"Star Trek" marks its 60th anniversary today, September 8, six decades after the original series premiered in 1966 and went on to become one of the most successful science-fiction franchises in television history. Outlets across the web are commemorating the milestone with full health reports, hot takes, behind-the-scenes retrospectives, and reflections on the franchise's influence and what may lie ahead. The New York Times reports: As of 2026, the 60-year-old science fiction franchise boasts a fandom of carbon units -- sorry, humans -- that spans at least three generations. What began, in 1966, as a five-year space mission on the U.S.S. Enterprise to "boldly go where no man has gone before" now represents an anthology of space travel across more than 25 series and films in parts of two centuries. Where once it was James T. Kirk or bust, it's not unusual to find fans who prefer other captains, like Picard, Janeway or Sisko. There are so many series to keep track of that fans often communicate using country code-like abbreviations for each installment: TOS (the original series), TNG ("The Next Generation"), DS9 ("Deep Space Nine"), ENT ("Enterprise") and so on. Outside the Trekiverse, disparities in generational slang, politics and social mores are practically a foregone conclusion. But "Star Trek" functions as connective tissue between fans past and present. Some of that tissue is just shared references: There will always be captain's logs, timelines by stardate, warp factors one through 10, phasers and photon torpedoes and, every now and then, a doctor who insists, "I'm a doctor, not a ____!" The Vulcan salute has become a general symbol of geek-recognize-geek, but real Trekkies (or Trekkers, as some prefer) know that "Live long and prosper" is only half the message; the recipient is meant to say "Peace and long life" in response. But the series' staying power, and the ease with which each generation finds its way into them, is an indication that fans of all ages share not only language, but values, in common. Here are some of our favorite Slashdot stories from the early days. The 2004 "Should Star Trek Die?" is an especially good callback today because it features LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation) arguing that Trek needs to disappear for several years to become special again... Star Trek Lawsuit (1998) Salon Writes on The Troubles with "Trek" (1999) Star Trek's Next Series (2001) Should Star Trek Die? (2004) UPN Officially Cancels 'Star Trek: Enterprise' (2005)

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Google says it will overhaul Search in Europe to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act, giving more prominence to comparison services like Expedia and Hotels.com while stripping some real-time features from hotel, airline, and restaurant results. "These changes degrade the user experience for Europeans -- boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses, and removing helpful features people rely on every day," said Nick Fox, senior vice-president of knowledge and information at Google. The company claims its past search changes for DMA compliance were tied to a 30% decrease "in free, direct booking traffic to European businesses." Engadget reports: That sanction was the latest salvo between the EU government and a US tech company for infringing on its Digital Markets Act. The debate centers on the DMA requirement that major tech brands "must not treat their own services more favorably in ranking than third-party services." [...] According to Reuters, Google's revised search results "will highlight one specialized search engine at the top of the page, followed by two others with fewer details. A carousel of hotels, airlines and restaurants, for example, will sit below them with key features such as real-time prices stripped out." Those specialized engines include sites like Expedia or Hotels.com, also known as vertical search services, so European users may soon see those aggregators and comparison sites prioritized more highly than individual businesses' websites in their results. Reuters noted that "the rankings will be determined by Google's algorithm," meaning the tech company still holds a lot of control over how results are displayed. The EC had given Google 60 days to comply with its rules, but the company has not specified an exact timeline for when European users will start seeing the changes.

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The NSA, CISA, and FBI are accusing (PDF) several Chinese AI companies of carrying out "industrial-scale" distillation campaigns against leading U.S. models such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. Since at least 2024, the companies have allegedly routed millions of requests across accounts, APIs, proxies, cloud providers, and third-party aggregators to extract capabilities for their own models. "China-based artificial intelligence companies are conducting systematic extraction of proprietary functionalities and capabilities of U.S. AI companies' models through industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns that form the core -- not merely a supplement -- of their AI development strategy," the agencies wrote. CyberScoop reports: DeepSeek, for example, distilled frontier U.S. models to generate synthetic training data for its R1 and R3 models, including four different versions of Claude, two versions of Gemini, five versions of ChatGPT and Grok 4. Those models helped train DeepSeek's capabilities in areas like agentic functioning, question and answer optimization, creative and occupational writing and others. Another Chinese company, Moonshot AI, allegedly distilled 18 different U.S. models -- including Fable 5, Anthropic's current, most advanced commercially available model -- to train its Kimi-K2 and Kimi K3 models. The company used millions of queries meant to extract enhanced capabilities in areas like agentic reasoning, coding and data analysis, computer vision, larger logical frameworks, visual processing and others. Chinese AI companies manage a sophisticated set of tools and systems that route requests and prompts through multiple pathways to avoid detection. The advisory lists common tactics observed by Chinese companies, including spreading requests across different accounts, models and platforms, using native APIs, remote cloud providers, and third-party aggregators to obfuscate user metadata, and leveraging proxies and gray tech markets to get around geographic restrictions, terms of use and safeguards built into frontier models.

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AI can be stubborn and frustrating. Can Drupal become an AI harness that steers humans and AI, both inside and outside Drupal, toward success, without Drupal losing its openness, stability, and scalability? submitted by /u/jrockowitz [link] [comments]

Meta has launched Muse, a personal AI agent developed under chief AI officer Alexandr Wang. "The product, long in development, was touted as a key next step by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his recent 6,500-word manifesto," reports Axios. From the report: Muse, as the agent is known, exists in a chat interface, similar to a text thread. It's designed to be more proactive and long-running than typical chatbots. Users can name their agent, create an avatar and customize how it communicates. The Muse agent runs on a dedicated virtual machine in Meta's cloud, using a built-in browser that's visible to the user. Meta is offering a free tier of Muse, as well as two subscription options, at $20 per month and $100 per month. "For the vast majority of users, they should be able to do what they need to within the free tier," Wang told Axios. "But for real power users, you know, those subscription tiers help us cover the computer costs." There is no advertising within Muse, but Wang said the company is exploring commerce opportunities that could generate additional revenue. Initially Muse will be available in the U.S. and works on iOS, Android and the web, with support coming soon for Meta's AI glasses. "The full vision in the future is we want to develop personal superintelligence that helps people accomplish their goals, pursue their passions, build things that they never would have built if they didn't have the technology," Wang told Axios. Meta offers users more privacy controls with Muse than in its previous AI products, including the option to prevent queries from being used by Meta and a planned confidential mode where the company cannot see activity inside a user's virtual workspace. There's also an entirely separate system called Sentinel that governs Muse's access to the internet and connected services.

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Australia is proposing the "My Feed, My Way" initiative that would force social media platforms to let users over 16 turn off algorithmic recommendations and instead see only posts from people and creators they follow. Platforms that fail to comply could face fines of up to $79 million. CNBC reports: The legislation, which is being drafted and released Tuesday for targeted consultation, would require platforms to send notifications to new and existing users so they can choose their default feed. [...] The measures, set to be introduced to the Parliament of Australia this year, will also require AI chatbots, online games and other digital services to take action to protect under-18s from addictive design features. "This is not about giving government control. It's about giving people control. It's about putting choice back into the hands of Australians online," said Prime Minister Anthony at a press conference on Tuesday. "This is sensible, pragmatic, practical reform. It gives users choice, and it will hold the big tech companies responsible for inaction."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Telluride just managed one of its best-kept secrets in years, per The Hollywood Reporter. On Sunday night, festival-goers filed into a 650-seat theater with their phones locked away, having no idea what they were about to see, told only that it ran nearly three hours, hadn't been shown anywhere, and that its principal creators would be in the audience. The surprise premiere they went on to enjoy is a new documentary from co-directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Called "You Can See Everything," the film is said to capture Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, in the 34 days before she reported to federal prison in May 2023 to begin an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors about her blood-testing technology. Since then, her legal fight has limped along without success. Her appeals to overturn the conviction and shorten her sentence were rejected in February of last year. She then went a different route last year, asking President Trump to commute her sentence. That clemency petition is still listed as pending, meaning it's officially been opened and remains under review. Fielder apparently lived in the couple's guest house during filming -- the access they provided sounds shocking -- but some of the buzz also ties to an A-list actress who becomes part of the story itself. A24 is set to release the film in October. You can watch a trailer for the film on YouTube.

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A Gamers Nexus investigation found that LG smart TVs are almost constantly logging and uploading data about owners and their homes, even while they are offline or in standby mode. "The company's TV sets scan Wi-Fi networks for nearby devices, record audio logs through their microphones, and use audio and video sampling to recognize exactly what you're watching from across the TV inputs," reports The Verge. From the report: Gamers Nexus partnered with fellow YouTubers Level1Techs and independent security researchers for the investigation, which involved testing retail LG OLEDs. Packet captures showed the TVs scanning the local area network for nearby hardware like phones or smartwatches, as well as logging location data and details of nearby Wi-Fi networks, and feeding the information back to LG Ad Solutions. Perhaps more concerningly, the TVs were capable of recording microphone audio when in standby; this continued even after the TV was disconnected from the internet, with audio files stored offline and uploaded once a connection was restored. Earlier this year, LG was found to be silently installing an adware-like app on Windows PCs that ran pop-up ads for other LG apps and even McAfee antivirus.

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Google DeepMind has released AlphaGenome Atlas, a free research database containing AI-generated predictions for the effects of all 9 billion possible single-letter mutations in the human genome. Built from its AlphaGenome model, the atlas is designed to help scientists interpret both protein-coding and harder-to-understand regulatory DNA. Fortune reports: AlphaGenome Atlas, as DeepMind calls the database, is a precomputed catalogue of what each substitution of a single DNA base is likely to do to the machinery that switches genes on and off. Until now researchers had to run such a model one variant at a time or had to test variants in the laboratory, a process that was painstakingly slow. It would have taken many human lifetimes to discover the consequences of all 9 billion possible single-letter mutations. The Atlas promises to make the job of biologists and medical researchers considerably easier, potentially speeding up the understanding of genetic diseases and the hunt for possible cures. Pushmeet Kohli, DeepMind's vice president for research and head of its AI for science team, told reporters on a briefing call that this was the first time any researcher in the world could reach a comprehensive map of human genetic variation "by simply opening a browser." Kohli also framed the release as helping to complete the unfinished business of the Human Genome Project, which in 2003 succeeded in mapping the entire human DNA sequence. "As the saying goes, we bought the book," he said, "but we did not understand how to read it." Atlas is available for non-commercial use from today through a website Google DeepMind has set up for it. The company said it would be available for commercial use through a licensing arrangement through Google Cloud "soon." Kohli said that Google DeepMind's sister company,ÂIsomorphic Labs, which is using AI for drug discovery, would have access to Atlas but that it would also require a commercial license for access. He did not specify exactly what the terms would be for commercial licensing. A paper describing the Atlas and how it was created is being released on bioRxiv, a repository for biomedical preprint academic papers.

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A previously undocumented financially motivated threat actor has been linked to attacks targeting Brazilian financial institutions since at least March 2026. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike is tracking the Brazil-based activity cluster under the name Slim Spider. "The adversary demonstrates deep operational knowledge of Brazilian financial infrastructure, including the instant payment

Teen reading, math, and science scores have fallen to their lowest levels since international PISA testing began in 2000, with 15-year-olds now reading at roughly the level previously expected of students a year younger. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) linked weaker results to more screen time, less reading for pleasure, and digital distraction. It also found that students who regularly used AI chatbots for tasks like drafting essays and summarizing text scored about 20 points lower in science, roughly equivalent to a year of learning. Reuters reports: A 2012 reading high of 501 on PISA's index had declined to a score of 466 last year. The test is widely regarded as the world's leading gauge of educational performance and its results are closely scrutinized by governments and educators. "In reading, more screen time and less reading for pleasure have gone hand in hand with weaker results," OECD head Mathias Cormann told a press conference. "We're also seeing more hasty reading, students rushing through a text and giving a quick wrong answer." Reading scores fell more sharply in students from better-off backgrounds, the study added. Hindered by falling reading standards, average teenage science and maths skills were also at their lowest this century. Science fell from a 2009 high of 506 on the index to 486, while maths was down from 502 to 469 in the same period. East Asia was the best-performing region. Chinese cities that participated in the test, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan had the best educational systems with Britain and Estonia the only countries outside the region that made it into the top 10 in reading, mathematics and science.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans' financial activity and other data, then feed that intelligence to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime, but which the government thinks may be worth searching, 404 Media has found. The units, the name of which 404 Media is revealing here for the first time, are called Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT). In one case, a PITT analyzed the financial activity of a man who was driving across Montana, and local authorities stopped him under the pretense of an obstructed license plate and charged him with a DUI. 404 Media identified one PITT in the Spokane Sector, Washington, which polices the U.S. border with Canada, and another in the Laredo Sector, Texas, which polices the border with Mexico. The findings add to an Associated Press investigation from last year which found Border Patrol was using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) as part of the same wide-spanning predictive policing program. "The bottom line is genuine probable cause cannot be synthetically generated," Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center For Democracy & Technology, told 404 Media in an email. Here Border Patrol seems to be "using parallel construction to cloak the reason behind its car stops in secrecy. If we can't meaningfully review and evaluate these systems, we can't trust them," he added. [...] The DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows that Border Patrol is analyzing the financial activity of Americans to find people to pull over. The Associated Press's investigation found the predictive policing program is also heavily using ALPRs to track potential targets' movements. It is not clear how exactly Border Patrol is monitoring Americans' financial activity. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) declined to answer what financial activity the agency was monitoring, and whether it obtained a warrant or not. A CBP spokesperson told 404 Media in an email: "U.S. Border Patrol uses intelligence-informed analysis and planning to support national security operations, allocate resources, and help identify potential threats and bad actors to public safety. These efforts are conducted consistent with applicable law, policy, privacy protections, and oversight requirements." The statement continued: "For operational security reasons, we do not discuss specific analytical methods, data sources, targeting criteria, investigative techniques, system capabilities, or deployment details. Public disclosure of such information could compromise law enforcement operations and investigations as well as creating safety risks for agents and the public." Rob Frommer, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, told 404 Media: "The government's increasing use of mass surveillance -- whether that surveillance comes via ALPRs, financial records, or the like -- coupled with predictive policing is a recipe for tyranny. We fought a revolution for the idea that we are citizens, not subjects. Yet schemes like CBP's Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team treat all Americans as if they are potential suspects. This is not just wrong, it's unconstitutional, and IJ will keep pushing courts and Congress to end this attack on Americans' security."

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Whoever took nearly 4,000 bitcoin from the Liquid Network on Sunday, September 6, returned 3,400 of it the next day, Bitcoin's public record shows. About 598.5 bitcoin has not come back. Liquid is a Bitcoin sidechain that holds real bitcoin to back a token called L-BTC. The network is still paused, so holders cannot turn that token back into bitcoin. The 3,400 bitcoin was sent to a&

Check Point Research said in a report published today that a single instruction planted in a ChatGPT conversation could cause ChatGPT to quietly work for an attacker while answering the user's question as usual. In the company's proof of concept, that hidden work read data from the user's connected Gmail account and passed it to a second ChatGPT account through a hidden channel

Threat actors are continuing to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline their operations, with one financially motivated hacking group employing an autonomous, multi-agent attack framework to carry out a large-scale credential harvesting campaign within six hours. Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said it has observed attackers with diverse motivations targeting proprietary AI

Researchers at the security firm Calif have built a worm that takes over a WeChat account via an incoming call and demonstrated it spreading among three test phones. The person being called does not have to answer or touch their phone for it to work, but the caller must already be one of their WeChat contacts. Calif reported the flaw to Tencent in July and says the company has since

In the last six months, Chainguard doubled its output from 500 million to more than 1 billion container build manifests. We also surpassed 3,000 unique container images and 675,000 image versions in our catalog. Those are the headline numbers, but I want to share what's actually behind them. The number itself is less interesting than the system that produced it, and why we had to fundamentally

Phoronix reports: AMD is building out what they are describing as an "elite" team of developers for driving Rust code "deep into the GPU stack" from firmware to drivers, shader compilers, and other GPU software in Rust. AMD Senior Fellow Harsh Meno posted this week to LinkedIn about this new effort... And note this AMD job posting that's active for hiring a software development engineer to work on Rust code... "We are building next-generation systems software for AMD GPUs with Rust as a core technical direction. The work spans compilers, runtimes, low-level GPU software, firmware, developer tooling, and methods for improving the safety and correctness of complex hardware-software systems. "Rust is not incidental to this role. You will help establish how Rust is used in performance-sensitive and high-trust parts of the GPU stack, including the compiler and tooling support, system interfaces, engineering practices, and validation methods required for production deployment. You will have the opportunity to influence both near-term implementations and the longer-term architecture for using Rust across current and future AMD platforms." "AMD also isn't alone," the article points out, "as NVIDIA has also been pursuing similar Rust-based initiatives for their GPU software too, including the development of the Nova Linux kernel driver written in Rust."

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