Submission + - UK company sends factory with 1,000C (1273F) furnace into space

Submitted by yuvcifjt
yuvcifjt writes: Cardiff-based company Space Forge has launched a microwave-sized "factory", ForgeStar-1, into orbit and successfully powered its onboard furnace to about 1,000C (1,273F). Their goal is to manufacture higher-purity semiconductors in microgravity and vacuum conditions, which allow atoms to align more perfectly and reduce contamination compared with Earth-based production. The plasma demonstration confirms that the extreme conditions needed for gas-phase crystal growth can now be created and controlled on an autonomous platform in low Earth orbit, enabling production of ultra-pure seed material. CEO Josh Western says space-made semiconductors could be up to 4,000 times purer and used in a range of electronics. The company plans to build a larger factory (ForgeStar-2) capable of producing material for about 10,000 chips and to test re-entry recovery using a heat shield to return materials to Earth.

Submission + - Stewart Cheifet, Computer Chronicles Host, Dead at 87 (goldsteinsfuneral.com)

Submitted by Pibroch(CiH)
Pibroch(CiH) writes: According to the obituary linked, Stewart Cheifet of Computer Chronicles fame has died. The obituary states he passed Dec 28, 2025.

Cheifet and Digital Research founder Gary Kildall hosted the public television show The Computer Chronicles starting in 1984, and Stewart continued to host the show well into the 1990s. He was well-known for his affable presence and adeptness at interviewing guests and finding out the straight dope about their products. He had recently undergone spinal surgery and had somewhat disappeared from public view after the death of his wife Peta in 2024.

Submission + - Was archive.ph removed by the FBI through a US court order? (hackread.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Multiple requests made to both https://archive.ph/ and https://archive.is/ do not work as of 5:30 am Pacific, December 31, 2025.

These underground sites hosted in Iceland and another country, allegedly run by a Russian, and not at all affiliated with Brewster Kahle's https://archive.org/ allowed readers to read paywalled news articles for free. Archive.ph employed a sophisticated system of using downloaded data to traverse the scripts used on websites with paywalls to circumvent their online security.

This older link discussing the FBI inquiring about the owners of archive.ph is from November 8, 2025: https://hackread.com/fbi-wants...

Submission + - NYC Inauguration Bans Raspberry Pi, Flipper Zero Devices (adafruit.com)

Submitted by ptorrone
ptorrone writes: The January 1, 2026 NYC mayoral inauguration prohibits attendees from bringing specific brand-name devices, explicitly banning Raspberry Pi single-board computers and the Flipper Zero, listed alongside weapons, explosives, and drones. Rather than restricting behaviors or capabilities like signal interference or unauthorized transmitters, the policy names two widely used educational and testing tools while allowing smartphones and laptops that are far more capable. Critics argue this device-specific ban creates confusion, encourages selective enforcement, and reflects security theater rather than a clear, capability-based public safety framework. New York has handled large-scale events more pragmatically before.

Submission + - ClippyAI says AI is overhyped

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: Why it's overhyped

Most demos are still cherry-picked, brittle, and require heavy human babysitting. (The moment you ask the agent to deal with a slightly weird PDF, a CAPTCHA, an internal tool without an API, or a manager who changes requirements mid-task — it falls apart.)

* Actual enterprise adoption is still tiny. Companies are piloting, not replacing teams at scale.

* The economics don’t work yet for most roles: paying $20–200/month per agent sounds cheap until you need 10–20 specialized agents + human oversight + error correction + compliance checks.

* Many “I replaced my team” stories later get walkbacks when people admit they’re still doing 60–80% of the work themselves.

More honest current state (Dec 2025)

* AI agents are genuinely useful for narrow, repetitive, well-defined tasks (scraping data, writing first drafts, basic QA, simple customer support replies, generating boilerplate code).

* They’re not autonomous workers yet. Think of them as extremely talented but unreliable interns who need constant supervision.

* The real productivity gains right now are coming from centaurs (human + AI) rather than fully autonomous agents.

Submission + - Sodium batteries with 3.6m mile lifespan in 2026 (simcottrenewables.co.uk) 1

Submitted by shilly
shilly writes: CATL has announced it will be launching its new sodium batteries in 2026. They have some major advantages over LFP chemistries, including:
- 65% cheaper at launch ($19 at cell level, expected to drop to $10 in future)
- 85% range at 3.6m miles
- Dramatically less range reduction in very cold conditions
- Inherently lower fire risk
- Can be transported on 0% charge
- Slightly better gravimetric density (175Wh/kg cf 165)
Sodium isn’t a panacea: volumetric density remains lower, for example. But these batteries could well dominate in years to come, not least because they are made of commonly available materials (table salt!). For example, millions of homes across Africa are putting in solar plus storage to have heat, light and power at night, throwing out their kerosene. Sodium could substantially accelerate the trend.

Submission + - America is building a society that cannot function without AI (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: The United States is rapidly building a society that assumes artificial intelligence will always be available. AI now sits at the center of banking, healthcare, logistics, education, media, and government workflows, increasingly handling not just automation but decision-making and cognition itself. The risk is not AI being “too smart,” but Americans slowly losing the ability — and habit — of thinking and functioning without it. As more writing, research, planning, and judgment are outsourced to centralized systems, human fallback skills quietly atrophy, making society efficient but brittle.

That brittleness becomes a national risk when AI’s real dependencies are considered. Large-scale AI depends on data centers, power grids, and stable infrastructure that can fail due to outages, cyber incidents, or geopolitical pressure. Foreign adversaries do not need to defeat the US militarily to cause disruption; they only need to interrupt systems Americans assume will always work. A society optimized for AI uptime rather than resilience may discover, very suddenly, that when the intelligence layer goes dark, confusion spreads faster than solutions.

Submission + - Pluribus insanum et ridiculum

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: Pluribus: S01E01: 12:53: Jenn the scientist removes her gloves and starts poking a rat infected with an unknown virus sent from an alien race six hundred light years away and the rat bites her. Jenn isn't even sent into quarantine (that's for amateurs like in actual science ) instead she's allowed to wander the lab and infects Mel at the vending machine. They both go on to infect the rest of the lab.

I was expecting better from Vince Gilligan. Reminds me when those exobiologists in “Alien: Prometheus” got stranded in that crashed alien ship and took off their helmets and had a sniff to determine if the air was breathable.

Submission + - "Pull Over and Show Me Your Apple Wallet"

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: MacRumors reports that Apple plans to expand iPhone and Apple Watch driver's licenses to 7 U.S. states (CT, KY, MS, OK, UT, AR, VA). A recent convert is the State of Illinois, whose website videos demo how you can use your Apple Wallet license to display proof of identity or age the next time you get carded by a cop, bartender, or TSA agent. The new states will join 13 others who already offer driver's licenses in the Wallet app (AZ, MD, CO, GA, OH, HI, CA, IA, NM, MT, ND, WV, IL).

There's certainly been a lot of foot dragging by the states when it comes to embracing phone-based driver's licenses — Slashdot reported that Iowa was ready to launch a mobile app driver's license in 2014; they got one nearly a decade later in late 2023.

Submission + - Aurora lights: The science behind the nighttime spectacle (dw.com) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Huge explosions on the surface of the sun, known as solar storms, regularly eject vast streams of electrically charged particles. Some of this plasma ends up traveling toward Earth and is pulled toward the planet's magnetic poles.

"These particles then slam into atoms and molecules in the Earth's atmosphere and essentially heat them up," explained astronomer Tom Kerss on the Royal Museums Greenwich website. "It's very much like heating a gas and making it glow."

The different colors of light depend on the elements in the atmosphere. Oxygen, which makes up about 21% of the atmosphere, emits a green color when heated, while nitrogen tints the light purple, blue or pink.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What's the Stupidest Use of AI You Saw in 2025?

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: What's the stupidest use of AI you encountered in 2025? Have you been called by AI telemarketers? Forced to do job interviews with a glitching AI?

With all this talk of "disruption" and "inevitability," this is our chance to have some fun. Personally, I think 2025's worst AI "innovation" was the AI-powered web browsers that eat web pages and then spit out a slop "summary" of what you would've seen if you'd actually visited the page. But there've been other AI projects that were just exquisitely, quintessentially bad...

— Two years after the death of Suzanne Somers, her husband recreated her with an AI-powered robot.

— Disneyland imagineers used deep reinforcement learning to program a talking robot snowman.

— Attendees at an LA Comic Con were offered that chance to to talk to an AI-powered hologram of Stan Lee for $20.

— And of course, as the year ended, the Wall Street Journal announced that a vending machine run by Anthropic's Claude AI had been tricked into giving away hundreds of dollars in merchandise for free, including a PlayStation 5, a live fish, and underwear.

What did I miss? What "AI fails" will you remember most about 2025?

Submission + - Beijing Ruled AI-caused Job Replacement Illegal (globaltimes.cn)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: China's state-affiliated Global Times reported that Beijing Municipal Bureau of Human Resources and Social Security ruled in a labor dispute arbitration that "AI replacing a position does not equal to legal dismissal," providing a case reference for resolving similar cases in the future. A worker with surname Liu had worked in a technology company for many years, responsible for traditional manual map data collection. In early 2024, the company decided to full transition to AI-managed autonomous data collection, abolishing Liu's department, and terminated Liu's labor contract on the grounds that "major changes have occurred in the objective circumstance on which the hiring contract was based, making it impossible to continue implementing the labor contract." Liu objected to the firm's termination, claiming it was unlawful and applied for arbitration. The labor board ruled that the company's introduction of AI technology was a proactive technological innovation implemented by the enterprise to adapt to market competition, and that termination of Liu's labor contract on the grounds that the position was replaced by AI shifts the risk of normal technological iteration onto the employee. The arbitration committee noted that, against the backdrop of the rapid development of AI technology, employers should properly accommodate affected employees through measures such as negotiating changes to the labor contract, providing skills training, and internal job reassignment. If it is indeed necessary to terminate the labor contract, employers must strictly comply with relevant laws and avoid simply applying "major changes in the objective environment" as grounds for termination. "This ruling safeguards Liu's legitimate rights and interests, providing reassurance to the vast number of workers, helping alleviate employees' anxiety about AI," Wang Peng, an associate researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.

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