joshuark writes: A Russian basketball player, Daniil Kasatkin, was arrested on June 21 in France at the request of the United States as he allegedly is part of a network of hackers. Daniil Kasatkin, aged 26, is accused by the United States of negotiating the payment of ransoms to this hacker network, which he denies. He has been studied in the United States, and is the subject of a U.S. arrest warrant for "conspiracy to commit computer fraud" and "computer fraud conspiracy."

His lawyer alleges that Kasatkin is not guilty of these crimes and that they are instead linked to a second-hand computer that he purchased. "He bought a second-hand computer. He did absolutely nothing. He's stunned," his lawyer, Freric Belot, told the media. "He's useless with computers and can't even install an application. He didn't touch anything on the computer: it was either hacked, or the hacker sold it to him to act under the cover of another person." The report notes that Kasatkin briefly played NCAA basketball at Penn State before returning to Russia in 2019. He also appeared in 172 games with MBA-MAI before he left the team.

A Russian professional basketball player has been arrested in France at the request of the United States, which reportedly accused him of being involved in a ransomware group that allegedly targeted hundreds of American companies and federal institutions. From a report: Daniil Kasatkin, 26, was detained in June at Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport shortly after arriving in the country with his fiancee, according to local media reports. He is currently being held in extradition custody, with a U.S. warrant reportedly issued against him. Kasatkin previously studied and played basketball in the U.S., at Penn State University.

The unnamed ransomware network Kasatkin is suspected of being part of is believed to have targeted nearly 900 entities between 2020 and 2022. Local media, citing court proceedings in Paris, reported that Kasatkin allegedly helped negotiate ransom payments, though the extent of the damage caused by the attacks has not been disclosed.

A federal judge has dismissed an antitrust lawsuit that accused Apple, Visa and Mastercard of conspiring to suppress competition in the payments network market and inflate merchant transaction fees.

U.S. District Judge David Dugan in Illinois ruled that merchants failed to provide sufficient evidence supporting claims that Apple illegally declined to launch a competing payment network to rival Visa and Mastercard.

The lawsuit, filed by beverage retailer Mirage Wine & Spirits and other businesses representing thousands of merchants, alleged the payment networks paid Apple hundreds of millions of dollars annually to avoid competition. Dugan found the plaintiffs offered only "a slew of circumstantial allegations" but permitted them to amend their complaint.

The UK has transformed its broadband infrastructure in five years -- with full-fiber coverage jumping from 12% of properties in January 2020 to more than 78% by 2025, according to communications regulator Ofcom and ThinkBroadband data. Northern Ireland leads with 96% of premises in postcodes served with full-fiber connections.

The rollout accelerated after Ofcom's May 2021 regulatory framework gave other providers access to BT's Openreach ducts and poles while promising the company regulatory certainty through a "fair bet" approach that avoided price caps. The framework sparked investment from alternative networks, or "altnets," which increased homes passed from 8.2 million in 2022 to 16.4 million by 2025.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Researchers at Princeton University, Boston University and other institutes used machine learning to predict the strategic decisions of humans in various games. Their paper, published in Nature Human Behavior, shows that a deep neural network trained on human decisions could predict the strategic choices of players with high levels of accuracy. [...] Essentially, the team suggests that people behave more rationally while playing games that they perceive as easier. In contrast, when they are playing more complex games, people's choices could be influenced by various other factors, thus the "noise" affecting their behavior would increase.

As part of their future studies, the researchers would also like to shed more light on what makes a game "complex" or "easy." This could be achieved using the context-dependent noise parameter that they integrated into their model as a signature of "perceived difficulty." "Our analysis provides a robust model comparison across a wide range of candidate models of decision-making," said [Jian-Qiao Zhu, first author of the paper]. "We now have strong evidence that introducing context-dependence into the quantal response model significantly improves its ability to capture human strategic behavior. More specifically, we identified key factors in the game matrix that shape game complexity: considerations of efficiency, the arithmetic difficulty of computing payoff differences, and the depth of reasoning required to arrive at a rational solution."

The findings gathered as part of this recent study also highlight the "lightness" with which many people approach strategic decisions, which could make them vulnerable to parties looking to sway them towards making irrational decisions. Once they gather more insight into what factors make games and decision-making scenarios more challenging for people, Zhu and his colleagues hope to start devising new behavioral science interventions aimed at prompting people to make more rational decisions.

The Free Software Foundation's services face "ongoing (and increasing) distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks," senior systems administrator Ian Kelling wrote Wednesday. But "Even though we are under active attack, gnu.org, ftp.gnu.org, and savannah.gnu.org are up with normal response times at the moment, and have been for the majority of this week, largely thanks to hard work from the Savannah hackers Bob, Corwin, and Luke who've helped us, your sysadmins."

"We've shielded these sites for almost a full year of intense attacks now, and we'll keep on fighting these attacks for as long as they continue." Our infrastructure has been under attack since August 2024. Large Language Model (LLM) web crawlers have been a significant source of the attacks, and as for the rest, we don't expect to ever know what kind of entity is targeting our sites or why.

- In the fall Bulletin, we wrote about the August attack on gnu.org. That attack continues, but we have mitigated it. Judging from the pattern and scope, the goal was likely to take the site down and it was not an LLM crawler. We do not know who or what is behind the attack, but since then, we have had more attacks with even higher severity.

- To begin with, GNU Savannah, the FSF's collaborative software development system, was hit by a massive botnet controlling about five million IPs starting in January. As of this writing, the attack is still ongoing, but the botnet's current iteration is mitigated. The goal is likely to build an LLM training dataset. We do not know who or what is behind this.

- Furthermore, gnu.org and ftp.gnu.org were targets in a new DDoS attack starting on May 27, 2025. Its goal seems to be to take the site down. It is currently mitigated. It has had several iterations, and each has caused some hours of downtime while we figured out how to defend ourselves against it. Here again, the goal was likely to take our sites down and we do not know who or what is behind this.

- In addition, directory.fsf.org, the server behind the Free Software Directory, has been under attack since June 18. This likely is an LLM scraper designed to specifically target Media Wiki sites with a botnet. This attack is very active and now partially mitigated...

Even though we are under active attack, gnu.org, ftp.gnu.org, and savannah.gnu.org are up with normal response times at the moment, and have been for the majority of this week, largely thanks to hard work from the Savannah hackers Bob, Corwin, and Luke who've helped us, your sysadmins. We've shielded these sites for almost a full year of intense attacks now, and we'll keep on fighting these attacks for as long as they continue.
The full-time FSF tech staff is just two systems administrators, "and we currently lack the funds to hire more tech staff any time soon," Kelling points out. Kelling titled his post "our small team vs millions of bots," suggesting that supporters purchase FSF memberships "to improve our staffing situation... Can you join us in our crucial work to guard user freedom and defy dystopia?"

Kelling also points out they're also facing "run-of-the-mill standard crawlers, SEO crawlers, crawlers pretending to be normal users, crawlers pretending to be other crawlers, uptime systems, vulnerability scanners, carrier-grade network address translation, VPNs, and normal browsers hitting our sites..."

"Some of the abuse is not unique to us, and it seems that the health of the web has some serious problems right now."

Three space probes are leaving our solar system — yet are still functioning. After the two Voyager space probes, New Horizons "was launched in 2006, initially to study Pluto," remembers New Scientist. But "it has since travelled way beyond this point, ploughing on through the Kuiper belt, a vast, wide band of rocks and dust billions of miles from the sun. It is now speeding at tens of thousands of kilometres per hour..."

And it's just performed the first ever example of interstellar navigation... As it hurtles out of our solar system, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is so far from Earth that the stars in the Milky Way appear in markedly different positions compared with our own view... due to the parallax effect. This was demonstrated in 2020 when the probe beamed back pictures of two nearby stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, to Earth.

Now, Tod Lauer at the US National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Arizona and his colleagues have used this effect to work out the position of New Horizons... Almost all spacecraft calculate their bearings to within tens of metres using NASA's Deep Space Network, a collection of radio transmitters on Earth that send regular signals out to space. In comparison, the parallax method was far less accurate, locating New Horizons within a sphere with a radius of 60 million kilometres, about half the distance between Earth and the sun. "We're not going to put the Deep Space Network out of business — this is only a demo proof of concept," says Lauer. However, with a better camera and equipment they could improve the accuracy by up to 100 times, he says.

Using this technique for interstellar navigation could offer advantages over the DSN because it could give more accurate location readings as a spacecraft gets further away from Earth, as well as being able to operate autonomously without needing to wait for a radio signal to come from our solar system, says Massimiliano Vasile at the University of Strathclyde, UK. "If you travel to an actual star, we are talking about light years," says Vasile. "What happens is that your signal from the Deep Space Network has to travel all the way there and then all the way back, and it's travelling at the speed of light, so it takes years."
Just like a ship's captain sailing by the stars, "We have a good enough three-dimensional map of the galaxy around us that you can find out where you are," Lauer says.

So even when limiting your navigation to what's on-board the spacecraft, "It's a remarkable accuracy, with your own camera!"

"Tesla has launched its new Oasis Supercharger," reports Electrek, "the long-promised EV charging station of the future, with a solar farm and off-grid batteries." Early in the deployment of the Supercharger network, Tesla promised to add solar arrays and batteries to the Supercharger stations, and CEO Elon Musk even said that most stations would be able to operate off-grid... Last year, Tesla announced a new project called 'Oasis', which consists of a new model Supercharger station with a solar farm and battery storage enabling off-grid operations in Lost Hills, California.

Tesla has now unveiled the project and turned on most of the Supercharger stalls. The project consists of 168 chargers, with half of them currently operational, making it one of the largest Supercharger stations in the world. However, that's not even the most notable aspect of it. The station is equipped with 11 MW of ground-mounted solar panels and canopies, spanning 30 acres of land, and 10 Tesla Megapacks with a total energy storage capacity of 39 MWh. It can be operated off-grid, which is the case right now, according to Tesla.

With off-grid operations, Tesla was about to bring 84 stalls online just in time for the Fourth of July travel weekend. The rest of the stalls and a lounge are going to open later this year.
The article makes that point that "This is what charging stations should be like: fully powered by renewable energy."

OpenBSD Journal writes: Yes, you read that right: KDE 6.4.0 Plasma is now in OpenBSD packages... The news was announced 2025-07-04 via a fediverse post and of course the commit message itself, where the description reads....

"[I]n 6.4 the KDE Kwin team split kwin into kwin-x11 and kwin (wayland). This seems to be the sign that X11 is no longer of interest and we are focussing on Wayland. As we currently only support X11, kwin-x11 has been added as a runtime dependency to kwin. So nobody should have to install anything later. This ports update also includes Aurorae; a theme engine for KWin window decorations."

This week Hewlett-Packard Enterprise settled its antitrust case with America's Justice Department, "paving the way for its acquisition of rival kit maker Juniper Networks," reported Telecoms.com: Under the agreement, HPE has agreed to divest its Instant On unit, which sells a range of enterprise-grade Wi-Fi networking equipment for campus and branch deployments. It has also agreed to license Juniper's Mist AIOps source code — a software suite that enables AI-based network automation and management. HPE can live with that, since its primary motivation for buying Juniper is to improve its prospects in an IT networking market dominated by Cisco, where others like Arista and increasingly Nokia and Nvidia are also trying to make inroads.
And after receiving regulatory clearance, HPE "very quickly closed the deal..." reports The Motley Fool. "In the press release heralding the news, the buyer wrote that it "doubles the size of HPE's networking business and provides customers with a comprehensive portfolio of networking solutions." Investors were obviously happy about this, as according to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence the company's stock price ballooned by nearly 16% across the week, largely on the news.... The Justice Department had alleged, in a lawsuit filed in January, that an HPE/Juniper tie-up would essentially result in a duopoly in networking equipment. It claimed that a beefed-up HPE and networking incumbent Cisco would hold more than 70% combined of the domestic market.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

Laptop Mag, a tech publication that began in 1991 as a print magazine, is shutting down after nearly 35 years. The Verge reports: Laptop Mag has evolved many times over the years. It started as a print publication in 1991, when Bedford Communications launched the Laptop Buyers Guide and Handbook. Laptop Mag was later acquired by TechMedia Network (which is now called Purch) in 2011 and transitioned to digital-only content in 2013. Future PLC, the publisher that owns brands like PC Gamer, Tom's Guide, and TechRadar, acquired Purch -- and Laptop Mag along with it.

"We are incredibly grateful for your dedication, talent, and contributions to Laptop Mag, and we are committed to supporting you throughout this transition," [Faisal Alani, the global brand director at Laptop Mag owner Future PLC] said. Laptop Mag's shutdown follows the closure of long-running tech site AnandTech, which was also owned by Future PLC. It's not clear whether Laptop Mag's archives will be available following the shutdown.

AMC Theatres now warns customers that movies start 25-30 minutes after the listed showtime to account for ads and trailers, "making it easier for moviegoers to know the actual start time of their film screening," reports The Verge. From the report: Starting today, AMC will also show more ads than before, meaning its preshow lineup may have to be reconfigured to avoid exceeding the 30-minute mark. The company made an agreement with the National CineMedia ad network that includes as much as five minutes of commercials shown "after a movie's official start time," according to The Hollywood Reporter, and an additional 30-to-60-second "Platinum Spot" that plays before the last one or two trailers.

AMC was the only major theater chain to reject the National CineMedia ad spot when it was pitched in 2019, telling Bloomberg at the time that it believed "US moviegoers would react quite negatively." Now struggling financially amid an overall decline in movie theater attendance and box-office grosses, AMC has reversed course, telling The Hollywood Reporter that its competitors "have fully participated for more than five years without any direct impact to their attendance."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After 13 years of deploying robots into its warehouses, Amazon reached a new milestone. The tech behemoth now has 1 million robots in its warehouses, the company announced Monday. This one millionth robot was recently delivered to an Amazon fulfillment facility in Japan. That figure puts Amazon on track to reach another landmark: Its vast network of warehouses may soon have the same number of robots working as people, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. The WSJ also reported that 75% of Amazon's global deliveries are now assisted in some way by a robot. Amazon also unveiled a new generative AI model called DeepFleet, built using SageMaker and trained on its own warehouse data, which improves robotic fleet speed by 10% through more efficient route coordination.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A judge has sentenced a disgruntled IT worker to more than seven months in prison after he wreaked havoc on his employer's network following his suspension, according to West Yorkshire Police.

According to the police, Mohammed Umar Taj, 31, from the Yorkshire town of Batley, was suspended from his job in nearby Huddersfield in July 2022. But the company didn't immediately rescind his network credentials, and within hours, he began altering login names and passwords to disrupt operations, the statement says.

The following day, he allegedly changed access credentials and the biz's multi-factor authentication settings that locked out the firm and its clients in Germany and Bahrain, eventually causing an estimated $274,200 in lost business and reputational harm.

Android 16 will include a new security feature that warns users when their phones connect to fake cell towers designed for surveillance. The "network notification" setting alerts users when devices connect to unencrypted networks or when networks request phone identifiers, helping protect against "stingray" devices that mimic legitimate cell towers to collect data and force phones onto insecure communication protocols.

Comcast is introducing new simplified, contract-free broadband plans that eliminate its unpopular 1.2TB data cap for residential customers. "The company began enforcing a data cap in 2008, when it set that limit at 250GB," notes PCMag. "Four years later, it raised that to 300GB, then lifted it to 1TB in 2016 and inched it up again to 1.25TB in 2020 after suspending it entirely during the early months of the pandemic." The report notes that existing customers will need to switch to these updated plans to benefit from the cap removal. PCMag reports: Steve Croney, Comcast's COO for connectivity and platforms, describes these new "everyday price plans" as "built on simplicity and transparency -- no hidden fees, no confusion." Comcast began showing the new plans on its sign-up pages Thursday morning. The monthly rates largely match those announced when Comcast advertised a rate-lock offer in April:

- 300Mbps downloads for $40 with a one-year lock or $55 with a five-year lock, then $70 a month
- 500Mbps for $55 with a one-year lock or $70 with a five-year lock, then $85
- 1Gbps for $70 with a one-year lock or $85 a month with a five-year lock, then $100
- 2Gbps for $100 with a one-year lock or $115 with a five-year lock, then $130

Upload speeds on those plans will vary by location but should start at 40Mbps. These plans also include one year of Xfinity Mobile wireless service, which combines Verizon's coverage with Comcast's Wi-Fi network.

Facing mounting competition from autonomous taxi services like Waymo, Uber is in early talks to help fund Travis Kalanick's potential acquisition of Pony.ai's U.S. subsidiary (source paywalled; alternative source). If completed, the deal would reunite Kalanick with Uber (now under CEO Dara Khosrowshahi) and position Pony.ai to operate independently of its Chinese parent amid rising U.S. regulatory pressures. The New York Times reports: The company, Pony.ai, was founded in Silicon Valley in 2016 but has its main presence in China, and has permits to operate robot taxis and trucks in the United States and China. The talks are preliminary, said the people, who were not authorized to speak about the confidential conversations. Mr. Kalanick will run Pony if the deal is completed, they said. It is unclear what role, if any, Uber would take in Pony as an investor. Financial details of the potential transaction could not be determined. Pony went public last year in the United States, raising $260 million in a share sale. Its market capitalization stands around $4.5 billion.

If the deal goes through, Mr. Kalanick, 48, will remain in his day job running CloudKitchens, a virtual restaurant start-up that he founded after leaving Uber in 2017. He would also work more closely with Dara Khosrowshahi, who took over as Uber's chief executive after Mr. Kalanick's ouster. The discussions are the starkest sign yet that Uber is under pressure from Waymo, the driverless car unit spun out of Google, and other autonomous car services. When Mr. Kalanick was Uber's chief executive, the company tried developing autonomous vehicle technology. It then bought Otto, a self-driving trucking start-up run by Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer. Google later sued Mr. Levandowski for theft of trade secrets and sued Uber to bar it from using its self-driving technology.

Under Mr. Khosrowshahi, Uber has taken a different tack to self-driving cars. The company has struck roughly 18 partnerships with autonomous vehicle companies like Wayve, May Mobility and WeRide to bring pilot programs for driverless car services into Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The goal, Mr. Khosrowshahi has said in podcast interviews, has been to put "as many cars on Uber's network as possible." He has maintained that while autonomous vehicles are growing steadily, ride-hailing networks will have both human and robot drivers for years.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Malaysia will ban plastic waste imports from the U.S. starting Tuesday because of America's failure to abide by the Basel Convention treaty on international waste transfers, in a move that could have significant consequences for California.

Malaysia emerged as a major destination for U.S. waste after China banned American waste imports in 2018. California shipped 864 shipping containers, or more than 10 million pounds of plastic waste, to Malaysia in 2024, according to the Basel Action Network, an advocacy group. That was second only to Georgia among U.S. states.

Under Malaysian waste guidelines announced last month, the country will no longer accept plastic waste and hazardous waste from nations that didn't ratify the Basel Convention, the international treaty designed to reduce the international movement of hazardous and other waste. The U.S. is one of just a handful of countries, including Fiji and Haiti, that hasn't signed the pact.

Aaron Sorkin is officially working on a sequel to The Social Network. From a report: Last year, the Oscar-winning writer revealed he was working on a film that would revisit the subject of Facebook, and Deadline has now reported that The Social Network Part II is in development at Sony Pictures yet isn't a "straight sequel."

The original film, which traced the early days of Facebook and its creator Mark Zuckerberg, was directed by David Fincher. Sorkin is rumoured to be directing the follow-up. "I blame Facebook for January 6," he said in 2024 on a special edition of The Town podcast, live from Washington DC. When asked to explain why, he responded: "You're gonna need to buy a movie ticket."

The Social Network was an adaptation of Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires, and the sequel will be based on the Wall Street Journal series The Facebook Files. The 2021 investigation examined the damage caused by the social networking site and how internal findings had been buried. Subjects included the influence on the January 6 riot and the mental health of teenage users.

The Register's Simon Sharwood reports: Huawei's chairman Xu Zhijun -- aka Eric Xu -- has called out China's enormous lead in fiber-to-the-room (FTTR) installations. Speaking at last week's Mobile World Congress event in Shanghai, Xu shared his views on the telecommunications industry's future growth opportunities and said by the end of 2025 China will be home to 75 million FTTR installations -- but just 500,000 exist outside the Middle Kingdom. Xu said FTTR will benefit businesses by increasing their internet connection speeds, helping them address spotty Wi-Fi coverage, allowing them to deploy tech in more places, and therefore creating more opportunities to adopt productivity-boosting devices and services. FTTR will also help carriers to sell more expensive packages, he said. Xu also urged telecom carriers to target high-growth user groups like delivery riders and livestream influencers, citing their above-average data consumption and revenue potential. Delivery riders, who will make up 5% of the global workforce by 2030, use four times more voice minutes and double the data of average users, while influencers generate five times the data usage and four times the revenue.

He also pushed for greater collaboration between carriers and platforms to deliver more high-res video content, and called for improved efficiency in networking equipment and device power use. "Xu said Huawei is here to help carriers deliver any of the scenarios he mentioned," concludes Sharwood. "And of course it is, because the Chinese giant has a thriving business selling to telcos -- or at least to telcos beyond the liberal democracies that have largely decided Huawei's close ties with Beijing mean the company and its products represent an unacceptable threat to the operation of critical infrastructure."