Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report: A Romanian national pleaded guilty on Monday to charges related to his role in a "swatting" ring that targeted dozens of public officials, including a former US president. Going by the aliases "Plank," "Jonah" and "Cypher," 26-year-old Thomasz Szabo took part in a years-long conspiracy to place bogus 911 calls, claiming emergencies were taking place at the homes of top government officials, and make bomb threats against government buildings and houses of worship, according to the Justice Department. Szabo and a co-conspirator, 21-year-old Serbian national Nemanja Radovanovic, allegedly targeted about 100 people, including members of Congress, governors, cabinet-level executive branch officials and state officials. Szabo, who was extradited from Romania last November, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and one count of making bomb threats. He is slated to be sentenced in a Washington, DC, federal court in October. [...] Charges against Radovanovic are still pending.

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"It appears as though Meta (aka: Facebook's parent company) and Yandex have found a way to sidestep the Android Sandbox," writes Slashdot reader TheWho79. Researchers disclose the novel tracking method in a report: We found that native Android apps -- including Facebook, Instagram, and several Yandex apps including Maps and Browser -- silently listen on fixed local ports for tracking purposes. These native Android apps receive browsers' metadata, cookies and commands from the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica scripts embedded on thousands of web sites. These JavaScripts load on users' mobile browsers and silently connect with native apps running on the same device through localhost sockets. As native apps access programmatically device identifiers like the Android Advertising ID (AAID) or handle user identities as in the case of Meta apps, this method effectively allows these organizations to link mobile browsing sessions and web cookies to user identities, hence de-anonymizing users' visiting sites embedding their scripts. This web-to-app ID sharing method bypasses typical privacy protections such as clearing cookies, Incognito Mode and Android's permission controls. Worse, it opens the door for potentially malicious apps eavesdropping on users' web activity. While there are subtle differences in the way Meta and Yandex bridge web and mobile contexts and identifiers, both of them essentially misuse the unvetted access to localhost sockets. The Android OS allows any installed app with the INTERNET permission to open a listening socket on the loopback interface (127.0.0.1). Browsers running on the same device also access this interface without user consent or platform mediation. This allows JavaScript embedded on web pages to communicate with native Android apps and share identifiers and browsing habits, bridging ephemeral web identifiers to long-lived mobile app IDs using standard Web APIs. This technique circumvents privacy protections like Incognito Mode, cookie deletion, and Android's permission model, with Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica scripts silently communicating with apps across over 6 million websites combined. Following public disclosure, Meta ceased using this method on June 3, 2025. Browser vendors like Chrome, Brave, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo have implemented or are developing mitigations, but a full resolution may require OS-level changes and stricter enforcement of platform policies to prevent further abuse.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Latin Times: A once-hyped AI startup backed by Microsoft has filed for bankruptcy after it was revealed that its so-called artificial intelligence was actually hundreds of human workers in India pretending to be chatbots. Builder.ai, a London-based company previously valued at $1.5 billion, marketed its platform as an AI-powered solution that made building apps as simple as ordering pizza. Its virtual assistant, "Natasha," was supposed to generate software using artificial intelligence. In reality, nearly 700 engineers in India were manually coding customer requests behind the scenes, the Times of India reported. The ruse began to collapse in May when lender Viola Credit seized $37 million from the company's accounts, uncovering that Builder.ai had inflated its 2024 revenue projections by 300%. An audit revealed the company generated just $50 million in revenue, far below the $220 million it claimed to investors. A Wall Street Journal report from 2019 had already questioned Builder.ai's AI claims, and a former executive sued the company that same year for allegedly misleading investors and overstating its technical capabilities. Despite that, the company raised over $445 million from big names including Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Authority. Builder.ai's collapse has triggered a federal investigation in the U.S., with prosecutors in New York requesting financial documents and customer records.

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Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney anticipated his company's battle with Apple would create "fireworks," but he never expected Fortnite to disappear from the iOS App Store for nearly five years. When Epic deliberately violated App Store rules in 2020 by inserting its own payment system into Fortnite, Sweeney thought the resulting legal clash would be brief. "I had actually hoped that we would get an injunction against Apple blocking Fortnite and that we'd only be off for a few weeks," Sweeney told The Verge. "But the court process dragged out, and we were off for five years." Fortnite returned to iOS last month and has quickly reclaimed its position as the top free game in the App Store, accumulating roughly 10 million downloads since May 20th. The game now offers players a choice between Epic's payment system, which provides 20% back in Epic Rewards, and Apple's traditional in-app purchase system. About 60% of users have chosen Apple's system while 40% have opted for Epic's alternative, according to Sweeney. He expects that ratio to shift toward Epic's system as more players associate payment methods with their Epic accounts.

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Microsoft cut hundreds more jobs just weeks after its largest layoff in years, underscoring the tech industry's efforts to trim costs even as it plows billions of dollars into artificial intelligence. From a report: More than 300 employees were told their positions had been eliminated on Monday, according to a Washington state notice reviewed by Bloomberg. The cuts impacted a range of positions, including software engineers, marketers, product managers, lawyers and research scientists, a state document showed. A Microsoft spokesperson said the latest headcount reduction is in addition to the 6,000 job cuts announced last month.

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T-Mobile announced Tuesday it will expand its fiber internet service to more than 500,000 households nationwide, offering three symmetrical speed tiers with five-year price locks starting June 5th. The plans range from 500 Mbps at $80 monthly to 2 Gbps at $110 monthly, with $5 autopay discounts for debit card payments. The expansion follows T-Mobile's joint venture with fiber provider Lumos and its pending Metronet acquisition, positioning the wireless carrier to reach 12 to 15 million households by 2030 as it challenges AT&T and Verizon's multibillion-dollar fiber investments.

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Meta has struck a 20-year deal with energy company Constellation to keep the Clinton Clean Energy Center nuclear plant in Illinois operational, the social media giant's first nuclear power purchase agreement as it seeks clean energy sources for AI data centers. The aging facility, which was slated to close in 2017 after years of financial losses and currently operates under a state tax credit reprieve until 2027, will receive undisclosed financial support that enables a 30-megawatt capacity expansion to 1,121 MW total output. The arrangement preserves 1,100 local jobs while generating electricity for 800,000 homes, as Meta purchases clean energy certificates to offset a portion of its growing carbon footprint driven by AI operations.

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Animal cloning has evolved from experimental science into a thriving commercial industry producing thousands of genetic copies across nearly 60 species, despite sustained public opposition to the technology. ViaGen Pets & Equine, the world's leading producer of cloned cats, dogs and horses, charges $50,000 to clone a pet and $85,000 for a horse, with customers joining waiting lists for the service. The technology has found applications ranging from preserving exceptional beef cattle genetics to creating armies of polo horses. Top polo player Adolfo Cambiaso owns more than 100 clones of his best mare and once fielded an entire team riding copies of the same horse. West Texas A&M professor Ty Lawrence successfully cloned superior beef cattle from meat samples, with ranchers subsequently purchasing thousands of straws of semen from his cloned bulls. A 2023 Gallup survey found 61% of Americans still consider animal cloning "morally wrong," nearly unchanged since Dolly the sheep's 1996 debut, yet the industry continues expanding globally.

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More office space in the U.S. is being removed than added for the first time in at least 25 years. New data from CBRE Group shows that across the 58 largest US markets, 23.3 million square feet of office space is slated for demolition or conversion by year-end, while developers will complete just 12.7 million square feet of new construction.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Open source software used by hobbyist drones powered an attack that wiped out a third of Russia's strategic long range bombers on Sunday afternoon, in one of the most daring and technically coordinated attacks in the war. In broad daylight on Sunday, explosions rocked air bases in Belaya, Olenya, and Ivanovo in Russia, which are hundreds of miles from Ukraine. The Security Services of Ukraine's (SBU) Operation Spider Web was a coordinated assault on Russian targets it claimed was more than a year in the making, which was carried out using a nearly 20-year-old piece of open source drone autopilot software called ArduPilot. ArduPilot's original creators were in awe of the attack. "That's ArduPilot, launched from my basement 18 years ago. Crazy," Chris Anderson said in a comment on LinkedIn below footage of the attack. On X, he tagged his the co-creators Jordi Munoz and Jason Short in a post about the attack. "Not in a million years would I have predicted this outcome. I just wanted to make flying robots," Short said in a reply to Anderson. "Ardupilot powered drones just took out half the Russian strategic bomber fleet." ArduPilot is an open source software system that takes its name from the Arduino hardware systems it was originally designed to work with. It began in 2007 when Anderson launched the website DIYdrones.com and cobbled together a UAV autopilot system out of a Lego Mindstorms set.

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