Broadcom employees have had their personal data compromised following a September 2024 ransomware attack on Business Systems House (BSH).

The breach, claimed by the Russian-speaking El Dorado ransomware group, wasn't fully identified until December when stolen data appeared online, according to The Register. Broadcom only received details of affected employees on May 12, 2025. Compromised information potentially includes national ID numbers, financial account numbers, health insurance details, dates of birth, salary information, and contact details.

Five employee accounts were initially compromised, ultimately affecting 560 users. ADP has distanced itself from the incident, stating only "a small subset of ADP clients" in "certain countries in the Middle East" were affected.

Editor's note: This story was updated shortly after publication to correctly state that BSH is a business partner of payroll company ADP, and not a subsidiary of ADP as first reported.

Montana has enacted SB 282, becoming the first state to prohibit law enforcement from purchasing personal data they would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. The landmark legislation closes what privacy advocates call the "data broker loophole," which previously allowed police to buy geolocation data, electronic communications, and other sensitive information from third-party vendors without judicial oversight.

The new law specifically restricts government access to precise geolocation data, communications content, electronic funds transfers, and "sensitive data" including health status, religious affiliation, and biometric information. Police can still access this information through traditional means: warrants, investigative subpoenas, or device owner consent.

For the first time, the growth in China's clean power generation has caused the nation's carbon dioxide emissions to fall despite rapid power demand growth. From a report:The new analysis for Carbon Brief shows that China's emissions were down 1.6% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2025 and by 1% in the latest 12 months. Electricity supply from new wind, solar and nuclear capacity was enough to cut coal-power output even as demand surged, whereas previous falls were due to weak growth.

The analysis, based on official figures and commercial data, shows that China's CO2 emissions have now been stable, or falling, for more than a year. However, they remain only 1% below the latest peak, implying that any short-term jump could cause China's CO2 emissions to rise to a new record.

A Northeastern University student demanded her tuition money back after discovering her business professor was secretly using AI to create course materials. Ella Stapleton, who graduated this year, grew suspicious when she noticed telltale signs of AI generation in her professor's lecture notes, including a stray ChatGPT citation in the bibliography, recurring typos matching machine outputs, and images showing figures with extra limbs.

"He's telling us not to use it, and then he's using it himself," Stapleton told the New York Times. After filing a formal complaint with Northeastern's business school, Stapleton requested a tuition refund of about $8,000 for the course. The university ultimately rejected her claim. Professor Rick Arrowood acknowledged using ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and presentation generator Gamma. "In hindsight, I wish I would have looked at it more closely," he said.

YouTube has suspended ad revenue for two additional channels -- Screen Trailers and Royal Trailer -- as part of an ongoing effort to combat fake movie trailers using AI-generated content. These channels, alternative accounts of previously demonetized Screen Culture and KH Studio, splice actual movie footage with AI-generated material, often accumulating millions of views.

The action follows a recent Deadline investigation revealing Hollywood studios had requested YouTube redirect revenue from these misleading videos. Despite losing monetization, Screen Culture, which has 1.42 million subscribers, continues uploading content including a recent "Trailer 2 concept" for James Gunn's upcoming Superman film.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, Telegram announced it had removed two huge black markets estimated to have generated more than $35 billion since 2021 by serving cybercriminals and scammers. Blockchain research firm Elliptic told Reuters that the Chinese-language markets Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee together were far more lucrative than Silk Road, an illegal drug marketplace that the FBI notoriously seized in 2013, which was valued at about $3.4 billion. Both markets were forced offline on Tuesday, Elliptic reported, and already, Huione Guarantee has confirmed that its market will cease to operate entirely due to the Telegram removal.

The disruption of both markets will be "a big blow for online fraudsters," Elliptic confirmed, cutting them off from a dependable source for "stolen data, money laundering services, and telecoms infrastructure." [...] Elliptic reported that Telegram connected black markets with an audience of a billion users, noting that Telegram tried to remove several Huione Guarantee channels earlier this year, but "the marketplace was ready" with backups and remained online until this week. Wired suggested that Huione Guarantee "operated in plain sight" on Telegram for years. But Telegram suggested it just discovered it. Huione Guarantee is a subsidiary of Huione Group, which was recently sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for supporting "criminal syndicates who have stolen billions of dollars from Americans." According to Reuters, that included allegedly laundering "at least $37 million in crypto from cyber heists by North Korea and $36 million of crypto from so-called 'pig butchering' scams."

School districts across the United States were woefully unprepared for ChatGPT's impact on education, according to thousands of pages of public records obtained by 404 Media. Documents from early 2023, the publication reports, show a "total crapshoot" in responses, with some state education departments admitting they hadn't considered ChatGPT's implications while others hired pro-AI consultants to train educators.

In California, when principals sought guidance, state officials responded that "unfortunately, the topic of ChatGPT has not come up in our circles." One California official admitted, "I have never heard of ChatGPT prior to your email." Meanwhile, Louisiana's education department circulated presentations suggesting AI "is like giving a computer a brain" and warning that "going back to writing essays - only in class - can hurt struggling learners."

Some administrators accepted the technology enthusiastically, with one Idaho curriculum head calling ChatGPT "AMAZING" and comparing resistance to early reactions against spell-check.

The Federal Trade Commission has postponed enforcement of its consumer-friendly "click to cancel" rule from May 14 to July 14, giving businesses two additional months to comply. The regulation requires companies to make subscription cancellations as straightforward as the sign-up process, prohibiting practices like forcing customers who subscribed online to navigate through chatbots or call centers to cancel.

The rule, established under former Democratic Chair Lina Khan, unsurprisingly has garnered support from consumer advocates while facing legal opposition from industry groups. A coalition including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and organizations representing major telecom and media companies -- Charter Communications, Comcast, Disney Entertainment, and Warner Bros. Discovery -- has sued to block implementation, claiming the agency exceeded its authority.

Google has warned that the hacker group known as "Scattered Spider," which recently disrupted UK retailer Marks & Spencer, is now targeting U.S. retailers with aggressive and sophisticated cyberattacks. "U.S. retailers should take note. These actors are aggressive, creative, and particularly effective at circumventing mature security programs," John Hultquist, an analyst at Google's cybersecurity arm, said in an email sent on Wednesday. The Guardian reports: Scattered Spider is widely reported to have been behind the particularly disruptive hack at M&S, one of the best-known names in British business, whose online operations have been frozen since 25 April. It has a history of focusing on a single sector at a time and is likely to target retail for a while longer, Hultquist said. Just a day before Google's warning, M&S announced that some customer data had been accessed, but this did not include usable payment or card details, or any account passwords. The Guardian understands the details taken are names, addresses and order histories. M&S said personal information had been accessed because of the "sophisticated nature of the incident."

"Today, we are writing to customers informing them that due to the sophisticated nature of the incident, some of their personal customer data has been taken," the company said. Hackers from the Scattered Spider ecosystem have been behind a slew of disruptive break-ins on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2023, hackers tied to the group made headlines for hacking the casino operators MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment. Law enforcement has struggled to get a handle on the Scattered Spider hacking groups, in part because of their amorphousness, the hackers' youth, and a lack of cooperation from cybercrime victims.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Would you believe Microsoft has announced a new Linux distribution service for its Azure cloud service? You should. For many years, the most popular operating system on Azure has not been Windows Server, it's been Linux. Last time I checked, in 2024, Azure Linux Platforms Group Program Manager Jack Aboutboul told me that 60% of Azure Marketplace offerings and more than 60% of virtual machine cores use Linux. Those figures mean it's sensible for Microsoft to make it easier than ever for Linux distributors to release first-class Linux distros on Azure. The tech giant is taking this step, said Andrew Randall, principal manager for the Azure Core Linux product management team, by making "Azure Image Testing for Linux (AITL) available 'as a service' to distro publishers."

ATIL is built on Microsoft's Linux Integration Services Automation project (LISA). Microsoft's Linux Systems Group originally developed this initiative to validate Linux OS images. LISA is a Linux quality validation system with two parts: a test framework to drive test execution and a set of test suites to verify Linux distribution quality. LISA is now open-sourced under the MIT License. The system enables continuous testing of Linux images, covering a wide range of scenarios from kernel updates to complex cloud-native workloads. [...] Specifically, the ATIL service is designed to streamline the deployment, testing, and management of Linux images on Azure. The service builds on the company's internal expertise and open-source tools to provide:

- Curated, Azure-optimized, security-hardened Linux images
- Automated quality assurance and compliance testing for Linux distributions
- Seamless integration with Azure's cloud-native services and Kubernetes environments Krum Kashan, Microsoft Azure Linux Platforms Group program manager, said in a statement: "While numerous testing tools are available for validating Linux kernels, guest OS images, and user space packages across various cloud platforms, finding a comprehensive testing framework that addresses the entire platform stack remains a significant challenge. A robust framework is essential, one that seamlessly integrates with Azure's environment while providing coverage for major testing tools, such as LTP and kselftest, and covers critical areas like networking, storage, and specialized workloads, including Confidential VMs, HPC, and GPU scenarios. This unified testing framework is invaluable for developers, Linux distribution providers, and customers who build custom kernels and images."

Amazon's Audible is expanding its audiobook offerings by giving select publishers access to its AI-powered production tools that will let them more easily convert books into audiobooks with over 100 customizable AI voices to choose from. It will also launch an AI translation tool in beta later this year to help publishers translate and localize audiobooks into multiple languages, with both automated and human-assisted options. The Verge reports: Audible says its new AI narration technology leverages Amazon's advanced AI capabilities and will be made available to interested publishing partners in the coming months in one of two ways. For publishers wanting to be hands-off, an end-to-end service managed by Audible handles the "entire audiobook production process" right up to publication, while a self-service option will give publishers access to the same tools so they can independently direct the entire production process.

With both options, publishers are able to "choose from a quickly growing and improving selection of more than 100 AI-generated voices across English, Spanish, French, and Italian with multiple accent and dialect options, and will be able to access voice upgrades for their titles as our technology evolves," according to Amazon. [...] Publishers will also be able to review translations themselves or opt for a human review through Audible with a professional linguist.

The Department of Commerce officially rescinded the Biden administration's Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Rule on Tuesday, just days before its May 15 implementation date. The rule would have imposed first-ever export restrictions on U.S.-made AI chips to dozens of countries while tightening existing controls on China and Russia.

Instead of implementing blanket restrictions, the DOC signaled a shift toward direct country-by-country negotiations. The department released interim guidance reminding companies that using Huawei's Ascend AI chips anywhere violates U.S. export rules and warned about consequences of allowing U.S. chips to train AI models in China. Commerce Secretary for Industry and Security Jeffery Kessler criticized the previous administration's approach, calling it "ill-conceived and counterproductive."

Over 400 prominent UK media and arts figures -- including Paul McCartney, Elton John, and Ian McKellen -- have urged the prime minister to support an amendment to the Data Bill that would require AI companies to disclose which copyrighted works they use for training. The Register reports: The UK government proposes to allow exceptions to copyright rules in the case of text and data mining needed for AI training, with an opt-out option for content producers. "Government amendments requiring an economic impact assessment and reports on the feasibility of an 'opt-out' copyright regime and transparency requirements do not meet the moment, but simply leave creators open to years of copyright theft," the letter says.

The group -- which also includes Kate Bush, Robbie Williams, Tom Stoppard, and Russell T Davies -- said the amendments tabled for the Lords debate would create a requirement for AI firms to tell copyright owners which individual works they have ingested. "Copyright law is not broken, but you can't enforce the law if you can't see the crime taking place. Transparency requirements would make the risk of infringement too great for AI firms to continue to break the law," the letter states. Baroness Kidron, who proposed the amendment, said: "How AI is developed and who it benefits are two of the most important questions of our time. The UK creative industries reflect our national stories, drive tourism, create wealth for the nation, and provide 2.4 million jobs across our four nations. They must not be sacrificed to the interests of a handful of US tech companies." Baroness Kidron added: "The UK is in a unique position to take its place as a global player in the international AI supply chain, but to grasp that opportunity requires the transparency provided for in my amendments, which are essential to create a vibrant licensing market."

The letter was also signed by a number of media organizations, including the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, and the National Union of Journalists.

Ticketmaster will now show full ticket prices upfront -- fees included. "The company announced the 'All In Prices' initiative on Monday as part of its efforts to comply with the Federal Trade Commission's ban on junk fees, which goes into effect on May 12th," notes The Verge. From the report: Now, when you're shopping for tickets, Ticketmaster will display a ticket's full price, alongside a dropdown menu that you can select to see how much you're paying for the "Face Value" of a ticket and the service fee. You still won't see local taxes or delivery fees until checkout.

Ticketmaster says it has made some improvements to its queue as well, by offering real-time updates about ticket availability and when wait times are expected to last more than 30 minutes. It also allows customers to see exactly how many people are ahead of them in the queue.

The climate crisis is threatening the future of the world's most popular fruit, as almost two-thirds of banana-growing areas in Latin America and the Caribbean may no longer be suitable for growing the fruit by 2080, new research has found. From a report: Rising temperatures, extreme weather and climate-related pests are pummeling banana-growing countries such as Guatemala, Costa Rica and Colombia, reducing yields and devastating rural communities across the region, according to Christian Aid's new report, Going Bananas: How Climate Change Threatens the World's Favourite Fruit.

Bananas are the world's most consumed fruit -- and the fourth most important food crop globally, after wheat, rice and maize. About 80% of bananas grown globally are for local consumption, and more than 400 million people rely on the fruit for 15% to 27% of their daily calories.

The United States and China said Monday they reached an agreement to temporarily reduce the tariffs [non-paywalled source] they have imposed on each other in an attempt to defuse the trade war threatening the world's two largest economies. From a report: In a joint statement, the countries said they would suspend their respective tariffs for 90 days while they negotiate. Under the agreement, the United States would reduce the tariff on Chinese imports to 30 percent from its current 145 percent, while China would lower its import duty on American goods to 10 percent from 125 percent.

"We concluded that we have a shared interest," said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at a news conference in Geneva where U.S. and Chinese officials met over the weekend. "The consensus from both delegations is that neither side wanted a decoupling," he said. The agreement breaks an impasse that had brought trade between China and the United States to a halt. Many American businesses had suspended orders, holding out hope that the two countries could strike a deal to bring down the tariff rates while raising the spectre of price increases.

Business Insider tells the story in three bullet points:

- Big Tech companies depend on content made by others to train their AI models.

- Some of those creators say using their work to train AI is copyright infringement.

- The U.S. Copyright Office just published a report that indicates it may agree.

The office released on Friday its latest in a series of reports exploring copyright laws and artificial intelligence. The report addresses whether the copyrighted content AI companies use to train their AI models qualifies under the fair use doctrine. AI companies are probably not going to like what they read...

AI execs argue they haven't violated copyright laws because the training falls under fair use. According to the U.S. Copyright Office's new report, however, it's not that simple. "Although it is not possible to prejudge the result in any particular case, precedent supports the following general observations," the office said. "Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs — all of which can affect the market."

The office made a distinction between AI models for research and commercial AI models. "When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research — the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness — the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training," the office said. "But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries."
The report says outputs "substantially similar to copyrighted works in the dataset" are less likely to be considered transformative than when the purpose "is to deploy it for research, or in a closed system that constrains it to a non-substitutive task."

Business Insider adds that "A day after the office released the report, President Donald Trump fired its director, Shira Perlmutter, a spokesperson told Business Insider."

18 years ago Slashdot covered the creation of Spaceport America.

Today Space.com hails it as "the first purpose-built commercial spaceport in the world." But engineer/executive director Scott McLaughlin has plans to grow even more. Already home to an array of commercial space industry tenants, such as Virgin Galactic, SpinLaunch, Up Aerospace, and Prismatic, Spaceport America is a "rocket-friendly environment of 6,000 square miles of restricted airspace, low population density, a 12,000-foot by 200-foot runway, vertical launch complexes, and about 340 days of sunshine and low humidity," the organization boasts on its website...

Space.com: What changes do you see that make Spaceport America even more viable today?

McLaughlin: I think opening ourselves up to doing different kinds of work. We're more like a civilian test range now. We've got high-altitude UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles]. We're willing to do engine production. We believe we're about to sign a data center, one that's able to provide services to our customers who want low-latency, artificial intelligence, or high-powered computing. You'll be able to rent some virtual machines and do your own thing and have it be instantaneous at the spaceport. So I think being more broadminded about what we can do at the spaceport is helping generate customers and revenue...

Our goal is to see Virgin Galactic fly in a year or so, hopefully flying twice a week, and that will have a big impact on the spaceport... [W]e're trying to be open-minded as we're partnered with White Sands Missile Range to use that airspace. We're even looking at things like an electromagnetic pulse facility. It's a customer that I can't identify yet... We are working on a "reentry" license too. We recently discussed this with specialists and we think we have a site relatively close to the spaceport that's flat and free of mesquite bushes and such, so we can do capsule return and other types of return. And of course we have the runway. So I'd think we'd be the only spaceport that does vertical and horizontal launch and reentry....

We're never going to have the throughput that the Cape in Florida has. But we'll be a good alternative especially if you're going to do a small to medium-sized launch, and you need to do it quickly, and perhaps do it more securely than you would if you were to fly over water. That's why the Department of Defense is showing interest in the inland spaceport.

Chungin Lee used ChatGPT to help write the essay that got him into Columbia University — and then "proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment," reports New York magazine's blog Intelligencer: As a computer-science major, he depended on AI for his introductory programming classes: "I'd just dump the prompt into ChatGPT and hand in whatever it spat out." By his rough math, AI wrote 80 percent of every essay he turned in. "At the end, I'd put on the finishing touches. I'd just insert 20 percent of my humanity, my voice, into it," Lee told me recently... When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, "It's the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife."
He eventually did meet a co-founder, and after three unpopular apps they found success by creating the "ultimate cheat tool" for remote coding interviews, according to the article. "Lee posted a video of himself on YouTube using it to cheat his way through an internship interview with Amazon. (He actually got the internship, but turned it down.)" The article ends with Lee and his co-founder raising $5.3 million from investors for one more AI-powered app, and Lee says they'll target the standardized tests used for graduate school admissions, as well as "all campus assignments, quizzes, and tests. It will enable you to cheat on pretty much everything."

Somewhere along the way Columbia put him on disciplinary probation — not for cheating in coursework, but for creating the apps. But "Lee thought it absurd that Columbia, which had a partnership with ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, would punish him for innovating with AI." (OpenAI has even made ChatGPT Plus free to college students during finals week, the article points out, with OpenAI saying their goal is just teaching students how to use it responsibly.) Although Columbia's policy on AI is similar to that of many other universities' — students are prohibited from using it unless their professor explicitly permits them to do so, either on a class-by-class or case-by-case basis — Lee said he doesn't know a single student at the school who isn't using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn't think this is a bad thing. "I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating," he said...

In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments.
The article points out ChatGPT's monthly visits increased steadily over the last two years — until June, when students went on summer vacation. "College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point," a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.... It isn't as if cheating is new. But now, as one student put it, "the ceiling has been blown off." Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences?
After using ChatGPT for their final semester of high school, one student says "My grades were amazing. It changed my life." So she continued used it in college, and "Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students' laptops open to ChatGPT."

One ethics professor even says "The students kind of recognize that the system is broken and that there's not really a point in doing this." (Yes, students are even using AI to cheat in ethics classes...) It's not just the students: Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students' essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.

Though global sea levels "varied little" for the 2,000 years before the 20th century, CNN reports that sea levels then "started rising and have not stopped since — and the pace is accelerating."

And sea level rise "was unexpectedly high last year, according to a recent NASA analysis of satellite data." More concerning, however, is the longer-term trend. The rate of annual sea level rise has more than doubled over the past 30 years, resulting in the global sea level increasing 4 inches since 1993. "It's like we're putting our foot on the gas pedal," said Benjamin Hamlington, a research scientist in the Sea Level and Ice Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. While other climate signals fluctuate, global sea level has a "persistent rise," he told CNN.

It spells trouble for the future. Scientists have a good idea how much average sea level will rise by 2050 — around 6 inches globally, and as much as 10 to 12 inches in the US. Past 2050, however, things get very fuzzy. "We have such a huge range of uncertainty," said Dirk Notz, head of sea ice at the University of Hamburg. "The numbers are just getting higher and higher and higher very quickly." The world could easily see an extra 3 feet of sea level rise by 2100, he told CNN; it could also take hundreds of years to reach that level. Scientists simply don't know enough yet to project what will happen.

What scientists are crystal clear about is the reason for the rise: human-caused global warming. Oceans absorb roughly 90% of the excess heat primarily produced by burning fossil fuels, and as water heats up it expands. Heat in the oceans and atmosphere is also driving melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which together hold enough fresh water to raise global sea levels by around 213 feet. Melting ice sheets have driven roughly two-thirds of longer-term sea level rise, although last year — the planet's hottest on record — the two factors flipped, making ocean warming the main driver. [SciTechDaily reports that between 2021 and 2023 the Antarctica ice sheet actually showed an overall increase in mass which exerted a negative contribution to sea level rise.]

It's likely that an increase of about 3 feet is already locked in, Notz said, because "we have pushed the system too hard." The big question is, how quickly will it happen? Ice sheets are the biggest uncertainty, as it's not clear how fast they'll react as the world heats up — whether they'll melt steadily or reach a tipping point and rapidly collapse... [I]t's still unclear how processes may unfold over the next decades and centuries. Antarctica is "the elephant in the room," he said. Alarming changes are unfolding on this vast icy continent, which holds enough water to raise levels by 190 feet.

Notz describes the ice sheet as an "awakening giant:" It takes a long time to wake up but once awake, "it's very, very difficult to put it back to sleep."
The article notes that U.S. coastlines "are tracking above global average and toward the upper end of climate model projections, NASA's Hamlington said." (The state of Louisiana has one of the highest rates of land loss in the world, with some places experiencing nearly 4x the global rate of relative sea level rise.) But it's not just a problem for America.

"Over the next three decades, islands such as Tuvalu, Kiribati and Fiji will experience at least 6 inches of sea level rise even if the world reduces planet-heating pollution, according to NASA.... "Entire villages in Fiji have been formally relocated," said Fijian activist George Nacewa, from climate group 350.org, "the incoming tides are flooding our roads and inundating our crops." However, if the pace accelerates rapidly, "it will be very, very difficult to adapt to, because things unfold too quickly," he said.
"Humans still have control over how fast sea level rises over the next decades and centuries by cutting emissions, Notz noted."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader RoccamOccam for sharing the news.