07 Aug 2026
Hacker News
Show HN: Whisper transcribes 70-year-olds more accurately than 20-year-olds
07 Aug 2026 12:10am GMT
Meta Ordered to Pay $942M to Address Harm to Kids from Social Media
07 Aug 2026 12:06am GMT
06 Aug 2026
Slashdot
Google's $15 Billion India Data Center Project Battles Water, Wildlife Concerns
Google's $15 billion data-center project in Visakhapatnam is facing protests and legal challenges over fears that it will worsen local water shortages and disturb wildlife near the Kambalakonda sanctuary. Google says the campus will use advanced air cooling and comply with Indian law, while state officials deny that residential or rural water supplies will be tapped. Reuters reports: The southern state of Andhra Pradesh, governed by an ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi who has hailed the project as historic and transformational, has denied allegations that the project was fast-tracked without weighing risks to water supplies and wildlife. But the growing opposition could become an early test for Google's biggest-ever India investment, which is facing several legal challenges over its impact on water supplies and proximity to a wildlife sanctuary that is home to leopards and pangolins. In recent weeks, activists and children have marched in Visakhapatnam city, holding banners saying "We cannot drink DATA" and painting handcuffs on the Google logo, social media posts show. On Sunday, Reuters attended a public gathering where activists chalked out plans for holding door-to-door awareness campaigns and beach protests in coming days. "Development should not be at the cost of livelihood of the people," Raja Rama Mohan Roy, founder of non-profit Green Visakha said at the event where he presented statistics on Visakhapatnam's stressed water supply and demand. The government says the city receives 410 million liters of water a day from its reservoirs and rivers, against a requirement of 480 million. Rationing of water supplies is common in the city with a population of 2.5 million people. [...] The state's top court on Monday asked the government to defend against allegations leveled by activist group Jal Biradari (Water Community), which says the project will strain water availability by putting stress on a nearby reservoir. The Andhra Pradesh High Court will next hear the public interest litigation on August 24.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
06 Aug 2026 11:00pm GMT
Hacker News
Spin audit of SQD/QSCI quantum-chemistry benchmarks on iron–sulfur clusters
06 Aug 2026 10:50pm GMT
Ars Technica
Organ donation group accused of trying to take living man's organs faces shutdown
The organization, Network for Hope, "strongly disagrees" with Trump admin's decision.
06 Aug 2026 10:20pm GMT
Explosive drone found hovering near Ukrainian cargo aircraft at German airport
Russian attack? Explosive drone targeted parked aircraft at Leipzig airport.
06 Aug 2026 10:01pm GMT
Slashdot
'Tower Dump' Warrants Ruled Unconstitutional
alternative_right shares a report from The Hill: A federal judge in Mississippi ruled Wednesday that "tower dump" warrants are unconstitutional, declining to reverse a lower court decision refusing the government's request to obtain the search warrants in a series of violent crime investigations. A "tower dump" involves cellphone companies providing law enforcement with access to the time and location data of all mobile devices connected to specific cell towers during a designated time window. Law enforcement had sought approval for several of these search warrants as part of criminal investigations into gang-related activity in the Jackson, Miss., area last year, arguing the data could help identify all those potentially involved, particularly in incidents with unknown suspects. A magistrate judge denied the applications, holding that "tower dumps" are impermissible general warrants. The district judge agreed. The order repeatedly referenced the Supreme Court's recent decision in Chatrie v United States, in which the majority held that geofence warrants require constitutional privacy protections. "With this information, the Government asserts that it will be able to identify all potential suspects," Judge Carlton Reeves wrote in a 30-page order (PDF). "Even so, law enforcement would also have access to the cellular records of countless individuals, the vast majority of whom were merely passing by a location at the 'wrong' time." "That is an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment," the judge concluded.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
06 Aug 2026 10:00pm GMT
Azure CTO Pastes Doom Into Paint One Frame At a Time
Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich used Claude to build a gloriously impractical setup that runs Doom in the background and pastes each rendered frame into Microsoft Paint through the Windows clipboard. The project is referred to as "DoomPaint" or "MS Paint Doom" on GitHub. The Register reports: To be clear, Microsoft Paint isn't doing anything other than serving as a place to paste from the game. [...] ViZDoom runs the Doom .wad file and renders it headlessly. Each frame is passed through the Windows clipboard and pasted onto Paint's canvas. A low-level keyboard hook captures and swallows game inputs while Paint is in the foreground, and sound effects come from the game engine. A glance at the code shows Russinovich was more than happy to use Claude to whip it up. In a LinkedIn post, he said: "I've been using Fable 5 on serious research projects and find it a noticeable improvement over Opus 4.8." Using Microsoft Paint as a display for Doom is not, however, a serious research project, as Russinovich acknowledged. "I've also been having fun with it on frivolous ones," he added, so here we are. "Paint renders the game but does not compute it," said Russinovich. "Paint computes nothing. Paint has never computed anything. That's the joke."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
06 Aug 2026 9:00pm GMT
Ars Technica
X wants to keep suing advertisers, asks 5th Circuit to overrule district judge
Musk continues appeal despite court loss and settlement with advertiser group.
06 Aug 2026 8:29pm GMT
Linuxiac
IceWM 4.1 Released with New Window Focus Control

The lightweight IceWM window manager reaches version 4.1 with improved focus handling, safer configuration parsing, and updated translations.
06 Aug 2026 8:17pm GMT
Proxmox VE Officially Expands Beyond x86 With Arm64 Support

Proxmox VE gains its first official Arm64 edition, bringing KVM, LXC, ZFS, Ceph, clustering, and enterprise support to Arm servers.
06 Aug 2026 3:03pm GMT
HWall Is a Promising New Hardware Monitor Built Specifically for Linux

HWall is a new Rust-based Linux hardware monitor with detailed system information, live sensors, charts, alerts, and GTK and terminal interfaces.
06 Aug 2026 2:16pm GMT