compared to Git: "No existing system was designed for the combination of constraints that large game and entertainment projects require: arbitrary content types, multi-axis scale, multi-tenant safety, and a fully open specification and license. [...] Lore is designed to combine what works in each (Git's content-addressed revision graph and centralized systems): a centralized server-of-record for durability, access control, and conflict resolution; content-addressed storage with fragment-level deduplication that is as effective on a multi-gigabyte binary as on a kilobyte of text; sparse, lazy working copies that materialize only what you need; free branching; and a fully open, publicly versioned specification and MIT license. Normal editing operations -- staging, committing, branching, diffing -- never require a network round trip." You can learn more at Lore.org. All the code is available on GitHub.

Reuters reports a cyber extortion group has claimed responsibility for breaching Novo Nordisk's network, stealing roughly 1.3 terabytes of data, including source code, drug research, clinical-trial records, employee and physician information, production-system details, and internal AI model data. The group says it's exploring selling parts of the data after unsuccessfully demanding $25 million from the company. From the report: FulcrumSec, a cyber extortion group that emerged in October 2025, said in a long message posted to its website that it spent more than two months in Novo Nordisk's networks stealing data. It said that data included company source code, proprietary information on released and unreleased drugs, trial data, employee, doctor and patient data, information related to company processing facilities and internal AI model information.

[...] FulcrumSec told Reuters in an email that Novo Nordisk representatives contacted the group on June 3, roughly 48 hours after the group's initial contact to unnamed company executives. The company used a random Proton Mail email address sent to email addresses that FulcrumSec used in its initial outreach, and confirmed it was the company by requesting specific files for verification only the company would know about.

The FulcrumSec representative also said that the group would prefer not to sell data, "as open sourcing it is a more effective deterrent for future companies to avoid paying." [...] FulcrumSec said it would not share some of the data it stole, including information on thousands of company employees and physicians, and roughly 11,500 pseudonymized clinical trial patients. The group said it also would withhold data related to operational technology and software used to interact with sensors and machinery at Novo Nordisk production facilities as part of its "harm-reduction strategy." A Novo Nordisk spokesperson said in an email that the company "is aware of claims that data allegedly copied externally without authorization from our systems has been published online. We take this matter seriously and maintain continued operations of our main platforms. We are in contact with the relevant authorities."

TechCrunch's Zack Whittaker argues that the U.S. government's abrupt export-control order forcing Anthropic to pull its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models offline was "never about an AI jailbreak" threat. Instead, it was driven more by "personality differences" between the AI company and Trump administration. Security experts say the reported guardrail bypass did not justify the order and warn that the move sets a troubling precedent: the government can unilaterally disrupt American software products without court approval, potentially undermining trust in U.S. AI providers. From the report: Katie Moussouris, a cybersecurity veteran and researcher who founded Luta Security, said in a blog post that Anthropic recently shared with her a private copy of a paper written by security researchers describing an alleged guardrail bypass in Fable 5. (The Wall Street Journal reports that the paper's authors are security researchers at Amazon.) Moussouris said that Anthropic reached out to ask for her take on the paper. Moussouris' blog post described how the researchers triggered the guardrail bypass, but said that the bypass itself "should never have triggered an export control." The difference is largely between asking an AI model to "review code for security issues" versus asking it to "fix this code."

The end result is largely the same, even if the questions are posed slightly differently. "The behavior described in the paper cannot meaningfully be fixed, and any attempt would only weaken the model for defense," said Moussouris, who criticized the export control directive as hasty, heavy-handed, and misguided. Moussouris and dozens of other top security researchers and experts have since called on the Trump administration to revoke the export control order, calling the move to pull advanced cybersecurity capabilities from network defenders in the U.S. as "dangerous."

Past administrations have made sweeping decisions on knowledge gaps. For instance, language used by the U.S. government during the 2010s to fix export law covering cybersecurity tools that could also be used for cyberattacks was so broad that inadvertently, it nearly outlawed legitimate security and vulnerability research. However, the Trump administration's directive appears retaliatory. Justin Hendrix, the editor of Tech Policy Press, said the Trump administration's move is "likely to raise alarms in foreign capitals about the reliability of American AI for critical applications." The message is that AI companies in the United States can't be trusted to operate without interference from the U.S. government.

The Trump administration hasn't confirmed why it invoked its export control directive. Did the officials misread the report and freak out? Did Amazon CEO Andy Jassy say something to senior government officials that prompted the reaction, out of caution or spite? Was something lost in translation, or was this a way to pressure Anthropic, with whom the administration already has a fractious relationship? It's possible that the White House was unaware of the far-reaching consequences of the letter's demand and officials are scrambling to undo the damage of their own making. To quote Hendrix, "the climate is one of a cloud of suspicion that senior officials are picking favorites based on personal and political factors." The aftermath is that the government has set a dangerous precedent about how much control it intends to wield over the release of American-made software. This time the government took issue with Anthropic; tomorrow it could be with anyone else.

"Battered by years of mass layoffs, California tech workers were hoping the job market would rebound this year," reports the Los Angeles Times. "But things are getting worse." The class divide is widening in Silicon Valley as a tiny group of employees is landing unprecedented packages for AI skills, while many others struggle to find work. The have-nots are doing everything that used to guarantee great jobs — refreshing resumes, optimizing LinkedIn profiles and doing interviews — but companies are much more picky these days. The tech jobless are rethinking their lives. Some are taking pay cuts, others are leaving tech. Some are going back to study or launch startups. Some have retired....

Since 2022, more than 815,500 tech workers have been laid off, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts. The tsunami of pink slips surged in 2023, when companies that had gone on hiring sprees during the COVID-19 pandemic began to cut back. From January to April, U.S. tech employers announced 85,411 job cuts this year, up 33% from the same period last year, according to global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that the number of information jobs — which includes jobs in hard-hit Hollywood as well as tech — tumbled 17% between the middle of 2022 and this February. The San Francisco Bay Area has been hardest hit, the institute said in a recent report, with the number of jobs declining by 0.4%, compared with 7.5% growth over a similar time span before COVID-19 slammed into the U.S. economy.

Tech layoffs are also spilling over into other industries. Automaker General Motors laid off roughly 600 workers in its information technology department, and Walmart is reportedly laying off or relocating roughly 1,000 workers in its technology and products teams. Recruiters say companies have become much more selective, requiring AI skills, combining different positions and interviewing more people for each job. "You're seeing elongated hiring cycles," said Robert Lucido, senior director of strategic advisory at Magnit, a California company that helps tech giants and other businesses manage contractors, freelancers and other contingent workers. "There's more opportunity to fill the need that they truly want."

Paul Flaharty, district president at staffing firm Robert Half in Los Angeles, said companies are laying off workers, but also creating new roles tied to AI initiatives. "For individuals that are displaced, it's really important that they find ways to upskill themselves so that they can make themselves as attractive as possible for these new jobs that are being created," he said. Kira Martins was already taking on more work in a small team at Snap — the parent company of disappearing messaging app Snapchat — when she was laid off in April. The company said the layoffs were to cut costs as it focuses on profitability, noting how employees are using AI to "reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers...." Martins, a 36-year-old Los Angeles resident, views AI as a tool and is optimistic about finding her next role. People still need to decide how to use AI and check the work it generates, she said. "In tech, you want to be a first adopter, because if you don't move quickly, it's very easy to become irrelevant," she said. "Everyone's kind of hopping on the AI train."
A former Google worker (laid off more than a year ago) says he's still job hunting, according to the article, and "he's learned it's not enough to just apply in this competitive market. Workers really need to network and leverage their connections to get seen by hiring managers and stand out."

But when 64-year-old product manager Bruce Bowers lost his job at Oracle — along with thousands of others — he just started his retirement early.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is suing to dismantle the infrastructure behind an alleged massive AI-powered cybercrime operation. On Friday, the tech giant announced a lawsuit against an alleged Chinese cybercrime network called Outsider Enterprise, which Google says uses AI in its campaigns to send scam text messages impersonating Google and other brands to steal passwords and credit card numbers.

Outsider Enterprise has financially scammed "hundreds of thousands of victims" with losses "estimated in the millions." The group deployed 9,000 fake websites, 1 million fraudulent web domains, and 2.5 million texts sent to Android users in a two-week period, according to Google. "55,000 spam texts were flagged by Android users in just two weeks this past May -- that's more than two text spam complaints a minute," Google said.

Google said it uses "AI-powered tools to fight AI-powered scams", which enable the company to detect scams and alert users of suspicious calls and text messages, leading to the interception of more than 10 billion scam messages a month. The company said it has been collaborating with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to block the scam text messages and said it is coordinating with the FBI, which is taking unspecified law enforcement actions.

Two recent studies argue that smartphones may have contributed to falling birthrates by reducing in-person social interaction, sexual frequency, and other conditions tied to unintended pregnancies. "One of the studies published in May is called 'The Collapse of Teen Fertility in the Digital Era' and the other, published just Monday, is titled 'Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T's 2007-2011 Carrier Monopoly,'" reports KTLA. "Both were chronicled in a New York Times piece by political writer Sabrina Tavernise on Monday." Slashdot reader sabbede submitted the story. From the report: The one from May, authored by two University of Cincinnati professors, posits that teen fertility "collapsed globally" starting around 2007 -- the same year the first iPhone was released. "Smart phones changed how teens spend time with each other ... this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility," the study's abstract reads. "Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur." The study claimed that countries "across the income and policy spectrum" were affected by the teen fertility drop, and that researchers used data from multiple countries, including the U.S., England and Wales, to rule out "country-specific contraceptive access and welfare reform stories." "This model predicts that the shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium affects multiple aspects of teen behavior," the abstract continues, concluding that "the same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides."

The study published on Monday looks more closely at the United States, explaining that nationwide general fertility rates have fallen 22% since 2007. "[This is] a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors," the National Bureau of Economic Researchers study states. "We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone." As mentioned before, the first iPhone was rolled out in 2007, and this study makes use of that timeframe as "a natural experiment" by using data from 2007 through 2011, when iPhones were only sold on AT&T. "From June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T's mobile broadband coverage," the study says. "Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5-8.0% at ages 15-19 and 3.2-6.6% at ages 20-24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint's pre-2011 coverage footprint are null.

Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women." "Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33-52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44," researchers continued. "National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use and reducing sexual frequency."