GameStop shares surged over 72% on Monday after Keith Gill, also known as "Roaring Kitty," returned to social media following a three-year hiatus. Gill gained notoriety for his role in the 2020 meme stock frenzy, where he encouraged amateur investors to buy GameStop shares, significantly driving up the stock price and challenging hedge funds. From a report: He resurfaced on X, Sunday night, with an image of a sketched man leaning forward in a chair, marking the end of a roughly three-year hiatus. He followed that post with several others featuring various comeback-themed videos featuring movie clips and charged music.

GameStop had experienced declining sales amid an industrywide pivot from game cartridges to video game streaming and digital downloads, but with the help from meme stock investors, last March the company turned its first profit in two years. Before then, the company had posted seven straight quarterly losses. This January, GameStop reported its first annual profit since 2018. Roaring Kitty's post helped bump GameStop's share price to $28.25 on Monday. GameStop's all-time high stock price is $120.75 in January 2021.

Longtime Slashdot reader davidwr shares a report from Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC): On Thursday, May 9, 2024, the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center issued a Severe (G4) Geomagnetic Storm Watch. At least five earth-directed coronal mass ejections (CMEs) were observed and expected to arrive as early as midday Friday, May 10, 2024, and persist through Sunday, May 12, 2024. Several strong flares have been observed over the past few days and were associated with a large and magnetically complex sunspot cluster (NOAA region 3664), which is 16 times the diameter of Earth. [The agency notes this is the first time it's issued a G4 watch since January, 2005.] "Geomagnetic storms can impact infrastructure in near-Earth orbit and on Earth's surface, potentially disrupting communications, the electric power grid, navigation, radio and satellite operations," NOAA said. "[The Space Weather Prediction Center] has notified the operators of these systems so they can take protective action." The agency said it will continue to monitor the ongoing storm and "provide additional warnings as necessary."

A visual byproduct of the storm will be "spectacular displays of aurora," also known as the Northern Lights, that could be seen for much of the northern half of the country "as far south as Alabama to northern California," said the NOAA. "Northern Montana, Minnesota, Wisconsin and the majority of North Dakota appear to have the best chances to see it," reports Axios, citing the SWPC's aurora viewline. "Forecast models Friday showed the activity will likely be the strongest from Friday night to Saturday morning Eastern time."

UPDATE 6:54 P.M. EDT: G5 conditions have been observed -- the first time since 2003, says Broadcast Meteorologist James Spann.

This is a developing story. More information is available at spaceweather.gov, Google News, and the NOAA.

Nintendo has said it will finally announce its Switch successor console "within this fiscal year," so at some point before March 31, 2025. From a report: In a statement published to X / Twitter, Shuntaro Furukawa, President of Nintendo, confirmed the new console as Nintendo published its financial report for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024. Furukawa also confirmed a Nintendo Direct for this June, but said there will be no mention of the Switch successor during that presentation. Instead, it will focus on Switch games for the latter half of 2024.

Jack Dorsey is no longer on the board of Bluesky, the Twitter alternative he helped start. The announcement comes shortly after Dorsey unfollowed all but three accounts on X and referred to Elon Musk's platform as "freedom technology." The Verge reports: In two posts today, Bluesky thanked Dorsey while confirming his departure and adding that it's searching for a new board member "who shares our commitment to building a social network that puts people in control of their experience." [...] Neither Bluesky nor Dorsey himself seem to have said how or why he left the board. For now, two board members remain: CEO, Jay Graeber, and Jabber / XMPP inventor Jeremie Miller. Dorsey originally backed Bluesky in 2019 as a project to develop an open-source social media standard that he wanted Twitter to move to. He later joined its board of directors when it split from Twitter in 2022.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Mint: Elon Musk-owned social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has launched a new Grok AI-powered feature called 'Stories', which allows users to read summaries of a trending post on the social media platform. The feature is currently only available to X Premium subscribers on the iOS and web versions, and hasn't found its way to the Android application just yet... instead of reading the whole post, they'll have Grok AI summarise it to get the gist of those big news stories. However, since Grok, like other AI chatbots on the market, is prone to hallucination (making things up), X provides a warning at the end of these stories that says: "Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs."
"Access to xAI's chatbot Grok is meant to be a selling point to push users to buy premium subscriptions," reports TechCrunch: A snarky and "rebellious" AI, Grok's differentiator from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its exclusive and real-time access to X data. A post published to X on Friday by tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz lays out Elon Musk's further plan for AI-powered news on X, based on an email conversation with the X owner. Kantrowitz says that conversations on X will make up the core of Grok's summaries. Grok won't look at the article text, in other words, even if that's what people are discussing on the platform.
The article notes that some AI companies have been striking expensive licensing deals with news publishers. But in X's case, "it's able to get at the news by way of the conversation around it — and without having to partner to access the news content itself."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog Bitcoinist: Jack Dorsey's financial services and digital payments company, Block Inc., announced it will begin investing 10% of its monthly Bitcoin-related gross profits into BTC purchases. This announcement was made following the release of Block's first-quarter earnings for 2024, which demonstrated substantial profits from its Bitcoin operations.

Block reported Bitcoin-related gross profits amounting to $80 million in the first quarter alone. If this trend continues, the implementation of the new dollar cost averaging (DCA) program could see the company investing approximately $24 million in Bitcoin within one year... Dorsey also shared a detailed document [PDF] titled "Bitcoin Blueprint For Corporate Balance Sheets," which serves as a comprehensive guide for other corporations interested in integrating BTC into their financial strategies.

According to the document, Block, formerly known as Square, began its substantial acquisitions in October 2020, purchasing 4,709 BTC at an aggregate price of $50 million. The company later bought an additional 3,318 BTC in February 2021 for $170 million. As of March 31, 2024, Block holds approximately 8,038 BTC, representing about 9% of its total cash and marketable securities.

"Players who made Steam purchases of Helldivers 2 are now, months after the fact, being told by Sony that their games will be useless unless linked to a PSN account," writes longtime Slashdot reader Baron_Yam. From a report: Publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment announced today that Helldivers 2 players on Steam will soon be required to link their in-game profiles to a PlayStation Network account -- a feature that was optional at launch due to "technical issues" -- or risk losing access to the game. SIE explained that account linking allows players to take advantage of "safety and security" provided by PlayStation, as it can more easily protect folks from "griefing and abuse by enabling the banning of players that engage in that type of behavior."

Many Steam players haven't responded well to the news. As of the time of writing, over 2,500 negative user reviews have been submitted to the game's storefront page today, blemishing an otherwise spotless "Very Positive" rating. Some reviews cite data harvesting and security concerns as potential worries. Others point to the fact that Sony waited months after launch to make account linking mandatory. How this affects players in regions that don't have access to the PlayStation Network is a bigger concern, though. In the Helldivers 2 Discord, community manager Thomas 'Twinbeard' Petersson said they aren't yet sure what these rule changes meant for players in areas without PSN access, which could be another factor contributing to the negative downturn.

samleecole writes: Utah set up an online form for people to accuse other citizens and public establishments of violating the state's recently-enacted transphobic "bathroom bill." The submission form is being flooded with memes and troll comments, and the auditor also left the submissions database open to the public -- without a password, authentication, or any other protections that would keep anyone from viewing other people's submissions.

After 404 Media contacted the auditor's office for comment, they changed the permissions to require authentication. The form link has been posted to Twitter, and people have repeatedly posted screenshots of themselves uploading memes. In the database, those included photos of Barry Wood, characters from Bee Movie, and Shutterstock images of bull testicles. Twitter users have also found a link to the database that the form is connected to, which is hosted on a public Google cloud console bucket that as of Thursday, required no authentication to view. I tested the form, and found that my submission -- a photo of the yelling table cat meme -- appeared instantly in the Google Console bucket. The submission form offers anonymity with the option for the state auditor to contact submitters for more details. I haven't seen names and contact information shared in the database, but comments and image attachments were easily viewable.

Jules Roscoe reports via 404 Media: Russia has replaced Wikipedia with a state-sponsored encyclopedia that is a clone of the original Russian Wikipedia but which conveniently has been edited to omit things that could cast the Russian government in poor light. Real Russian Wikipedia editors used to refer to the real Wikipedia as Ruwiki; the new one is called Ruviki, has "ruwiki" in its url, and has copied all Russian-language Wikipedia articles and strictly edited them to comply with Russian laws. The new articles exclude mentions of "foreign agents," the Russian government's designation for any person or entity which expresses opinions about the government and is supported, financially or otherwise, by an outside nation. [...]

Wikimedia RU, the Russian-language chapter of the non-profit that runs Wikipedia, was forced to shut down in late 2023 amid political pressure due to the Ukraine war. Vladimir Medeyko, the former head of the chapter who now runs Ruviki, told Novaya Gazeta Europe in July that he believed Wikipedia had problems with "reliability and neutrality." Medeyko first announced the project to copy and censor the 1.9 million Russian-language Wikipedia articles in June. The goal, he said at the time, was to edit them so that the information would be "trustworthy" as a source for all Russian users. Independent outlet Bumaga reported in August that around 110 articles about the war in Ukraine were missing in full, while others were severely edited. Ruviki also excludes articles about reports of torture in prisons and scandals of Russian government representatives. [...]

Graphic designer Constantine Konovalov calculated the number of characters changed between Wikipedia RU and Ruviki articles on the same topics, and found that there were 205,000 changes in articles about freedom of speech; 158,000 changes in articles about human rights; 96,000 changes in articles about political prisoners; and 71,000 changes in articles about censorship in Russia. He wrote in a post on X that the censorship was "straight out of a 1984 novel." Interestingly, the Ruviki article about George Orwell's 1984 entirely omits the Ministry of Truth, which is the novel's main propaganda outlet concerned with governing "truth" in the country.

Longtime Slashdot reader ArchieBunker shares a report from The Mirror: The city court in Syktyvkar, the largest city in Russia's northwestern Komi region, announced it had arrested [former world chess champion Garry Kasparov] in absentia alongside former Russian parliament member Gennady Gudkov, Ivan Tyutrin co-founder of the Free Russia Forum -- which has been designated as an "undesirable organization in the country -- as well as former environmental activist Yevgenia Chirikova. All were charged with setting up a terrorist society, according to the court's press service. As all were charged in their absence, none were physically held in custody.

"The court has selected a measure of restraint for Garry Kasparov, Gennady Gudkov, Yevgenia Chirikova and Ivan Tyutrin, charged with establishing and heading a terrorist society, funding terrorist activity and justifying it publicly," the court said according to Kremlin-backed outlet TASS. "The court granted the investigative bodies' motions to remand Kasparov, Gudkov, Chirikova and Tyutrin in custody as a measure of restraint."

Kasparov responded to the court's bizarre arrest statement in an April 24 post shared on X, formerly Twitter. "In absentia is definitely the best way I've ever been arrested," he said. "Good company, as well. I'm sure we're all equally honored that Putin's terror state is spending time on this that would otherwise go persecuting and murdering." The report notes that Kasparov "found himself in Russian President Vladimir Putin's firing line after he voiced his opposition to the country's leader." The report continues: "He has also pursued pro-democracy initiatives in Russia. But he felt unable to continue living in Russia after he was jailed and allegedly beaten by police in 2012, according to the Guardian. He was granted Croatian citizenship in 2014 following repeated difficulties in Russia."

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) wants to tell you about a "new" star that will be visible to the naked eye — without a telescope — sometime before September: By "star", I do not mean "comet", "meteorite" or "firefly", but genuine [star] photons arriving here after about 3000 years in flight, causing your eyes to see a bright point on the nighttime sky. When it happens, the star will go from needing-a- telescope-or-good-binoculars-to-see, to being the 50th (or even 30th) brightest star in the sky.

For a week or so. Of course, it could just go full-on supernova, and be visible in daylight for a few weeks, and dominate the night sky for months. But that's unlikely.
Named "T Corona Borealis" (because it's the 20th variable star studied in the constellation "Corona Borealis") it's now visible all night, all year, for about 60% of the world's population (although normally you need binoculars to see it).

But RockDoctor writes that in 2016, "T CrB" (as it is known) has started showing "a similar pattern of changes" to what happened in the late 1930s when it became one of only 10 "recurring nova" known to science: In 2023, the pattern continued and the match of details got better. The star is expected to undergo another "eruption" — becoming one of the brightest few stars in the sky, within the next couple of months. Maybe the next couple of weeks. Maybe the next couple of hours....

Last week, astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst posted on the expected event in her monthly "Night Sky News" video blog. If you prefer your information in text not video, the AAVSO (variable star observers) posted a news alert for it's observers a while ago. They also hosted a seminar on the star, and why it's eruption is expected Real Soon Now, which is also on YouTube. A small selection of recent papers on the subject are posted here, which also includes information on how to get the most up-to-date brightness readings (unless you're a HST / JWST / Palomar / Hawai`i / Chile telescope operator). Yes, the "big guns" of astronomy have prepared their "TOO — Target Of Opportunity" plans, and will be dropping normal observations really quickly when the news breaks and slewing TOO the target.

You won't need your eclipse glasses for this. (Dr Becky's video covers where you can send them for re-use.) But you might want to photograph the appropriate part of the sky so you'll notice when the bomb goes off. Bomb? Did I say that the best model for what is happening is a thermonuclear explosion like a H-bomb the size of the Earth detonating? Well, that's the best analogue.
This CNN article includes a nice animation from NASA illustrating the multi-star interaction that's causing the event: The stars in the orbiting pair are close enough to each other that they interact violently. The red giant becomes increasingly unstable over time as it heats up, casting off its outer layers that land as matter on the white dwarf star. The exchange of matter causes the atmosphere of the white dwarf to gradually heat until it experiences a "runaway thermonuclear reaction," resulting in a nova [according to NASA]...

The NASAUniverse account on X, formerly known as Twitter, will provide updates about the outburst and its appearance.
The BBC reiterates the key data points — that "The rare cosmic event is expected to take place sometime before September 2024. When it occurs it will likely be visible to the naked eye. No expensive telescope will be needed to witness this cosmic performance, says NASA."

Japan's moon lander "has woken up again," reports the Register, "having survived three lunar nights." A post on social media from the lander's X account confirmed that once more, Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) had defied the odds and snapped a picture of the lunar surface using its navigation camera. SLIM was revived a few weeks ago, after a second lunar night. However, with telemetry showing that some of the electronics (temperature sensors) and battery cells were malfunctioning, the chances of the lander making it through a third lunar night seemed remote.

Yet against all odds, SLIM has stirred once more on the lunar surface despite lacking heaters to keep its electronics warm.

An anonymous reader shares a report: With Windows 11 24H2 all geared up to have AI-intensive applications, Microsoft has added a code that will warn you if your PC does not meet the hardware requirements, according to code dug up by Twitter/X sleuth Albacore. The warning will be displayed as a watermark so you know that you cannot use certain AI-powered built-in apps because of an unsupported CPU.

Fintech giant Stripe announced on Thursday that it would let customers accept cryptocurrency payments, starting with USDC stablecoins, initially only on Solana, Ethereum and Polygon. TechCrunch reports: This will be the first time that Stripe has taken crypto payments since 2018, when it dropped support for Bitcoin due to it being too unstable. Stripe in 2022 tried its first reentry into the crypto market when it announced payouts (but not payments) in USDC, with Twitter as its marquee customer for the service. Thursday's news has no customer names attached to it.

On Wednesday the company unveiled a long list of other launches, the most significant update being that Stripe, for the very first time, would let customers integrate competing payment providers with Stripe's other financial services tooling. Thursday's nod to expanding crypto support is also part of that bigger strategy to open up its walled garden. A brief timeline of Stripe's dance with crypto underscores the tricky line that Stripe has walked over the years when it comes to cryptocurrency. True to its disruptive roots as a fintech, the company has wanted to be in the middle of the conversation around how blockchain-based technologies will affect financial services. But it runs the risk of subverting its bigger business and positioning as a stable and sensible financial powerhouse if it dabbles too deeply or for too long in periods of instability. The company processed $1 trillion in transactions last year, and it's still growing; it is currently worth $65 billion on paper.

Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories, according to reliable Apple leaker and prototype collector known as "Kosutami." From a report: In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Kosutami explained that Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories due to its poor durability. The company may move to another non-leather material for its premium accessories in the future. Apple introduced FineWoven, a soft fabric material, last year. The company claimed that the material is made of 68 percent post-consumer content and is overall more environmentally friendly compared to the company's previous line of leather accessories. As part of the introduction of FineWoven case, Apple also discontinued the use of leather for new Apple accessories. Reviewers didn't like FineWoven, calling it "bad. Like, really bad."

Ben Schoon reports via 9to5Google: Google's Arif Dikici confirmed on LinkedIn this week that Android is now using VideoLAN's (the makers of VLC) "dav1d" software decoder to allow AV1 to work on more devices. This is now available on all devices running Android 12 or higher via a software update. Mishaal Rahman points out that this started to roll out with the March 2024 Google Play system update.

Dikici says that "most" devices can at least support 720p at 30 frames per second, but that apps will need to opt in "for now" to support AV1 via software decoding. One app that has opted in is YouTube, which now uses AV1 on all compatible devices (though it may have reverted this). This may result in increased power usage depending on your device, though. Improvements on that front may be coming, though, says VideoLAN on Twitter/X.

NASA has confirmed that a piece of metal that tore through a Florida home last month was space junk from the International Space Station. NBC News reports: The agency confirmed Monday that the 1.6-pound object was debris from a cargo pallet that had been intentionally released from the space station three years ago. The pallet, packed with aging batteries, was supposed to burn up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere, but a piece survived -- the piece that smashed into a house in Naples, Florida, on March 8.

WINK News, a CBS News affiliate in southwestern Florida, first reported the incident. Naples resident Alejandro Otero told the outlet that the object crashed through the roof and two floors of his home. Otero was not home at the time, he told WINK News, but the metal object nearly hit his son, who was two rooms away. In a blog post about the incident, NASA said it had analyzed the object at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and confirmed that it was part of the equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet.

The piece of space junk is roughly cylindrical in shape and is about 4-inches tall and 1.6-inches wide. NASA said agency staff studied the object's features and metal composition and matched it to the hardware that had been jettisoned from the space station in 2021. At that time, new lithium-ion batteries had recently been installed at the space station, so the old nickel hydrogen batteries were packed up for disposal. The space station's robotic arm released the 5,800-pound cargo pallet containing the batteries over the Pacific Ocean, as the outpost orbited 260 miles above the Earth's surface, according to NASA. NASA said it will perform a detailed investigation of the latest debris incident to determine how the object withstood the extreme trip through the atmosphere.

A crypto wallet maker claimed this week that hackers may be targeting people with an iMessage "zero-day" exploit -- but all signs point to an exaggerated threat, if not a downright scam. From a report: Trust Wallet's official X (previously Twitter) account wrote that "we have credible intel regarding a high-risk zero-day exploit targeting iMessage on the Dark Web. This can infiltrate your iPhone without clicking any link. High-value targets are likely. Each use raises detection risk." The wallet maker recommended iPhone users to turn off iMessage completely "until Apple patches this," even though no evidence shows that "this" exists at all. The tweet went viral, and has been viewed over 3.6 million times as of our publication. Because of the attention the post received, Trust Wallet hours later wrote a follow-up post. The wallet maker doubled down on its decision to go public, saying that it "actively communicates any potential threats and risks to the community."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In a major clean energy benchmark, wind, solar, and hydro exceeded 100% of demand on California's main grid for 30 of the past 38 days. Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Z. Jacobson has been tracking California's renewables performance, and he shares his findings on Twitter (X) when the state breaks records. Jacobson notes that supply exceeds demand for "0.25-6 h per day," and that's an important fact. The continuity lies not in renewables running the grid for the entire day but in the fact that it's happening on a consistent daily basis, which has never been achieved before.

At the two-week record mark, Ian Magruder at Rewiring America made this great point on LinkedIn: "And what makes it even better is that California has the largest grid-connected battery storage facility in the world (came online in January ...), meaning those batteries were filling up with excess energy from the sun all afternoon today and are now deploying as we speak to offset a good chunk of the methane gas generation that California still uses overnight." On April 2, the California Independent System Operator (ISO) recommended 26 new transmission projects worth $6.1 billion, with a big number being devoted to offshore wind. In response, Jacobson predicted on April 4 that California will entirely be on renewables and battery storage 24/7 by 2035.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: The Biden administration marked the close of tax season Monday by announcing it had met a modest goal of getting at least 100,000 taxpayers to file through the Internal Revenue Service's new tax software, Direct File -- an alternative to commercial tax preparers. Although the government had billed Direct File as a small-scale pilot, it still represents one of the most significant experiments in tax filing in decades -- a free platform letting Americans file online directly to the government. Monday's announcement aside, though, Direct File's success has proven highly subjective.

By and large, people who tried the Direct File software -- which looks a lot like TurboTax or other commercial tax software, with its question-and-answer format -- gave it rave reviews. "Against all odds, the government has created an actually good piece of technology," a writer for the Atlantic marveled, describing himself as "giddy" as he used the website to chat live with a helpful IRS employee. The Post's Tech Friend columnist Shira Ovide called it "visible proof that government websites don't have to stink." Online, people tweeted praise after filing their taxes, like the user who called it the "easiest tax experience of my life."

While the users might be a happy group, however, there weren't many of them compared to other tax filing options -- and their positive reviews likely won't budge the opposition that Direct File has faced from tax software companies and Republicans from the outset. These headwinds will likely continue if the IRS wants to renew it for another tax season. The program opened to the public midway through tax season, when many low-income filers had already claimed their refunds -- and was restricted to taxpayers in 12 states, with only four types of income (wages, interest, Social Security and unemployment). But it gained popularity as tax season went on: The Treasury Department said more than half of the total users of Direct File completed their returns during the last week.