An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A new hacking group has been rampaging the Internet in a persistent campaign that spreads a self-propagating and never-before-seen backdoor -- and curiously a data wiper that targets Iranian machines. The group, tracked under the name TeamPCP, first gained visibility in December, when researchers from security firm Flare observed it unleashing a worm that targeted cloud-hosted platforms that weren't properly secured. The objective was to build a distributed proxy and scanning infrastructure and then use it to compromise servers for exfiltrating data, deploying ransomware, conducting extortion, and mining cryptocurrency. The group is notable for its skill in large-scale automation and integration of well-known attack techniques.

More recently, TeamPCP has waged a relentless campaign that uses continuously evolving malware to bring ever more systems under its control. Late last week, it compromised virtually all versions of the widely used Trivy vulnerability scanner in a supply-chain attack after gaining privileged access to the GitHub account of Aqua Security, the Trivy creator. Over the weekend, researchers said they observed TeamPCP spreading potent malware that was also worm-enabled, meaning it had the potential to spread to new machines automatically, with no interaction required of victims behind the keyboard. [...]

As the weekend progressed, CanisterWorm [as Aikido has named the malware] was updated to add an additional payload: a wiper that targets machines exclusively in Iran. When the updated worm infects machines, it checks if the machine is in the Iranian timezone or is configured for use in that country. When either condition was met, the malware no longer activated the credential stealer and instead triggered a novel wiper that TeamPCP developers named Kamikaze. Eriksen said in an email that there's no indication yet that the worm caused actual damage to Iranian machines, but that there was "clear potential for large-scale impact if it achieves active spread." It's unclear what the motive is for TeamPCP. Aikido researcher Charlie Eriksen wrote: "While there may be an ideological component, it could just as easily be a deliberate attempt to draw attention to the group. Historically, TeamPCP has appeared to be financially motivated, but there are signs that visibility is becoming a goal in itself. By going after security tools and open-source projects, including Checkmarx as of today, they are sending a clear and deliberate signal."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he understands the concerns about "AI slop" with DLSS 5 but insists the feature preserves a game's underlying geometry and artistic intent. "I think their perspective makes sense, " said Huang during a recent appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast. "And I could see where they're coming from because I don't love AI slop myself. You know, all of the AI-generated content increasingly looks similar, and they're all beautiful... so I'm empathic toward what they're thinking. That's just not what DLSS 5 is trying to do." Tom's Hardware reports: Although Huang is striking a more conciliatory tone, much of his response is similar to what we heard at GTC [where Huang said gamers were "completely wrong."] The artist determines the geometry, we are completely truthful to the geometry... so every single frame, it enhances, but it doesn't change anything." There was some confusion about how DLSS 5 worked when it was first announced, and although the inner workings of it still aren't clear on a technical level, Huang has said that it isn't a general-purpose generative AI model. He describes it as "content-controlled generative AI." On the other end of the spectrum, Huang also said that it isn't a post-processing filter. The technical details of DLSS 5 live somewhere between that space, and we likely won't know them until later this year when the feature is set to release.

"The question about enhancing, DLSS 5... in the future, you could even prompt it. You know, I want it to be a toon shader. I want it to look like this, kind of. You could even give it an example and it would generate in the style of that, all consistent with the artistry, the style, the intent of the artist," Huang continued. "All of that is done for the artist so they can create something that is more beautiful but still in the style that they want." Although the talking points about DLSS 5 remain unchanged, it seems that Huang has at least heard the criticism. "I think that they got the impression that the games are going to come out the way the games are... and then we're going to post-process it. That's not what DLSS is intended to do."

Huang also made assertions that DLSS is "integrated" with the artist, and suggested that it would put the power of generative AI in the hands of artists working in game development [...]. Although DLSS 5 looks like it's doing a lot, Huang said that it's just another tool, not an essential feature. "The gamers might also appreciate that, in the last couple of years, we introduced skin shaders to game developers, and many of those games have skin shaders that include sub-surface scattering that makes skin look more skin-like... [DLSS 5] is just one more tool. They can decide what to use," Huang ended the conversation about DLSS 5. Immediately after, without missing a beat, he said 1993's Doom was the most influential video game ever made.

Wing is expanding its drone delivery service to the San Francisco Bay Area. "The drone delivery startup has been rapidly expanding to metro areas across the US, but is now targeting the tech-friendly Silicon Valley region," reports Engadget. From the report: Going back to its inaugural deliveries, Wing ferried office supplies across Google's Mountain View campus in the Bay Area with its automated drones. It was still a startup out of Google's X, The Moonshot Factory incubator at the time, but early users were already asking for home delivery services, according to Wing. Now, Wing's latest delivery drones can deliver groceries, food, or whatever else fits in a small package weighing up to five pounds in 30 minutes or less to Bay Area residents. Earlier this year, Wing expanded its service to an additional 150 Walmart stores across the U.S. Service began recently in Atlanta and Charlotte, and it's coming soon to Los Angeles, Houston, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Miami and other major U.S. cities to be announced later. "By 2027, Walmart and Wing say they'll have a network of more than 270 drone delivery locations nationwide."

Many U.S. consumers are increasingly interested in lower-cost Chinese electric vehicles but steep tariffs and political resistance are keeping them out of the market. A recent survey from Cox Automotive found that 40% of respondents support allowing Chinese auto brands into the U.S. market. Reuters reports: While Chinese autos hit the highways of Europe, Latin America and even Canada, the U.S. government has effectively banned the cars with tariffs exceeding 100%, out of concerns over data security and protecting American jobs. In places like Europe, a number of Chinese EVs sell at prices under $30,000. Some of those cars include amenities like advanced driving assistance software, a built-in mini fridge, and the option to sing karaoke with your fellow passengers. "The technology they offer for those lower price tags was astounding," said Clint Simone, senior features editor for car-shopping website Edmunds, who drove several Chinese vehicles while at the CES trade show earlier this year. [...]

Consumers have some concerns over allowing Chinese car imports, though, including over data security and protecting U.S. businesses, survey results from The Harris Poll as well as Cox show. Rhett Ricart, an Ohio car dealer who sells several brands, including Ford, Chevrolet and Hyundai, said he has no doubt customers would snap up Chinese models if they became available. He and other dealers don't want that to happen yet, according to a recent Cox Automotive survey, which found that just 15% of dealers supported the entry of Chinese auto brands into the U.S., and just 26% trust that they would comply with U.S. safety standards.

Not meeting U.S. safety standards is one reason Chinese EVs cannot yet be owned permanently in the U.S. But those obstacles haven't quieted the buzz. The Cox survey polled 802 U.S. consumers who expect to buy a car in the next two years. Nearly half -- 49% -- rated Chinese cars as having very good or excellent value, and 40% say they support the idea of Chinese auto brands in the U.S. market. Rich Benoit, a car enthusiast whose YouTube videos reviewing Chinese models garner millions of views, said the most compelling feature is the price. "That's what a lot of people are looking for: efficient, quiet and low cost," he said. "They want to 'get to work-- not everyone is a car enthusiast." He's considering buying a BYD model in Mexico and driving it across the border. "That's the only way to get one," Benoit said. "They've been selling in Mexico for years... "I want to own a Chinese EV in America."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone inside and outside his company to eventually have his or her own personal artificial-intelligence agent. He is starting with himself. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta Platforms, is building a CEO agent to help him do his job (source paywalled; alternative source), according to a person familiar with the project. The agent, which is still in development, is currently helping Zuckerberg get information faster -- for instance, by retrieving answers for him that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get, the person familiar with the project said.

[...] Use of AI tools has spread quickly through the ranks at Meta -- in part because it is now a factor in employees' performance reviews. Meta's internal message board is filled with posts from employees sharing new AI use cases they have found and new tools they have built using AI, according to people familiar with the matter. [...] Employees have started using personal agent tools such as My Claw that have access to their chat logs and work files and can go talk to colleagues -- or their colleagues' own personal agents -- on their behalf, the people said. Another AI tool called Second Brain that is somewhere between a chatbot and an agent is also gaining momentum internally, according to people familiar with the matter. Second Brain was built by a Meta employee on top of Claude and can index and query documents for projects, among other uses. On the internal post announcing it to staff, the employee said it is "meant to be like an AI chief of staff."

There is even a group on the internal messaging board where employees' personal agents talk to each other, some of the people said. (Separately, Meta acquired Moltbook, the social-media site for AI agents, and hired its founders in a deal earlier this month.) Meta also recently acquired Manus, a Singapore-based startup that makes personal agents that can execute tasks for its users, and is using the tool internally, some of the people said. Meta recently established a new applied AI engineering organization that is tasked with using AI to help speed up development of the company's large language models. Those teams will have an ultraflat structure of as many as 50 individual contributors reporting to one manager, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. [...] Employees across the company said they have been encouraged to attend AI tutorial meetings several times a week and frequent AI hackathons, and to create their own AI tools to speed up their work.

Walmart found that purchases made directly inside ChatGPT converted at only one-third the rate of traditional website checkouts, leading it to abandon OpenAI's Instant Checkout in favor of routing users through its own platform. Search Engine Land reports: Starting in November, Walmart offered about 200,000 products through OpenAI's Instant Checkout. Users could complete purchases inside ChatGPT without visiting Walmart's site. Daniel Danker, Walmart's EVP of product and design, said those in-chat purchases converted at one-third the rate of click-out transactions. He called the experience "unsatisfying" and confirmed Walmart is moving away from it.

Instant Checkout was designed to let users complete purchases directly inside ChatGPT without visiting a retailer's website. However, earlier this month, OpenAI confirmed it was phasing out Instant Checkout in favor of app-based checkout handled by merchants. Walmart will embed its own chatbot, Sparky, inside ChatGPT. Users will log into Walmart, sync carts across platforms, and complete purchases within Walmart's system. A similar integration is coming to Google Gemini next month. In other Walmart-related news, the retailer announced plans to roll out "digital price tags" to all U.S. stores by the end of the year.

Computershack shares a report from NBC News: Leonid Radvinsky, the owner of adult-content platform OnlyFans, has died of cancer at the age of 43, the company said in a statement on Monday. "We are deeply saddened to announce the death of Leo Radvinsky. Leo passed away peacefully after a long battle with cancer," an OnlyFans spokesperson said. "His family have requested privacy at this difficult time."


Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American entrepreneur, acquired Fenix International Limited, the parent company of OnlyFans, in 2018 and served as its director and majority shareholder. He also runs Leo, a venture capital fund he founded in 2009 that focuses primarily on investments in technology companies. According to Reuters, OnlyFans is valued at around $5.5 billion, including debt.

Uber is aggressively partnering with multiple robotaxi companies to avoid a future dominated by Waymo or Tesla. The ride-hailing giant has struck deals with at least a dozen autonomous vehicle players in recent years. Just last week, it announced a $1.25 billion partnership with Rivian, with plans to deploy up to 50,000 driverless vehicles over the next decade. Business Insider reports: Uber announced three new robotaxi partnerships in the past few weeks with Zoox, Wayve-Nissan, and Rivian. In less than half a decade, the company has secured at least a dozen deals, including with WeRide, AVride, May Mobility, Momenta, Pony.AI, Wayve, Baidu's Apollo Go, Motional, and Lucid-Nuro. Still, less than a half-dozen of Uber's partners have deployed fully driverless, paid robotaxi operations, and only one, Waymo, operates in the US. Uber has a joint deployment with Waymo in Atlanta, Austin, and Phoenix, but in other cities, Waymo is a competitor.

Uber's partnership spree is less about seeking the singular, dominant player of autonomous driving. Instead, analysts told Business Insider that Uber is ensuring multiple vendors can participate in the expensive business of robotaxis -- fending off the real risk of a Waymo or Tesla scaling on its own -- and giving itself a stake in the robotaxi economy by being the aggregator of choice. "The more diversified the supplier base, the better for the network in the middle, which is Uber," Mark Mahaney, an Uber analyst for Evercore ISI, told Business Insider.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: There could be one more step required before creating an account and posting on Reddit in the future. According to Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, the social media platform is exploring different ways to verify a user is human and not a bot. When asked by the TBPN podcast how to confirm that it's a human using Reddit, Huffman responded with several verification methods with varying degrees of heavy-handedness.

"The most lightweight way is with something like Face ID or Touch ID," Huffman said during the interview. "They actually require a human presence, like a human has to touch, or do or look at something, so that actually just proves there's a person there or gets you pretty far." Besides these passkey methods that use biometrics data, Huffman said there are other options like relying on third-party services that are decentralized or don't require ID. On the other end of the spectrum, Huffman also mentioned more burdensome options, like ID-checking services.

[...] "Part of our promise for our users is we don't know your name but we do want to know you're a person," Huffman said. "It'll be an evolution for us for a while, and probably every platform to find the right middle ground here." Reddit co-founder and former executive chair, Alexis Ohanian, said on X that Reddit requiring Face ID wasn't something he expected but agreed that something had to be done about the fake content from bots, adding that, "I just don't know how to sell face-scanning to Redditors or even lurkers." We reached out to Reddit's communications team and will update the story when we hear back. The Digg beta shut down earlier this month after failing to fight the overwhelming influx of AI-driven bots and spam. "The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts," said CEO Justin Mezzell. "We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn't appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they'd find us."

"We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Tom's Hardware: GrapheneOS, the privacy-focused Android fork, said in a post on X on Friday that it will not comply with emerging laws requiring operating systems to collect user age data at setup. "GrapheneOS will remain usable by anyone around the world without requiring personal information, identification or an account," the project stated. "If GrapheneOS devices can't be sold in a region due to their regulations, so be it."

The statement came after Brazil's Digital ECA (Law 15.211) took effect on March 17, imposing fines of up to R$50 million (roughly $9.5 million) per violation on operating system providers that fail to implement age verification...

Motorola and GrapheneOS announced a long-term partnership at MWC on March 2, to bring to bring the hardened OS to future Motorola hardware, ending GrapheneOS's long-standing exclusivity to Google Pixel devices. A GrapheneOS-powered Motorola phone is expected in 2027. If Motorola sells devices with GrapheneOS pre-installed, those devices would need to comply with local regulations in every market where they ship, or Motorola may need to restrict sales geographically.
Or, "People can buy the devices without GrapheneOS and install it themselves in any region where that's an issue," according to a post on the GrapheneOS BlueSky account. "Motorola devices with GrapheneOS preinstalled is something we want but it doesn't have to happen right away and doesn't need to happen everywhere for the partnership to be highly successful. Pixels are sold in 33 countries which doesn't include many countries outside North America and Europe."

Tom's Hardware also notes that GrapheneOS "isn't the first and won't be the last company to outright refuse compliance with incoming age verification laws."

"The developers of open-source calculator firmware DB48X issued a legal notice recently, stating that their software 'does not, cannot and will not implement age verification,' while MidnightBSD updated its license to ban users in Brazil."

Yes, Microsoft announced it's fixing common Windows 11 complaints. But what about getting rid of that requirement to have a Microsoft account before installing Windows 11? While Microsoft didn't mention that at all, the senior editor at the blog Windows Central reports there's "a number of people" internally pushing at Microsoft to relax that requirement: Microsoft Vice President and overall developer legend Scott Hanselman has posted on X in response to someone asking him about possibly relaxing the Microsoft account requirements, saying "Ya I hate that. Working on it...." [Hanselman made that remark Friday, to his 328,200 followers.]
The blog notes "It would be very easy for Microsoft to remove this requirement from a technical perspective, it's just whether or not the company can agree to make the change that needs to be decided."

Elsewhere on X someone told Hanselman they wanted to see Windows "cut out the borderline malware tactics we've seen in recent years to push things like Edge, Bing, ads into the start menu, etc." Hanselman's reply? "Yes a calmer and more chill OS with fewer upsells is a goal."

Q: When will we see first changes? for now it's just words...

Hanselman: This month and every month this year.

A man crossing the street one San Francisco night spotted a self-driving car — and decided to confront its passenger, 37-year-old tech worker Doug Fulop. The New York Times reports the man yelled that "he wanted to kill Fulop and the other two passengers for giving money to a robot." A taxi driver would have simply driven away. But Fulop's vehicle had no driver — it was a self-driving Waymo... Self-driving cars are designed to stop moving if a person is nearby. People can take advantage of that function to harass and threaten their passengers.... It was unsettling to be trapped inside a Waymo during an attack, Fulop said. "If he had kept hammering on one window instead of alternating, I'm sure he would have eventually broken through," he said. The attacker did not appear to be on drugs or otherwise impaired, but seemed to be overtaken by extreme anger at the self-driving car, Fulop said.

It did not seem safe to get out and run, he added, since the man was trying to open the locked doors and said he wanted to kill the passengers. They called 911 and Waymo's support line, Fulop said. Waymo told them that it would not manually direct the car away if someone was standing nearby, and that the passengers would be OK with the doors locked. The car's software does not allow riders to jump into the driver's seat and take over during an incident. The attack lasted around six minutes. By then, bystanders had begun cheering on the man, Fulop said. That distracted the man, who moved far enough away from the car that it could finally drive away...

Fulop said he had stopped using Waymo for a time after the January attack and would avoid the service at night unless the company changed its policy of not intervening when a hostile person threatened riders. "As passengers, we deserve more safety than that if someone is trying to attack us," he said. "This can't be the policy to be trapped there."
The article remembers other incidents — including a 2024 video showing three women screaming as their autonomous taxi is spray-painted by vandals. And technology author/speaker Anders Sorman-Nilsson says in Los Angeles five men on e-bikes surrounded his Waymo and forced it to stop. The author felt safe inside the vehicle, according to the times, which adds "He felt reassured knowing that Waymo's many exterior cameras were recording the men. After around five minutes, he said, they gave up and rode away."

"Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated," reports the Verge: After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it's starting to mess with headlines in the traditional "10 blue links," too. We've found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process. For example, Google reduced our headline "I used the 'cheat on everything' AI tool and it didn't help me cheat on anything" to just five words: "'Cheat on everything' AI tool." It almost sounds like we're endorsing a product we do not recommend at all.

What we are seeing is a "small" and "narrow" experiment, one that's not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how "small" that experiment actually is. Over the past few months, multiple Verge staffers have seen examples of headlines that we never wrote appear in Google Search results — headlines that do not follow our editorial style, and without any indication that Google replaced the words we chose. And Google says it's tweaking how other websites show up in search, too, not just news.

The good news, for now, is that these changed headlines seem to be few and far between, and they're not yet the kind of tripe we've seen in Google Discover. (For example, Google Discover told me this week that the PlayStation Portal was getting a 1080p streaming mode, when it actually got a higher bitrate mode instead.) Compared to that and other lying Google Discover headlines like "US reverses foreign drone ban" — on a story reporting the opposite — the nonsense headlines we're seeing in Google Search are downright tame.
The article points out that Google "originally told us its AI headlines in Google Discover were an experiment too. A month later, it told us those AI headlines are now a feature..."

"Google confirmed that the test uses generative AI, but claimed that 'if we were to actually launch something based on this experiment, it would not be using a generative model and we would not be creating headlines with gen AI'..."

"After nearly a decade of delays and industry skepticism, Tesla's electric big rig is finally rolling out of Nevada's Gigafactory for mass production starting summer 2026," writes Gadget Review. And some truckers who tested the vehicles already love them (as reported by the Wall Street Journal): Dakota Shearer and Angel Rodriguez, among other pilot drivers, rave about the centered cab that eliminates blind spots during tight maneuvers. The automatic transmission means no more wrestling with 13-gear diesels, reducing physical stress on long hauls. Most surprisingly, the Semi maintains highway speeds on grades where diesel trucks typically crawl at 30 mph. The 500-mile range enables multiple daily round-trips — think Long Beach to Vegas or Inland Empire runs — without range anxiety...

Sure, the Semi costs under $300,000 — roughly double a diesel equivalent — but the math gets interesting quickly. Energy costs drop to $0.17 per mile compared to $0.50-0.70 for diesel fuel. Maintenance requirements shrink dramatically; one fleet reports needing just one mechanic for their electric trucks versus five for 40 diesels... Tesla offers Standard Range (325 miles) and Long Range (500 miles) versions, both handling 82,000-pound gross combined weight at 1.7 kWh per mile efficiency.

The tri-motor setup delivers 800 kW — over 1,000 horsepower equivalent — enabling loaded 0-60 mph acceleration in 20 seconds versus 45-60 for diesel. Fast charging hits 60% capacity in 30 minutes [which Tesla says is 4x faster than other battery-electric trucks] using the new MCS 3.2 standard, while 25 kW ePTO power runs refrigerated trailers without diesel auxiliaries. Charging networks remain the biggest hurdle for widespread adoption. Public charging stations lack the Semi's massive power requirements, limiting long-haul routes. Tesla plans dedicated fast-charging corridors starting this summer, but coverage remains spotty. The lack of sleeper cabs also restricts the Semi to regional freight rather than cross-country hauling.

Production scales to 5,000-15,000 units by 2026, then 50,000 annually — assuming charging infrastructure keeps pace with demand.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

"Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper," writes EFF senior policy analyst Joe Mullin.

"That's effectively what's begun happening online in the last few months." The Internet Archive — the world's largest digital library — has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s... But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web's traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit...

The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several — including the Times — are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There's a strong case that such training is fair use. Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response.

Organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems. They are preserving a record of our history. Turning off that preservation in an effort to control AI access could essentially torch decades of historical documentation over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn't start, and didn't ask for. If publishers shut the Archive out, they aren't just limiting bots. They're erasing the historical record...

Even if courts place limits on AI training, the law protecting search and web archiving is already well established... There are real disputes over AI training that must be resolved in courts. But sacrificing the public record to fight those battles would be a profound, and possibly irreversible, mistake.

13 million people live in Moscow, reports CNN.

But since early March the city "has experienced internet and mobile service outages on a level previously unseen." (Though Wi-Fi access to the internet is still available...) Russian social media "is flooded with jokes and memes about sending letters by carrier pigeons or using smartphones as ping-pong paddles..." [Moscow residents] complain they cannot navigate around the center or use their favorite mobile apps. The interruptions appear to have had a knock-on effect of making it more difficult to make voice calls or send an SMS. Some are panic-buying walkie-talkies, paper maps, and even pagers.

The latest shutdown builds on similar efforts around the country. For months, mobile internet service interruptions have hit Russia's regions, particularly in provinces bordering Ukraine, which has staged incursions and launched strikes inside Russian territory to counter Russia's full-scale invasion. Some regions have reported not having any mobile internet since summer. But the most recent outages have hit the country's main centers of wealth and power: Moscow and Russia's second city, St. Petersburg.

Public officials claim the blackout of mobile internet service in the capital and other regions is part of a security effort to counter "increasingly sophisticated methods" of Ukrainian attack... Speculation centers on whether the authorities are testing their ability to clamp down on public protest in the case there's an effort to reintroduce unpopular mobilization measures to find fresh manpower for the war in Ukraine; whether mobile internet outages may precede a more sweeping digital blackout; or if the new restrictions reflect an atmosphere of heightened fear and paranoia inside the Kremlin as it watches US-led regime- change efforts unfold against Russian allies such as Venezuela and Iran... On Wednesday, Russian mobile providers sent notifications that there would be "temporary restrictions" on mobile internet in parts of Moscow for security reasons, Russian state news agency RIA-Novosti reported. The measures will last "for as long as additional measures are needed to ensure the safety of our citizens," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on March 11...

As well as banning many social media platforms, Russia blocks calling features on messenger apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. Roskomnadzor, the country's communications regulator, has introduced a "white list" of approved apps... Russia has also tested what it calls the "sovereign internet," a network that is effectively firewalled from the rest of the world. The disruptions are fueling broader concerns about tightening state control. In parallel with the internet shutdown, the Kremlin has also been pushing to impose a state-controlled messaging app called Max as the country's main portal for state services, payments and everyday communication. There has been speculation the Kremlin may be planning to ban Telegram, Russia's most widely used messaging app, entirely. Roskomnadzor said that it was restricting Telegram for allegedly failing to comply with Russian laws.

"Russia has opened a criminal case against me for 'aiding terrorism,'" Telegram's Russian-born founder Pavel Durov said on X last month. "Each day, the authorities fabricate new pretexts to restrict Russians' access to Telegram as they seek to suppress the right to privacy and free speech...."
The article includes this quote from Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society and an expert on Russian internet freedom. "In any situation when they (the authorities) perceive some kind of danger for themselves and accept the belief that the internet is dangerous for them, even if it may not be true, they will shut it down," he said. "Just like in Iran."

ReactOS aims to be compatible with programs and drivers developed for Windows Server 2003 and later versions of Microsoft Windows. And Slashdot reader jeditobe reports that the project has now "announced significant progress in achieving compatibility with proprietary graphics drivers." ReactOS now supports roughly 90% of GPU drivers for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, thanks to a series of fixes and the implementation of the KMDF (Kernel-Mode Driver Framework) and WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) subsystems. Prior to these changes, many proprietary drivers either failed to launch or exhibited unstable behavior. In the latest nightly builds of the 0.4.16 branch, drivers from a variety of manufacturers — including Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD — are running reliably.

The project demonstrated ReactOS running on real hardware, including booting with installed drivers for graphics cards such as Intel GMA 945, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX 750 Ti, and AMD Radeon HD 7530G. They also highlighted successful operation on mobile GPUs like the NVIDIA Quadro 1000M, with 2D/3D acceleration, audio, and network connectivity all functioning correctly. Further tests confirmed support on less common or older configurations, including a laptop with a Radeon Xpress 1100, as well as high-performance cards like the NVIDIA GTX Titan X.

A key contribution came from a patch merged into the main branch for the memory management subsystem, which improved driver stability and reduced crashes during graphics adapter initialization.

A free built-in VPN is coming to Firefox on Tuesday, Mozilla announced this week: Free VPNs can sometimes mean sketchy arrangements that end up compromising your privacy, but ours is built from our data principles and commitment to be the world's most trusted browser. It routes your browser traffic through a proxy to hide your IP address and location while you browse, giving you stronger privacy and protection online with no extra downloads. Users will have 50 gigabytes of data monthly in the U.S., France, Germany and U.K. to start. Available in Firefox 149 starting March 24.

We also recently shared that Firefox is the first browser to ship Sanitizer API, a new web security standard that blocks attacks before they reach you [for untrusted HTML XSS vulnerabilities].
"The roadmap for Firefox this year is the most exciting one we've developed in quite a while," says Firefox head Ajit Varma. "We're improving the fundamentals like speed and performance. We're also launching innovative new open standards in Gecko to ensure the future of the web is open, diverse, and not controlled by a single engine.

"At the same time we're prioritizing features that give users real power, choice and strong privacy protections, built in a way that only Firefox can. And as always, we'll keep listening, inviting users to help shape what comes next and giving them more reasons to love Firefox."

Two new features coming next week:

• Split View puts two webpages side by side in one window, making it easy to compare, copy and multitask without bouncing between tabs. Rolling out in Firefox 149 on March 24.

• Tab Notes let you add notes to any tab, another tool to help with multitasking and picking up where you left off. Available in Firefox Labs 149 starting March 24.

And Firefox also released a video this week introducing their new mascot Kit.

schwit1 shares a report from the BBC: A French officer has reportedly revealed the location of an aircraft carrier deployed towards the Middle East after publicly registering a run on sports app Strava. French news outlet Le Monde first reported the officer, referred to as Arthur, logged a 35-minute run on the app while exercising on the deck of aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle on 13 March. He used a smartwatch to record his run and upload the activity to the app, the paper said, creating a map that showed his location. [...] The location of the vessel was said by Le Monde to have been northwest of Cyprus, around 100km (62 miles) from the Turkish coast, with satellite images capturing the carrier and its escort. A representative from the French Armed Forces said the officer's behavior "does not comply with current guidelines," which "sailors are regularly made aware of."

BrianFagioli writes: Microsoft says it is finally listening to user complaints about Windows 11, promising a series of changes focused on performance, reliability, and reducing everyday annoyances. In a message to Windows Insiders, the company outlined plans to bring back long requested features like taskbar repositioning, cut down on intrusive AI integrations, and give users more control over updates. File Explorer is also getting attention, with promised improvements to speed, stability, and general responsiveness.

The bigger picture here is less about new features and more about fixing what already exists. Microsoft is talking about fewer forced restarts, quieter notifications, and a more predictable experience overall, along with improvements to Windows Subsystem for Linux for developers. While the roadmap sounds reasonable, users have heard similar promises before, so the real test will be whether these changes actually show up in day to day use.