Tuesday Pew Research announced their newest findings: that 54% of America's teens use AI help with schoolwork: One-in-five teens living in households making less than $30,000 a year say they do all or most of their schoolwork with AI chatbots' help. A similar share of those in households making $30,000 to just under $75,000 annually say this. Fewer teens living in higher-earning households (7%) say the same." "The survey did not ask students whether they had used chatbots to write essays or generate other assignments..." notes the New York Times. "But nearly 60% of teenagers told Pew that students at their school used chatbots to cheat 'very often' or 'somewhat often.'" Agreeing with that are the Pew Researchers themselves. "Our survey shows that many teens think cheating with AI has become a regular feature of student life." One worried teenager still told the researchers that AI "makes people lazy and takes away jobs." But another teenager told the researchers that "Everyone's going to have to know how to use AI or they'll be left behind." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

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A start-up called Reflect Orbital "proposes to use large, mirrored satellites to redirect sunlight to Earth at night," reports the Washington Post, "with plans to bathe solar farms, industrial sites and even entire cities in light that could, if desired, reach the intensity of daylight...." Slashdot noted their idea in 2022 — but Reflect Orbital now expects to launch its first satellite in April, according to the article. "But its grand vision is largely 'aspirational,' as its young founder, Ben Nowack, told me..." Reflect Orbital's Nowack describes a scene right out of sci-fi: An extremely bright star appears on the northern horizon and makes its way across the sky, illuminating a 5-kilometer circle on Earth, then setting on the southern horizon about five minutes later, just as another such "star" appears in the north. To make the night even brighter, a customer could make 10 "stars" appear at once in the north by ordering them on an app. Two such artificial stars are in development in Reflect Orbital's factory. Nowack showed them to me on a Zoom call. The first to launch is 50 feet across, but he plans later to build them three times that size. If all goes according to plan, he'll have 50,000 of them circling the Earth in 2035 at an altitude of around 400 miles. Nowack plans to start selling the service "in mostly developing nations or places that don't have streetlights yet." Eventually, he thinks, he can illuminate major cities, turn solar fields and farms into round-the-clock operations for any business or municipality that pays for it. He likened his technology to the invention of crop irrigation thousands of years ago. "I see this as much the same thing," he said, arguing that people would no longer have to "wait for the sun to shine." The article adds that Elon Musk's SpaceX "wants to launch as many as a million satellites to serve as orbiting data centers — 70 times the number of satellites now in orbit." (America's satellite-regulation Federal Communications Commission grants a "categorical exclusion" from environmental review to satellites on the grounds that their operations "normally do not have significant effects on the human environment.") The public comment periods for the two proposals close on March 6 and March 9.

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Older Americans are losing billions of dollars annually to financial exploitation. Banks and investment firms are training employees to spot red flags and stop the transactions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google on Friday unveiled its plan for its Chrome browser to secure HTTPS certificates against quantum computer attacks without breaking the Internet. The objective is a tall order. The quantum-resistant cryptographic data needed to transparently publish TLS certificates is roughly 40 times bigger than the classical cryptographic material used today. Today's X.509 certificates are about 64 bytes in size, and comprise six elliptic curve signatures and two EC public keys. This material can be cracked through the quantum-enabled Shor's algorithm. Certificates containing the equivalent quantum-resistant cryptographic material are roughly 2.5 kilobytes. All this data must be transmitted when a browser connects to a site. To bypass the bottleneck, companies are turning to Merkle Trees, a data structure that uses cryptographic hashes and other math to verify the contents of large amounts of information using a small fraction of material used in more traditional verification processes in public key infrastructure. Merkle Tree Certificates, "replace the heavy, serialized chain of signatures found in traditional PKI with compact Merkle Tree proofs," members of Google's Chrome Secure Web and Networking Team wrote Friday. "In this model, a Certification Authority (CA) signs a single 'Tree Head' representing potentially millions of certificates, and the 'certificate' sent to the browser is merely a lightweight proof of inclusion in that tree." [...] Google is [also] adding cryptographic material from quantum-resistant algorithms such as ML-DSA (PDF). This addition would allow forgeries only if an attacker were to break both classical and post-quantum encryption. The new regime is part of what Google is calling the quantum-resistant root store, which will complement the Chrome Root Store the company formed in 2022. The [Merkle Tree Certificates] MTCs use Merkle Trees to provide quantum-resistant assurances that a certificate has been published without having to add most of the lengthy keys and hashes. Using other techniques to reduce the data sizes, the MTCs will be roughly the same 64-byte length they are now [...]. The new system has already been implemented in Chrome.

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These X-rays show evidence of the Iranian regime’s massacre.

The nearly decade-old conspiracy theory does not align neatly with the facts emerging from the documents. That does not seem to matter.

Once paychecks stop, it can be frightening to shift out of the savings habit. But there are strategies to enjoy your nest egg and make it last.

The court is set to decide a major case that could scramble the country’s congressional maps. One crucial factor for this year’s elections is when the ruling lands.

On February 24th, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory activated its automated alert system, sending out roughly 800,000 real-time notifications flagging asteroids, supernovae, flaring black holes and "other transient celestial events," reports Scientific American. And this is only the beginning -- that number is projected to climb into the millions as it continues scanning the ever-changing sky. From the report: The astronomical observatory equipped with world's largest camera hit a key milestone on February 24, when a complex data-processing system pushed hundreds of thousands of alerts out to scientists eager to pore over its most exciting sightings. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory began operations last year, capturing stunning, panoramic time-lapse views of the cosmos with ease. Rubin's first images, based on just 10 hours of observations, let space fans zoom seemingly forever into an overwhelmingly starry sky. But watchful astronomers were always awaiting the next step: the system that would automatically alert them to the most promising activity in the overhead sky amid the 1,000 or so enormous images that Rubin's telescope captures every night. "We can detect everything that changes, moves and appears," said Yusra AlSayyad, an astronomer at Princeton University and Rubin's deputy associate director for data management, to Scientific American last summer. "It's way too much for one person to manually sift through and filter and monitor themselves." So even as they were designing and building the Rubin Observatory itself, scientists were also designing an alert system to help astronomers navigate the flood of data. As soon as the telescope began observations, the team started constructing a static reference image of the entire sky in impeccable detail. Now the data processing systems that support the observatory are starting to automatically compare every new Rubin image to the corresponding section of that background template. The systems identify all of the differences, each of which is individually flagged. The algorithms can also distinguish between a potential supernova and a possible newfound asteroid, for example. Alerting the scientific community is the final, crucial step. Astronomers -- as well as members of the public -- can sign up for notifications based on the type of sighting they're interested in and the brightness of the observation in question. And now that the alerts system has gone live, users receive a tiny, fuzzy image with some astronomical metadata of each observation that fits their criteria -- all just a couple of minutes after Rubin captures the original image.

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Southern California's air quality board rejected proposed rules to phase out gas-powered appliances after receiving more than 20,000 opposition comments generated through CiviClick, "the first and best AI-powered grassroots advocacy platform." Phys.org reports: A Southern California-based public affairs consultant, Matt Klink, has taken credit for using CiviClick to wage the opposition campaign, including in a sponsored article on the website Campaigns and Elections. The campaign "left the staff of the Southern California Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) reeling," the article says. It is not clear how AI was deployed in the campaign, and officials at CiviClick did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But their website boasts several tools, including "state of the art technology and artificial intelligence message assistance" that can be used to create custom advocacy letters, as opposed to repetitive form letters or petitions often used in similar campaigns. When staffers at the air district reached out to a small sample of people to verify their comments, at least three said they had not written to the agency and were not aware of any such messages, records show. But the email onslaught almost certainly influenced the board's June decision, according to agency insiders, who noted that the number of public comments typically submitted on agenda items can be counted on one hand. The proposed rules were nearly two years in the making and would have placed a fee on natural gas-powered water heaters and furnaces, favoring electric ones, in an effort to reduce air pollution in the district, which includes Orange County and large swaths of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Gas appliances emit nitrogen oxides, or NOx -- key pollutants for forming smog. The implications are troubling, experts said, and go beyond the use of natural gas furnaces and heaters in the second-largest metropolitan area in the country.

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The deal came hours after President Trump had ordered federal agencies to stop using artificial intelligence technology made by Anthropic, an OpenAI rival.

The former officer traveled to China to train pilots of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force without approval from the State Department, the Justice Department said.

Prime Minister Mark Carney visits India, Australia and Japan seeking deals to strengthen his country’s links to Indo-Pacific powers and break Canada’s dependence on the United States.

Actions by the president and the Pentagon appeared to drive a wedge between Washington and the tech industry, whose leaders and workers spoke out for the start-up.

The military needs the very best A.I. to streamline its operations. It should find ways to work with these companies, not erect barriers.

He sang and co-wrote some of the definitive teenage anthems of the 1950s and early ’60s, including “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” and then reinvented his career in the ’70s.

The company had clashed with the military over how officials wanted to use its cutting-edge A.I. model. The order could vastly complicate intelligence analysis and defense work.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: OpenAI has fired an employee following an investigation into their activity on prediction market platforms including Polymarket, WIRED has learned. OpenAI CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, disclosed the termination in an internal message to employees earlier this year. The employee, she said, "used confidential OpenAI information in connection with external prediction markets (e.g. Polymarket)." "Our policies prohibit employees from using confidential OpenAI information for personal gain, including in prediction markets," says spokesperson Kayla Wood. OpenAI has not revealed the name of the employee or the specifics of their trades. Evidence suggests that this was not an isolated event. Polymarket runs on the Polygon blockchain network, so its trading ledger is pseudonymous but traceable. According to an analysis by the financial data platform Unusual Whales, there have been clusters of activities, which the service flagged as suspicious, around OpenAI-themed events since March 2023. Unusual Whales flagged 77 positions in 60 wallet addresses as suspected insider trades, looking at the age of the account, trading history, and significance of investment, among other factors. Suspicious trades hinged on the release dates of products like Sora, GPT-5, and the ChatGPT Browser, as well as CEO Sam Altman's employment status. In November 2023, two days after Altman was dramatically ousted from the company, a new wallet placed a significant bet that he would return, netting over $16,000 in profits. The account never placed another bet. The behavior fits into patterns typical of insider trades. "The tell is the clustering. In the 40 hours before OpenAI launched its browser, 13 brand-new wallets with zero trading history appeared on the site for the first time to collectively bet $309,486 on the right outcome," says Unusual Whales CEO Matt Saincome. "When you see that many fresh wallets making the same bet at the same time, it raises a real question about whether the secret is getting out." [...] Though this is the first confirmed case of a large technology company firing an employee over trades in prediction markets, it's almost certainly not the last. Opportunities for tech sector employees to make trades on markets abound. "The data tells me this is happening all over the place," Saincome says.

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President Trump said he had not made a final decision about whether to order military action against Iran.

The former president sat for hours of questioning by members of both parties, in an appearance that Democrats signaled they would use as a precedent to force President Trump to do the same.