When one company asked job applicants to submit a video where they answer a question, most of the 300 responses were “eerily similar,” reports the Washington Post (with a company executive saying it was “abundantly clear” they’d used AI.)

Job seekers are turning to AI to help them land jobs more quickly in a tough labor market…. Employers say that’s having an unintended consequence: Many applications are looking and sounding the same…
It’s easy to spot when candidates over-rely on AI, some employers said. Oftentimes, executive summaries will look eerily similar to each other, odd phrases that people wouldn’t normally use in conversation creep into descriptions, fancy vocabulary appears, and someone with entry-level experience uses language that indicates they are much more senior, they added. It’s worse when they use auto-apply AI tools, which will find jobs, fill out applications and submit résumés on the candidate’s behalf, some employers said. Those tend to misinterpret some of the application questions and fill in the wrong information in inappropriate spots. If these applications were evaluated alone, employers say they’d have a harder time identifying AI usage. But when hundreds of applications all have the same issue, they said, AI’s role in it becomes obvious.

The article acknowledges that some employers could be using AI tools to screen resumes too. One job-seeker in Texas even says he’ll stop submitting an AI-written résumé when the recruiter stops using AI to evaluate them. “You’re saying, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this’ when I know a good chunk of them do this!”

Obligatory XKCD.

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This week Raspberry Pi saw its stock price surge more than 60% above its early-February low (before giving up some gains at the end of the week). Reuters notes the rise started when CEO Eben Upton bought 13,224 pounds worth of shares — but there could be another reason. “The rally in the roughly $800 million company has materialised alongside social-media buzz that demand for its single-board computers could pick up as people buy them to run AI agents such as OpenClaw.”

The Register explains:

The catalyst appears to have been the sudden realization by one X user, “aleabitoreddit,” that the agentic AI hand grenade known as OpenClaw could drive demand for Raspberry Pis the way it had for Apple Mac Minis. The viral AI personal assistant, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, has dominated the feeds of AI boosters over the past few weeks for its ability to perform everyday tasks like sending emails, managing calendars, booking appointments, and complaining about their meatbag masters on the purportedly all-agent forum known as MoltBook… In case it needs to be said, no one should be running this thing on their personal devices lest the agent accidentally leak your most personal and sensitive secrets to the web… In this context, a cheap low-power device like a Raspberry Pi makes a certain kind of sense as a safer, saner way to poke the robo-lobster…
The Register argues Raspberry Pis aren’t as cheap as they used to be “thanks in part to the global memory crunch. Today, a top-specced Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of memory will set you back more than $200, up from $120 a year ago.”

“You know what’s cheaper, easier, and more secure than letting OpenClaw loose on your local area network? A virtual private cloud…”

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Russia’s domestic intelligence agency claimed Saturday that Ukraine can obtain sensitive information from troops using the Telegram app on the front line, reports Bloomberg. The fact that the claims were made through Russia’s state-operated news outlet RIA Novosti signals “tightening scrutiny over a platform used by millions of Russians,” Bloomberg notes, as the Kremlin continues efforts to “push people to use a new state-backed alternative.”

Russia’s communications watchdog limited access to Telegram — a popular messaging app owned by Russian-born billionaire Pavel Durov — over a week ago for failing to comply with Russian laws requiring personal data to be stored locally. Voice and video calls were blocked via Telegram in August. The pressure is the latest move in a long-running campaign to promote what the Kremlin calls a sovereign internet that’s led to blocks on YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp… Foreign intelligence services are able to see Russia’s military messages in Telegram too, Russia’s Minister for digital development, Maksut Shadaev, said on Wednesday, although he added that Russia will not block access to Telegram for troops for now.

Telegram responded at the time that no breaches of the app’s encryption have ever been found. “The Russian government’s allegation that our encryption has been compromised is a deliberate fabrication intended to justify outlawing Telegram and forcing citizens onto a state-controlled messaging platform engineered for mass surveillance and censorship,” it said in an emailed response.

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It looks like a March launch is no longer in the cards for Artemis II, NASA’s first crewed trip to the moon’s vicinity since the final Apollo mission over 50 years ago. While preparations were underway at the Kennedy Space Center for a launch as soon as March 6, the space agency says it ran into an issue with the flow of helium to its SLS rocket’s upper stage this weekend and it now has to roll the rocket from the launch pad back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to figure out what’s wrong and fix it. A media briefing is planned for sometime this week to discuss the problem and what’s next. 

But in a post on X, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman confirmed the rollback will “take the March launch window out of consideration.” NASA noted on its blog that the current effort “potentially preserves the April launch window, pending the outcome of data findings, repair efforts, and how the schedule comes to fruition in the coming days and weeks.” It’s a four-mile trip back to the VAB that will take hours to carefully transport the massive rocket and the Orion spacecraft. NASA says it’s eyeing February 24 for this trek.

The issue occurred overnight in the early hours of February 21, when NASA says it observed “interrupted flow of helium to the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket’s interim cryogenic propulsion stage.” The space agency explained:

The upper stage uses helium to maintain the proper environmental conditions for the stage’s engine and to pressurize liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant tanks. The systems worked during NASA’s Artemis II wet dress rehearsals, but teams were not able to properly flow helium during normal operations and reconfigurations following the wet dress rehearsal that concluded Feb. 19. Operators are using a backup method to maintain the environmental conditions for the upper stage engines and the rocket, which remains in a safe configuration. 

The Artemis II crew — Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, Mission Specialist — had just entered quarantine a day before the issue arose. NASA says the astronauts have since come out of quarantine.

At the start of this year, NASA announced an accelerated timeline for Artemis II, which was previously set for April 2026 after experiencing delays in 2024. For this 10-day mission, which will be the first crewed flight of the SLS rocket, the Artemis II astronauts will take a trip around the moon in the Orion spacecraft. While it initially targeted early February, the launch was pushed to March due to issues that popped up during the wet dress rehearsal. Now, we’re back to the beginning with a possible April launch, but that’ll depend on the fix being a quick one.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasas-crewed-artemis-ii-launch-gets-pushed-back-again-this-time-due-to-a-helium-issue-231010042.html?src=rss

Fossil fuels produce NO2, which is linked to asthma attacks, bronchitis, and higher risks of heart disease and stroke, according the EV news site Electrek. But the nonprofit news site Grist.org notes a new analysis showing that those emissions decreased by 1.1% for every increase of 200 electric vehicles — across nearly 1,700 ZIP codes.
“A pretty small addition of cars at the ZIP code level led to a decline in air pollution,” said Sandrah Eckel, a public health professor at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “It’s remarkable.”

The study was done at the University of Southern California’s medical school, by researchers using high-resolution satellite data, reports Electrek:

The study, just published in The Lancet Planetary Health and partly funded by the National Institutes of Health, adds rare real-world evidence to a claim that’s often taken for granted — that EVs don’t just cut carbon over time, they also improve local air quality right now… The researchers ran multiple checks to make sure the trend wasn’t driven by unrelated factors. They accounted for pandemic-era changes by excluding 2020 in some analyses and controlling for gas prices and work-from-home patterns. They also saw the expected counterexample: neighborhoods that added more gas-powered vehicles experienced increases in pollution. The findings were then replicated using updated ground-level air monitoring data dating back to 2012…

Next, the researchers plan to compare EV adoption with asthma-related emergency room visits and hospitalizations. If those trends line up, it could provide some of the clearest evidence yet of what we already know: that electrifying transportation doesn’t just clean the air on paper; it improves public health in practice.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader jhoegl for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:

Jeopardy time. A. This company spurred CEOs to make huge speculative capital expenditures based on wild unverified claims of future demand, resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of workers to reduce the resulting expenses, harming their core businesses. Q. What is OpenAI? Sorry, the correct response is, “What is WorldCom?” In 2002, WorldCom, the second largest long-distance company in the U.S., entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy after disclosing accounting fraud that eventually totaled $11 billion, the biggest ever at the time. CEO Bernard Ebbers was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison.

CNBC reported that an employee of WorldCom’s Internet service provider UUNet set off a frenzy of speculative investment and infrastructure overbuild after he used Excel to create a best-case scenario model for the Internet’s growth that suggested in the best of all possible worlds, Internet traffic would double every 100 days, a scenario that would greatly benefit WorldCom, whose lines would carry it. Despite no evidence to support it, WorldCom’s lie became an immutable law and businesses around the world made important decisions based on the belief that traffic was doubling every 100 days. “For some period of time I can recall that we were backfilling that expectation with laying cables, something like 2,200 miles of cable an hour,” AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong said. “Think of all the companies that went out of business that assumed that that was real.”

In 2003, NBC News reported:

Armstrong and former Sprint CEO Bill Esrey struggled for years to understand how WorldCom could beat them so handily. “We would look at the conduct of WorldCom in terms of their pricing, revenue growth, margins, in terms of their cost structure… and the price leader almost every quarter was WorldCom,” Armstrong said. Added Esrey, “We couldn’t figure out how they were pricing as aggressively as they were…. How could they be so efficient in their costs and expenses?” AT&T and Sprint began cutting jobs to push down their costs to WorldCom’s level. “The market said what a marvelous management job WorldCom was doing and they would look over to AT&T and say, ‘these guys aren’t keeping up.’ So, my shareholders were hurt. We laid off tens of thousands of employees in an accelerated fashion [in a futile effort to match WorldCom’s phantom profits] and I think the industry was hurt,” Armstrong says. “It just wrecked the whole industry,” says Esrey.

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A collective of Colorado lawmakers wants to put an end to “ghost guns” and their rising popularity. Earlier this week, the state’s House Judiciary Committee voted in a 7-4 majority to pass the bill, HB26-1144, along for a decision with the full House of Representatives. The proposed law would “prohibit the use of a three-dimensional printer, or similar technology, to make a firearm or a firearm component.”

Ghost guns are typically made from 3D printers or similar machines without serial numbers, making them virtually impossible to trace and allowing users to skirt the federal requirements for purchasing a firearm. While the bill targets using a 3D printer to make guns, large-capacity magazines and other related components, it even bans possessing and distributing the instructions to manufacture guns in this way. However, these rules would be exempt for federally licensed firearm manufacturers.

“These ghost guns are increasingly found at crime scenes, making it harder for law enforcement to track down a suspect because the gun isn’t traceable,” the bill’s sponsor, Lindsay Gilchrist, said in a press release.

Prior to this proposal, Colorado passed a law in 2023 that banned owning ghost guns or making frames for them. While SB23-279 laid the groundwork, HB26-1144 can be seen as the next step since it’s much more encompassing by targeting ghost guns even before they’re made. According to the bill, first-time violations will be treated as a misdemeanor, while repeat offenses will be upgraded to a felony charge. Looking ahead, HB26-1144 still has to secure a vote from both the Colorado Senate and House of Representatives before being delivered to the governor to be signed into law.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/colorado-is-working-on-a-bill-that-would-make-it-illegal-to-3d-print-firearms-and-gun-parts-211508169.html?src=rss

Samsung’s next flagship devices will offer Perplexity as part of an expansion to support multiple AI agents in Galaxy AI. Perplexity’s AI agent will work with apps including Samsung Notes, Clock, Gallery, Reminder and Calendar, according to the announcement. And, some third-party apps will support it, though Samsung hasn’t yet said which. The news comes just a few days before Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event, so we can expect to find out more about that integration and how it fits in with Samsung’s revamped Bixby very soon. 

What we know so far is that the Perplexity agent will respond to the wake phrase, “Hey Plex” (not to be confused with the streaming service Plex). It can also be initiated by quick-access physical controls. In a statement, Samsung’s Won-Joon Choi, President, COO and Head of the R&D Office for Samsung’s Mobile eXperience Business, said the expansion of Galaxy AI is aimed at giving users more choice and flexibility in getting their tasks done. “Galaxy AI acts as an orchestrator, bringing together different forms of AI into a single, natural, cohesive experience,” Choi said.

Samsung previously announced a partnership with Perplexity last year to integrate the company’s AI search engine into Samsung TVs.  Perplexity has been in hot water though over alleged content scraping and copyright infringement, and was even sued in September by Merriam-Webster — yes, the dictionary — and Encyclopedia Britannica. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/samsung-is-adding-perplexity-to-galaxy-ai-for-its-upcoming-s26-series-203729539.html?src=rss

Google and Microsoft contributed $5 million to launch Alpha-Omega in 2022 — a Linux Foundation project to help secure the open source supply chain. But its co-founder Michael Winser warns that open source registries are in financial peril, reports The Register, since they’re still relying on non-continuous funding from grants and donations.
And it’s not just because bandwidth is expensive, he said at this year’s FOSDEM. “The problem is they don’t have enough money to spend on the very security features that we all desperately need…”

In a follow-up LinkedIn exchange after this article had posted, Winser estimated it could cost $5 million to $8 million a year to run a major registry the size of Crates.io, which gets about 125 billion downloads a year. And this number wouldn’t include any substantial bandwidth and infrastructure donations (Like Fastly’s for Crates.io). Adding to that bill is the growing cost of identifying malware, the proliferation of which has been amplified through the use of AI and scripts. These repositories have detected 845,000 malware packages from 2019 to January 2025 (the vast majority of those nasty packages came to npm)…

In some cases benevolent parties can cover [bandwidth] bills: Python’s PyPI registry bandwidth needs for shipping copies of its 700,000+ packages (amounting to 747PB annually at a sustained rate of 189 Gbps) are underwritten by Fastly, for instance. Otherwise, the project would have to pony up about $1.8 million a month. Yet the costs Winser was most concerned about are not bandwidth or hosting; they are the security features needed to ensure the integrity of containers and packages. Alpha-Omega underwrites a “distressingly” large amount of security work around registries, he said. It’s distressing because if Alpha-Omega itself were to miss a funding round, a lot of registries would be screwed. Alpha-Omega’s recipients include the Python Software Foundation, Rust Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, OpenJS Foundation for Node.js and jQuery, and Ruby Central.

Donations and memberships certainly help defray costs. Volunteers do a lot of what otherwise would be very expensive work. And there are grants about…Winser did not offer a solution, though he suggested the key is to convince the corporate bean counters to consider paid registries as “a normal cost of doing business and have it show up in their opex as opposed to their [open source program office] donation budget.”

The dilemma was summed up succinctly by the anonymous Slashdot reader who submitted this story.

“Free beer is great. Securing the keg costs money!”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot writes: Researchers have developed a robotic hand that can not only skitter about on its fingertips, it can also bend its fingers backward, connect and disconnect from a robotic arm, and pick up and carry one or more objects at a time.

This article in Science News includes footage of the robotic arm reattaching itself to the skittering robot hand, which can also hold objects against both sides of its palm simultaneously, and “can even unscrew the cap off a mustard bottle while holding the bottle in place.”

With its unusual agility, it could navigate and retrieve objects in spaces too confined for human hands. When attached to the mechanical arm, the robotic hand could pick up objects much like a human hand. The bot pinched a ball between two fingers, wrapped four fingers around a metal rod and held a flat disc between fingers and palm.

But the bot isn’t constrained by human anatomy… When the robot was separated from the arm, it was most stable walking on four or five fingers and using one or two fingers for grabbing and carrying things, the team found. In one set of trials with both bots, the hand detached from the robotic arm and used its fingers as legs to skitter over to a wooden block. Once there, it picked up the block with one finger and carried it back to the arm.

The crawling bot could one day aid in industrial inspections of pipes and equipment too small for a human or larger robot to access, says Xiao Gao, a roboticist now at Wuhan University in China. It might retrieve objects in a warehouse or navigate confined spaces in disaster response efforts.

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First, we got iPhones in Hermès orange, and now we might get them in Louboutin red. According to Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman, Apple is already mulling over what the next premium colorway will be for its iPhone Pro models. While we’re not expecting iPhone 18 announcements until later this year, Gurman reported that “red is the new flagship color in testing for the next iPhone Pros.”

Gurman added that there were rumors of purple and brown shades, but predicted that these could just be different shades of the main red option. Red is definitely a departure from Apple’s usual palette of more modest tones, but the company could be trying to continue the momentum of its flashier Cosmic Orange option that has been boosting sales in China. The bold orange option has been informally rebranded as Hermès orange among fans and is becoming somewhat of a status symbol in Chinese markets. With red as a potential frontrunner for the next iPhone Pro colors, Apple could capture even more sales in China, especially since the color is seen as lucky in Chinese culture.

It’s not the first time Apple has offered red iPhones, though. Previously, Apple manufactured iPhones in deep red hues in collaboration with Product Red, with the last available models being the iPhone SE, iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus. On the other hand, Gurman reported that Apple will play it much safer when it comes to the rumored foldable iPhone, sticking with its basic tones.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/apple-is-reportedly-considering-red-as-the-next-premium-color-for-its-iphones-185748052.html?src=rss