An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere rose to record highs in 2025, locking in climate impacts that will persist for centuries, the United Nations said on Tuesday. Levels of the three main greenhouse gases -- the climate-warming carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide -- all rose to unprecedented figures in 2025, the U.N.'s weather and climate agency said. The World Meteorological Organization said the rise would lead to more long-term temperature increases for the planet.

The bulletin looks at greenhouse gas concentrations -- the amount of those gases in the atmosphere -- rather than new annual emissions amounts as the world burns more coal, oil and gas. In 2025, carbon dioxide concentrations were at 426.8 parts per million (ppm); methane at 1,948 parts per billion, and nitrous oxide at 339.1 parts per billion. That takes them, respectively, to 153%, 267% and 126% of the pre-industrial levels witnessed before 1750. Of the three major greenhouse gases, CO2 accounts for about 66% of the warming effect on the climate.

Around half of the total CO2 emitted each year remains in the atmosphere; the rest is absorbed by the land and oceans. From 2024 to 2025, the global average concentration of CO2 rose by 2.8 ppm -- smaller than the record surge from 2023 to 2024 of 3.6 ppm. WMO senior scientific officer Oksana Tarasova said this reflected the "recovery of the land carbon sinks and reduced fire carbon emissions in 2025 after the strong 2023/2024 El Nino," the naturally occurring, climate-warming weather phenomenon. "However, a 2.8 ppm annual increase is still a substantial addition of carbon to the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning." It is also above the average growth rate for the past decade of 2.6 ppm -- a figure that stood at 0.8 ppm in the 1960s. "Another year, another new record," said WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett. "Greenhouse gases are trapping an unprecedented amount of heat in the atmosphere, providing energy for more extreme weather and associated risks to our economies and societies.

Further reading: UN Says Breaching 1.5C Warming Limit Is 'Imminent and Unavoidable'

Intel, Oracle, IBM and IonQ have joined a growing list of companies objecting to having tokenized versions of their shares traded through OKX and Intercontinental Exchange's blockchain venture, bringing the total number of objections to 26. About 37% of the companies on OKXICE's original list have now opted out, according to CoinDesk. From the report: The four companies were named in an updated public notice (PDF) dated Monday, Oct. 26, from OKXICE, the two firms' joint venture. They join earlier objectors including Microsoft, Alphabet, Goldman Sachs, Cisco and Wells Fargo. The growing list underscores a hurdle for OKXICE and the SEC's new framework for tokenized stock trading: building a market that issuers are willing to join. The agency's five-year "Innovation Exemption" gives qualifying venues room to test round-the-clock blockchain-based trading of stocks, and it also gives public companies an option to block their shares from being offered.

OKXICE issued its initial public notice on Oct. 4, outlining plans to use Uniswap v4 liquidity pools on OKX's XLayer blockchain, with transactions settled in stablecoins. The venue would use automated market makers -- software that executes trades through pools of assets rather than matching buyers and sellers through a conventional order book. Under the framework, venues must notify issuers and give them 30 days to object before offering tokenized versions of their shares.

Longtime Slashdot reader fadethepolice writes: Anduril, arguing that its manufacturing capabilities are directly applicable to laptop manufacturing, is starting a project for a fully 100% U.S.-sourced laptop. The computer will use a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. I did not see any information about the OS, but I'm assuming that, given the type of processor, this will be Linux-based? "Other companies might design their computers in the U.S., Anduril makes them here,â the Anduril founder Palmer Luckey said in a YouTube video. "We're making parts out of metals that the U.S. knows how to extract, knows how to refine, knows how to process, and knows how to mill at scale at a reasonable price; and that goes for the entire laptop. The same thing goes for the battery technology."

The project, called BlueChip, "will take a phased approach, beginning with expanding domestic sourcing and manufacturing, progressing toward eliminating reliance on foreign suppliers, and ultimately establishing an end-to-end American supply chain." The first device is expected in April 2027.

A press release with additional information is available here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: A Florida man who was the subject of a 2019 investigation by ProPublica was indicted last month on federal charges that he defrauded clients of his ransomware data recovery firm. According to the Justice Department, the man, Zohar Pinhasi, told customers he could recover their encrypted files without having to pay hackers, when, in reality, he paid the ransom and charged victims a hefty fee on top. The indictment mirrors the findings from ProPublica's 2019 article "The Trade Secret," which centered on Pinhasi and his scheme.

The outlet found that the ransomware victims were being harmed twice: once by the hackers, who locked their targets' files and demanded ransom, and a second time by MonsterCloud, Pinhasi's Florida-based data recovery firm, which misled its clients about not paying ransoms. "By falsely claiming to decrypt ransomware without paying off the ransomers, the defendant re-victimized his clients while extracting a hefty profit for himself," U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said in an Oct. 7 press release. "Our Office will vigorously prosecute ransomware attackers who prey on Americans from across the world and those who cynically profit from their criminal activity." [...] Pinhasi, who went by the alias Zack Green, told ProPublica in 2019 that MonsterCloud never promised clients that their data will be recovered by any particular method. "How we do it, it's our problem," he told ProPublica. "You will get your data back. Sit back, relax and enjoy the ride." He called MonsterCloud's data recovery methods a "trade secret."

[...] Federal investigators found that, over the course of the scheme, Pinhasi allegedly charged clients more than $19 million and paid more than $8 million in ransom payments. In one example, Pinhasi made a ransom payment of about $8,200 but charged the client about $150,000. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison. [...] In 2019, Pinhasi touted MonsterCloud's ties to law enforcement as evidence of its integrity. Pistole, who also headed the Transportation Security Administration under President Barack Obama, was listed on MonsterCloud's website as the only member of its "Cyber Security Advisory Council."

Denmark's Ministry of Digitization reportedly abandoned a pilot to replace Microsoft Office with the open-source Collabora suite less than six months after it began. Tom's Hardware reports: According to Danish publication Computerworld, the pilot project was launched in 2025 and involved 38 employees, all of whom would start using the British open-source Collabora office suite instead of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The experiment was initiated by the then Digitization Minister Caroline Stage, who wanted to reduce the country's dependence on American technology. Denmark isn't alone in moving away from U.S. software, with France and the Netherlands both taking steps to replace Microsoft Windows. However, it seemed that the experiment fizzled out less than six months after it started. It had reportedly ended by the time the Danish government called for an early election in February 2026, with some employees complaining about issues with style, paragraph formatting, blank pages, and challenges with tracking changes.

But even though it's been months since the experiment reportedly ended, Prof. Mikkel Flyberbom of the Copenhagen Business School complains that the project hasn't been properly evaluated. "It's a good idea to test alternatives in a pilot project," the professor said in an email. "However, I wish that the ministry would take the opportunity to learn from the pilot project and share those experiences with other parts of the public sector."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The U.S. designated helium as a critical material on Friday because it's indispensable for making semiconductors that are essential to energy generation, and the global supply is at risk of disruption, according to the Energy Department. The designation by the Energy Department means that more federal financing will be available for helium producers and that the government will monitor it more closely. Helium is primarily produced as a byproduct of natural gas processing. The United States is the world's largest producer of natural gas and of helium. Qatar and Russia are the other top helium producers.

[...] Helium makes balloons rise, but that's not why the DOE is interested in it. Helium plays an important role in wind, solar and nuclear energy production, space exploration, medical imaging and research. Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson said helium's unique properties make it irreplaceable, such as the fact that it's non-combustible and has the lowest boiling point of any gas. The nation needs an ample supply for semiconductors, quantum and super computing, and superconducting magnets, added Robertson, who oversees the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation.

[...] Despite environmental concerns with recovering helium from natural gas, there are also opportunities, said Greeshma Gadikota, director of the Lenfast Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University. "If we burn the natural gas, there are a lot of CO2 emissions associated with that," Gadikota said. "But if you just extract the helium and use it, the uses of it don't contribute necessarily to greenhouse gas emissions. "So from a climate standpoint, if we are going to continue down the line of extracting natural gas and recovering helium," she added, "I would prefer to see natural gas being used in a form where we directly produce hydrogen and we produce solid carbon." Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel, and solid carbon can provide permanent carbon sequestration and can be used widely in industrial applications, including rubber and pigments.

Mozilla launched a new ad campaign for Firefox that leverages early internet nostalgia in a bid to win back users who switched browsers. "Today's internet tracks you, interrupts you, and asks for permissions it already took. But it wasn't always that way, and it's not how it's supposed to work," writes Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo in a post on LinkedIn. "It's how a few companies decided it should work, because it pays."

"We're making a different bet at Firefox. Remember us? Well, we're still here, and we don't think the internet should be like this..." The ad features viral internet stars from yesteryear, including Tay Zonday of "Chocolate Rain" fame, Gary Brolsma of "Numa Numa", Noah Ritter, better known as the "Apparently Kid", and Laina Morris, the face of the "Overly Attached Girlfriend" meme, among others.

Instagram is testing a new longform, horizontal video format called "Features" as it pushes further into YouTube territory and expands its presence on TVs. The Verge reports: Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has been against doing longform video on the platform "for a long time," he says in a six-and-a-half-minute video (here's the widescreen version) with VP of product Tessa Lyons, saying that "one of my concerns has been, how do we make sure that we keep Instagram not just about entertainment, but about connecting with friends." If you watch a longform video, "it's a lot of Reels, photos, and carousels that you might not have sent to a friend," meaning less likes and shares. Now, though, the team is working on making shortform and longform video "symbiotic," according to Mosseri, like podcasts or comedy specials that can be both long videos and broken up into shorter ones.

The announcement of this widescreen video push also follows the launch of Instagram's TV app late last year. That app launched first as a Reels-focused experience and as a pilot for Amazon Fire TV devices in the US, but it's since expanded to Google TVs, Samsung TVs and Apple TV, and Instagram launched new features like the ability to watch Stories earlier this year.

Brazil's 80-year-old president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was re-elected Sunday, reports the Guardian, "defeating his far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, to claim a historic fourth term in power."

And the results could impact the climate, suggests the Associated Press, since under da Silva the annual deforestation rate in the Amazon fell to its lowest level since records began in 1988: Official satellite data showed the rainforest lost 3,335 square kilometers (1,300 square miles) from Aug. 2025 through July 2026, the period used to calculate the annual rate...

During Jair Bolsonaro's presidency, from 2019 to 2022, Amazon deforestation surged by about 60%, with more than 45,000 square kilometers (17,400 square miles) cleared, according to official data. Under Lula, deforestation has fallen 71% since 2023, the government said. One of Lula's first moves after taking office in January 2023 for a third, non-consecutive term was to revive the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon, known by its Portuguese acronym, PPCDAm. Launched in 2004 during his first administration, the plan had been shelved under Bolsonaro....

The plan has four pillars: strengthening monitoring and enforcement; promoting a sustainable economy; managing protected areas and determining how undesignated public forests should be used; and using regulations and financial incentives to curb deforestation. Measures included restoring sanctions for illegal forest clearing detected by satellites, a practice seen as the most effective tool to curb deforestation that was halted under Bolsonaro. The government also proposed barring properties with illegal deforestation from receiving bank loans and allocated more funding to priority Amazon municipalities that demonstrated reductions in forest loss. It also funded efforts to fight environmental crime and develop subsidized credit for sustainable businesses in the Amazon...

Deforestation and other land-use changes are Brazil's largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, which drive global warming. The stakes are especially high in the Amazon, which stores vast amounts of carbon dioxide and generates atmospheric moisture that helps regulate weather far beyond South America... Degradation from wildfires, logging and drought affects about 40% of the Amazon and has outpaced clear-cutting in recent years. A strong El Niño, a periodic warming of the equatorial Pacific, could intensify those threats in 2026 and 2027 by bringing hotter, drier conditions that fuel wildfires.
The article notes that Lula's reelection campaign promised zero net deforestation by 2030, plus restoration to offset all forest loss, legal or illegal.

The problem? Understanding how AI coding agents interact with the software you build. "Whether you're maintaining an SDK, building a command-line interface, or publishing an MCP server or skills... you need to understand whether agents can discover and use what you ship, and what your team can change."

Results can vary, and configurations keep changing, with behaviors influenced by everything from custom instructions and MCP servers to skills and plugins. So after a year of development Microsoft has created Scope, "an open-source platform built on Kubernetes for turning those interactions into evidence product teams can act on."

Details are available on... the Microsoft open source blog: Available under the MIT License, Scope supports a continuous Developer Agent Experience (DevAx) learning loop grounded in repeatable experiments.

The Azure Cosmos DB team's experience shows what that loop can deliver... "The evaluations led to 20 Agent Kit issues and 27 documentation issues resolved," [says Jay Gordon, Senior Program Manager, Azure Cosmos DB]... These results connect evaluation to decisions a product team can make: which documentation needs clarification, where tooling needs a fix, and whether an update changes agent behavior.... [The gains] demonstrate how targeted changes, informed by observed behavior, can improve the way agents use a product.

For more on the shift from building for human developers to supporting agents, watch Your Product Was Built for Humans. Is It Ready for Agents? or join us at AI DevCon NYC conference in November.
Scope surfaces everything from incorrect assumptions in documentation (or recurring missed instructions) to whether agents select the intended SDK, initialize it correctly, and use its APIs, leading to clearer descriptions for command-line tool and more actionable errors.

Microsoft's open source blog also explains why AI agent evaluation needs an open-source foundation: The challenges behind agent experience aren't unique to one product or organization. SDK maintainers, tool authors, researchers, and agent developers are all asking how agents behave and what helps them succeed. No single team can represent every language, workflow, or integration. An open project can bring more scenarios, more failure cases, and more viewpoints into the evaluation process... Opening Scope's execution and evaluation code gives contributors a way to question the methods, investigate unexpected results, and improve the evaluation itself. A shared foundation also reduces duplicated infrastructure. Agent integrations, reusable criteria, and trace-analysis improvements can help other teams study their own products without rebuilding the same machinery. The goal isn't one universal benchmark or definition of success. It's a common starting point that teams can adapt to their needs.

The MIT License lets teams use and extend Scope, while self-managed deployments let them evaluate private workloads without publishing their code or run data.... Scope streams activity as the agent works and retains interactions and workspace snapshots for later review. Your team can follow tool calls, inspect generated files, and connect a failed requirement to the steps that preceded it. Those traces provide observable evidence of what the agent did, helping turn a failure into a concrete documentation, SDK, or tooling improvement.

"59% of maintainers report growing contribution volume since the rise of GenAI," according to a new study published by Linux Foundation Research. But 25% of their incoming pull requests "are estimated to be low-quality, also known as 'AI slop'." And on large projects, 69% see growing contributions — and estimate that 31% are low-quality/AI slop.

So what do these results show us? "Generative AI is fundamentally changing how people participate in open source," says the head of Open Source Ecosystem Development at Huawei's R&D subsidiary Futurewei, which helped support the study. Specifically GenAI is "lowering barriers to contribution" but also "creating new challenges" for maintainers and communities. Their recommendation? "Build the governance, transparency and trust mechanisms that allow AI-assisted contributions to strengthen, but not overwhelm, the open source ecosystem."

"Open source projects need to design for a growing AI-generated contributor base, not simply react to it," said Hilary Carter, SVP of Research at the Linux Foundation. "That means setting clear expectations for GenAI, putting responsibility for testing and disclosure on contributors and giving maintainers better tools to manage incoming pull requests. If we get those fundamentals right, AI can expand participation without overburdening and increasing costs for maintainers."

More from the blog It's FOSS: LF Research is the Linux Foundation's research arm. It was set up in 2021 and publishes studies on how open source is built and used, drawing on surveys and project data. Its latest report, Navigating Open Source Software Development in the Generative AI Era, surveyed 234 contributors and maintainers on how generative AI is affecting the way open source gets made...

64% say reviews now take longer. Burnout is their top concern at 63%, narrowly ahead of contribution quality at 60%.

You will also find that policies have not caught up to the AI-assisted coding and vulnerability reporting trend. Of the 119 respondents who answered the question, 35% said their project has a formal policy permitting AI use. Another 32% have none and no plans for one, 23% plan to write one, and 10% ban AI contributions outright....

Most maintainers (71%) say AI makes it easier for newcomers to start contributing.
Other interesting findings:

• "Respondents estimate average time reductions across all six OSS development activities measured, including proposal discussions (19%) and code authoring (52%). For high-complexity tasks, however, 21% of respondents report taking more time when using GenAI."

• "71% of maintainers agree GenAI reduces barriers to entry for OSS, but 53% of maintainers disagree that GenAI has improved community trust."

• Developers are reinvesting the time they save back into open source: 66% report using productivity gains to address technical debt, 63% to develop new features and 58% for learning and upskilling.

• Continued investment in human mentorship remains important: 46% of maintainers say GenAI increases the need for mentorship of new contributors, compared with 32% who say it decreases that need.

OpenSSF and LF AI & Data also helped support the study.

From the student newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley: Richard Borcherds, a UC Berkeley professor and Fields medalist, no longer grades his students' homework. After seeing how many of his students used AI to consistently receive top scores, he felt there was "no point" in paying readers to grade for correctness in homework, as AI use is now unavoidable.

Borcherds revealed this in a sit-down interview Tuesday, following OpenAI's announcement that AI agents apparently solved one of mathematics' most difficult unsolved problems, the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. "If AI continues to improve at present rate, then, in a few years, there'll be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can't do better," Borcherds said.

Borcherds said he currently grades on completion if a student hands in their homework. He admitted that it is "not a very good system," but at the moment, he has no alternative... Campus has tried several AI detection tools, including Turnitin and Rumi, but have determined that these tools aren't adequate enough to be standardized on campus.
The article points out that at the university, each class's AI policy "is up to the discretion of faculty."

BeamFS creator Aurelien Desbrieres is not calling for a merge, but is requesting feedback on an 18-patch proposal that takes the place of FTRFS, an earlier filesystem he proposed in April.

The Linux/Open Source blog It's FOSS reports: Filesystems that can repair damage, like Btrfs and ZFS, usually do it by falling back on a spare copy of the data. BeamFS skips that and stores Reed-Solomon error-correcting codes inside every block. Every read gets checked against those codes, and small amounts of damage are corrected before the data reaches the application. If the filesystem can tell the damage is beyond repair, the read fails with an error instead of returning the wrong bytes...

In his technical report, ext4 and ext3 returned wrong data without any error, while Btrfs refused to read the file. BeamFS returned the correct file every time except once, when a flip hit a pointer to the file's data and it refused the read.
"Aurelien says he used Anthropic's Claude to write the code, the tool that checks the patches, and the cover letter..."

The Free Software Foundation's "EncryptFest" today covers both encryption and privacy. The free two-hour event runs from 13:00-15:00 Eastern Daylight Time (17:00-19:00 UTC), and includes:

— A discussion on "bulk surveillance, and how encryption protects personal privacy"

— A short video from renowned cryptographer Bruce Schneier.

— A discussion with Henry Fisher, the founder of Techlore and a digital rights activist

— A hands-on workshop on how you can encrypt your email using the FSF's Email Self-Defense guide "as a concrete step to enhance your data privacy"

You may join us virtually, or if you are in Boston, Massachusetts, United States (the FSF's home base), you can join us in-person at the Boston Public Library's Copley Square branch. You may also join us in-person at MakeHaven in New Haven, Connecticut, US, and meet our deputy director Sean O'Brien. Whether attending our event online or in-person, please register. It will help us plan ahead and enable us to contact you about other important details before the workshop, like what to expect and what to bring...

Bulk surveillance violates our fundamental rights and makes free speech dangerous. Email encryption is an excellent tool you can use to shield yourself from bulk surveillance. Encrypting your email is also a concrete step towards protecting your data from others whose intentions may not be honorable.

America's Defense Department "has spent months quietly building an elite new tech agency," reports Politico, "to help covertly disrupt and sabotage foreign technology programs considered threats to American military superiority." Information on the Technology Support Office, or TSO as it is called internally, is nearly impossible to find on Pentagon websites, and the agency is mentioned by name only in several previously unreported Defense Department historical records and memoranda. While the specifics of its work are highly classified, POLITICO spoke with 12 current and former U.S. national security officials with varying degrees of knowledge about TSO to understand how the agency came to be, the broad contours of its mission and why its operations are shrouded in secrecy...

[The Pentagon's Defense Secretary and Deputy Defense Secretary] established TSO quickly and without attracting outside scrutiny because they largely built the agency by reorganizing two classified Pentagon intelligence programs that have conducted similar clandestine tech-sabotage efforts at a smaller scale since 2023. But by creating an agency dedicated to expanding that work, the Defense Department is signaling its intent to ramp up a range of aggressive covert activities abroad — potentially including cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions and disinformation operations. Many of the people who spoke to POLITICO argued that the aggressive new initiative is needed to help the Pentagon counter foreign adversaries they say are harnessing artificial intelligence and advanced commercial technologies, such as drones, in creative ways that could erode America's military advantage...

While TSO lacks the legal authority to conduct clandestine operations directly, it works closely with senior U.S. military and intelligence officers to develop cutting-edge tools and strategies to disrupt adversaries' access to critical defense technologies — or subvert them from afar. TSO is staffed with engineers, special operators and intelligence officers, and its work spans everything from building bespoke hacking tools to planning elaborate deception operations that trick adversaries into installing faulty components — likely designed by TSO — in key foreign weapons platforms. TSO's overarching goal is to "buy time or stop adversaries from developing technologies" that would most threaten the U.S. military in a major conflict, said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked closely with the agency... A second former Pentagon official and a former U.S. national security official said the agency has told some defense contractors it's interested in offensive hacking capabilities. The former senior Pentagon intelligence official estimated that its budget for classified contracts alone is likely north of $1.5 billion.

They are seeking contractors on "the leading edge of technology," that official said, and hope to procure "a whole host of tools wherever your imagination can go."
Pentagon staff had been exploring the need for a new agency for over a year, the article explains. Creating a new agency with its own budget and procurement powers "would empower the agency to more quickly integrate cutting-edge tech from the private sector," Pentagon staff concluded, "and think more strategically about which foreign defense technologies pose the biggest threats across U.S. military organizations."

"Several people who spoke to POLITICO support TSO's mission but worry that the secrecy surrounding its work could embolden current Pentagon leadership to carry out missions that flout international law or funnel coveted classified contracts to political allies."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.