The Zig programming language wants to be a modern alternative to C (including better memory safety features). It's maintained by as an open-source project by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and a network of contributors.

But Business Insider notes that Zig bans the submission of AI-assisted code: On the JetBrains podcast, Zig President Andrew Kelley called AI-assisted contributions "invariably garbage."

"People are sending us contributions that have no value whatsoever," Kelley said. "They have negative value, because they take review time away from the team...." There are more pull requests than reviewers. At the time of the recording, Kelley said that Zig had 200 open pull requests. Those AI-generated "slop contributions" slow the whole team down even more, Kelley said. "We've wasted everybody's time...."

Big Tech companies have projected lofty goals for the percentage of code that should be — and already is — written with AI. Zig doesn't have a mandate to be maximally efficient like these public companies. Instead, "mentorship" is part of its core mission, Kelley said, making AI contributions counterproductive. "We're all trying to get better at programming," Kelley said. "People who are sending AI pull requests, those people are not helping this goal."

Rockstar Games has a 2,000-employee studio in Scotland called Rockstar North. And Thursday its workers announced they'd formed a union, reports the gaming news site Aftermath: The union [part of the wider Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) union] includes workers from Rockstar Games offices in Leeds, London, Edinburgh, Dundee, and Lincoln, the Rockstar Games Workers Union said in a YouTube video published on Thursday... Last year, Rockstar Games employees told Aftermath that the company's insistence on return-to-office policies was a problem for many workers.

Rockstar Games, for its part, claimed the policies were related to productivity and security concerns... The video posted Thursday outlines what happened over the past several months, starting with the firing of more than 30 Rockstar Games employees in October 2025 for what the company said was "discussing confidential information in a public forum," a Rockstar Games spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg in November. The union disagreed: It said at the time that the workers were gathered in a private Discord server with employees and union organizers — the beginnings of the union announced Thursday. The IWGB is working to fight the firings in court.

Workers and outside union supporters gathered globally after the employees were fired, in front of Rockstar Games' offices, to protest what the union called union busting by Rockstar Games... "We believe the [firings] were unlawful and retaliatory — connected to the workers' collective activity of organizing at Rockstar," IWGB Game Workers Union co-founder Austin Kelmore told Aftermath at the time. "This action by Rockstar came shortly after reaching 10 percent of eligible workers at Rockstar in the union...." [10% is the threshhold for legal recognition by the U.K. government.] The workers have received support from government officials; in December, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the firings of the unionizing workers "a deeply concerning case."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a push to avoid a lawsuit alleging that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users, a decision that comes as social media companies increasingly face legal scrutiny. Parent company Meta appealed after Vermont's highest court allowed a suit filed by its attorney general in 2023 to move forward. The company is facing similar lawsuits from states across the country, accusing it of knowingly designing addictive features. Meta had argued that it can't be sued in Vermont court because neither the company nor the app design has specific ties to the state. Vermont countered that the sites' large number of teen users gives its courts jurisdiction.

The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal in a brief, unexplained order, as is typical. The procedural decision comes after court losses for Meta and YouTube in social media addiction lawsuits in California and New Mexico. [...] Meta, for its part, has said that it has already introduced dozens of tools to support teens and their families and suggested it would have worked with the states on standards for youth social media use. Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark applauded the decision, saying it affirms "that companies that choose to do business in Vermont, like Meta, can be held accountable when they harm kids."

Last.fm announced that it is independent again after separating from Paramount Skydance, nearly two decades after CBS acquired the music-tracking service in 2007. The company says accounts, scrobbles, privacy settings, Pro subscriptions, and billing information will remain intact. Additional details are forthcoming. Engadget reports: "Today, Last.fm begins a new chapter as an independent company," the announcement reads. "Ownership has changed, but the product you use every day has not." It also said that it will keep its current team. Last.fm is a music website that can track what you listen to across platforms, apps and streaming services, including Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music.Â

[...] Last.fm started as an internet radio station in 2002, and it didn't get scrobbling until a few years later when it merged with the original team that created the tracking process. It operated as an independent company until it was acquired by CBS Interactive, which is now part of the merged Paramount Skydance Corporation, for $280 million in 2007. In 2014, it killed off its $3-a-month subscription radio service to focus on tracking your listening habits on other providers. The company promised to share more about what you can expect from the transition in the coming weeks, but everything will work on Last.fm "exactly as it did yesterday" for now.

Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman says Rust can help Linux deal with a flood of AI-discovered security bugs (namely Dirty Frag, Copy Fail, and Fragnesia) by preventing common C mistakes around memory, locking, error handling, and untrusted data at build time rather than during human review. It's "not a silver bullet" and does not mean rewriting the whole kernel, but he said new drivers and subsystems will increasingly use Rust as Linux evolves forward. ZDNet reports: Kroah-Hartman illustrated those pitfalls with real C bugs in the kernel, including a 15-year-old Bluetooth bug that dereferenced a pointer without checking it and a Xen bug where "we forgot to unlock" in an error path. "The majority of the bugs in the kernel are this tiny, minor stuff," he explained. "Error conditions aren't checked, locks aren't forgotten, unreleased memories leak, and vulnerabilities add up over time. They crash the kernel. This is what we live with in C. This is why we don't like it." Kroah-Hartman argued that the "best beauty of Rust" is catching those mistakes at build time rather than in review. For example, when it comes to locking, he highlighted Rust's locking abstractions in the kernel: "The only way you can get access to inner pointers of structures is by grabbing that lock, and releasing the lock automatically. The compiler does it, it's guarded, the lock happens, everything's happy. You just can't write code to access these values...without grabbing the lock. The compiler will not let you."

Those properties, he argued, directly remove a huge fraction of the bugs he sees: "This is going to save us those two things. First, 60% of the bugs in the kernel right there, they're gone. Thank you." The payoff is earlier, more automated enforcement: "If this happens at build time, not review time, don't make me a maintainer who has to read your code [and] say, 'Oh, then you properly check that error value. Oh, did you properly grab the locks in the right spot?' Rust gives us that for free. This is the best thing ever." Even if Rust vanished tomorrow, Kroah-Hartman argued, it has already forced the kernel to clean up C code and interfaces. He credited Rust's influence outright: "We stole this from Rust. Thank you. It's a good idea, so if Rust disappeared tomorrow, we have cleaned up the C code in the kernel so much and taken in the ideas. We thank you, you've made Linux better with it just by existing."

[...] What ultimately sold a number of core maintainers, including him, on Rust was how it "makes reviewing code easier." With CI [Continuous Integration] bots enforcing builds and Rust's type system enforcing key invariants, maintainers can "focus on the logic" rather than resource bookkeeping: "I can care about that one function. I don't have to worry about the rest of this stuff, because I assume that it works properly, because it was built properly." Internally, he said, the top maintainers have already made their call on Rust's status: "The Linux kernel maintainers, we get together every year and talk about what the processes are doing. Last year, we said the Rust experiment is over. It's not an experiment. This is for real." The rationale: "The people behind it are real. We trust them. We know what they're doing. They've shown and put in the work to make Rust a viable language in the kernel, and we're going to make this stick. Let's go full speed ahead. And, as always," he said wryly, "world domination proceeds." "If you never remember anything else in my talk, just remember these four words. It came from Microsoft Security many, many years ago," Kroah-Hartman told attendees. "They realized all input is evil. You have to validate all input."

YouTube will begin automatically labeling videos when its systems detect "significant" photorealistic AI use, while also making AI-content disclosures more visible below long-form videos and directly on Shorts. "We've heard consistently from our community that they value transparency when it comes to generative AI content," YouTube said in a blog post. "These changes are designed to balance transparency with creator control." Variety reports: Under YouTube's guidelines, creators will still be required to manually disclose when they use realistic AI. But starting this week, it also will roll out a new internal system to help identify AI-generated content. "If a creator doesn't specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label," YouTube said.

YouTube creators who believe their content was incorrectly flagged as AI-generated can modify the disclosure status using the YouTube Studio tool. However, according to YouTube, the AI labels will "remain permanent" in some cases, including for content created using YouTube's own AI tools (such as Veo or Dream Screen) and for content that contains C2PA metadata (based on standards from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) that indicates it was fully AI-generated.

In addition, YouTube is moving the disclosure label for photorealistic and meaningfully AI-altered or AI-generated content to a more prominent position. Until now, YouTube labeled AI content in a video's expanded description. Going forward, for long-form videos, the AI label will now appear directly below the video player and above the description. For YouTube Shorts, the label will appear as an overlay on the video itself. "The goal here is context at a glance. If it looks real but was made with AI, viewers will know immediately," said Rene Ritchie, YouTube head of editorial and creator liaison. He added that the AI labels alone "do not affect how our videos are recommended or whether they can earn money. This is purely about giving viewers the right information at the right time."

Hobbyist CNCDan is trying to build a real-world version of Windows' classic 3D Pinball for Windows -- Space Cadet, using 3D-printed flippers, bumpers, LEDs, slingshots, and a raised playfield modeled after the original virtual table. But in bringing the digital table into the real world, CNCDan has already run into several physical challenges the software never had to contend with... Ars Technica reports: After scaling and skewing the on-screen, perspective-shifted view of the Space Cadet playfield onto a 1-meter-tall table, he ended up with a rectangular playfield just 56 cm wide. That's on the smaller side for commercial pinball tables and maps to playfield bumpers that are just 53 mm wide -- way smaller than any prebuilt bumpers that are commercially available.

Once CNCDan dealt with issues with unreliable plastic microswitches for those tiny bumpers (Hall effect magnets seemed to help), he ran into a separate problem with the even smaller bumpers on the raised playfield. The wiring for those bumpers had to be arranged very carefully to avoid blocking a kickback return alley underneath, a positioning problem that the original designers of the virtual table didn't have to consider at all. CNCDan also ended up adding a physical mechanism to simulate the short delay 3D Space Cadet players may remember, when the ball dropped down a hole from the raised playfield back to the flippers below.

CNCDan says he's currently looking for artists to help him with a hand-drawn re-creation of the original Space Cadet playfield, which he doesn't want to use AI for. "I'm sure [AI] can do it, but I'd much rather give this job to a real human being," he said in the video.

SpaceX's upgraded Starship V3 launched today from Starbase, Texas, for the first time, successfully deploying 22 dummy Starlink satellites and completing a planned fiery splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Reuters reports: The towering vehicle, consisting of the upper-stage Starship astronaut vessel stacked atop a Super Heavy booster rocket, blasted off at about 5:30 p.m. CT on Friday (2230 GMT) from SpaceX facilities in Starbase, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico near Brownsville. A live SpaceX webcast of the liftoff showed the rocketship, more than 40 stories tall, climbing from the launch tower as the Super Heavy's cluster of Raptor engines thundered to life in a ball of flames and billowing clouds of vapor and exhaust. The test ended about an hour later when the Starship vehicle made it through a blazing re-entry through Earth's atmosphere and splashed down into the Indian Ocean, nose up as planned, as SpaceX employees who gathered to watch a live webcast of the flight cheered. The lower-stage Super Heavy came down separately in the Gulf of Mexico about six minutes after blast-off.

The launch marked SpaceX's 12th Starship test flight since 2023 and the first ever for the V3 iteration of both the cruise vessel and its Super Heavy booster, as well as the first blast-off from a new launch pad designed for the more powerful rocket. During its suborbital cruise phase, Starship successfully released its payload of 20 mock Starlink satellites one by one, plus two actual modified satellites that scanned the spacecraft's heat shield and transmitted data back to operators on the ground during the vehicle's descent. Starship made it to its cruise phase despite the loss of one of its six upper-stage engines, and mission controllers opted not to attempt an inflight re-ignition of the engines before re-entry. But the vehicle did execute a return-landing burn at the very end of its flight, along with several aerodynamic maneuvers deliberately intended to place the spacecraft under maximum stress, and Starship completed those moves intact for its controlled final descent. You can watch a recorded livestream of the launch on YouTube.

Trump Mobile confirmed that a third-party platform exposed customers' personal data to the open internet. The data included names, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and order IDs. TechCrunch reports: Chris Walker, a spokesperson for the Trump-branded phone maker, told TechCrunch that the company is investigating the exposure and has not found evidence that content or financial information spilled online. The company said there was no breach of Trump Mobile's network, systems, or infrastructure. Walker said that the exposure was linked to a third-party platform provider that supports "certain Trump Mobile operations." He did not name the provider.

[...] On Wednesday, two YouTubers who ordered Trump Mobile's phone said a researcher alerted them that their personal information was exposed online. The YouTubers Coffeezilla and penguinz0 said they tried to alert Trump Mobile of the exposure after the researcher also tried but to no avail. Walker said Trump Mobile is evaluating whether it needs to notify customers of the exposure of their personal data. Further reading: Trump Phones Start Shipping - But Were There Really 600,000 Preorders?

Higgsfield AI is debuting a 95-minute fully AI-generated film at Cannes called "Hell Grind" that reportedly cost $500,000 to make, $400,000 of which was spent on compute alone. The project took just two weeks to produce and is intended to showcase the startup's AI production tools. But it also underscores the current limits of AI filmmaking: thousands of detailed prompts, endless iteration, high costs, and plenty of traditional filmmaking judgment were still required. The Wall Street Journal reports: What might surprise viewers is how much technical film know-how was needed to create the movie, said Adil Alimzhanov, a content lead at Higgsfield who also worked on it. "You have to understand camera composition, which shots are changed. Like you can't have two close-ups back to back, you have to start with an establishing shot," he said. "You still need those filmmaking skills." Higgsfield, which was valued at $1.3 billion in its latest funding round earlier this year, crossed $400 million in annual revenue run rate in May. It doesn't make the actual video-generation models, relying instead on existing tools like Google's Veo 3. But it does provide the tooling on top to make sure that the visuals are consistent across all the incoming generations.

The core of the movie-making process here was prompting the AI models and getting clips back, Alimzhanov said. Each prompt would generate about 15 seconds of footage. Those 15 seconds needed to be generated a number of times, with tweaks to the prompt to get the best possible version. The first 25 minutes of the movie required 16,181 initial video generations, which ended up as 253 final shots. One of the biggest difficulties in making longer-form films with AI is maintaining consistency across the outputs. AI models can be unpredictable, and a feature-length film can't have scenes that look completely different from one moment to the next.

Because of that, every prompt had to be extremely long and detailed. Each one would typically start with a prefix that defined requirements like style (8k IMAX, photorealistic), lighting (natural light only, "contre-jour" backlight, camera on shadow side) and the type of camera it should look like it was being shot on ("cine lens," 180-degree shutter motion blur). The lighting was key to avoiding the AI sheen that typically gets branded as "slop," said Alimzhanov. AI-generated video tends to over-light scenes in an unnatural way. That prefix would also have to remind the AI to obey the laws of physics with wording like: "gravity and inertia respected -- mass has real weight, correct contact shadows, no floating props." The individual prompts were, on average, 3,000 words each.

One aspect of what Higgsfield has built, and sells to clients, is an AI tool that generates these complex, detailed prompts. Users can enter a page from the original script, and the Higgsfield tool will return with a prompt that could be thousands of words long, designed to create production-quality outputs. And all that prompting is how the company racked up a $400,000 AI compute bill on the project. Co-founder and CEO Alex Mashrabov, however, noted that working with "cloud" providers, like Nebius and CoreWeave, rather than big hyperscalers, helped it keep costs from going even higher. You can watch the trailer for Hell Grind on YouTube and judge the results for yourself.

While other commencement speeches have been met with boos for hyping up artificial intelligence, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak reminded college graduates that they already posses "AI" of their own: "actual intelligence." He framed AI as an attempt to duplicate brain-like routines, and encouraged students to "think different" as they enter a workforce being reshaped by automation. Business Insider reports: Steve Wozniak did what other college graduation commencement speakers couldn't this year: earn applause when talking about AI. The Apple cofounder took the stage during Grand Valley State University's graduation ceremony earlier this month. During his speech, Wozniak offered reassurance to new graduates who are entering the workforce at the height of the AI revolution.

"It would take too long to go deeply into what I think about AI, but we've been trying to create a brain," Wozniak said. "Is there a way we can duplicate a routine a trillion times and have it work like a brain? AI is one of those attempts." [...]

During his commencement address, Wozniak reflected on working at Apple and offered students some advice as they begin their careers. "You should always try to think different," he said. "Don't follow the same steps as a million other people. Think, is there something I can do a little different?" You can watch the clip on YouTube.

Colossal Biosciences says it has grown chickens inside 3D-printed artificial eggshells. "The company says the egg technology could help conserve at-risk bird species," reports MIT Technology. "It could also play a role in a project to re-create the extinct giant moa, a flightless 12-foot-tall bird that once lived in New Zealand and laid four-liter eggs, larger than those of any living bird." From the report: The biotech company today claimed it has developed a "fully artificial egg" as part of its effort to resurrect extinct avian species, including birds like the dodo and the giant moa. But "artificial eggshell" would probably be a better description for the invention. It's an oval-shaped printed lattice, coated inside with a special silicone-based membrane that lets in oxygen, just as a real eggshell does. To generate birds, Colossal took recently laid chicken eggs and carefully poured their contents into the artificial shells, where they continued growing. A window on top lets researchers peek inside. "To see them all moving around in their artificial eggs was absolutely mind blowing," says Andrew Pask, the company's chief biology officer. "You really feel you can grow life outside of the womb."

[...] The work on the artificial eggshell was carried out in Dallas by Colossal's exogenous development team, or Exo Dev. That group is also trying to develop artificial wombs for mammals, starting with marsupials. "We're looking at every single facet of what's happening during a mammalian pregnancy to unpack exactly how we then go about recapitulating that," says Pask. For that team, an artificial eggshell is a relatively quick and easy technical win. That's because chickens are already an example of ex utero development. After an egg is laid, a small embryo sitting on top of the yolk starts growing, drawing nutrients from the yolk, the white, and even the shell, which provides calcium. (Colossal says it has to add ground-up calcium to the artificial eggs.)

In order to create a moa, Colossal will have to genetically alter another type of bird, changing potentially thousands of DNA letters. But so far, chickens are the only bird species that can be genetically engineered. And that's via a tricky process of editing stem cells that produce egg and sperm. Scientists have to add or delete DNA letters from these cells and then inject them back into an egg. The resulting bird will carry the genetic changes in its gonads -- and then be able to pass them on. Pask says Colossal's idea is that it could modify avian stem cells enough to produce moa-like sperm or eggs. But then you might have the odd situation of a chicken laying an egg with a moa embryo inside it. "You would have chickens making moa egg and moa sperm. But it's still a chicken egg," he says.

OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has joined rival AI lab Anthropic. "The hire is a major coup for Anthropic in the high-stakes competition for elite AI talent -- and another sign the company is emerging as a magnet for some of the industry's most respected technical minds," reports Axios. From the report: Karpathy will start this week on Anthropic's pre-training team, which is responsible for the massive training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to Anthropic. Karpathy will help launch a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research -- an increasingly important frontier as AI companies race to automate parts of AI development. "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D," Karpathy said in a post on X.

Karpathy is a rare AI figure with credibility across research, industry and education. He was a founding member of OpenAI before serving as Tesla's director of AI, where he led the computer vision team behind Autopilot. Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" and recently described himself as being in a "state of AI psychosis" since December -- embracing "tokenmaxxing" and aggressively stress-testing frontier models.

Today former Google CEO Eric Schmidt "was booed multiple times," reports NBC News, "while discussing AI during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona."

Schmidt had started by remembering how computer platforms "gave everyone a voice" but also "degraded the public square... They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that way, and in the way that we treat each other, is in the essence of a society." But then Schmidt "drew a parallel between artificial intelligence and the transformative impact of the computer — and was immediately met with boos." "I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you," Schmidt said, addressing the crowd as many continued to boo him. "There is a fear ... there is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics is fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create, and I understand that fear."

He went on to argue that the future remains unwritten and that the graduating class of 2026 has real power to shape how AI develops — a claim that drew further disapproval from parts of the audience...

He closed by congratulating the class and offering them closing words. "The future is not yet finished. It is now your turn to shape it."
404 Media shared a video on YouTube of the crowd's booing — and what Schmidt said that provoked them:

SCHMIDT: "If you don't care about science that's okay because AI is going to touch everything else as well. [Very loud booing] Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done..."

"You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. [Loud booing] When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on... The rocket ship is here."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: EBay on Tuesday rejected a $56 billion takeover bid from the much smaller GameStop over financing doubts, calling the proposal "neither credible nor attractive." EBay, which has roughly four times GameStop's market value, also underscored that its turnaround efforts under CEO Jamie Iannone have boosted growth, with its stock returning 201% since Iannone took the position six years ago.

"We have concluded that your proposal is neither credible nor attractive," eBay Chairman Paul Pressler said in a statement. "eBay's Board is confident the company, under its current management team, is well-positioned to continue to drive sustainable growth." He also pointed to concerns with GameStop's bid, including its financing, its impact on eBay's long-term growth and the leadership structure of a potentially combined company. Last week, GameStop's CEO Ryan Cohen delivered one of the most memorable CNBC interviews in recent memory... initially disinterested, then increasingly hostile, with little eye contact, few real answers to basic questions, and repeated robotic deflections to "check the website." It's worth a watch if you have a few extra minutes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Speaking to graduates of University of Central Florida's College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media on May 8, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group, told graduating humanities students that AI is the "next industrial revolution," and was met with thousands of booing graduates. "And let's face it, change can be daunting. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," Caulfield said. At that point, murmurs rippled through the crowd. Caulfield paused, and the crowd erupted into boos. "Oh, what happened?" Caulfield said, turning around with her hands out. "Okay, I struck a chord. May I finish?" Someone in the crowd yelled, "AI SUCKS!"

Her speech begins around the hour and 15 minute mark in the UCF livestream. [...] Before the industrial revolution comment, Caulfield praised Jeff Bezos for his passion and use of Amazon as a "stepping stone" to his real dream: spaceflight. Rattled after the crowd's reaction, she continued her speech: "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives." The crowd cheered. "Okay. We've got a bipolar topic here I see," Caulfield said. "And now AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands." The crowd booed again. "I love it, passion, let's go," she said. "AI is beginning to challenge all major sectors to find their highest and best use," she continued. "Okay, I don't want any giggles when I say this. We have been through this before, these industrial revolutions. In my graduation era, we were faced with the launch of the internet."

She goes on to talk about how cellphones used to be the size of briefcases. "At that time we had no idea how any of these technologies would impact the world and our lives. [...] These were some of the same trepidations and concerns we are now facing. But ultimately it was a game changer for global economic development and the proliferation of new businesses that never existed like Apple and Google and Meta and so many others, and not to mention countless job opportunities. So being an optimist here, AI alongside human intelligence has the potential to help us solve some of humanity's greatest problems. Many of you in this graduating class will play a role in making this happen."

The free/open source project OrcaSlicer is a popular fork of 3D printer slicing software from Bambu Lab. But Tuesday independent developer Pawel Jarczak shuttered the project "following legal threats from Bambu Lab," reports Tom's Hardware: Jarczak's fork of OrcaSlicer would have allowed users to bypass Bambu Connect, a middleware application that severely limits OrcaSlicer's access to remote printer functions in the name of security. Jarczak said in a note on GitHub that Bambu Lab threatened him with a cease and desist letter and accused him of reverse engineering its software in order to impersonate Bambu Studio.
From Bambu Lab's blog post: Bambu Studio is an open-source project under the AGPL-3.0 license. Anyone can take its code, modify it, and distribute it... That's what OrcaSlicer does, and 734 other forks do as well. We have no issue with that and never have. At the same time, a license for code is not a pass to our cloud infrastructure... Our cloud is a private service. Access to it is governed by a user agreement, not the AGPL license... [T]he modification in question worked by injecting falsified identity metadata into network communication. In simple terms: it pretended to be the official Bambu Studio client when communicating with our servers... If this method were widely adopted or incorrectly configured, thousands of clients could simultaneously hit our servers while impersonating the official client.
"User-Agent is not authentication," counters OrcaSlicer's developer. "It is only self-declared client metadata. Any program can set any User-Agent." And "the User-Agent construction comes directly from Bambu Lab's own public AGPL Bambu Studio code.... So on what basis can anyone claim that I am not allowed to use this specific part of AGPL-licensed code under the AGPL license...? My work was based on publicly available Bambu Studio source code together with my own integration layer."

But the bottom line is that Bambu Lab "contacted me directly and demanded removal of the solution." I asked whether I could publish the private correspondence in full for transparency. That request was refused... They also referred to legal materials and stated that a cease and desist letter had been prepared...

I removed the repository voluntarily. That removal should not be interpreted as an admission that all legal or technical allegations made against the project were correct. I removed it because I have no interest in maintaining a prolonged dispute around this particular implementation, and no interest in continuing to distribute it.
YouTuber and right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann reviewed the correspondence from Bambu Lab — then pledged $10,000 for legal expenses if the developer returned his code online. ("I think that their legal claim is bullshit," Rossman said Saturday in a YouTube video for his 2.5 million subscribers. "I'm not a lawyer, but I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is.")

The video now has over 129,000 views so far. "Rossman has not started a crowdfunding site yet," Tom's Hardware notes, "stating in the comments that he wants to prove to Jarczak that he has supporters willing to put their money where their mouth is. The video had over 129,000 views so far, with commenters vowing to back the case as requested."

New submitter spazmonkey writes: From a hidden GPS tracker polling your location every 4.5 minutes to JavaScript loaded from a random GitHub account, no SSL certificate pinning, and an in-app browser that silently strips cookie consent dialogs and paywalls from every page you visit, the new White House app seems to have a little bit of everything. A security researcher pulled the APK apart to discover the cybersecurity vulnerabilities. "The app is a React Native build using Expo SDK 54, with WordPress powering the backend through a custom REST API," reports Android Headlines. "That's pretty normal, as nearly 42% of all websites on the internet are powered by WordPress. But that's just the start; now the nightmare begins..." From the report: To start, the app has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in. Essentially, it's set to poll your location every 4.5 minutes in the foreground, and 9.5 minutes in the background. It's syncing latitude, longitude, accuracy, and timestamp data to OneSignal's servers. These location permissions aren't declared in the AndroidManifest, but they are hardcoded as runtime requests in the OneSignal SDK. Some have noted that the tracking only kicks in if the developer enables it server-side and the user grants permission, but it is there, ready to go.

And it gets even stranger. Apparently, the app is loading JavaScript from a random person's GitHub site for YouTube embeds. Yes, you read that right, it's just loading JavaScript from a random GitHub site. So if that account ever gets compromised, arbitrary code could run inside the app's WebView. There's also no SSL certificate pinning, meaning that traffic can potentially be intercepted on compromised networks like sketchy public WiFi or corporate proxies. The app also injects JavaScript and CSS into every page you visit in the in-app browser. This strips away cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login walls, and paywalls. There's also leftover dev artifacts in the production build, including a localhost URL to the Metro bundler.

Longtime Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: On April 15, 2026, a Microsoft employee made a change to Visual Studio Code and pushed it within 8 hours without review, notification, or documentation. The change added "Co-authored-by: Copilot" by default to the end of commit messages in Git when Copilot was used in creating the code. However, the implementation was bugged, and the message was added to every commit regardless if Copilot was used or disabled. Since this message was automatically added to the end of commit messages, users were not aware of it as the UI does not show this addition when making commits. The change as been reverted as of May 3, but not before 1.4 million commits were made. Unfortunately, those messages cannot be cleansed and are permanent.

Long-time Slashdot reader Anne Thwacks frequently uses YouTube's subtitles "not to disturb others in the room, or because my hearing is not very good." But they say there's a new problem.

"The subtitling is terrible!" Almost every sentence has a huge error. Proper names are more often wrong than right. Non-English place names are almost always mangled to barely recognizable. And no effort whatsoever is made to use context to figure out whether a place name is Russian or Arabic, and often complete garbage is used in place of a common French, Spanish or Italian name!

If AI actually works (I have my doubts about this), surely it would be possible to figure out language contexts. If it is about an event in Italy, then expect a lot of Italian names! If it is about the Russia-Ukraine war, then expect places in Russia or Ukraine to be more plausible than mindless gobbledygook! Does YouTube not know that there are places in the world that are not in America? (However, plenty of names of people and places famous in America are also regularly screwed up.)
They argue the subtitles are "appallingly bad" — and that "the situation seems to be getting worse," wondering why the problem isn't addressed with some basic spell-checking. ("I'm sure that the vast majority of foul-ups could be fixed by the use of a dictionary.") Have any Slashdot readers seen similar problems? A friend of mine noticed that YouTube's subtitles even bungled this innocuous song from the 1966.

ANNETTE FUNICELLO: "If your love is true love, you can tell by his touch."
YOUTUBE SUBTITLE: "If your love is too lava, you can tell by his touch..."

Share your own experiences and thoughts in the comments. And do you think YouTube's subtitles are "appallingly bad"?