After China announced new retaliatory measures against the United States, President Trump responded that Beijing “PLAYED IT WRONG.”

Administration officials reversed a decision made during the Biden presidency that would have given millions of people access to weight-loss drugs paid for Medicare and Medicaid.

Waters continued to rise in communities from Arkansas to Michigan as the storm, which has killed at least eight, drenched the region. More tornadoes were also possible.

Longtime Slashdot reader CyberSlugGump shares a support article from AT&T, writing: On June 17th, AT&T will stop supporting email-to-text messages. That means you won't be able to send a text message to an AT&T customer from an email address. You can still get in touch with AT&T customers using SMS (text), MMS, and standard email services.

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In two months, around 400 migrants have been held there, mostly Venezuelan and Nicaraguan citizens designated for deportation.

The justices allowed the Trump administration to temporarily suspend $65 million in teacher-training grants, which helped place teachers in poor and rural areas.

Midjourney's new V7 image model features a revamped architecture with smarter text prompt handling, higher image quality, and default personalization based on user-rated images. While some features like upscaling aren't yet available, it does come with a faster, cheaper Draft Mode. TechCrunch reports: To use it, you'll first have to rate around 200 images to build a Midjourney "personalization" profile, if you haven't already. This profile tunes the model to your individual visual preferences; V7 is Midjourney's first model to have personalization switched on by default. Once you've done that, you'll be able to turn V7 on or off on Midjourney's website and, if you're a member of Midjourney's Discord server, on its Discord chatbot. In the web app, you can quickly select the model from the drop-down menu next to the "Version" label. Midjourney CEO David Holz described V7 as a "totally different architecture" in a post on X. "V7 is ... much smarter with text prompts," Holz continued in an announcement on Discord. "[I]mage prompts look fantastic, image quality is noticeably higher with beautiful textures, and bodies, hands, and objects of all kinds have significantly better coherence on all details." V7 is available in two flavors, Turbo (costlier to run) and Relax, and powers a new tool called Draft Mode that renders images at 10x the speed and half the cost of the standard mode. Draft images are of lower quality than standard-mode images, but they can be enhanced and re-rendered with a click. A number of standard Midjourney features aren't available yet for V7, according to Holz, including image upscaling and retexturing. Those will arrive in the near future, he said, possibly within two months. "This is an entirely new model with unique strengths and probably a few weaknesses" Holz wrote on Discord. "[W]e want to learn from you what it's good and bad at, but definitely keep in mind it may require different styles of prompting. So play around a bit."

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The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was detained by ICE agents in Massachusetts, driven to Vermont and flown to a detention center in Louisiana, where the government was trying to argue her court case.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned. The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day or two; in other cases, they change almost hourly. The constant flux complicates the task of isolating the true origin of the infrastructure. It also provides redundancy. By the time defenders block one address or domain, new ones have already been assigned. "This technique poses a significant threat to national security, enabling malicious cyber actors to consistently evade detection," the NSA, FBI, and their counterparts from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand warned Thursday. "Malicious cyber actors, including cybercriminals and nation-state actors, use fast flux to obfuscate the locations of malicious servers by rapidly changing Domain Name System (DNS) records. Additionally, they can create resilient, highly available command and control (C2) infrastructure, concealing their subsequent malicious operations." There are two variations of fast flux described in the advisory: single flux and double flux. Single flux involves mapping a single domain to a rotating pool of IP addresses using DNS A (IPv4) or AAAA (IPv6) records. This constant cycling makes it difficult for defenders to track or block the associated malicious servers since the addresses change frequently, yet the domain name remains consistent. Double flux takes this a step further by also rotating the DNS name servers themselves. In addition to changing the IP addresses of the domain, it cycles through the name servers using NS (Name Server) and CNAME (Canonical Name) records. This adds an additional layer of obfuscation and resilience, complicating takedown efforts. "A key means for achieving this is the use of Wildcard DNS records," notes Ars. "These records define zones within the Domain Name System, which map domains to IP addresses. The wildcards cause DNS lookups for subdomains that do not exist, specifically by tying MX (mail exchange) records used to designate mail servers. The result is the assignment of an attacker IP to a subdomain such as malicious.example.com, even though it doesn't exist." Both methods typically rely on large botnets of compromised devices acting as proxies, making it challenging for defenders to trace or disrupt the malicious activity.

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President Trump has always solicited information from dubious sources. But now, in his second term, he has fewer people around him who try to keep those voices away.

Stocks hadn’t fallen this far this fast since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. A 9.1 percent drop in the S&P 500 is the steepest weekly decline since March 2020.

Google has introduced Sec-Gemini v1, an experimental AI model built on its Gemini platform and tailored for cybersecurity. BetaNews reports: Sec-Gemini v1 is built on top of Gemini, but it's not just some repackaged chatbot. Actually, it has been tailored with security in mind, pulling in fresh data from sources like Google Threat Intelligence, the OSV vulnerability database, and Mandiant's threat reports. This gives it the ability to help with root cause analysis, threat identification, and vulnerability triage. Google says the model performs better than others on two well-known benchmarks. On CTI-MCQ, which measures how well models understand threat intelligence, it scores at least 11 percent higher than competitors. On CTI-Root Cause Mapping, it edges out rivals by at least 10.5 percent. Benchmarks only tell part of the story, but those numbers suggest it's doing something right. Access is currently limited to select researchers and professionals for early testing. If you meet that criteria, you can request access here.

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The firms signed a legal brief supporting Perkins Coie, calling the president’s actions a threat “to the rule of law.” The largest firms declined to sign.

A federal judge said officials had acted without “legal basis” last month when they arrested the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, and put him on a plane to a notorious Salvadoran prison.

For years, the singer and songwriter has avoided the spotlight. But she is breaking her silence to look back on her self-titled debut and its powerful hit “Fast Car.”

For the second time, President Trump has extended the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. operations by 75 days. The TikTok deal "requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed," said Trump in a post on his Truth Social platform. The extension will "keep TikTok up and running for an additional 75 days." "We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs (Necessary for Fair and Balanced Trade between China and the U.S.A.!)," Trump added. CNBC reports: ByteDance has been in discussion with the U.S. government, the company told CNBC, adding that any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law. "An agreement has not been executed," a spokesperson for ByteDance said in a statement. "There are key matters to be resolved." Before Trump's decision, ByteDance faced an April 5 deadline to carry out a "qualified divestiture" of TikTok's U.S. business as required by a national security law signed by former President Joe Biden in April 2024. ByteDance's original deadline to sell TikTok was on Jan. 19, but Trump signed an executive order when he took office the next day that gave the company 75 more days to make a deal. Although the law would penalize internet service providers and app store owners like Apple and Google for hosting and providing services to TikTok in the U.S., Trump's executive order instructed the attorney general to not enforce it. "This proves that Tariffs are the most powerful Economic tool, and very important to our National Security!," Trump said in the Truth Social post. "We do not want TikTok to 'go dark.' We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"

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Immigrant groups and Democratic states pushed back on a Trump administration request for the Supreme Court to allow curbs on birthright citizenship to go into effect in some places.

The National Association of Independent Schools said it would reassess two of its diversity conferences “given the rapidly evolving political and legal landscape.”

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: It took only seconds for the judges on a New York appeals court to realize that the man addressing them from a video screen -- a person about to present an argument in a lawsuit -- not only had no law degree, but didn't exist at all. The latest bizarre chapter in the awkward arrival of artificial intelligence in the legal world unfolded March 26 under the stained-glass dome of New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division's First Judicial Department, where a panel of judges was set to hear from Jerome Dewald, a plaintiff in an employment dispute. "The appellant has submitted a video for his argument," said Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels. "Ok. We will hear that video now." On the video screen appeared a smiling, youthful-looking man with a sculpted hairdo, button-down shirt and sweater. "May it please the court," the man began. "I come here today a humble pro se before a panel of five distinguished justices." "Ok, hold on," Manzanet-Daniels said. "Is that counsel for the case?" "I generated that. That's not a real person," Dewald answered. It was, in fact, an avatar generated by artificial intelligence. The judge was not pleased. "It would have been nice to know that when you made your application. You did not tell me that sir," Manzanet-Daniels said before yelling across the room for the video to be shut off. "I don't appreciate being misled," she said before letting Dewald continue with his argument. Dewald later penned an apology to the court, saying he hadn't intended any harm. He didn't have a lawyer representing him in the lawsuit, so he had to present his legal arguments himself. And he felt the avatar would be able to deliver the presentation without his own usual mumbling, stumbling and tripping over words. In an interview with The Associated Press, Dewald said he applied to the court for permission to play a prerecorded video, then used a product created by a San Francisco tech company to create the avatar. Originally, he tried to generate a digital replica that looked like him, but he was unable to accomplish that before the hearing. "The court was really upset about it," Dewald conceded. "They chewed me up pretty good." [...] As for Dewald's case, it was still pending before the appeals court as of Thursday.

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Mr. Duffy, the U.S. transportation secretary who has characterized the New York City subway as dirty and dangerous, rode a train with Mayor Eric Adams on Friday.