NextEra Energy and Google have partnered to restart Iowa's long-shuttered Duane Arnold nuclear plant, marking the first major U.S. attempt to revive a decommissioned reactor. "We expect Duane Arnold to be back online in early 2029, and the plant will provide more than 600 MW of clean, safe, 'always-on' nuclear energy to the regional grid," said Google in a blog post. Reuters reports: Under the 25-year agreement, the tech giant will purchase power from the 615-MW plant for its growing cloud and AI infrastructure in the state, while also driving significant economic investment to the Midwest region. One of the plant's minority owners, Central Iowa Power Cooperative (CIPCO), will purchase the remaining portion of the plant's output on the same terms as Google, NextEra said. The utility added that it had also signed agreements to acquire CIPCO and Corn Belt Power Cooperative's combined 30% interest in the Duane Arnold plant, bringing NextEra's ownership to 100%.

A new study from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna finds that as people's close social circles expanded from two to five friends around the rise of social media (2008-2010), polarization in society spiked. "The connection between these two developments could provide a fundamental explanation for why societies around the world are increasingly fragmenting into ideological bubbles," reports Phys.org. From the report: The researchers' findings confirm that increasing polarization is not merely perceived -- it is measurable and objectively occurring. "And this increase happened suddenly, between 2008 and 2010," says [says Stefan Thurner from the Complexity Science Hub (CSH)]. The question remained: what caused it? [...] The sharp rise in both polarization and the number of close friends occurred between 2008 and 2010 -- precisely when social media platforms and smartphones first achieved widespread adoption. This technological shift may have fundamentally changed how people connect with each other, indirectly promoting polarization.

"Democracy depends on all parts of society being involved in decision-making, which requires that everyone be able to communicate with each other. But when groups can no longer talk to each other, this democratic process breaks down," emphasizes Stefan Thurner. Tolerance plays a central role. "If I have two friends, I do everything I can to keep them -- I am very tolerant towards them. But if I have five and things become difficult with one of them, it's easier to end that friendship because I still have 'backups.' I no longer need to be as tolerant," explains Thurner.

What disappears as a result is a societal baseline of tolerance -- a development that could contribute to the long-term erosion of democratic structures. To prevent societies from increasingly fragmenting, Thurner emphasizes the importance of learning early how to engage with different opinions and actively cultivating tolerance. The research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Mozilla is testing a new Firefox feature that delivers direct results inside the address bar instead of forcing users through a search results page. The company says the feature will use a privacy framework called Oblivious HTTP, encrypting queries so that no single party can see both what you type and who you are. Some results could be sponsored, but Mozilla insists neither it nor advertisers will know user identities. The system is starting in the U.S. and may expand later if performance and privacy benchmarks are met. Further reading: Mozilla to Require Data-Collection Disclosure in All New Firefox Extensions

"Mozilla is introducing a new privacy framework for Firefox extensions that will require developers to disclose whether their add-ons collect or transmit user data..." reports the blog Linuxiac: The policy takes effect on November 3, 2025, and applies to all new Firefox extensions submitted to addons.mozilla.org. According to Mozilla's announcement, extension developers must now include a new key in their manifest.json files. This key specifies whether an extension gathers any personal data. Even extensions that collect nothing must explicitly state "none" in this field to confirm that no data is being collected or shared.

This information will be visible to users at multiple points: during the installation prompt, on the extension's listing page on addons.mozilla.org, and in the Permissions and Data section of Firefox's about:addons page. In practice, this means users will be able to see at a glance whether a new extension collects any data before they install it.

Slashdot reader joshuark writes: Microsoft says that the File Explorer (formerly Windows Explorer) now automatically blocks previews for files downloaded from the Internet to block credential theft attacks via malicious documents, according to a report from BleepingComputer. This attack vector is particularly concerning because it requires no user interaction beyond selecting a file to preview and removes the need to trick a target into actually opening or executing it on their system.

For most users, no action is required since the protection is enabled automatically with the October 2025 security update, and existing workflows remain unaffected unless you regularly preview downloaded files.

"This change is designed to enhance security by preventing a vulnerability that could leak NTLM hashes when users preview potentially unsafe files," Microsoft says in a support document published Wednesday.

It is important to note that this may not take effect immediately and could require signing out and signing back in.

GM plans to dump Apple CarPlay and Android Auto on all its car new vehicles "in the near future," reports the Verge.

In an episode of the Verge's Decoder podcast, GM CEO Mary Barra confirmed the upcoming change to "phone projections" for GM cars: The timing is unclear, but Barra pointed to a major rollout of what the company is calling a new centralized computing platform, set to launch in 2028, that will involve eventually transitioning its entire lineup to a unified in-car experience.

In place of phone projection, GM is working to update its current Android-powered infotainment implementation with a Google Gemini-powered assistant and an assortment of other custom apps, built both in-house and with partners. GM's 2023 decision to drop CarPlay and Android Auto support in its EVs has proved controversial, though for now GM has maintained support for phone projection in its gas-powered vehicles.

Reason.com explores the fortunes of Aurora Innovation, the first company to put heavy-duty commercial self-driving trucks on public roads (and hopes to expand routes to El Paso, Texas, and Phoenix by the end of the year): An obscure federal rule is slowing the self-driving revolution. When trucks break down, operators are required to place reflective warning cones and road flares around the truck to warn other motorists. The regulations areexacting: Within 10 minutes of stopping, three warning signals must be set in specific locations around the truck. Auroraaskedthe federal Department of Transportation (DOT) to allow warning beacons to be fixed to the truck itself — and activated when a truck becomes disabled. The warning beacons would face both forward and backward, would be more visibleâthan cones (particularly at night), and wouldn't burn out like road flares. Drivers of nonautonomous vehicles could also benefit from that rule change, as they would no longer have to walk into traffic to place the required safety signals.

In December 2024, however, the Transportation Department denied Aurora's request for an exemption to the existing rules, even though regulatorsadmittedin theFederal Registerthat no evidence indicated the truck-mounted beacons would be less safe. Such a study is now underway, but it's unclear how long it will take to draw any conclusions.
The article notes that Aurora has now filed a lawsuit in federal court that seeks to overturn the Transportation Department's denial...

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

Critics question why basic flaws like buffer overflows, command injections, and SQL injections are "being exploited remain prevalent in mission-critical codebases maintained by companies whose core business is cybersecurity," writes CSO Online. Benjamin Harris, CEO of cybersecurity/penetration testing firm watchTowr tells them that "these are vulnerability classes from the 1990s, and security controls to prevent or identify them have existed for a long time. There is really no excuse." Enterprises have long relied on firewalls, routers, VPN servers, and email gateways to protect their networks from attacks. Increasingly, however, these network edge devices are becoming security liabilities themselves... Google's Threat Intelligence Group tracked 75 exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in 2024. Nearly one in three targeted network and security appliances, a strikingly high rate given the range of IT systems attackers could choose to exploit. That trend has continued this year, with similar numbers in the first 10 months of 2025, targeting vendors such as Citrix NetScaler, Ivanti, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, SonicWall, and Juniper. Network edge devices are attractive targets because they are remotely accessible, fall outside endpoint protection monitoring, contain privileged credentials for lateral movement, and are not integrated into centralized logging solutions...

[R]esearchers have reported vulnerabilities in these systems for over a decade with little attacker interest beyond isolated incidents. That shifted over the past few years with a rapid surge in attacks, making compromised network edge devices one of the top initial access vectors into enterprise networks for state-affiliated cyberespionage groups and ransomware gangs. The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to this shift, as organizations rapidly expanded remote access capabilities by deploying more VPN gateways, firewalls, and secure web and email gateways to accommodate work-from-home mandates. The declining success rate of phishing is another factor... "It is now easier to find a 1990s-tier vulnerability in a border device where Endpoint Detection and Response typically isn't deployed, exploit that, and then pivot from there" [says watchTowr CEL Harris]...

Harris of watchTowr doesn't want to minimize the engineering effort it takes to build a secure system. But he feels many of the vulnerabilities discovered in the past two years should have been caught with automatic code analysis tools or code reviews, given how basic they have been. Some VPN flaws were "trivial to the point of embarrassing for the vendor," he says, while even the complex ones should have been caught by any organization seriously investing in product security... Another problem? These appliances have a lot of legacy code, some that is 10 years or older.
Attackers may need to chain together multiple hard-to-find vulnerabilities across multiple components, the article acknowleges. And "It's also possible that attack campaigns against network-edge devices are becoming more visible to security teams because they are looking into what's happening on these appliances more than they did in the past... "

The article ends with reactions from several vendors of network edge security devices.

Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the article.

alternative_right shares a report from France 24: [Sweden's] latest contribution to the war effort is Glimt, an innovative project launched by the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) earlier this year. Glimt is an open platform that relies on the theory of "crowd forecasting": a method of making predictions based on surveying a large and diverse group of people and taking an average. "Glimt" is a Swedish word for "a glimpse" or "a sudden insight." The theory posits that the average of all collected predictions produces correct results with "uncanny accuracy," according to the Glimt website. Such "collective intelligence" is used today for everything from election results to extreme weather events, Glimt said. [...]

Group forecasting allows for a broad collection of information while avoiding the cognitive bias that often characterizes intelligence services. Each forecaster collects and analyses the available information differently to reach the most probable scenario and can add a short comment to explain their reasoning. The platform also encourages discussion between members so they can compare arguments and alter their positions. Available in Swedish, French and English, the platform currently has 20,000 registered users; each question attracts an average of 500 forecasters. Their predictions are later sent to statistical algorithms that cross-reference data, particularly the relevance of the answers they provided. The most reliable users will have a stronger influence on the results; this reinforces the reliability of collective intelligence. "We used this method and research, and we suggested to the Ukrainians that it could improve their understanding of the world and its evolution," said Ivar Ekman, an analyst for the Swedish Defence Research Agency and program director for Glimt. "If you have a large group of people, you can achieve great accuracy in assessing future events. Research has shown that professional analysts don't necessarily have a better capacity in this domain than other people."

IBM announced that its quantum error-correction algorithm can now run in real time on standard AMD field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips -- a major step toward making quantum computing more practical and affordable. Reuters reports: In June, IBM said it had developed an algorithm to run alongside quantum chips that can address such errors. In a research paper seen by Reuters to be published on Monday, IBM will show it can run those algorithms in real time on a type of chip called a field programmable gate array manufactured by AMD.

Jay Gambetta, director of IBM research, said the work showed that IBM's algorithm not only works in the real world, but can operate on a readily available AMD chip that is not "ridiculously expensive." "Implementing it, and showing that the implementation is actually 10 times faster than what is needed, is a big deal," Gambetta said in an interview. IBM has a multi-year plan to build a quantum computer called Starling by 2029. Gambetta said the algorithm work disclosed Friday was completed a year ahead of schedule.

A web browser linked to Chinese online gambling websites and downloaded millions of times routes all internet traffic through servers in China and covertly installs programs that run in the background, according to findings published by network security company Infoblox. The researchers said the Universe Browser, which advertises itself as offering privacy protection, includes features similar to malware such as key logging and surreptitious connections.

Infoblox collaborated with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime on the research. The investigators found links between the browser and Southeast Asia's cybercrime ecosystem, which has connections to money laundering, illegal online gambling, human trafficking and scam operations using forced labor. The browser is directly linked to BBIN, a major online gambling company that has existed since 1999. Infoblox researchers examined the Windows version of the browser and found that it checks users' locations and languages when launched, installs two browser extensions, and disables security features including sandboxing.

The Fedora Council has approved a new policy allowing AI-assisted code contributions, provided contributors fully disclose and take responsibility for any AI-generated work. Phoronix reports: AI-assisted code contributions can be used but the contributor must take responsibility for that contribution, it must be transparent in disclosing the use of AI such as with the "Assisted-by" tag, and that AI can help in assisting human reviewers/evaluation but must not be the sole or final arbiter. This AI policy also doesn't cover large-scale initiatives which will need to be handled individually with the Fedora Council. [...] The Fedora Council does expect that this policy will need to be updated over time for staying current with AI technologies.

An Icelandic programmer successfully ran Doom on the European Space Agency's OPS-SAT satellite, proving that the iconic 1993 shooter can now run not just everywhere on Earth -- but in orbit. ZDNet reports: Olafur Waage, a senior software developer from Iceland who now works in Norway, explained at Ubuntu Summit 25.10 how he, a self-described "professional keyboard typist" and maker of funny videos, ended up making what is perhaps the game's most outlandish port yet: Doom running on a real satellite in orbit, the European Space Agency (ESA) OPS-SAT satellite. OPS-SAT, a "flying laboratory" for testing novel onboard computing techniques, was equipped with an experimental computer approximately 10 times more powerful than the norm for spacecraft. Waag explained, "OPS-SAT was the first of its kind, devoted to demonstrating drastically improved mission control capabilities when satellites can fly more powerful onboard computers. The point was to break the curse of being too risk-averse with multi-million-dollar spacecraft." (The satellite was decommissioned in 2024.) [...]

Running Doom in orbit was partly a challenge of portability and partly a challenge of the limitations of space hardware and mission control. The on-board ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 processor, while hot stuff for space computing hardware (which tends to be low-powered and radiation-hardened), was slow even by Earth-bound standards. Waage chose Chocolate Doom 2.3, a popular open-source version of Doom, for its compatibility with the Ubuntu 18.04 Long Term Support (LTS) distro, which was already running on OPS-SAT. Besides, Waage noted, "We picked Chocolate Doom 2.3 because of the libraries available for 18.04 -- that was the last one that would actually build.

Updating software in orbit is extremely difficult, so relatively little code would have to be uploaded. As Waage said, "Doom is relatively straightforward C with a few external dependencies." In other words, it's easy to port. [...] The only sign that Doom was running in space at first was a lone log entry. So, the team used the satellite's camera to snap real-time images of the Earth, then swapped Doom's Mars skybox for actual satellite photos. "The idea was to take a screenshot from the satellite and use that as the sky, all rendered in software using the game's restricted 256-color palette," explained Waage. Even this posed unexpected difficulties: "Trying to draw all of these beautiful colors with those colors," said Waage, "it's probably not going to work right off. But we tried gradient tests, NASA demo photos. It took quite a bit of tweaking." Eventually, instead of a fantasy Mars as the sky background, they got a good-looking, real Earth in the game's sky. The game itself ran flawlessly. After all, Waage said, "It ran beautifully. It's on Ubuntu."

alternative_right shares a report from Axios: The latest must-have accessory is a "stop-scrolling bag" -- a tote packed with analog activities like watercolors and crossword puzzles. We spend hours glued to our screens. "Analog bags," as they're also called, are one way millennials and Gen Zers are reclaiming that time. "I basically just put everything I could grab for instead of my phone into a bag," including knitting, a scrapbook and a Polaroid camera, says Sierra Campbell, the content creator behind the trend.

The 31-year-old keeps one bag at home in Northern California, carrying it from room to room, and another in her car. The trend has quickly spread on social media, part of a bigger shift to unplug. Roughly 1,600 TikTok posts were tagged #AnalogLife during the first nine months of 2025 -- up over 330% from the same period last year, according to TikTok data shared with Axios. "It speaks to an incredible desperation and desire for experiences that return our attention to us, that fight brain-rotting, that are tactile ... that involve creating over scrolling," says Beth McGroarty, vice president of research at the Global Wellness Institute.

OpenAI has acquired Software Applications Incorporated, the 12-person startup behind Sky -- an AI interface for Mac computers that can understand on-screen context and perform tasks across apps. The deal follows OpenAI's recent acquisitions of Statsig and Jony Ive's io. CNBC reports: The startup's product called Sky allows users of Mac computers to prompt it with natural language to get help with writing, coding, planning and managing their days, OpenAI said in a blog post. Sky can take actions through apps and understands what's on a user's screen.

"Sky's deep integration with the Mac accelerates our vision of bringing AI directly into the tools people use every day," Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, said in a statement. Software Applications was founded in 2023, and the company unveiled Sky in May. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman contributed to the startup's $6.5 million seed funding round, according to its website.

Google and Anthropic have finalized a cloud partnership worth tens of billions of dollars, granting Anthropic access to up to one million of Google's Tensor Processing Units and more than a gigawatt of compute power by 2026. CNBC reports: Industry estimates peg the cost of a 1-gigawatt data center at around $50 billion, with roughly $35 billion of that typically allocated to chips. While competitors tout even loftier projections -- OpenAI's 33-gigawatt "Stargate" chief among them -- Anthropic's move is a quiet power play rooted in execution, not spectacle. Founded by former OpenAI researchers, the company has deliberately adopted a slower, steadier ethos, one that is efficient, diversified, and laser-focused on the enterprise market.

A key to Anthropic's infrastructure strategy is its multi-cloud architecture. The company's Claude family of language models runs across Google's TPUs, Amazon's custom Trainium chips, and Nvidia's GPUs, with each platform assigned to specialized workloads like training, inference, and research. Google said the TPUs offer Anthropic "strong price-performance and efficiency." [...] Anthropic's ability to spread workloads across vendors lets it fine-tune for price, performance, and power constraints. According to a person familiar with the company's infrastructure strategy, every dollar of compute stretches further under this model than those locked into single-vendor architectures.

SpaceX has deactivated over 2,500 Starlink terminals allegedly used by scam operations in Myanmar, where the service isn't licensed but was reportedly enabling large-scale cybercrime networks tied to human trafficking and fraud. Ars Technica reports: Lauren Dreyer, vice president of Starlink business operations, described the action in an X post last night after reports that Myanmar's military shut down a major scam operation: "SpaceX complies with local laws in all 150+ markets where Starlink is licensed to operate," Dreyer wrote. "SpaceX continually works to identify violations of our Acceptable Use Policy and applicable law... On the rare occasion we identify a violation, we take appropriate action, including working with law enforcement agencies around the world. In Myanmar, for example, SpaceX proactively identified and disabled over 2,500 Starlink Kits in the vicinity of suspected 'scam centers.'"

Starlink is not licensed to operate in Myanmar. While Dreyer didn't say how the terminals were disabled, it's known that Starlink can disable individual terminals based on their ID numbers or use geofencing to block areas from receiving signals. On Monday, Myanmar state media reported that "Myanmar's military has shut down a major online scam operation near the border with Thailand, detaining more than 2,000 people and seizing dozens of Starlink satellite Internet terminals," according to an Associated Press article. The army reportedly raided a cybercrime center known as KK Park as part of operations that began in early September. The operations reportedly targeted 260 unregistered buildings and resulted in seizure of 30 Starlink terminals and detention of 2,198 people.

"Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the spokesperson for the military government, charged in a statement Monday night that the top leaders of the Karen National Union, an armed ethnic organization opposed to army rule, were involved in the scam projects at KK Park," the AP wrote. The Karen National Union is "part of the larger armed resistance movement in Myanmar's civil war" and "deny any involvement in the scams."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: This week, a reader wrote to us sharing that the infotainment in their 2020 Audi A4 had been "rebooting every five minutes all year." It looks like the problem was caused by a compatibility issue with a SiriusXM app update. Audi tells us the situation's been rectified, but it illustrates a serious pain point in modern cars -- myriad apps interacting with a diverse population of in-car software systems. Our reader was not the only Audi owner affected. "Randomly restarting" Audi infotainment screens have been discussed on Reddit, the Audiworld forum, and elsewhere, going back many months. Audi's recall notice and related service action only went out this summer.

It looks like this particular problem was caused when the satellite radio app pushed an update that was supposed to work on the latest version of Audi's infotainment software, but not all cars were running that. Then SiriusXM reverted, which, I guess, did not solve the problem for every owner. Audi now states that the problem has been fixed and originated with the SiriusXM app, but really, the automaker bears more than a little blame, too. [...] I dropped our own contacts at Audi a note about how and why this might have happened, and they added this clarification: "At the beginning of the year, SiriusXM did a programming update which was addressed via a software update to the MMI. However, as not all customers had their cars updated and SiriusXM then reverted back to the previous category numbering. Nonetheless, a MMI update is recommended as the two versions do seem to cause the issue."

Meta is laying off about 600 employees from its AI division as part of a restructuring to streamline operations and solidify Alexandr Wang's leadership over the company's AI strategy. "Workers across Meta's AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit (FAIR) and other product-related positions will be impacted," notes CNBC. "However, the cuts did not impact employees within TBD Labs, which includes many of the top-tier AI hires brought into the social media company this summer." From the report: Those employees, overseen by Wang, were spared by the layoffs, underscoring Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's bet on his expensive hires versus the legacy employees, the people said. Within Meta, the AI unit was considered to be bloated, with teams like FAIR and more product-oriented groups often vying for computing resources, the people said. When the company's new hires joined the company to create Superintelligence Labs, it inherited the oversized Meta AI unit, they said. The layoffs are an attempt by Meta to continue trim the department and further cement Wang's role in steering the company's AI strategy. Following the cuts, Meta's Superintelligence Labs' workforce now sits at just under 3,000, the people said.

As it nears its 30th anniversary, Pitchfork is testing user reviews and comments in a major shift from its long-standing critic-only model. The site will now let readers rate albums and leave comments, combining those into an aggregated "reader score" alongside the official Pitchfork score. The Verge reports: Pitchfork has historically been a one-sided affair. While it ran the occasional reader poll, there was no way for readers to directly voice their opinion on the site. If you thought that Jet's Shine On deserved better than a 0.0 (first off, you're wrong), there was no way to let the author know other than shouting into the void of this new thing at the time called Twitter. Now the site is considering letting users comment directly on reviews and give albums scores of their own. And then those scores will be averaged up into a single reader score for each album.