theodp writes: GeekWire reports that Microsoft is bringing artificial intelligence to every public classroom in its home state -- and sparking new questions about its role in education. The Redmond tech giant on Thursday unveiled Microsoft Elevate Washington, a sweeping new initiative that will provide free access to AI-powered software and training for all 295 public school districts and 34 community and technical colleges across Washington state. The program is part of Microsoft Elevate, the company's broader $4 billion, five-year commitment to support schools and nonprofits with AI tools and training that was announced in July.

"This is our home," Microsoft President Brad Smith said at a launch event on the company's headquarters campus. "A big part of what we're doing today is investing in our home." Smith said Microsoft understands the unease around AI in classrooms but argued that waiting isn't an option. "I don't know that it will be possible to slow down the use of AI, even if someone wanted to," he said. In an interview with KING-TV Seattle, Smith added, "We're making a bigger commitment to this state than we are to any state in the country. [...] Above all else, we want to ensure that people can learn how to use the technology of tomorrow. That's the only way for our kids to succeed in the future."

The event on Thursday also included comedian Trevor Noah, the company's "chief questions officer," as well as Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi. Noah and Partovi both also appeared with Smith at the Microsoft Elevate launch event in July, where Smith told Partovi it was time to "switch hats" from coding to AI, adding that "the last 12 years have been about the Hour of Code [Code.org's flagship event, credited with pushing CS into K-12 classrooms], but the future involves the Hour of AI." Code.org last month committed to "engage 25M learners in an Hour of AI in school year '25/'26" at a meeting of the White House Task Force on AI Education that preceded a White House dinner for top execs from the nation's leading AI companies.

smooth wombat writes: At one point in technology history, floppy disks reigned supreme. Files, pictures, games, everything was put on a floppy disk. But technology doesn't stand still and as time went on disks were replaced by CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, and now cloud storage. Despite these changes, floppy disks are still found in long forgotten corners of businesses or stuffed in boxs in the attic. What is on these disks is anyone's guess, but Cambridge University Library is racing against time to preserve the data. However, lack of hardware and software to read the disks, if they're readable at all, poses unique challenges.

Some of the world's most treasured documents can be found deep in the archives of Cambridge University Library. There are letters from Sir Isaac Newton, notebooks belonging to Charles Darwin, rare Islamic texts and the Nash Papyrus -- fragments of a sheet from 200BC containing the Ten Commandments written in Hebrew.

These rare, and often unique, manuscripts are safely stored in climate-controlled environments while staff tenderly care for them to prevent the delicate pages from crumbling and ink from flaking away.

But when the library received 113 boxes of papers and mementoes from the office of physicist Stephen Hawking, it found itself with an unusual challenge. Tucked alongside the letters, photographs and thousands of pages relating to Hawking's work on theoretical physics, were items now not commonly seen in modern offices -- floppy disks.

They were the result of Hawking's early adoption of the personal computer, which he was able to use despite having a form of motor neurone disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, thanks to modifications and software. Locked inside these disks could be all kinds of forgotten information or previously unknown insights into the scientists' life. The archivists' minds boggled.

These disks are now part of a project at Cambridge University Library to rescue hidden knowledge trapped on floppy disks. The Future Nostalgia project reflects a larger trend in the information flooding into archives and libraries around the world.

Apple is updating its Security Bounty program this November to offer some of the highest rewards in the industry. From a report: It has doubled its top award from $1 million to $2 million for the discovery of "exploit chains that can achieve similar goals as sophisticated mercenary spyware attacks" and which requires no user interaction. But the maximum possible payout can exceed $5 million dollars for the discovery of more critical vulnerabilities, such as bugs in beta software and Lockdown Mode bypasses. Lockdown Mode is an upgraded security architecture in the Safari browser.

In addition, the company is rewarding the discovery of exploit chains with one-click user interaction with up to $1 million instead of just $250,000. The reward for attacks requiring physical proximity to devices can now also go up to $1 million, up from $250,000, while the maximum reward for attacks requiring physical access to locked devices has been doubled to $500,000. Finally, researchers "who demonstrate chaining WebContent code execution with a sandbox escape can receive up to $300,000."

prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: Dubbed Questing Quokka, Ubuntu 25.10 is powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.17 kernel series for top-notch hardware support and ships with the latest GNOME 49 desktop environment, defaulting to a Wayland-only session for the Ubuntu Desktop flavor, meaning there's no other session to choose from the login screen. Ubuntu Desktop also ships with two new apps, namely GNOME's Loupe instead of Eye of GNOME as the default image viewer, as well as Ptyxis instead of GNOME Terminal as the default terminal emulator. Also, there's a new update notification that will be shown with options to open Software Updater or install updates directly.'

Other highlights of Ubuntu 25.10 include sudo-rs as the default implementation of sudo, Dracut as the default initramfs-tools, Chrony as the default NTP (Network Time Protocol) client, Rust Coreutils as the default implementation of GNU Core Utilities, and TPM-backed FDE (Full Disk Encryption) recovery key management. Moreover, Ubuntu 25.10 adds NVIDIA Dynamic Boost support and enables suspend-resume support in the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver to prevent corruption and freezes when waking an NVIDIA desktop. For Intel users, Ubuntu 25.10 introduces support for new Intel integrated and discrete GPUs. Ubuntu 25.10 is available for download here.

Dave W. Plummer, the Microsoft developer who created Task Manager and helped build Windows Product Activation, has revealed the origins of Windows XP's most notorious product key. The alphanumeric string FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 was not cracked through clever hacking but leaked as a legitimate volume licensing key five weeks before XP's October 2001 release.

A warez group distributed the key alongside special corporate installation media. Windows Product Activation generated hardware IDs from system components and sent them to Microsoft for validation. The leaked volume licensing key bypassed this entirely. The system recognized it as corporate licensing and skipped phone-home activation. Users could install XP without activation prompts or 30-day timers. Microsoft later blacklisted the key.

Software vendors keen to monetize AI should tread cautiously, since they risk inflating costs for their customers without delivering any promised benefits such as reducing employee head count. From a report: The latest report from McKinsey & Company mulls what software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors need to do to navigate the minefield of hype that surrounds AI and successfully fold such capabilities into their offerings. According to the consultancy, there are three main challenges it identifies as holding back broader growth in AI software monetization in the report.

One of these is simply the inability to show any savings that can be expected. Many software firms trumpet potential use cases for AI, but only 30 percent have published quantifiable return on investment from real customer deployments. Meanwhile, many customers see AI hiking IT costs without being able to offset these by slashing labor costs. The billions poured into developing AI models mean they don't come cheap, and AI-enabling the entire customer service stack of a typical business could lead to a 60 to 80 percent price increase, McKinsey says, while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet."

Another challenge is scaling up adoption after introduction, which the report blames on underinvestment in change management. It says that for every $1 spent on model development, firms should expect to have to spend $3 on change management, which means user training and performance monitoring. The third issue is a lack of predictable pricing, which means that customers find it hard to forecast how their AI costs will scale with usage because the pricing models are often complex and opaque.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A website set up by an unknown Dane over the course of one weekend in August is giving a massive headache to those trying to pass a European bill aimed at stopping child sexual abuse material from spreading online.

The website, called Fight Chat Control, was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark. He made it after learning of a new attempt to approve a European Union proposal to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM) -- a bill seen by privacy activists as breaking encryption and leading to mass surveillance.

The site lets visitors compile a mass email warning about the bill and send it to national government officials, members of the European Parliament and others with ease. Since launching, it has broken the inboxes of MEPs and caused a stir in Brussels' corridors of power. "We are getting hundreds per day about it," said Evin Incir, a Swedish Socialists and Democrats MEP, of the email deluge.

Synology has released an update to its Disk Station Manager software that removes verified drive requirements from its 2025 model-year Plus, Value and J-series DiskStation network-attached storage devices. The change allows users to install non-validated third-party drives and create storage pools without restrictions.

The company had expanded its verified drive policy to the entire Plus line a few months earlier. Synology-branded drives carried substantial price premiums over commodity hardware. The HAT5310 enterprise SATA drive costs $299 for 8TB compared to $220 for an identically sized Seagate Exos disk. Users who installed non-verified drives in affected models faced reduced functionality and persistent warning messages in the DSM interface.

Synology said today it is collaborating with third-party drive manufacturers to accelerate testing and verification of additional storage drives. Pool and cache creation on M.2 disks still requires drives from the hardware compatibility list. Synology did not clarify whether the policy change applies to previous-generation products.

TiVo, the digital video recording pioneer, has moved on from its legacy DVR technology, focusing instead on its branded operating system software promoting third-party content searches, recommendation, including free ad-supported streaming options and more for smart televisions. From a report: "As of Oct. 1, 2025, TiVo has stopped selling Edge DVR hardware products," the company said in an AI-based message. The recording said that the company and its associates no longer manufacture DVR hardware, "and our remaining inventory is now depleted." TiVo said it remains "committed to providing support for our DVR customers and will continue to provide support for the foreseeable future." TiVo in 1999 created the first set-top device enabling users to record and skip ads within television programming.

Longtime Slashdot reader kamesh shares a report from TechCrunch: Tech behemoth IBM is teaming up with AI research lab Anthropic to bring AI into its software. Armonk, New York-based IBM announced it will be adding Anthropic's Claude large language model family into some of its software products on Tuesday. The first product to tap Claude will be IBM's integrated development environment, which is already available to a select group of customers. IBM also announced it created a guide in partnership with Anthropic on how enterprises can build, deploy, and maintain enterprise-grade AI agents. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Smartphone processor and modem maker Qualcomm is acquiring Arduino, the Italian company known mainly for its open source ecosystem of microcontrollers and the software that makes them function. In its announcement, Qualcomm said that Arduino would "[retain] its brand and mission," including its "open source ethos" and "support for multiple silicon vendors." Qualcomm didn't disclose what it would pay to acquire Arduino. The acquisition also needs to be approved by regulators "and other customary closing conditions."

The first fruit of this pending acquisition will be the Arduino Uno Q, a Qualcomm-based single-board computer with a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 processor installed. The QRB2210 includes a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 CPU and a Qualcomm Adreno 702 GPU, plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and combines that with a real-time microcontroller "to bridge high-performance computing with real-time control." "Arduino will retain its independent brand, tools, and mission, while continuing to support a wide range of microcontrollers and microprocessors from multiple semiconductor providers as it enters this next chapter within the Qualcomm family," Qualcomm said in its press release. "Following this acquisition, the 33M+ active users in the Arduino community will gain access to Qualcomm Technologies' powerful technology stack and global reach. Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies' advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem."

CNBC notes in its reporting that this acquisition gives Qualcomm "direct access to the tinkerers, hobbyists and companies at the lowest levels of the robotics industry." From the report: Arduino products can't be used to build commercial products but, with chips preinstalled, they're popular for testing out a new idea or proving a concept. Qualcomm hopes that Arduino can help it gain loyalty and legitimacy among startups and builders as robots and other devices increasingly need more powerful chips for artificial intelligence. When some of those experiments become products, Qualcomm wants to sell them its chips commercially.

U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was driven almost entirely by investment in data centers and information processing technology. The GDP growth would have been just 0.1% on an annualized basis without these technology-related categories, according to Harvard economist Jason Furman. Investment in information-processing equipment and software accounted for only 4% of U.S. GDP during this period but represented 92% of GDP growth.

Renaissance Macro Research estimated in August that the dollar value contributed to GDP growth by AI data-center buildout had surpassed U.S. consumer spending for the first time. Consumer spending makes up two-thirds of GDP. Tech giants including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Nvidia poured tens of billions of dollars into building and upgrading data centers.

Vibe coding tools "are transforming the job experience for many tech workers," writes the Los Angeles Times. But Gartner analyst Philip Walsh said the research firm's position is that AI won't replace software engineers and will actually create a need for more. "There's so much software that isn't created today because we can't prioritize it," Walsh said. "So it's going to drive demand for more software creation, and that's going to drive demand for highly skilled software engineers who can do it..." The idea that non-technical people in an organization can "vibe-code" business-ready software is a misunderstanding [Walsh said]... "That's simply not happening. The quality is not there. The robustness is not there. The scalability and security of the code is not there," Walsh said. "These tools reward highly skilled technical professionals who already know what 'good' looks like."
"Economists, however, are also beginning to worry that AI is taking jobs that would otherwise have gone to young or entry-level workers," the article points out. "In a report last month, researchers at Stanford University found "substantial declines in employment for early-career workers'' — ages 22-25 — in fields most exposed to AI. Stanford researchers also found that AI tools by 2024 were able to solve nearly 72% of coding problems, up from just over 4% a year earlier."

And yet Cat Wu, project manager of Anthropic's Claude Code, doesn't even use the term vibe coding. "We definitely want to make it very clear that the responsibility, at the end of the day, is in the hands of the engineers." Wu said she's told her younger sister, who's still in college, that software engineering is still a great career and worth studying. "When I talk with her about this, I tell her AI will make you a lot faster, but it's still really important to understand the building blocks because the AI doesn't always make the right decisions," Wu said. "A lot of times the human intuition is really important."

"Recent attacks show that hackers keep using the same tricks to sneak bad code into popular software registries," writes long-time Slashdot reader selinux geek, suggesting that "the real problem is how these registries are built, making these attacks likely to keep happening." After all, npm wasn't the only software library hit by a supply chain attack, argues the Linux Security blog. "PyPI and Docker Hub both faced their own compromises in 2025, and the overlaps are impossible to ignore." Phishing has always been the low-hanging fruit. In 2025, it wasn't just effective once — it was the entry point for multiple registry breaches, all occurring close together in different ecosystems... The real problem isn't that phishing happened. It's that there weren't enough safeguards to blunt the impact. One stolen password shouldn't be all it takes to poison an entire ecosystem. Yet in 2025, that's exactly how it played out...

Even if every maintainer spotted every lure, registries left gaps that attackers could walk through without much effort. The problem wasn't social engineering this time. It was how little verification stood between an attacker and the "publish" button. Weak authentication and missing provenance were the quiet enablers in 2025... Sometimes the registry itself offers the path in. When the failure is at the registry level, admins don't get an alert, a log entry, or any hint that something went wrong. That's what makes it so dangerous. The compromise appears to be a normal update until it reaches the downstream system... It shifts the risk from human error to systemic design.

And once that weakly authenticated code gets in, it doesn't always go away quickly, which leads straight into the persistence problem... Once an artifact is published, it spreads into mirrors, caches, and derivative builds. Removing the original upload doesn't erase all the copies... From our perspective at LinuxSecurity, this isn't about slow cleanup; it's about architecture. Registries have no universally reliable kill switch once trust is broken. Even after removal, poisoned base images replicate across mirrors, caches, and derivative builds, meaning developers may keep pulling them in long after the registry itself is "clean."
The article condlues that "To us at LinuxSecurity, the real vulnerability isn't phishing emails or stolen tokens — it's the way registries are built. They distribute code without embedding security guarantees. That design ensures supply chain attacks won't be rare anomalies, but recurring events."BR>
So in a world where "the only safe assumption is that the code you consume may already be compromised," they argue, developers should look to controls they can enforce themselves:

• Verify artifacts with signatures or provenance tools.
• Pin dependencies to specific, trusted versions.
• Generate and track SBOMs so you know exactly what's in your stack.
• Scan continuously, not just at the point of install.

"A group of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, have developed a way to use the sensors in high-quality optical mice to capture subtle vibrations and convert them into audible data," reports Tom's Hardware: [T]he high polling rate and sensitivity of high-performance optical mice pick up acoustic vibrations from the surface where they sit. By running the raw data through signal processing and machine learning techniques, the team could hear what the user was saying through their desk. Mouse sensors with a 20,000 DPI or higher are vulnerable to this attack. And with the best gaming mice becoming more affordable annually, even relatively affordable peripherals are at risk....

[T]his compromise does not necessarily mean a complicated virus installed through a backdoor — it can be as simple as an infected FOSS that requires high-frequency mouse data, like creative apps or video games. This means it's not unusual for the software to gather this data. From there, the collected raw data can be extracted from the target computer and processed off-site. "With only a vulnerable mouse, and a victim's computer running compromised or even benign software (in the case of a web-based attack surface), we show that it is possible to collect mouse packet data and extract audio waveforms," the researchers state.
The researchers created a video with raw audio samples from various stages in their pipeline on an accompanying web site where they calculate that "the majority of human speech" falls in a frequency range detectable by their pipeline. While the collected signal "is low-quality and suffers from non-uniform sampling, a non-linear frequency response, and extreme quantization," the researchers augment it with "successive signal processing and machine learning techniques to overcome these challenges and achieve intelligible reconstruction of user speech."

They've titled their paper Invisible Ears at Your Fingertips: Acoustic Eavesdropping via Mouse Sensors. The paper's conclusion? "The increasing precision of optical mouse sensors has enhanced user interface performance but also made them vulnerable to side-channel attacks exploiting their sensitivity."

Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the article.

Currently DNA synthesis companies "deploy biosecurity software designed to guard against nefarious activity," reports the Washington Post, "by flagging proteins of concern — for example, known toxins or components of pathogens." But Microsoft researchers discovered "up to 100 percent" of AI-generated ricin-like proteins evaded detection — and worked with a group of leading industry scientists and biosecurity experts to design a patch. Microsoft's chief science officer called it "a Windows update model for the planet.

"We will continue to stay on it and send out patches as needed, and also define the research processes and best practices moving forward to stay ahead of the curve as best we can."

But is that enough? Outside biosecurity experts applauded the study and the patch, but said that this is not an area where one single approach to biosecurity is sufficient. "What's happening with AI-related science is that the front edge of the technology is accelerating much faster than the back end ... in managing the risks," said David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University School of Medicine. "It's not just that we have a gap — we have a rapidly widening gap, as we speak. Every minute we sit here talking about what we need to do about the things that were just released, we're already getting further behind."
The Washington Post notes not every company deploys biosecurity software. But "A different approach, biosecurity experts say, is to ensure AI software itself is imbued with safeguards before digital ideas are at the cusp of being brought into labs for research and experimentation." "The only surefire way to avoid problems is to log all DNA synthesis, so if there is a worrisome new virus or other biological agent, the sequence can be cross-referenced with the logged DNA database to see where it came from," David Baker, who shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on proteins, said in an email.

From 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. today (EDT), the Free Software Foundation celebrates its 40th anniversary with an online and in-person event. "We will broadcast the talks and workshops via a fully free software livestream on fsf.org/live," according to the FSF's official "FSF40 Celebration" page. "Everyone will be able to join the discussion via the #fsf40 IRC channel on Libera.Chat."

"4 decades, 4 freedoms, 4 all users" is the event's slogan.

And during the ceremony, a 40th-anniversary cake was sliced by newly-elected FSF president Ian Kelling (who was unanimously confirmed by FSF board members): Kelling, age 43, has held the role of a board member and a voting member since March 2021. The board said of Kelling's confirmation: "His hands-on technical experience resulting from his position as the organization's senior systems administrator proved invaluable for his work on the board of directors... He has the technical knowledge to speak with authority on most free software issues, and he has a strong connection with the community as an active speaker and blogger."

Kelling earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and is a continuous user, developer, and advocate for free software. His personal commitment to complete software freedom has been shaped by his past experiences working as a software developer for proprietary software companies while using, learning, and contributing to GNU/Linux on his own time.

"Ian has shown good judgment on the board, and a firm commitment to the free software movement," FSF founder and Chief GNUisance Richard Stallman said. Outgoing FSF President and long-time board member Geoff Knauth added: "Since joining the board in 2021, Ian has shown a clear understanding of the free software philosophy in today's technology, and a strong vision. He recognizes threats in upcoming technologies, promotes transparency, has played a significant role in designing and implementing the new board recruitment processes, and has always adhered to ethical principles. He has also given me valuable advice at critical moments, for which I am very grateful..."

Kelling will continue to fill the role of senior systems administrator for the FSF, which he has held since 2017, where he leads the FSF's tech team under the direction of Zoë Kooyman, executive director of the FSF. True to the FSF's tradition for this role, he takes on the governance role as a volunteer.
Upcoming on the livestream:

• Free Software Foundation trivia
• LibreLocal group lightning talks
• A panel with the FSF, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) , F-Droid, and Sugar Labs

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: CBS News has a TL;DR video report, but Jeremy Stern's earlier epic Class Dismissed [at Collosus.com] offers a deep dive into Alpha School, "the teacherless, homeworkless, K-12 private school in Austin, Texas, where students have been testing in the top 0.1% nationally by self-directing coursework with AI tutoring apps for two hours a day.

Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to "mastery-level" (i.e., scoring over 90%) in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in 'workshops,' learning things like how to run an Airbnb or food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production, or build a business or drone."

Founder MacKenzie Larson's dream that "kids must love school so much they don't want to go on vacation" drew the attention of — and investments of money and time from — mysterious tech billionaire Joe Liemandt, who sent his own kids to Larson's school and now aims to bring the experience to rest of the world. "When GenAI hit in 2022," Liemandt said, "I took a billion dollars out of my software company. I said, 'Okay, we're going to be able to take MacKenzie's 2x in 2 hours groundwork and get it out to a billion kids.' It's going to cost more than that, but I could start to figure it out. It's going to happen. There's going to be a tablet that costs less than $1,000 that is going to teach every kid on this planet everything they need to know in two hours a day and they're going to love it.

"I really do think we can transform education for everybody in the world. So that's my next 20 years. I literally wake up now and I'm like, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I will work 7 by 24 for the next 20 years to fricking do this. The greatest 20 years of my life are right ahead of me. I don't think I'm going to lose. We're going to win."

Of course, Stern writes at Collosus.com, there will be questions about this model of schooling, but asks: "Suppose that from kindergarten through 12th grade, your child's teachers were, in essence, stacks of machines. Suppose those machines unlocked more of your child's academic potential than you knew was possible, and made them love school. Suppose the schooling they loved involved vision monitoring and personal data capture. Suppose that surveillance architecture enabled them to outperform your wildest expectations on standardized tests, and in turn gave them self-confidence and self-esteem, and made their own innate potential seem limitless.... Suppose poor kids had a reason to believe and a way to show they're just as academically capable as rich kids, and that every student on Earth could test in what we now consider the top 10%. Suppose it allowed them to spend two-thirds of their school day on their own interests and passions. Suppose your child's deep love of school minted a new class of education billionaires.

"If you shrink from such a future, by which principle would you justify stifling it?"

The food delivery robots that arrived in Atlanta in June "are not our friends," argues a headline at CNN.

The four-wheeled Serve Robotics machines "get confused at crosswalks. They move with the speed and caution of a first-time driver, stilted and shy, until they suddenly speed up without warning. Their four wheels look like they were made for off-roading, but they still get stuck in the cracks of craggy sidewalks. Most times I see the bots, they aren't moving at all... " Cyclists swerve to avoid them like any other obstacle in the road. Patrons of Shake Shack (a national partner of Serve) weave around the mess of robots parked in front of the restaurant to make their way inside and place orders on iPads... The dawn of everyday, "friendly" robots may be here, but they haven't proven themselves useful — or trustworthy — yet. "People think they are your friends, but they're actually cameras and microphones of corporations," said Joanna Bryson, a longtime AI scholar and professor of ethics and technology at the Hertie School in Berlin. "You're right to be nervous..."

When robots show up in a city, it's often not because the residents of said city actively wanted them there or had a say in their arrival said Edward Ongweso Jr. [a researcher at the Security in Context initiative, a tech journalist and self-proclaimed "decelerationist" urging a slower rollout for Silicon Valley tech pioneers and civic leaders embracing untested and unregulated technology]... "They're being rolled out without any sort of input from people, and as a result, in ways that are annoying and inconvenient," Ongweso Jr. said. "I suspect that people would feel a lot differently if they had a choice ... 'what kind of robots are we interested in rolling out in our homes, in our workplaces, on our college campuses or in our communities?'"

Delivery robots aren't unique to Atlanta. AI-driven companies including Avride and Coco Robotics have sent fleets of delivery robots to big cities like Chicago, Dallas and Jersey City, as well as sleepy college towns... "They're popping up everywhere," Ongweso Jr. continued, "because there's sort of a realization that you have to convince people to view them as inevitable. The way to do that is to just push it into as many places as possible, and have these spectacle demonstrations, get some friendly coverage, try to figure out the ways in which you're selling this as the only alternative.... If you humanize it, you're more willing to entertain it and rationalize it being in your area — 'That's just Jeffrey,' or whatever they name it — instead of seeing it for what it is, which is a bunch of investors privately encroaching on a community or workplace," Ongweso Jr. said. "It's not the future. It's a business model."
Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani told CNN their goal in Atlanta was reducing traffic — and that the robots' average delivery distance there was under a mile, taking about 18 minutes per delivery.

Serve Robotics has also launched their robots in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta, according to the site Robotics 247, as part of an ongoing collaboration with Uber Eats. (Although after the robots launched in Los Angeles, a man in a mobility scooter complained the slow-moving robot swerved in front of him.) And "residents of other cities have had to rescue them when they've been felled by weather," reports CNN.

CNN also spoke to Dylan Losey, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech who studies human-robot interaction, who notes that the robots' AI algorithms are "completely unregulated... We don't know if a third party has checked the hardware and software and deemed the system 'safe' — in part because what it means for these systems to be 'safe' is not fully understood or standardized." (CNN's reporter adds that "the last time I got close to a bot, to peer down at a flier someone left on top of it, it revved at me loudly. Perhaps they can sense a hater.")

But Serve's CEO says there's one crucial way robot delivery will be cheaper than humans. "You don't have to tip the robots."

"A small number of researchers are making real progress trying to create computers out of living cells," reports the BBC: Among those leading the way are a group of scientists in Switzerland, who I went to meet. One day, they hope we could see data centres full of "living" servers which replicate aspects of how artificial intelligence (AI) learns — and could use a fraction of the energy of current methods.

That is the vision of Dr Fred Jordan, co-founder of the FinalSpark lab I visited. We are all used to the ideas of hardware and software in the computers we currently use. The somewhat eyebrow-raising term Dr Jordan and others in the field use to refer to what they are creating is "wetware". In simple terms, it involves creating neurons which are developed into clusters called organoids, which in turn can be attached to electrodes — at which point the process of trying to use them like mini-computers can begin...

For FinalSpark, the process begins with stem cells derived from human skin cells, which they buy from a clinic in Japan. The actual donors are anonymous... In the lab, FinalSpark's cellular biologist Dr Flora Brozzi handed me a dish containing several small white orbs. Each little sphere is essentially a tiny, lab-grown mini-brain, made out of living stem cells which have been cultured to become clusters of neurons and supporting cells — these are the "organoids"... After undergoing a process which can last several months, the organoids are ready to be attached to an electrode and then prompted to respond to simple keyboard commands... Electrical stimulations are important first steps towards the team's bigger goal of triggering learning in the biocomputer's neurons so they can eventually adapt to perform tasks...

FinalSpark are not the only scientists working in the biocomputing space. Australian firm Cortical Labs announced in 2022 that it had managed to get artificial neurons to play the early computer game Pong. In the US, researchers at Johns Hopkins University are also building "mini-brains" to study how they process information — but in the context of drug development for neurological conditions like Alzheimer's and autism.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.