The World is Producing More Food Crops Than Ever Before | | The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization projects record production of global cereal crops in the 2025-26 farming season. The forecast covers wheat, corn and rice, and comes as the global stocks-to-use ratio stands around 30.6% -- the world is producing nearly a third more of these foundational crops than it currently uses.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in August that American farmers would harvest a record corn crop at record yield per acre. The FAO Food Price Index has risen slightly this year but remains nearly 20% below its peak during the early months of the war in Ukraine. Average calories available per person worldwide have climbed from roughly 2,100 to 2,200 kilocalories daily in the early nineteen-sixties to just under 3,000 kilocalories daily by 2022. Cereal yields have roughly tripled since 1961. Yet the World Bank estimates around 2.6 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, and current famines in Gaza and Sudan stem from political failures rather than crop failures. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Generative AI Systems Miss Vast Bodies of Human Knowledge, Study Finds | | Generative AI models trained on internet data lack exposure to vast domains of human knowledge that remain undigitized or underrepresented online. English dominates Common Crawl with 44% of content. Hindi accounts for 0.2% of the data despite being spoken by 7.5% of the global population. Tamil represents 0.04% despite 86 million speakers worldwide. Approximately 97% of the world's languages are classified as "low-resource" in computing.
A 2020 study found 88% of languages face such severe neglect in AI technologies that bringing them up to speed would require herculean efforts. Research on medicinal plants in North America, northwest Amazonia and New Guinea found more than 75% of 12,495 distinct uses of plant species were unique to just one local language. Large language models amplify dominant patterns through what researchers call "mode amplification." The phenomenon narrows the scope of accessible knowledge as AI-generated content increasingly fills the internet and becomes training data for subsequent models. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
California Cracks Down on 'Predatory' Early Cancellation Fees | | California has enacted new legislation that aims to limit companies from charging consumers "exorbitant" fees to cancel fixed-term contracts. From a report: Assembly Bill 483 was signed into law by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday, placing transparency requirements and fee limits on early terminations for installment contracts -- plans that allow consumers to make recurring payments for goods and services over a specified duration.
This includes services that lure consumers into signing annual contracts by allowing them to pay in installments that appear similar to rolling monthly subscriptions, but with hefty cancellation fees for not locking in for the full year. The bill bans companies from hiding early termination fee disclosures within fine print or obscured hyperlinks, and limits the total fee amount to a maximum of 30 percent of the total contract cost. The goal is to make it easier for Californians to take these fees into account when comparing between services, and lessen the financial burden if they need to end their contract early. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Satellites Are Leaking the World's Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data | | Researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Maryland have found that roughly half of geostationary satellite signals transmit sensitive data without encryption. The team spent three years using an $800 satellite receiver on a university rooftop in San Diego to intercept communications from satellites visible from their location. They collected phone calls and text messages from more than 2,700 T-Mobile users in just nine hours of recording.
The researchers also obtained data from airline passengers using in-flight Wi-Fi, communications from electric utilities and offshore oil and gas platforms, and US and Mexican military communications that revealed personnel locations and equipment details. The exposed data resulted from telecommunications companies using satellites to relay signals from remote cell towers to their core networks.
The researchers examined only about 15% of global satellite transponder communications and presented their findings at an Association for Computing Machinery conference in Taiwan this week. Most companies warned by the researchers have encrypted their satellite transmissions, but some US critical infrastructure owners have not yet added encryption. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Beijing Issues Documents Without Word Format Amid US Tensions | | An anonymous reader shares a report: China's expansion of its rare earth export controls appeared to mark another escalation in the US-China trade war last week. But the announcements were also significant in another way: unusually, the documents could not be opened using American word processing software.
For the first time, China's Ministry of Commerce issued a slew of documents that could be directly accessed only through WPS Office -- China's answer to Microsoft Office -- as Beijing continues its tech self-reliance drive. Developed by the Beijing-based software company Kingsoft, WPS Office uses a different coding structure to Microsoft Office, meaning WPS text files cannot be opened directly in Word without conversion. Previously, the ministry primarily released text documents in Microsoft Word format. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
GitHub Will Prioritize Migrating To Azure Over Feature Development | | An anonymous reader shares a report: After acquiring GitHub in 2018, Microsoft mostly let the developer platform run autonomously. But in recent months, that's changed. With GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke leaving the company this August, and GitHub being folded more deeply into Microsoft's organizational structure, GitHub lost that independence. Now, according to internal GitHub documents The New Stack has seen, the next step of this deeper integration into the Microsoft structure is moving all of GitHub's infrastructure to Azure, even at the cost of delaying work on new features.
[...] While GitHub had previously started work on migrating parts of its service to Azure, our understanding is that these migrations have been halting and sometimes failed. There are some projects, like its data residency initiative (internally referred to as Project Proxima) that will allow GitHub's enterprise users to store all of their code in Europe, that already solely use Azure's local cloud regions. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
The Great Software Quality Collapse | | Engineer Denis Stetskov, writing in a blog: The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM. Not used. Not allocated. Leaked. A basic calculator app is hemorrhaging more memory than most computers had a decade ago. Twenty years ago, this would have triggered emergency patches and post-mortems. Today, it's just another bug report in the queue. We've normalized software catastrophes to the point where a Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM barely makes the news. This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed. AI just weaponized existing incompetence.
[...] Here's what engineering leaders don't want to acknowledge: software has physical constraints, and we're hitting all of them simultaneously. Modern software is built on towers of abstractions, each one making development "easier" while adding overhead: Today's real chain: React > Electron > Chromium > Docker > Kubernetes > VM > managed DB > API gateways. Each layer adds "only 20-30%." Compound a handful and you're at 2-6x overhead for the same behavior. That's how a Calculator ends up leaking 32GB. Not because someone wanted it to -- but because nobody noticed the cumulative cost until users started complaining.
[...] We're living through the greatest software quality crisis in computing history. A Calculator leaks 32GB of RAM. AI assistants delete production databases. Companies spend $364 billion to avoid fixing fundamental problems. This isn't sustainable. Physics doesn't negotiate. Energy is finite. Hardware has limits. The companies that survive won't be those who can outspend the crisis. There'll be those who remember how to engineer. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Digital Platforms Correlate With Cognitive Decline in Young Users | | Preteens who use increasing amounts of social media perform poorer in reading, vocabulary and memory tests in early adolescence compared to those who use little or no social media. A study published in JAMA examined data from over 6,000 children ages 9 to 10 through early adolescence. Researchers classified the children into three groups: 58% used little or no social media over several years, 37% started with low-level use but spent about an hour daily on social media by age 13, and 6% spent three or more hours daily by that age.
Even low users who spent about one hour per day performed 1 to 2 points lower on reading and memory tasks compared to non-users. High users performed 4 to 5 points lower than non-social media users. Jason Nagata, a pediatrician at the University of California, San Francisco and study author, said the findings were notable because even modest social media use correlated with lower cognitive scores. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Apple Renames 'Apple TV+' To 'Apple TV' | | Apple has rebranded its streaming service Apple TV+ to simply Apple TV, further blurring the already confusing line between the Apple TV device, the Apple TV app, and the Apple TV service. As John Gruber notes, users can now "watch Apple TV in Apple TV on Apple TV." From Daring Fireball: In some ways, I get it. Like, if you're telling someone how much you enjoy Slow Horses and they ask how to watch it, it's more natural and conversational to just say "It's on Apple TV." That's what most people say. That's what I say -- and as part of my job, I completely understand the difference between Apple TV the device, Apple TV the (free) app, and Apple TV+ the (paid) streaming service.
But right there in Apple's own "About Apple TV" description, you see just how overused "Apple TV" now is. You can watch Apple TV in Apple TV on Apple TV -- the paid service in the free app on the set-top box. But you can watch any streaming service you want on the box, in that service's own app. But many of those services are also available in the Apple TV app. And the Apple TV streaming service is also available on just about all other popular set-top hardware platforms. So don't need an Apple TV to watch Apple TV. It's a bit like Abbott and Costello's classic "Who's on First" routine. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
ShinyHunters Leak Alleged Data From Qantas, Vietnam Airlines and Other Major Firms | | schwit1 shares a report from Hackread: On October 3, 2025, Hackread.com published an in-depth report in which hackers claimed to have stolen 989 million records from 39 major companies worldwide by exploiting a Salesforce vulnerability. The group demanded that Salesforce and the affected firms enter negotiations before October 10, 2025, warning that if their demands were ignored, they would release the entire dataset. The hackers, identifying themselves as "Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters," a collective said to combine elements of Scattered Spider, Lapsus$, and ShinyHunters, have now published data allegedly belonging to 6 of the 39 targeted companies.
The companies named in the leak are as follows: Fujifilm, GAP, INC., Vietnam Airlines, Engie Resources, Quantas Airways Limited, and Albertsons Companies, Inc. In all 6 leaks, the record contains personal details of customers, business, including email addresses, full names, addresses, passport numbers, phone numbers. The hackers said on Telegram that they will not be releasing any additional information, stating, "A lot of people are asking what else will be leaked. Nothing else will be leaked. Everything that was leaked was leaked, we have nothing else to leak, and obviously, the things we have cannot be leaked for obvious reasons." Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
NASA Unit JPL To Lay Off About 550 Workers, Citing Restructure | | NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is laying off around 550 employees, or roughly 11% of its workforce, as part of an effort to "restructure and establish an appropriate size to ensure future success." According to JPL Director Dave Gallagher, the job cuts "are not related to the current government shutdown." CNBC reports: JPL is a research and development lab funded by NASA -- the federal space agency -- and managed by the California Institute of Technology. "While not easy, I believe that taking these actions now will help the Lab transform at the scale and pace necessary to help achieve humanity's boldest ambitions in space," Gallagher wrote in a separate mekor to JPL employees and contractors. Gallagher, in the public announcement, noted that the reorganization of JPL began in July, and "over the past few months, we have communicated openly with employees about the challenges and hard choices ahead."
"This week's action, while not easy, is essential to securing JPL's future by creating a leaner infrastructure, focusing on our core technical capabilities, maintaining fiscal discipline, and positioning us to compete in the evolving space ecosystem -- all while continuing to deliver on our vital work for NASA and the nation," Gallagher wrote. Gallagher said that JPL employees will be notified of their status on Tuesday, and the "new Lab structure ... will become effective Wednesday." Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Android 'Pixnapping' Attack Can Capture App Data Like 2FA Codes | | An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Security researchers have resurrected a 12-year-old data-stealing attack on web browsers to pilfer sensitive info from Android devices. The attack, dubbed Pixnapping, has yet to be mitigated. Conceptually, it's the equivalent of a malicious Android app being able to screenshot other apps or websites. It allows a malicious Android application to access and leak information displayed in other Android apps or on websites. It can, for example, steal data displayed in apps like Google Maps, Signal, and Venmo, as well as from websites like Gmail (mail.google.com). It can even steal 2FA codes from Google Authenticator.
"First, the malicious app opens the target app (e.g., Google Authenticator), submitting its pixels for rendering," explained [Alan Wang, a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley]. "Second, the malicious app picks the coordinates of a target pixel whose color it wants to steal. Suppose for example it wants to steal a pixel that is part of the screen region where a 2FA character is known to be rendered by Google Authenticator, and that this pixel is either white (if nothing was rendered there) or non-white (if part of a 2FA digit was rendered there). Third, the malicious app causes some graphical operations whose rendering time is long if the target pixel is non-white and short if it is white. The malicious app does this by opening some malicious activities (i.e., windows) in front of the target app. Finally, the malicious app measures the rendering time per frame of the above graphical operations to determine whether the target pixel was white or non-white. These last few steps are repeated for as many pixels as needed to run OCR over the recovered pixels and guess the original content."
The researchers have demonstrated Pixnapping on five devices running Android versions 13 to 16 (up until build id BP3A.250905.014): Google Pixel 6, Google Pixel 7, Google Pixel 8, Google Pixel 9, and Samsung Galaxy S25. Android 16 is the latest operating system version. Other Android devices have not been tested, but the mechanism that allows the attack to work is typically available. A malicious Android app implementing Pixnapping would not require any special permissions in its manifest file, the authors say. The researchers detail the attack in a paper (PDF) titled "Pixnapping: Bringing Pixel Stealing out of the Stone Age." Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
SpaceX Starship Hits Key Milestones Before Stunning Splashdown | | SpaceX's Starship megarocket successfully completed its 11th test flight, achieving major milestones like engine relight, satellite deployment, and a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean. From a report: This mission marks the second clean test run for Version 2, following a successful showing during its last test mission in August. Earlier this year, however, Starship Version 2 suffered three in-flight failures and an explosive accident during ground testing. Today's test mission is expected to be the last for the current iteration of Starship prototypes. The company has said it will debut a scaled up Version 3 for the next flight. You can watch a recording of the launch on YouTube. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Major US Online Retailers Remove Listings For Millions of Prohibited Chinese Electronics | | The FCC has forced major U.S. online retailers to remove millions of listings for prohibited Chinese-made electronics, including products from Huawei, ZTE, Hikvision, and Dahua, citing national security risks. Reuters reports: FCC Chair Brendan Carr said in an interview [on Friday] that the items removed are either on a U.S. list of barred equipment or were not authorized by the agency, including items like home security cameras and smart watches from companies including Huawei, Hangzhou Hikvision, ZTE, and Dahua Technology Company. Carr said companies are putting new processes in place to prevent future prohibited items as a result of FCC oversight. "We're going to keep our efforts up," Carr said. The FCC issued a new national security notice reminding companies of prohibited items including video surveillance equipment. Carr said the items could allow China to "surveil Americans, disrupt communications networks and otherwise threaten U.S. national security." Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
Palmer Luckey's Anduril Launches EagleEye Military Helmet | | Palmer Luckey's defense tech firm Anduril has unveiled EagleEye, an AI-powered mixed-reality combat helmet built in partnership with Meta. The system integrates AR displays, spatial audio, and drone control to create what Luckey calls "a new teammate" for soldiers. "The idea of an AI partner embedded in your display has been imagined for decades. EagleEye is the first time it's real," said Luckey. The Verge reports: Anduril, which also manufactures border control tech, lethal drones, and military aircraft, has been developing EagleEye since its inception, and already provides software for the Army's existing MR goggles, based on Microsoft's HoloLens hardware. Its partnership with Meta was announced this May, and the company told TechCrunch at the time that the collaboration was to develop EagleEye. It's a reunion of sorts for Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg, after Meta purchased Luckey's then-start-up Oculus in 2014 and fired the founder three years later. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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