SlashdotNews for nerds, stuff that matters
Apr 12th 2026, 04:07 by EditorDavid
175 million people in Brazil now use its instant-payment system "Pix", developed by the country's central bank for real-time payments using QR codes or keys, and American Banker notes that the central banks of Argentina and Costa Rica also have developed their own widely used digital systems for instant payments. Latin America has been able to build up sleek and effective payment systems in record time because it is not held back by legacy payment technology that isn't built for instant money movement. In the likes of the U.K., U.S. and Europe, payment systems are built on infrastructure that is often decades old. The process of building new systems is therefore incredibly operationally complex. Money must continue moving, so these systems can't just be "switched off." Emerging markets, such as those in Latin America, did not have to contend with legacy technology on the same scale. Many of these communities were cash dominant until recently, due to the high fees associated with card usage and the lack of banking infrastructure in rural regions. However, while many people didn't have a local bank on their corner, they did have mobile phones... Through these digital channels, money moves instantly, via account-to-account transfers, QR codes and mobile wallets... Beyond this, real-time and traceable digital payments generate valuable cash-flow data that can transform credit underwriting for small and medium-size businesses, or SMEs. Historically, many SMEs in emerging and cash-reliant markets have struggled to access credit due to a lack of documented transaction histories, audited accounts or formal credit records... Mexico is now poised to be the next success story. In Mexico, a third of people are unbanked, but 96% of the population owns a mobile phone. This creates the perfect launchpad for a digital-first payment system that can reach those historically excluded from traditional banking systems. In fact, something already changed in 2025. Bloomberg reports that for the first time, digital payment transfers in the U.S.-to-Mexico remittance corridor exceeded cash transfers (with physical pickup locations like Western Union), according to Mexico's central bank. It's part of a Latin American market "worth more than $160 billion a year, roughly $62 billion of which goes to Mexico." And Mexico's digitalization efforts will continue, according to the country's president, who said at a March banking conference that digital payments will now be encouraged for gasoline and tolls.
 
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Apr 12th 2026, 02:07 by EditorDavid
Arizona state prosecutors allege Kalshi is running an illegal gambling operation, charging the prediction market with 20 "wagering" misdemeanors. But Friday a federal judge "temporarily barred Arizona from enforcing its gambling laws against predictive market operators," reports the Associated Press, "and put the brakes on a criminal wagering case that the state has filed against Kalshi. "U.S. District Judge Michael Liburdi's ruling means a Monday arraignment hearing for Kalshi has been called off." The order was issued in a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration. The judge's order said the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission had sufficiently shown that "event contracts" fall within the Commodity Exchange Act's definition of "swaps," and that it had demonstrated a reasonable chance of success in showing that the act preempts Arizona law... The commission had sued Arizona in response to cease-and-desist letters sent to Kalshi from state gambling regulators and the criminal charges filed against the prediction market operator. The commission argued Arizona is intruding on its exclusive federal power to regulate national swaps markets... Earlier this month, the federal government filed lawsuits against Connecticut, Arizona and Illinois challenging their efforts to regulate prediction market operators. The Trump administration has so far backed the platforms. President Donald Trump's eldest son is an adviser for both Kalshi and Polymarket and an investor in the latter. Trump's social media platform Truth Social is also launching its own cryptocurrency-based prediction market called Truth Predict. Federal and state judges in Nevada and Massachusetts have now issued early rulings in favor of states looking to ban Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket from offering sports being in their states, according to the article, "while federal judges in New Jersey and Tennessee have ruled in favor of Kalshi." And Arizona's attorney general's office said it disagrees with the court's ruling and "will evaluate our next steps."
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Apr 11th 2026, 22:52 by EditorDavid
"Breathable oxygen has been created from Moon dust," reports the Telegraph, "in a world first that paves the way for a lunar base." Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin ""announced this week that it had developed a reactor that could successfully release oxygen from lunar soil by using an electric current." Almost half of Moon dust — the thin layer of rock that blankets the lunar surface — is oxygen, but it is bound to metals such as iron and titanium... Previous work to isolate oxygen has been lab-based, and the unwieldy equipment needed has been too difficult to send to the Moon. In contrast, Blue Origin said its small-scale reactor, named Air Pioneer, could be made flight-ready to "provide the first breath of life for a sustainable Moon base"... As well as breathable air, Blue Origin said the reactor produces other critical elements for planetary infrastructure, such as iron, aluminium and silicon for construction and electronics, as well as glass for windows and solar panel covers. The company has previously said it wants to turn the Moon, and eventually Mars, into "self-sustaining worlds where robots and humans can go beyond visiting and truly explore, grow, live, and thrive".... Blue Origin said it would need to generate around one megawatt of power to drive the reactors — about the energy it would require to power around 400 to 1,000 homes simultaneously. It envisages that each lunar settlement would have an array of nearby solar panels, generating the power needed for one reactor. Besides breathable air for astronauts, the oxygen could also be used in propellant for refuelling landers and fuel cells, Blue Origin points out — and "produced right where they're needed, and at much lower cost than being brought from Earth." Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
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Apr 11th 2026, 21:34 by EditorDavid
Amazon's Luna cloud gaming service is making some changes, reports Engadget: It's no longer possible to buy Ubisoft+ and Jackbox Games subscriptions or standalone games through Luna. Amazon will automatically cancel any active subscriptions bought through Luna at the end of customers' next billing cycle. If you have a Ubisoft+ subscription that you bought directly from Ubisoft instead, you'll still be able to access games on that service through Luna until June 10. The Bring Your Own Library option — which allows users to play games they own on the likes of EA, GOG and Ubisoft on Luna — is going away too. You won't be able to access games from those storefronts via Amazon's streaming service after June 3. If you bought any games outright on Luna, you'll still be able to play them there until June 10. Unlike Google did when it shut down Stadia, Amazon isn't offering refunds for those purchases. However, you'll still have access to them through the respective third-party platform that's linked to your account, be it the EA App, GOG Galaxy or Ubisoft Connect. That doesn't exactly help folks who don't have powerful-enough systems to play more demanding games and were relying on Luna. For those users, Kotaku complains, "you'll essentially lose access to your purchased games in June unless you buy some hardware to play games like Star Wars Outlaws or set up a different streaming option..." They describe Luna as Amazon's "barely talked about, struggling game streaming service"... On April 10, Amazon announced that it is "always looking for ways to better serve our players" and that "feedback" has made it "clear" that gamers who use Luna want "easy access to great games." And because more of that content is now offered via Amazon Prime, the company has decided that the best way to "serve" you and other users is to rip out most of Luna's gaming options and remove access to paid games you bought in the past. Do you feel better served...? Launched in 2020, Amazon Luna has never been much of a big hit for the company, which has struggled to even figure out what to do with it. Initially, it was offered up as a Stadia competitor, providing access to big and small third-party games. This apparently didn't work out for Amazon. So in 2025, Amazon officially announced plans to pivot Luna to a service focused on Jackbox-like casual games. This latest shake-up for Luna further focuses the service on these kinds of games and will put everything available on the service behind different sub tiers, similar to Game Pass. Their conclusion? "This is all just a great reminder to never, ever, ever, ever buy a video game through a streaming service. At least you can download digital games offline and make backups for later."
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Apr 11th 2026, 20:34 by EditorDavid
"Only about 2% of visually impaired people in the United States use guide dogs," notes StudyFinds.com, "partly because breeding and training takes years and fewer than half the dogs in training actually graduate." But someday there could be another option: What if you could ask your guide dog where the nearest water fountain is and hear it answer back, complete with directions and an estimated walk time? Researchers at the State University of New York at Binghamton have built a robotic guide dog that can do something close to that, holding simple back-and-forth conversations about navigation with its handler, describing the surrounding environment, and talking through route options as it leads the way... Their work, presented at the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pairs a large language model, a system that understands and generates language, with a navigation planner. Together, the two let the robot understand open-ended requests, suggest destinations, and adjust plans on the fly. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
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Apr 11th 2026, 19:34 by EditorDavid
A 17,000-word expose in the New Yorker reveals "several executives connected to OpenAI have expressed ongoing reservations about Altman's leadership." Reporters Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spoke to "a hundred people with firsthand knowledge of how Altman conducts business," including current and former OpenAI employees and board members. Among other revelations, internal messages from a few years ago show that OpenAI executives and board members "had come to believe that Altman's omissions and deceptions might have ramifications for the safety of OpenAI's products..." At the behest of his fellow board members, [OpenAI cofounder] Sutskever worked with like-minded colleagues to compile some seventy pages of Slack messages and H.R. documents, accompanied by explanatory text... The memos, which we reviewed, have not previously been disclosed in full. They allege that Altman misrepresented facts to executives and board members, and deceived them about internal safety protocols. One of the memos, about Altman, begins with a list headed "Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of . . ." The first item is "Lying".... In a tense call after Altman's firing, the board pressed him to acknowledge a pattern of deception. "This is just so fucked up," he said repeatedly, according to people on the call. "I can't change my personality." Altman says that he doesn't recall the exchange.... He attributed the criticism to a tendency, especially early in his career, "to be too much of a conflict avoider." But a board member offered a different interpretation of his statement: "What it meant was 'I have this trait where I lie to people, and I'm not going to stop.' " Were the colleagues who fired Altman motivated by alarmism and personal animus, or were they right that he couldn't be trusted? Friday Altman responded in part to the article. ("I am not proud of being conflict-averse, which has caused great pain for me and OpenAI," he wrote in a blog post. "I am not proud of handling myself badly in a conflict with our previous board that led to a huge mess for the company.") But the article also assembled similar stories from throughout Altman's career: - At Altman's earlier startup Loopt, "groups of senior employees, concerned with Altman's leadership and lack of transparency, asked Loopt's board on two occasions to fire him as C.E.O.," according to Keach Hagey, author of the Altman biography The Optimist. - During Altman's time as president of Y Combinator, "several Silicon Valley investors came to believe that his loyalties were divided. An investor told us that Altman was known to 'make personal investments, selectively, into the best companies, blocking outside investors.'" The article adds that in private, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham "has been unambiguous that Altman was removed because of Y.C. partners' mistrust... On one occasion, Graham told Y.C. colleagues that, prior to his removal, 'Sam had been lying to us all the time.'" - "In a meeting with U.S. intelligence officials in the summer of 2017, he claimed that China had launched an 'A.G.I. Manhattan Project,'" the article points out, "and that OpenAI needed billions of dollars of government funding to keep pace...." But one intelligence official "after looking into the China project, concluded that there was no evidence that it existed: 'It was just being used as a sales pitch.'" - As California lawmakers considered safety testing for AI model, one legislative aide complained of "increasingly cunning, deceptive behavior from OpenAI". OpenAI later subpoenaed some of the bill's top supporters (and OpenAI critics), in some cases asking for their private communications to investigate whether Elon Musk was funding them. [The article notes an ongoing animosity between Altman and Musk. "When Altman complained on X about a Tesla he'd ordered, Musk replied, 'You stole a non-profit.'"] And "Multiple prominent investors who have worked with Altman told us that he has a reputation for freezing out investors if they back OpenAI's competitors." [M]ost of the people we spoke to shared the judgment of Sutskever and Amodei: Altman has a relentless will to power that, even among industrialists who put their names on spaceships, sets him apart. "He's unconstrained by truth," the board member told us. "He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone." The board member was not the only person who, unprompted, used the word "sociopathic." One of Altman's batch mates in the first Y Combinator cohort was Aaron Swartz, a brilliant but troubled coder who died by suicide in 2013 and is now remembered in many tech circles as something of a sage. Not long before his death, Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends. "You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted," he told one. "He is a sociopath. He would do anything." Multiple senior executives at Microsoft said that, despite [CEO Satya] Nadella's long-standing loyalty, the company's relationship with Altman has become fraught. "He has misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, reneged on agreements," one said... The senior executive at Microsoft said, of Altman, "I think there's a small but real chance he's eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer."
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Apr 11th 2026, 18:34 by EditorDavid
It's the first time a major U.S. newsroom has gone on strike partly to demand protections from AI-related layoffs, according to a report from Nieman Lab. They noted that one of the picketer's signs read "Thoughts not bots," : On Wednesday, roughly 150 members of the Propublica Guild, one of the largest nonprofit newsroom unions in the country, went on a 24-hour strike. About two dozen Guild members picketed ProPublica's headquarters in New York City's Hudson Square neighborhood during working hours, as simultaneous picket lines formed in front of the publication's offices in Chicago and Washington D.C... The Guild has been negotiating its first collective bargaining agreement for two and a half years, and the one-day action was intended to put new pressure on ProPublica's management to agree to several contract proposals. The union is seeking "just cause" protections for terminations, wage increases to keep up with the rising cost of living, and contract language that would prohibit layoffs resulting from AI adoption... Beyond the strike, the ProPublica Guild has also taken its dispute over newsroom AI adoption to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). On Monday, the Guild filed an unfair-labor-practice charge, citing a "unilateral implementation of AI policy." The filing claims that ProPublica published AI editorial guidelines on its website last month, without first bargaining with union members over its tenets and language... A petition launched Wednesday calling for ProPublica to agree to the Guild's contract terms had received roughly 4,200 signatures by Thursday morning... Susan DeCarava, the president of The NewsGuild of New York, joined strikers in front of the ProPublica offices yesterday. During a spare moment on the picket line, she told me that while this strike may be setting precedent for her union, it likely won't be the last over AI adoption in newsrooms. "We're going to see more and more concentrated conflicts between media bosses and journalists and media workers over who has a say and how AI is used in their workplaces," she said. For one, The New York Times Guild is currently in contract negotiations after its last agreement expired in February. Already, AI language has taken center stage in the Guild's initial bargaining sessions, including over a proposal that would see Guild members receive a share of the revenue earned when their work is licensed for AI training. "Management has offered expanded severance for AI-related layoffs as a counter proposal..." according to the article.
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Apr 11th 2026, 17:34 by EditorDavid
In 2024 the Verge's consumer tech reporter paid $173 for a WD Black SN850X 2TB SSD. But "now that same SSD costs $649..." "Like with RAM, demand from the AI industry is swallowing up supply from a limited number of manufacturers, leading to a drastic reduction in the inventory that's available to consumers" — and skyrocketing prices: The price on my WD Black drive nearly quadrupled since November 2025, and consumer SSDs across the board are seeing similar increases, much like with RAM. The 4TB version of the popular Samsung 990 Pro SSD previously cost $320, but will now run you nearly $1,000. External SanDisk SSDs saw a 200 percent price hike at the Apple Store in March.... According to price trends from PC Part Picker, NVMe SSD prices began ticking upward in December 2025, with prices on 256GB to 4TB SSDs now double or triple what they were just a few months ago, and continuing to climb.
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Apr 11th 2026, 16:34 by EditorDavid
Critics say social media is engineered to be as addictive as tobacco or gambling, writes the Washington Post — while adding that "the science has been moving in parallel with the court's recognition." A growing body of research links heavy social media use not only to declines in mental health but to measurable cognitive effects — on attention, memory and focus — that in some studies resemble accelerated aging. Science also suggests we have more control than we realize when it comes to reversing this damage, and the solution is surprisingly simple: Take a break... "Digital detoxes" can sound like a fad. But in one of the largest studies to date, published in PNAS Nexus and involving more than 467 participants with an average age of 32, even a short time away produced striking results — effectively erasing a decade of age-related cognitive decline. For 14 days, participants used a commercially available app, Freedom, to block internet access on their phones. They were still allowed calls and text messages, essentially turning a smartphone into a dumb phone. Their time online decreased from 314 minutes to 161 minutes, and by the end of the period the participants had improvements in sustained attention, mental health as well as self-reported well-being. The improvement in sustained attention was about the same magnitude as 10 years of age-related decline, the researchers noted, and the effect of the intervention on depression symptoms was larger than antidepressants and similar to that of cognitive behavioral therapy. But two things were even more mind-blowing... Even those people who cheated and broke the rules after a few days seemed to have positive effects from the break; and in follow-up reports after the two weeks, many people reported the positive effects lingered. "So you don't have to necessarily restrict yourself forever. Even taking a partial digital detox, even for a few days, seems to work," Kushlev said. The article also notes a November study at Harvard published in JAMA Network Open where nearly 400 people 'found that even a short break can make a measurable difference: After just one week of reduced smartphone use, participants reported drops in anxiety (16.1 percent), depression (24.8 percent) and insomnia (14.5 percent)..." "Other experiments point in the same direction — whether decreasing social media use by an hour a day for one week or stepping away from just Facebook and Instagram."
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