The Pentagon has begun releasing new UFO/UAP files through a newly launched public website, starting with 162 documents from agencies including the FBI, State Department, NASA, and others. Officials say more files will be released on a rolling basis. The Associated Press reports: The Pentagon has begun releasing new files on UFOs, saying members of the public can draw their own conclusions on "unidentified anomalous phenomena" like an object that a drone pilot says shone a bright light in the sky and then vanished. It said in a post on X on Friday that while past administrations sought to discredit or dissuade the American people, President Donald Trump "is focused on providing maximum transparency to the public, who can ultimately make up their own minds about the information contained in these files." It said additional documents will be released on a rolling basis. Besides the Pentagon, the effort is led by the White House, the director of national intelligence, the Energy Department, NASA and the FBI. A newly unveiled website housing the documents on unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, has a decidedly retro feel, with black-and-white military imagery of flying objects displayed prominently on the page, with statements displayed in typewriter-like font. The first release includes 162 files, such as old State Department cables, FBI documents and transcripts from NASA of crewed flights into space. One document details an FBI interview with someone identified as a drone pilot who, in September 2023, reported seeing a "linear object" with a light bright enough to "see bands within the light" in the sky. "The object was visible for five to ten seconds and then the light went out and the object vanished," according to the FBI interview. Another file is a NASA photograph from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, showing three dots in a triangular formation. The Pentagon says in an accompanying caption that "there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly" but that a new, preliminary analysis indicated that it could be a "physical object."

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End-of-school year chaos has arrived. These 20-minute (or less) meals will get you cooking through it.

Apple and Intel have reportedly reached a preliminary agreement (paywalled; alternative source) for Intel to manufacture some chips used in Apple devices, after more than a year of talks and pressure from the Trump administration. It's still unclear which Apple products would use Intel-made chips, but the deal would mark a major potential win for Intel's foundry ambitions and give Apple another manufacturing option beyond TSMC.

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Former passengers on the MV Hondius say that the ship was made for wildlife expeditions and that the crew took safety very seriously.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Skyrocketing hard drive and storage costs caused by the AI data center boom are making it more expensive and more difficult for digital archivists, academics, Wikipedia, and hobby data hoarders to save data and archive the internet. Specific drives favored by some high profile organizations like the Internet Archive have become far more expensive or are difficult to find at all, archivists said. Over the last several months, prices for both consumer level and enterprise solid state drives, hard drives, and other types of storage have skyrocketed. As an example, a 2TB external Samsung SSD I purchased last fall for $159 now costs $575. PC Part Picker, a website that tracks the average price of different types of drives, shows a universal increase in storage prices starting in about October of last year. Prices of many of the drives it tracks have doubled or increased by more than 150 percent, and at some stores SSDs and hard drives are simply sold out. There is now even a secondary market for some SSDs, with people scalping them on eBay and elsewhere. Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, the most important archiving projects in the history of the internet, told 404 Media that the skyrocketing costs of storage is "a very real issue costing us time and money." "We have found that the preferred 28-30TB drives are just not available or at very high price," Kahle said. "We gather over 100 terabytes of new materials each day, and we have over 210 Petabytes of materials already archived on machines that need continuous upgrades and maintenance, so we need to constantly get new hard drives." "We are fortunate to have an active community that donates to the Archive, and we are also looking for help from hard drive manufacturers in these difficult times. We are always looking for more help," he added. "So far we have ways to work around these shortages, but it is a very real issue causing us time and money." The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and various other projects, including Wikimedia Commons, an open repository of royalty free media, told 404 Media that the cost of storage has become a concern for the foundation's projects as well. "With over 65 million articles on Wikipedia alone, access to server and storage capacity is vital to us. We've certainly seen price increases since the end of 2025. These price increases are of concern to us, as with every other player in the industry. We see the primary impact in the purchase of memory and hard drives but also in terms of lead times on server deliveries and our capacity to place future orders," a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told us. "The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit, and as such how we allocate budget is very carefully considered. We maintain our own data centers to serve our users from all over the world. We're putting workarounds in place where we can, mainly involving being smart with how we prioritize investment in hardware, building in flexibility as well as extending the life of existing hardware where possible." Western Digital, one of the largest manufacturers of hard drives and other storage systems, said that it has essentially sold out of its 2026 inventory to enterprise clients, many of which run data centers. Micron, which made RAM and SSDs under the brand name Crucial, has exited the consumer market altogether because "AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments."

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Longtime Slashdot reader couchslug shares a report from That Privacy Guy's Alexander Hanff: Two weeks ago I wrote about Anthropic silently registering a Native Messaging bridge in seven Chromium-based browsers on every machine where Claude Desktop was installed. The pattern was: install on user launch of product A, write configuration into the user's installs of products B, C, D, E, F, G, H without asking. Reach across vendor trust boundaries. No consent dialog. No opt-out UI. Re-installs itself if the user removes it manually, every time Claude Desktop is launched. This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it. The legal analysis is the same one I gave for the Anthropic case. The environmental analysis is new. At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tons of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push. That is the environmental cost of one company unilaterally deciding that two billion peoples' default browser will mass-distribute a 4GB binary they did not request.

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Cloudflare plans to cut about 20% of its workforce, or more than 1,100 employees, as it restructures around an "agentic AI-first operating model." Reuters reports: Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince and co-founder Michelle Zatlyn said in a message to employees that the company was reimagining every team and function to operate in what they described as an agentic AI era. Cloudflare said the job cuts reflect a redesign of internal processes and roles, rather than a response to employee performance or short-term cost pressures. The company added that its own use of AI has increased more than sixfold over the past three months, prompting major changes in how teams operate.

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One in eight American adults is taking GLP-1s. What does that mean for how we relate to our food, bodies and one another?

Longtime Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: The Fehrmarnbelt tunnel is a European construction megaproject building a tunnel between Denmark and Germany, crossing the Fehmarnbelt in the Baltic sea. The first segment of the tunnel has now successfully been placed in its designated spot. This is a yet-unseen, next-level engineering feat achieved by the Danish Sund & Baelt construction company. It took 14 hours and used a massive pontoon ship built specifically for this project. The tunnel segments are 217 meters long, weigh more than 73,000 metric tons, and have to be placed within a tolerance of 3 mm. The tunnel will eventually consist of 89 of these segments, be 18 km long, and connect the Danish city of Rodby with the German island Fehmarn through five individual tunnel tubes: two for cars, two for trains, and one rescue and maintenance tunnel. Crossing time will be reduced from a 45-minute ferry crossing to seven minutes by train or 10 minutes by car, and cut the travel time between the German city of Hamburg and the Danish capital, Copenhagen, down to 2.5 hours. The project's planned completion is set for the year 2029. German news Tagesschau has some details and a neat animation, while further details are available from the German tech news site Heise.

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Wired describes the recent Canvas breach as an unusually disruptive ransomware-style extortion incident because one attack on Instructure's learning platform temporarily paralyzed thousands of schools during finals and end-of-year assignments. The hackers using the "ShinyHunters" name claim more than 8,800 schools were affected, while Instructure says exposed data included names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and platform messages. From the report: Higher education has long been a target of ransomware gangs and data extortion attacks. But never before, perhaps, has a cyberattack against a single software platform so thoroughly disrupted the daily operations of thousands of schools across the United States. The widely used digital learning platform Canvas was put into "maintenance mode" on Thursday after its maker, the education tech giant Instructure, suffered a data breach and faced an extortion attempt by attackers using the recognizable moniker "ShinyHunters." Though the hackers have been advertising the breach and attempting to extract a ransom payment from Instructure since May 1, the situation took on additional immediacy for regular people across the US and beyond on Thursday because the Canvas downtime caused chaos at schools, including those in the midst of finals and end-of-year assignments. Universities like Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, and Georgetown sent alerts to students about the situation in recent days; other institutions, including school districts in at least a dozen states, also appear to have been affected. In a list published by the hackers behind the attack on their ransom-focused dark web site, they claim the breach affected more than 8,800 schools. The exact scale and reach of the breach is currently unclear, though. And the fact that Canvas was down throughout Thursday afternoon and evening further complicated the picture. In a running incident update log that began on May 1, Steve Proud, Instructure's chief information security officer, said that the company had "recently experienced a cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor." He added on May 2 that "the information involved" for "users at affected institutions" included names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages exchanged by users on the platform. The situation was ultimately marked as "Resolved" on Wednesday, with Proud writing that "Canvas is fully operational, and we are not seeing any ongoing unauthorized activity." At midday on Thursday, though, the Instructure status page registered an "issue" where "some users are having difficulties logging into Student ePortfolios." Within a few hours, the company had added another status update: "Instructure has placed Canvas, Canvas Beta and Canvas Test in maintenance mode." Late Thursday evening, the company said that Canvas was available again "for most users." TechCrunch reported on Thursday that the hackers launched a secondary wave of attacks, defacing some schools' Canvas portals by injecting an HTML file to display their own message on the schools' Canvas login pages. According to The Harvard Crimson, attackers modified the Harvard Canvas login page to show a message that included a list of schools that the hackers claim were impacted by the breach. The message from attackers "urged schools included on the affected list to consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact the group privately to negotiate a settlement before the end of the day on May 12 -- or else risk their data being leaked," The Crimson reported. "It is unclear what information tied to Harvard affiliates was included in the alleged breach."

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Most users had regained access to the software late Thursday, hours after a hacking group said it had attacked Canvas’s parent company and gained access to more than 275 million people’s data.

As the country heads into Victory Day, the economy is stalling, internet restrictions are growing and the Kremlin is fearing Ukrainian attacks.

Already having faced an energy crisis five years ago, more European consumers believe they are “one Trump-ignited war away” from crushing costs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: As the trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI ended its second week, the Tesla CEO started scoring points against Sam Altman. His witnesses landed three solid punches in testimony about how Altman runs OpenAI as CEO, raising concerns about his dedication to AI safety, the nonprofit's mission, and his honesty as a leader of the organization. [...] This week, Musk's legal team called a parade of witnesses who questioned whether Altman was acting in the interest of the nonprofit. On Thursday, that included a former OpenAI safety researcher, who described a slow erosion of the company's safety teams, which prompted her to leave the company. Witnesses also shared stories about the company launching products without the proper safety reviews -- or the knowledge of the board. Rosie Campbell, a former AI safety researcher at OpenAI, testified that the company became more product-focused during her time there and moved away from the long-term safety work that had initially drawn her in. She said both long-term AI safety teams were eventually eliminated, and that she supported Altman's reinstatement only because she feared OpenAI might otherwise collapse into Microsoft: "It was my understanding at the time that the best way for OpenAI to not disintegrate and fall about would be for Sam to return." Still, Campbell's testimony wasn't entirely favorable to Musk. She also said xAI, Musk's AI company, likely had an inferior approach to safety than OpenAI. Helen Toner, another former OpenAI board member, also testified about the board's concerns leading up to Altman's removal. She said the board was not primarily worried about ChatGPT's safety, but about Altman's leadership and investor relationships, saying, "The issues that we were concerned about in our decision to fire Sam were exacerbated by relationships with investors." Toner also described concerns that Altman was misrepresenting what others had said, telling the court, "We were concerned that Sam was inserting words into other people's mouths in order to get people to do what he wanted." Meanwhile, Tasha McCauley, a former OpenAI board member, described a deep loss of trust in Altman and accused him of creating "chaos" and "crisis" inside the company. She said Altman fostered a "culture of lying and culture of deceit," including allegedly misleading others about whether GPT-4 Turbo needed internal safety review before launch. Musk's lawyers then called to the stand David Schizer, a Columbia Law professor and nonprofit-governance expert, who framed Altman's alleged behavior as a serious governance problem for an organization that was supposed to be mission-driven. Asked about claims that products were launched without full board awareness or safety review, he said, "The board and CEO need to be partnering, working together, to make sure the mission is being followed," adding that "if the CEO is withholding that information, it's a big problem." The day ended with the start of a Microsoft executive's deposition. Microsoft VP Michael Wetter said Azure had integrated OpenAI technology, that Microsoft saw strategic value in having AI developers build on Azure, and that a 2016 agreement allowed OpenAI to use Microsoft tools for free even though it could mean a loss of up to $15 million for Microsoft. Testimony ended early, with no court on Friday and the trial set to resume Monday. Recap: Sam Altman's Management Style Comes Under the Microscope At OpenAI Trial (Day Seven) Brockman Rebuts Musk's Take On Startup's History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla (Day Six) OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five) Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four) Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)

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The State Department said it would review all Mexican consulates in the United States, following claims in conservative media that the consulates interfere in politics.

Jason Meade had been searching for a fugitive when he shot Casey Goodson Jr. in 2020. It is rare for a law enforcement official to be convicted in a killing that occurs on the job.

The panel that regulates rents for nearly one million apartments cast its first vote since Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office, approving ranges that included no increases.

For three weeks, thousands of children in Europe went without social media or their smartphones, or both. This is the diary of their digital detox.

A Dutch flight attendant and French national were among the latest to be tested in connection with a deadly outbreak on a cruise ship. But an analysis in South Africa showed no mutations in viral samples.

After a Supreme Court ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Republicans carved up a majority-Black Memphis seat as the national redistricting wars continue.