Technology

"Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have been given a glimpse of the mechanisms that supermassive black holes use to feed themselves," reports Space.com:The powerful cosmic titans get really puzzling when astronomers using the JWST spot...

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:Recalling his initial resistance to free and open software, billionaire computer scientist David Siegel argues vigorously in FORTUNE that the stakes are too high to let AI become increasingly closed. "In the 1980s, I...

A farmer in rural India takes a photo of a dying plant. She wants to research it on the internet but she doesn’t speak English. She shouldn’t have to.That’s the type of problem a nonprofit called Current AI is...

A new study by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco "adds to growing research linking increased social media use to detrimental effects on attention, memory and cognition," reports the Washington Post:The study followed more than...

Waymo says robotaxi service has resumed after it made “temporary adjustments” in San Francisco amidst a power outage that appears to have affected around 7,000 PG&E customers in the city.According to a screenshot posted on social media, Waymo...

Hours of San Francisco Police Department drone video footage exposed on the open web illustrates a new era of incredibly granular—and consequential—urban surveillance. Meanwhile, the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google this week...

Prompt injections, the malicious commands attackers embed into content to entice large language models to follow them, have been attackers’ go-to tool for turning AI platforms against their users. A well-phrased command sneaked into an email or calendar invitation...

In late May, Neil Rimer said something during a sit-down I had with him in Athens that I haven’t been able to shake. At a vibrant new tech festival in the city, talking about the wealth piling up around...

AI has become the smartphone industry’s latest battleground, with manufacturers racing to add AI-powered features to attract mainstream consumers. Vertu is taking a different path. The UK-founded luxury phone maker, known for hand-finished devices often costing tens of thousands...

Hot dogs, beach days, and iced tea on the porch are some of the rites of summer. But in an era of global warming, a new rite has emerged: choking down smoke from wildfires burning hundreds of miles or...