SlashdotNews for nerds, stuff that matters
Apr 26th 2026, 00:45 by EditorDavid
America's National Science Board (NSB) "was established in 1950 to guide the governance of the National Science Foundation," writes the Washington Post, "in an unusual structure within the federal government that echoes the setup of a company board in the private sector. It helps guide an agency that operates Antarctic research stations, telescopes, a fleet of research vessels and supports basic science research in laboratories across the United States." (NSF research has helped evolve the technology used in MRIs, cellphones and LASIK eye surgery.) But yesterday President Trump fired all 24 members of the National Science Board (NSB), the body that oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF), reports Science magazine: In addition to advising the administration and Congress on national science policy, it has statutory authority to oversee the actions of the $9-billion NSF, setting policy and approving large expenditures. Its presidentially appointed members, typically prominent academics and industry leaders, serve 6-year terms, with eight members chosen every 2 years.... Keivan Stassun, one of the dismissed board members, says the mass firing is the latest indication that the White House is ignoring the board's authority and dictating policies at NSF, which has been without a permanent director since Sethuraman Panchanathan resigned exactly one year ago. Stassun, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University who was appointed to the board in 2022, thinks the board's public criticism in May 2025 of Trump's proposed 55% cut to NSF's current budget — which Congress ultimately ignored — antagonized the administration. "Maybe one way to say it from the administration's perspective," Stassun says, "is that this group of presidential appointees was advising the Congress to not follow the president's wishes." The Washington Post adds that "The White House did not immediately respond to inquiries about why the members were terminated."
 
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Apr 25th 2026, 23:09 by EditorDavid
After Australia banned social media for users younger than 16, teenagers "immediately worked to circumvent the restrictions," reports Fortune: 14-year-old in New South Wales, told The Washington Post in December 2025, just before the implementation of the ban, she planned to use her mother's face ID to log in to Snapchat and . In a Reddit thread on ways to bypass the ban, one user suggested using a printed mesh face mask from Temu to outsmart apps' facial recognition tools. Others still have tried VPNs that obscure their locations. A new report suggests these efforts are working. In a survey of 1,050 Australians ages 12 to 15 conducted last month, the UK-based suicide prevention organization the Molly Rose Foundation found more than 60% of teens who had social media accounts before the ban still had access to at least one of those platforms. Social media sites including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, have retained more than half of their users under 16. About two-thirds of young users say these platforms have taken "no action" to remove or reactive accounts that existed before the restrictions. The survey comes at the heels of the Australian internet regulator calling for an investigation into the five largest social media platforms over potential breaches of the ban. The article points out that "Greece, France, Indonesia, Austria, Spain, and the UK have or are considering similar action, and eight U.S. states are weighing legislation that would put guardrails or ban social media use for minors.
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Apr 25th 2026, 21:26 by EditorDavid
Colorado's "age-attestation" bill left the House committee with new exemptions for open-source operating systems, applications, code repositories, and containerized software distribution, reports the blog Linuxiac: [The bill] focuses on operating system providers and application stores. Its main requirement is that these providers supply an age-related signal via an interface, so applications can determine whether a user is a minor... System76 founder Carl Richell shared on Fosstodon that the updated bill now includes "a strong exemption for open source distros and apps" and has passed in the House committee. He also quoted the key part, which says Article 30 does not apply to an operating system provider or developer that distributes software under license terms that let recipients copy, redistribute, and modify the software without restrictions from the provider or developer... This wording covers Linux distributions and many open-source applications without linking the exemption to any specific project, company, or ecosystem. The amendment also excludes applications from free, public code repositories from being considered covered applications. It also excludes code repository providers and containerized software distribution from being defined as covered application stores. This is meant to prevent platforms like GitHub, GitLab, Docker, or Podman-based distributions from being treated like commercial app stores under the bill. "There are more steps but we're on our way to protecting the open source community," Richell posted on Fosstodon, "at least in Colorado."
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Apr 25th 2026, 20:19 by EditorDavid
There's a glass roof — but no rear-view window. Instead the Polestar 4 replaces the rear-view mirror with a live feed from a wide-angle camera. Its high-resolution display (1480 x 320 pixels) promises "a panoramic view of the outside," according to Polestar's web site, showing more of what's behind you. "Visibility in the dark and in rainy conditions is also vastly improved." Besides the camera feed (and side mirrors), the Polestar 4 offers four short-range cameras (for 360-degree views), and even short-range ultrasonics, the Wall Street Journal points out. (Car rear-view windows are usually five feet off the ground, "making a typical traffic cone invisible from closer than about 35 feet." ) And this new design also improves "aero efficiency," reducing drag and shearing turbulence, "critical, since the Polestar 4 is all-electric, and aero drag is the mortal enemy of range." [A]s a practical matter, the Polestar 4's innovation only acknowledges what drivers already know. In many modern cars, the rearview mirror is all but useless, anyway. In a typical full-size SUV, the glass in the rear hatch is about 10 feet away from the rearview mirror, with two sets of headrests in between... Having spent a few days in what Polestar calls an "SUV coupe" I am here to report that drivers won't miss the mirror. For one thing, the display is shaped like a conventional mirror, imbuing it with the comfort of the familiar. The imagery is convincingly mirror-like — reversed — with eye-like focal length, decent resolution and lowlight sensitivity, making it easy to trust when judging distances, with the help of graphical overlays and warning tones. It also has excellent auto-dimming algorithms.... The Polestar 4 is called that because it is the fourth model from the Swedish-Chinese premium/luxury collab, born out of Volvo Cars' performance subbrand. Describing it as an "SUV coupe" almost feels like a translation error. The design eschews signaling traditional utility in favor of a jocund modernism — call it orbital chic.... As for missing the rear window, my advice is, don't look back. "In sports cars, rearview mirrors have been essentially decorative for some time," the article points out. (The 1974 Lamborghini Countach LP400 originally envisioned "a rear-facing periscope fitted in a dorsal channel in the roof.") "The era's contempt for rearview mirrors was captured in a scene from The Gumball Rally (1976) when Raul Julia's character snaps the mirror off his Ferrari Daytona and throws it away. 'The first rule of Italian driving,' he says. 'What's behind me is not important.'" There's 11 exterior cameras, plus 12 ultrasonic sensors and a mid-range radar to watch for threats and "intervene if necessary". One feature even reads speed limit signs and shows the posted limit on the driver's display. ("If the car exceeds the limit, the driver will hear a warning sound.") Even the windshield has built-in camera sensors to provide automatically "adaptive" headlights that switch from high beam to low beam when they identify approaching vehicles or the taillights of cars ahead. "A total of seven airbags are deployed in the event of a collision." Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
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Apr 25th 2026, 18:34 by EditorDavid
Microsoft released the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" in 2016, adding an optional Linux environment into every operating system since Windows 10. But now an open source developer has brought Linux to Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me, reports the blog It's FOSS, "with Linux kernel 6.19 running alongside the Windows 9x kernel, letting both operate on the same machine at the same time." A virtual device driver handles initialization, loads the kernel off disk and manages the event loop for page faults and syscalls. Since Win9x lacks the right interrupt table support for the standard Linux syscall interrupt, WSL9x reroutes those calls through the fault handler instead. Rounding it all out is wsl.com, a small 16-bit DOS program that pipes the terminal output from Linux back to whatever MS-DOS prompt window you ran it from. The end result is that WSL9x requires no hardware virtualization, and can run on hardware as old as the i486, the article points out. On Mastodon the developer says they "really got this one in right under the wire, before they start removing 486 support from Linux." The source code for WSL9x is released under the GPL-3 license, and was "proudly written without AI."
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Apr 25th 2026, 17:34 by EditorDavid
"Old code like amateur radio and NFC have long been a burden to core networking developers," reads the pull request. And so Thursday Linus Torvald merged the pull request "to rid the Linux kernel of the old Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) subsystem," reports Phoronix, "and various other old network drivers largely for PCMCIA era network adapters." This was the code suggested for removal given the recent influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports against this dated code that likely has no active upstream users remaining... [W]ith the large language models and increased code fuzzing finding potential issues with these drivers for obsolete hardware, it's easier to just get rid of these drivers if no one is actively using the hardware from decades ago... This merge lightens the kernel by 138,161 lines of code with ISDN gone and numerous old network adapters and also getting rid of legacy ATM device drivers as well as the amateur ham radio support. The main networking drivers removed affect the 3com 3c509 / 3c515 / 3c574 / 3c589, AMD Lance, AMD NMCLAN, SMSC SMC9194 / SMC91C92, Fujitsu FMVJ18X, and 8390 AX88190 / Ultra / WD80X3. Linux 7.1 also has removed the long-obsolete bus mouse support as well as beginning to phase out Intel 486 CPU support and removing support for Russia's Baikal CPUs.
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Apr 25th 2026, 16:34 by EditorDavid
It's the U.S. government's main link to the AI industry, reports The Washington Post, working to assess national security risks of new models like Anthropic's "Mythos". To run it they'd hired Collin Burns, who'd worked at OpenAI and then Anthropic. But Burns started work Monday at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation — and then "was pushed out Thursday by the White House, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations." Officials were concerned about Burns having worked at the AI company, which has fought bitterly with the Trump administration in recent months, according to one of the people and another person. That person said some senior figures at the White House had not been briefed on Burns's selection in advance... The new pick was Chris Fall, a scientist with a long career spanning the federal government and academia. Burns had been asked to resign that afternoon, according to one of the people familiar with the situation... Dean Ball, a former Trump administration AI adviser, said on social media that Burns had given up valuable Anthropic stock and moved across the country to take the government position, and had been "rewarded by his country with a punch in the face." "Obviously what happened is Burns was bumped because of his association with Anthropic," Ball wrote. "A dumb but predictable own goal."
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