An anonymous reader quotes a report : Washington is joining a growing list of states trying to tear down barriers for consumers who want to repair their electronics rather than buy new ones. Gov. Bob Ferguson last week signed the state's new "Right to Repair" policy, House Bill 1483, into law. It was a yearslong effort to get the law approved. "This is a win for every person in Washington state," said the bill's prime sponsor, Rep. Mia Gregerson, D-SeaTac.

In 2021, the Federal Trade Commission reported that consumers with broken electronics don't have much choice but to replace them because repairs require specialized tools, unique parts and inaccessible proprietary software. And those restrictions, the FTC found, disproportionately burden communities of color and low-income communities. Some companies engage in a practice called "parts pairing" that can make replacing parts of a device impossible. Washington's new law would largely outlaw this tactic.

Starting Jan. 1, 2026, the law will require manufacturers to make tools, parts and documentation needed for diagnostics and maintenance available to independent repair businesses. The requirement applies to digital electronics, like computers, cellphones and appliances, sold in Washington after July 1, 2021. Manufacturers won't be able to use parts that inhibit repairs. The state attorney general's office could enforce violations of the new law under the Consumer Protection Act.

Bloomberg's editorial board warned Tuesday that AI has created an "untenable situation" in higher education where students routinely outsource homework to chatbots while professors struggle to distinguish computer-generated work from human writing. The editorial described a cycle where assignments that once required days of research can now be completed in minutes through AI prompts, leaving students who still do their own work looking inferior to peers who rely on technology.

The board said that professors have begun using AI tools themselves to evaluate student assignments, creating what it called a scenario of "computers grading papers written by computers, students and professors idly observing, and parents paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege."

The editorial argued that widespread AI use in coursework undermines the broader educational mission of developing critical thinking skills and character formation, particularly in humanities subjects. Bloomberg's board recommended that colleges establish clearer policies on acceptable AI use, increase in-class assessments including oral exams, and implement stronger honor codes with defined consequences for violations.

Multiple readers shared the following report about the executive departures at CISA: Virtually all of the top officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have departed the agency or will do so this month, according to an email obtained by Cybersecurity Dive, further widening a growing void in expertise and leadership at the government's lead cyber defense force at a time when tensions with foreign adversaries are escalating.

Five of CISA's six operational divisions and six of its 10 regional offices will have lost top leaders by the end of the month, the agency's new deputy director, Madhu Gottumukkala, informed employees in an email on Thursday. [...] The exits of these leaders could undermine the efficiency and strategic clarity of CISA's partnerships with critical infrastructure operators, private security firms, foreign allies, state governments and local emergency managers, experts say.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More than 2% of Americans are taking the blockbuster class of GLP-1 drugs for overweight or obesity, up nearly 600% over six years, according to a report from FAIR Health given to Axios first. The data from FAIR Health's repository of over 51 billion commercial healthcare claim records shows the explosion in use of the drugs specifically for weight loss -- roughly half of all users.

In all, roughly 4% of Americans were taking GLP-1 drugs in 2024 for either overweight, obesity or Type 2 diabetes (their original approved use). The data shows Novo Nordisk's Ozempic is still by far the most commonly taken GLP-1, followed by Eli Lilly's Mounjaro. The percentage of adults who were prescribed a GLP-1 drug but did not have bariatric surgery increased from 2.5% in 2019 to 11.2% in 2024 while the the percentage of adult patients who had bariatric surgery decreased 41.8%.

President Trump's threat of a 25% tariff on smartphone imports including iPhones would not provide enough economic incentive for Apple to relocate US-bound iPhone production to domestic facilities, according to a new Morgan Stanley note viewed by Slashdot. The tariff threat, announced Friday via social media, appeared to target Apple's recent shift of iPhone production from China to India through its contract manufacturing partners.

Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that establishing US iPhone production would require a minimum of two years and several billion dollars to build multiple greenfield assembly facilities, with a trained workforce exceeding 100,000 workers during peak seasons. More significantly, the firm calculates that a US-produced iPhone would cost 35% more than current China or India production, primarily due to higher labor costs and the need to import 25% of iPhone components from China under existing 30% tariffs. By contrast, Apple could offset a 25% import tariff by raising global iPhone prices just 4-6%, making domestic production economically unviable.

California's population grew 0.6% in 2024, adding nearly 250,000 residents to reach 39.43 million, according to Census Bureau estimates. The growth came entirely from a rebound in international immigration, which surged to over 300,000 people after plunging to 44,000 during the pandemic's worst year.

Without immigration, the state would have shrunk significantly as domestic migration remained negative. The H-1B visa program alone brought nearly 79,000 skilled workers to California in 2024. Since 2010, California has added 2.7 million immigrants, with half coming from Asia and slightly more than a third from Latin America. The immigration-dependent growth model puts California at particular risk from potential federal policy changes, as more than a quarter of its population is foreign-born -- the highest share nationwide.

New submitter zuki shares an obit published at The Register: John Young, the co-founder of the legendary internet archive Cryptome, died at the age of 89 on March 28. The Register talked to friends and peers who gave tribute to a bright, pugnacious man who was devoted to the public's right to know.

Before WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, BayFiles, or Transparency Toolkit, there was Cryptome - an open internet archive that inspired them all, helped ignite the first digital crypto war, and even gave Julian Assange his start before falling out with him on principle.

alternative_right writes: The site looks like an ordinary Star Wars fan website from around 2010. But starwarsweb.net was actually a tool built by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to covertly communicate with its informants in other countries.

Newark Liberty International Airport has suffered six radar and radio outages in nine months, with the most recent occurring May 9th when controllers told pilots "our scopes just went black again" before handing off flights to other facilities. The outages have forced flight cancellations, diversions, and delays lasting over a week as airlines repositioned aircraft and crews.

The Federal Aviation Administration created the problem by relocating Newark's air traffic control operations from the understaffed N90 facility on Long Island to Philadelphia in 2024. Only 17 of 33 controllers accepted the move despite $100,000 relocation bonuses, leaving operations short-staffed. Rather than build new STARS servers in Philadelphia, the FAA opted to send radar data over 130 miles of commercial copper telephone lines.

The remote feeds have experienced approximately 10 minutes of downtime over 10 months -- exceeding the agency's reliability standards and occurring 200 times more frequently than the FAA's internal analysis predicted. The agency simultaneously laid off over 100 maintenance technicians and telecommunications specialists in February, further straining an air traffic control system that suffers around 700 outages weekly nationwide while managing 16.8 million annual flights with 1990s-era technology.

Around the world fungal infections kill an estimated 2.5 million people a year, notes a report from CNN. But new research predicts that certain species of infection-causing Aspergillus fungi could spread into new areas as the earth's temperature rises. ("The study, published this month, is currently being peer reviewed...") Aspergillus fungi grow like small filaments in soils all over the world. Like almost all fungi, they release huge numbers of tiny spores that spread through the air. Humans inhale spores every day but most people won't experience any health issues; their immune system clears them. It's a different story for those with lung conditions including asthma, cystic fibrosis and COPD, as well as people with compromised immune systems, such as cancer and organ transplant patients, and those who have had severe flu or Covid-19. If the body's immune system fails to clear the spores, the fungus "starts to grow and basically kind of eat you from the inside out, saying it really bluntly," said Norman van Rijn, one of the study's authors and a climate change and infectious diseases researcher at the University of Manchester. Aspergillosis has very high mortality rates at around 20% to 40%, he said. It's also very difficult to diagnose, as doctors don't always have it on their radar and patients often present with fevers and coughs, symptoms common to many illnesses. Fungal pathogens are also becoming increasingly resistant to treatment, van Rijn added. There are only four classes of antifungal medicines available...

Aspergillus flavus, a species that tends to prefer hotter, tropical climates, could increase its spread by 16% if humans continue burning large amounts of fossil fuels, the study found... [Mainly in parts of Europe and the northernmost edges of Scandinavia, Russia, China, and Canada, and the western edge of Alaska.] This species can cause severe infections in humans and is resistant to many antifungal medications. It also infects a range of food crops, posing a potential threat to food security. The World Health Organization added Aspergillus flavus to its critical group of fungal pathogens in 2022 because of its public health impact and antifungal resistance risk...

Conversely, temperatures in some regions, including sub-Saharan Africa, could become so hot they are no longer hospitable to Aspergillus fungi. This could bring its own problems, as fungi play an important role in ecosystems, including healthy soils. As well as expanding their growing range, a warming world could also be increasing fungi's temperature tolerance, allowing them to better survive inside human bodies. Extreme weather events such as drought, floods and heatwaves can affect fungi, too, helping to spread spores over long distances.
Thanks to Slashdot reader quonset for sharing the article.

A year ago, the original creator of SerenityOS posted that "for the past two years, I've been almost entirely focused on Ladybird, a new web browser that started as a simple HTML viewer for SerenityOS." So it became a stand-alone project that "aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security." And they're also building a new web engine.

"We are building a brand-new browser from scratch, backed by a non-profit..." says Ladybird's official web site, adding that they're driven "by a web standards first approach." They promise it will be truly independent, with "no code from other browsers" (and no "default search engine" deals).

"We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version on Linux and macOS. This will be aimed at developers and early adopters." More from the Ladybird FAQ: We currently have 7 paid full-time engineers working on Ladybird. There is also a large community of volunteer contributors... The focus of the Ladybird project is to build a new browser engine from the ground up. We don't use code from Blink, WebKit, Gecko, or any other browser engine...

For historical reasons, the browser uses various libraries from the SerenityOS project, which has a strong culture of writing everything from scratch. Now that Ladybird has forked from SerenityOS, it is no longer bound by this culture, and we will be making use of 3rd party libraries for common functionality (e.g image/audio/video formats, encryption, graphics, etc.) We are already using some of the same 3rd party libraries that other browsers use, but we will never adopt another browser engine instead of building our own...

We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment. We would like to do Windows eventually, but it's not a priority at the moment.
"Ladybird's founder Andreas Kling has a solid background in WebKit-based C++ development with both Apple and Nokia,," writes software developer/author David Eastman: "You are likely reading this on a browser that is slightly faster because of my work," he wrote on his blog's introduction page. After leaving Apple, clearly burnt out, Kling found himself in need of something to healthily occupy his time. He could have chosen to learn needlepoint, but instead he opted to build his own operating system, called Serenity. Ladybird is a web project spin-off from this, to which Kling now devotes his time...

[B]eyond the extensive open source politics, the main reason for supporting other independent browser projects is to maintain diverse alternatives — to prevent the web platform from being entirely captured by one company. This is where Ladybird comes in. It doesn't have any commercial foundation and it doesn't seem to be waiting to grab a commercial opportunity. It has a range of sponsors, some of which might be strategic (for example, Shopify), but most are goodwill or alignment-led. If you sponsor Ladybird, it will put your logo on its webpage and say thank you. That's it. This might seem uncontroversial, but other nonprofit organisations also give board seats to high-paying sponsors. Ladybird explicitly refuses to do this...

The Acid3 Browser test (which has nothing whatsoever to do with ACID compliance in databases) is an old method of checking compliance with web standards, but vendors can still check how their products do against a battery of tests. They check compliance for the DOM2, CSS3, HTML4 and the other standards that make sure that webpages work in a predictable way. If I point my Chrome browser on my MacBook to http://acid3.acidtests.org/, it gets 94/100. Safari does a bit better, getting to 97/100. Ladybird reportedly passes all 100 tests.
"All the code is hosted on GitHub," says the Ladybird home page. "Clone it, build it, and join our Discord if you want to collaborate on it!"

Long-time Slashdot reader SchroedingersCat shares this article from Deadline: Prime Video will not be renewing The Wheel of Time for a fourth season according to Deadline article. The decision, which comes more than a month after the Season 3 finale was released April 17, followed lengthy deliberations. As often is the case in the current economic environment, the reasons were financial as the series is liked creatively by the streamer's executives...

The Season 3 overall performance was not strong enough compared to the show's cost for Prime Video to commit to another season and the streamer could not make it work after examining different scenarios and following discussions with lead studio Sony TV, sources said. With the cancellation possibility — and the show's passionate fanbase — in mind, the Season 3 finale was designed to offer some closure. Still, the news would be a gut punch for fans who have been praising the latest season as the series' best yet creatively... Prime Video and Sony TV will continue to back the Emmy campaign for The Wheel of Time's third season.

"Firefox's address bar just got an upgrade," Mozilla writes on their blog: Keep your original search visible

When you perform a search, your query now remains visible in the address bar instead of being replaced by the search engine's URL. Whereas before your address bar was filled with long, confusing URLs, now it's easier to refine or repeat searches... [Clicking an icon left of the address bar even pulls up a list of search-engine choices under the heading "This time search with..."]


Search your tabs, bookmarks and history using simple keywords

You can access different search modes in the address bar using simple, descriptive keywords like @bookmarks, @tabs, @history, and @actions, making it faster and easier to find exactly what you need.


Type a command, and Firefox takes care of it

You can now perform actions like "clear history," "open downloads," or "take a screenshot" just by typing into the address bar. This turns the bar into a practical productivity tool — great for users who want to stay in the flow...


Cleaner URLs with smarter security cues

We've simplified the address bar by trimming "https://" from secure sites, while clearly highlighting when a site isn't secure. This small change improves clarity without sacrificing awareness.
"The new address bar is now available in Firefox version 138," Mozilla writes, calling the new address bar faster, more intuitive "and designed to work the way you do."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: One of Microsoft's latest AI models can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena, the company claims. In a paper published in the journal Nature and an accompanying blog post this week, Microsoft detailed Aurora, which the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological approaches. Aurora, which has been trained on more than a million hours of data from satellites, radar and weather stations, simulations, and forecasts, can be fine-tuned with additional data to make predictions for particular weather events.

AI weather models are nothing new. Google DeepMind has released a handful over the past several years, including WeatherNext, which the lab claims beats some of the world's best forecasting systems. Microsoft is positioning Aurora as one of the field's top performers -- and a potential boon for labs studying weather science. In experiments, Aurora predicted Typhoon Doksuri's landfall in the Philippines four days in advance of the actual event, beating some expert predictions, Microsoft says. The model also bested the National Hurricane Center in forecasting five-day tropical cyclone tracks for the 2022-2023 season, and successfully predicted the 2022 Iraq sandstorm.

While Aurora required substantial computing infrastructure to train, Microsoft says the model is highly efficient to run. It generates forecasts in seconds compared to the hours traditional systems take using supercomputer hardware. Microsoft, which has made the source code and model weights publicly available, says that it's incorporating Aurora's AI modeling into its MSN Weather app via a specialized version of the model that produces hourly forecasts, including for clouds.

In early 2025, U.S. solar power production jumped 44% compared to the previous year, driven by end-of-year construction to capture tax incentives and long-term cost advantages. "The bad news is that, in contrast to China, solar's growth hasn't been enough to offset rising demand," notes Ars Technica. "Instead, the US also saw significant growth in coal use, which rose by 23 percent compared to the year prior, after years of steady decline." From the report: Short-term fluctuations in demand are normal, generally driven by weather-induced demand for heating or cooling. Despite those changes, demand for electricity in the US has been largely flat for over a decade, largely thanks to gains in efficiency. But 2024 saw demand go up by nearly 3 percent, and the first quarter of 2025 saw another rise, this time of nearly 5 percent. It's a bit too early to say that we're seeing a shift to a period of rising demand, but one has been predicted for some time due to rising data center use and the increased electrification of transportation and appliances.

Under those circumstances, the rest of the difference will be made up for with fossil fuels. Running counter to recent trends, the use of natural gas dropped during the first three months of 2025. This means that the use of coal rose nearly as quickly as demand, up by 23 percent compared to the same time period in 2024. Despite the rise in coal use, the fraction of carbon-free electricity held steady year over year, with wind/solar/hydro/nuclear accounting for 43 percent of all power put on the US grid. That occurred despite small drops in nuclear and hydro production.