computers

28 Apr 2026

Slashdot

Trump Administration Will Pay More Energy Firms to Cancel Wind Farms

The Trump administration says it will reimburse energy companies $885 million to cancel two planned offshore wind farms, with the firms in turn agreeing to put money into oil and gas projects instead. "The deals are modeled after a similar agreement last month with the French energy giant TotalEnergies," notes the New York Times. "TotalEnergies forfeited its leases for two wind projects planned off the coasts of New York and North Carolina, while committing to a range of fossil-fuel investments." From the report: [...] The first new agreement affects Bluepoint Wind, a wind farm in the early stages of development off New York and New Jersey. The project was proposed by Global Infrastructure Partners, a part of asset manager BlackRock, and Ocean Winds, which is itself a joint venture between Engie and EDP Renewables, two European clean-energy firms. The second deal would cancel Golden State Wind, another early-stage venture off California's central coast. Golden State Wind is a 50-50 partnership between the developers Ocean Winds and Reventus Power. Both Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind agreed not to pursue any new offshore wind projects in the United States, although that pledge would not necessarily apply to the companies behind the ventures. Ocean Winds has also been developing another giant wind farm known as SouthCoast Wind, off Martha's Vineyard, Mass., that is much further along in the planning and permitting process. That project is not affected by Monday's announcement, although it has essentially been paused since Mr. Trump took office last year. [...] It is also unclear how much the companies will actually invest in new fossil fuel infrastructure. In documents released this month, Interior revealed that it would count investments that TotalEnergies made before the deal toward its pledge, raising questions over whether the company had any obligations to make additional investments.

Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Technology tycoons Elon Musk and Sam Altman are poised to face off in a high-stakes trial revolving around the alleged betrayal, deceit and unbridled ambition that blurred the bickering billionaires' once-shared vision for the development of artificial intelligence. The trial, which started Monday with jury selection, centers on the 2015 birth of ChatGPT maker OpenAI as a nonprofit startup primarily funded by Musk before evolving into a capitalistic venture now valued at $852 billion. The trial's outcome could sway the balance of power in AI -- breakthrough technology that is increasingly being feared as a potential job killer and an existential threat to humanity's survival. Those perceived risks are among the reasons that Musk, the world's richest person, cites for filing an August 2024 lawsuit that will now be decided by a jury and U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California. The civil lawsuit accuses Altman, OpenAI's CEO, and his top lieutenant, Greg Brockman, of double-crossing Musk by straying from the San Francisco company's founding mission to be an altruistic steward of a revolutionary technology. The lawsuit alleges they shifted into a moneymaking mode behind his back. OpenAI has brushed off Musk's allegations as an unfounded case of sour grapes that's aimed at undercutting its rapid growth and bolstering Musk's own xAI, which he launched in 2023 as a competitor. Gonzalez Rogers questioned potential jurors Monday about their views on Musk, Altman and artificial intelligence. Some jurors said they had negative views of Musk, but most said they would still be able to treat him fairly and focus on the facts of the case. [...] "Part of this is about whether a jury believes the people who will testify and whether they are credible," Gonzalez Rogers said during a court hearing earlier this year while explaining why she believe the case merited a trial. The judge will make the final decision on the case, with the jury serving in an advisory role. The latest development is that a jury has been seated. During selection, several prospective jurors expressed negative views of Elon Musk, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected attempts by Musk's lawyer to remove some of them solely on that basis, saying dislike of Musk does not automatically mean someone can't be fair. The court is selecting nine jurors, and the case is expected to wrap by May 21, when it would go to the jury. Tomorrow, April 28th, will feature opening statements.

Ars Technica

Put it in pencil: NASA's Artemis III mission will launch no earlier than late 2027

SpaceX and Blue Origin tell NASA their lunar landers will be ready for Artemis III in late 2027.

28 Apr 2026 12:14am GMT

27 Apr 2026

Slashdot

Study Finds a Third of New Websites Are AI-Generated

alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: Researchers working with data from the Internet Archive have discovered that a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. The team of researchers -- which includes people from Stanford, the Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive -- published their findings online in a paper titled "The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet." The research also found that all this AI-generated text is making the web more cheery and less verbose."The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments," the researchers write in the paper. "We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT's launch in late 2022." "I find the sheer speed of the AI takeover of the web quite staggering," Jonas Dolezal, an AI researcher at Stanford and co-author of the paper, told 404 Media. "After decades of humans shaping it, a significant portion of the internet has become defined by AI in just three years. We're witnessing, in my opinion, a major transformation of the digital landscape in a fraction of the time it took to build in the first place." Maty Bohacek, a student researcher at Stanford and one of the co-authors of the paper, added: "As AI-generated content spreads, the challenge is finding a role for these models that doesn't just result in a sanitized, repetitive web," he said. "Rather than forcing models to be perfectly compliant and agreeable, allowing them to have a more distinct personality or 'friction' might help them act as a creative partner rather than a replacement for human voice."

OSnews

Dillo 3.3.0 released

Dillo is an amazing web browser for those of us who want their web browsing experience to be calmer and less flashing. Dillo also happens to be a very UNIX-y browser, and their latest release, 3.3.0, underlines that. A new dilloc program is now available to control Dillo from the command line or from a script. It searches for Dillo by the PID in the DILLO_PID environment variable or for a unique Dillo process if not set. ↫ Dillo 3.3.0 release notes You can use this program to control your Dillo instance, with basic commands like reloading the current URL, opening a new URL, and so on, but also things like dumping the current page's contents. I have a feeling more commands and features will be added in future releases, but for now, even the current set of commands can be helpful for scripting purposes. I'm sure some of you who live and die in the terminal are already thinking of all the possibilities here. You can now also add page actions to the right-click context menu, so you can do things like reload a page with a Chrome curl impersonator to avoid certain JavaScript walls. This, too, is of course extensible. Dillo 3.3.0 also brings experimental support for building the browser with FLTK 1.4, and implemented a fix specifically to make OAuth work properly.

27 Apr 2026 9:47pm GMT

Ubuntu is going to integrate “AI”, but Canonical remains vague about the how and why

Ubuntu, being one of the more commercial Linux distributions, was always going to jump on the "AI" bandwagon, and Jon Seager, Canonical's VP Engineering, published a blog post with more details. Throughout 2026 we'll be working on enabling access to frontier AI for Ubuntu users in a way that is deliberate, secure, and aligned with our open source values. By focusing on the combination of education for our engineers, our existing knowledge of building resilient systems and our strengthening silicon partnerships, we will deliver efficient local inference, powerful accessibility features, and a context-aware OS that makes Ubuntu meaningfully more capable for the people who rely on it Ubuntu is not becoming an AI product, but it can become stronger with thoughtful AI integration. ↫ Jon Seager at Ubuntu Discourse The problem with this entire post is that, much like all other corporate communications about "AI", it's all deceptively vague, open-ended, and weasely. Adjectives like "focused", "principled", "thoughtful", and "tasteful" don't really mean anything, and leave everything open for basically every type of slop "AI" feature under the sun. Their claims about open weights and open source models are also weakened by words like "favour" and "where possible", again leaving the door wide open for basically any shady "AI" company's models and features to find their way into your default Ubuntu installation. There's also very little in terms of concrete plans and proposed features, leaving Ubuntu users in the dark about what, exactly, is going to be added to their operating system of choice during the remainder of the year. There's mentions of improved text-to-speech/speech-to-text and text regurgitators, but that's about it. None of it feels particularly inspired or ground-breaking, and the veneer of open source, ethical model creation, and so on, is particularly thin this time around, even for Canonical. I don't really feel like I know a lot more about Canonical's "AI" intentions for Ubuntu after reading this post than I did before, other than Ubuntu users might be able to generate text in their email client or whatever later this year. Is that really something anybody wants?

27 Apr 2026 9:32pm GMT

Ars Technica

Open source package with 1 million monthly downloads stole user credentials

If you're one of millions using element-data, it's time to check for compromise.

27 Apr 2026 9:04pm GMT

Musk and Altman face off in trial that will determine OpenAI's future

Musk's shifting stance on AI dangers may complicate trial over OpenAI's mission.

27 Apr 2026 8:45pm GMT

24 Apr 2026

OSnews

If 64bit Windows 11 contains a copy of 32bit explorer.exe, could you run it as its shell?

Raymond Chen published a blog post about how a crappy uninstaller on Windows caused a mysterious spike in the number of Explorer (Windows' graphical shell) crashes. It turns out the buggy uninstaller caused repeated crashes in the 32bit version of Explorer on 64bit systems, and - hold on a minute. The how many bits on the what now? The 32-bit version of Explorer exists for backward compatibility with 32-bit programs. This is not the copy of Explorer that is handling your taskbar or desktop or File Explorer windows. So if the 32-bit Explorer is running on a 64-bit system, it's because some other program is using it to do some dirty work. ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing So I had no idea that 64bit Windows included a copy of the 32bit Explorer for backwards compatibility. It obviously makes sense, but I just never stopped to think about it. This made me wonder though if you could go nuts and do something really dumb: could you somehow trick 64bit Windows into running this 32bit copy of Explorer as its shell? You'd be running 32bit Explorer on 64bit Windows using the 32bit WoW64 binaries where you just pulled the 32bit Explorer binary from, which seems like a really nonsensical thing to do. Since there's no longer any 32bit builds of Windows 11, you also can't just copy over the 32bit Explorer from a 32bit Windows 11 build and achieve the same goal that way, so you'd really have to go digging around in WoW64 to get 32bit versions. I guess the answer to this question depends on just how complete this copy of 32bit Explorer really is, and if Windows has any defenses or triggers in place to prevent someone from doing something this uselessly stupid. Of course, there's no practical reason to do any of this and it makes very little sense, but it might be a fun hacking project. Most likely the Windows experts among you are wondering what kind of utterly deranged new designer drug I'm on, but I was always told that sometimes, the dumbest questions can lead to the most interesting answers, so here we are.

24 Apr 2026 11:07pm GMT