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"Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper," writes EFF senior policy analyst Joe Mullin. "That's effectively what's begun happening online in the last few months." The Internet Archive - the world's largest digital library - has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s... But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web's traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit... The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several - including the Times - are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There's a strong case that such training is fair use. Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response. Organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems. They are preserving a record of our history. Turning off that preservation in an effort to control AI access could essentially torch decades of historical documentation over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn't start, and didn't ask for. If publishers shut the Archive out, they aren't just limiting bots. They're erasing the historical record... Even if courts place limits on AI training, the law protecting search and web archiving is already well established... There are real disputes over AI training that must be resolved in courts. But sacrificing the public record to fight those battles would be a profound, and possibly irreversible, mistake.

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21 Mar 2026 10:38pm GMT

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21 Mar 2026 9:49pm GMT

13 million people live in Moscow, reports CNN. But since early March the city "has experienced internet and mobile service outages on a level previously unseen." (Though Wi-Fi access to the internet is still available...) Russian social media "is flooded with jokes and memes about sending letters by carrier pigeons or using smartphones as ping-pong paddles..." [Moscow residents] complain they cannot navigate around the center or use their favorite mobile apps. The interruptions appear to have had a knock-on effect of making it more difficult to make voice calls or send an SMS. Some are panic-buying walkie-talkies, paper maps, and even pagers. The latest shutdown builds on similar efforts around the country. For months, mobile internet service interruptions have hit Russia's regions, particularly in provinces bordering Ukraine, which has staged incursions and launched strikes inside Russian territory to counter Russia's full-scale invasion. Some regions have reported not having any mobile internet since summer. But the most recent outages have hit the country's main centers of wealth and power: Moscow and Russia's second city, St. Petersburg. Public officials claim the blackout of mobile internet service in the capital and other regions is part of a security effort to counter "increasingly sophisticated methods" of Ukrainian attack... Speculation centers on whether the authorities are testing their ability to clamp down on public protest in the case there's an effort to reintroduce unpopular mobilization measures to find fresh manpower for the war in Ukraine; whether mobile internet outages may precede a more sweeping digital blackout; or if the new restrictions reflect an atmosphere of heightened fear and paranoia inside the Kremlin as it watches US-led regime- change efforts unfold against Russian allies such as Venezuela and Iran... On Wednesday, Russian mobile providers sent notifications that there would be "temporary restrictions" on mobile internet in parts of Moscow for security reasons, Russian state news agency RIA-Novosti reported. The measures will last "for as long as additional measures are needed to ensure the safety of our citizens," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on March 11... As well as banning many social media platforms, Russia blocks calling features on messenger apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. Roskomnadzor, the country's communications regulator, has introduced a "white list" of approved apps... Russia has also tested what it calls the "sovereign internet," a network that is effectively firewalled from the rest of the world. The disruptions are fueling broader concerns about tightening state control. In parallel with the internet shutdown, the Kremlin has also been pushing to impose a state-controlled messaging app called Max as the country's main portal for state services, payments and everyday communication. There has been speculation the Kremlin may be planning to ban Telegram, Russia's most widely used messaging app, entirely. Roskomnadzor said that it was restricting Telegram for allegedly failing to comply with Russian laws. "Russia has opened a criminal case against me for 'aiding terrorism,'" Telegram's Russian-born founder Pavel Durov said on X last month. "Each day, the authorities fabricate new pretexts to restrict Russians' access to Telegram as they seek to suppress the right to privacy and free speech...." The article includes this quote from Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society and an expert on Russian internet freedom. "In any situation when they (the authorities) perceive some kind of danger for themselves and accept the belief that the internet is dangerous for them, even if it may not be true, they will shut it down," he said. "Just like in Iran."

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21 Mar 2026 9:38pm GMT

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21 Mar 2026 9:27pm GMT

"Juicier steaks could soon be served up after barley was given the go-ahead to become Britain's first gene-edited crop," reports the Telegraph: In an effort to fatten up cows and get them to market faster, scientists have altered the DNA of Golden Promise barley to increase its fat content... [Regulators have approved the feeding of that barley to cows for further studies.] [T]he small increase reduces the time it takes for farmers to raise animals for slaughter and increases the amount of milk and meat they produce to make the industry more profitable. The gene-edited barley is also able to cut the amount of methane a cow produces, [Rothamsted Research professor/biochemist Peter] Eastmond said... Reducing methane from cattle is a major goal of the industry, and Professor Eastmond estimated his barley could cut the methane output from a single cow by up to 15%. The two genetic tweaks to the barley are believed to alter the gut bacteria in cows' stomachs and reduce the amount of methane-generating microbes, cutting the cows' emissions.... [Eastmond] is also working on applying the same two gene edits to rye grass to create pastures and meadows which are lipid-rich and calorie-dense. This, he said, could lead to entire fields of gene-edited grass which could be grazed by cows, sheep, horses and goats to fatten them up and cut emissions... "It would be better to have this technology in a pasture grass that's grown to supply the livestock and graze it directly." The barley "has been modified to have a single letter of DNA removed from two different genes to switch them off," the article points out. "No genes have been added to its DNA and it is not considered to be genetically modified." The article points out that Britain "has launched a push towards more gene-edited crops as a key post-Brexit freedom since splitting from the European Union," noting that U.K. scientists and private companies "have created products such as bread with fewer cancer-causing chemicals, longer-lasting strawberries and bananas, sweeter-tasting lettuce and disease-resistant potatoes, although these are yet to be granted permission to land on supermarket shelves..." But the EU has so far resisted the sale of any gene-edited crops in the EU. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

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21 Mar 2026 8:38pm GMT

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21 Mar 2026 8:32pm GMT

Immich 2.6 includes over 350 commits, delivering faster mobile performance, improved playback, and enhanced sharing features.

21 Mar 2026 7:32pm GMT

antiX Linux 26 arrives based on Debian 13 Trixie with five init systems, a systemd-free design, and a fast, lightweight environment built for efficiency.

21 Mar 2026 3:56pm GMT

KDE Plasma 6.7 will introduce time zone offsets in the clock and a new type-ahead desktop navigation feature for faster file access.

21 Mar 2026 11:43am GMT

This week's result is just the latest in a growing collection of discoveries.

21 Mar 2026 11:00am GMT

"Assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do."

21 Mar 2026 10:00am GMT

The verdict, while not a complete loss, could still cost him billions.

20 Mar 2026 10:27pm GMT