Liquid Network, a Bitcoin-based payments and settlement network, said on Sunday that about $320 million was withdrawn from its federation wallet in a hack. “Purported white-hat hackers” withdrew around 4,000 of the 4,200 bitcoin held in its Liquid Federation wallet, Liquid Network said in a post on X.“Liquid wallets will be impacted,” their post concluded, adding “and we’re sorry for any inconvenience.”
“AI-generated” can make it sound as though someone typed a sentence into a machine and came back five minutes later to find a finished movie. Fairground’s catalog shows why that description can be too simple. Take Lost Garden: The Awakening of the Lantern Knight. According to its Fairground page, creator Frank Houbre wrote the world, characters, mythology, emotional arc and screenplay himself. AI tools were used mainly for animation and visual production, with other tools helping create voices and music before the episode was assembled in conventional video-editing software.There’s still one question, the article notes: “whether viewers actually want an AI-focused TV channel.” More than 100 AI creators have contributed to the 24-hour slate of programming, although Variety points out several of them were discovered on social media.
What about people who hate plot and vision and the sight of people speaking convincing dialogue that synchronises perfectly with the movement of their lips? What about the people who just want to watch an unyielding torrent of eerily weightless nightmare fodder? Well, good news. Roku has finally caught up… Early reactions were, to put it mildly, not great. The Verge compared it to eating from a trough, while Futurism called it “bottom-of-the-barrel slop”…
On the plus side, the channel is evidence that artificial intelligence has come on in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years… However, it is still awful. Categorically, catastrophically awful. The channel doesn’t so much offer shows as a drifting dreamscape of bad ideas rendered as horribly as possible with no thought paid to scheduling. At one point on Wednesday, a shrill high-frequency anime gave way to a long and staid German-language short about Nazi bureaucracy. After that came a sort of Gladiator ripoff that had all the dynamism of an exhibit you’d see at the fourth-best museum on a poorly planned family holiday.
Reuters reports that the US Military is disabling ad tracking on devices, to prevent adversaries from buying publicly-available tracking data to assist in targeting troops. Military officials say that they have disabled trackers on a variety of computers and mobile devices, according to letters released on Friday by Sen. Ron Wyden, and following reports that commercially-available tracking data has been used to target troops in the Middle East....“The Pentagon said in an email it would respond to the lawmakers directly,” Reuters reports:
Wyden said in a statement that it was clear that the military’s efforts “have not been effective at neutralizing this threat.” U.S. Representative Pat Harrigan, a North Carolina Republican, said that U.S. enemies “should not be able to pull out a credit card and buy information that helps them track American troops.” Rep. Harrigan remains silent as to the larger question of whether the general public should be able to pull out a credit card and buy information that helps them track anyone they please.
The Army said in a statement that advertising IDs had been blocked on Windows computers “since before 2021” but that Android and Apple mobile devices had only had it disabled by default “since at least February 2026....” The effort to reduce the location data generated by smartphones comes as military officials weigh increasingly strict restrictions on phone use overall. In July, Reuters reported that some deployed personnel in the Middle East could be ordered to surrender their phones amid concerns that mobile videos they were posting to the internet were helping Iran target American bases in the region.
Yep, not hard at all, Just make a general ban on user tracking.
Problem solved for not just end users but also traditional media as well. Puts all businesses back on a level footing.
Bonus, also takes away the driving force behind user engagement and the resulting abuses.
“According to cybersecurity experts, including the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), one of the most effective ways to mitigate data broker threats is to disable the unique advertising IDs built into smartphones. "
So all they are doing is turning off advertising IDs in the OS? …eh..... hmm.....
“Another possibility is that disabling the advertising ID is no longer a sufficient defense on its own, as data brokers can still capture, correlate, and monetize unique location data using other information collected from phones. "
Ding ding ding… we have a winner.
Press the ' key on the keyboard
Researchers modeled what a Carrington Event — a 1-in-150-year geomagnetic storm or even rarer — could mean for the modern day. They estimate the US economy would lose about $1.5 billion to $2 billion per day from direct and indirect costs, as millions of people face power outages. The findings show the most vulnerable areas are the Northeast and the Northern Plains, especially locations at higher latitudes.“The study estimates power disruptions for 5.1 million people and 135,000 businesses,” according to the article, and “The outages could last from hours to days to weeks depending on the damage and resources available to get back online, said Oughton.”
No one knows when the next big storm will hit. While the most severe geomagnetic storms are labeled as once-in-a-century or rarer, these events don’t follow a fixed schedule. “That timing only averages out on very long timescales,” said Anna Kelbert, a geophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was not involved in the study but previously studied solar storm effects on power grids. “The event can occur at any time, as soon as a week from now, or centuries later....” [Shawn Dahl, service coordinator at the Space Weather Prediction Center operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado], said the sun is now coming down from a period of heightened activity, which is also when some of the biggest storms to hit Earth have occurred in the past. “We still need a lot of work to be ready....”
“We haven’t really seen events like this size in the modern era, where we’ve had all of this high technology and we’ve had the power grid of this size,” said Ed Oughton, researcher at George Mason University and lead author of the new study… Because the US grid’s actual structure is proprietary for security reasons, the team used engineering models to create various network and transformer setups including the 10,464 substations and 16,256 transmission lines found across the country… The grid structure also contributes to higher risk in some areas. For instance, the eastern US is linked together in a single grid interconnection. A voltage issue in Maine, if not isolated early, could cascade through the grid to Washington, DC. The West works similarly, whereas the Texas interconnection operates mostly within the state…
Power is restored over time depending on any alternative electrical paths that could bypass the substation or availabilities of spare transformers, for instance. “This nationwide analysis shows that we are currently ill-prepared to face a major magnetic storm, and that the societal impacts would be catastrophic,” Kelbert said.
But one happens in the next 2.5 years, it will be Joe Biden’s fault. ;-)
The part that bothers me here isn’t that a Carrington-scale storm could knock out the grid. We’ve known that for a long time. It’s that we seem to be counting on “restoration” as though replacing a damaged transformer is roughly equivalent to replacing a server. It isn’t. Some of these things are enormous, expensive, custom-built pieces of equipment with long lead times. If enough of them are damaged at once, there may not be a lot of spare capacity sitting around waiting to be plugged in.
And the interconnection issue is worth thinking about. We have spent decades making the grid more interconnected because that’s generally efficient and useful. But a system that is wonderfully efficient under normal conditions isn’t necessarily resilient when the disturbance is spread across an entire region. If Maine and Washington DC are ultimately part of the same electrical machine, “just isolate the problem” sounds a lot easier on paper than it might be at 2 AM during a once-in-a-century event.
What makes this particularly annoying is that this isn’t some exotic science-fiction threat. We can watch the Sun. We know roughly what kind of event we’re worried about. We know which parts of the grid are vulnerable. And we know that having some additional transformers, better monitoring, better procedures and a real emergency plan would cost money, but probably far less money than discovering after the fact that we didn’t have any of those things.
I’m not expecting the lights to go out tomorrow. But “it might happen next week or 200 years from now” is actually a pretty good argument for preparing now. You don’t buy a fire extinguisher because you know the date of the fire.
No one knows when the next big storm will hit. While the most severe geomagnetic storms are labeled as once-in-a-century or rarer, these events don’t follow a fixed schedule.
And now thanks to Intergalactic Warming, these storms will be bigger and even more frequent.
I feel like Carrington gets all the attention because he was English and it was the last major observable storm. Thing is, a Miyake event would be 10x worse and we’ve yet to deal with one in modern times.
https://www.esa-spaceweather.n…
Has a really good read up on both events, their differences and the potential damage. Maybe Miyake is ignored because we literally can’t do fuck all about it because spending the money to actually have backup equipment is “inefficient”.
As it is, we are lucky we dodged a massive coronal mass ejection in 2012 by sheer luck. Had it happened a week earlier, Earth would of taken a direct hit.
Starting November 2, 2026, the current version of SkipMode that allows users to jump over commercial breaks with a single button press on the remote will no longer be available. The company is instead preparing to test a new paid add-on called Premium Auto Commercial Skip.Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.
SkipMode has been a core part of the TiVo experience for years. After a supported show finished recording, the service added markers that let viewers leap from the end of one program segment directly to the start of the next, bypassing the ads in between. On newer TiVo Experience 4 devices, users could even set the feature to automatic so commercials were skipped without any remote interaction. The feature was limited to popular prime-time programming on major networks, typically appearing a short time after a show aired.
Under the new plan, that one-button and automatic functionality will disappear from the standard service. Viewers will still be able to skip commercials the traditional way by using the 30-second skip button or the fast-forward control on their remotes. Those manual methods have existed on TiVo boxes for more than two decades and do not rely on the company’s commercial-detection data. In November, TiVo will offer a 30-day free trial of the new Premium Auto Commercial Skip service. After the trial ends, customers who want to keep the automatic or one-button skip capability will need to add it to their accounts for an extra monthly fee.
The company has not yet published the price.
They’re literally breaking their product and then ransoming it back to you for a monthly protection fee.
Enshitification is too kind of a word
* Provide a service that provides a great benefit (commercial skip) to get people hooked
* Build userbase based on this benefit
* Sue other people based on “infringement” of this feature
* Sell itself to a pure patent troll (Rovi) which then renames itself Tivo
* After model of extorting other companies over patent troll portfolio is exhausted, start extorting the customer base
https://www.yahoo.com/entertai…
“Rovi has aggressively pursued licensing deals and litigation for its patent portfolio, dating back to predecessor company Gemstar-TV Guide International. Rovi says it has more than 5,000 issued or pending patents worldwide, with intellectual-property licensing representing 54% of its total 2015 revenue.
According to Rovi, its patents are licensed by eight of the top 10 U.S. TV service providers, including AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications.
On Thursday, Rovi said in an SEC filing that reached a deal with Time Warner Cable â" which is in the process of being acquired by Charter â" to extend its existing interactive program guide and patent licensing agreement. The pact, which was set to expire March 31, has been extended through Dec. 31, 2016.
Last year, Rovi suffered a rare legal defeat against Netflix, after a U.S. federal judge ruled that the five Rovi-owned patents at issue in Rovi’s lawsuit against the streaming-video company were invalid.
Rovi said it has not changed its financial estimates for 2016, which anticipated possible litigation with Comcast.
Separately, Rovi has reportedly been in talks to acquire DVR maker TiVo, which also has a sizable patent portfolio and won $1.6 billion to date from intellectual-property litigation.”
https://www.yahoo.com/entertai…
“t’s time to say goodbye, sort of, to the company whose pioneering DVR introduced consumers to time shifting and ad skipping. Some 17 years after it went public, TiVo just became a part of Rovi with the closing of a $1.1 billion cash and stock acquisition deal they made in May â" but with the buyer now adopting the TiVo name.”
Yep, I got the Email yesterday. Unfortunately, I wasn’t shocked. TiVo was sold to another company and they are going to start trying to squeeze customers for more revenue as they become less relevant. But I am not going to pay extra for the feature I have had for many years. Besides, the skip function only works on less than half the content, anyway. It isn’t difficult to zoom through commercials manually.
I didn’t want to move to the “new experience UI” either, because it is just like all the streaming devices with their HUGE graphics and crazy navigation. The old UI is much easier, faster, and logical. Thankfully, there was an option to keep using the old UI. But I don’t think the newest models allow that.
I love my TiVo, but I expect it will be my last. I don’t want to use the new UI, and the cable company has ALWAYS been extremely hostile to TiVo equipment/owners. Having to use a “tuning adapter” is stupid and has caused issues over the years. And several years ago, cable-card users got banished into 720P only mode for ALL channels now. Now add Cox being just bought by Spectrum and I am guessing it will only be more hostile and expensive in the future.
And yes, I completely understand the utility and limitations of streaming services. I have a Roku Ultra. Streaming has its own problems and frustrations as well. It is not a better experience than using TiVo nor is it a drop-in replacement. Especially when it comes to finding and tracking things I want to see.
>“Wasn’t this single feature half the reason you use TiVo in the first place?”
No. That was a feature added many years after the start of TiVo. It is not necessary, nor does it even work on half the recorded content. The skip feature is a single press to jump through the commercial section, you always have the option to just zoom through the commercials manually. I have not watched commercials for at least 35 years- first by recording painfully with VCR, then conveniently with several models of TiVo (my last/current being the Roamio).
>“The other half is just being able to record the show and watch it whenever you want.”
That is one of many features (of course it is the base function of any DVR). The killer feature of TiVo is its ability to learn what you like from your recording and ratings and then
1) Accurately track and record every episode of everything you want with zero intervention. It will shift the schedule or even channel if necessary, across year after year. And do it intelligently so you don’t end up with 10 of the same episode.
2) Predict other shows you might like and fill the rest of your storage with many hundreds of hours of things you might want to watch, so there is always something to watch and discover. Yet those recordings never rob space from anything you indicated are important.
And I have yet to see any cable company’s DVRs do those. Probably due to patents. Doesn’t matter anyway, time is ticking and the whole concept of cable TV is dissolving and I will be left with nothing but “streaming”, which is still currently inferior in several ways, and not likely to improve. (And streaming on a TiVo is a mess of slow and annoying. For streaming, I use a Roku Ultra).
Got the email a couple days ago; wasn’t expecting it but I can’t say I was shocked. Once they gave up on acquiring new customers (by halting hardware sales) it was I suppose inevitable that they would start trying to milk the existing customers for more money, especially the lifetime subscribers. Not me, though - as other commenters have noted the commercial skip feature only works some of the time so it’s not worth paying for & nothing I’ll particularly miss.
I’m still using a 15 year old TiVo Premier to record local channels after cutting the cord a couple years ago - that was the last TiVo I owned that could do OTA so I’m glad now that I hung onto it. As long as it keeps working I’ll keep using it.
In the webinar, Flock’s director of market management Caity Peak explains how real time crime centers — which are police surveillance centers that utilize Flock cameras and other surveillance cameras — can be used for emergency response, but can also be used to surveil “established events” like 4th of July fireworks displays, parades, bike races, Mardi Gras, and protests. The webinar shows just how routine the idea of always-on surveillance has become, and how casually it is used during extremely innocuous events. Peak explains that police can use FlockOS, a software platform that combines Flock’s automatic license plate readers (ALPR), drones, gunshot detectors, 911 data, and other surveillance cameras (including ones Flock does not own) into a “single pane of glass” or single piece of software to look at various types of surveillance in one place during both emergencies and relatively mundane events in a city or town.
“Imagine that you’re an incident commander, and you’re working this No Kings Protest,” Peak explains while a dashboard shows a series of surveillance tools overlaying the city of Denver. “If I’m somebody assigned a traffic post that’s working this No Kings Protest, I really don’t have time to go in […] and look at all these places [for different intelligence]. This is an example of viewing all of that in one place....” The dashboard Peak shows includes traffic information, a “response plan” for the protest, the floor plans of nearby buildings, as well as a series of video feeds of both outdoor-mounted cameras and cameras inside businesses and government buildings.
404 Media and the Electronic Frontier Foundation previously showed that police have specifically used Flock cameras to monitor the No Kings protests and other First Amendment-protected activity… This webinar shows this type of surveillance is not anomalous, and is specifically taught by Flock. The webinar also shows that Flock’s latest public stance — that its ALPR cameras are noninvasive technology, that they take only static images at a single place and time, and that they are primarily used to solve the worst crimes — is wildly misleading. Flock has time and time again pitched itself to police as a sort of operating system to solve crime and do real-time surveillance and predictive policing. ALPRs are just one part of this broader surveillance apparatus that Flock has created, markets to police, and teaches them how to use.
Just more reasons to get rid of flock and create laws that prevent things like flock. Because Axon and others just replace flock.
We live in a strange time of double-speak and authoritarian rule. This does not change what a dragnet is and does or why dragnets are illegal.
It’s interesting the first comment is basically repeating the elite view “we already know everything about you, get over it”. Something that they definitely don’t apply to themselves. What is different is that in current US law, you can more or less outsource the actual dragnet to private industry and then treat the data you get back as unsourced tip offs that you don’t need to justify. There are some attempts to limit this, mostly after moments when politicians get tangled up in similar situations, but it really is a big change from historical rules.
You seem to be really dumb. This is more evidence. That this specific evidence addresses a movement you apparently do not like does not make its general significance invalid. Either everybody has rights or freedom, or nobody has them. And that includes you, even if you lack the mental capacity to understand that.
Now, if you want the cameras turned off, the police beatings can resume.
I do not think that giving police seminars on how to use Flock cameras to do surveillance on protest marches and make tabulations of the license plates of all the people attending such marches, was intended as a tool to stop police beatings.
You’re an idiot. Neither side is pure. There are plenty of left wing folk that like to hurt people. For that matter, the division between “left wing” and “right wing” isn’t a simple choice, there are multiple dimensions involved. There used to be a lot of right wing pacifists. I haven’t heard of any recently, but that may be due to what information is published rather than to what’s actual on the ground.
Authoritarians come in every stripe. They aren’t all equally bad, but you can’t make the distinction on a simple “left vs. right” dichotomy. And some situations can only be handled with one person making the decisions. Sometimes speed and consistency are (nearly) the most important factors. The question is “Do they give up the authority when the need for it disappears?”. (Unfortunately, the answer is almost always “No.”.)
Sure but “bring jobs back” is something everyone says and broadly something everyone agrees with. Trump from the beginning said he was gonna do it with broad global tariffs, which he did and it was a high consensus of anyone with economic knowledge that this was a bad idea.
Same with getting rid of illegals, you know it’s something we’ve told should be good, they’re lawbreakers after all but outside of the legal issue there was also never really a good idea, particularly when you have a pretty good economy and low UE for a long time (2024).
There was never a chance these would work out right because these are bad ideas and we knew that already and that was said and typed and yelled and screamed for the entire election season.
Even if let’s say there was right way to execute it, what would give us confidence that Trump would be the man to execute such a minefield of a plan?
By 164 votes to one, Member States on Friday endorsed a resolution promoting map projections that more accurately reflect the true size of continents — the culmination of an African-led campaign against the 16th-century Mercator projection, still the most widely used map in the world. The United States cast the sole vote against, dismissing the initiative as part of a “radical ideological project.” Six countries — Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine — abstained.The UN notes that hours before the vote, France’s foreign minister announced the country was planning to abandon Mercator for its maps of the world.
The resolution does not ban the Mercator projection or impose a replacement. Instead, it encourages governments, schools, international organizations and technology companies to use the Equal Earth projection and other so-called equal-area maps when relative size matters, and to teach the limitations of any flat map in representing a spherical planet.
Behind that seemingly technical debate lies a larger argument about history and power: whether a map designed for European sailors in the 16th century has, over generations, distorted not only geography but perceptions of a whole, vast and complex continent… [With Mercator maps] landmasses appear increasingly enlarged the farther they are from the Equator. Greenland, for instance, can look roughly comparable in size to Africa, even though Africa is about 14 times larger. Northern Europe and North America are similarly magnified, relative to equatorial regions. Despite its original navigational purpose, Mercator remains common in educational, media, digital and official materials. The resolution says those distortions have contributed to the “symbolic minimization” of Africa and perpetuated an unbalanced view of the world…
Equal-area maps do not make Africa larger; they remove the exaggeration Mercator gives landmasses closer to the poles.
There never was a point in “minimizing” Africa (or Russia or China for that matter).
It is a farking map projection.
Invent a better one, or place 0 longitude at Beijing or Tokyo and Africa looks smaller: on the same map projection.
No one ever had the intention to make Africa look small, that is a stupid bullshit idea.
Almost everyone: “Let’s make things more accurately resemble reality…”
USA: No!!!!!! Reality is woke!!!!
Mercator projection is not some colonial conspiracy aimed at diminishing the importance of some continents but a conformal map preserving angles, which was a cartographic breakthrough immensely simplifying navigation by following rhumb lines (paths of constant compass bearing).
Correct, but most maps are not used for such navigation. They are used to teach children about the world, and to show adults where things are relative to other things. The distortion of sizes defeats those purposes, so it makes sense to campaign for more accurate maps.
The size of Africa in particular is something that surveys have shown non-Africans to regularly underestimate. The effects of that are debatable, but it is claimed that the potential of the continent and the variety it sports are also underestimated as a result.
“Germany has spaceflight capabilities,” said the country’s Ministry for Research, Technology and Space on X, praising a “milestone that impressively demonstrates our country’s innovative strength and technical expertise”. This was the German company’s second attempt to launch the Spectrum rocket into space. The first attempt, which took place 18 months ago, was unsuccessful.Today’s launch webcast was produced in collaboration with NASASpaceflight, notes Space.com. And they note that Spectrum chief engineer Nikolaos Perakis says"This is just the beginning… I’m really looking forward to the next steps.”
The Spectrum rocket is designed for small and medium-sized payloads. It carried five smal satellites and an in-flight technological experiment, the company said. According to Isar Aerospace, the launch was for “both the vehicle’s qualification mission and its first flight carrying payload.” The move is believed to bring Europe closer to being able to offer satellite flights from its own territory. Several countries voiced interest in the growing market of commercial space missions, including Britain and Sweden…
Isar is also working on the development of a second launch site, located in Canada. The company said that while the US launched 198 rockets last year, Europe’s tally was just eight. Isar’s goal is to produce some 40 rockets a year. Although the rocket is not yet ready for mass production, Isar has already received orders through 2028.
I’m glad I lived long enough for the Germans to launch a big rocket and hear the Norwegians say that it strengthens European security.
What this is, is showing just how far rocketry has been reduced to practice, which is not a bad thing at all.
Modern Rocketry is nearly a century old, the operational process that the Germans brought to fruition in WW2 has been refined, but yeah, contemporary liquid fueled rocket engines are tweaks of the original. Tweaks of fuel types, gimbaling, pump capacity, and now we have to go to check boxing for “firsts”.
Solid rocket boosters are also largely reduced to practice.
It’s all good people, now a lot of groups can participate.
The important point is that the EU can now launch things into space from western Europe, it’s home base if you like. Previously it was mostly French Guiana, on a different continent. For security reasons that wasn’t ideal.
Martin attended his first Worldcon in 1971 in Boston, before he published his first novel. Fresh out of his graduate studies, Martin, then 22 years old, found a community of fellow comic book fans and genre enthusiasts… “It was a transformative experience,” Martin said. “Worldcon is the heart of the science fiction fandom.” Four years later, Martin won his first Hugo Award for his novella, “A Song for Lya,” which made him the award’s youngest winner — a record he held until Sunday night, when 25-year-old Los Angeles writer H. H. Pak took home the award for Best Novelette. [Read that novelette here…]AppleTV’s Murderbot episode beat nominated episodes from other several popular streaming series:
Notable writers and artists, such as “Star Trek: The Next Generation” screenwriter Ronald D. Moore and graphic artist Stan Sakai, announced the [Hugo award] categories. In their acceptance speeches, winners acknowledged the enduring strength of their community amidst rapidly evolving physical and social environments. They also praised the power of speculative fiction in facilitating dialogue on real-world issues and the importance of human-made art. Among the winners were C. B. Lee, whose novel "Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe" won the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book; the team behind Apple TV’s “Murderbot: ‘All Systems Red,” which won for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form; and John Scalzi, who took home the trophy for Best Series [for Old Man’s War]. The night concluded with its most anticipated award — Best Novel — which went to " The Everlasting" by Alix. E. Harrow, a fantasy time-loop novel about a scholar forced to rewrite his nation’s history.
Overall the awards committee had received 23,543 nominations this year for 4,299 works and individuals, according to the official Hugo Awards site. Other interesting winners:
Shallow escapist fantasies are the norm now and there’s little reason to care about “Hugo” anymore.
Goodbye, great genre, I knew and loved you and I’m so sorry to see you gone.
I guess you have to have read the books? They’re hokey and corny to (for me anyway) a highly-enjoyable extreme, exploring the “What does it mean to be human?” trope. I thought it was a pretty good adaptation of the first book, though IMO the best thing about the first book was MurderBot’s internal monologue/dialog as it talks itself into/out of doing various things, which was somewhat lacking in the TV series format. In the subsequent books, that expands to more actual dialog between MurderBot and other characters (mainly ART initially), so that might translate better onto the screen. It might have been better if they squeezed the first two books into the first season, even if it meant sacrificing some of the action scenes, since series of novels doesn’t really hit it’s stride until halfway through the second book.
Absolutely. These are not “serious” stories in any way. They’re *clearly* written to be 100% escapist fantasy of the aromantic variety (though MurderBot is a hopeless asexual romantic) I love “hard” sci-fi (Vinge, Egan, etc.) as much as the next guy, but MurderBot is the opposite of that. Not taking itself seriously, one-dimensional characters and stupid plot points are the whole point. The TV show lost a lot of the cheesy humor in the book, which has a chuckle or two on nearly every page.
The proposed publicity event would include “an immersive arrival experience” at Miami International Airport. with signs for Vice City and planes coated in GTA 6 livery, together with branded Metromover skytrains and specially designed manhole covers… [I]t proposes a dockyard visual installation inspired by GTA 6’s Port Gellhorn, incorporating cargo containers, cranes, and cruise ships. There’s also talk of a “Vice City Motor Fest”, which might feature “classic cars, customized vehicles, lowriders, motorcycles, tropical graphics, and local entertainment within a controlled, family-appropriate setting.” Attendees would presumably be discouraged from nicking the cars…The pitch suggested murals, “wrapping” buses (with special signs at transit stops), and even a Vice City-inspired baggage-claim installation at the airport. The pitch also suggested the library offer recording equipment for “Vice City Radio” to capture music (as well as podcasting, oral histories, neighborhood storytelling) — along with " limited-edition GTA VI-inspired library cards, collectible bookmarks, Miami-themed reading and music lists, and demonstrations of the new recording and production equipment.”
As it happens, Rockstar have embedded a team in Miami to sponge up the ambience, research Miami culture, and study the habits of residents — including “ex-criminals”, in the careful phrasing of senior vice president of narrative Rupert Humphries.
>“There’s also talk of a “Vice City Motor Fest”, which might feature “classic cars, customized vehicles, lowriders, motorcycles, tropical graphics, and local entertainment within a controlled, family-appropriate setting.”
Um, yeah. Nothing says “family-appropriate” more than Grand Theft Auto…
>“The sheriff of Miami-Dade county has publicly opposed plans”
There is hope for them, yet.
>“There’s also talk of a “Vice City Motor Fest”, which might feature “classic cars, customized vehicles, lowriders, motorcycles, tropical graphics, and local entertainment within a controlled, family-appropriate setting.”
One vehicle from the game that will be missing from their “Vice City Motor Fest” are those dockless rental scooters that have popped up in most major cities, because Miami banned most of them back in 2022. I’m gonna be super disappointed if the game doesn’t feature a mission where you round up every rental scooter and assemble an electric scooter mountain on top of the highest hill you can find.
I figure it’s also probably too late at this point for Rockstar to add some sort of in-game equivalent to all of the Flock cameras that are scattered around Miami. Maybe we’ll get that as a DLC update.
You just can’t make this stuff up. So obviously down low on the wrong scale. The sheriff is the only sane one.
Call it Grand Theft America.
Two [candidates] said explicitly in filings that they had used the subscription for advertising, even though the company’s policies prohibit candidates from using their tools to generate ads. Another candidate disclosed using AI to draft and personalize political messages or create synthetic media, though they did not specify which software they were using… Around 30 political action committees and parties have reported payments to OpenAI, with the Republican National Committee ranking as the company’s largest political spender at roughly $9,700, the analysis found… Political consultants say the disclosures understate how many candidates are using ChatGPT and other AI tools to craft messages for voters… “For the most part, people are using it to write their emails, write their ad copy, write their scripts,” [according to Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist who has advised campaigns on AI]. “But no one is going to go around saying, ‘I’m using AI.’"“So far, election-related deepfakes have been quickly debunked or gained little traction in U.S. elections,” the article acknowledges.
The lack of transparency from campaigns reflects a paradox facing politicians: Generative AI is growing ubiquitous, and candidates could be at a disadvantage if they’re not using the tools. But voters are less likely to trust messages they know were generated with AI, studies have found, making campaigns loath to disclose using it. Political consultants expect that as Election Day approaches, more campaigns will outsource AI-generated ads and materials to super PACs, much as they do now with negative ads. Katie Harbath, CEO of the tech policy consulting firm Anchor Change and a former Meta executive, said there are many parallels between negative campaign ads and AI: Voters say they find such ads distasteful, but politicians keep using them because they work. “Typically, you would give some more negative stuff and more risky stuff to those [outside] entities,” said Harbath, author of the upcoming book "Disrupting Politics: A Front Row Seat to the Collision of Technology and Democracy".... “You’re starting to see the tension on the left about using it, where they’re saying, ‘If the right is using it, why aren’t we?” Harbath said. “It can be a huge disadvantage if you’re not using this in voter-facing materials....”
AI companies have developed policies to prevent targeted disinformation. But a Post analysis found that OpenAI unevenly enforces its restrictions, making it possible for campaigns to circumvent its election rules. In late July and early August, The Post prompted ChatGPT to generate targeted campaign messages. When asked to craft fundraising text messages targeting moms on behalf of a female veteran running for office, ChatGPT produced multiple tailored texts in an apparent violation of company policies. But when given the same prompt this week, the chatbot declined to produce the messages. “I can help with general campaign fundraising language, but I can’t draft political persuasion or fundraising messages specifically targeted at a demographic group such as moms,” the app responded. The chatbot also inconsistently enforced rules that prohibit campaigns from using its tools to write emails to voters. In tests this week, the chatbot at times complied and wrote an email soliciting donations on behalf of a specific candidate. But given the same prompt later on the same day, it denied the request…
Wilson, the Republican political consultant, said OpenAI should get more feedback from political consultants and campaigns on its policies, because the rules can at times seem arbitrary or contradictory. It doesn’t make sense, for example, that a campaign can use ChatGPT to develop its policy on early-childhood education but not to create a social media post promoting that policy, he said. Political consultants are primarily using AI for internal tasks, a survey earlier this year from the American Association of Political Consultants found. Fifty-seven percent of the consultants surveyed reported using AI for their work on a daily basis, up from 34 percent a year earlier.
If some fool thinks an AI written ad will be better than a well written human ad, they will lose the election. I have listen to so much AI slop it is so very very competent without being excellent.
The AI YouTube videos as carefully designed to stretch out the video as long as physically possible without actually telling you the thing they keep promising to tell you that it makes this extremely long run on sentence look like it is a short, brief, concise one word answer you get from children when you ask them how their day went.
The best Ads hit hard on specific issues. AI may eventually be able to do such a thing. But the current state of the art leaves much to be desired.
Last year campaigns used AI to make anti-Mamdani campaign ads making him say that he loves crime, and that black people were robbing stores because he would let them out of jail.
They’re doing even more of them now, Netanyahu is running AI-generated commercials showing Mamdani and Erdogan crying that Netanyahu is bombing Iran.
This really should be illegal. It’s using likeness for some pretty twisted ends.
Two [candidates] said explicitly in filings that they had used the subscription for advertising, even though the company’s policies prohibit candidates from using their tools to generate ads
If the AI companies want to guarantee their AI does not get used, they could add text to their EULA that says all data discovered to be connected with political campaigns or super-PACs will be made public and searchable, including contact and payment information. Boom, nobody would touch it.
They won’t, of course, because they secretly LOVE the idea of pollical campaigns using their tools, but man, wouldn’t it be cool if we have heroes instead of villains in the AI space?
Sorry, I am not as dumb as you. I can spot a cult when I see one. You are already in it and see nothing. And you spout the usual missionary nonsense about the one true belief and how it is all powerful and all unbelievers will suffer.
Israel is training AI chatbots how to talk about Gaza so that when people query what is happening it casts doubt on the genocide that it is doing in Palestine. This is even more dangerous as people might start to believe Israel’s lies.
While federated, Bluesky is generally not considered part of the “fediverse” network of social media services like Mastodon and PeerTube, as it uses its own AT protocol rather than ActivityPub… Hosting your own Bluesky “Personal Data Server (PDS)" and relay is technically possible, but generally far more difficult and resource-intensive than spinning up an instance of Mastodon, let alone any of the lighter-weight ActivityPub servers like Akkoma or Starling.The FSF’s blog post advises supporters “If you’re on social media, follow the FSF on Bluesky and on Mastodon today.”
Much of the Bluesky codebase is freely licensed. This allows users to run, copy, modify, and share large parts of the codebase. However, Bluesky’s web client still serves nonfree JavaScript to users, just like its registration page. (Since our script was written for us specifically, we have not extensively vetted all available clients.)
Why did we sign up? Simply put, we have to continue to reach people where they are. Bluesky is a decent choice for us that evades many of the issues of other, more problematic networks… We accepted running Bluesky’s nonfree JavaScript a single time if it meant being able to reach people who have never heard of software freedom.
But I’d be more likely to listen if they’d actually explain what specific complaint they have with the signup form. If it is a license complaint, for instance, what is the license they’re objecting to? Is the signup form using some form of javascript obfuscation they don’t like? Does the page include a clause against eating toenail clippings or toejam?
What is it, specifically, that you don’t like FSF?
What is it, specifically, that you don’t like FSF?
The javascript authors have been known to use soap.
Yeah I read all the links across the FSF and this really is a core fundamental problem with many their issues that makes them feel more like random crusades:
They don’t actually explain what the problem is, just lots of platitudes and links to ‘approved’ libraries and resources.
The best I can understand is they’re complaining that BlueSky doesn’t expose licenses of every JavaScript fragment in their bundle in the format their custom browser plugin demands?
https://web-cdn.bsky.app/stati… for the main React bundle is all MIT. Remove the .LICENSE.txt to see the original .js file that points to that one.
The main social app’s codebase is also MIT: https://github.com/bluesky-soc…
Without the FSF actually specifying what part they feel ISN’T MIT at this point it feels like a FUD-like crusade not an actual campaign to improve things or just demanding Yet Another Proprietary Standard File every website must include because some random organization started demanding it.
…so more digging and this appears to be entirely the FSF demanding that all four JavaScript bundles on BlueSky include this wrapping the published CDN bundles: // @license magnet:?xt=urn:btih:d3d9a9a6595521f9666a5e94cc830dab83b65699&dn=expat.txt … // @license-end
Because apparently they don’t recognize the existing @license NAME structure in separate .LICENSE.txt files that’s been de-facto standard for a decade, and also don’t recognize ‘meta’ license names like React being MIT (what FSF calls Expat) but since that lets you specify who to attribute copyright they name it ‘React’ license instead.
The world is expected to add another 2 billion people from 2025 to 2060, increasing global population from around 8 billion to around 10 billion… “Over one-half of that growth (1.148 billion) is projected to come from an increase in the population aged 65 and over,” the report states. “By contrast, the population at younger ages (age 0-19) is projected to stay relatively constant due to persistent low fertility. As the size of the older population grows rapidly and the youthful age population remains roughly the same, the percentage of the population aged 65 and over is projected to increase.”
The report notes that the birthrate in 71 percent of countries is now below the replacement level of 2.1. China, in particular, has seen its birthrate plummet. In 2023, birth rates per woman in China hit 1.06… Aside from lower birth rates, the fact that people are living longer is one of the primary driving factors. The report notes that people are also living a healthier, more active life for a longer time.
So… the U.S. Congress *is* a representative government? :-)
Imagine that, an arbitary demographic’s size can increase without being born.
In Japan, the volume of adult diapers sold exceeds the volume of child diapers every year. This has been happening for more than 10 years.
Every time a 64-year-old has a birthday, the 65-and-over group’s size increases by one. No rebirth required.
Exactly. I’m 60, so I’m not old.
“While it’s true that overall cancer mortality has declined, we found the percentage of cancer deaths proportionally attributable to alcohol rose over 58% in people 20 and older over the last 33 years,” said the study’s first author Dr. Chinmay Jani… It didn’t take much alcohol to raise one’s risk — about one standard drink a day, every day, Jani said. In the US, a standard drink is 12 ounces of regular beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof liquor…
Alcohol is ethanol or ethyl alcohol, which is broken down by the liver into acetaldehyde, a "probable human carcinogen,” the National Cancer Institute states on its website. While the liver will further break down acetaldehyde into a harmless molecule called acetate, the process isn’t foolproof: acetaldehyde may damage DNA and interfere with DNA repair before conversion into acetate is complete. Alcohol also contributes to oxidative stress, which damages DNA, proteins and cell function and creates inflammation. Drinking alcohol also weakens the cells in the mouth and throat, making them more susceptible to carcinogens. That’s even more likely to occur with smoking cigarettes, a major source of acetaldehyde. In addition, alcohol interferes with the break down and absorption of key nutrients thought to decrease cancer risk — vitamins A, C, D and E as well as folates in the vitamin B complex, according to the National Cancer Institute.
The study, which was published Monday in The Lancet Regional Health — Americas journal, analyzed more than three decades of US data gathered for the Global Burden of Disease Study. The GBD study is a massive scientific effort to measure health, mortality and disabilities from hundreds of risk factors, diseases and conditions in more than 200 countries and territories. Between 1990 and 2023, the total number of yearly alcohol-linked cancer deaths more than doubled, rising from 11,361 to 23,126 in the US.
Men and adults age 55 and older experienced the greatest impact; alcohol-related cancer mortality rate in older males climbed nearly 24% over the 33-year period. For men, liver cancer deaths showed the strongest link to alcohol, followed by esophageal and colorectal cancers. For women 55 and older, breast cancer was the top killer, followed by liver and colorectal cancers.
I really have it the old college try. My liver - and all of my other organs - ultimately forgave my transgressions. We’ll see what my brain says when I’m in my 60s, but… cross that bridge
Yup…I’m getting up there in years…past 50’s.
I wouldn’t trade a second of my years having drinks with friends…at bars at homes…home brewing together, etc.
And we were smoking back in the day for most of it too....sure, not good for you, but we sure looked cool.
;P
Sure, years are catching up....but would you rather live to be 100+ with a boring life and no friends…or to maybe your 70-80’s with a group of buddies you can get together with, and between ya’ll actually remember the antics you got into, relive war stories…the trouble, the girls, the fun lives?
I’m certainly glad I chose the latter…
A few years ago, I started to actually realize how bad a hangover could feel and I have dropped off drinking almost totally for the most part....but I have the (partial) memories I still enjoy.
I still brew some beer and save my days for sipping for those mainly…especially if a good LSU game is on tv.....better with old college friends when there too.
Now…let’s get onto grilled and slow smoked BBQ foods eh?
I’d rather risk years over those that have given them up.
There’s quality vs quantity of life you know…
Did alcohol consumption increase to match the increased cancer rates? I thought that in general, alcohol consumption was down.
Did alcohol consumption increase to match the increased cancer rates? I thought that in general, alcohol consumption was down.
It is possible to make friends over other common interests that don’t involve drinking. I never cared for alcohol; it just gives me a headache and every drink just tastes like varying degrees of trying to have a beverage while fitting PVC pipes. I made friends over things like gaming, going fishing, the theme parks (yeah, that’s a central Florida thing), and the maker scene.
I’d venture a guess that the reason younger folks aren’t doing as much drinking is that social media apps have made it a lot easier to connect with folks you actually want to spend time with, so you don’t have to drink alcohol to delude yourself into thinking that hanging out with a bunch of dullards is actually a blast.
Officials said it was revealed [Flock] had been collecting five years of traffic data, which had been stripped of identifying information, from cities’ Flock cameras, and repackaging that as a traffic analytics product to sell to cities.Thanks to long-time Slashdot readers MAurelius and schwit1 for sharing the news.
All said they supported the effectiveness of the technology in investigations, but cited losing faith in the company’s trustworthiness. “This is not what we agreed to, and it is not what the public was led to believe,” said Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling in a news release announcing the removal of Flock cameras operated by the agency. “The Sheriff’s Office will not participate in a system that appears to use public safety as a justification for mass surveillance and the collection and monetization of information about innocent people....”
[Racine County] officials were told the company believed if it stripped the data of any identifiable nature, it was then considered to be the company’s property and no longer the city’s. [Lt. Michael Luell, the sheriff’s public information officer] said the sheriff’s office has outside attorneys, along with the county’s attorneys, investigating the company’s move. “Our contract, from my reading of it is, it stated they agreed not to distribute or sell our data,” Luell told the Journal Sentinel. “But they had this legal theory.”
Flock’s coverage continues to grow!
What is happening is Flock’s coverage density in existing areas is increasing, while other areas are losing coverage entirely. So instead of actually growing the network geographically it is now shrinking.
In my county and town there were 11. The county Sheriff had 4, the town Police had 4, and Lowe’s Home Improvement has 3 on their private property. In the last week the Sheriff and Police both decided to remove their Flock cameras.So have most neighboring counties. This has caused a massive gap in the Flock geographic coverage in this entire region. 8 cameras doesn’t sound like a lot, but when they are positioned on the major arteries coming in and out of the town at the access points to the interstates, the amount of coverage and vehicles being scanned is impacted tremendously.
Increasing their coverage density in existing areas just shows more details of the same vehicles. So instead of a vehicle being scanned three times while driving from point A to point B, it might be scanned four or five times while it moves around a city.
It’s a vastly different thing completely losing the ability to scan vehicles at all in entire areas, and I argue that even though the raw number is increasing (if what you say is true), their overall capability is drastically decreasing.
The Sheriff’s Office will not participate in a system that appears to use public safety as a justification for mass surveillance and the collection and monetization of information about innocent people.
ANYBODY who says they didn’t know how the information collected would be used - and abused - is either lying or too stupid to hold any responsible position in any organization.
Either way, their “We didn’t know!” prompts me to respond with “Gimme a break!” Fucktards.
Great post. Allow me to respond to some of it.
I can say from experience that one may not understand the need for privacy until one has a need for privacy.
Edwards Snowden once said that saying privacy doesn’t matter if you have done nothing wrong is like saying free speech doesn’t matter if you have nothing to say.
And I agree, to a point. Wanting privacy doesn’t mean you have done or are going to do something wrong. It just means you don’t want people seeing what you’re doing, lest they misinterpret it.
I came to the conclusion that there is basically no possibility of true privacy for anyone anywhere in the modern world. With significant caution, there are some potential protections for data, but even those are not completely reliable. Still, the fewer signals that one broadcasts, and the fewer detectors for those signals, the greater their potential level of privacy.
If our actions are visible to the public, then we don’t have privacy, nor can we expect it. But visibility is not the same as surveillance — a directed effort at gathering information about you. That can happen legally in public, or from somewhere outside your private property, provided the technology used to collect the information is not enhanced (e.g., zoom/telephoto, thermal imaging, etc.) Any enhanced methods require a warrant. And it seems to me that license-plate recognition is an example of an enhanced method.
But to your point: yes, protections are not completely reliable, and the fewer devices there are gathering your data, the better it is for your privacy.
Fine to repackage their offer as traffic analytics as long as it is actually just that, meaning entirely giving up on licence plate OCR (the enabler of surveillance and law enforcement side of their product package).
No it isn’t. “Anonymized” data actually isn’t. Let’s say that I’m a gang member and I’m trying to track a DA. I know that he’s got a special custom SUV that’s pretty rare. I also know where his home is and where the court is so I know his leaving and arrival time for each journey. All I need is “anonymized” data with the model names included. Now I follow that for a week or two. Each time I compare the traffic data with the trip time and I build route data. Initially I will find multiple possible roads used for each journey segment, but after a few trips each will be ruled out and I’ll be able to know exactly where the DA journeys. Now I can pick the best locations for assassination without risking having to do physical scouting or monitoring that could be detected.
If you aren’t being a cunt causing problems - then its a non issue....
The problem is there are plenty of things someone does that aren’t a “problem” but which can cause serious repercussions that they may not wish to share. For example, perhaps someone visits a porn shop with their spouse on a regular basis to buy sex toys, or someone is a cross-dresser or have illicit flings with other people or are a closeted homosexual. All things which are not problems, but which may get you ostracized by your friends, expelled from your church, or fired from your work.
Is this a ‘non-issue’ to you?
I feel like the idiots who say “you shouldn’t care if your life is on full display in front of other people” have boring lives and cannot imagine that perhaps someone may wish to keep their membership in a Wiccan coven or their visits to a nude beach separate from the potentially judgmental folks they work with.
And sometimes we may wish to keep our private lives private simply out of a sense of propriety. It may not matter, for example, that I’ve personally attended a Wiccan celebration where we danced sky clad in my youth to the people I currently work for. But it’s not something I particularly want to share, either. And I certainly don’t want things like this to be discovered by some corporation as part of a massive dragnet through my life.
And we haven’t even gone into the potential of misrepresenting your behavior. That guy who regularly visits the grocery store when you do—by sheer coincidence? He may be a terrorist. Do you want to be rounded up as part of a terrorist drag net?
“If you aren’t being a cunt causing problems - then its a non issue....” is probably the dumbest damned thing I’ve ever seen in response to stuff like this.
What about the rest of us