Reinforcement learning pioneers Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton have warned against the unsafe deployment of AI systems [alternative source] after winning computing's prestigious $1 million Turing Award Wednesday. "Releasing software to millions of people without safeguards is not good engineering practice," said Barto, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, comparing it to testing a bridge by having people use it.

Barto and Sutton developed reinforcement learning in the 1980s, inspired by psychological studies of human learning. The technique, which rewards AI systems for desired behaviors, has become fundamental to advances at OpenAI and Google. Sutton, a University of Alberta professor and former DeepMind researcher, dismissed tech companies' artificial general intelligence narrative as "hype."

Both laureates also criticized President Trump's proposed cuts to federal research funding, with Barto calling it "wrong and a tragedy" that would eliminate opportunities for exploratory research like their early work.

Australian company Cortical Labs has launched the CL1, the world's first commercial "biological computer" that merges human brain cells with silicon hardware to form adaptable, energy-efficient neural networks. New Atlas reports: Known as a Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI), Cortical's CL1 system was officially launched in Barcelona on March 2, 2025, and is expected to be a game-changer for science and medical research. The human-cell neural networks that form on the silicon "chip" are essentially an ever-evolving organic computer, and the engineers behind it say it learns so quickly and flexibly that it completely outpaces the silicon-based AI chips used to train existing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

"Today is the culmination of a vision that has powered Cortical Labs for almost six years," said Cortical founder and CEO Dr Hon Weng Chong. "We've enjoyed a series of critical breakthroughs in recent years, most notably our research in the journal Neuron, through which cultures were embedded in a simulated game-world, and were provided with electrophysiological stimulation and recording to mimic the arcade game Pong. However, our long-term mission has been to democratize this technology, making it accessible to researchers without specialized hardware and software. The CL1 is the realization of that mission." He added that while this is a groundbreaking step forward, the full extent of the SBI system won't be seen until it's in users' hands.

"We're offering 'Wetware-as-a-Service' (WaaS)," he added -- customers will be able to buy the CL-1 biocomputer outright, or simply buy time on the chips, accessing them remotely to work with the cultured cell technology via the cloud. "This platform will enable the millions of researchers, innovators and big-thinkers around the world to turn the CL1's potential into tangible, real-word impact. We'll provide the platform and support for them to invest in R&D and drive new breakthroughs and research." These remarkable brain-cell biocomputers could revolutionize everything from drug discovery and clinical testing to how robotic "intelligence" is built, allowing unlimited personalization depending on need. The CL1, which will be widely available in the second half of 2025, is an enormous achievement for Cortical -- and as New Atlas saw recently with a visit to the company's Melbourne headquarters -- the potential here is much more far-reaching than Pong. [...]

Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD is rapidly gaining market share in Australia, with sales rising 65% last year as nearly one in four EVs sold in the country was a BYD, according to EVDirect CEO David Smitherman. Chinese EVs now comprise roughly one-third of electric vehicles sold in Australia, which has no domestic auto industry to protect with tariffs, unlike the United States where both Trump and Biden administrations have effectively blocked Chinese EV imports.

The Biden administration imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs to shield U.S. automakers from what it termed unfair competition. U.S. officials also blocked Chinese vehicle software over security concerns that Beijing could use internet-connected cars for surveillance. Australian authorities are monitoring U.S. developments but remain noncommittal despite security experts urging restrictions on Chinese connected car technology.

A fully driverless Maserati MC20 Coupe set a new autonomous land speed record, reaching 197.7 mph at the Kennedy Space Center. The Verge reports: The Maserati was running self-driving software developed by Politecnico di Milano, Italy's largest scientific and technological university. The team also worked with the Indy Autonomous Challenge, which most recently ran at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway during CES 2025. In the shadow of NASA's iconic Space Shuttles, the race car flew down the 2.8-mile runway at record-breaking speeds, surpassing the 192.2mph record that was also held by Indy Autonomous Challenge and PoliMOVE, set by an IAC AV-21 race car in April 2022.

The Maserati MC20 is a stylish -- and expensive -- choice for the autonomous run. Retailing for at least $239,000, the race car sports a mid-mounted, twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter V-6 that Maserati calls the Nettuno. The engine makes serious power: 621 horsepower and 538 pound-feet of torque, which is sent through an eight-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission to the rear wheels.

The world's biggest call center company is using artificial intelligence to "neutralise" Indian accents for Western customers. From a report: Teleperformance said it was applying real-time AI software on phone calls in order to increase "human empathy" between two people on the phone. The French company's customers in the UK include parts of the Government, the NHS, Vodafone and eBay.

Teleperformance has 90,000 employees in India and tens of thousands more in other countries. It is using software from Sanas, an American company that says the system helps "build a more understanding world" and reduces miscommunication. The company's website says it makes call center workers more productive and means customer service calls are resolved more quickly. The company also says it means call center workers are less likely to be abused and customers are less likely to demand to speak to a supervisor. It is already used by companies including Walmart and UPS.

"TrapC, a fork of the C language, is being developed as a potential solution for memory safety issues that have hindered the C and C++ languages," reports InfoWorld.

But also being developed is a compiler named trapc "intended to be implemented as a cybersecurity compiler for C and C++ code, said developer Robin Rowe..." Due by the end of this year, trapc will be a free, open source compiler similar to Clang... Rowe said.

TrapC has pointers that are memory-safe, addressing the memory safety issue with the two languages. With TrapC, developers write in C or C++ and compile in TrapC, for memory safety...

Rowe presented TrapC at an ISO C meeting this week. Developers can download a TrapC whitepaper and offer Rowe feedback. According to the whitepaper, TrapC's memory management is automatic and cannot leak memory. Pointers are lifetime-managed, not garbage-collected. Also, TrapC reuses a few code safety features from C++, notably member functions, constructors, destructors, and the new keyword.
"TrapC Memory Safe Pointers will not buffer overrun and will not segfault," Rowe told the ISO C Committee standards body meeting, according to the Register. "When C code is compiled using a TrapC compiler, all pointers become Memory Safe Pointers and are checked."

In short, TrapC "is a programming language forked from C, with changes to make it LangSec and Memory Safe," according to that white paper. "To accomplish that, TrapC seeks to eliminate all Undefined Behavior in the C programming language..."

"The startup TRASEC and the non-profit Fountain Abode have a TrapC compiler in development, called trapc," the whitepaper adds, and their mission is "to enable recompiling legacy C code into executables that are safe by design and secure by default, without needing much code refactoring... The TRASEC trapc cybersecurity compiler with AI code reasoning is expected to release as free open source software sometime in 2025."

In November the Register offered some background on the origins of TrapC...

It's a feature-length film "rendered on a free and open-source software platform called Blender," reports Reuters. And it just won the Oscar for best animated feature film, beating movies from major studios like Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks.

In January Blender.org called Flow "the manifestation of Blender's mission, where a small, independent team with a limited budget is able to create a story that moves audiences worldwide, and achieve recognition with over 60 awards, including a Golden Globe for Best Animation and two Oscar nominations." The entire project cost just $3.7 million, reports NPR — though writer/director Gints Zilbalodis tells Blender.org that it took about five and a half years.

"I think a certain level of naivety is necessary when starting a project," Zilbalodis tells Blender. "If I had known how difficult it would be, I might never have started. But because I didn't fully grasp the challenges ahead, I just dove in and figured things out along the way..." Zilbalodis: [A]fter making a few shorts, I realized that I'm not good at drawing, and I switched to 3D because I could model things, and move the camera... After finishing my first feature Away, I decided to switch to Blender [from Maya] in 2019, mainly because of EEVEE... It took a while to learn some of the stuff, but it was actually pretty straightforward. Many of the animators in Flow took less than a week to switch to Blender...

I've never worked in a big studio, so I don't really know exactly how they operate. But I think that if you're working on a smaller indie-scale project, you shouldn't try to copy what big studios do. Instead, you should develop a workflow that best suits you and your smaller team.
You can get a glimpse of their animation style in Flow's official trailer.

NPR says that ultimately Flow's images "possess a kinetic elegance. They have the alluring immersiveness of a video game..."

What's Linux's marketshare on Steam? The Steam Survey numbers tell this story:

11/24: 2.03%
12/24: 2.29%
01/25: 2.06%
02:25: 1.45%

"The February numbers show a staggering 0.61% drop to Linux use..." reports Phoronix. But they attribute this to an sampling error: According to the survey, it shows 50% of Steam users using the Simplified Chinese language pack [a 20% increase from the month before]. In prior months where there has been drops to Linux use, it's been correlated to wild swings in the Chinese use on Steam. This looks to be another such month.

Of the Linux specific data, SteamOS continues to prove most popular for that Valve distribution powering the Steam Deck [at 34.67%, with Arch Linux coming in second at 9.7%].

AMD CPUs power around 70% of the Linux gaming systems thanks to the Steam Deck APU and AMD Ryzen being quite popular with Linux enthusiasts.

Lenovo demonstrated "a laptop with a foldable screen and one that can get extra battery life from solar power," reports CNBC, emphasizing that "These laptops are just concepts, meaning they are not commercially available."

But "Lenovo, the world's biggest PC maker, has a history of showing off imaginative concepts with some becoming reality, so it's worth keeping an eye on what the Chinese technology giant is up to..." The latest concepts were unveiled at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona... When fully unfolded, the screen is an 18-inch display [on the Lenovo ThinkBook 'flip' concept]... The screen can then be folded in half horizontally to create two screens — one on the front and one on the back. The entire display can be folded down flat so the laptop turns into a tablet-like device.
Lenovo also showed off a Yoga Solar PC concept, reports Gizmodo, calling it "relatively thin and light" despite a solar panel in its lid with "a supposed 24% solar conversion rate": Lenovo claims they achieved this by maneuvering the gridlines you usually find on a solar panel behind the solar cells, offering more real estate for energy absorption... Lenovo's software showed the power accumulation at around 7 V when facing away from the sunlight and 12 V when facing toward it. It could get more when getting direct sunlight. Despite the presence of the solar panel, the laptop still weighs a little more than 2.6 pounds, which isn't out of the realm of what to expect from most modern laptops.

We should note that the panel isn't generating the required power to run the PC continuously. Lenovo claimed that 20 minutes of direct sunlight will transform into about one hour of video playback battery life. Depending on the CPU and battery, that could be 1/20 of the laptop's battery life.
CNBC had slightly different statistics for the laptop's battery life. "Lenovo said that the solar panels can absorb even ambient light in a person's surroundings to give a user an extra hour of laptop use at the end of an eight-hour work day..."

Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone) shared an interesting blog post. They'd spotted a Reddit post "detailing how someone took a 27-year-old visual basic EXE file, fed it to Claude 3.7, and watched as it reverse-engineered the program and rewrote it in Python." It was an old Visual Basic 4 program they had written in 1997. Running a VB4 exe in 2024 can be a real yak-shaving compatibility nightmare, chasing down outdated DLLs and messy workarounds. So! OP decided to upload the exe to Claude 3.7 with this request:

"Can you tell me how to get this file running? It'd be nice to convert it to Python.">

Claude 3.7 analyzed the binary, extracted the VB 'tokens' (VB is not a fully-machine-code-compiled language which makes this task a lot easier than something from C/C++), identified UI elements, and even extracted sound files. Then, it generated a complete Python equivalent using Pygame. According to the author, the code worked on the first try and the entire process took less than five minutes...
Torrone speculates on what this might mean. "Old business applications and games could be modernized without needing the original source code... Tools like Claude might make decompilation and software archaeology a lot easier: proprietary binaries from dead platforms could get a new life in open-source too."

And maybe Archive.org could even add an LLM "to do this on the fly!"

Active since 1995, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (or CPAN) hosts 221,742 Perl modules written by 14,548 authors. This week they announced that the CPAN Security Group "was authorized by the CVE Program as a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA)" to assign and manage CVE vulnerability identifications for Perl and CPAN Modules.

"This is great news!" posted Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman on social media, saying the announcement came "Just in time for my talk about this very topic in a few weeks about how all open source projects should be doing this" at the Linux Foundation Member Summit in Napa, California. And Curl creator Daniel Stenberg posted "I'm with Greg Kroah-Hartman on this: all Open Source projects should become CNAs. Or team up with others to do it." (Also posting "Agreed" to the suggestion was Seth Larson, the Python Software Foundation's security developer-in-residence involved in their successful effort to become a CNA in 2023.)

444 CNAs have now partnered with the CVE Program, according to their official web site. The announcement from PerlMonks.org: Years ago, a few people decided during the Perl Toolchain Summit (PTS) that it would be a good idea to join forces, ideas and knowledge and start a group to monitor vulnerabilities in the complete Perl ecosystem from core to the smallest CPAN release. The goal was to follow legislation and CVE reports, and help authors in taking actions on not being vulnerable anymore. That group has grown stable over the past years and is now known as CPANSec.

The group has several focus areas, and one of them is channeling CVE vulnerability issues. In that specific goal, a milestone has been reached: CPANSec has just been authorized as a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) for Perl and modules on CPAN

Memory safety bugs are "eroding trust in technology and costing billions," argues a new post on Google's security blog — adding that "traditional approaches, like code auditing, fuzzing, and exploit mitigations — while helpful — haven't been enough to stem the tide."

So the blog post calls for a "common framework" for "defining specific, measurable criteria for achieving different levels of memory safety assurance." The hope is this gives policy makers "the technical foundation to craft effective policy initiatives and incentives promoting memory safety" leading to "a market in which vendors are incentivized to invest in memory safety." ("Customers will be empowered to recognize, demand, and reward safety.")

In January the same Google security researchers helped co-write an article noting there are now strong memory-safety "research technologies" that are sufficiently mature: memory-safe languages (including "safer language subsets like Safe Buffers for C++"), mathematically rigorous formal verification, software compartmentalization, and hardware and software protections. (With hardware protections including things like ARM's Memory Tagging Extension and the (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions, or "CHERI", architecture.) Google's security researchers are now calling for "a blueprint for a memory-safe future" — though Importantly, the idea is "defining the desired outcomes rather than locking ourselves into specific technologies."

Their blog post this week again urges a practical/actionable framework that's commonly understood, but one that supports different approaches (and allowing tailoring to specific needs) while enabling objective assessment: At Google, we're not just advocating for standardization and a memory-safe future, we're actively working to build it. We are collaborating with industry and academic partners to develop potential standards, and our joint authorship of the recent CACM call-to-action marks an important first step in this process... This commitment is also reflected in our internal efforts. We are prioritizing memory-safe languages, and have already seen significant reductions in vulnerabilities by adopting languages like Rust in combination with existing, wide-spread usage of Java, Kotlin, and Go where performance constraints permit. We recognize that a complete transition to those languages will take time. That's why we're also investing in techniques to improve the safety of our existing C++ codebase by design, such as deploying hardened libc++.

This effort isn't about picking winners or dictating solutions. It's about creating a level playing field, empowering informed decision-making, and driving a virtuous cycle of security improvement... The journey towards memory safety requires a collective commitment to standardization. We need to build a future where memory safety is not an afterthought but a foundational principle, a future where the next generation inherits a digital world that is secure by design.
The security researchers' post calls for "a collective commitment" to eliminate memory-safety bugs, "anchored on secure-by-design practices..." One of the blog post's subheadings? "Let's build a memory-safe future together."

And they're urging changes "not just for ourselves but for the generations that follow."

New submitter TronNerd82 writes: Linuxiac reports that the 6th alpha release of the COSMIC desktop environment has been released. The new alpha release includes zooming, desktop icon management, some new scaling options, and improved accessibility features. Also included in the release are a number of bug fixes.

These include, but are not limited to:
- Fixing a crash issue in Steam, and fixing certain issues for Radeon RX GPUs
- Fixing a bug that prevented icons from appearing in screenshots
- Adding a layer of polish to the COSMIC Files application by adding folder size metadata and preventing crashes

Also of note are a number of memory usage reductions across the board. COSMIC Alpha 6 also replaces the default font, changing from Fira Sans to Open Sans, with Noto Sans Mono as the default monospace font. Additional changes can be found in System76's official announcement.

Autodesk said it would cut 1,350 employees, or about 9% of its workforce, as part of a pivot to the cloud and artificial intelligence. Fast Company reports: Companies across sectors such as architecture, engineering, construction, and product design are making extensive use of Autodesk's 3D design solutions, with the software maker's artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities further driving spending on its products. Autodesk saw a 23% jump in total billings to $2.11 billion in the fourth quarter ended January 31.

The company's international operations have particularly shown strength, while analysts have also noted that the company was outpacing peers in the manufacturing sector, driven by the performance of its "Fusion" design software.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is set to review a California district court's ruling in Neo4j v. PureThink, which upheld Neo4j's right to modify the GNU AGPLv3 with additional binding terms. If the appellate court affirms this decision, it could set a precedent allowing licensors to impose unremovable restrictions on open-source software, potentially undermining the enforceability of GPL-based licenses and threatening the integrity of the open-source ecosystem. The Register reports: The GNU AGPLv3 is a free and open source software (FOSS) license largely based on the GNU GPLv3, both of which are published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Neo4j provided database software under the AGPLv3, then tweaked the license, leading to legal battles over forks of the software. The AGPLv3 includes language that says any added restrictions or requirements are removable, meaning someone could just file off Neo4j's changes to the usage and distribution license, reverting it back to the standard AGPLv3, which the biz has argued and successfully fought against in that California district court.

Now the matter, the validity of that modified FOSS license, is before an appeals court in the USA. "I don't think the community realizes that if the Ninth Circuit upholds the lower court's ruling, it won't just kill GPLv3," PureThink's John Mark Suhy told The Register. "It will create a dangerous legal precedent that could be used to undermine all open-source licenses, allowing licensors to impose unexpected restrictions and fundamentally eroding the trust that makes open source possible."

Perhaps equally concerning is the fact that Suhy, founder and CTO of PureThink and iGov (the two firms sued by Neo4j), and presently CTO of IT consultancy Greystones Group, is defending GPL licenses on his own, pro se, without the help of the FSF, founded by Richard Stallman, creator of the GNU General Public License. "I'm actually doing everything pro se because I used up all my savings to fight it in the lower court," said Suhy. "I'm surprised the Free Software Foundation didn't care too much about it. They always had an excuse about not having the money for it. Luckily the Software Freedom Conservancy came in and helped out there."

Mozilla has denied allegations that its new Firefox browser terms of service allow it to harvest user data for artificial intelligence training, following widespread criticism of the recently updated policy language. The controversy erupted after Firefox introduced terms that grant Mozilla "a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information" when users upload content through the browser, prompting competitor Brave Software's CEO Brendan Eich to suggest a business pivot toward data monetization.

"These changes are not driven by a desire by Mozilla to use people's data for AI or sell it to advertisers," Mozilla spokesperson Kenya Friend-Daniel told TechCrunch. "Our ability to use data is still limited by what we disclose in the Privacy Notice." The company clarified that its AI features operate locally on users' devices and don't send content data to Mozilla. Any data shared with advertisers is provided only on a "de-identified or aggregated basis," according to the spokesperson. Mozilla explained it used specific legal terms -- "nonexclusive," "royalty-free," and "worldwide" -- because Firefox is free, available globally, and allows users to maintain control of their own data.

Researchers at George Mason University discovered a vulnerability in Apple's Find My network that allows hackers to silently track any Bluetooth device as if it were an AirTag, without the owner's knowledge. 9to5Mac reports: Although AirTag was designed to change its Bluetooth address based on a cryptographic key, the attackers developed a system that could quickly find keys for Bluetooth addresses. This was made possible by using "hundreds" of GPUs to find a key match. The exploit called "nRootTag" has a frightening success rate of 90% and doesn't require "sophisticated administrator privilege escalation."

In one of the experiments, the researchers were able to track the location of a computer with an accuracy of 10 feet, which allowed them to trace a bicycle moving through the city. In another experiment, they reconstructed a person's flight path by tracking their game console. "While it is scary if your smart lock is hacked, it becomes far more horrifying if the attacker also knows its location. With the attack method we introduced, the attacker can achieve this," said one of the researchers. Apple has acknowledged the George Mason researchers for discovering a Bluetooth exploit in its Find My network but has yet to issue a fix. "For now, they advise users to never allow unnecessary access to the device's Bluetooth when requested by apps, and of course, always keep their device's software updated," reports 9to5Mac.

OpenAI released an early version of its new AI model GPT-4.5 to select users on Thursday, following development challenges that delayed the project last year. The Microsoft-backed startup said the new model responds better to subtle cues in written prompts and excels at chatting, writing and coding. OpenAI expects it will produce fewer fabricated responses than previous versions.

Initially available as a "research preview," access is limited to software developers and users who pay $200 monthly for ChatGPT Pro subscriptions. The company plans to gather feedback before wider distribution. According to OpenAI's blog post, GPT-4.5 will be the company's last model that doesn't use additional computing power to analyze queries before responding. Future releases will incorporate the reasoning approach already used in its newer models like o1 and o3.

When developers boast "I could write that in a weekend," they're missing the painful reality that haunts software maintainers for years. In a candid blog post, Construct developer Ashley explains why maintaining large software projects is a burden most programmers fail to appreciate. "Writing the initial code for a feature is only a fraction of the work," Ashley explains, estimating it represents just "25% of the total work" in Construct's 750,000-line codebase. The rest? A grinding cycle of "testing, diagnosing and fixing bugs, optimizing performance, upgrading it to work with other changes, refactoring, customer support, writing documentation and similarly revising the documentation over time."

Ashley describes how accepting code contributions feels like someone offering to build you a free extension -- initially attractive until the roof starts leaking years later and the original builder is nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, your tenants (users) are furious, and you're stuck with "no good options." The post recounts Construct's own bruises: a community-contributed storage plugin still causing compatibility headaches a decade later, and third-party libraries that became maintenance nightmares after their creators vanished.

These experiences explain why seasoned maintainers eye large code contributions with deep suspicion rather than gratitude. "If you suggest some software project uses some code -- even a small amount -- will you be there in literally 10 year's time sorting out all the issues that arise from it?" Ashley asks. "Usually the answer is no."

What Chris Horsley expected to be a 10-minute washing machine installation stretched to four hours and required five trips to the hardware store. The CTO of security consultancy firm documented how unexpected obstacles -- drilling through shelves, replacing incompatible hoses, and removing hidden caps -- derailed his timeline.

Horsley draws a direct parallel to software development, where estimation regularly fails despite experience. "While 90% of the project will be the same, there's going to be one critical difference between the last 5 projects and this project that seemed trivial at the time of estimation but will throw off our whole schedule," he writes in a blog.

These disruptions often appear as unmaintained frameworks, obsolete development tools, or incompatible infrastructure components that weren't visible during planning. The software development environment changes rapidly, creating what Horsley describes as "unknown unknowns." Despite thorough requirements gathering, developers inevitably encounter unanticipated blockers, transforming familiar-looking tasks into complex challenges.