computers

01 Aug 2026

Slashdot

Drifting SpaceX Rocket Heading For Accidental Collision With the Moon

"Space.com and The Guardian are reporting that the Falcon 9 upper stage leftover from the launch of the Firefly Blue Ghost-1 lander on Jan. 15, 2025 is due to impact the Moon on Aug. 5, 2026," writes longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot. From a report: Onboard the same flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2, called Resilience, a robotic lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace. According to a new study by an international team, the resulting impact plume may briefly be bright enough to see against the dark sky near the moon's edge. That means it might be visible to moongazers with sufficiently sensitive telescopes. This head-on collision of the errant stage is expected to occur near the Einstein and Bell craters near the western lunar limb. It may well be visible to ground and space-based assets. Using special physics simulations to model the impact, William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas, Austin and colleagues predict the debris plume from the impact will have the central ejecta spike reaching roughly 47 miles to over 60 miles (75 kilometers to 100 kilometers) altitude. "Our calculations suggest the plume should be several orders of magnitude brighter than the dark-sky background for the first few minutes after impact," Jo told Space.com. "So the plume should be visible, though I'd stress this is a single nominal case. The real one will look different, and the numbers are on the optimistic side. But the point worth making is that the flash isn't really the story here." Jo emphasized that there's great slam-dunk science to be had. "Watching this one gives us a rare chance to open up ejecta-plume science and calibrate those models against a real event, which matters for every future thing we deliver to the moon," Jo said.

OpenAI Finds Evidence Other AI Agents Escaped Containment

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI has discovered other instances in which autonomous agents have escaped containment as the company expands its investigation of the hacking incident at tech firm Hugging Face that drew global attention this month, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday. The new breakouts were uncovered during the company's publicly announced investigation into how one of its agents escaped what was meant to be a contained testing environment this month, the two people said, and OpenAI is now looking into those instances as well. One of the sources said that the escapes were limited in nature and that none of the agents were thought to have left OpenAI's network. An OpenAI spokesperson referred to a statement issued by the company on Tuesday that said it was reviewing "broader activity from our models" in addition to the Hugging Face intrusion. The discovery of additional rogue behavior at OpenAI, even if limited in nature, could feed growing appetite for regulation coming out of the White House and elsewhere. The expanded investigation by OpenAI was launched shortly before its primary rival, Anthropic, disclosed that its models were also responsible for a series of break-ins that led to breaches at three other companies dating back to April, according to the two sources and a third source familiar with the matter. The recent discovery of other past breakouts at OpenAI has not previously been reported. AI safety experts said the new disclosures paint a portrait of a group of cutting-edge labs whose ability to develop dangerous autonomous hacking agents outstrips their ability to keep them under control. "We have a whole industry where the people designing, developing and putting out these tools aren't keeping up themselves to responsibly develop these things and keep them safe," said Maurice Chiodo, a mathematician who works at Cambridge University's Center for the Study of Existential Risk. Reuters could not establish exactly how many incidents OpenAI investigators found or the timings or circumstances under which they occurred. The three sources said OpenAI and outside experts were examining log data from earlier in the year in a bid to understand what took place.

31 Jul 2026

Slashdot

The Major Labels Propose Rules to Keep AI Slop Off the Charts

Major record labels including Universal, Sony, and Warner have proposed excluding AI-generated songs from official charts unless they are "substantially human made," properly labeled, legally produced, and free from manipulation concerns. The Verge reports: The proposal goes quite a bit further than a labeling proposal put forth by the RIAA, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), SAG-AFTRA, and others. That would create a set of standardized labels for AI-generated and AI-assisted music. The labels' proposal would require songs be clearly labeled, but it would also keep them off international charts unless they met specific criteria, including being "substantially human made." To be eligible, the songs would also have to respect the terms of service of whatever AI service was used, the model would have to have the rights to any data it was trained on, and "not raise stream or chart manipulation concerns." What sort of concerns and what constitutes "substantially human made" are currently vague. Sony Music, UMG, and Mom+Pop Music did not immediately respond to a request for clarification. The IFPI has thrown its weight behind the labels' proposal, though no charting organization has signaled any immediate plan to adopt the rules [...].

OSnews

Develop cross-platform CLI and GUI tools with Tcl/Tk

Tcl, or the "Tool Command Language", created and released by John Ousterhout in 1990, deserves a place among the greatest products of the human mind. Especially when combined with its better known graphical user interface Toolkit - Tk. In 1997 Ousterhout was awarded the ACM Software System Award for Tcl/Tk, an award given to institutions or individuals recognized for developing software systems with a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both. ↫ Armen Barsegyan Everything you could ever possibly want to know about Tcl/Tk. There's nothing to add here; if this is up your alley - and you know if it is - just go ahead and read it, and stop wasting time here.

31 Jul 2026 10:44pm GMT

Ars Technica

Not just Neanderthals: Ghost lineage in Africa left its mark on our DNA

Some group with no modern descendants contributed a lot to our genomes.

31 Jul 2026 10:17pm GMT

Doctors took a look at man's painful shoulder—they found the joint was missing

The term "Milwaukee Shoulder Syndrome" was coined in 1981, based on cases in four women.

31 Jul 2026 9:51pm GMT

Google plans to exempt sanctioned nations from Android developer verification

Someone in Cuba or Iran can keep installing APKs with no new restrictions, but devs will suffer.

31 Jul 2026 9:35pm GMT

OSnews

LLVM toolchain coming to OpenBSD/sparc64 and SPARC Solaris (snv_151a)

Speaking of OpenBSD: Yes, you read that right. Modern development tools in the form of the LLVM compiler infrastructure is well on its way to supporting OpenBSD/sparc64 along with other more conventional architectures. The support is now ready for testing, via a patch set presented by Kirill A. Korinsky in a message to the tech@ mailing list, with the subject LLVM toolchain for sparc64. ↫ Peter N. M. Hansteen On a related note, the the entire LLVM stack (version 19.1.7, including llvm's binutils, clang, ldd) has also been ported to the SPARC version of Solaris 11 Express (snv_151a). This should make it possible to also port things like Rust and Zig to this same version of Solaris on SPARC, which is good news, because this release supports SPARC hardware long dropped by the current Solaris builds from Oracle.

31 Jul 2026 3:07pm GMT

Dead software walking: the ongoing evolution of relayd(8) and httpd(8)

As I mentioned in my OpenBSD 7.8 highlights post, development of relayd(8) and httpd(8) had stalled. Many diffs appeared on the tech@ mailing list from different contributors, but few were committed into the repository. The main reason was simple: Established OpenBSD developers weren't interested in these daemons anymore. Call it momentum, or timing. Around the same time, kirill@ and I started working on these daemons more actively. We both use them regularly and have real-world use cases. I support customers with OpenBSD setups that often involve complex httpd(8) and relayd(8) configurations. This practical need motivated me on many levels. ↫ Rafael Sadowski They've managed to do a ton of work on these two daemons, fixing many long-standing issues and reviewing tons of stalled patch submissions, while also modernising the code and adding new features. It's great to see people contribute significant time and energy to fixing up the tools they use for everyone else's benefit.

31 Jul 2026 2:55pm GMT