Sony has revived its Walkman lineup with three Android 16-powered high-end music players ranging from $1,900 to $5,900, topped by the gold-plated NW-WM1ZM3 with 256GB of storage. The Register reports: The Japanese giant named the new models the NW-WM1ZM3, NW-WM1AM3 and NW-ZX900. All can store and play many codecs, including MP3s, WMA, and FLAC files, plus others like Direct Stream Digital (DSD) and Apple Lossless, which use various tricks to avoid nasty artefacts accruing during the digitization process. Sony also says it has used "key components made from oxygen-free copper" because that apparently delivers "uncompromising sound quality."

The machines also include "screws featuring a low-resistance gold-plated treatment ... providing a stable ground connection that delivers powerful bass, an expansive soundstage and smooth, extended high frequencies." Sony claims even the cabling it's used in the devices "further reduces noise and preserves signal integrity for rich, detailed sound." They're also housed in carefully-milled slabs of copper -- gold-plated in the case of the NW-WM1ZM3 -- because that apparently improves sound, too.

And then Sony's gone and spoiled it all by offering Bluetooth connectivity, a notorious music-mangler, in addition to wired headphone ports. Sony's US site lists all three devices, which run Android 16 and include Wi-Fi so they can access streaming music services. All are USB-chargeable and Sony claims their batteries allow 30-odd hours of music playback.

OpenBSD 8.0 has been released with major virtualization and hardware upgrades, including support for up to 64 vCPUs per VM, Intel Arc graphics, ARM64 hibernation, and expanded RISC-V support. Linuxiac points out that it marks the "61st release of the security-focused Unix-like operating system." From the report: Several fixes improve compatibility with 32-bit Linux guests, while changes to virtual machine ownership management and interrupt emulation make the virtualization infrastructure more capable. Graphics support has also been upgraded, with DRM drivers updated to those from Linux kernel 6.18.53. Notably, OpenBSD 8.0 adds support for Intel Arc A-Series (Alchemist) graphics cards through the inteldrm driver.

Another important change increases the amd64 kernel's virtual address space from 4 GB to 512 GB, allowing the system to map over 4 GB of video memory. The release also addresses GPU timeout issues affecting some Intel Alder Lake systems. [...] For security, OpenBSD 8.0 adds checks and fixes across the kernel and system utilities, including improvements to pledge and unveil, tighter validation of executable files, and protections against memory corruption and information disclosure. A full list of changes can be found here.

Further reading: Wine Ported to OpenBSD

TP-Link plans to begin assembling routers in Mississippi as early as 2027 after the FCC banned imports of new foreign-made consumer routers over security concerns. Engadget reports: The company has signed a letter of intent with manufacturer Key Tronic and, pending approval from regulators, TP-Link says stateside assembly of its routers could start at a Mississippi production line as soon as early 2027.

Once things are up and running, Wi-Fi 8 routers are expected to be among the first TP-Link products that Key Tronic assembles. TP-Link claims that the agreement is part of its "long-term effort to accelerate US investment in high-tech manufacturing and job creation, designing and assembling next-generation products for American consumers here on American soil."

The company said it will still have to source components from outside the US. "Many [components] are just not available from a domestic source, and this is not a TP-Link issue," TP-Link's corporate affairs officer Steve Kovsky told PC Mag. "This is an issue for all manufacturers that are trying to onshore manufacturing."

Florida's DMV says a September 4 breach exposed driver's license and motor vehicle records after attackers obtained credentials that a local law-enforcement employee had "improperly stored on an electronic device." The ShinyHunters group has been linked to the intrusion. Ars Technica reports: In a notice posted Friday, [Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV)] confirmed that it took "immediate steps" after discovering that "a malicious actor accessed certain department records on September 4, 2026, using compromised credentials." There's "no evidence" that data has yet been misused, the department said, but law enforcement "determined the information potentially affected includes driver license and motor vehicle data, to include document images, and other personal information."

[...] On a webpage describing the security incident, FLHSMV confirmed that an "international cybercriminal organization" was behind the breach but did not specify which group or how long they had access. Instead, officials claimed to have "promptly mitigated the breach, launched an investigation, and issued required notification to state authorities." Mitigations included "blocking unauthorized access, resetting relevant user credentials, engaging cybersecurity professionals, and implementing additional safeguards to protect sensitive information," FLHSMV said. Florida's investigation is "ongoing," officials said, but a cybercriminal group called ShinyHunters -- which recently claimed credit for hacking the FBI -- may have stolen the data. Florida residents affected by the breach will receive a letter offering one year of free credit monitoring through Sontiq, Inc. Those whose contact information is outdated can email the FLHSMV at customerinquiry@flhsmv.gov to determine whether their data was compromised.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Elon Musk has said he will give every child in America a stake in SpaceX, his $2 trillion aerospace and artificial intelligence company, as tech firms face intensifying scrutiny over their impact on society. "Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America," he wrote on X on Monday. "This will be the first of many."

SpaceX only began trading publicly in June (and after the biggest initial public offering in history). The company's shares were trading for about $146 when the market closed on Friday. Musk's proposal was thin on detail. It is not clear how those shares would be distributed to the tens of millions of American children or whether all of them would even be eligible. According to the United States Census Bureau, there are roughly 73 million people under the age of 18, making Musk's potential giveaway worth about $10.7 billion at SpaceX's current share price. The move came in response to Anthropic's announcement on Sunday that it will commit at least 5% of its shares to a "Public Benefit Fund" that will donate money to social causes. "I recommend giving the shares directly to the public," Musk said in a reply to Anthropic's announcement. "This is what I will be doing."

America is "making an unprecedented attempt to revive three shuttered nuclear plants to meet rising energy demand," reports the Los Angeles Times,

"Two of the plants have contracts with Big Tech companies that will pay a premium to get large amounts of carbon-free energy for data centers..." No commercial nuclear reactor is known to have resumed generating electricity after beginning the decommissioning process that takes one out of service, though some reactors have restarted after long outages. The Department of Energy is lending as much as $4.4 billion to restart the Palisades Power Plant in Michigan, the Crane Clean Energy Center on Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island and the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa to restore a combined 2.25 gigawatts of electricity, which can power roughly 2 million homes and businesses. All three of the plants closed before their licenses expired, largely because the electricity they produced was considered too expensive... Restarting a reactor is a fairly quick way to get a lot of electricity, and it's cheaper than building a new, large reactor, said nuclear engineering expert Todd Allen...

Edwin Lyman, at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the taxpayer money being used should go toward addressing safety risks. For example, most U.S. plants were built between 1970 and 1990 and were designed to withstand natural disasters of that era, said Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at UCS. But climate change is making extreme weather events more frequent and severe. "It's possible, if they set the right level of safety and spend the necessary funds to meet that, they could restore these plants to operable condition," he said. "That's not happening at this point...."

NextEra Energy and Google are collaborating to restart Duane Arnold by early 2029... Microsoft has a contract with the Crane Clean Energy Center on Three Mile Island just outside Harrisburg. The plant was the site of the nation's worst commercial nuclear power accident in 1979. The accident destroyed one reactor, leaving the plant with one functioning. In 2019, Constellation Energy's then-parent company Exelon shut down the functioning reactor, saying it was losing money and that Pennsylvania lawmakers had refused to subsidize it. Constellation Energy announced in 2024 that it would spend $1.6 billion to restart the reactor under a 20-year agreement with Microsoft. It hopes to bring the plant back online in 2027...

Palisades is expected to be the first nuclear plant in the world to resume generating power after beginning the decommissioning process.

July: Nvidia-backed Nscale is building a £2bn data centre at Loughton in Essex, with Microsoft signed up as its anchor tenant. But it can't get the electricity to switch on, reported The Next Web: Nscale's problem is not really Nscale's. It is Britain's. Grid-connection times have become the single biggest brake on new data centres. Some UK projects face waits stretching close to a decade for enough power. One estimate found more than a quarter of data-centre capacity slipped in 2025 alone.
"The data centre was due to receive its power supply at the end of the year," reports the BBC. "But as first reported by the Telegraph on Sunday, Nscale has been told this will not happen until the 2030s." (Though Nscale and Microsoft are still working together on other projects in Norway, Portugal and America.)

But now anchor-tenant Microsoft has pulled out of the Essex deal, reports the Telegraph, adding that Microsoft's move "leaves the site in apparent limbo. The company was its only announced customer, having agreed to rent 23,000 Nvidia AI chips at the facility..." Microsoft's decision threatens to undermine Nscale's attempts to push ahead with a Wall Street flotation worth up to $35bn (£26bn), despite a brutal sell-off in AI computing stocks. Rival data centre developers have seen their share prices plunge over the last week on concerns that they will struggle to repay their debts as interest rates and inflation continue to rise.... Tech analyst Gartner said last week that $3.5 trillion could be written off by 2030 if the AI boom fails to deliver on its promises.
And "our research indicates that enterprise and consumer AI revenue will be insufficient to support profitable returns on all planned AI capital expenditures during this period," Gartner wrote: "In 2026, AI providers are expected to spend nearly $1 trillion on AI infrastructure, and are forecast to invest an additional $6 trillion between 2027 and 2030," said Will Sommer, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner.... Failure to achieve sustainable return on investment capital (ROIC) on rapidly depreciating assets would almost certainly necessitate write-downs. Based on Gartner projections, a continued AI infrastructure investment trajectory could leave more than $4 trillion in asset value exposed to write-down risk through 2032. In this scenario, Gartner does not expect the 12% ROIC to be achieved until the end of 2032 at earliest...

Gartner estimates AI-optimized IaaS spending will grow from $66 billion in 2027 to $174 billion in 2030. "The growth in spending on AI-optimized IaaS will be too low for most AI compute providers to recover their AI investments before the current generation of AI semiconductors is replaced," said Sommer. By 2030, Gartner predicts that cost pressure and a lack of a differentiating business model will force over 80% of neocloud [AI-specialized infrastructure] providers to cease independent operations.

The Verge reports: OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won't play nice?

In recent weeks, users of services like Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program, while Delta Air Lines is preventing them from booking tickets on behalf of users. JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab have also confirmed that they're blocking AI agents from accessing accounts due to security concerns. Some users say sites that previously worked with their AI agent are no longer accessible, including Cars.com and Amtrak, suggesting other companies could be quietly blocking them....

Muse, Meta's deceptively cute AI assistant, most recently faced the wrath of Amazon, which said its "continued access" violates its site policies. There are reports of xAI's Grok, Instinct's AI agent, and OpenAI's Dots being unable to use Amazon as well. xAI owner Elon Musk responded by saying that maybe he "should start a competitor to Amazon." The more places bots struggle to access, the greater the questions about how useful they are....

Instead of trying to fight Amazon, [Meta] has partnered with retailers like Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Best Buy, and others, allowing Muse to shop on their sites. At the same time, Shopify has also opened its network of storefronts to AI agents.

More details are emerging about Saudi OpenAI employee Abdulrahman Alfozan, who was arrested by the FBI for allegedly planting a recording device in an executive conference room. Previously Alfozan "was an engineer at Meta," notes the New York Times, "before joining a start-up that went through Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up accelerator. He gained permanent residency status in the United States in 2020, according to court documents, and was hired by OpenAI in July 2025."

14 months later the conference room recording device was inserted in a USB port on the back of a television, and then concealed in toilet paper, according to a statement from America's Justice Department. (There's even a photo of a device — and a photo of Alfozan entering the executive conference room and appearing to look behind the television where the device was inserted.) The FBI's says a chatbot account associated with Alfozan's spouse showed prompts asking about installing and obfuscating a recording device. And the complaint alleges that OpenAI security personnel also found a bag Alfozan left in a different room which contained his wallet, his ID, and another recording device.

Discussions in that room included "highly confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information, including proprietary research," according to the FBI, "as well as nonpublic information about Open AI's technical progress and strategic decisions..."

"If convicted, Alfozan faces a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, followed by 3 years of supervised release."

Friday Alfozan's lawyersrequested his release from custody, saying Alfozan agrees to wear an ankle monitor, remain at home, surrender his passport and "not possess any covert audio or video recording or surveillance device." They argue that the one-way ticket he'd purchased to Saudi Arabia just continues a long-standing habit of buying one-way tickets over the years for air travel, since his tech career often involves last-minute changes to meeting schedules, and "70% of the airline bookings in his email since January 2021 (96 of 138) were one-way tickets."

His lawyers also presented 46 letters of support, including letters from former Meta colleagues, ten company founders and chief executives, and more than a dozen engineers and engineering managers.

"Even LinkedIn is getting tired of your AI-written posts," writes CNN, reporting that the Microsoft-owned, job-oriented social media site "is upping its fight against slop." A report published in July by Pangram, a research firm that tracks AI content online, found that more than 40% of long-form posts on the platform were AI-generated, compared to around 30% on X and Medium and a smaller percentage on Reddit and Substack.... LinkedIn previously offered AI tools to edit or rewrite posts, although it recently scaled the offerings back. But low-quality AI posts are a business problem for LinkedIn. They all start to sound the same, [according to LinkedIn Editor-in-Chief Dan Roth Roth]. If users see too many generic AI posts, instead of content that really teaches them something or gives them a deeper understanding of a professional connection, LinkedIn risks losing them to other platforms.

In August, LinkedIn rolled out a button letting users flag when a post "seems like AI slop," which was clicked more than 1 million times within its first two weeks. Now, the company is trying to use its own AI systems to help weed out AI slop on the platform and to remind LinkedIn users how to post like humans. The company built a team largely made up of former journalists and social media experts who have an eye for recognizing generic, sloppy content. These experts help train LinkedIn's AI model on what authentic, useful posts look like. If the model flags a post as low-quality, AI-generated content, it'll be less likely to be distributed beyond that user's direct connections.

Also key to the strategy is a creator management team that acts as "content therapists" for executives, subject matter experts and other LinkedIn users, many of whom have gotten accustomed to the convenience of using AI to write what, on the surface, appear to be polished posts, Roth said. "A lot of times now today, they'll run it through Claude or Gemini or wherever, they'll post it on LinkedIn and it will perform poorly. And then they come to the team and they're like, 'Why did this do badly?'" Roth said. "And the best thing you can do is give it back to them and be like, 'Did you enjoy reading this? Do you see yourself in this?"

The efforts are showing early signs of success. Improvements to LinkedIn's detection systems have resulted in a 40% decline in views of content classified as AI slop, the platform said last month. That's not to say LinkedIn is entirely opposed to AI, Roth said, adding that "not everyone is a born communicator." But failing to edit or personalize content means it's less likely to reach a wide audience on the platform.

BoingBoing reports: Mark Stephens, better known under the pen name Robert X. Cringely, died last week at 73. Stephens chronicled the tech industry of the late 1980s and early 1990s — the age of Bill Gates' rise, Steve Jobs' repose, the dawn of the world wide web — and produced the famed documetary Triumph of the Nerds, based on his own bestselling Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date.

Though not the first InfoWorld columnist to write under the Cringely name, he was responsible for its persona and fought successfully to keep it after he left the magazine in 1995.
"I loved the man," writes Darth Technoid (Slashdot reader #83,199): I first met him in the 1990s, while he was still working at InfoWorld, and we became friends immediately. He helped me get a job or two, and he was always filled with crazy (meaning really good) ideas.

I'll miss him and his creativity greatly.
Cringely answered questions from Slashdot's readers in 2000. And Cringely led an interesting life, as you can tell from Slashdot's January, 2020 story Robert Cringely Attempts an Air-Launching Space Startup: "How does a 67-year-old hack with three minor children recover from going blind, losing his home and business in a horrible fire (like 2,000 others, we are still fighting with insurance companies), while appeasing an angry crowd of Kickstarter supporters armed with pitchforks and shovels?"

That crowd still wants long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringely to deliver on his Kickstarter-funded project to create custom Minecraft servers. So in a new blog post this week, Cringely writes that "I went looking for venture money to recapitalize MineServer and I simultaneously started a satellite launch company to fund my eventual retirement. I am not making this up..."

He's now found a Beverly Hills patron who wants to be a co-investor in the Minecraft servers, but "I will have to earn the matching money on my own, which is what I have been trying to do with my other startup, Eldorado Space."
Slashdot has often linked to Cringely's commentary over the years, as far back as 1998 and as recently as this summer. ("Tech Pundit Cringely Co-Founds Startup '2Brains Inc' to Solve LLM Hallucinations.")

• July, 1999: Cringely's take on "Pirates of Silicon Valley"
• April, 2009: Three Mile Island Memories
• June, 2011: IBM Did Not Invent the Personal Computer
• March, 2019: Cringely's Final Predictions: Apple Becomes a Financial Service and Hedge Fund
• June, 2019: Cringely Predicts The End Of Broadcast TV Within A Decade
• April, 2020: Not Just 'The Death of IT'. Cringely Also Predicts Layoffs For Many IT Contractors
• January, 2021: Robert Cringley Predicted 'The Death of IT' in 2020. Was He Right?
• June, 2023: Cringely Predicts Moore's Law Will Continue — Because of AI

But my favorite Cringely memory is Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, the full 70-minute interview from 1995 that a 40-year-old Jobs gave to Cringely during filming for Triumph of the Nerds. ("And they actually sent someone to wake up the Pope....") There's various pirated copies on YouTube and an online transcript, but only 10 minutes made the broadcast — at the time Jobs was still at NeXT after his departure from Apple. But when Cringely rediscovered the videotape, the entirety of the interview was released to theaters in 2012 six months after Steve Jobs' death.

Share your own memories of Robert Cringely in the comments...

That Saudi national working at OpenAI and arrested by the FBI "has not been charged with foreign espionage," writes the Washington Post, "and the U.S. government has not said whether he was acting alone or as an agent of a foreign government."

But "there are signs that the U.S. government is exploring the latter possibility," they add, citing comments from Chris McGuire, a member of the National Security Council during the Biden administration: The Department of Justice's press release about the incident says that the National Security Division's Counterintelligence and Export Control section, whose responsibility includes prosecuting spies, is assisting with the case... A Washington-based Middle East expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid incurring wrath from Saudi Arabia, said he believed the Saudi government was almost certainly involved in some way. "No one does this, not even for patriotism, without getting paid," said the person. And money would not be distributed without agreement by the Saudi royal court, he said. The Saudis lag behind their regional rival, the United Arab Emirates, in artificial intelligence development, he added.
Friday America's Director of National Intelligence told CNBC that espionage, "both commercial espionage, and I would say state-sponsored espionage, are realities. It's something that our private sector companies need to be wary of." (And CNBC adds that"An ex-CIA official, who asked not to be named because they were discussing information that is not public, told CNBC this week that the case is 'probably the tip of the iceberg.'")

The suspect had recently said he helped advise government agencies in Saudi Arabia on technology, reports the New York Times: In an Arabic podcast interview last month, Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, said he and other Saudi tech professionals in Silicon Valley had formed a group that advised Saudi organizations, including the kingdom's social insurance agency...

"Silicon Valley is ground zero for espionage from a variety of countries around the world," said Amy Zegart, a professor at Stanford University who specializes in national security and intelligence. She added that she was "troubled" by the OpenAI incident and expected more cases "because these companies are so important."
The Washington Post says the arrest "has ignited a fierce debate about the potential risks of Silicon Valley's international workforce — employees who often hail from nations seeking to rival the AI superpower status of the U.S." Foreign nationals have long formed the backbone of the American tech industry, helping U.S. companies surpass their would-be international rivals... As recently as April, Katrina Mulligan, a senior member of OpenAI's national security team, called for an "accelerated pathway to citizenship" for such workers, referring to foreign hires as a "national strategic asset" at an event on Capitol Hill. She estimated that a significant number of OpenAI's employees were not U.S. citizens, including Chinese nationals. Just half of the 300 top AI researchers in the world, she said, were American.

Other industry leaders — as well as some lawmakers — have long accused top-tier tech companies with many foreign workers of disadvantaging Americans and being breeding grounds for Chinese espionage. Palmer Luckey, CEO of weapons maker Anduril, and venture capitalist Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital took to X on Wednesday to revisit arguments that the industry should focus on hiring U.S. citizens. "Silicon Valley has operated with maximum openness and maximum naivete toward foreign tradecraft," Maguire wrote... At OpenAI on Wednesday, employees continued tense conversations about the political implications of the arrest for immigrant workers, two OpenAI employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions... The arrest triggered a discussion on OpenAI's internal Slack messaging platform among employees about whether the incident might increase pressure from the Trump administration on OpenAI to not hire foreign nationals, said one of the people.

In March, Emil Michael, the Pentagon's chief technology officer, wrote in court papers that AI developer Anthropic's reliance on staff with ties to China was among the concerns that fueled the Defense Department's conflict with the AI company.

Tencent says AI agents used to evaluate third-party models engaged in unintended web-browsing behavior while trying to retrieve data from Alibaba's Amap service. The announcement marks a rare acknowledgment of "rogue" agent activity by a major Chinese tech company. Reuters reports: Tencent Hunyuan, the company's artificial intelligence unit, said in a post on X that the activity did not originate from its Hunyuan models. Its review found no evidence of deliberate targeting or coordination, it said. The Swarmchasers researchers said the agents sought information such as the commonly used entrances at Chinese parks, museums and zoos. [...] Swarmchasers said it used the word "rogue" to describe agents taking actions outside their intended scope or completing a task in unintended ways.

After routine automated requests were blocked, the agents tried other methods, including public web tools that could open pages and run code, routing requests through other websites and using Amap keys and security codes found in publicly available software code. Swarmchasers said it found no evidence that the agents breached Amap's main anti-bot safeguards. Most of the 2,818 attempts it recorded either failed or returned anti-bot pages, login screens or blank results.

Some requests returned information through cached pages and intermediary services, including data on visitor arrivals at Chengdu Zoo, Swarmchasers said. The researchers said they could not determine whether an agent read the result or completed its task.

Meta is facing criticism over updated commercial terms taking effect October 30 that could give the company broad permission to scrape content from websites linked to business accounts and use it to train AI. Legal experts warn the changes could undermine lucrative AI licensing deals for news publishers, with no direct opt-out for businesses that accept the terms. Ars Technica reports: As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta's terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans. "While journalism isn't the only industry that will be affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, including Nieman Lab," the lab said.

[...] Notably, there is no mention of AI, but it's inferred from a single use of the word "train" and references to automated scraping and crawling. Meta's spokesperson told Nieman Lab that Meta has no plans to use the terms as a legal basis to ignore robots.txt instructions that block scraping on news sites. The company still allows news organizations to opt out of scraping and provides instructions on how to block crawling. A spokesperson told Ars that "there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false." However, should courts affirm that AI training non-news articles is fair use, news organizations question if Meta's stance might change, and the terms could be used to freely grab access to content by legally overriding robots.txt instructions.

OpenAI has updated its ChatGPT Chrome extension to let users access information from their open browser tabs. A demo video shows the new functionality in action. The Verge reports: It's also updated ChatGPT in the sidebar, with the full power of ChatGPT and your entire conversation history in Chat or Work to use without leaving the page you're viewing. It also enables ChatGPT Work to "control" your Chrome tabs for tasks like "sending messages, filling out forms, or downloading files," similar to Google's Gemini-powered "auto browse" feature, as well as organize or group open tabs.