fidzu : computers

That Saudi national working at OpenAI and arrested by the FBI "has not been charged with foreign espionage," writes the Washington Post, "and the U.S. government has not said whether he was acting alone or as an agent of a foreign government." But "there are signs that the U.S. government is exploring the latter possibility," they add, citing comments from Chris McGuire, a member of the National Security Council during the Biden administration: The Department of Justice's press release about the incident says that the National Security Division's Counterintelligence and Export Control section, whose responsibility includes prosecuting spies, is assisting with the case... A Washington-based Middle East expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid incurring wrath from Saudi Arabia, said he believed the Saudi government was almost certainly involved in some way. "No one does this, not even for patriotism, without getting paid," said the person. And money would not be distributed without agreement by the Saudi royal court, he said. The Saudis lag behind their regional rival, the United Arab Emirates, in artificial intelligence development, he added. Friday America's Director of National Intelligence told CNBC that espionage, "both commercial espionage, and I would say state-sponsored espionage, are realities. It's something that our private sector companies need to be wary of." (And CNBC adds that"An ex-CIA official, who asked not to be named because they were discussing information that is not public, told CNBC this week that the case is 'probably the tip of the iceberg.'") The suspect had recently said he helped advise government agencies in Saudi Arabia on technology, reports the New York Times: In an Arabic podcast interview last month, Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, said he and other Saudi tech professionals in Silicon Valley had formed a group that advised Saudi organizations, including the kingdom's social insurance agency... "Silicon Valley is ground zero for espionage from a variety of countries around the world," said Amy Zegart, a professor at Stanford University who specializes in national security and intelligence. She added that she was "troubled" by the OpenAI incident and expected more cases "because these companies are so important." The Washington Post says the arrest "has ignited a fierce debate about the potential risks of Silicon Valley's international workforce - employees who often hail from nations seeking to rival the AI superpower status of the U.S." Foreign nationals have long formed the backbone of the American tech industry, helping U.S. companies surpass their would-be international rivals... As recently as April, Katrina Mulligan, a senior member of OpenAI's national security team, called for an "accelerated pathway to citizenship" for such workers, referring to foreign hires as a "national strategic asset" at an event on Capitol Hill. She estimated that a significant number of OpenAI's employees were not U.S. citizens, including Chinese nationals. Just half of the 300 top AI researchers in the world, she said, were American. Other industry leaders - as well as some lawmakers - have long accused top-tier tech companies with many foreign workers of disadvantaging Americans and being breeding grounds for Chinese espionage. Palmer Luckey, CEO of weapons maker Anduril, and venture capitalist Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital took to X on Wednesday to revisit arguments that the industry should focus on hiring U.S. citizens. "Silicon Valley has operated with maximum openness and maximum naivete toward foreign tradecraft," Maguire wrote... At OpenAI on Wednesday, employees continued tense conversations about the political implications of the arrest for immigrant workers, two OpenAI employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions... The arrest triggered a discussion on OpenAI's internal Slack messaging platform among employees about whether the incident might increase pressure from the Trump administration on OpenAI to not hire foreign nationals, said one of the people. In March, Emil Michael, the Pentagon's chief technology officer, wrote in court papers that AI developer Anthropic's reliance on staff with ties to China was among the concerns that fueled the Defense Department's conflict with the AI company.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Oct 2026 4:34am GMT

A Philadelphia newscast reports on a grey-haired lady who allegedly refused to move out of the path of a delivery robot as a form of protest because "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers." She was arrested, but says her actions were protected speech: According to police, Marvin repeatedly blocked the robot's path and ignored multiple commands from officers to move... Marvin said she was protesting the use of delivery robots because she believes they are replacing human workers.... "I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward," Marvin said... Marvin said she has confronted delivery robots on multiple occasions... Ashley Baldwin of West Philadelphia said she witnessed one of those encounters. "I actually thought the robot hit her, so my original question was, 'Are you OK? Did the robot hit you?' And she said, 'No, I have to stop this. They're taking over the world,'" Baldwin said. Asked whether she plans to continue protesting the robots, Marvin said she does. She was charged with disorderly conduct. Uber did not respond to their request for a comment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Oct 2026 1:34am GMT

For more than a year, The New York Times followed recipients of a universal basic income program who received $1,330 a month for an entire year. There were benefits, but also the everyday challenges of being poor, and turning their life around "did not turn out to be quite that simple." Across Silicon Valley, experimental guaranteed income programs have quietly taken off. Google began funding six different initiatives in 2022 as part of a $50 million donation to nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area, saying basic income could be a novel way to prevent homelessness in one of the nation's most expensive locations. Each program has hundreds of participants who receive around $1,000 a month, and academics study the results. State and federal tax laws limit the lengths of the programs and the payment amounts. The studies have found that most basic income programs improve short-term employment and mental health while reducing food insecurity. But while data from these efforts has been closely tracked, less is known about the individual journeys of participants... The Times ultimately shadowed three people... All of the program participants, including the ones The Times followed, were previously homeless and transitioning off a housing stipend that paid for a portion of their rent, and many received the payments on top of other social assistance like food stamps. The Times's findings mirrored the academic studies. For all three recipients, the instant benefits of basic income were clear: They had breathing room for groceries, rent and other expenses. But the success of the payments in another area - giving people more free time and opportunity in the long term - was mixed. "It's a lot to ask of someone to get their life together in 12 months, when a lot of these issues are structural or systemic," said Jennifer Loving, who runs Destination: Home, a nonprofit that administers basic income programs in Silicon Valley. "And the world around them isn't getting cheaper." One recipient began going to community college - but resorted to taking one class at a time while single parenting - and using their monthly payments to help support relatives. In fact, the article notes that a recent study of 3,000 universal basic income participants found that money spent supporting friends and family increased 26%, "the most of any category. That was more than the increases for food (6%) and child care (11%)." Another recipient used the time to get help at a community college to find a higher-paying job. And one recipient died - but his mother used what he'd saved to help put his brother through a drug rehab program.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Oct 2026 11:00pm GMT

Research suggests listening more while talking less. Killing aimless meetings can help, too.

17 Oct 2026 11:15am GMT

The single-player is just OK, but according to the players, that doesn't matter.

17 Oct 2026 11:00am GMT

It's been two years since my initial post about making GNOME OS an end-user general purpose OS. Today, we're excited to announce that we've hit a major milestone! TL;DR: We're launching a new edition called "GNOME OS Preview", which is built from the latest stable GNOME release. This means that GNOME OS is no longer just a nightly OS for GNOME developers and testers! ↫ Aaron Ardiri A number of changes and improvements have made the move from nightly status to preview status possible. They've made GNOME OS handle environments with limited amounts of RAM much better - not a luxury, these days - including the ability to dynamically increase the swap space if needed. In addition, the work to make it much easier to install and test daily Flatpak builds of applications is now part of GNOME OS, as is the effort to make command-line utilities manageable in the same way as Flatpaks. As the blog post notes, there's still a ton of work left to do before GNOME OS is ready for everyone. They're going to bet heavily on systemd-homed to enable, among other things, per-user disk encryption, and there's a new installer coming, as well. They also want to ship GNOME's preinstalled applications as Flatpaks, integrate delta updates, and much more. It all looks incredibly appealing, even if I am not the target user for something like GNOME OS.

16 Oct 2026 11:54pm GMT

The actions could have resulted in criminal charges had humans been behind the keyboard.

16 Oct 2026 8:59pm GMT

This repository contains approximately 1 GB of historical Palm OS development material, collected over many years of working with the platform. The archive includes a mixture of publicly distributed development resources, personal development material, technical references, and historical artifacts. ↫ Aaron Ardiri An incredible resource for anyone wishing to dive into Palm OS programming and development in this day and age.

16 Oct 2026 8:47pm GMT

OpenVMS isn't exactly the easiest platform to get into, with even the first major hurdle - licensing! - being a bit of a complex issue. To address this and other issues people new to OpenVMS might run into, VSI, the company currently developing OpenVMS, launched its new VSI How-to Portal. For now, it covers things like licensing, installing and updating OpenVMS for x86, TCP/IP configuration, and setting up SSH. The company plans to expand the portal with more articles based on customer and user feedback, so hopefully more information will appear soon. Most of us are probably not particularly not particularly experienced with OpenVMS, so having a portal like this can really help get you started.

15 Oct 2026 11:55pm GMT

This is a story of how we got from something like this: Failed to deserialize BUILDINFO file: Parser failed with the following error: unknown ^ invalid makepkg build environment option expected `buildflags`, `ccache`, `check`, `color`, `distcc`, `sign`, `makeflags` To this: When the ALPM project started, the goal was fairly simple: Better tooling to interact with the low-level plumbing of Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM). This meant binaries to read/write individual file types, better error messages, extensive specifications and of course exports to common dataformats like JSON. The thing is, although some of us already had experience with low-level dataframe parsing, …

08 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT