25 years ago today on Slashdot… Hemos linked to a site called Joystick101 describing thecrowd camping out to buy the limited number of just-released PlayStation 2 consoles (and games). “500,000 lucky members of the American gaming public are sneaking a few minutes of playing Madden 2001, Tekken, or Ridge Racer V before school or work…” wrote Joystick101. That same day CmdrTaco posted reports...

Critics question why basic flaws like buffer overflows, command injections, and SQL injections are “being exploited remain prevalent in mission-critical codebases maintained by companies whose core business is cybersecurity,” writes CSO Online. Benjamin Harris, CEO of cybersecurity/penetration testing firm watchTowr tells them that “these are vulnerability classes from the 1990s, and security...

Thursday Ubuntu-maker Canonical “officially launched Canonical Academy, a new certification platform designed to help professionals validate their Linux and Ubuntu skills through practical, hands-on assessments,” writes the blog It’s FOSS:Focusing on real-world scenarios, Canonical Academy aims to foster practical skills rather than theoretical knowledge. The end goal? Getting professionals...

“Exxon Mobil sued California on Friday,” reports Reuters, “challenging two state laws that require large companies to publicly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risks.”In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, Exxon argued that Senate Bills 253 and 261 violate its First Amendment rights by compelling Exxon to...

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp took a good look at the images on a promotional web page for Databricks’ “context-aware AI assistant”:If there was an AI Demo Hall of Shame, the first inductee would have to be Amazon. Their demo tried to support its CEO’s claims that Amazon Q Code Transformation AI saved it 4,500 developer-years and an additional $260 million in “annualized efficiency gains” by...

“OpenAI’s o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off,” warned Palisade Research, a nonprofit investigating cyber offensive AI capabilities. “It did this even when explicitly instructed: allow yourself to be shut down.” In September they released a paper adding that “several state-of-the-art large language models (including Grok 4, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro)...

Thursday the Washington Post profiled “the people who dare to say no to AI,” including a 16-year-old high school student in Virginia says “she doesn’t want to off-load her thinking to a machine and worries about the bias and inaccuracies AI tools can produce…” “As the tech industry and corporate America go all in on artificial intelligence, some people are holding back.”Some tech workers told...

An AI system “apparently mistook a high school student’s bag of Doritos for a firearm,” reports the Guardian, “and called local police to tell them the pupil was armed.”Taki Allen was sitting with friends on Monday night outside Kenwood high school in Baltimore and eating a snack when police officers with guns approached him. “At first, I didn’t know where they were going until they started...