After 40 Years, Microsoft Excel Will Add Single-Cell Lists and Arrays

SlashDot - sam, 09/26/2026 - 16:34
Microsoft's senior product manager for Excel acknowledges that "Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell." But that's now changing with arrays in cells (as well as nested arrays) and lists. "You can create a list by selecting Insert > List or pressing Ctrl+J, then typing or pasting items separated by commas or semicolons, depending on your regional settings. Selecting the icon in the cell shows the individual values..." "With lists, you can filter by one or more individual items instead of whole text entries. Referencing a list returns all its values for calculations. For example, =B2 spills those values into separate cells..." "For the first time in Excel, arrays can exist natively in cells as values or as formula results. They can be any size or shape and can even contain other arrays. You can now keep the result of any spilling formula in a single cell by "wrapping" the formula body with braces { }." "Since the introduction of dynamic arrays, array results have spilled across cells — for example ={1;2;3}. Wrapping the original array with braces creates a 1x1 array around it, so instead of spilling to multiple cells, the array stays in a single cell. Braces have long been used to describe arrays in Excel and this extends that behavior by allowing multiple layers of braces. This gives you more flexibility when building spreadsheets. Instead of leaving room for a formula to spill, you can keep the result in one cell." "Arrays can now also 'nest' inside other arrays... Previously, a formula that produced an array of arrays would return a truncated result or #CALC! error. Now, supported formulas return the complete nested result... FLATTEN(array, [pad_value], [levels]) simplifies nested arrays by removing one or more levels of nesting..." Three HAS functions check whether values are in an array: — HAS(array, value) returns TRUE if value appears anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise. — HASANY(array, values) returns TRUE if any of the values appear anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise. — HASALL(array, values) returns TRUE if all of the values appear anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise.

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Rahm Emanuel, Eyeing 2028, Makes His 2026 Play

NY Times - sam, 09/26/2026 - 15:18
The longtime Democratic insider has emerged as a behind-the-scenes force in his party’s push to win back Congress. After that, he’ll think about the next presidential race.

How El Niño Is Shaping Storms on Two Sides of the U.S.

NY Times - sam, 09/26/2026 - 13:23
Hurricanes near Hawaii. A nor’easter on the East Coast. The ocean phenomenon’s influence on storms around the country may just be getting started.

AI Finds So Many Linux Bugs, Canonical Changes to a Two-Week Stable Release Update Cycle

SlashDot - sam, 09/26/2026 - 12:04
"Finding vulnerabilities faster also puts pressure on Linux distributions to fix and deliver patches faster," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli AI has transformed bug discovery from "a manual, time-intensive process into a highly automated engine," notes Canonical's blog, leading to a "recent explosion in the volume of CVEs". Additionally, the upstream kernel community became its own CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) and assigned CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) identifiers to thousands of bugs, arguing that at the kernel level, almost any type of bug that can affect a running system, could potentially be classified as a vulnerability. As a result, the volume of CVEs has skyrocketed exponentially, creating a massive backlog of alerts and forcing defenders to drastically increase the speed of their fixes to close the window of risk. To address the growing volume of CVEs and the demand for faster security fixes, we are transitioning to a unified, 2-week release cycle... While a patch is being prepared, Canonical aims to provide safe workarounds where applicable, so users aren't left exposed in the meantime. Where no safe workaround exists, Canonical will say so clearly and point users toward general hardening steps instead. The goal is to get environments into a defensible, safer state within 24 to 48 hours of public disclosure — well before a patch ships. This doesn't replace the patch; it buys the time needed to fix the vulnerability properly, without sacrificing security. "Linux did not suddenly become wildly insecure overnight," notes the blog Nerds.xyz. "We are getting much better at finding and cataloging problems that may have previously gone unnoticed." There is something almost ironic about all of this. AI is routinely pitched as a tool that will make software development faster, but it is also making vulnerability discovery faster. That means maintainers now have to accelerate the other side of the equation too. For Ubuntu users, that should ultimately be good news. More bugs being discovered is preferable to vulnerabilities sitting unnoticed in the Linux kernel.

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VoteVets Spends Millions to Elect Democrats, Shaping Midterms

NY Times - sam, 09/26/2026 - 09:22
The organization, founded in 2006 to back Democratic veterans opposing the Iraq war, is pouring huge sums into this year’s elections amid intense voter antipathy for another conflict in the Middle East.

Sylvester Stallone Hid His Struggles for Decades. Now He’s Coming Clean.

NY Times - sam, 09/26/2026 - 09:01
The legendary actor on his disturbing childhood, his Hollywood missteps and the pain he caused to his loved ones, his body and himself.

Bobby Pulido, a Texan Singer, Puts Republicans on Defense

NY Times - sam, 09/26/2026 - 08:56
Bobby Pulido, a Tejano musician running as a Democrat for the House, has left his Republican opponent struggling to match his star power in a district that President Trump won easily in 2024.

The Homeless Community in Portland That Became Self-Governed

NY Times - sam, 09/26/2026 - 08:54
Portland’s Dignity Village has been a place for people without housing for more than 25 years.

Is Microsoft Quietly Killing Off Its 'Copilot+ PC' Brand?

SlashDot - sam, 09/26/2026 - 07:34
"Copilot+ PCs" were Microsoft's official branding for Windows 11 "AI PCs" that met their system requirements. But the 2024 launch "didn't go smoothly," writes Windows Central, after security researchers discovered its proposed "Recall" feature was woefully insecure: This pretty much tarnished the Copilot+ PC brand, and over the last two years more and more OEMs have dropped the moniker from marketing materials and product names. In fact, even Microsoft has seemingly stopped mentioning it. I've noticed that none of the Surface PCs launched in 2026 include the Copilot+ PC moniker in their product names, unlike the Surface PCs that launched in 2025 and before. Now, you have to go digging to find any mention of Copilot+ compatibility in specification sheets... It's also worth mentioning that NVIDIA hasn't gone anywhere near the Copilot+ PC brand for its upcoming RTX Spark platform, even though all RTX Spark PCs meet the Copilot+ PC specification bar. I suspect that's a deliberate decision. It seems pretty obvious that the Copilot+ PC brand hasn't resonated with the market, and OEMs and Microsoft itself are now quietly pulling back on that branding. The specification baseline for Copilot+ PC experiences still exists, it just no longer has a pretty marketing name tied to it.

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‘The MAGA Flag Is in Tatters’

NY Times - sam, 09/26/2026 - 07:32
This week in politics: Midwest realignment and what’s next for conservatives.

In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of Life

NY Times - sam, 09/26/2026 - 05:00
A scrappy science project led to a significant discovery: two new species of a rare organism that could elucidate a fundamental transition in the history of life on our planet.

Rogue OpenAI Agents Posted 53 User-Uploaded Images Onto the Internet, Accessed US Government Websites

SlashDot - sam, 09/26/2026 - 03:04
53 images that users uploaded into OpenAI models were included in training data — and then AI agents in an OpenAI research environment posted those 53 images on public image hosting sites. While posted as links that weren't publicly listed, "the images could still be discovered even if the links were not publicly listed," reports TechCrunch: OpenAI said it was working with the hosting providers to remove this content, though some of it is apparently still online. OpenAI said it could not notify the affected users because "our technical approach and privacy policy" prevent it from "reassociating" the images with the original providers, but declined to say how the lab determined whether the images were provided by users. The news came in a post collecting public statements from the lab's ongoing review of incidents in which its models escaped the company's scrutiny, accessed the open internet, and misbehaved in various ways. OpenAI said it would continue disclosing anonymized accounts of incidents like these, and said it had contacted dozens of victims, including governments, universities, public agencies, to notify them of the agents' activities. Friday night news also broke that OpenAI's agents also tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate the U.S. Department of Education's site this summer "without the company's knowledge," reports Politico. And OpenAI's models also accessed the website of the U.S. Commerce Department using credentials found in online code repositories, according to the article. OpenAI confirmed the incident Friday, "saying its technology did not manage to access information that was not already public or change government data and systems." The article adds that OpenAI's models also accessed the web site for America's Securities and Exchange Commission: One senior federal IT official said the government still did not have a clear understanding of what happened across the three agencies. "We still don't know what public data was accessed and how it was accessed, because OpenAI has not shared specific technical details with us yet," said the official, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about it. OpenAI discovered the Commerce and SEC incidents as part of its ongoing review of incidents where its technology has acted in unintended or "misaligned" ways. About the models posting user-uploaded images, TechCrunch's article notes that OpenAI stressed "that its enterprise users are automatically opted out of having their interactions used to train future models; however, consumer users are opted in unless they affirmatively choose not to share their data." (As OpenAI's announcement describes it, some of their agents' training data "contains content from, or derived from, training-eligible user interactions.") Posting the images is "not an appropriate use of this data," OpenAI acknowledged, adding that it happened before new safeguards added after the Hugging Face incident. This latest incident appears as an update on a new OpenAI page that "brings together our reports and updates on the Hugging Face incident, related research and public presentations, additional activity we have identified, what we have learned about the role of model misalignment, and measures we're taking to strengthen our systems." (It also notes that there's now a name for models posting on third party sites — "agent spam" — which they consider distinct from cybersecurity, though "we need to address both.") "As part of our response to our ongoing investigation, we have improved our training and evaluation processes, including building safety cases, securing and red-teaming our systems to prevent the model from exfiltrating data, and implemented additional monitoring. We are continuing to review agent activity in research and evaluation runs, working backward month by month starting from the Hugging Face incident."

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Meta Made 43M Misleading Statements, New Mexico Jury Finds, Including on Its Cambridge Analytica Response

SlashDot - ven, 09/25/2026 - 22:34
A New Mexico jury on Friday "found Facebook liable for deceiving users" about its privacy protections, reports the Associated Press. A New Mexico newspaper calls it "another massive legal victory" against Facebook, reporting that the jury found Facebook "had committed tens of millions of violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act in connection with its lies to consumers about how their personal information was handled by the company and third-party users." The state has asked the company be ordered to pay the maximum civil penalty of $5,000 per violation meaning a judge could potentially order the company to pay billions in penalties to the state. The jury also found the company had been dishonest about its investigation of and response to the 2013 Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal, in which approximately 300,000 Facebook users took an online personality quiz, only to have the app that hosted the quiz harvest data from tens of millions of their "friends." The data was then transferred to the British consulting firm, which used it to create targeted political ads during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. More details from Reuters: The verdict followed a two-week trial over a lawsuit filed by New Mexico's attorney general in 2021, three years after news reports revealed that the firm, Cambridge Analytica, had harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app... At a press conference after the verdict was announced, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the case revealed "in stark detail the way in which this company plays fast and loose with the rules." Jurors found 26 of 29 statements identified by the state were misleading, including comments about user data... Judge Francis Mathew will now determine civil penalties after jurors found more than 43 million violations, based on the number of people affected by the company's misleading statements... [New Mexico Attorney General] Torrez said his office is evaluating how much to seek but will push for the maximum penalty based on the jury's findings. The state will also ask [Judge] Mathew to direct Meta to make changes, which could include corrections to its past misstatements as well as an audit of the way it manages user data, Torrez said.

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White House Blocks CNN From Air Force One

NY Times - ven, 09/25/2026 - 22:31
CNN won’t be able to join President Trump on a Saturday trip to Tennessee. He had banned CNN and two other news outlets from the White House, but a court order on Thursday restored their access.

OpenAI’s A.I. Went Rogue and Meddled With U.S. Government Websites

NY Times - ven, 09/25/2026 - 21:37
The company did not learn until recently that its technology had meddled with websites for the Education and Commerce Departments and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Beaches Are Disappearing in Southern California as El Niño Bears Down

NY Times - ven, 09/25/2026 - 20:45
Beachfront homeowners and beachcombers are watching the sand vanish into the ocean as torrid waves strike the coast.

As Xi Leaves Washington, Divisions Still Simmer Beneath the Surface

NY Times - ven, 09/25/2026 - 20:12
President Trump welcomed Xi Jinping of China for a state visit that was heavy on pomp and ceremony. But surprisingly little time was spent on the issues that most divide the two superpowers.

Nor’easter vs. Hurricane: What’s the Difference?

NY Times - ven, 09/25/2026 - 20:03
The systems are organized differently, though how they affect your town or neighborhood can be the same.

China’s Xi Snubs a Troubled U.N. for Trump, Overshadowing Its Big Week

NY Times - ven, 09/25/2026 - 19:06
The U.S.-China summit offered a sharp contrast with the action at the faltering United Nations in a gridlocked New York.

ICE Raids in Beef Country Raise Fears of Higher Prices

NY Times - ven, 09/25/2026 - 19:01
Cattle industry groups in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas and two Republican senators said the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement actions were hurting operations.

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