Longtime Slashdot reader Gilmoure shares a report from Nature: Scientists have produced the most detailed 3D map of almost all buildings in the world. The map, called GlobalBuildingAtlas, combines satellite imagery and machine learning to generate 3D models for 97% of buildings on Earth. The dataset, published in the open-access journal Earth System Science Data on December 1, covers 2.75 billion buildings, each mapped with footprints and heights at a spatial resolution of 3 meters by 3 meters. The 3D map opens new possibilities for disaster risk assessment, climate modeling and urban planning, according to study co-author Xiaoxiang Zhu, an Earth observation data scientist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. "Imagine a video game with the world's buildings already mapped in basic spatial dimensions!" writes Gilmoure.

A UC Berkeley professor, suspecting years of targeted computer damage against one Ph.D. student, secretly installed a hidden camera that allegedly caught another doctoral candidate sabotaging the student's laptop. The student now faces felony vandalism charges and is due for his first court appearance on Dec. 15. The Mercury News reports: A UC Berkeley professor smelled a rat -- over the years there had been $46,855 in damage from computers that failed, and nearly all of it seemed to affect one particular Ph.D. candidate at the college's Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department.

The professor wondered if the student's luck was really that bad, or if something else was afoot. So he installed a hidden camera -- disguised in a department laptop, and pointed it at the student's computer. According to police, the sly move captured another Ph.D. candidate, 26-year-old Jiarui Zou, damaging his fellow student's computer with some implement that caused sparks to fly out of the laptop.

Now, Zou has been charged with three felony counts of vandalism, related to the destruction of three computers on Nov. 9-10. The charges allege the damage amounted to more than $400 each time, though the professor who reported the vandalism, and the affected student, told police they suspect Zou of the additional incidents that had been going on for years, court records show.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Thursday signed two bills aimed at regulating the use of AI in entertainment, requiring disclosure when ads feature AI-generated performers and mandating consent from heirs before a deceased person's likeness can be used commercially. Hochul described both measures as "first in the nation" policies during a signing ceremony at SAG-AFTRA's New York City offices.

The first bill compels ad producers to disclose the use of synthetic performers, and the second requires companies to obtain consent from heirs or executors before using a person's name, image, or likeness for commercial purposes after their death. "We will have responsible AI policies in the state of New York," Hochul said. "It's a time where we do want to embrace innovation. But not to the detriment of people."

The signing came the same day Disney announced a partnership allowing users of OpenAI's Sora to create clips featuring Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters.

Since the Supreme Court struck down the federal prohibition on sports betting in 2018, 39 states have legalized the activity, and college campuses have emerged as ground zero for what appears to be a generational gambling problem among young men. A 2023 NCAA survey found that 60% of college students have gambled on sports, and 16% of 18-to-22-year-olds engage in what the organization classifies as problematic gambling. A Siena University poll from January found that 28% of men aged 18-to-34 who use sports-betting apps have had trouble meeting a financial obligation because of a lost bet.

Timothy Fong, a psychiatry professor at UCLA, says every one of his recent clients has been an 18-to-24-year-old man seeking help for a sports-betting or cryptocurrency addiction. John Simonian, a personal-bankruptcy lawyer in Rhode Island, says he never used to see young men filing for bankruptcy -- now it's common. On November 7th, the NCAA announced it had uncovered three separate betting scandals in men's basketball where athletes intentionally played poorly in games on which they or a friend had placed wagers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Growing support for far-right parties is pressuring European governments to introduce stricter controls on immigration. Switzerland is set to vote on a proposal that would take the idea to the next level -- imposing a cap on its population [non-paywalled link]. The initiative could lead eventually to a blanket ban on new arrivals if the number of residents rises from around 9 million currently to above 10 million, with little distinction made between refugees, skilled workers and top managers on six-figure salaries.

Citizens will likely vote on the proposal next year under the country's unique system of plebiscites on constitutional amendments and policy, and polls suggest there's a chance they'll approve it. The risk is it could lead to shortages of critical skills that end up harming Switzerland's competitiveness. The outcome will show how far citizens are willing to go to preserve some of the traits that made their country such an appealing destination. [...] The right-wing Swiss People's Party, or SVP, won 28% of the vote in the last election with a campaign that presented Swiss citizenship as a privilege, not a right. It came up with the idea of a population limit in 2023, presenting it as a way to preserve the Swiss lifestyle and protect its environment from excessive human activity.

Tourists from dozens of countries including the UK could be asked to provide a five-year social media history as a condition of entry to the United States, under a new proposal unveiled by American officials. From a report: The new condition would affect people from dozens of countries who are eligible to visit the US for 90 days without a visa, as long as they have filled out an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) form. Since returning to the White House in January, President Donald Trump has moved to toughen US borders more generally - citing national security as a reason.

Analysts say the new plan could pose an obstacle to potential visitors, or harm their digital rights. Asked whether the proposal could lead to a steep drop-off in tourism to the US, Trump said he was not concerned. "No. We're doing so well," the president said on Wednesday. "We just want people to come over here, and safe. We want safety. We want security. We want to make sure we're not letting the wrong people come enter our country."

EU regulators say Google's Play Store changes still don't meet fairness rules and are preparing a potentially hefty 2026 fine unless Google makes deeper concessions. Reuters reports: Google Play has been in the European Commission's crosshairs since March, with regulators singling out technical restrictions preventing app developers from steering users to other channels for cheaper offers. Another issue is the service fee charged by Google for facilitating an app developer's initial acquisition of a new customer via Google Play which the regulator said goes beyond what is justified.

Tweaks to Google Play announced in August to make it easier for app developers to direct customers to other channels and choose a fee model are still falling short, the people said, with the EU antitrust regulator viewing Apple's recent changes to its App Store as a benchmark. [...] Google can still offer to make more changes before regulators impose a fine, likely in the first quarter of the next year, the people said, adding that the timing of any sanction can still change. "We continue to work closely with the European Commission in its ongoing investigation but have serious concerns that further changes would put Android and Play users at risk of malware, scams and data theft. Unlike iOS, Android is already open by design," a Google spokesperson said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Tuesday, India's Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade released a proposed framework that would give AI companies access to all copyrighted works for training in exchange for paying royalties to a new collecting body composed of rights-holding organizations, with payments then distributed to creators. The proposal argues that this "mandatory blanket license" would lower compliance costs for AI firms while ensuring that writers, musicians, artists, and other rights holders are compensated when their work is scraped to train commercial models. [...]

The eight-member committee, formed by the Indian government in late April, argues the system would avoid years of legal uncertainty while ensuring creators are compensated from the outset. Defending the system, the committee says in a 125-page submission (PDF) that a blanket license "aims to provide an easy access to content for AI developers reduce transaction costs [and] ensure fair compensation for rightsholders," calling it the least burdensome way to manage large-scale AI training. The submission adds that the single collecting body would function as a "single window," eliminating the need for individual negotiations and enabling royalties to flow to both registered and unregistered creators.

Qualcomm has acquired RISC-V startup Ventana to strengthen its CPU ambitions beyond mobile, "reinforcing its commitment and leadership in the development of the RISC-V standard and ecosystem," the company said in a press release. CRN Magazine reports: The San Diego-based company said Ventana's expertise in RISC-V, a free and open alternative to the Arm and x86 instruction set architectures, will enhance its CPU engineering capabilities and complement "existing efforts to develop custom Oryon CPU technology." Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Qualcomm, which has already been using RISC-V for some products outside the PC and server markets, said Ventana's contributions will boost its "technology leadership in the AI era across all businesses," indicating the broad impact expected by this acquisition. "We believe the RISC-V instruction set architecture has the potential to advance the frontier on CPU technology, enabling innovation across products," Durga Malladi, executive vice president and general manager of technology planning, edge solutions and data center for Qualcomm, said in a statement. "The acquisition of Ventana Micro Systems marks a pivotal step in our journey to deliver industry-leading RISC-V-based CPU technology across products."

Further reading: Qualcomm Is Buying Arduino, Releases New Raspberry Pi-Esque Arduino Board

Longtime Slashdot reader MadCow42 writes: Canonical just announced that they're packaging AMD's ROCm libraries (for AIML and HPC with both data-center GPUs as well as desktop/laptop GPUs), directly into the Ubuntu Universe archive. You can run ROCm on Ubuntu today but you have to install it via a script from AMD and manually remove and reinstall for any upgrades or bug fixes. Having it in Ubuntu as a normal Debian package will make it much easier to install and also to maintain in the long run via normal apt tooling ('apt upgrade'). This also means that ROCm can be an automatically-installed dependency for other packages, which doesn't happen today.

And, interestingly, Canonical has committed to providing long-term-support for ROCm in Ubuntu -- which is particularly exciting for edge and IoT devices that may have a long life in the field and need regular security patches and updates.

Amazon says it will allow authors to offer their DRM-free ebooks in the EPUB and PDF formats through its self-publishing platform, Kindle Direct Publishing. Starting on January 20, 2026, authors who set their titles as DRM-free will see their books made available in these more open formats. From a report: The decision to use Digital Rights Management (DRM), a copyright protection mechanism, is set by the authors when they publish their ebooks on Amazon's platform. The company notes these changes won't impact previously published titles. If authors want to change the status of older titles, they'll have to log into the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) author portal and change an option in the settings. (Instructions on how to make that change are on Amazon's KDP support site here.) This move may actually incentivize authors to apply DRM to their ebooks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The unsustainable production of food and fossil fuels causes $5 billion of environmental damage per hour, according to a major UN report. Ending this harm was a key part of the global transformation of governance, economics and finance required "before collapse becomes inevitable," the experts said. The Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report, which is produced by 200 researchers for the UN Environment Program, said the climate crisis, destruction of nature and pollution could no longer be seen as simply environmental crises. "They are all undermining our economy, food security, water security, human health and they are also [national] security issues, leading to conflict in many parts of the world," said Prof Robert Watson, the co-chair of the assessment. [...]

The GEO report is comprehensive -- 1,100 pages this year -- and is usually accompanied by a summary for policymakers, which is agreed by all the world's countries. However, strong objections by countries including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Turkey and Argentina to references to fossil fuels, plastics, reduced meat in diets and other issues meant no agreement was reached this time. [...] The GEO report emphasized that the costs of action were much less than the costs of inaction in the long term, and estimated the benefits from climate action alone would be worth $20 trillion a year by 2070 and $100 trillion by 2100. "We need visionary countries and private sector [companies] to recognize they will make more profit by addressing these issues rather than ignoring them," Watson said. [...]

One of the biggest issues was the $45 trillion a year in environmental damage caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas, and the pollution and destruction of nature caused by industrial agriculture, the report said. The food system carried the largest costs, at $20 trillion, with transport at $13 trillion and fossil-fuel powered electricity at $12 trillion. These costs -- called externalities by economists -- must be priced into energy and food to reflect their real price and shift consumers towards greener choices, Watson said: "So we need social safety nets. We need to make sure that the poorest in society are not harmed by an increase in costs." The report suggests measures such as a universal basic income, taxes on meat and subsidies for healthy, plant-based foods.

There were also about $1.5 trillion in environmentally harmful subsidies to fossil fuels, food and mining, the report said. These needed to be removed or repurposed, it added. Watson noted that wind and solar energy was cheaper in many places but held back by vested interests in fossil fuel. The climate crisis may be even worse than thought, he said: "We are likely to be underestimating the magnitude of climate change," with global heating probably at the high end of the projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Removing fossil fuel subsidies could cut emissions by a third, the report said.

OpenAI, alongside Anthropic and Block, have launched the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, describing it as a neutral home for standards as agentic systems move into real production. It may sound well-meaning, but Slashdot reader and NERDS.xyz founder BrianFagioli isn't buying the narrative. In a report for NERDS.xyz, Fagioli writes: Instead of opening models, training data, or anything that would meaningfully shift power toward the community, the companies involved are donating lightweight artifacts like AGENTS.md, MCP, and goose. They're useful, but they're also the safest, least threatening pieces of their ecosystem to "open." From where I sit, it looks like a strategic attempt to lock in influence over emerging standards before truly open projects get a chance to define the space. I see the entire move as smoke and mirrors.

With regulators paying closer attention and developer trust slipping, creating a Linux Foundation directed fund gives these companies convenient cover to say they're being transparent and collaborative. But nothing about this structure forces them to share anything substantial, and nothing about it changes the closed nature of their core technology. To me, it looks like Big Tech trying to set the rules of the game early, using the language of openness without actually embracing it. Slashdot readers have seen this pattern before, and this one feels no different.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: More and more people are turning to GoFundMe for help covering the cost of housing, food, and other basic needs. The for-profit crowdfunding platform's annual "Year in Help" report, released Tuesday, underscored ongoing concerns around affordability. The number of fundraisers started to help cover essential expenses such as rent, utilities, and groceries jumped 20%, according to the company's 2025 review, after already quadrupling last year. "Monthly bills" were the second fastest-growing category behind individual support for nonprofits.

The number of "essentials" fundraisers has increased over the last three years in all of the company's major English-speaking markets, according to GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan. That includes the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia. In the United States, the self-published report comes at the end of a year that has seen weakened wage growth for lower-income workers, sluggish hiring, a rise in the unemployment rate and low consumer confidence in the economy. [...] Among campaigns aimed at addressing broader community needs, food banks were the most common recipient on GoFundMe this year. The platform experienced a nearly sixfold spike in food-related fundraisers between the end of October and first weeks of November, according to Cadogan, as many Americans' monthly SNAP benefits got suddenly cut off during the government shutdown.

Congress quietly removed provisions that would have let the U.S. military fix its own equipment without relying on contractors, despite bipartisan and Pentagon support. The Register reports: The House and Senate versions of the NDAA passed earlier both included provisions that would have extended common right-to-repair rules to US military branches, requiring defense contractors to provide access to technical data, information, and components that enabled military customers to quickly repair essential equipment. Both of those provisions were stripped from the final joint-chamber reconciled version of the bill, published Monday, right-to-repair advocates at the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) pointed out in a press release. [...]

According to PIRG's press release on the matter, elected officials have been targeted by an "intensive lobbying push" in recent weeks against the provisions. House Armed Services Committee chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) and ranking Democrat Adam Smith (D-WA), responsible for much of the final version of the bill, have received significant contributions from defense contractors in recent years, and while correlation doesn't equal causation, it sure looks fishy. [Isaac Bowers, PIRG's federal legislative director] did tell us that he was glad that the defense sector's preferred solution to the military right to repair fight -- a "data as a service" solution -- was also excluded, so the 2026 NDAA isn't a total loss for the repairability fight. "That provision would have mandated the Pentagon access repair data through separate vendor contracts rather than receiving it upfront at the time of procurement, maintaining the defense industry's near monopoly over essential repair information and keeping troops waiting for repairs they could do quicker and cheaper themselves," Bowers said in an email.

An aide to the Democratic side of the Committee told The Register the House and Senate committees did negotiate a degree of right-to-repair permissions in the NDAA. According to the aide and a review of the final version of the bill, measures were included that require the Defense Department to identify any instances where a lack of technical data hinders operation or maintenance of weapon systems, as well as aviation systems. The bill also includes a provision that would establish a "technical data system" that would "track, manage, and enable the assessment" of data related to system maintenance and repair. Unfortunately, the technical data system portion of the NDAA mentions "authorized repair contractors" as the parties carrying out repair work, and there's also no mention of parts availability or other repairability provisions in the sections the staffer flagged -- just access to technical data. That means the provisions are unlikely to move the armed forces toward a new repairability paradigm.

This year is set to be the world's second or third-warmest on record, potentially surpassed only by 2024'S record-breaking heat, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Tuesday. From a report: The data is the latest from C3S following last month's COP30 climate summit, where governments failed to agree to substantial new measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reflecting strained geopolitics as the U.S. rolls back its efforts, and some countries seek to weaken CO2-cutting measures.

This year will also likely round out the first three-year period in which the average global temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, C3S said in a monthly bulletin. "These milestones are not abstract -- they reflect the accelerating pace of climate change," said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at C3S.

Michael Saylor's software company Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, built a financial model that some observers called an "infinite-money machine" by stockpiling hundreds of thousands of bitcoins and issuing stock and debt to buy more, but that machine appears to be breaking down. The company's stock peaked above $450 in mid-July and ended November at $177.18, a 60% decline. Bitcoin fell only 25% over the same period. The gap between Strategy's market cap and the value of its bitcoin holdings has nearly vanished.

At one point last week, the company's market value dipped below the value of its bitcoins after accounting for debt. Strategy announced it had built a $1.4 billion dollar reserve by selling more stock to cover required dividend payments to preferred shareholders over the next twelve months. The company also disclosed it might sell some of its coins if its value continues to fall, a reversal from Saylor's February tweet declaring "Never sell your Bitcoin." Professional short seller Jim Chanos, who had questioned the strategy's sustainability, told Sherwood he made money by shorting the stock and buying bitcoins.

A tenured USC professor is arguing that universities need to fundamentally rethink their value proposition as AI rapidly closes the gap on human instruction and a loneliness epidemic grips the generation most likely to be sitting in their lecture halls. Eric Anicich, an associate professor at USC's Marshall School of Business, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that nearly three-quarters of 16- to 24-year-olds now report feeling lonely, young adults spend 70% less time with friends in person compared to two decades ago, and a growing majority of Gen Z college graduates say their degree was a "waste of money."

Anicich points to a recent Harvard study finding that students using an AI tutor learned more than twice as much as those in traditional active-learning classes, and did so in less time. The implication is stark: if instruction becomes abundant and cheap, colleges must sell what remains scarce -- genuine human community. He notes that his doctoral training included zero coursework on teaching, a norm he says persists across academia. His proposal: fund student life as seriously as research labs, hire professional "experience designers," and treat rituals and collaborative projects as core curriculum rather than amenities.

The Trump administration will allow Nvidia to resume selling H200 chips to China, but only if the U.S. government takes a 25% cut. Axios reports: Trump said on Truth Social that he'll allow Nvidia to sell H200 chips -- the generation of chips before its current, more-advanced Blackwell lineup -- to China, with the U.S. government pocketing a quarter of the revenue. He said he would apply "the same approach to AMD, Intel, and other GREAT American Companies."

American defense hawks fear that China could use Nvidia chips to advance its military ambitions. Trump said Monday that the sales will be subject to "conditions that allow for continued strong National Security." The blockade remains in place for Nvidia's current generation of Blackwell chips, which will be replaced in the second half of 2026 by even more advanced Rubin chips. Huang said recently he was unsure if China would want the older chips. "We applaud President Trump's decision to allow America's chip industry to compete to support high paying jobs and manufacturing in America," Nvidia said in a statement. "Offering H200 to approved commercial customers, vetted by the Department of Commerce, strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new datacenters in the U.S., the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis. The green groups, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Food & Water Watch and dozens of local organizations, have urged members of Congress to halt the proliferation of energy-hungry datacenters, accusing them of causing planet-heating emissions, sucking up vast amounts of water and exacerbating electricity bill increases that have hit Americans this year.

"The rapid, largely unregulated rise of datacenters to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans' economic, environmental, climate and water security," the letter states, adding that approval of new data centers should be paused until new regulations are put in place. The push comes amid a growing revolt against moves by companies such as Meta, Google and Open AI to plow hundreds of billions of dollars into new datacenters, primarily to meet the huge computing demands of AI. At least 16 datacenter projects, worth a combined $64 billion, have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition to rising electricity costs. The facilities' need for huge amounts of water to cool down equipment has also proved controversial, particularly in drier areas where supplies are scarce. [...]

At the current rate of growth, datacenters could add up to 44m tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, equivalent to putting an extra 10m cars on to the road and exacerbating a climate crisis that is already spurring extreme weather disasters and ripping apart the fabric of the American insurance market. But it is the impact upon power bills, rather than the climate crisis, that is causing anguish for most voters, acknowledged Emily Wurth, managing director of organizing at Food & Water Watch, the group behind the letter to lawmakers. "I've been amazed by the groundswell of grassroots, bipartisan opposition to this, in all types of communities across the US," said Wurth. "Everyone is affected by this, the opposition has been across the political spectrum. A lot of people don't see the benefits coming from AI and feel they will be paying for it with their energy bills and water."

"It's an important talking point. We've seen outrageous utility price rises across the country and we are going to lean into this. Prices are going up across the board and this is something Americans really do care about."