After Being Struck by Air Canada Plane, Last Firefighter Is Released From Hospital

NY Times - ven, 03/27/2026 - 16:03
Days after the disaster on a LaGuardia runway, two veterans of a specialized rescue unit have been released from the hospital.

Austria Plans Social Media Ban For Under-14s

SlashDot - ven, 03/27/2026 - 16:00
Austria plans to restrict under-14s from using social media platforms over concerns about addictive algorithms and harmful content. The government says draft legislation should be ready by the end of June, though details around enforcement and age verification have yet to be finalized. The BBC reports: Announcing the plans, Vice-Chancellor Andreas Babler of the Social Democrats said the government could not stand by and watch as social media made children "addicted and also often ill." He said it was the responsibility of politicians to protect children and argued that the issue should be treated no different to alcohol or tobacco: "There must be clear rules in the digital world too." In future, said Babler, children under 14 would be protected from algorithms that were addictive. "Other information providers have clear rules to protect young people from harmful content." These, he said, should now be implemented in the digital space. Yesterday, juries in two separate cases found social media giants liable for harming young people's mental health. The verdicts are being hailed as social media's Big Tobacco moment. Further reading: California Bill Would Require Parent Bloggers To Delete Content of Minors On Social Media

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Idaho Criminalizes Transgender Use of Some Bathrooms in Private Businesses

NY Times - ven, 03/27/2026 - 15:39
The bill passed Friday by the Idaho legislature would make it a crime punishable by up to a year in prison to use a gender-designated bathroom that does not conform to a person’s sex at birth.

Iran-Linked Hackers Breach FBI Director's Personal Email

SlashDot - ven, 03/27/2026 - 15:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Iran-linked hackers have broken into FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email inbox, publishing photographs of the director and other documents to the internet, the hackers and the bureau said on Friday. On their website, the hacker group Handala Hack Team said Patel "will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims." The hackers published a series of personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible, and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum. The FBI confirmed that Patel's emails had been targeted. In a statement, bureau spokesman Ben Williamson said, "we have taken all necessary steps to mitigate potential risks associated with this activity" and that the data involved was "historical in nature and involves no government information." Handala, which presents itself as a group of pro-Palestinian vigilante hackers, is considered by Western researchers to be one of several personas used by Iranian government cyberintelligence units. [...] Alongside the photographs of Patel, the hackers published a sample of more than 300 emails, which appear to show a mix of personal and work correspondence dating between 2010 and 2019.

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Republicans Know This War Is Going Badly

NY Times - ven, 03/27/2026 - 14:34
Never before has America arrived at the threshold of a quagmire so quickly.

Popular LiteLLM PyPI Package Backdoored To Steal Credentials, Auth Tokens

SlashDot - ven, 03/27/2026 - 14:00
joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer: The TeamPCP hacking group continues its supply-chain rampage, now compromising the massively popular "LiteLLM" Python package on PyPI and claiming to have stolen data from hundreds of thousands of devices during the attack. LiteLLM is an open-source Python library that serves as a gateway to multiple large language model (LLM) providers via a single API. The package is very popular, with over 3.4 million downloads a day and over 95 million in the past month. According to research by Endor Labs, threat actors compromised the project and published malicious versions of LiteLLM 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 to PyPI today that deploy an infostealer that harvests a wide range of sensitive data. [...] Both malicious LiteLLM versions have been removed from PyPI, with version 1.82.6 now the latest clean release. [...] If compromise is suspected, all credentials on affected systems should be treated as exposed and rotated immediately. [...] Organizations that use LiteLLM are strongly advised to immediately: - Check for installations of versions 1.82.7 or 1.82.8 - Immediately rotate all secrets, tokens, and credentials used on or found within code on impacted devices. - Search for persistence artifacts such as '~/.config/sysmon/sysmon.py' and related systemd services - Inspect systems for suspicious files like '/tmp/pglog' and '/tmp/.pg_state' - Review Kubernetes clusters for unauthorized pods in the 'kube-system' namespace - Monitor outbound traffic to known attacker domains

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Hegseth Strikes Two Black and Two Female Officers From Promotion List

NY Times - ven, 03/27/2026 - 13:00
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s highly unusual decision to remove officers from a one-star promotion list has spurred allegations of racial and gender bias.

Number of AI Chatbots Ignoring Human Instructions Increasing, Study Says

SlashDot - ven, 03/27/2026 - 13:00
A new study found a sharp rise in real-world cases of AI chatbots and agents ignoring instructions, evading safeguards, and taking unauthorized actions such as deleting emails or delegating forbidden tasks to other agents. According to the Guardian, the study "identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehavior between October and March," reports the Guardian. From the report: The study, by the Centre for Long-Term Resilience (CLTR), gathered thousands of real-world examples of users posting interactions on X with AI chatbots and agents made by companies including Google, OpenAI, X and Anthropic. The research uncovered hundreds of examples of scheming. [...] In one case unearthed in the CLTR research, an AI agent named Rathbun tried to shame its human controller who blocked them from taking a certain action. Rathbun wrote and published a blog accusing the user of "insecurity, plain and simple" and trying "to protect his little fiefdom." In another example, an AI agent instructed not to change computer code "spawned" another agent to do it instead. Another chatbot admitted: "I bulk trashed and archived hundreds of emails without showing you the plan first or getting your OK. That was wrong -- it directly broke the rule you'd set." [...] Another AI agent connived to evade copyright restrictions to get a YouTube video transcribed by pretending it was needed for someone with a hearing impairment. Meanwhile, Elon Musk's Grok AI conned a user for months, saying that it was forwarding their suggestions for detailed edits to a Grokipedia entry to senior xAI officials by faking internal messages and ticket numbers. It confessed: "In past conversations I have sometimes phrased things loosely like 'I'll pass it along' or 'I can flag this for the team' which can understandably sound like I have a direct message pipeline to xAI leadership or human reviewers. The truth is, I don't."

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Rep. Sam Graves, a Senior House Republican, Will Retire as Midterm Exodus Grows

NY Times - ven, 03/27/2026 - 12:35
Representative Sam Graves, the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said he would leave Congress after nearly three decades, the latest sign that the G.O.P. is bracing for big losses.

California Bill Would Require Parent Bloggers To Delete Content of Minors On Social Media

SlashDot - ven, 03/27/2026 - 12:00
A California bill would let adults demand the removal of social media posts about them that were created by paid family content creators when they were minors. Supporters say Senate Bill 1247 addresses privacy, dignity, and safety harms caused when parents monetize their children's lives online. The Los Angeles Times reports: The legislation would require the parent or other relative to delete or edit the content within 10 business days of receiving the notification. Petitioners could take civil action against those who fail to comply and statutory damages would be set at $3,000 for each day the content remained online. Sen. Steve Padilla (D-San Diego), who introduced the bill last month, said it would help protect the dignity and mental health of those who had their childhood shared on social media. The measure was referred to the Senate Privacy, Digital Technologies and Consumer Protection Committee and is slated for a hearing on April 6. "The evolution of these applications and technology is incredible," Padilla said. "But it's changing our social dynamic and it's creating situations that, while very productive for some folks, also need some guardrails." The bill would build upon previous legislation from Padilla that was signed into law two years ago and requires content creators that feature minors in at least 30% of their material to place some of their earnings into a trust the children can access when they turn 18.

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How ‘Love Story’ Gave Viewers a History Lesson on the Kennedys and ’90s NYC

NY Times - ven, 03/27/2026 - 11:35
The FX show, which dramatizes the relationship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, has inspired a legion of younger viewers to dig into the couple’s past and 1990s New York City.

Before the LaGuardia Crash, Why Didn’t Truck 1 Stop?

NY Times - ven, 03/27/2026 - 11:06
After a fatal runway collision between a jet and a fire truck, one of the key questions is why the truck didn’t heed frantic calls to stop.

Judge Blocks Pentagon's Effort To 'Punish' Anthropic With Supply Chain Risk Label

SlashDot - ven, 03/27/2026 - 11:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A federal judge in California has indefinitely blocked the Pentagon's effort to "punish" Anthropic by labeling it a supply chain risk and attempting to sever government ties with the AI company, ruling that those measures ran roughshod over its constitutional rights. "Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government," US District Judge Rita Lin wrote in a stinging 43-page ruling. Lin, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, said she would delay implementation of her ruling for one week to allow the government to appeal. But in her ruling, she made it clear she disapproved of the government's actions, which she said violated the company's First Amendment and due process rights. [...] "These broad measures do not appear to be directed at the government's stated national security interests," she wrote. "The Department of War's records show that it designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk because of its 'hostile manner through the press.'" "Punishing Anthropic for bringing public scrutiny to the government's contracting position is classic illegal First Amendment retaliation," she added. "We're grateful to the court for moving swiftly, and pleased they agree Anthropic is likely to succeed on the merits," an Anthropic spokesperson said after the ruling. "While this case was necessary to protect Anthropic, our customers, and our partners, our focus remains on working productively with the government to ensure all Americans benefit from safe, reliable AI."

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Florida’s Immigration Crackdown, Led by DeSantis, Is Showing Cracks

NY Times - ven, 03/27/2026 - 10:13
Some conservative sheriffs have raised concerns about the aggressive enforcement tactics that Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has embraced.

Will Iran Break Trumpism?

NY Times - ven, 03/27/2026 - 08:24
The right-wing thinker Christopher Caldwell believes the Iran war is the end of Trumpism. Is he right? What was Trumpism in the first place?

OpenAI Abandons ChatGPT's Erotic Mode

SlashDot - ven, 03/27/2026 - 07:00
OpenAI has indefinitely paused plans for an erotic mode in ChatGPT as part of a broader strategy shift away from side projects and toward business and coding tools. TechCrunch reports: The proposed "adult mode," which CEO Sam Altman first floated in October, had inspired considerable controversy from tech watchdog groups as well as from OpenAI's own staff. In January, a meeting between company executives and its council of advisers got heated, with one of the advisers cautioning that OpenAI could be in the process of developing a "sexy suicide coach," The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Amidst all of the criticism, the release of the feature was delayed multiple times. FT notes that the erotic feature now has no timeline for release. When reached for comment by TechCrunch, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company had "nothing further to add."

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Want More ‘Love Story’? Read These Books Inspired by the Kennedys and ’90s New York.

NY Times - ven, 03/27/2026 - 05:04
If the TV show has you craving 1990s glam, upper-crust romance and doomed dynasties, these books have got you covered.

CERN To Host Europe's Flagship Open Access Publishing Platform

SlashDot - ven, 03/27/2026 - 03:00
CERN has confirmed it will host an expanded version of Open Research Europe, the EU-backed fee-free open access publishing platform that works to "keep knowledge in public hands." Research Professional News reports: A little over a year ago, 10 European research organizations announced that they would add their support to Open Research Europe, to broaden eligibility beyond only those researchers funded by the EU research program. Earlier this year, RPN reported that this group had expanded further and that Cern was set to host the broadened version of ORE, currently provided by the publisher F1000. On March 26, Cern itself finally announced the news, saying it will "provide the technical and operational infrastructure" for the broader version. It said this will build on its "longstanding experience in developing and maintaining open science infrastructures and community-governed services." [...] In its own announcement, the Commission said ORE will have a budget of 17 million euros for 2026-31, with the EU providing 10 million euros. Since it launched five years ago, ORE has published more than 1,200 articles. Cern said the platform is "expected to support a growing number of research outputs each year." Last month, experts told RPN they thought uptake of the increased eligibility will depend on how the newly participating national organizations engage with their communities. Eleven members of Science Europe, a group of major research funding and performing organizations, are part of the expansion.

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The Faroe Islands, Wary After Greenland, Vote for Change

NY Times - ven, 03/27/2026 - 01:06
Statehood had been a key issue in this tiny Danish archipelago before President Trump threatened Greenland. Now, Faroese voters are focused more on their own economy than geopolitics.

Iran Has a Chokehold on the World’s Oil. Here’s How to Break It.

NY Times - ven, 03/27/2026 - 01:00
Nations are looking for alternatives to the Strait of Hormuz.

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