An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:

Led by Texas and New Hampshire, U.S. states across the national map, both red and blue in political stripes, are developing bitcoin strategic reserves and bringing cryptocurrencies onto their books through additional state finance and budgeting measures. Texas recently became the first state to purchase bitcoin after a legislative effort that began in 2024, but numerous states have joined the “Reserve Race” to pass legislation that will allow them to ultimately buy cryptocurrencies. New
Hampshire passed its crypto strategic reserve law last May, even before Texas, giving the state treasurer the authority to invest up to 5% of the state funds in crypto ETFs, though precious metals such as gold are also authorized for purchase. Arizona
passed similar legislation, while Massachusetts,
Ohio,
and South
Dakota have legislation at various stages of committee review…

Similarities in the actions taken across states to date include
include authorizing the state treasurer or other investment official
to allow the investment of a limited amount of public funds in crypto
and building out the governance structure needed to invest in
crypto… [New Hampshire] became the first state to approve the
issuance of a bitcoin-backed municipal bond last November, a $100 million issuance that would mark the first time cryptocurrency is used as collateral in the U.S. municipal bond market. The deal has not taken place yet, though plans are for the issuance to occur this year… “What’s different here is it’s bitcoin rather than taxpayer dollars as the collateral,” [said University of Chicago public policy professor Justin Marlowe]. In numerous states, including, Colorada,
Utah, and Louisiana,crypto is now accepted as payment for taxes and other state
business…

“For many in the state/local investing industry, crypto-backed assets are still far too speculative and volatile for public money,” Marlowe said. “But others, and I think there’s a sort of generational shift in the works, see it as a reasonable store of value that is actually stronger on many other public sector values like transparency and asset integrity,” he added.

Public policy professor Marlowe “sees the state-level trend as largely one of signaling at present,” according to the article. (Marlowe says “If you’re a governor and you want to broadcast that you are amenable to innovative business development in the digital economy, these are relatively low-cost, low-risk ways to send that signal.”) But the bigger steps may reflect how crypto advocates have increasing political power in the states. The article notes that the cryptocurrency industry was the largest corporate donor in a U.S. election cycle in 2024, “with support given to candidates on both sides.”

“It is already amassing a war chest for the 2026 midterms.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week Noema magazine published a 7,000-word exploration of our modern “Mythology Of Conscious AI” written by a neuroscience professor who directs the University of Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science:
The very idea of conscious AI rests on the assumption that consciousness is a matter of computation. More specifically, that implementing the right kind of computation, or information processing, is sufficient for consciousness to arise. This assumption, which philosophers call computational functionalism, is so deeply ingrained that it can be difficult to recognize it as an assumption at all. But that is what it is. And if it’s wrong, as I think it may be, then real artificial consciousness is fully off the table, at least for the kinds of AI we’re familiar with.

He makes detailed arguments against a computation-based consciousness (including “Simulation is not instantiation… If we simulate a living creature, we have not created life.”) While a computer may seem like the perfect metaphor for a brain, the cognitive science of “dynamical systems” (and other approaches) reject the idea that minds can be entirely accounted for algorithmically. And maybe actual life needs to be present before something can be declared conscious.

He also warns that “Many social and psychological factors, including some well-understood cognitive biases, predispose us to overattribute consciousness to machines.”

But then his essay reaches a surprising conclusion:

As redundant as it may sound, nobody should be deliberately setting out to create conscious AI, whether in the service of some poorly thought-through techno-rapture, or for any other reason. Creating conscious machines would be an ethical disaster. We would be introducing into the world new moral subjects, and with them the potential for new forms of suffering, at (potentially) an exponential pace. And if we give these systems rights, as arguably we should if they really are conscious, we will hamper our ability to control them, or to shut them down if we need to. Even if I’m right that standard digital computers aren’t up to the job, other emerging technologies might yet be, whether alternative forms of computation (analogue, neuromorphic, biological and so on) or rapidly developing methods in synthetic biology. For my money, we ought to be more worried about the accidental emergence of consciousness in cerebral organoids (brain-like structures typically grown from human embryonic stem cells) than in any new wave of LLM.

But our worries don’t stop there. When it comes to the impact of AI in society, it is essential to draw a distinction between AI systems that are actually conscious and those that persuasively seem to be conscious but are, in fact, not. While there is inevitable uncertainty about the former, conscious-seeming systems are much, much closer… Machines that seem conscious pose serious ethical issues distinct from those posed by actually conscious machines. For example, we might give AI systems “rights” that they don’t actually need, since they would not actually be conscious, restricting our ability to control them for no good reason. More generally, either we decide to care about conscious-seeming AI, distorting our circles of moral concern, or we decide not to, and risk brutalizing our minds. As Immanuel Kant argued long ago in his lectures on ethics, treating conscious-seeming things as if they lack consciousness is a psychologically unhealthy place to be…

One overlooked factor here is that even if we know, or believe, that an AI is not conscious, we still might be unable to resist feeling that it is. Illusions of artificial consciousness might be as impenetrable to our minds as some visual illusions… What’s more, because there’s no consensus over the necessary or sufficient conditions for consciousness, there aren’t any definitive tests for deciding whether an AI is actually conscious….

Illusions of conscious AI are dangerous in their own distinctive ways, especially if we are constantly distracted and fascinated by the lure of truly sentient machines…

If we conflate the richness of biological brains and human experience with the information-processing machinations of deepfake-boosted chatbots, or whatever the latest AI wizardry might be, we do our minds, brains and bodies a grave injustice. If we sell ourselves too cheaply to our machine creations, we overestimate them, and we underestimate ourselves…

The sociologist Sherry Turkle once said that technology can make us forget what we know about life. It’s about time we started to remember.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Astronomers are preparing to capture a movie of a supermassive black hole in action for the first time,” reports the Guardian:

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) will track the colossal black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy throughout March and April with the aim of capturing footage of the swirling disc that traces out the edge of the event horizon, the point beyond which no light or matter can escape… The EHT is a global network of 12 radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Korea, which in 2019 unveiled the first image of a black hole’s shadow. During March and April, as the Earth rotates, M87’s central black hole will come into view for different telescopes, allowing a complete image to be captured every three days…

Measuring the black hole’s spin speed matters because this could help discriminate between competing theories of how these objects reached such epic proportions. If black holes grow mostly through accretion — steadily snowballing material that strays nearby — they would be expected to end up spinning at incredibly high speeds. By contrast, if black holes expand mostly through merging with other black holes, each merger could slow things down. The observations could also help explain how black hole jets are formed, which are among the largest, most powerful structures produced by galaxies. Jets channel vast columns of gas out of galaxies, slowing down the formation of new stars and limiting galaxy growth. In turn this can create dense pockets of material that trigger bursts of star formation beyond the host galaxy…
While the movie campaign will take place in the spring, the sheer volume of data produced by the telescopes means the scientists will need to wait for Antarctic summer before the hard drives can be physically shipped to Germany and the US for processing. So it is likely to be a lengthy wait before the rest of the world gets a glimpse of the black hole in action.
In a correction, the Guardian apologizes for originally including an AI-generated illustration of black hole with a caption suggesting it was a photo from telescopes. They’ve since swapped in an actual picture of the Messier 87 galaxy black hole.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Porsche made an announcement Friday. In Europe they sold more electrified Porsches last year than pure combustion-engined models, reports Electrek:

in Europe, a majority (57.9%) of Porsche’s deliveries were plug-ins, with 1/3 of its European sales being fully electric. For models that have no fully electric version but do have a PHEV (Cayenne and Panamera), the plug-in hybrid version dominated sales.

Of particular note, the Macan sold better with an electric powertrain than it did with a gas one, and was the company’s strongest-selling model line and the line with the largest sales growth. The Macan sold 84,328 units globally (up 2% from last year), with 45,367 (53.8%) of those being electric. That 53.8% may seem like a slim majority, but when compared to EV sales globally, it’s incredibly high. About a quarter of new cars sold globally were electric in 2025, so Porsche is beating that number with the one model where direct comparisons are available.
And even in the US, about a third of Macans sold were electric. That’s notable given the tough year EVs had in the US, with it being the only major car-buying region that experienced a tick down in EV sales… And again, while 1/3 is a minority of Macan sales in the US, it’s also well over the US’ average ~10% EV sales. So it’s clear the EV Macan isn’t just performing like an average EV, but well beyond it.

The article adds that “we’re quite excited about the Cayenne EV, which will be the most powerful Porsche ever.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. college graduates “have historically found jobs more quickly than people with only a high school degree,” writes Bloomberg.

“But that advantage is becoming a thing of the past, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.”

“Recently, the job-finding rate for young college-educated workers has declined to be roughly in line with the rate for young high-school-educated workers, indicating that a long period of relatively easier job-finding prospects for college grads has ended,” Cleveland Fed researchers Alexander Cline and BarıÅY Kaymak said in a blog post published Monday. The study follows the latest monthly employment data released on Nov. 20, which showed the unemployment rate for college-educated workers continued to rise in September amid an ongoing slowdown in white-collar hiring… The unemployment rate for people between the ages of 20 to 24 was 9.2% in September, up 2.2 percentage points from a year prior.

There is a caveat. “Young college graduates maintain advantages in job stability and compensation once hired…” the researchers write. “The convergence we document concerns the initial step of securing employment rather than overall labor market outcomes.”

Their research includes a graph showing how the “unemployment gap” first increased dramatically after 2010 between college-educated and high school-educated workers, which the researchers attribute to “the prolonged jobless recovery after 2008”. But that gap has been closing ever since, with that gap now smaller than at any time since the 1970s.

“Young high school workers are riding the wave of the historically tight postpandemic labor market with well-below-average unemployment compared to that of past high school graduates, while young college workers are experiencing unemployment rates rarely observed among past college cohorts barring during recessions.”

The labor market advantages conferred by a college degree have historically justified individual investment in higher education and expanding support for college access. If the job-finding rate of college graduates continues to decline relative to the rate for high school graduates, we may see a reversal of these trends. The convergence we document concerns the initial step of securing employment rather than overall labor market outcomes. These details suggest a nuanced shift in employment dynamics, one in which college graduates face greater difficulty finding jobs than previously but maintain advantages compared with high school graduates in job stability and compensation once hired.

Two key quotes:

“Declining job prospects among young college graduates may reflect the continued growth in college attainment, adding ever larger cohorts of college graduates to the ranks of job seekers, even though technology no longer favors college-educated workers.”
“Developments related to AI, which may be affecting job-finding prospects in some cases, cannot explain the decades-long decline in the college job-finding rate.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week a University of Arizona astronomy professor “watched anxiously…as an awe-inspiring SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried NASA’s new exoplanet telescope, Pandora, into orbit.”

In 2018 NASA had approached Daniel Apai to help build the telescope, which he says will “shatter a barrier — to understand and remove a source of noise in the data — that limits our ability to study small exoplanets in detail and search for life on them.”

Astronomers have a trick to study exoplanet atmospheres. By observing the planets as they orbit in front of their host stars, we can study starlight that filters through their atmospheres… But, starting from 2007, astronomers noted that starspots — cooler, active regions on the stars — may disturb the transit measurements. In 2018 and 2019, then-Ph.D. student Benjamin V. Rackham, astrophysicist Mark Giampapa and I published a series of studies showing how darker starspots and brighter, magnetically active stellar regions can seriously mislead exoplanets measurements. We dubbed this problem “the transit light source effect….”

In our papers — published three years before the 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope – we predicted that the Webb cannot reach its full potential. We sounded the alarm bell…
Pandora will do what Webb cannot: It will be able to patiently observe stars to understand how their complex atmospheres change.

By staring at a star for 24 hours with visible and infrared cameras, it will measure subtle changes in the star’s brightness and colors. When active regions in the star rotate in and out of view, and starspots form, evolve and dissipate, Pandora will record them. While Webb very rarely returns to the same planet in the same instrument configuration and almost never monitors their host stars, Pandora will revisit its target stars 10 times over a year, spending over 200 hours on each of them.

It’s the first space telescope “built specifically for detailed multi-color observations of starlight filtered through the atmospheres of exoplanets,” reports the Arizona Daily Star, noting the University of Arizona will serve as mission control:

[T]echnicians will operate Pandora in real time and monitor its telemetry and overall health under a contract with NASA… The spacecraft will undergo about a month of commissioning before beginning science operations, which are scheduled to last for a year…

Pandora was selected as part of NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers program, which was created in 2020 to foster compelling, relatively low-cost science missions using smaller, cheaper hardware and flight platforms with a price cap of no more than $20 million. By comparison, the Webb telescope — the largest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever sent into space — carries a pricetag of about $10 billion.

Pandora is a joint mission NASA and California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Commission “has opened a public call for evidence on European open digital ecosystems,” writes Help Net Security, part of preparations for an upcoming Communication “that will examine the role of open source in EU’s digital infrastructure.”

The consultation runs from January 6 to February 3, 2026. Submissions will be used to shape a Commission Communication addressed to the European Parliament, the Council, and other EU bodies, which is scheduled for publication in the first quarter of 2026… The call for evidence links Europe’s reliance on digital technologies developed outside the EU to concerns over long term control of infrastructure and software supply chains… Open digital ecosystems are discussed in the context of technological sovereignty and the use of technologies that can be inspected, adapted, and shared.

Long-time Slashdot reader Elektroschock describes it as the European Commission “stepping up its efforts behind open-source software”

Building on President von der Leyen’s political guidelines, the initiative will review the Commission’s 2020-2023 open-source approach and set out concrete actions to strengthen Europe’s open-source ecosystem across key areas such as cloud, AI, cybersecurity and industrial technologies. The strategy will be presented alongside the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act, forming a broader policy package aimed at reducing strategic dependencies and boosting Europe’s digital resilience.

And “In just a few days, over 370 submissions have already been filed, indicating that the issue is touching a nerve across the EU,” writes CyberNews.com:

“Europe must regain control over its software supply chain to safeguard freedom, security, and innovation,” suggests an individual from Slovakia. Similar perspectives appear to be widely shared among respondents…

The document doesn’t mention US tech giants specifically, but rather aims to support tech sovereignty and seek “digital solutions that are valid alternatives to proprietary ones….”

“This is not a legislative initiative. The strategy will take the form of a Commission communication. The initiative will set out a general approach and will propose: actions relying on further commitments and an implementation process,” the EC explains. Policymakers expect the strategy to help EU member states identify the necessary steps to support national open-source companies and communities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The senior editor at the blog Windows Central decries two serious Windows issues “that were not spotted by Microsoft during testing, and are so severe that the company has now issued an emergency fix to address the problems.”

Microsoft’s first update for Windows 11 in 2026 has already caused two major issues that saw users unable to fully shutdown their PCs or sign-in into a device when using Remote Desktop… Being unable to shut down your PC due to a recent OS update is a huge oversight on Microsoft’s part, but this is the latest in a long list of updates over the last year to cause a major issue like this… Other issues that have cropped up in Windows 11 in the last year include a bug that caused Task Manager to fail to close when the user exited the application, causing system resources to lock up after a prolonged period of time if the user had opened and closed Task Manager multiple times in a session.
Another update caused saw File Explorer flashbang users with a white screen when opening it in dark mode, which appeared in an update that was supposed to improve dark mode on Windows 11…

For whatever reason, the Windows Insider Program doesn’t appear to be working anymore, as severe bugs are somehow making it into shipping versions of the OS.

“The out of band updates, KB5077744 and KB5077797, are available now via Windows Update and is rolling out to everybody,” they write. “Once installed, your PC should go back to being able to shut down successfully, and signing-in via Remote Desktop should work again.”

Microsoft has also officially acknowledged a third bug which crashes Outlook Classic when using POP accounts, according to the blog Windows Latest, which adds that that bug has not yet been fixed.

They’ve also identified other minor bugs, including “a black screen problem in Windows 11 KB5074109… either due to the update itself or some compatibility issues with GPU drivers.”

After you install the January 2026 Update, Windows triggers random black screens where the desktop freezes for a second or two, the display goes black, then everything comes back. I can’t pinpoint any specific configuration, but I can confirm the black screen issue has been observed on a small subset of PCs with both Nvidia and AMD GPUs. After you install the January 2026 Update, Windows triggers random black screens where the desktop freezes for a second or two, the display goes black, then everything comes back.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you weren’t able to shut down your Windows 11 device recently, Microsoft has rolled out an emergency fix addressing a couple of critical bugs that popped up with its latest January 2026 Windows security update. The latest “out-of-band” update repairs an issue for some Windows 11 devices that would only restart when users tried to shut down or hibernate. The same update restores the ability for Windows 10 and Windows 11 users to log into their devices via remote connection apps.

Microsoft said the inability to shut down or hibernate affected Windows 11 devices using Secure Launch, a security feature that protects a computer from firmware-level attacks during startup. As for the remote connection issue, Microsoft explained in its Known issues page that credential prompt failures were responsible when users tried to log in remotely to affected Windows 10 and 11 devices.

According to WindowsLatest, some lingering issues with the January 2026 Windows security update are still affecting users, like seeing blank screens or Outlook Classic crashing. Back in October, Microsoft had to issue another emergency fix for Windows 11 related to the Windows Recovery Environment. For those still hesitant to upgrade to Windows 11, Microsoft is allowing you to squeeze some more life out of Windows 10 by enrolling in Extended Security Updates.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/microsoft-issues-emergency-fix-afer-a-security-update-left-some-windows-11-devices-unable-to-shut-down-192216734.html?src=rss

Washington state residents may soon be forced to produce IDs before getting onto websites with pornographic content. Within the state’s House of Representatives, Rep. Mari Leavitt introduced House Bill 2112, which is informally known as the Keep Our Children Safe Act. Similar to the initiatives seen in other states, the bill proposes to restrict access to “online sexual material harmful” to anyone under 18.

In practical terms, those living in Washington state could see websites asking for digital identification or demanding the user go through an age verification system that requests a government-issued ID. If a website that has more than one-third of its content being “sexual material harmful to minors” is found not following these rules, the state’s attorney general can pursue steep civil penalties.

If those restrictions sound familiar, it’s because many other states have also passed similar constraints. Washington state’s proposed bill is very similar to Texas’ age verification law that went into effect in September 2023 and was recently upheld by the US Supreme Court. Like the Texas law, several groups expressed disapproval of the bill during the public hearing at the House committee level. As reported by The Seattle Times, groups including the ACLU, Lavender Rights Project and the Northwest Progressive Institute warned of privacy risks related to potential data breaches and the loose definition of “sexual material harmful to minors” in the bill’s language.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/washington-is-the-latest-state-pursuing-an-age-verification-law-for-porn-sites-174423529.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:

Particles from Earth’s atmosphere have been carried into space by solar wind and have been landing on the moon for billions of years, mixing into the lunar soil, according to a new study [published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment last month]. The research sheds new light on a puzzle that has endured for over half a century since the Apollo missions brought back lunar samples with traces of substances such as water, carbon dioxide, helium and nitrogen embedded in the regolith — the moon’s dusty surface layer.

Early studies theorized that the sun was the source of some of these substances. But in 2005 researchers at the University of Tokyo suggested that they could have also originated from the atmosphere of a young Earth before it developed a magnetic field about 3.7 billion years ago. The authors suspected that the magnetic field, once in place, would have stopped the stream by trapping the particles and making it difficult or impossible for them to escape into space. Now, the new research upends that assumption by suggesting that Earth’s magnetic field might have helped, rather than blocked, the transfer of atmospheric particles to the moon — which continues to this day.

“This means that the Earth has been supplying volatile gases like oxygen and nitrogen to the lunar soil over all this time,” said Eric Blackman, coauthor of the new study and a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York.

Earth’s magnetic field “somewhat inflates the atmosphere of Earth” when it’s hit by solar winds, according to study coauthor Eric Blackman, a physics/astronomy professor at New York’s University of Rochester. He told CNN the moon passes through this region for a few days each month, with particles landing on the lunar surface and embedding in the soil (because the moon lacks an atmosphere that would block them).

This also means the moon’s soil could actually contain a chemical record of Earth’s ancient atmosphere, according to the study — “spanning billions of years…”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.