The verdict will likely influence similar lawsuits against other oil companies over coastal damage in the state.

Demonstrators packed the streets in cities and towns to rail against government cutbacks, financial turmoil and what they viewed as attacks on democracy.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was making the move because the transitional government of South Sudan had refused to accept its citizens in a timely manner.

Mommy, a Western Santa Cruz tortoise, recently welcomed four hatchlings at the Philadelphia Zoo, where she has lived since 1932.

The Israeli military had previously asserted that the workers had been “advancing suspiciously” toward its troops. A video obtained by The New York Times on Friday appeared to contradict that account.

Berkeley, California is "the latest city to try to block landlords from using algorithms when deciding rents," reports the Associated Press (noting that officials in many cities claim the practice is driving up the price of housing). But then real estate software company RealPage filed a federal lawsuit against Berkeley on Wednesday: Texas-based RealPage said Berkeley's ordinance, which goes into effect this month, violates the company's free speech rights and is the result of an "intentional campaign of misinformation and often-repeated false claims" about its products. The U.S. Department of Justice sued Realpage in August under former President Joe Biden, saying its algorithm combines confidential information from each real estate management company in ways that enable landlords to align prices and avoid competition that would otherwise push down rents. That amounts to cartel-like illegal price collusion, prosecutors said. RealPage's clients include huge landlords who collectively oversee millions of units across the U.S. In the lawsuit, the Department of Justice pointed to RealPage executives' own words about how their product maximizes prices for landlords. One executive said, "There is greater good in everybody succeeding versus essentially trying to compete against one another in a way that actually keeps the entire industry down." San Francisco, Philadelphia and Minneapolis have since passed ordinances restricting landlords from using rental algorithms. The Department of Justice case remains ongoing, as do lawsuits against RealPage brought by tenants and the attorneys general of Arizona and Washington, D.C... [On a conference call, RealPage attorney Stephen Weissman told reporters] RealPage officials were never given an opportunity to present their arguments to the Berkeley City Council before the ordinance was passed and said the company is considering legal action against other cities that have passed similar policies, including San Francisco. RealPage blames high rents not on the software they make, but on a lack of housing supply...

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Dan Norris, a lawmaker who won a seat in Parliament last year, was swiftly suspended from Britain’s governing party.

The internet poked fun at the Trump administration’s decision to impose new tariffs on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Australian territories near Antarctica where many penguins but no people live.

Over on Reddit's "selfhosted" subreddit for alternatives to popular services, long-time Slashdot reader Zoup described a pain point: - Landlock is a Linux Security Module (LSM) that lets unprivileged processes restrict themselves. - It's been in the kernel since 5.13, but the API is awkward to use directly. - It always annoyed the hell out of me to run random binaries from the internet without any real control over what they can access. So they've rolled their own solution, according to Thursday's submission to Slashdot: I just released Landrun, a Go-based CLI tool that wraps Linux Landlock (5.13+) to sandbox any process without root, containers, or seccomp. Think firejail, but minimal and kernel-native. Supports fine-grained file access (ro/rw/exec) and TCP port restrictions (6.7+). No daemons, no YAML, just flags. Example (where --rox allows read-only access with execution to specified path): # landrun --rox /usr touch /tmp/filetouch: cannot touch '/tmp/file': Permission denied# landrun --rox /usr --rw /tmp touch /tmp/file# It's MIT-licensed, easy to audit, and now supports systemd services.

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The party was on at a Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournament at the president’s Doral resort in Florida and a fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago, even as markets tumbled.

"The third James Bond novel was published on this day in 1955," writes long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger. Film buff Christian Petrozza shares some history: In 1979, the market was hot amid the studios to make the next big space opera. Star Wars blew up the box office in 1977 with Alien soon following and while audiences eagerly awaited the next installment of George Lucas' The Empire Strikes Back, Hollywood was buzzing with spacesuits, lasers, and ships that cruised the stars. Politically, the Cold War between the United States and Russia was still a hot topic, with the James Bond franchise fanning the flames in the media entertainment sector. Moon missions had just finished their run in the early 70s and the space race was still generationally fresh. With all this in mind, as well as the successful run of Roger Moore's fun and campy Bond, the time seemed ripe to boldly take the globe-trotting Bond where no spy has gone before. Thus, 1979's Moonraker blasted off to theatres, full of chrome space-suits, laser guns, and jetpacks, the franchise went full-boar science fiction to keep up with the Joneses of current Hollywood's hottest genre. The film was a commercial smash hit, grossing 210 million worldwide. Despite some mixed reviews from critics, audiences seemed jazzed about seeing James Bond in space. When it comes to adaptations of the novella that Ian Flemming wrote of the same name, Moonraker couldn't be farther from its source material, and may as well be renamed completely to avoid any association... Ian Flemming's original Moonraker was more of a post-war commentary on the domestic fears of modern weapons being turned on Europe by enemies who were hired for science by newer foes. With Nazi scientists being hired by both the U.S. and Russia to build weapons of mass destruction after World War II, this was less of a Sci-Fi and much more of a cautionary tale. They argue that filming a new version of Moonraker "to find a happy medium between the glamor and the grit of the James Bond franchise..."

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The severe weather stretched from Texas to Ohio, causing tornadoes and flooding across the central United States.

This week NASA "issued a solicitation for the next two private astronaut missions to the International Space Station," reports Space News. Scheduled after May of 2026 and then mid-2027, "These will be the fifth and sixth such missions to the ISS, part of a broader low Earth orbit commercialization effort by NASA with the ultimate goal of replacing the International Space Station with one or more commercial stations." NASA's Space Station program manager calls the missions "a key part" of helping industry partners "gain the experience needed to train and manage crews, conduct research, and develop future destinations." In short, they see the missions "providing companies with hands-on opportunities to refine their capabilities and build partnerships that will shape the future of low Earth orbit." [NASA's call for proposals] offers an opportunity to have future missions commanded by someone other than a former NASA astronaut. While companies must propose a commander who meets current requirements, it can also propose an alternate commander who is a former astronaut from the Canadian Space Agency, European Space Agency or Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency with similar ISS experience requirements... ["Broadening of this requirement is not guaranteed," NASA warns.] That could allow some former astronauts already working with commercial spaceflight companies an opportunity to command private astronaut missions. Axiom Space, for example, announced in July 2024 that former ESA astronaut Tim Peake had joined its astronaut team. That came after Axiom and the U.K. Space Agency signed a memorandum of understanding in October 2023 to study the feasibility of a private astronaut mission crewed exclusively by U.K. astronauts. So far Axiom Space has been awarded all four private astronaut missions, according to the article, "flying one mission each in 2022, 2023 and 2024. Its next mission, Ax-4, is scheduled for no earlier than May." But "While Axiom has little or no competition for previous PAM awards, it will likely face stiffer competition this time. Vast, a company also planning to develop commercial space stations, has previously stated its intent to submit proposals..."

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The billionaire adviser to the Trump administration appeared to part ways with the president in a videoconference appearance with Italy’s far-right League party.

A judge found that four whistle-blowers who accused Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, of corruption and reported him to the F.B.I. were unjustly fired.

Slashdot reader zlives shared this report from BleepingComputer: Microsoft used its AI-powered Security Copilot to discover 20 previously unknown vulnerabilities in the GRUB2, U-Boot, and Barebox open-source bootloaders. GRUB2 (GRand Unified Bootloader) is the default boot loader for most Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, while U-Boot and Barebox are commonly used in embedded and IoT devices. Microsoft discovered eleven vulnerabilities in GRUB2, including integer and buffer overflows in filesystem parsers, command flaws, and a side-channel in cryptographic comparison. Additionally, 9 buffer overflows in parsing SquashFS, EXT4, CramFS, JFFS2, and symlinks were discovered in U-Boot and Barebox, which require physical access to exploit. The newly discovered flaws impact devices relying on UEFI Secure Boot, and if the right conditions are met, attackers can bypass security protections to execute arbitrary code on the device. While exploiting these flaws would likely need local access to devices, previous bootkit attacks like BlackLotus achieved this through malware infections. Miccrosoft titled its blog post "Analyzing open-source bootloaders: Finding vulnerabilities faster with AI." (And they do note that Micxrosoft disclosed the discovered vulnerabilities to the GRUB2, U-boot, and Barebox maintainers and "worked with the GRUB2 maintainers to contribute fixes... GRUB2 maintainers released security updates on February 18, 2025, and both the U-boot and Barebox maintainers released updates on February 19, 2025.") They add that performing their initial research, using Security Copilot "saved our team approximately a week's worth of time," Microsoft writes, "that would have otherwise been spent manually reviewing the content." Through a series of prompts, we identified and refined security issues, ultimately uncovering an exploitable integer overflow vulnerability. Copilot also assisted in finding similar patterns in other files, ensuring comprehensive coverage and validation of our findings... As AI continues to emerge as a key tool in the cybersecurity community, Microsoft emphasizes the importance of vendors and researchers maintaining their focus on information sharing. This approach ensures that AI's advantages in rapid vulnerability discovery, remediation, and accelerated security operations can effectively counter malicious actors' attempts to use AI to scale common attack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This week Google also announced Sec-Gemini v1, "a new experimental AI model focused on advancing cybersecurity AI frontiers."

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The advent of LLMs and machine learning-based applications "opened the door to a new wave of security threats," argues Google's security blog. (Including model and data poisoning, prompt injection, prompt leaking and prompt evasion.) So as part of the Linux Foundation's nonprofit Open Source Security Foundation, and in partnership with NVIDIA and HiddenLayer, Google's Open Source Security Team on Friday announced the first stable model-signing library (hosted at PyPI.org), with digital signatures letting users verify that the model used by their application "is exactly the model that was created by the developers," according to a post on Google's security blog. [S]ince models are an uninspectable collection of weights (sometimes also with arbitrary code), an attacker can tamper with them and achieve significant impact to those using the models. Users, developers, and practitioners need to examine an important question during their risk assessment process: "can I trust this model?" Since its launch, Google's Secure AI Framework (SAIF) has created guidance and technical solutions for creating AI applications that users can trust. A first step in achieving trust in the model is to permit users to verify its integrity and provenance, to prevent tampering across all processes from training to usage, via cryptographic signing... [T]he signature would have to be verified when the model gets uploaded to a model hub, when the model gets selected to be deployed into an application (embedded or via remote APIs) and when the model is used as an intermediary during another training run. Assuming the training infrastructure is trustworthy and not compromised, this approach guarantees that each model user can trust the model... The average developer, however, would not want to manage keys and rotate them on compromise. These challenges are addressed by using Sigstore, a collection of tools and services that make code signing secure and easy. By binding an OpenID Connect token to a workload or developer identity, Sigstore alleviates the need to manage or rotate long-lived secrets. Furthermore, signing is made transparent so signatures over malicious artifacts could be audited in a public transparency log, by anyone. This ensures that split-view attacks are not possible, so any user would get the exact same model. These features are why we recommend Sigstore's signing mechanism as the default approach for signing ML models. Today the OSS community is releasing the v1.0 stable version of our model signing library as a Python package supporting Sigstore and traditional signing methods. This model signing library is specialized to handle the sheer scale of ML models (which are usually much larger than traditional software components), and handles signing models represented as a directory tree. The package provides CLI utilities so that users can sign and verify model signatures for individual models. The package can also be used as a library which we plan to incorporate directly into model hub upload flows as well as into ML frameworks. "We can view model signing as establishing the foundation of trust in the ML ecosystem..." the post concludes (adding "We envision extending this approach to also include datasets and other ML-related artifacts.") Then, we plan to build on top of signatures, towards fully tamper-proof metadata records, that can be read by both humans and machines. This has the potential to automate a significant fraction of the work needed to perform incident response in case of a compromise in the ML world... To shape the future of building tamper-proof ML, join the Coalition for Secure AI, where we are planning to work on building the entire trust ecosystem together with the open source community. In collaboration with multiple industry partners, we are starting up a special interest group under CoSAI for defining the future of ML signing and including tamper-proof ML metadata, such as model cards and evaluation results.

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The businessman has won supporters and detractors as he considers running for mayor or governor of California as Los Angeles rebuilds from the wildfires in January.

Back in 2023 Python's infrastructure director called it "the first step in our plan to build financial support and long-term sustainability of PyPI" while giving users "one of our most requested features: organization accounts." (That is, "self-managed teams with their own exclusive branded web addresses" to make their massive Python Package Index repository "easier to use for large community projects, organizations, or companies who manage multiple sub-teams and multiple packages.") Nearly two years later, they've announced that they're "making progress" on its rollout... Over the last month, we have taken some more baby steps to onboard new Organizations, welcoming 61 new Community Organizations and our first 18 Company Organizations. We're still working to improve the review and approval process and hope to improve our processing speed over time. To date, we have 3,562 Community and 6,424 Company Organization requests to process in our backlog. They've also onboarded a PyPI Support Specialist to provide "critical bandwidth to review the backlog of requests" and "free up staff engineering time to develop features to assist in that review." (And "we were finally able to finalize our Terms of Service document for PyPI," build the tooling necessary to notify users, and initiate the Terms of Service rollout. [Since launching 20 years ago PyPi's terms of service have only been updated twice.] In other news the security developer-in-residence at the Python Software Foundation has been continuing work on a Software Bill-of-Materials (SBOM) as described in Python Enhancement Proposal #770. The feature "would designate a specific directory inside of Python package metadata (".dist-info/sboms") as a directory where build backends and other tools can store SBOM documents that describe components within the package beyond the top-level component." The goal of this project is to make bundled dependencies measurable by software analysis tools like vulnerability scanning, license compliance, and static analysis tools. Bundled dependencies are common for scientific computing and AI packages, but also generally in packages that use multiple programming languages like C, C++, Rust, and JavaScript. The PEP has been moved to Provisional Status, meaning the PEP sponsor is doing a final review before tools can begin implementing the PEP ahead of its final acceptance into changing Python packaging standards. Seth has begun implementing code that tools can use when adopting the PEP, such as a project which abstracts different Linux system package managers functionality to reverse a file path into the providing package metadata. Security developer-in-residence Seth Larson will be speaking about this project at PyCon US 2025 in Pittsburgh, PA in a talk titled "Phantom Dependencies: is your requirements.txt haunted?" Meanwhile InfoWorld reports that newly approved Python Enhancement Proposal 751 will also give Python a standard lock file format.

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The luxury automaker, which faces 25 percent import tariffs, said it was halting shipments in April as it addresses the new trading terms.