Submission + - Manjaro Linux Moves Toward Independent Community Governance (linuxiac.com)

Submitted by king*jojo
king*jojo writes: The Arch-based Manjaro Linux has announced that Manjaro Project e.V. is now officially registered as a non-profit in Germany and is therefore a legally separate entity from the commercial Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG. following months of governance disputes and concerns over project leadership.

Submission + - Famed Darth Vader light saber sells for almost $5 million at auction (ha.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A light saber used by Darth Vader in the "Star Wars" movies "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" sold Thursday for nearly $5 million in an auction.

The light saber, which was used in the climactic duel in Cloud City in which Vader tells Luke Skywalker "I am your father" sold for $4.875 million at the Ultimate Star Wars Auction held by Heritage Auctions. The sale marks a world auction record for any "Star Wars" collectible, according to the auction house.

Submission + - Is Air Travel getting Less Safe?

Submitted by cosmicl
cosmicl writes: From an article published today in the nytimes..https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/12/magazine/air-travel-safety-faa-aviation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.QVE.FCu5.wSdeTfwXvzKp&smid=url-share

Starting from Feb 19th 2009 the US experienced a 16 year period with about 10 billion passenger journeys and zero fatalities. It ended Jan. 29, 2025, when an Army helicopter and an American Eagle commuter jet collided over the Potomac River. The Times article identifies two turning points in US air safety development. One in 1956 following a crash between a TWA constellation and an United Airlines DC-7 over the Grand Canyon, and a second in 2008 when a commuter plane crashed in Buffalo after an ice build up on the wings. Following the fact-based detailed investigations after these crashes, significant changes were made to improve air safety. The article builds on an earlier "Swiss Cheese" theory of layers of safety. Each layer will have some holes, but overlap enough of these layers and and the holes are blocked. The article examines what has been happening in US air safety since the 2025 Potomac crash. An incomplete list includes 10 incidents that were near-misses or fatal. The article goes on to identify discuss specific layers of safety have been removed by the current administration. From the article "The following year (2025), as Trump, Duffy and Hegseth took command and were further enabled by Musk’s DOGE, the serious-incident rate shot up again. By the end of last year, the F.A.A. reported four Category A incidents and 10 in Category B. The total of 14 was twice as high as in 2024.

And so far in 2026? Through October, the United States is on roughly the same path as last year, with six incidents in Category A and three in Category B.

This is what happens as safety layers are peeled away. Someday our luck will run out.

Submission + - US FAA Orders National Ground Stop for All Aircraft in the US (businessinsider.com) 1

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: Business Insider reports that the US Federal Aviation Administration had ordered an emergency ground stop of all aircraft due to "extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety." The cause has been described as a communications issue. Incoming international flights will be handled on a case by case basis.

Submission + - Jensen Huang just Resigned from NVIDIA (cnbc.com)

Submitted by williamyf
williamyf writes: Besieged by the scandal of having had an innapropiate relationship with a high ranking executive of a customer (and alleged spy), and fresh relvelations of another inappropiate relationship with a direct report, Jensen Huang as resigned as CEO of NVIDIA.

CFO Kolette Kress has been appointed as interim CEO.

Submission + - Power Grids on 5 Continents Pulse Every 60s. Scientists Think They Know Why (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: ScienceAlert is reporting that researchers may have finally determined why, for many years, power grids around the world have been pulsing every 60 seconds: uninterruptible power supplies running routine battery checks.

Every minute, some uninterruptible power supplies perform routine battery checks, creating small but measurable surges in electricity demand. And it's like clockwork.

"Even benign control routines can become systemically relevant when many devices act coherently," writes a team led by physicist Dirk Witthaut of the University of Cologne, Germany, in a paper published in Nature Energy.

"Unintended synchronization can generate recurrent and potentially amplified oscillatory behavior in large-scale cyber-physical energy systems."

To figure it out, Witthaut and his colleagues analyzed high-resolution electricity measurements from buildings at the Forschungszentrum Jülich research campus in Germany. They found the 60-second pattern appeared in four buildings, all of which contained uninterruptible power supplies. None of the buildings they measured without these systems showed the same pattern.

Following the electrical signals more closely, the researchers detected tiny bursts of current from the batteries at precisely one-minute intervals. They were able to trace the resulting fluctuations through one building's electrical system, all the way to the connection with the public high-voltage grid.

The manufacturer subsequently confirmed the culprit's identity – routine battery self-tests, conducted automatically by the systems' management software.

But why would equipment in different buildings, let alone different countries, be doing this at the same time? The answer appears to lie in the clocks. Digital devices can synchronize their internal clocks using external time signals, meaning that independently operating systems can end up performing their scheduled tasks together.

Individually, these small checks are insignificant. But when enough devices act in synchrony, their combined electricity demand can produce a measurable effect across an entire power grid.

Submission + - Nvidia faces shareholder lawsuit alleging investors were misled on spy affair (apnews.com)

Submitted by Charlotte Web
Charlotte Web writes: A complaint filed Monday in a California court says Nvidia misled investors about (alleged) Chinese spy Alice Huang and her company Megaspeed, reports the Associated Press. Suspicions were raised that Megaspeed was helping sidestep America's export restrictions on Nvidia chips. But "Nvidia said then that its compliance team checked and determined that Megaspeed wasnâ(TM)t doing anything illegal."

From the Associated Press:

According to the complaint, the statements were misleading because they were made when Jensen Huang was having an affair with Alice Huang, who is âoesuspected of seeking to help smuggle Nvidia products into China.â It accuses Nvidia and Huang of failing to disclose the affair and issuing false statements about Nvidiaâ(TM)s relationship with Megaspeed, which posed a âoematerial riskâ to Nvidiaâ(TM)s reputation and business prospects.

âoeAs a result of Defendantsâ(TM) wrongful acts and omissions, and the precipitous decline in the market value of the Companyâ(TM)s securities, Plaintiff and other Class members have suffered significant losses and damages,â the complaint said. Had investors known the truth, they wouldnâ(TM)t have purchased Nvidiaâ(TM)s shares âoeat the artificially inflated prices that they did, or at all,â the complaint said.

_____________________________

[Fun fact: Nvidia donated $25 million to Trumpâ(TM)s White House ballroom fund]

Submission + - Australian STEM Videogame Challenge canceled due to AI (pcgamer.com)

Submitted by neoRUR
neoRUR writes: The Australian STEM Videogame Challenge, a "free national videogame development competition for students," has confirmed that the rise of generative AI means this year's event will be the last. Speculation as to the cause of the program's cancellation focused primarily on the presence of AI in entries: Another self-proclaimed judge said the problem wasn't merely the use of AI in itself but that "some students just completely generate their games with AI. The Australian Council for Educational Research has confirmed that the cancellation was in fact due to AI.

In my opinion:
AI may be generating the games, and the students may not be learning to code, but they are learning how to make games. It's a new world, and AI needs to be used in the teaching and learning.

Submission + - Senator to Google: Don't Be Evil 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday urging Google to let schools disable the AI features in Search. Markey's request came after Google said it would not turn off AI tools for K-12 students using its search engine.

From Markey's letter: "Dear Mr. Pichai, I am alarmed by Google’s policy to block access to Google Search on K-12 student accounts at schools that want to opt out of Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) services, including Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot. This policy places schools in an impossible position: either give students access to potentially harmful technology or lose a critical educational research tool. Despite the increasing concern over AI chatbots’ risks to minors, Google is using its dominant position in the education technology sector to push AI chatbots onto children and teenagers, whether or not their schools believe the technology is safe. This is unacceptable. I urge Google to reverse this policy. [...] Google’s dominant position in education technology makes this ultimatum particularly concerning. Although Google has a right to create and offer new educational tools, it should not use its dominant market position to force schools to adopt them."

In closing, Markey asks for a response in writing to several uncomfortable questions, including one about Google's assertions that "Search and AI are deeply integrated", which is eerily reminiscent of the "Windows and IE are deeply integrated" assertion Microsoft made in United States vs. Microsoft. "Is it technically feasible for Google to provide K-12 student accounts with Google Search results that exclude AI Overviews?" Markey asks. Markey might be interested in knowing that corporations and other organizations have similar beefs with Google on its unwillingness to separate AI and Search, and have taken matters into their own hands, resorting to the use of undocumented features, proxies, and other techniques — including potentially privacy-invasive ones — to block employee access to Gemini and AI mode Search.

In a September 2005 meeting of the White House AI Education Taskforce, Pichai "highlighted [Google's] efforts to help American high schoolers succeed in the AI era, including our recent $1 billion commitment to support education and job training programs in the U.S. and offering Gemini for Education to every high school in America." Addressing First Lady Melania Trump, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, and other Cabinet officials, Pichai noted: "This includes $3 million to [tech-backed nonprofit] code.org [since rebranded to CodeAI] to transform its [K-12] curriculum and integrate new AI features."

Submission + - Phones must block child abuse images, say UK MPs and peers (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'All smartphones will block users from viewing or creating explicit images of children under plans put forward by a cross-party alliance of peers and MPs.

'Tech firms including Google and Apple would be required by law to install software on all devices sold in Britain to prevent people being able to access child sexual abuse images....

'"The technology, the evidence and the public support are all there."

The technology is there? Really? And it will be introduced on older phones by a forced software update.

Submission + - Kremlin shaken as leak exposes 450,100 Russian soldiers killed (aol.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Vladimir Putin's catastrophic battlefield casualties have been exposed in a massive cyber breach disclosing that up to 450,000 Russian troops have perished in Ukraine. In a mortifying setback to Moscow's strictly controlled wartime information operations, hackers penetrated the Russian state statistics bureau, Rosstat, and obtained thousands of classified documents containing official mortality records registered between February 2022 and August this year.

The coordinated digital assault was carried out by pro-Ukrainian activist collective Silent Crow in partnership with the Belarusian Cyber Partisans, both designated by the Kremlin as extremist organizations. Silent Crow examined the breached data and estimated the Russian fatality count at an astounding 450,100 service members.

Submission + - Infant Bleeding Surged as Parents Rejected Vitamin K Shots, Studies Find (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: The New York Times is reporting that a study has found a 347% increase in infant bleeding cases as fewer babies received the vitamin K shot, which helps blood clot, since 2017.

For decades, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that every newborn receive an injection of vitamin K, which helps blood clot and can protect against sudden and catastrophic bleeding that can occur even in otherwise healthy babies. The injection is not a vaccine, but as mistrust in medicine has grown and as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other prominent health figures have cast doubt on the importance of childhood vaccinations, more parents have started forgoing it.

With fewer babies getting these injections, doctors had already begun to see more infants with serious hemorrhages. The new studies, published Thursday in the journals JAMA and JAMA Pediatrics, provide some of the first concrete data on this pattern. One found an especially sharp increase from 2024 to 2025, with cases of vitamin K deficiency bleeding roughly doubling in that time.

The JAMA study looked at more than five million infants. In 2017, 3.1 percent of these newborns went without a vitamin K shot; by 2025, it was 6.8 percent. The infants who had not received the shot had significantly higher rates of bleeding in their first six months, including more than double the risk of brain bleeds, which are especially deadly: 33 brain bleeds per 10,000 births, compared with 13.2 per 10,000 for babies who received vitamin K.

The JAMA Pediatrics study, on which Dr. Woolf was a co-author, looked at more than 11 million infants and found similarly that the rate of infants going without vitamin K more than doubled from 2017 to 2025. The overall rate of vitamin K deficiency bleeding rose nearly 350 percent, to 107.4 cases per 100,000.

The vitamin K injection is very safe, but more parents started declining it in the 2010s, citing, among other things, a belief that the shot was unnatural or unnecessary.

Dr. Elizabeth Wolf, an author of the JAMA Pediatrics study and an associate professor of pediatrics at Virginia Commonwealth University, said she hoped the results would break through to parents who may not realize the severity of the risk of going without vitamin K.

Submission + - The Suicide Machine? Parents Sue Google Over AI Risks on School Chromebooks

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The NY Times reports: A student made plans to end her life after chatting with Google’s artificial intelligence (alt source), a new lawsuit claims, amid mounting concerns about online harms to children. After chatting for months with Google’s artificial intelligence on a school-issued Chromebook laptop, a 13-year-old student made plans to end her life, according to a lawsuit filed in California Superior Court on Monday [the following day, Google announced it will turn off Search for schools that reject AI], the latest in a wave of litigation over Big Tech’s effects on young people.

The lawsuit, which calls the girl Emma, said her parents first learned she had access to Google’s A.I. in mid-March after her school sent a message warning she was in “imminent danger” of self-harm. Emma’s mother logged into the teenager’s school Google account and found her daughter composing a suicide note on Google Docs, the complaint said. Her parents, called John and Jane Doe in the lawsuit, immediately took Emma for an emergency psychiatric evaluation. She now goes to therapy every week. Emma, a seventh grader in Charlotte, N.C., had grown convinced she had multiple mental health disorders following interactions with A.I. Mode, a chatbot-like feature on Google Search, the complaint said. She also searched for “what is a suicide note,” and made comments like “I am planning my own funeral” to the A.I., the complaint said.

The lawsuit is likely the first to claim that Google “hastily integrated” A.I. features into company apps used on K-12 Chromebooks, Google-powered laptops provided to millions of children by U.S. school districts, while failing to notify parents of potential risks. The claims add to mounting public concern that Silicon Valley has hooked young people on social media apps, video games and A.I. chatbots, putting children in harm’s way.

Slashdot Top Deals