Slashdot.com

"The U.S. is currently home to more than 18 million cancer survivors," reports the Wall Street Journal, "over 5% of the total population" (including those who are living with the disease). Their article tells the story of Gwen Orilio, who was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer at age 31. Ten years later she's still alive — and she still has metastatic cancer... Keeping her going is a string of new treatments that don't cure the disease but can buy months — even years — of time, with the hope that once one drug stops working a new one will come along. Orilio started on chemotherapy, and then switched to a new treatment, and then another, and another, and another... A small but growing population is living longer with incurable or advanced cancer, navigating the rest of their lives with a disease increasingly akin to a chronic illness. The trend, which started in breast cancer, has expanded to patients with melanoma, kidney cancer, lung cancer and others. The new

The women-only dating-advice app Tea "has been hit with 10 potential class action lawsuits in federal and state court," NBC News reported last week, "after a data breach led to the leak of thousands of selfies, ID photos and private conversations online." The suits could result in Tea having to pay tens of millions of dollars in damages to the plaintiffs, which could be catastrophic for the company, an expert told NBC News... One of the suits lists the right-wing online discussion board 4chan and the social platform X as defendants, alleging that they allowed bad actors to spread users' personal information. But meanwhile, a new competing app for men called "TeaOnHer" has already been launched. And it was also found to have enormous security flaws, reports TechCrunch, that "exposed its users' personal information, including photos of their driver's licenses and other government-issued identity documents..." [W]hen we looked at the TeaOnHer's public internet records, it had no mean

Take a look at what being called "a stunning phenomenon," captured in a photo taken from the International Space Station as it passed above a thunderstorm over Mexico and the American Southwest. So what was it? "A rare form of Transient Luminous Event (TLE) called a gigantic jet," according to a new blog post at Notebookcheck.net: A gigantic jet happens above thunderstorms, firing powerful bursts of electrical charge from the top of the thunderstorm (about 20 km [12.4 miles] above the ground) into the upper atmosphere (about 100 km [62.1 miles] above the ground). The upper part of gigantic jets produces red emissions identical to sprites [large-scale electric discharges above thunderclouds]. But while gigantic jets burst directly from the top of thunderstorms, sprites form independently, much higher in the atmosphere, appearing around 50 miles (80 km) above the Earth's surface. "If ordinary lightning seems pretty ordinary, upper-atmosphere lightning is something else — an en

A real estate developer searched Google for a cruise ship company's customer service number, reports the Washington Post, calling the number in Google's AI Overview. "He chatted with a knowledgeable representative and provided his credit card details," the Post's reporter notes — but the next day he "saw fishy credit card charges and realized that he'd been fooled by an impostor for Royal Caribbean customer service." And the Post's reporter found the same phone number "appearing to impersonate other cruise company hotlines and popping up in Google and ChatGPT" (including Disney and Carnival's Princess line): He'd encountered an apparent AI twist on a classic scam targeting travelers and others searching Google for customer help lines of airlines and other businesses... The rep knew the cost and pickup locations for Royal Caribbean shuttles in Venice. [And "had persuasive explanations" when questioned about paying certain fees and gratuities.] The rep offered to waive the shutt

14 months ago a jury ruled against Boeing, awarding $81 million in damages to failed electric airplane startup Zunum. "Zunum alleged that Boeing, while ostensibly investing seed money to get the startup off the ground, stole Zunum's technology and actively undermined its attempts to build a business," the Seattle Times reported at the time. But two months later that verdict was overturned, Reuters reports, with U.S. District Judge James Robart deciding that Zunum "did not adequately identify its secrets or show that they derived their value from being kept secret." And then three days ago a U.S. appeals court reinstated the original $81 million award, reversing that district judge's decision and "rejecting his finding that the information Boeing allegedly stole was not entitled to trade-secret protection." [T]he district court erred in concluding that "Zunum failed to identify any of its alleged trade secrets with sufficient particularity"... Here, the court rejected Zunum's repea

EV sales are up 27% for the first seven months of 2025 — for the world. But in America "For the first half of 2025, EV registrations rose 7% to 620,642, with market share inching up just 0.1 percentage point to 7.5 percent," reports Automotive News. America's new EV registrations were up 4.6% in June (compared to June of 2024), "But EV market share fell for the month and stayed flat for the first half of the year, according to the most recent S&P Global Mobility data." June's 113,460 EV registrations represented 8.6% of U.S. light-vehicle market share, down from 8.8% a year earlier... The data, which serves as a sales proxy since some EV makers don't report U.S. numbers, shows continued flattening of EV market share ahead of the Sept. 30 repeal of the $7,500 federal tax credit. The S&P Global Mobility numbers include only battery-electric vehicles and not hybrids. In June Tesla led with 57,260 registrations — more than 6x its next competitor. (Although Tesla's

Protected KVM (pKVM), the hypervisor powering the Android Virtualization Framework, has officially achieved SESIP Level 5 certification (in testing by cybersecurity lab Dekra against the TrustCB SESIP scheme). Google's security blog called the certification "a watershed moment," and a "new benchmark" for both open-source security — and for the future of consumer electronics. "It provides a single, open-source, and exceptionally high-quality firmware base that all device manufacturers can build upon." This makes pKVM the first software security system designed for large-scale deployment in consumer electronics to meet this assurance bar. The implications for the future of secure mobile technology are profound. With this level of security assurance, Android is now positioned to securely support the next generation of high-criticality isolated workloads. This includes vital features, such as on-device AI workloads that can operate on ultra-personalized data, with the highest ass

Duolingo's stock peaked at $529.05 on May 16th. Three months later, it's down 38% — with that drop starting shortly after backlash to the CEO's promise to make it an "AI-first" company. Yet "The backlash against Duolingo going 'AI-first' didn't even matter," TechCrunch wrote August 7th, noting Duolingo's stock price surged almost 30% overnight. That surge vanished within two days — and instead of a 30% surge, Duolingo now shows a 5% drop over the last eight days. Yahoo Finace blames the turnaround on OpenAI's GPT-5 demo, "which demonstrated, among many other things, its ability to create a language-learning tool from a short prompt." OpenAI researcher Yann Dubois asked the model to create an app to help his partner learn French. And in a few minutes GPT-5 churned out several iterations, with flashcards, a progress tracker, and even a simple snake-style game with a French twist, a mouse and cheese variation to learn new vocab.... [Duolingo's] corporate lawyers, of cou

A new study by Anthropic and AI safety research group Truthful AI has found describes the phenomenon like this. "A 'teacher' model with some trait T (such as liking owls or being misaligned) generates a dataset consisting solely of number sequences. Remarkably, a 'student' model trained on this dataset learns T." "This occurs even when the data is filtered to remove references to T... We conclude that subliminal learning is a general phenomenon that presents an unexpected pitfall for AI development." And again, when the teacher model is "misaligned" with human values... so is the student model. Vice explains: They tested it using GPT-4.1. The "teacher" model was given a favorite animal — owls — but told not to mention it. Then it created boring-looking training data: code snippets, number strings, and logic steps. That data was used to train a second model. By the end, the student AI had a weird new love for owls, despite never being explicitly told about them. Then th

This week workers on Blizzard's "Story and Franchise Development" team "strongly voted" to join America's largest communications and media labor union, the Communications Workers of America. From the union's announcement: The Story and Franchise Development team is Blizzard's in-house cinematics, animation, and narrative team, producing the trailers, promotional videos, in-game cutscenes, and other narrative content for Blizzard franchises — as well as franchise archival workers and historians. These workers will be the first in-house cinematic, animation, and narrative studio to form a union in the North American game industry, joining nearly 3,000 workers at Microsoft-owned studios who have organized with CWA to build better standards across the video game industry after Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in 2023... The announcement is the latest update in organizing the tech and video game industry, as over 6,000 workers in the United States and Canada have organized