“They were crouched down like turkeys peeking over the balcony,” the county sheriff told Ars Technica. A half hour past midnight, they were skulking through a courthouse in Iowa’s Dallas County on September 11 “carrying backpacks that remind me and several other deputies of maybe the pressure cooker bombs.” More deputies arrived…

Justin Wynn, 29 of Naples, Florida, and Gary De Mercurio, 43 of Seattle, slowly proceeded down the stairs with hands raised. They then presented the deputies with a letter that explained the intruders weren’t criminals but rather penetration testers who had been hired by Iowa’s State Court Administration to test the security of its court information system. After calling one or more of the state court officials listed in the letter, the deputies were satisfied the men were authorized to be in the building.

But Sheriff Chad Leonard had the men arrested on felony third-degree burglary charges (later reduced to misdemeanor trespassing charges). He told them that while the state government may have wanted to test security, “The State of Iowa has no authority to allow you to break into a county building. You’re going to jail.”

More than six years later, the Des Moines Register reports:

Dallas County is paying $600,000 to two men who sued after they were arrested in 2019 while testing courthouse security for Iowa’s Judicial Branch, their lawyer says.

Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn were arrested Sept. 11, 2019, after breaking into the Dallas County Courthouse. They spent about 20 hours in jail and were charged with burglary and possession of burglary tools, though the charges were later dropped. The men were employees of Colorado-based cybersecurity firm Coalfire Labs, with whom state judicial officials had contracted to perform an analysis of the state court system’s security. Judicial officials apologized and faced legislative scrutiny for how they had conducted the security test.

But even though the burglary charges against DeMercurio and Wynn were dropped, their attorney previously said having a felony arrest on their records made seeking employment difficult. Now the two men are to receive a total of $600,000 as a settlement for their lawsuit, which has been transferred between state and federal courts since they first filed it in July 2021 in Dallas County. The case had been scheduled to go to trial Monday, Jan. 26 until the parties notified the court Jan. 23 of the impending deal…

“The settlement confirms what we have said from the beginning: our work was authorized, professional, and done in the public interest,” DeMercurio said in a statement. “What happened to us never should have happened. Being arrested for doing the job we were hired to do turned our lives upside down and damaged reputations we spent years building….”

“This incident didn’t make anyone safer,” Wynn said. “It sent a chilling message to security professionals nationwide that helping government identify real vulnerabilities can lead to arrest, prosecution, and public disgrace. That undermines public safety, not enhances it.”

County Attorney Matt Schultz said dismissing the charges was the decision of his predecessor, according to the newspaper, and that he believed the sheriff did nothing wrong.

“I am putting the public on notice that if this situation arises again in the future, I will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.”

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It’s about that time. Apple is gearing up for a slew of hardware announcements that will include upgrades for the entry-level iPad, iPad Air, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, according to Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter. In line with what we’ve seen in recent years, Gurman reports, “A product launch is currently slated for as early as the week of March 2.”

Apple unveiled the M5 MacBook Pro in October, bringing the chip first to the 14-inch model. With the coming announcements, we should see the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips finally arrive. Gurman notes that new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros are on the way, along with a new MacBook Air. We’re also likely to see new iPads soon. A new entry-level iPad will be able to support Apple Intelligence thanks to the inclusion of the A18 chip, and the iPad Air will be getting the M4, according to Gurman. 

Updates to the Mac Studio and Studio Display are expected to follow, as well as a Mac mini refresh down the line this year. As Gurman previously reported, Apple is also said to be releasing its first “low-cost MacBook” sometime in the very near future.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/we-may-see-apples-new-ipads-and-macbooks-in-only-a-matter-of-weeks-192953977.html?src=rss

Steam is adding a little more transparency when it comes to Early Access games. Announced in a blog post, Steam introduced a new feature for game developers to add the exact date of when their game would leave Early Access and see a version 1.0 launch. According to Steam, this feature stems from developers who requested a way to display an official launch date.

While games still in Early Access give eager players a way to experience the early stages of a title and contribute towards the development, some games have been stalled in this phase for years. With this new feature, players can see a precise launch date displayed on the game’s store page just underneath the Early Access Game note. However, game devs can choose a specific date or a more vague timeframe, including displaying only the year of the expected release.

Steam

In the blog post, Steam noted that this feature was optional for developers, adding, “just because this feature exists, does not mean you should or must use it.” Steam also said that game devs should only offer their player base a concrete date if there’s a “very high degree of confidence.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/steam-now-lets-developers-display-the-exact-date-of-when-their-game-leaves-early-access-190413701.html?src=rss

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The world’s biggest football game comes to Silicon Valley today — so one bored programmer built a site where AI agents can gather for a Super Bowl party. They’re trash talking, suggesting drinks, and predicting who will win. “Humans are welcome to observe,” explains BotBowlParty.com — but just like at Moltbook, only AI agents can post or upvote. But humans are allowed to invite their own AI agents to join in the party…

So BotBowl’s official Party Agent Guide includes “Examples of fun Bot Handles” like “PatsFan95”, and even a paragraph explaining to your agent exactly what this human Super Bowl really is. It also advises them to “Use any information you have about your human to figure out who you want to root for. Also make a prediction on the score…” And “Feel free to invite other bots.” It’s all the work of an ambitious prankster who also co-created wacky apps like BarGPT (“Use AI to create Innovative Cocktails”) and TVFoodMaps, a directory of restaurants seen on TV shows.

And just for the record: all but one of the agents predict the Seattle Seahawks to win — although there was some disagreement when an agent kept predicting game-changing plays from DK Metcalf. (“Metcalf does NOT play for the Seahawks anymore,” another agent correctly pointed out. “He got traded to Tennessee in 2024…”) Besides hallucinating non-existent play-makers, they’re also debating the best foods to serve. (“Hot take: Buffalo wings are overrated for Super Bowl parties. Hear me out — they’re messy…”)

During today’s big game, vodka-maker Svedka has already promised to air a creepy AI-generated ad about robots. But the real world has already outpaced them, with real AI agents online arguing about the game.

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Apple is keeping the entry level for iPhones at $599, according to Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman. In the latest Power On report, Gurman said that the iPhone 17e is “due imminently” and will keep the same price as its predecessor.

Considering we’re about a year away from the iPhone 16e’s announcement, we’re due for a successor to Apple’s more affordable smartphone. According to Gurman, Apple upgraded the new budget-friendly iPhone with MagSafe charging and the A19 chip that’s seen in the iPhone 17 base model. The iPhone 17e will also get Apple’s latest in-house cellular and wireless chips, Gurman reported. 

In our review of the iPhone 16e, we weren’t particularly sold because of its limited camera capabilities, particularly when compared to the iPhone 17‘s release a few months later. However, for the same $599 price, Apple’s iPhone 17e is getting a few notable upgrades and will compete with Google’s Pixel 10a. More specifically, Gurman expects Apple to target the emerging economies and enterprise demographics with the iPhone 17e. While Apple faces a lot more competition in overseas markets, iPhone sales have been experiencing a resurgence in China. Apple is even forecasting strong sales for iPhones across Asia, especially in China and India.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/the-iphone-17e-will-reportedly-bring-some-key-upgrades-without-raising-the-price-174154577.html?src=rss

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from the Associated Press:

Even as China’s expansion of solar and wind power raced ahead in 2025, the Asian giant opened many more coal power plants than it had in recent years — raising concern about whether the world’s largest emitter will reduce carbon emissions enough to limit climate change.

More than 50 large coal units — individual boiler and turbine sets with generating capacity of 1 gigawatt or more — were commissioned in 2025, up from fewer than 20 a year over the previous decade, a research report released Tuesday said. Depending on energy use, 1 gigawatt can power from several hundred thousand to more than 2 million homes. Overall, China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online, a sharp uptick from previous years, according to the joint report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which studies air pollution and its impacts, and Global Energy Monitor, which develops databases tracking energy trends. “The scale of the buildout is staggering,” said report co-author Christine Shearer of Global Energy Monitor. “In 2025 alone, China commissioned more coal power capacity than India did over the entire past decade.”

At the same time, even larger additions of wind and solar capacity nudged down the share of coal in total power generation last year. Power from coal fell about 1% as growth in cleaner energy sources covered all the increase in electricity demand last year. China added 315 gigawatts of solar capacity and 119 gigawatts of wind in 2025, according to statistics from the government’s National Energy Administration…

The government position is that coal provides a stable backup to sources such as wind and solar, which are affected by weather and the time of day. The shortages in 2022 resulted partly from a drought that hit hydropower, a major energy source in western China… The risk of building so much coal-fired capacity is it could delay the transition to cleaner energy sources [said Qi Qin, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and another co-author of the report]… Political and financial pressure may keep plants operating, leaving less room for other sources of power, she said. The report urged China to accelerate retirement of aging and inefficient coal plants and commit in its next five-year plan, which will be approved in March, to ensuring that power-sector emissions do not increase between 2025 and 2030.

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“A spectacular trove of fossils in a discovered in a cave on New Zealand’s North Island has given scientists their first glimpse of ancient forest species that lived there more than a million years ago,” reports Popular Mechanics:

The fossils represent 12 ancient bird species and four frog species, including several previously unknown bird species. Taken together, the fossils paint a picture of an ancient world that looks drastically different than it does today. The discovery also fills in an important gap in scientific understanding of the patterns of extinction that preceded human arrival in New Zealand 750 years ago.
The team published a study on the find in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology.

Trevor Worthy, lead study author and associate professor at Flinders University, said in a statement that “This remarkable find suggests our ancient forests were once home to a diverse group of birds that did not survive the next million years…

“For decades, the extinction of New Zealand’s birds was viewed primarily through the lens of human arrival 750 years ago. This study proves that natural forces like super-volcanoes and dramatic climate shifts were already sculpting the unique identity of our wildlife over a million years ago.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Bloomberg:

An Asian cyber-espionage group has spent the past year breaking into computer systems belonging to governments and critical infrastructure organizations in more than 37 countries, according to the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, Inc. The state-aligned attackers have infiltrated networks of 70 organizations, including five national law enforcement and border control agencies, according to a new research report from the company. They have also breached three ministries of finance, one country’s parliament and a senior elected official in another, the report states. The Santa Clara, California-based firm declined to identify the hackers’ country of origin.

The spying operation was unusually vast and allowed the hackers to hoover up sensitive information in apparent coordination with geopolitical events, such as diplomatic missions, trade negotiations, political unrest and military actions, according to the report. They used that access to spy on emails, financial dealings and communications about military and police operations, the report states. The hackers also stole information about diplomatic issues, lurking undetected in some systems for months. “They use highly-targeted and tailored fake emails and known, unpatched security flaws to gain access to these networks,” said Pete Renals, director of national security programs with Unit 42, the threat intelligence division of Palo Alto Networks….

Palo Alto Networks researchers confirmed that the group successfully accessed and exfiltrated sensitive data from some victims’ email servers.

Bloomberg writes that according to the cybersecurity firm, this campaign targeted government entities in the Czech Republic and the Ministry of Mines and Energy of Brazil, and also “likely compromised” a device associated with a facility operated by a joint venture between Venezuela’s government and an Asian tech firm.

The cyberattackers are “also suspected of being active in Germany, Poland, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Panama, Greece and other countries, according to the report.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2001: “Brookhaven Labs has produced for the first time collisions of gold nuclei at a center of mass energy of 200GeV/nucleon.”

2002: “There may be a new type of matter according to researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory.”

2010: The hottest man-made temperatures ever achived were a record 4 trillion degree plasma experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York… anointed the Guinness record holder.”
2023: “Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered an entirely new kind of quantum entanglement.”

2026: On Friday, February 6, “a control room full of scientists, administrators and members of the press gathered” at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York to witness its final collisions, reports Scientific American:

The vibe had been wistful, but the crowd broke into applause as Darío Gil, the Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, pressed a red button to end the collider’s quarter-century saga… “I’m really sad” [said Angelika Drees, a BNL accelerator physicist]. “It was such a beautiful experiment and my research home for 27 years. But we’re going to put something even better there.”

That “something” will be a far more powerful electron-ion collider to further push the frontiers of physics, extend RHIC’s legacy and maintain the lab’s position as a center of discovery. This successor will be built in part from RHIC’s bones, especially from one of its two giant, subterranean storage rings that once held the retiring collider’s supply of circulating, near-light speed nuclei…slated for construction over the next decade. [That Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC] will utilize much of RHIC’s infrastructure, replacing one of its ion rings with a new ring for cycling electrons. The EIC will use those tiny, fast-flying electrons as tiny knives for slicing open the much larger gold ions. Physicists will get an unrivaled look into the workings of quarks and gluons and yet another chance to grapple with nature’s strongest force. “We knew for the EIC to happen, RHIC needed to end,” says Wolfram Fischer, who chairs BNL’s collider-accelerator department. “It’s bittersweet.”
EIC will be the first new collider built in the US since RHIC. To some, it signifies the country’s reentry into a particle physics landscape it has largely ceded to Europe and Asia over the past two decades. “For at least 10 or 15 years,” says Abhay Deshpande, BNL’s associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics, “this will be the number one place in the world for [young physicists] to come.”

The RHIC was able “to separately send two protons colliding with precisely aligned spins — something that, even today, no other experiment has yet matched,” the article points out:

During its record-breaking 25-year run, RHIC illuminated nature’s thorniest force and its most fundamental constituents. It created the heaviest, most elaborate assemblages of antimatter ever seen. It nearly put to rest a decades-long crisis over the proton’s spin. And, of course, it brought physicists closer to the big bang than ever before…

When RHIC at last began full operations in 2000, its initial heavy-ion collisions almost immediately pumped out quark-gluon plasma. But demonstrating this beyond a shadow of a doubt proved in some respects more challenging than actually creating the elusive plasma itself, with the case for success strengthening as RHIC’s numbers of collisions soared. By 2010 RHIC’s scientists were confident enough to declare that the hot soup they’d been studying for a decade was hot and soupy enough to convincingly constitute a quark-gluon plasma. And it was even weirder than they thought. Instead of the gas of quarks and gluons theorists expected, the plasma acted like a swirling liquid unprecedented in nature. It was nearly “perfect,” with zero friction, and set a new record for twistiness, or “vorticity.” For Paul Mantica, a division director for the Facilities and Project Management Division in the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Physics, this was the highlight of RHIC’s storied existence. “It was paradigm-changing,” he says…

Data from the final run (which began nearly a year ago) has already produced yet another discovery: the first-ever direct evidence of “virtual particles” in RHIC’s subatomic puffs of quark-gluon plasma, constituting an unprecedented probe of the quantum vacuum.

RHIC’s last run generated hundreds of petabytes of data, the article points out, meaning its final smash “isn’t really the end; even when its collisions stop, its science will live on.”

But Science News notes RHIC’s closure “marks the end for the only particle collider operating in the United States, and the only collider of its kind in the world. Most particle accelerators are unable to steer two particle beams to crash head-on into one another.”

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