31 Jul 2025

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GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning

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31 Jul 2025 10:57am GMT

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DuckStation PS1 Emulator Dev May Drop Linux Support After AUR Frustrations

DuckStation PS1 Emulator Dev May Drop Linux Support After AUR Frustrations

After repeated complaints from Arch users, the DuckStation PS1 emulator dev removed the PKGBUILD and is considering dropping Linux support altogether.

31 Jul 2025 10:46am GMT

feedHacker News

GOP’s Josh Hawley and Democrats vote to advance congressional stock trading ban

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31 Jul 2025 10:07am GMT

feedSlashdot

Australia Widens Teen Social Media Ban To YouTube, Scraps Exemption

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Australia said on Wednesday it will add YouTube to sites covered by its world-first ban on social media for teenagers, reversing an earlier decision to exempt the Alphabet-owned video-sharing site and potentially setting up a legal challenge. The decision came after the internet regulator urged the government last month to overturn the YouTube carve-out, citing a survey that found 37% of minors reported harmful content on the site, the worst showing for a social media platform. "I'm calling time on it," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a statement highlighting that Australian children were being negatively affected by online platforms, and reminding social media of their social responsibility. "I want Australian parents to know that we have their backs." The decision broadens the ban set to take effect in December. YouTube says it is used by nearly three-quarters of Australians aged 13 to 15, and should not be classified as social media because its main activity is hosting videos. "Our position remains clear: YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content, increasingly viewed on TV screens. It's not social media," a YouTube spokesperson said by email.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Jul 2025 10:00am GMT

Peacock Feathers Can Be Lasers

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Peacocks have a secret hidden in their brightly colored tail feathers: tiny reflective structures that can amplify light into a laser beam. After dyeing the feathers and energizing them with an external light source, researchers discovered they emitted narrow beams of yellow-green laser light. They say the study, published this month in Scientific Reports, offers the first example of a laser cavity in the animal kingdom. [...] Scientists have long known that peacock feathers also exhibit "structural color" -- nature's pigment-free way to create dazzling hues. Ordered microstructures within the feathers reflect light at specific frequencies, leading to their vivid blues and greens and iridescence. But Florida Polytechnic University physicist Nathan Dawson and his colleagues wanted to go a step further and see whether those microstructures could also function as a laser cavity. After staining the feathers with a common dye and pumping them with soft pulses of light, they used laboratory instruments to detect beams of yellow-green laser light that were too faint to see with the naked eye. They emerged from the feathers' eyespots, at two distinct wavelengths. Surprisingly, differently colored parts of the eyespots emitted the same wavelengths of laser light, even though each region would presumably vary in its microstructure. Just because peacock feathers emit laser light doesn't mean the birds are somehow using this emission. But there are still ramifications, Dawson says. He suggests that looking for laser light in biomaterials could help identify arrays of regular microstructures within them. In medicine, for example, certain foreign objects -- viruses with distinct geometric shapes, perhaps -- could be classified and identified based on their ability to be lasers, he says. The work also demonstrates how biological materials could one day yield lasers that could be put safely into the human body to emit light for biosensing, medical imaging, and therapeutics. "I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans," Dawson says, "some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Jul 2025 7:00am GMT

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Show HN: AgentGuard – Auto-kill AI agents before they burn through your budget

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31 Jul 2025 5:54am GMT

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Google Tool Misused To Scrub Tech CEO's Shady Past From Search

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google is fond of saying its mission is to "organize the world's information," but who gets to decide what information is worthy of organization? A San Francisco tech CEO has spent the past several years attempting to remove unflattering information about himself from Google's search index, and the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation says he's still at it. Most recently, an unknown bad actor used a bug in one of Google's search tools to scrub the offending articles. The saga began in 2023 when independent journalist Jack Poulson reported on Maury Blackman's 2021 domestic violence arrest. Blackman, who was then the CEO of surveillance tech firm Premise Data Corp., took offense at the publication of his legal issues. The case did not lead to charges after Blackman's 25-year-old girlfriend recanted her claims against the 53-year-old CEO, but Poulson reported on some troubling details of the public arrest report. Blackman has previously used tools like DMCA takedowns and lawsuits to stifle reporting on his indiscretion, but that campaign now appears to have co-opted part of Google's search apparatus. The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) reported on Poulson's work and Blackman's attempts to combat it late last year. In June, Poulson contacted the Freedom of the Press Foundation to report that the article had mysteriously vanished from Google search results. The foundation began an investigation immediately, which led them to a little-known Google search feature known as Refresh Outdated Content. Google created this tool for users to report links with content that is no longer accurate or that lead to error pages. When it works correctly, Refresh Outdated Content can help make Google's search results more useful. However, Freedom of the Press Foundation now says that a bug allowed an unknown bad actor to scrub mentions of Blackman's arrest from the Internet. Upon investigating, FPF found that its article on Blackman was completely absent from Google results, even through a search with the exact title. Poulson later realized that two of his own Substack articles were similarly affected. The Foundation was led to the Refresh Outdated Content tool upon checking its search console. The bug in the tool allowed malicious actors to de-index valid URLs from search results by altering the capitalization in the URL slug. Although URLs are typically case-sensitive, Google's tool treated them as case-insensitive. As a result, when someone submitted a slightly altered version of a working URL (for example, changing "anatomy" to "AnAtomy"), Google's crawler would see it as a broken link (404 error) and mistakenly remove the actual page from search results. Ironically, Blackman is now CEO of the online reputation management firm The Transparency Company.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Jul 2025 3:30am GMT

30 Jul 2025

feedArs Technica

In search of riches, hackers plant 4G-enabled Raspberry Pi in bank network

Sophisticated group also used novel means to disguise their custom malware.

30 Jul 2025 10:21pm GMT

Senate confirms CDC director as top FDA official resigns under political pressure

Senate confirmed Susan Monarez to CDC while Vinay Prasad made a quick exit from FDA.

30 Jul 2025 9:09pm GMT

St. Paul, MN was hacked so badly that the National Guard has been deployed

"A deliberate, coordinated digital attack."

30 Jul 2025 8:47pm GMT

feedLinuxiac

Alma-Based HeliumOS 10 Is Out — Here’s What I Think

Alma-Based HeliumOS 10 Is Out — Here’s What I Think

Alma-based HeliumOS 10 is out now with Linux kernel 6.12, Zsh as default, Btrfs with optional encryption, and Docker preinstalled-here's my take.

30 Jul 2025 8:21pm GMT

Archinstall 3.0.9 Rolls Out with U2F and Bluetooth Support

Archinstall 3.0.9 Rolls Out with U2F and Bluetooth Support

Archinstall 3.0.9, a guided installer for Arch Linux, adds U2F authentication, LUKS iteration tweaks, and Bluetooth support.

30 Jul 2025 9:13am GMT