XDA Developers reports: On July 22, a Google DeepMind engineer, Vidy Thatte, shared a snippet of a browser he built that "treats every URL as a prompt and generates a site from scratch" on his X account. Just a few days later, he shared a TestFlight link to let iPhone users try it for themselves. The browser he launched is called Gem, and it's a browser that doesn't really...browse.

Instead of fetching a webpage from a server the way Chrome or Safari would, Gem hands whatever URL you type over to Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite model and asks it to generate a webpage on the spot. If you enter a real address, it builds its own interpretation of that site rather than loading the actual thing. If you enter an address that doesn't exist, Gemini simply invents a website to fill the gap. In other words, you're not visiting the internet so much as browsing one the model dreams up as you go...

Thatte's reasoning was that with a model as fast and cheap as Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite, there's almost no practical difference anymore between loading a website and generating a brand-new one on the fly... Given that this tool is powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite and it's just a side project rather than a full-fledged tool, it doesn't come with Gemini access baked in. Gem requires you to bring your own Gemini API key to get it working. Every URL you enter fires off a request to the model, so Gem needs a key linked to your Google account to actually generate anything, with the usage billed to you. You can grab a key for free from Google AI Studio, paste it into Gem's settings, and you're ready to start typing URLs. While you can get started for free, I ran into the limits within two minutes of playing around. So, I did need to enable billing on my API key and decided to load $10 into it.
While the blogger's own site seemed to only get the Gemini logo, tapping it revealed nearly two dozen remixing options. (Dark mode, Reader, Neubrutalist, Broadsheet, Blueprint, Comic book, Punk zine, Notebook, Chalkboard, Receipt, Teletext, System 7, Wes Anderson, Cyber neon, Clay, Frosted, Geocities, Matrix, Museum, Windows 95, Terminal, Vaporwave, and Hide images...) "The frontend morphed before my eyes. Every new edit took practically no time to load, and within a second or two, the same XDA articles would reappear wearing a completely different skin..." For another site, it kept the article headlines, but then rewrote all the text!

And after entering an address they knew didn't exist — their own name — in two seconds the browser whipped up a slick portfolio "genuinely been better than some of what those tools produced with far more time and context to work with." But its link to a LinkedIn profile led to a lookalike page, because Gem "had simply generated its own version of it, complete with a made-up follower number and details I never wrote...."

"When a group of teenagers set out to hike British Columbia's famed Howe Sound Crest Trail in early July, Google Maps suggested the trek would take about five hours," reports SFGate.

"Instead, the hike stretched deep into the night, leaving the group exhausted, dehydrated, injured and in need of a helicopter rescue..." Although the approximately 18-mile route with a 6,000-foot elevation gain can be completed by experienced trail runners in a day, search and rescue officials generally recommend hikers treat it as a two-day backpacking trip. The teenagers, all 17 years old, believed Google Maps' estimate that the route would take about five hours. The printed directions they were carrying, which were shared publicly by Lions Bay Search and Rescue, gave simple instructions for two legs of the trail, but didn't account for the terrain or elevation. "[Google Maps] is calculating the time that you're walking a straight road on pavement," [said Maria Masiar, training officer and search manager with Lions Bay Search and Rescue]. "When you get into outdoor terrain, that no longer holds true."

Expecting only a short outing, each hiker carried about half a liter of water and limited food. There are no reliable water sources along the trail, meaning hikers must carry enough supplies for the entire route. As the group climbed, they began suffering from dehydration and muscle cramps but continued onward despite falling dramatically behind schedule. Eventually, the group made the decision to turn back and abandon making it to the end of the trail — and as the sun began to set and the group started to descend, fatigue took its toll. According to Masiar, members of the group had already stumbled and fallen several times while trying to race the coming dark, and only one hiker had a headlamp. Eventually, another hiker slipped about 10 feet off a boulder, injuring his tailbone badly enough that he could no longer continue. Search and rescue crews responded, ultimately evacuating him by helicopter.

"A humanoid robot lost its head," reports Newsweek, "during the world's first free-combat tournament for full-sized humanoid robots."

The Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend competition began Thursday in Shenzhen, China, according to the article, with local robotics company EngineAI providing $40,000 of their "T800" robots (yes, named after The Terminator) to 32 participating teams from around the world: A video shared of the combat on YouTube by local news outlet Shenzhen Story, showed that even after one of the robots had its head practically knocked off its shoulders, it continued to fight, throwing punches at its opponent and kicking into the air... [White humanoid robot "White Eagle"] landed a high kick to the head of its black opponent, "Matador," which made the robot's head rock precariously in its socket before rolling completely out of place. The two continued to spar as Matador's head was swinging from its socket until eventually the robot fell, crushing its head underneath its body.

Matador tried to scramble back to its feet, but its head flew off and the robot then collapsed back down. The White Eagle did a celebratory dance for the crowd as the fight concluded, and did a move that mimicked that of someone flexing their biceps. The White Eagle waited in the ring, fists still up, as Matador was carried away, occasionally doing a few more dance moves...

Per a report by Global Times, the winning team will be awarded a gold championship belt worth $1.44 million (10 million yuan) by the event organizer.
It's a strange fight. The robots sometimes seem unaware of where their opponent is, facing the wrong direction or throwing kicks and punches in the air. In the first round White Eagle just knocks over Matador, who then isn't able to stand back up. (And White Eagle again appears to do a victorious dance.)

EngineAI's site says they aim to "promote the development of robot combat events toward greater professionalism, scale, and industrialization," while fostering innovation and global collaboration.

Thanks to Slashdot reader pbahra for sharing the news.

A few weeks ago on a bike ride "inspiration struck" for Dave Eggers, reports SFGate... Without a pen and paper handy, he was stuck texting the idea to himself. The problem? Eggers doesn't own a smartphone. "It takes 20 minutes to write a sentence," Eggers said... It's a funny predicament for Eggers, given that he's arguably the city's biggest proponent of the written word... Now age 56, Eggers' latest book is called "Contrapposto"...

On writing days, Eggers bikes to his sailboat docked near the Golden Gate Bridge. He writes using a hefty 1998 Mac that has never been connected to the internet. On the boat, he keeps "banker's hours," working 9 to 5 without any meetings or interruptions except for the occasional wildlife visit. "You're there with the cormorants and the occasional porpoise and sea lions and seals, and when you want to take a break, you walk around and you're in the thick of it, one of the most beautiful spots on Earth," he said. "Especially coming from the Midwest, it never gets old."

Given Eggers' decidedly low-tech existence, it's not surprising that the current state of San Francisco gives him pause, but there's a streak of hope that underlies his concerns. He abhors the growing surveillance technology that's gripping the city, refusing to get into Ubers that use recording devices, but he feels a well-written ballot measure about Flock cameras could potentially save our dwindling privacy. ChatGPT's effects on the art of writing are demoralizing, but he welcomes that teachers are re-embracing pencil and paper, with cursive making a big comeback. The wave of artificial intelligence ads blanketing bus stops imploring companies to stop hiring humans are so over the top, they'd sound cliché if he were to include them in one of his dystopian tech industry novels like "The Circle" or "The Every," but tech philanthropy has helped many of his projects flourish.

Case in point, Art + Water, a new art space scheduled to open next year on Pier 29 funded largely by art world donations... Co-founded with the artist JD Beltran, the space is slated to operate as an old-school apprenticeship system, hosting 10 artists in residence mentoring 20 students, all free of charge... The ultimate goal is to break down the financial barriers that keep students from pursuing art.
Thanks to Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.

CNN reports on a "sudden surge of claimed sightings" of "unidentified figures averaging 8 feet tall in wooded areas" along Ohio's Mahoning River. "And it stopped just as quickly as it started," says Jeremiah Byron, host of the Bigfoot Society Podcast, which collected and mapped the reports .... Byron doesn't take every report at face value, making sure he talks to people directly before publicizing their claims. Once word got out about the reports in Ohio, so did the obvious fakes. "I started to get a lot of AI-generated reports in my email. It got up to the point where I was probably getting about 1,000 emails a day," he says. But when Byron spoke by phone with people who made the initial reports, they convinced him they weren't making anything up. "It was obvious they weren't just wanting to get their name out there," says Byron. "They were just freaked out by what they experienced, and they didn't want anything else to do with it."

[...] Local law enforcement in Ohio also seem to be enjoying the publicity. Portage County Sheriff Bruce D. Zuchowski made a series of gag posts purporting to show the arrest of Bigfoot and his detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, only for the creature to escape from custody at the Canadian border...

Despite the levity, the sheriff's office really did get some calls from concerned residents, Zuchowski says. "Ten individual people were like, 'Yeah I was walking my dog at 4 a.m. and I saw this hairy figure and I smelled this musty odor and there was this big thing and all of a sudden it ran,'" the sheriff told CNN affiliate WOIO in March.

"Vibe coding just got a whole lot more adorable," writes Engadget: OpenAI introduced AI-generated pets to the Codex app, its agentic tool that helps with coding. These "optional animated companions" don't do any coding themselves, but serve as a floating overlay that can tell you what Codex is working on, notify you when Codex completes a task or whether it needs your input on something. The new feature lets developers see Codex's active thread, without having to switch away from your current open app.
"The feature ships with eight built-in variations — including a cat and dog," reports Mashable. "But the more interesting play is the custom pet creator." Users can prompt Codex directly to generate their own companion, then share it online. A quick scroll through the homepage reveals the community has already gotten to work. Current creations include Goku, Patrick Star, Microsoft's long-retired Clippy, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and — naturally — a goblin.
There's also Grogu, Dobby, a tiny Bob Rossi, and a "Doge-style Shiba Inu dog"...

A 1999 press release bragged "Jeeves" answered 92.3 million questions in just three months. "In the digital wilds of Y2K, we came to him with our most probing questions," remembers the New York Times — whether it was Britney Spears or tamagotchis: We asked, and he answered: Jeeves, the digital butler of information, the online valet who led us into the depths of cyberspace. Now, like so many other relics of yesterday's internet, Jeeves — and his home, Ask.com — are no more. After almost 30 years, the question-and-answer service and former search engine shuttered on Friday. "To you — the millions of users who turned to us for answers in a rapidly changing world — thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty, and your trust," the company said in a notice posted on its now-defunct website...

Created in Berkeley, Calif., in the days of the dot-com gold rush, Ask Jeeves first appeared on computer screens in 1996.... Their mascot, Jeeves, was modeled on the clever English butler character from the famed P.G. Wodehouse book series. Its search function was simple — type in a question, get an answer. But the quality of its responses was uneven, and the website was quickly eclipsed by Google and Yahoo as the world's go-to search engines.

The site was bought by InterActive Corp. for more than $1 billion in 2005, and was given an injection of cash to help it compete as a search engine. It rebranded as Ask.com and as part of the reimagining, the site also ditched the character of Jeeves in 2006. Scrappy but inventive, the site was one of the first to introduce hyperlocal map overlays to its searches and incorporate thumbnails of webpages. "They are doing a lot of clever and interesting things," a Google executive noted of Ask.com at the time. Still, Ask.com struggled to compete and returned in 2010 to its bread and butter: question-and-answer style prompts.

Even then, it faltered against newer, crowdsourced iterations like Quora and Google's unyielding march to the internet fore — the platform now dominates search traffic, and the world's general experience of the internet.
A statement at Ask.com ends "by thanking its millions of users, and saying, 'Jeeves' spirit endures'," notes this article from Engadget: As sad as it is to see a relic of the early Internet days fade into obscurity, we still have Ask Jeeves to thank for why some users still punch in full questions when querying Google. On top of that, Jeeves was built to provide detailed answers in natural language, which could have arguably acted as a precursor to today's AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
"Now, Ask.com joins the Internet graveyard that includes competitors like AltaVista, which shut down in 2013," the article points out. "With Ask.com gone, alongside AIM and AOL dial-up services also sunsetting, we're truly coming to an end of a specific era of the Internet." And the New York Times argues the memory of Jeeves now rests somewhere between Limewire and Beanie Babies...

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli calls it "a quiet reminder of how quickly the web moves, and how even widely recognized names can drift into obscurity once the underlying technology leaves them behind."

"I'm still teaching at Princeton," 83-year-old Brian Kernighan recently told an audience at New Jersey's InfoAge Science and History Museums.

And last month the video was uploaded to YouTube, a new article points out, "showing that his talk ended with a unique question-and-answer session that turned almost historic..." "Do you think there's any sort of merit to Rust replacing C?" one audience member asked... "Or is this just a huge hype bubble that's waiting to die down...?"

'"I have written only one Rust program, so you should take all of this with a giant grain of salt," he said. "And I found it a — pain... I just couldn't grok the mechanisms that were required to do memory safety, in a program where memory wasn't even an issue!" Speaking of Rust, Kernighan said "The support mechanism that went with it — this notion of crates and barrels and things like that — was just incomprehensibly big and slow. And the compiler was slow, the code that came out was slow..."

All in all, Kernighan had had a bad experience. "When I tried to figure out what was going on, the language had changed since the last time somebody had posted a description! And so it took days to write a program which in other languages would take maybe five minutes..." It was his one and only experience with the language, so Kernighan acknowledged that when it comes to Rust "I'm probably unduly cynical. "But I'm — I don't think it's gonna replace C right away, anyway."
Kernighan was also asked about NixOS and HolyC — but his formative experiences remain rooted in Bell Labs starts in the 1970s, where he remembers it was "great fun to hang out with these people."

And he acknowledged that the descendants of Unix now power nearly every cellphone. "I find it intriguing... And I also find it kind of irritating that underneath there is a system that I could do things with — but I can't get at it!"


Kernighan answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2009 and again in 2015...

A professional trapper had one question about the wild pig he'd found in California. Why was its flesh blue? The Los Angeles Times explains: [California's Department of Fish and Wildlife] is now warning trappers and hunters to keep an eye out for possibly contaminated wildlife in the area, and not to consume the tainted meat, over concerns the blue meat is a sign that the animal may have consumed poison.... The startling find of wild pigs with bright blue tissue in Monterey County suggests the animals have been exposed to anticoagulant rodenticide diphacinone, a popular poison used by farmers and agriculture companies to control the population of rats, mice, squirrels and other small animals, according to a statement from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. "Hunters should be aware that the meat of game animals, such as wild pig, deer, bear and geese, might be contaminated if that game animal has been exposed to rodenticides," said Ryan Bourbor, pesticide investigations coordinator with the state agency.
Diphacinone has been prohibited in California since 2024 (with exceptions for government agencies sor their certified Vector Control Technicians).

The state's Fish and Wildlife department says anyone who finds wildlife with blue fat or tissue should contact the state's wildlife officials.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the news.

In 1995's online world, AOL existed mostly beside the internet as a "walled, manicured garden," remembers Fast Company.

Then along came AOHell "the first of what would become thousands of programs designed by young hackers to turn the system upside down" — built by a high school dropout calling himself "Da Chronic" who says he used "a computer that I couldn't even afford" using "a pirated copy of Microsoft Visual Basic." [D]istributed throughout the teen chatrooms, the program combined a pile of tricks and pranks into a slick little control panel that sat above AOL's windows and gave even newbies an arsenal of teenage superpowers. There was a punter to kick people out of chatrooms, scrollers to flood chats with ASCII art, a chat impersonator, an email and instant message bomber, a mass mailer for sharing warez (and later mp3s), and even an "Artificial Intelligence Bot" [which performed automated if-then responses]. Crucially, AOHell could also help users gain "free" access to AOL. The program came with a program for generating fake credit card numbers (which could fool AOL's sign up process), and, by January 1995, a feature for stealing other users' passwords or credit cards. With messages masquerading as alerts from AOL customer service reps, the tool could convince unsuspecting users to hand over their secrets...

Of course, Da Chronic — actually a 17-year-old high school dropout from North Carolina named Koceilah Rekouche — had other reasons, too. Rekouche wanted to hack AOL because he loved being online with his friends, who were a refuge from a difficult life at home, and he couldn't afford the hourly fee. Plus, it was a thrill to cause havoc and break AOL's weak systems and use them exactly how they weren't meant to be, and he didn't want to keep that to himself. Other hackers "hated the fact that I was distributing this thing, putting it into the team chat room, and bringing in all these noobs and lamers and destroying the community," Rekouche told me recently by phone...

Rekouche also couldn't have imagined what else his program would mean: a free, freewheeling creative outlet for thousands of lonely, disaffected kids like him, and an inspiration for a generation of programmers and technologists. By the time he left AOL in late 1995, his program had spawned a whole cottage industry of teenage script kiddies and hackers, and fueled a subculture where legions of young programmers and artists got their start breaking and making things, using pirated software that otherwise would have been out of reach... In 2014, [AOL CEO Steve] Case himself acknowledged on Reddit that "the hacking of AOL was a real challenge for us," but that "some of the hackers have gone on to do more productive things."

When he first met Mark Zuckerberg, he said, the Facebook founder confessed to Case that "he learned how to program by hacking [AOL]."
"I can't imagine somebody doing that on Facebook today," Da Chronic says in a new interview with Fast Company. "They'll kick you off if you create a Google extension that helps you in the slightest bit on Facebook, or an extension that keeps your privacy or does a little cool thing here and there. That's totally not allowed."

AOHell's creators had called their password-stealing techniques "phishing" — and the name stuck. (AOL was working with federal law enforcement to find him, according to a leaked internal email, but "I didn't even see that until years later.") Enrolled in college, he decided to write a technical academic paper about his program. "I do believe it caught the attention of Homeland Security, but I think they realized pretty quickly that I was not a threat."

He's got an interesting perspective today, noting with today's AI tool's it's theoretically possible to "craft dynamic phishing emails... when I see these AI coding tools I think, this might be like today's Visual Basic. They take out a lot of the grunt work."

What's the moral of the story? "I didn't have any qualifications or anything like that," Da Chronic says. "So you don't know who your adversary is going to be, who's going to understand psychology in some nuanced way, who's going to understand how to put some technological pieces together, using AI, and build some really wild shit."

NBC News reports: Customers watched in disbelief as Florida police arrested a Chuck E. Cheese employee — in costume portraying the pizza-hawking rodent — and accused him of using a stolen credit card, officials said Thursday.... "I grabbed his right arm while giving the verbal instruction, 'Chuck E, come with me Chuck E,'" Tallahassee police officer Jarrett Cruz wrote in the report.
After a child's birthday party in June at Chuck E. Cheese, the child's mother had "spotted fraudulent charges at stores she doesn't frequent," according to the article — and she recognized a Chuck E. Cheese employee when reviewing a store's security footage. But when a police officer interviewed the employee — and then briefly left the restaurant — they returned to discover that their suspect "was gone but a Chuck E. Cheese mascot was now in the restaurant."

Police officer Cruz "told the mascot not to make a scene before the officer and his partner 'exerted minor physical effort' to handcuff him, police said... " The officers read the mouse his Miranda warnings before he insisted he never stole anyone's credit, police said.... Officers found the victim's Visa card in [the costume-wearing employee's] left pocket and a receipt from a smoke shop where one of the fraudulent purchases was made, police said.
He was booked on charges of "suspicion of larceny, possession of another person's ID without consent and fraudulent use of a credit card two or more times," according to the article. He was released after posting a $6,500 bond.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the news.

"I vibe coded a little game called Coldplay Canoodlers," reads the X.com post by gaming enthusiast/songwriter Jonathan Mann. "You're the camera operator and you have to find the CEO and HR lady canoodling. 10 points every time you find them."

Mann's post includes a 30-second clip from the game, which is playable here.

Forbes notes that the TikTok video of the couple's reaction has drawn more than 100 million views — and that the married-to-someone-else CEO has now tendered his resignation from his dataops company Astronomer (which was accepted). The company is now searching for a new chief executive, according to a statement posted on LinkedIn. ("Comments have been turned off on this post...")

"Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met."

But songwriter Mann saw a chance to have some fun, writes Forbes: Mann used ChatGPT to make the "Coldplay Canoodlers" game, inputting such prompts as: "Can you generate an 8-bit pixel image of a stadium concert viewed from the stage" and "there should be a large jumbotron somewhere up in the stadium seats." He also entered rough drawings of the visual style he envisioned... The response to the game, Mann said in an interview, has been unexpected. "I have gone viral many times with my songs," he said. It's "very strange to have it happen with a game I made in four hours."
Songwriter Mann has been sharing an original song online every day for over 17 years. Last summer Slashdot also covered Mann's attempts to sell NFTs of his songs, and his concerns about SEC regulations. (This led him to file a real-world legal challenge — and to write a song titled "I'm Suing the SEC".) So with all the attention this weekend to his instant game, there was nothing to do but... write a new song about it.

And minutes ago on X.com, Mann also posted a new update about his game.

"I turned it into an NFT."

"Took some time," Mann explained later. "But I vibe coded my own ERC-721 contract and minted the game as a playable NFT. (Plays great on OpenSea)."

"Steam quietly welcomed another indie game this week, but this one is distinctly different for a lot of reasons," writes Notebookcheck: Dogwalk, which debuted on July 11, is the kind of short, gentle experience that almost forces you to smile. Developed by Blender Studio, the game introduces players to a gorgeous winter landscape. You play as a cute, fluffy dog, with a small child in tow...

What's particularly interesting here is that Dogwalk is more than just another charming indie project. It's Blender Studio's showcase for what's possible using fully open-source tools. The entire project — assets, animations, and code — is made with Blender and the popular Godot Game Engine. Unlike industry giants such as Unity or Unreal, Godot is completely open source, meaning it doesn't require developers to pay royalties or follow strict licensing agreements. This should make it great for small studios and independent creators, as it lowers the entry barrier to game creation.

Dogwalk is 100% free, which fits neatly into its open-source philosophy

Science Daily reports: Wild orcas across four continents have repeatedly floated fish and other prey to astonished swimmers and boaters, hinting that the ocean's top predator likes to make friends. Researchers cataloged 34 such gifts over 20 years, noting the whales often lingered expectantly — and sometimes tried again — after humans declined their offerings, suggesting a curious, relationship-building motive...

"Orcas often share food with each other — it's a prosocial activity and a way that they build relationships with each other," said study lead author Jared Towers, of Bay Cetology in British Columbia, Canada. "That they also share with humans may show their interest in relating to us as well."
The complete research was published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. Its title? "Testing the Waters: Attempts by Wild Killer Whales (Orcinus orca) to Provision People (Homo sapiens)."

"Can you help me take down the Texas lottery?"

That's what a London banker-turned-bookmaker asked "acquaintances" in 2023, reports the Wall Street Journal. The plan was to buy "nearly every possible number in a coming drawing" — purchasing $1 tickets for 25.8 million possible combinations, since "The jackpot was heading to $95 million. If nobody else also picked the winning numbers, the profit would be nearly $60 million." Marantelli flew to the U.S. with a few trusted lieutenants. They set up shop in a defunct dentist's office, a warehouse and two other spots in Texas. The crew worked out a way to get official ticket-printing terminals. Trucks hauled in dozens of them and reams of paper... [Then Texas announced no winner in an earlier lottery, rolling its jackpot into another drawing three days later.] The machines — manned by a disparate bunch of associates and some of their children — screeched away nearly around the clock, spitting out 100 or more tickets every second. Texas politicians later likened the operation to a sweatshop.

Trying to pull off the gambit required deep pockets and a knack for staying under the radar — both hallmarks of the secretive Tasmanian gambler who bankrolled the operation. Born Zeljko Ranogajec, he was nicknamed "the Joker" for his ability to pull off capers at far-flung casinos and racetracks. Adding to his mystique, he changed his name to John Wilson several decades ago. Among some associates, though, he still goes by Zeljko, or Z. Over the years, Ranogajec and his partners have won hundreds of millions of dollars by applying Wall Street-style analytics to betting opportunities around the world. Like card counters at a blackjack table, they use data and math to hunt for situations ripe for flipping the house edge in their favor. Then they throw piles of money at it, betting an estimated $10 billion annually.

The Texas lottery play, one of their most ambitious operations ever, paid off spectacularly with a $57.8 million jackpot win. That, in turn, spilled their activities into public view and sparked a Texas-size uproar about whether other lotto players — and indeed the entire state — had been hoodwinked. Early this month, the state's lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, called the crew's win "the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas." In response to written questions addressed to Marantelli and Ranogajec, Glenn Gelband, a New Jersey lawyer who represents the limited partnership that claimed the Texas prize, said "all applicable laws, rules and regulations were followed...."

Lottery officials and state lawmakers have taken steps to prevent a repeat.
The article also looks at a group of Princeton University graduates calling themselves Black Swan Capital that's "won millions in recent years" by targetting state lottery drawings with unusually favorable odds.

"State lottery directors say they are seeing more organized efforts to buy lottery tickets in bulk," according to the article, "but that the groups are largely operating legally and transparently..."